THE OXFORD HANDBOOK OF

FILM THEORY
The Oxford Handbook of

Film Theory

Edited by
KYLE STEVENS
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Library of Congress Control Number: 2022027402

ISBN 978–0–19–087392–9
eISBN 978–0–19–087394–3
DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190873929.001.0001
 C

Acknowledgments
List of Contributors

Introduction: The Very Thought of Theory

K S

SECTION I: META-THEORY
1. A Machine for Killing Time
T G
2. Interested and Disinterested Judgments: Film Theory and the Valences
of the Aesthetic
D M
3. Moral Philosophy and the Moving Image
B P
4. Film|Video|Essay
D T
5. The Medium Matters! In Defense of Medium-Specificity in Classical
Film Theory
M T
6. In Defense of Psychoanalytic Film Theory
D R Y
 SECTION II: FILM THEORY’S PROJECT OF
EMANCIPATION
7. Film Theory as Ideology Critique (after Trump)
N B
8. Buddhism and Film Theory: Beyond a Legacy
V F
9. Feminist Film Theory on the Brink of Laughter
M H
10. Theory for the Masses; or, Toward a Vernacular Criticism
N I
11. “The Fold of Old Wounds”: Daughters of the Dust, Eve’s Bayou, and
Mississippi Damned as Cinematic Black Feminist Theory
K K

SECTION III: APPARATUS AND PERCEPTION

12. Lesbian Photographers: Affect and Cinematic Self-Discovery
M F
13. Notes on Some Forms of Repetition
H K
14. Empiricism and Film Theory: On the Moviola’s Political Ontology
D P
15. Film Theory and Machine Vision
A S
16. Headphones, Cinematic Listening, and the Frame of the Skull
K S

SECTION IV: AUDIOVISUALITY

17. The Audio-visual Nonrelation and the Digital Break
 L A
18. The Composer of musique concrète Wields a Camera
M C
T C G
19. The Many Bodies of the Dancer-Actress: Toward a Kinesics of Film
Acting
U I
20. Documentary Listening Habits: From Voice to Audibility
P R
21. Audiovisual Rhythm and Its Spectator: Moonlight as Example
R W

SECTION V: HOW CLOSE IS CLOSE READING?

22. Contesting the White Gaze: Black Film and Postcinematic
Spectatorship
C B -A
23. In Other Words: Film and the Spider Web of Description
T C
24. Women’s Hands and the Cinematic Cut: The Work of Montage in
Man With a Movie Camera, Klute, and The Piano
D A. G
25. Standing Up Too Close or Back Too Far? A Slanted History of Close
Film Analysis
A M
26. On Fire: When Fashion Meets Cinema
M U
27. When and Where Does a Film Begin? Putting Films in Context
A V
 SECTION VI: THE TURN TO EXPERIENCE
28. The Affective Turnabout’s Fair Play
S K
29. An Invention with a Future: Collective Viewing, Joint Deep Attention,
and the Ongoing Value of the Cinema
J H
30. Those Who Have: The Impersonality of Film Theory
J D R
31. On the Impersonality of Experience: Psychoanalysis, Interiority, and
the Turn to Affect
S C. R
32. Cinematic Experience: From Moving Images to Virtual Reality
R S

Index
 A

EDITED collections should, I believe, be collective. So I must first thank each

of the contributors, who shared my excitement and ambition for the volume
from the beginning. Many of the authors were also cheerleaders, reinforcing
my sense that the field needs a new volume of film theory, and that it
should be this one. Writing, and writing about art and entertainment, during
a global pandemic is not easy, and we were slowed down. But the
pandemic’s lockdowns also reminded us of the intimate and, at the same
time, vast space that audiovisual fictions occupy in our lives, and many of
us turned to movies for comfort (especially by rewatching old favorites),
intellectual stimulation, and a sense of social connectedness. I am proud of
all of us, and very grateful to the contributors for sustaining the conviction
that thinking seriously about cinema and the cinematic is a worthwhile,
even necessary, enterprise during tumultuous times.
At Oxford University Press, Norm Hirschy and Lauralee Yeary are
absolutely lovely to work with. No notes! Appalachian State University
generously provided funds for translators. Adrian Martin not only assisted
with the language of Antonio Somaini’s chapter. He went above and beyond
and edited it, too.
I must also thank the many supportive colleague-friends who discussed
my vision for the collection and helped me maintain enthusiasm for it over
its years to fruition: including Kris Cannon, Eric Dienstfrey, Jennifer Fay,
Maria San Filippo, Craig Fischer, Veronica Fitzpatrick, Noah Isenberg,
Kartik Nair, Jules O’Dwyer, Brian Price, Scott Richmond, and Meghan
Sutherland. No one encourages more radically than Eugenie Brinkema. Her
fire kept me warm during some of the colder editorial days. Nor could I
have managed without the ongoing Twitter groupchat with Maggie
Hennefeld and Nicholas Baer. Sarah Keller not only writes the best emails;
she also listens with uncanny sympathy and provides the most heartfelt
advice. Rick Warner and I have been friends in the most profound sense of
the word since graduate school. My orientation to film, and to thinking
about film, is thoroughly shaped by our decades of conversation. And
where would this volume be—where would I be?—without Dan Morgan?
He was, as usual, the first call I made when I decided to undertake this
project. His input into the introductory chapter was also invaluable. Finally,
every possible whit of gratitude goes to James Pearson, my partner,
proofreader, sounding board, and teammate. He gave both material and
immaterial support. Is there a greater expression of love than becoming an
expert in a new citation style?
 L C

Luka Arsenjuk (University of Maryland, College Park)

Nico Baumbach (Columbia University)

Caetlin Benson-Allott (Georgetown University)

Michel Chion (Université of Paris III: Sourbonne Nouvelle)

Timothy Corrigan (University of Pennsylvania)

Victor Fan (King’s College London)

Marta Figlerowicz (Yale University)

David Gerstner (CUNY)

Tom Gunning (University of Chicago)

Julian Hanich (University of Groningen)

Maggie Hennefeld (University of Minnesota)

Noah Isenberg (University of Texas at Austin)

Usha Iyer (Stanford University)

Kara Keeling (University of Chicago)

Sarah Keller (University of Massachusetts Boston)

Homay King (Bryn Mawr College)

Adrian Martin (Monash University)

Daniel Morgan (University of Chicago)

Davide Panagia (UCLA)

Brian Price (University of Toronto)

Pooja Rangan (Amherst College)

John David Rhodes (University of Cambridge)

Scott C. Richmond (University of Toronto)

Robert Sinnerbrink (Macquarie University)

Antonio Somaini (Université Sorbonne Nouvelle: Paris 3)

Kyle Stevens (Appalachian State University)

Domietta Torlasco (Northwestern University)

Malcolm Turvey (Tufts University)

Marketa Uhlirova (University of the Arts London)

Amy Villarejo (UCLA)

Rick Warner (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)

Damon R. Young (University of California at Berkeley)

 INTRODUCTION

The Very Thought of Theory

KYLE STEVENS

WHEN we think about the origins of “modern” or “contemporary” film

theory we often have the academicization of film theory in mind. We might
think of the late 1960s and 1970s, and of works that established lines of
thought about the cinematic apparatus, representation of politicized
identities, and audience experience that continue to extend today, such as
Peter Wollen’s Signs and Meaning in the Cinema (1969); Donald Bogle’s
Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks: An Interpretive History of
Blacks in American Films (1973); Amos Vogel’s Film as a Subversive Art
(1974); Molly Haskell’s From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women
in Movies (1974); Laura Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”
(1975); or Christian Metz’s The Imaginary Signifier (translated into English
in 1977). Yet only two of these authors—Bogle and Metz—were academics
at the time. Wollen and Mulvey would go on to become university faculty,
but my point is that this foundational scholarship was written not for a field
but for a culture. That is, what we might in retrospect think of as academic
film theory was really an aspect of a cultural practice, a mechanism within
the larger post-1960s grand project of theory, one that sought to ameliorate
ideological injustices by better understanding the signs and images that
comprise so much of culture, and by looking especially to mainstream
cinema as a dominant source of this ideological dissemination.1 To be a
film theorist was not just to participate in a discipline. It was to seek to do
good in the world by creating a counterideology and a concomitant
counterpractice. Film theorists at this time wrote explicitly against the
propagation of dominant values for a presumptive readership of fellow
oppressed victims of structures of racism, patriarchy, and capitalism.
This was a shift. When we speak of “classical” film theory, we generally
refer to essays that either considered film as an almost magical, humanist
new art form that promised transcendence of, and over, a mundane material
world or that considered cinema to be an art form rooted in mechanicity, a
symptom of industrialization and consumerism. By focusing on the
ideology of movies, and of the viewing of movies (sound was rarely a
concern at this time), theorists changed the scene by applying systems of
thought—particularly Marxism, psychoanalysis, and semiotics—to films as
a means of leftist and liberal political progress. This is not to say that the
transformation was entirely smooth, as evident in one of the more
contentious, formative debates in the field a few years later, between
Stephen Heath and Noël Carroll. Carroll wrote a harsh seventy-four-page
critique of Heath’s 1981 book, Questions of Cinema, largely because
Heath’s cinematic questions concerned ideology and not aesthetics (which
Carroll regarded as antithetical). Heath responded with a retort to “Le Père
Noël” by arguing that ideology was not some ignorable-at-will
epiphenomenon but constitutive of subjectivity. At odds in this debate, too,
was the matter of truth. Heath drew on the rationales of Althusser and
Lacan to mount his critique, accusing Carroll of an overattachment to
science, claiming that, for Carroll, “Science is the absolute truth of the
world itself, and all social, historical, political questions are ruled out of
court.”2
I will return to this opposition between truth and ideology critique in a
moment, but first I want to point out that both writers were implicitly
appealing to common sense, too. For Carroll, common sense was
(problematically) an innocent, shared ground, whereas for Heath common
sense was both a method and a target, inasmuch as ideological values
typically condition what is understood to be common sense in the first
place. Their disagreement helps to highlight a certain precarity to
theoretical work, one that I want to argue in favor of here. When Mulvey
decided to weaponize psychoanalysis to make her case about camera
perspective, the sex of characters, and identification, she asserted that
audiences identify with the camera’s and character’s gazes. Was her
argument made in terms of a formal or logical proof? Did she survey all of
Hollywood history in order to convince her reader? Perhaps not, but that
was not her aim. Theorists make cases. In many cases a theoretical point
makes good sense for good reasons, and, more important, can reach further
into cultural politics and highlight the way that films, in turn, shape cultural
assumptions about what counts as common sense altogether. This is all to
say that theory can be and remain conjectural, even tentative. Eugenie
Brinkema describes the “true task” of theory: “theoria, contemplation,
speculation, to look at something (otherwise; in a new light).”3 Theory is, in
this sense, creative. It creates new ways of seeing things. Its power lies in
being “really useful,” as Christine Gledhill and Linda Williams write in
their important collection, Reinventing Film Theory—arguably the last
anthology of film theory that, like this one, eschews surveys of keywords
and concepts in favor of fresh interventions, questions, and arguments.4
More broadly, Stuart Hall also endorses a utilitarian view of theory: “The
purpose of theorizing is not to enhance one’s intellectual or academic
reputation but to enable us to grasp, understand, and explain … the
historical world and its processes; and thereby to inform our practice so that
we may transform it.”5
Yet why, if theory is so positive, so promising, have we arrived at a
moment when many find the very thought of theory repellent? Brinkema
laments this current situation: “theory is being surpassed, elegized, ignored,
and derided, and yet so very many of us still crave its appearance, its
surprises, and its speculations.”6 There are certainly good intellectual
reasons for turning away from film theory as it traditionally shaped itself,
heavily favoring intellectual inheritances from white cishet cultures within
American/French/German/British geopolitical boundaries. One can lay the
blame for objectionable canons of films and auteurs at the feet of this
history, too. And, in fact, many of the most exciting scholars working on
issues of decoloniality, indigeneity, race, and gender diversity today have
turned away from film theory, gravitating instead toward the recovery of the
historical archive, or to the study of other media now more popular than
cinema. Film is no longer, as Hungarian film theorist Béla Balázs declared
in 1945, the “potentially greatest instrument of mass cultural influence ever
devised in the whole course of human cultural history.”7
 Moreover, there was at the turn of the last century a sense that film theory
had reached an impasse. David Bordwell and Noël Carroll famously
narrated the “posttheory” sensibility into being in 1996, and anxiety about
making ambitious theoretical claims emerged, coinciding with anxiety
about the move from cinematic images that result from light projected
through celluloid to digital image-making technologies. Mary Ann Doane,
for example, worried: “What happens to a discipline on the verge of the
disappearance of its object, or, to put it more conservatively, in the face of
the perception of the death of its object?”8 Together, these anxieties
motivated a resurgence in cinephilia, a sense that film scholars should
cherish the medium they feared losing—and cinephilia was positioned as
“the antithesis of theory.”9 At the same time, too, the field began to shift its
self-identification. Programs and departments previously called “film
studies” became “film and media studies” or simply “media studies.” In
large part these changes sought to be inclusive of what was called “new
media.” However, there was also confusion in this respect, as studies of new
media insisted they were a “new language” (Manovich) that required a
“new philosophy” (Hansen).10 Film theory’s ongoing relevance was thus
unclear.
As a result, we might say that in fact both parts of the equation “film
theory” were under attack. Although more attention has been paid to the
effects of digital technology on “film,” there was a displacement of
“theory” by “philosophy.” Leading film theorists, such as D. N. Rodowick,
argued that film theory had effectively lost its momentum and much of its
significance and was necessarily replaced by film and philosophy.
Symptomatically, at the same time that the Society for Cinema and Media
Studies’ film theory scholarly interest group folded, a Film-Philosophy
interest group was formed, which continues to thrive. Indeed, many
scholars who, in the last century, might have become film theorists now
identify as working in the area of “film and philosophy,” or “film-
philosophy” as the journal of that title would have it (to connote the sense
that films can themselves do philosophy). And this is perhaps a starting
point for undertaking the difficult task of distinguishing between
philosophy and theory, which Brinkema calls “one of the most fraught
questions of our current scholarly moment.”11 There was never a journal
called Film-Theory, after all, and few ever felt the need to make the case
that films do theory. The turn away from theory in this context seems to
ask, “Who needs theory when we can have philosophy?” Those who would
feel no need to answer this question are likely drawn to the cultural prestige
attached to “philosophy,” with its ties to ancient legacies of originary
insights, and with a practical benefit of convincing deans or readers to pony
up funds.
I cannot help but recall, however, Marx’s famous words, “The
philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is
to change it.”12 So beyond respectability politics, I want to somewhat
polemically interrogate the need to consider film under the aegis of
“philosophy,” as it, perhaps surprisingly, suggests that the tension between
Carroll and Heath—between logicoscientific truth and ideology critique—
was never quite resolved.13 For one thing, practitioners of film and
philosophy are more often inclined to invoke rather vague notions of what
philosophy is rather than engage deeply with the work of any particular
philosopher, suggesting a certain shakiness in the subdiscipline’s self-
assurance. But first we should not overestimate the novelty of believing
film to be of philosophical interest. Although he was technically a
psychologist, Hugo Münsterberg’s well-known 1916 study, The Photoplay:
A Psychological Study, today reads as a text belonging to the area of film
and philosophy. He argues that films may shed light on particular mental
activities due to cinema’s ability to formally imitate them so well. In 1918,
Louis Aragon writes of film’s “philosophic qualities,” in terms of its ability
to reveal reality to us in a new, aestheticized manner—and especially an
ordinary kind of reality, one made up of objects familiar to the audience.14
Take a more complex example from Alfred Hitchcock’s North by
Northwest (1958) (Hitchcock being precisely the kind of filmmaker that
motivated film theory in the first place, as well as a source of fascination for
film and philosophy). A scene opens at a train station. Whether or not it’s a
set, it convincingly appears to be a real train station. Next, we see Roger
Thornhill (Cary Grant) and Eve Kendall (Eva Marie Saint) stepping down
from the train and onto the platform. She is trying to help him evade the
authorities, so when they spy a couple of lawmen, Eve tells Roger to “go on
ahead” while she approaches them. Hitchcock then cuts to her talking to the
two men, but now the background is a bit off. Hitchcock has filmed the set
and then rear-projected the image behind them. At the moment she lies to
these men, so, too, is the image no longer to be trusted (in the same way).
There is thus an internal relation occurring between kinds of images within
the film and a seeming awareness of their natures. Such moments can feel
philosophical due to their reflexive condition.
Without denying the force of such affects, I also suspect that the air of
philosophy that surrounds film has to do with problems raised by
attempting to talk about it. In describing a moving moment, for example,
we may want to say “X film shows us a close-up of Y’s hand.” But how
odd? That close-up is the film. Does it make good sense to say that the film
shows itself to us in this moment? Or, “then there is a close-up of Y’s
hand.” This feels more accurate but still does not quite find a way to talk
about the thing itself. Nor does “then Y’s hand fills the screen.” My point is
that without interjecting a hypothetical agency, as when we speak of a
director’s choices as manifest, or say “the film cuts to,” “then the camera
pans upward,” and so forth, movies are difficult to talk about. It’s not that
these descriptions are senseless but that they are, strictly speaking, false. We
do not see the film cutting or the camera panning. We see one shot after
another and objects drifting out of frame in just that way. Our dependence
upon these metaphors suggests a duality to the text, as though it exists in
relation to itself. This can create a sense that the medium grasps itself, that
it is a subject, perhaps capable of self-understanding, and maybe, then,
capable of doing something we might call philosophy.
But whether or not films can properly do philosophy, or whether or not
philosophy can be done through film, is less relevant to understanding film
and philosophy’s contrast with film theory than the kind of questions asked
in each area. Writing in 2006, Noël Carroll and Jinhee Choi state that
“philosophical attention” to the medium “has grown exponentially” in their
introduction to Philosophy of Film and Motion Pictures: An Anthology.
They define “philosophical attention” in this way:
 In contrast to empirical research, philosophy is the discipline that is primarily preoccupied
with the “logic” or conceptual frameworks of our practices. So a philosophical perspective
on the motion picture involves attending to the conceptual frameworks of our motion picture
practices. This includes: (1) the analysis of the concepts and categories that organize our
practices (for example, asking what is film or what is a documentary?); (2) the clarification
of the relations between those organizing concepts and categories (for example, can what
falls under the category of film also fall under the category of art, or is there some reason
that precludes the former from being an instance of the latter?); (3) the resolution of the
conceptual paradoxes, tensions, and contradictions that the relevant practices appear to
provoke (for example, how is it possible for us to fear fiction films?); (4) the elucidation of
the forms of reasoning—the modes of connecting concepts—appropriate to our practices
(for example, what techniques of interpretation are suitable or valid with respect to classic
Hollywood movies?); and (5) the discovery of the metaphysical presuppositions and
entailments of the conceptual frameworks of the relevant practices (for example, what kind
of narrators, ontologically speaking, do fiction films presuppose?)15

What I find striking about this thorough effort to map out new philosophical
terrain is how familiar the questions Carroll and Choi pose would have been
to film theorists in previous decades. Questions of generic taxonomy,
spectatorship, aesthetics, narrative, interpretation, and so forth were
theoretical questions. More recently, to take just one other example among
many, in 2017 Bernd Herzogenrath writes in the collection Film as
Philosophy that “during the past ten to fifteen years, the convergence of
film studies and philosophy has become ‘the next big thing’ in (not only)
the field of media studies,” yet the book includes chapters on writers such
as Jean Epstein, Béla Balázs, and André Bazin, thinkers who wanted
precisely to be dubbed theorists as opposed to critics.16 (Bazin states quite
plainly of his method: “I apologize for proceeding by way of metaphor, but
I am not a philosopher and I cannot convey my meaning any more
directly.”17)
There are undoubtedly speculative and imaginative aspects of
philosophical activity, too, and both theory and philosophy draw
distinctions between objects, ask what we are justified to believe, and so
forth, but philosophers usually appeal to a system that can confirm or
establish their claims. To state the obvious: philosophy is more concerned
with what is true than what is necessarily useful (of course, a pragmatist
may argue that knowing the truth is useful). In Anglophone contexts logic
typically dictates what is, or can be considered, true or false. Timothy
Williamson demands that no matter what area of philosophy one is in,
philosophers “must do better” to create shared standards.18 As we have
seen, in the past theorists have applied (scientific) systems such as
semiotics or psychoanalysis to warrant claims, but such fealty is not
necessary. Theory can begin with intuition. Any position that helps advance
the cause of solving an ideological problem, or that helps us to better
understand one (beginning, we might say, with literacy skills necessary to
grasp such a problem), is permissible. What matters about theory is what
we can do with it. It is a gizmo, a word that bears the imprint of theory’s
purpose by having no etymological origin to speak of. It was invented to be
helpful when we are confronted by a lacuna in our knowledge or
vocabulary.
I will not adjudicate the competing values of the philosophically true and
the theoretically useful (which of course need not be opposed), nor do I
wish to imply that theory does not involve, or should not involve,
intellectual clarity and moral responsibility. Indeed, I would argue that a
theorist must be philosophically informed—come to strong views on what
is right and true, and to know of the history of the normative principles and
positions that led to those conclusions—in order to theorize well. (In
contrast, one may do certain kinds of philosophy without a robust
knowledge of critical or cultural theory.) Following this line of thought, and
unlike philosophy’s frequent deference to past thinkers, theory loves the
new. The pursuit of theoretical novelty—of new terms, new concepts—is
vital to continually develop a language with which to understand cultural
objects, particularly when extant theoretical positions and critiques have
been taken up and accounted for by the objects themselves. In this light,
film theory is now repellent for exactly the reasons that it was once
entrancing. Scholars searching for the security of boundaries, of systems to
affirm one’s correctness, may be averse to the risks of thought that the
doing of theory requires.
Authors in this volume aim to take such risks. They see the Oxford
Handbook of Film Theory as an opportunity to clarify the complex array of
inquiries that now fall under the banner of film, and to refresh the kinds of
questions and problems that cohere the field. It is not just the relationship of
film theory and film-philosophy that is at stake but the question of cinema
itself. This volume invests in thinking of film as a medium, and a medium
with some specificity, but without making claims about ontological
necessities. This is not to say that film is merely a relative term, though it
may be becoming that. Claiming “ontology” gives one the authority to talk
about the reality of the thing, which we might try to express in terms of
truth. But truth is a semantic notion, not, or not only, a metaphysical one. It
is a property of statements within our theory, not an attribute of things in
reality. (This is another place that theory and philosophy meet.) So truth
may be found in nonontological approaches, and even if we no longer
recognize the category of film by custom, it is also, and historically, a
system of principles and expectations that direct technique and our
appraisal of it as a medium, with secondary principles, via criticism and
critical films, to challenge that system. The fitting attitude to take toward
the practice of film theory is, then, one of caution. Theorists can create new
ways of seeing or judging a film, new ways of conceptualizing the film
medium, film culture, spectatorship, and so on, and therefore, influence
future films, their reception, and the business of film history. There can be
no pure “film theory,” for building concepts and systems of understanding
solely from film history would be inadequate to understanding its aesthetic
forms and their cultural affects. Film theory needs the help of resources
from philosophy, social theory, the criticism of literature and theater, art
history, and so forth. Film theory becomes part of cultural and political
theory. Its value lies not solely in evaluating or understanding films and
filmic technique but in understanding culture and its institutions.
Hence, despite changes in the media landscape, movies remain a vital
force in contemporary culture, as does our idea of what a movie is, and the
concept of “the cinematic” continues to be germane to the reception of a
range of forms of art and entertainment. Indeed, we might say that the
category “film” now only exists in theory. Long-form serial narratives such
as Twin Peaks: The Return (David Lynch, 2017) or Small Axe (Steve
McQueen, 2020) are dubbed “movies” by directors and critics. Theaters
have gone digital, there aren’t twenty-four frames per second, and most
movies are watched at home on television or computer monitors. It is
incumbent upon us, then, to question what we mean by “film” today—and
how, and when, we know to use the term. At the same time, we know the
category of film has always been somewhat arbitrary, often determined by
capitalist industrial forces, particularly Hollywood. Feature-length
durations, aspect ratios, color palettes, etc. have all at one point or another
been used to determine whether an object was properly cinematic, and
knowledge about what technology was used to create the sights and sounds
before them was hardly at the forefront of most filmgoers’ minds.
This is all to say that we have now the chance to make film theory new
again. Decades after “posttheory,” we once again operate outside ossified
ideas of what film theory is or must be. The conditions leading up to
contemporary film theory’s origins and our own are remarkably similar.
There have been two decades of attention to the mechanical matters of
cinema, this time the digital, and much concern with the experience of film
as transcendental, in the form of affect theory. Our moment has a similarly
vexed relation to truth claims and ideology critique, with scholars largely
operating within one camp as opposed to the other. (The overwhelming
whiteness of those who have self-identified as working in the area of film
and philosophy, myself included, cannot be overlooked.) And while
scholars need not defend an ideological approach to a text as Heath did, that
does not mean that ideology critique no longer needs theoretical
clarification, lest we risk simply repeating ourselves. “Ideology critique,” as
Caren Irr writes, “remains the primary social contribution made by
intellectuals in the humanities to the project of emancipation and planetary
survival.”19 However, Irr warns us that it is currently in danger:
Many academic humanists today replace ideology critique with mere propaganda labeling
and ethical condemnation. Propaganda labeling identifies well-known tropes whose social
content is already widely disavowed. Confirming the truisms of the present by re-erecting
and then toppling once again the statues that have already been felled by a previous
generation, propaganda labeling fosters intellectual stagnation and replaces critique with an
unearned and ready-made sense of accomplishment. In other words, such work performs
reproductive tasks rather than critical ones: it reproduces the norms of the present by
repeating and memorializing the actions that created our own circumstances rather than
investigating them. This is the project of ideological rigidification rather than the active
critical labor of unsettling, opening, and liberating.20

Now more than ever we must combat “ideological rigidification” if we are

to put a halt to cyclical structures of society.
This volume thus moves the conversation of and about film theory
beyond the fixation on the technological or ontological status of the film
image that, understandably, preoccupied film-theoretical discussion at the
turn of the twenty-first century as digital technology came to permeate
virtually all aspects of the film object. To put it another way, the aim of this
collection is to narrow in on the subject of film, though not with a
conservative or nostalgic sensibility, and with the recognition that what
constitutes a film is historically contingent, in dialogue with the vicissitudes
of entertainment, art, and empire. Questions regarding the history of theory,
of what historical theoretical methods can be applied to contemporary texts,
how to put international theorists in dialogue, the critical dismissal of
pleasure, the potential biases inherent to using hypothetical spectators in
one’s theory, relations of the theorist to the collective they are theorizing,
and others were also overshadowed by attention to the relation of film to
other media. These are questions asked here.
The first section, Meta-Theory, concerns the theory of film theory. What
theory has been helpful? What are the values that have subtended certain
ideas of, for example, time in film theory, as Tom Gunning explores?
Daniel Morgan contextualizes recent trends in film theory, such as the
interest in affect theory and the work of Hannah Arendt, within longer
legacies of aesthetic scholarship in order to show how imbricated political
and aesthetic queries so often are. In a similar move but in a different
register, Brian Price contends that films and film theory can have
applications beyond the scope of film and intervene into questions
belonging to moral psychology and philosophy. Malcolm Turvey returns to
classical film theory to defend the relevance of particular conceptions of an
expressive medium. In another defense, Damon Young demonstrates the
persistent value of psychoanalytic film theory, rescuing it from now-cliched
judgments. Domietta Torlasco reflects on the theories we use to demarcate
films, essays, and essayistic films.
Reflecting on the nature of film theory leads us to the second section,
Film Theory’s Project of Emancipation, which is also concerned with the
history of theory, asking how and when we know that our theoretical praxis
yields knowledge and is not, in fact, a process that generates further
ideological problems. The chapters in this section thus question our
theoretical–ideological inheritance, urging us to unlearn ways of seeing and
hearing movies—and thinking about cinema. Nico Baumbach considers the
role of the idea of ideology in film theory, and specifically asks after its
efficacy in an age that witnessed Trumpism and the rise of populism. Victor
Fan highlights the bias toward Western thinkers in Western film theory,
recounting the rich history of film theoretical writings in China, explicating
how its Buddhist metaphysical grounding encourages us to see the medium.
In her chapter, Maggie Hennefeld takes up the mantle of feminist film
theory and extends its scope by innovating a taxonomy of mischievous, and
subversive, female character types. Kara Keeling, in conversation with
three films authored by Black women, develops a new and urgent iteration
of Black feminist film theory. Noah Isenberg expands our history of film
theory by recovering the historical importance of writers whose work has
been excluded from the film theory canon but, despite being written for
nonscholars, was deeply engaged in theoretical concerns and achieved
popular reach.
The third section, Apparatus and Perception, implicitly revisits the 1970s
impulse to theorize relations of the cinematic apparatus to audience, but in
new ways. Through careful readings of image-making in three lesbian-
themed films, Marta Figlerowicz questions “our conventional notions of
what genuinely subversive, nonnormative self-scrutiny and affirmation
should consist in, and what results it should yield.” Homay King explores
how a range of films, especially experimental ones, obsess over issues of
repetition, interval, and reenactment. Davide Panagia points out the central
role of the moviola to ideas of montage in studies of Jean-Luc Godard’s
work, and, beyond this, argues for a new politicized, empiricist film theory.
Antonio Somaini’s chapter traces the history of the idea of “machine
vision” from the Soviet Kino-Eye to the present, arguing that contemporary
artificial intelligence practices demand that we rethink, again, what we
mean by terms like “vision” and “image.” Also looking at current
technology, Kyle Stevens takes up the importance of headphones as one of
the principal technologies of film exhibition, offering a new theory of film
sound that accommodates for the shift from being “inside” the sound of an
exhibition space to the sound being “inside” us.
Section four, Audiovisuality, continues this interest in listening, seeking
to remedy the all too commonly divided considerations of sound and image
in film scholarship by focusing on neither separately but on audiovisuality
as a condition of film. Luka Arsenjuk begins the section by engaging with
media theory more broadly in order to argue that not only is cinema
properly audiovisual but that to speak of film’s digital revolution only in
terms of the image is one-sided, and, in turn, to acknowledge valuable
differences in seeing and listening to movies, as the sonic digital transition
did not solicit the same degree of anxiety. Celebrated theorist of film sound
Michel Chion next reflects on how his own experience pursuing musique
concrete informed his understanding of cinema. Examining Hindi films,
Usha Iyer focuses on the expressive ambiguities of the dancer-actress,
developing a theory of screen performance that accommodates kinetic
complexities unaccounted for in theories of acting, such as the famous
Method. In her chapter on the documentary mode, Pooja Rangan articulates
tensions between the status of filmed subjects and authorial intention with
regard to the politics and authority given to the voice, and in doing so, urges
us to depart from prior, overly simplistic, treatments of the voice of
documentary films. To close this section, Rick Warner meticulously reads
Barry Jenkins’s 2016 drama Moonlight, crafting a new way of reading films
audiovisually by attending to the atmosphere-building effects of musical
and shot rhythms (and their relations).
Warner’s close reading of Moonlight segues into the fifth section, How
Close Is Close Reading? As the title makes explicit, the authors
contemplate the idea of close reading, advocating for the value of intimate
proximity to a text. Theory and aesthetic object ought to inform one another
in bidirectional and balanced ways, they agree, with the theorist being
prepared to go where the material intensities and formal workings of the
aesthetic object take them. The close reading section reacquaints us with the
necessity of scrupulous film analysis, not as divorced from historical
political concerns but precisely because understanding what a work of art is
really doing—how it creates certain effects—is inseparable from its
politics. Hence, and against broader trends toward “surface reading,” close
reading is vital to the charge of social justice, too. Contributors to this
section advocate for the labor of careful attention, reckoning with how the
enduring specificity of style presents a particular challenge to the
generalizing impulses of theory. Yet first one must determine the perimeters
of the object. This is the question Amy Villarejo takes up in her chapter.
Her driving question—when does a film begin?—seeks to get at the
importance of a film’s context: What knowledge, attitudes, and beliefs do
audiences bring with them, and how does that affect the film that
individual’s experience? Caetlin Benson-Allott asks similar questions
concerning spectatorship, in this case, about how different uses of images of
Black violence presuppose, or appeal to, or seek to create different kinds of
politicized attention—and demonstrates how to productively combine film
theory and media theory. In his chapter on the nature of description,
Timothy Corrigan contemplates the theoretical stakes in adapting a film to
prose, and that reflecting on the process of writing about film is requisite
for all who do so. David Gerstner compares and analogizes images of
women cutting things throughout film history and ideas of montage,
challenging us to think more deeply about relations of images across a
movie, and of parts to their whole. In doing so, he mounts the argument that
terms like “representation” are often used reductively, as content that exists
within a film, rather than looking for the expressive aesthetic and
ideological function of the images. Marketa Uhlirova also looks at
depictions of women in a range of films, with an eye on their attire.
Beginning with the famous dress of the Serpentine dancer in the Lumière
brothers’ famous film, Uhlirova interrogates our own perception of such
garments: When do we (think we) see costumes, as opposed to fashion? She
then creates a technical term out of “clothes” to resolve this dilemma. Also
in this section, Adrian Martin offers a profound and wide-ranging defense
of close reading, reminding us that such reading is technologically
dependent and changes over time—even for a single audience member.
Martin’s argument is a welcome rejoinder to the idea that film criticism is a
negative regime, as he revels in the affection and appreciation at the heart of
close reading.
The final section, The Turn to Experience, signals the current interest in
the field to interpretive methods derived from affect theory and
phenomenology. The success of “the affective turn” in the twenty-first
century has opened up the question of emotional labor, and in doing so has
expanded our category of “meaning.” Yet there is much more to be said
about affect, labor, epistemic validity, spectatorship, and technology. How
do we determine the adequacy of emotional responses, or of our responses
to those responses? What of the overly sentimental or, in contrast, a
spectator who laughs ironically to protect from being moved? The
compulsively sappy and chronically cold are both forms of failure to meet
the text adequately. But how to discuss this? What standards can be
applied? The chapters in this section ruminate on questions such as these.
Sarah Keller reevaluates the implicit notion throughout affect theory of the
partially passive spectator, scorned since the heyday of apparatus theory, as
well as how many affect-based accounts of the film experience stress the
concepts of activity, agency, and interactivity when the viewer’s at least
partially passive reception of sensations and processes is largely what
makes affect worth talking about in the first place. She does this by arguing
that independent films by female filmmakers such as Céline Sciamma offer
particular iterations of empathy, and that reading films with affect in mind
—in dialogue with feminist theories of affect more broadly—can yield new
insights into film form. In his chapter, Julian Hanich intervenes into the
ways that when film theorists have historically described a hypothetical
“viewer” or “spectator” of a movie they neglect to consider the importance
of whether such a person encounters the film in isolation or as one member
of a collective—and of the tendencies to respond affectively differently in
each situation. Scott Richmond looks, too, to film theory past, taking a
historiographical approach to the similarities and differences among
apparatus theory and psychoanalytic film theory, looking specifically at
how each of these schools casts the importance of subjectivity and
interiority, both onscreen figures’ and the audience’s. In doing so, he
substantially rethinks the limits and strengths of affect as a theoretical
concept. John David Rhodes is also concerned with subjectivity. He returns
to the scene of modernism’s fascination with mechanicity and its
suppositional cognate, impersonality. The “impersonal inorganic vitality” of
the cinematic camera, Rhodes shows, has had enduring power in the history
of film theory, threatening to hide the evaluation, or devaluation, of the
human that sustains it. Finally, by tracking distinctions in the concept of
experience as it appears in various film theoretical and film-philosophical
contexts, Robert Sinnerbrink meditates upon the transformation of audience
experience from cinema to newer digital media forms such as virtual reality.
The ambition of these chapters, taken together, is to further our
exchanges about the methods that cohere film studies. Psychologists may
think deeply about love. Philosophers may think deeply about love.
Scholars of romantic comedies may think deeply about love. What
determines a scholarly community is how they think. If film theory is to
perdure, the conversation about our shared methods and questions is
imperative.
N
1. Examples of film theorists blurring boundaries between academic and nonacademic contexts
abound. We might think of Susan Sontag’s work on film as a public intellectual, or of Annette
Michelson, who pioneered New York University’s film studies program while publishing
essays in Artforum that reached an audience well beyond the walls of academe.
2. Stephen Heath, “Le Père Noël,” October 26 (Fall 1983): 90.
3. Eugenie Brinkema, “A Theory of Regret by Brian Price,” JCMS: Journal of Cinema and Media
Studies 58, no. 2 (Winter 2019): 185.
4. Christine Gledhill and Linda Williams, Reinventing Film Studies (London: Arnold, 2000).
5. Quoted in Helen Davis, Understanding Stuart Hall (London: SAGE, 2004), 150.
6. Brinkema, “Theory of Regret,” 189.
7. Béla Balázs, Theory of the Film: Character and Growth of a New Art, trans. Edith Bone (New
York: Dover, 1970), 17.
8. Mary Ann Doane, “The Object of Theory,” in Rites of Realism: Essays on Corporeal Cinema,
ed. Ivone Margulies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 80–92.
9. Ibid., 82.
10. Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001); Mark
Hansen, New Philosophy for New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004).
11. Brinkema, “Theory of Regret,” 189.
12. Karl Marx, The German Ideology (New York: Prometheus Books, 1998), 574.
13. In taking a polemical stance, I am admittedly losing nuances, such as how film historians
demonstrate and innovate theory and how classical film theorists were also invested in certain
ideas of social improvement.
14. Louis Aragon, “On Décor,” in The Shadow and its Shadow, ed. Paul Hammond (San Francisco,
CA: City Lights, 2001), 30.
15. Noël Carroll and Jinhee Choi, Philosophy of Film and Motion Pictures (Malde, MA:
Blackwell, 2006), 1.
16. Bernd Herzogenrath, Film as Philosophy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017),
vii.
17. André Bazin, André Bazin and Italian Neorealism, ed. Bert Cardullo (New York: Continuum,
2011), 169.
18. Timothy Williamson, “Must Do Better,” in Truth and Realism, ed. Patrick Greenough and
Michael P. Lynch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 278–92.
19. Caren Irr, “Ideology Critique 2.0,” The South Atlantic Quarterly 119, no. 4 (October 2020):
715.
20. Ibid., 716.
 SECTION I

META-THEORY
 CHAPTER 1

A MACHINE FOR KILLING

TIME

TOM GUNNING

W T
A clock that is running will always be a disturbance on the stage where it cannot be permitted its
role in measuring time […] it is most revealing that film—where appropriate—can readily make
use of time as measured by the clock.

—Walter Benjamin “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Reproducibility” (Second version, 1937)1
FRITZ Lang’s Scarlet Street (1945) opens with a celebration in which Chris
Cross, a cashier, is honored by his boss J. J. Holgarth with the traditional
emblem of employee longevity and loyalty, a gold watch, “a 14-carat
seventeen jewel time piece.” As he hands Chris the gift, Holgarth equates
the man with the mechanism, describing Cross as “a 14-carat, seventeen
jewel cashier.” However, as Chris leaves the celebration with a fellow clerk
we see a crack in his characterization as a paragon of mechanical regularity.
Coming down the stoop of the restaurant, he sniffs the night air saying,
“nothing like the smell of spring,” and stumbles, realizing he is a bit drunk.
He confesses to his colleague that in his youth he dreamed of being a great
painter. The clerk asks if he still paints and Chris nods and replies, “Every
Sunday.” The clerk responds, “Well that’s one way to kill time. You know
Sunday is the one day of the week I don’t like. I never know what to do
with myself.” Soon after, Chris, lost in the maze of Greenwich Village
streets, encounters Kitty Marsh and initiates an affair that will have fatal
consequences for them both. If this burst of middle-age passion initially
appears as a rebellion against the routine of his life, Kitty’s sexual allure
becomes represented by a different mechanism, a scratched recording of
“Melancholy Baby,” which repeats the lyric “in love, in love, in love,” with
maddening insistence. After murdering Kitty upon discovering her with a
lover, the motif of the broken record on the soundtrack serves as the refrain
of Cross’s growing madness and guilt. The film ends with Chris, nearly
mad with guilt, now an indigent wandering the nighttime streets of New
York City as the phrase that revealed his mistress’s infidelity (“Jeepers I
love you, Johnny”) echoes on the soundtrack. Chris Cross has become a
broken record, no longer marking the passing of time, but condemned to
eternal repetition of a traumatic moment.
I want to consider the mechanical marking of the passing of time as one
of the specificities of cinema, one it admittedly shares with other recording
media but employs in unique ways. I will trace cinema’s absorption of
clock-time on several levels: as a technical process, as a mode of reception,
and as an influence on the structures of individual films and film genres. In
some ways, this chapter serves as a footnote to Mary Ann Doane’s
magisterial treatment of the emergence of cinematic time, but with a
narrower scope and a more literal concentration, dealing less with the
representation of time in the cinema and her major theme of its relation with
contingency and order than with the mechanical marking of time, “clock-
time.”2 The cinema apparatus produces a mechanically generated and
processed flow of time, which it portions out to audiences who use it as a
means of passing, or even more radically, to quote Chris’s friend, of “killing
time.”
Defining the specificities of media implies an act of differentiation and,
potentially, of isolation. Early film theory focused on its specificities
primarily to argue that film was simultaneously different from, and equal to,
the other arts. The last gasp of such claims may have expired with the
polemic between video and film art in the 1960s, when technologies of the
image, modes of production and reception, seemed at antipodes. Even in the
current promiscuous media environment, theoretical claims about essential
differences between the photographic and the digital, the chemical versus
the electronic, persist. But the current melting pot of media production and
viewing practices blurs distinctions rather than supports them. Not only do
media mix, they participate in a mutual contagion, an orgy of camouflage or
cannibalism.
Instead of patrolling borders, I want to trace specificities that snake
through diverse media yielding new configurations. I have always been
intrigued by Thomas Edison’s famous opening statement for his 1888
Caveat for a motion pictures device: “I am experimenting upon an
instrument which does for the eye what the phonograph does for the ear
which is the recording and reproduction of things in motion.”3 Edison
conceives a new medium through analogy with another recent one. The
caveat describes not only Edison’s invention, the kinetoscope, but its union
with the phonograph (“by the insertion of the listening tubes of the
phonograph into the ear the illusion is complete and we may see and hear a
whole opera as if actually present although the actual performance may
have taken place years before,”4) supporting Bazin’s claim in “The Myth of
Total Cinema” that the inventors of cinema conceived of it as a “complete
illusion” from its origins.5 I want to stress that an original conception of
motion pictures emerged in close relation to sound recording. This is
evident in the many technical details in his caveat that were borrowed from
the already patented phonograph (“photographing these series of pictures in
a continuous spiral on a cylinder or plate in the same manner as sound is
recorded on the phonograph”; “the cylinders may be about the same size as
the phonograph”).6
But the implications of Edison’s invocation of the phonograph go beyond
these technical aspects: both devices preserve the time during which
moving images and recorded sounds occur. The phonograph and the
kinetograph record different phenomena; the specificity they share lies in
their ability to record and replay time passing. Capturing the experience of a
specific length of continuously flowing time—the ability to replay and
share it—may constitute a key fascination the recording media holds for
viewers and listeners. Recording and replaying makes the flow of time
palpable and graspable, lifted out of the ordinary passing of lived time.
Earlier forms of transcription differ in essential ways from the novel
temporal recording the phonograph and cinema introduced. For instance,
the visible speech form of transcribing sound devised by Alexander
Melville Bell, father of Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of the
telephone, used special signs to indicate a wide range of sounds. In public
demonstrations, Alexander fils could pronounce the sounds his father had
transcribed, including languages he did not understand or nonsensical vocal
noise. Bell’s system of symbols offered a representation of sound and
provided a program for its reproduction.7 The first public demonstration of
the phonograph similarly amazed audiences by the machine’s ability to
reproduce “every note” of a complex trumpet performance, or to replay the
vocal cacophony produced by audience members. But as accurate as its
transcription might be, Bell’s system could not replay the moment of the
utterance as the phonograph could, only its content. The essence of
recording, then, goes beyond simple accuracy of reproduction and resides in
replaying the moment of the flow of time, its duration. One might make a
similar observation about chronophotography, the sequential photography
of bodies in motion pioneered by photographer Eadweard Muybridge and
physiologist Étienne-Jules Marey that preceded, and technically, led to, the
development of cinema. As a scientist Marey fairly scorned the invention of
cinematography, the recreation of continuous motion as exemplified by
Lumière’s cinématographe.8 Marey viewed the photography of motion as a
tool of analysis and instruction, not a form of entertainment. The still
images of motion that chronophotography produced served as a graph, a
spatial mapping of the temporal positions and trajectories of movement.
The flow of time enters into them only as a representation, not as an
unfolding temporal experience. These images do not replay; indeed, they
are intended to overcome the flow of time.
In contrast to the scientific use of Marey’s chronophotography, the
Lumiére Company’s cinématographe provided a form of entertainment by
replaying a moment, sparking an audience response that surprised its
inventors, who ultimately exhibited it as a theatrical attraction rather than
the latest novelty in amateur photography like the other products of this
photographic supply company.9 The sources of its popularity have often
been cited: technical novelty, uncanny realism, delight in the motion of
manifold details, but I would add the fascination exerted by images that
take time, the temporal dimension of the experience of motion. The
experience of an audience sharing with an apparatus not only the
representation of an event but its actual temporal unfolding, while only one
aspect of the appeal of cinema, is the focus of this chapter. Entertainment
implies not only the affect of amusement but an occupation of time, a
pastime. Rather than the event that transpires, I stress the transpiring itself,
its relative emptiness, its hollow receptivity,
Recording in “real time” indicates an isomorphism between a represented
event and its record (e.g., in film long takes without cuts are understood to
preserve the “real time” of the event).10 But rather than a claim of realism,
this chapter focuses on the reception of time itself, the isomorphism
between the time recorded and the time spent by a listener/viewer. This may
appear tautological, but sharing the time of a mechanical unfolding by
sitting through it defines a specificity of temporal entertainment. The
viewer/auditor shares the same duration of time not only with other
audience members but with the mechanism as it operates. I am not
disputing the possibility of highly different “subjective” experiences during
the projection, but I want to emphasize that the time of replaying the
recording unites device and audience in a shared duration. That this stretch
of time can be precisely measured by clock-time defines the way time gets
recorded technically. Phonograph records, films, and videos all have
specific running times. Watching (and listening to) a film, video, or sound
recording, the recipient participates in an externalized mechanical time that
begins and lasts for a determined period. Obviously, the shared passing of
time occurs with any attended performance (theatrical play, concert, circus),
but with recorded media the time is not contingent on an event but is fixed
and inherent in the working of the machine.
Beyond this technical aspect I want to explore the historical context of
recorded time, the social dimension of this technical innovation of capturing
time for replay. Cinema emerged and flourished in the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries, an era when time was being redefined both
socially and technologically. In his classic 1934 study, Technics and
Civilization, Lewis Mumford proclaimed, “The clock, not the steam engine,
is the key-machine of the modern industrial age.”11 The clock not only
marked time, it redefined it. As Mumford put it, “The clock, moreover, is a
piece of power-machinery whose product is seconds and minutes: by its
essential nature it dissociated time from human events and helped create
belief in an independent world of mathematically measurable sequences:
the special world of science.”12 The end of the nineteenth and turn of the
twentieth century saw an intensification of this transformation of the ways
time was measured, inaugurating what Stephen Kern has called a “Culture
of Time and Space.”13
During this period, the experience of time became increasingly
determined by new technologies of clock-time. Industrial labor became
subjected to new temporal discipline, typified by such innovations as
Frederick W. Taylor’s scientific management, which subdivided workers’
activity into phases regulated by a stopwatch;14 the institution of standard
time zones, which systematized networks of transportation and
communication stretching across the nation and around the world; and new
technologies for recording time ranging from “railway watches” with
second hands to scientific instruments calibrated to fractions of a second.15
Through these and other transformations, the late nineteenth century
established time as a universal standard of measurement, homogenous and
infinitely divisible. This abstract understanding of time of the world of
science and engineering penetrated into everyday life, as the clock on the
village church gave way to alarm clocks and pocket watches. Modern time
became clock-time, and this means of mechanical regulation transformed
the way time was spent. German sociologist George Simmel claimed: “If all
the watches in Berlin suddenly went wrong in different ways even only as
much as an hour, its entire economic and commercial life would be derailed
for some time.”16
This standard mode of temporality also spawned a philosophical and
social critique. Heidegger’s 1926 Being and Time described time measured
by the clock as, “Public time which has been leveled off and which belongs
to everyone—and that means to nobody.”17 A few years earlier, in 1907,
Henri Bergson opposed this concept of a homogenous time composed of
equal units to what he called the experience of duration, which consists of a
continuous flow of becoming rather than a numerical division into static
instants as shown by a clock. The precision of clock-time may be invaluable
to the sciences, Bergson claimed, but it distorted our understanding of
human lived time. “Which amounts to saying real time regarded as a flux,
or, in other words, as the very mobility of being, escapes the hold of
scientific knowledge.”18
 Nonetheless, Bergson admitted, human intellect has a hard time trusting
our intuitive grasp of the natural flow of duration and prefers instead to
freeze the continuous flow of time by breaking it into analyzable bits. This
conception of time as a succession of abstractly equal instants, Bergson
claimed, has become our dominant understanding of time. Walter Benjamin
described such “homogenous empty time” as the product of the decay of
experience in modern life which he termed “Erlebnis,” time simply lived
through, as opposed to traditional “Erfahrung,” time rich in memory and
informed by communal experience.19 Although the model for this abstract
time may be the clock’s mechanical regulated motion, Bergson referenced
an even newer technology to name its effect, calling it “the
cinematographical mechanism of thought and the mechanistic illusion.”20
For Bergson the cinema epitomized time processed by a machine and
therefore provided a perfect model for the way it represses our original
experience of time. The cinema is born under the sign of modern clock-
time. Indeed, the basic mechanism of the cinema derives technically from
clockwork’s regulation of motion. Motion in the cinema, Bergson would
observe, is created by an apparatus that slices the actual flow of motion and
duration into successive static pictures, lasting for an instant and producing
not an experience of duration but an abstract image of time and motion.21
Cinema participates technically and experientially (and, I would claim,
dialectically) in this transformation in the modern experience of time.
Stephen Kern in his useful overview of this modern “culture of time and
space” has described cinema as a technological challenge to traditional
views of time as a linear and irreversible succession, largely due to film’s
possibilities of manipulating time.22 I find this claim insightful—yet overly
simple. This chapter seeks to embed the experience of film viewing into a
modern everyday culture regulated by the clock. But film’s role as a new
form of mass entertainment enacts on several levels a dialectical relation to
modern time, both reflecting the abstract burden of regulated clock-time
and simultaneously seeking release from the tyranny of the clock.
For both Heidegger and Benjamin, empty time as measured by the
passing seconds surfaces most clearly in the experience of boredom.
Benjamin roots Baudelaire’s sense of ennui and spleen in the isolating
nature of modern experience (Erlebnis) embodied in “the ticking of the
seconds that enslaves the melancholy man.”23 Heidegger’s magisterial
discussion of boredom in his 1929/1930 lecture course on The Fundamental
Concepts of Metaphysics claims boredom reveals human beings’
fundamental attunement to time.24 His analysis of a quintessential modern
instance of boredom—waiting for a train in a station—describes the way we
continually look at our watches as a helpless subjection to time. “Looking at
our watch already indicates, by its helpless gesture, our failure to pass the
time, and thus indicates that we are becoming increasingly bored.”25
Invoking the phrase that Chris Cross’s colleague used, Heidegger’s
clock-watching moves from the failure to pass time to the desire to kill it.
“[W]e wish to ascertain how much time is left until the train departs, or
whether the time until the train arrives will soon have elapsed, i.e. whether
we must continue to struggle against the emergent boredom by this
unsuccessful killing of time, strangely lacking any goal. It is not a matter of
simply spending time, but of killing it, of making it pass more quickly.”26
What are we looking for when, out of deep boredom, we look at our watch?
Is it simply to learn what time it is? Heidegger responds, “even though we
often look at the clock, we look away again just as quickly. Towards what?
Toward nothing particular.” He then adds, “Yet we are looking for
something that will divert our attention. Divert it from what? From being
oppressed by time as it drags. We are seeking to pass the time […]
strangely, this means an occupation that diverts our attention away from
time as it drags and from its oppressing us.”27
Taking time. Passing time. Killing time. Moviegoing partakes of all these
modes of temporal experience. Describing the temporal nature of cinema
demands that this experiential and social dimension of time be a factor.

K T
In the July Revolution an incident occurred in which this consciousness came into its own. On the
first evening of the fighting, it so happened that the dials on clocktowers were being fired at
simultaneously and independently from several locations in Paris.

—Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History”28

As Mumford and others noted, the mechanism of the clock broke the
organic time of natural cycles—birth and death, sleep and waking, day and
night, the seasons—into a uniform systematic succession. The innovation of
the mechanical clock in the Middle Ages (replacing the less reliable water
clock, based on a process of flow and subject to weather condition, such as
freezing) lay in the innovation of the escapement mechanism. This device
regulated the movement of the clock, alternately braking and releasing it, so
that its progress became regularized but also intermittent (the tick-tock of
mechanical clocks reflects such a rhythm).29 As E. R. Truitt puts it
succinctly, the escapement mechanism “meant that time-keeping could shift
from a continuous process (the movement of water) to a repetitive process
(the back and forth of the verge).”30 In the late Middle Ages, a variety of
precision machines grew out of the principles of clock-making, such as
automata, mechanized figures of humans and animals made to move by
clockwork, and complex mechanisms such as water pumps and mechanical
saws which derived from the clock’s escapement mechanism.31 The cinema
uses a similar mechanism of regular intermittent motion not only to record
the successive moments of time with the camera but to replay those
moments through the projector. Cinema’s moving image in essence depends
on the regularity of a clockwork mechanism.
The motion picture camera slices the flow of action into singular
photographic frames (called by some semioticians “photograms”) each one
registered on the strip of negative film as it moves intermittently through
the camera. As Marey replaced the photographic plates originally used by
Muybridge and his own chronophotography with the new flexible roll film,
cinema began to emerge—and to differentiate itself—from photography.32
This required a mechanism that could move the film strip rapidly and
precisely, as well as stilling it for an instant during which a photographic
exposure was made. This rapid, intermittent, and precise movement
demanded a mechanism similar to the escapement devices of clockwork,
pulling down the film strip, holding it still for an instant, then releasing it.
As Bergson had intuited, the cinema synthesizes photography and
clockwork. The regular succession of film frames moving through the
camera when shooting—or at the movie theater moving through the
projector—constitutes the essential mechanical metric beat of the cinema,
even before the editing or motion of a film creates its own individual
rhythm. As my great teacher, the Austrian experimental filmmaker Peter
Kubelka (whose films I will discuss later in this essay), would say, “There
is basic rhythm in cinema”: every film shown has, underlying its action, this
same steady metric beat of the individual frames passing through the
projector.33
One can relate (as Doane and others have) cinematic time to the
rationality and instrumental time of the clock and its extensions into the
industrialization of labor and the rationalism of time in Taylorism. Henri
Bergson’s use of the cinematograph as the image of time drained of the
lived experience grounded this view theoretically. Cinema embodies the
empty time of capitalism, flattened out and made inaccessible to Erfahrung.
But if we follow Benjamin’s argument in “The Work of Art in the Age of
Mechanical Reproduction,” this modern temporality stripped of its aura also
opens up other possibilities, or at least ambivalences.34 Here lies my claim
of the dialectical relation of cinema to modern time. I neither celebrate nor
condemn cinema’s relation to mechanically recorded time but rather probe
its manifold possibilities and contradictions.
The expression “killing time” catches this ambivalence. Killing time may
relate profoundly to the “dead time” of modern labor and systems of
exchange. But one could claim the terms “killing” and “dead” define less
complementary than antagonistic responses to modern temporality. “Killing
time” indicates a mode of wasting time, or laying time to waste—a response
to time’s oppression as Heidegger’s train station boredom showed. If the
time that “hangs heavy on one’s hands” is usually understood as
nonproductive, it therefore has an inverse relation to the empty time of
industrial production, which Benjamin and others would see exemplified by
the repetitive and alienated gestures of the assembly line. The deadening
effect of alienated labor bleeds into free time so that, when released from
drudgery, workers find their free time can be as regulated as factory time.
The regimentation and rationalization of leisure time as the complement
of rationalized labor has long formed part of leftist critiques of capitalist
modernity.35 As Theodor Adorno puts it in his late essay “Free Time,” “…
free time is nothing more than a shadowy continuation of labor,” subject to
similar constraints of behavior and temporality.36 More recently, the late
Bernard Stiegler amplified Adorno’s suspicion of free time in his volume 3
of Technics and Time.37 Stiegler’s suspicion exceeds Adorno’s identifying
the cinema with a primal and passive boredom stultifying the imagination.
In Stiegler’s view, film watching represents a desire, “Just to be lost in the
flow of images.”38 The attraction of cinema for the bored viewer, Stiegler
claims, comes essentially from our mental laziness: “we need only look.”39
He describes such watching as literally a means of passing time:
the cinematic will attract our attention to the passing images, no matter what they are, and
we will prefer to see them unfold before our eyes. We become immersed in the time of their
flowing forth; we forget all about ourselves watching, perhaps “losing ourselves” (losing
track of time) …
During the passing ninety minutes or so … of this pastime, the time of our consciousness
will be totally passive within the thrall of those “moving” images that are linked together by
noises, sound words, voices.40

In spite of my great respect of the first two volumes of Stiegler’s work, I

find this characterization of the passive consumption of the flow of
cinematic images short-sighted. Stiegler admits that “good movies” can
overcome this enthrallment, stating a paragraph later that in a “good film”:
The cinematographic machine, having taken charge of our boredom will have transformed it
into new energy, transubstantiated it, made something out of nothing—the nothing of that
terrible, nearly fatal feeding of a Sunday afternoon of nothingness.41

I could easily dismiss this account of how the author spends his Sundays as
the last gasp of French Apparatus Theory of the 1970s, which equated
cinema with the illusionistic shadows on the wall of Plato’s cave.42
Although the work’s subtitle is “Cinematic Time,” Stiegler undertakes little
serious analysis of films to let us know what, or indicating what, a film
could do to transform its boredom. Rather than attributing the possibilities
of cinema to certain “good movies,” I take seriously the role cinema plays
as a pastime in which the flow of images exerts a certain fascination rooted
in its intimate relation to modern clock-time and the phenomenon of
boredom. It is its encounter with this clock-time, its literal dependence on it,
that opens the possibility of cinema as a transformation of our experience of
time.

M T F
 “Mutual Films Make Time Fly”

—Logo of the Mutual Film Company founded in 1912

I hear an inchoate rebellion expressed in the term “killing” time. As
Jonathan Kasson’s analysis of another industrialized pastime from the era of
cinema’s emergence, the Coney Island type of electrical amusement park,
reminds us, such attractions inverted the technology of industrial
production. Roller coasters, the Ferris wheel, spinning floors, sliding
staircases, even the merry-go-round, used massive electrical machinery to
produce disordered and dizzying behavior (the category of play that Roger
Caillois called ilinx) rather than manufacture commodities.43 I would claim
the fascination exerted by entertainments based in recorded time relies on a
similar inversion of the values attached by capitalism to clock-time. Time
becomes emptied of purpose and filled by something else, a release from
the purposeful employment of time. Instead of the worker being subjected
to clock schedules, time is captured by the cinema for her amusement.
“Passing” or “killing” time describes this act of transformation. It differs,
however, from forms of pure reverie, such as gazing at a fire or more
traditional contemplative forms of behavior in which time seems to
disappear. In clock-time, one is at least recurrently aware that time is
passing in defiance of Stiegler’s claim that we “lose all track of time.”
Killing time differs from suspending time, whether the ecstatic escape from
time that extreme religious or certain aesthetic experiences offer—or even
the pastime that turn-of-the-century social reformers such as Jane Addams
or Vachel Lindsay hoped cinema could replace: drunkenness in a saloon.44
The enormous growth of cheap film theaters, especially in urban areas of
the United States from 1905 to 1913, transformed attractions, as the
popularity of the primarily middle-class vaudeville theaters was fading, into
a commercial pastime capitalizing on the newfound free time of the
working class.45 “Nickelodeons” transformed the entertainment world by
offering not only programs of films (especially the new “story” films) but a
different form of “theater” from the social protocol of the upper-class legate
theater and even middle-class vaudeville. Most importantly, admission was
cheap (hence their name, nickelodeon, a show for a nickel, the price of a
beer); showings were continuous, so spectators could enter at any point (a
practice borrowed from vaudeville shows); seating lacked the traditional
hierarchy of prices and places; and most of all, the program was brief.
Instead of an evening’s entertainment, most nickelodeon programs lasted
for less than an hour and the films shown were one reel in length, twenty
minutes or less. For people with a newly acquired, but still limited, leisure
time, the nickelodeon provided a quick dose of free time, filled with action-
based stories and eye-popping magical attractions or slapstick gags. This
was a form of entertainment (which I have called “The Cinema of
Attractions”) that owed less to traditional narrative absorption of the drama
than to bursts of visual fascination.46 Movies were a pastime easily inserted
into the temporal regimes of the turn-of-the-century working day and
designed to grab the viewer’s attention.
Killing time implies a certain degree of violence. Undoubtedly, the
working-class audiences that crowded into nickelodeons early in the
twentieth century were attracted by the possibilities of spending time
released from realms of work or domesticity, undoing their subservience to
schedules and routines. However, while supplying distraction from daily
temporal demands, the pastime itself nonetheless possessed a determined
temporal structure; it would begin and end and in between transport its
audience along with its unrolling. Films engender enough interest to make
other demands recede from consciousness, but their running time also
restricts this release to a predetermined amount of time.
Clearly complex levels of cinematic syntax in both narrative and
nonnarrative films make cinematic time more than just the drone of passing
time seized on by an anxious audience. But this mechanical drone provides
a baseline for our experience of cinema, which films transform rather than
transcend. Indeed, the preservation of time that André Bazin claimed as the
essence of filmic realism can possess a power that is more than simply the
lowest level of cinematic engagement, what Stiegler referred to as merely
being lost in the flow of images.47 Cinema begins rather than ends with the
flow of mechanically captured moving images; it sublates rather than
eliminates clock-time.
How does this basic law of cinema, its continuous progression of time
recorded by the apparatus, relate to the creative manipulation of time in
narrative form? The films that drew the working class to the nickelodeon
were tailored to almost Taylorized temporal limits and relied often on the
burst visual pleasure of trick film attractions and slapstick action, but the
immersive story films played an increasingly important role in making the
movies a dominant pastime, moving beyond its working-class base to take
in both rural audiences and middle-class fans. D. W. Griffith and other early
filmmakers developed during the nickelodeon era films with suspenseful
narratives and empathetic characters, a cinema of narrative integration
where storytelling became dominant.48 However, neither the visual
attractions nor the underlying metric progression of time were abandoned
by narrative forms; rather they were transformed and played with.
I would describe every narrative film as having two temporal regimes.
On the one hand, we have the basic mechanical impulse of the apparatus,
the running time of the film which viewers experience, especially when
they check their watch. The second level would be the structured
temporality of the narrative plot, its arrangements of temporal order that
make up that story (whether a linear progression or a flashback structure or
other achronologies, such as the reversed time of Ozon’s 5X2 (2004) or
Nolan’s Memento (2000)).49
Paul Ricoeur’s three-volume Time and Narrative provides a complex
analysis of the role narrative takes in expressing the human experience of
time.50 Ricoeur broadly claims, “time becomes human time to the extent
that it is organized after the manner of a narrative.”51 To describe this
process by which time becomes narrativized, he asserts three interrelated
levels, which he calls mimesis1, mimesis2 and mimesis3, corresponding
roughly to the prefigured human world of actions (mimesis1), the creative
process of emplotment (mimesis2), and finally the cultural reception of
narrative forms (mimesis3). Although Ricoeur’s schema could be applied
directly to narrative films, my two-level model of film narrative stresses a
primal level to film narrative: that of the mechanical running time of the
film, its “clock-time.” Narrative becomes superimposed onto this basic
rhythm. The temporal mode of narrative may eclipse that primal clock-time,
but nonetheless it peeks through to varying degrees. The relation of clock-
time to actual film texts involves more than a technical condition of
projection and plays a role in our social and aesthetic reception of film.
The confluence of mechanical clock-time with narrative pattern reveals
how the simple forward motion of film’s recording apparatuses shapes our
cinematic experience. Cinema transforms modern temporality and offers a
response to boredom. To trace the patterns of cinema time in relation to
clock-time demands close analysis of the narrative and formal patterns of
individual films, genre patterns, or narrative structures. Film theory must
originate in a careful attention to film practice (both filmmaking and film
viewing), or it risks becoming a mere playing with terms. As Lee
Carruthers puts it in her recent book Doing Time, “films know about time,
and can teach us something about it … I want to say that cinema forges
arguments about temporality by diverse aesthetic means.”52

T T
“Lady, I don’t have the time.”

—Lee Marvin’s final line in Don Siegel’s The Killers (1964)

There is a motion picture installation that would seem designed to illustrate
my thesis about the cinema and clock-time, but unfortunately I have never
seen it. Christian Marclay’s The Clock (2010) is a twenty-four-hour
installation piece consisting of clips from films, good, bad, and indifferent,
that include clocks (from wristwatches, to electronic timers, to London’s
Big Ben) each showing specific times. The times shown on the screen are
edited so that they synchronize with the running time of the piece (at the
first moment of the screening cycle the clocks on the screen show 12:01,
and the times shown then progresses in strict succession). The piece forms
an endless loop, cycling through twenty-four hours with shots showing each
moment. Brief sequences of narrative action surround the shots of the
clocks, sometimes suspenseful, sometime quotidian.
As an installation with a twenty-four-hour cycle, the piece contrasts
sharply with the temporality of movie exhibition. Audiences come and go
with no sense of a beginning or closure other than the countdown of the
clocks. It also flaunts the status of the movies as objects of mass culture,
circulating in numerous technologically identical prints. Instead, The Clock
takes on the “aura” of an artwork with limited availability. It is shown
primarily in major art museums that can foot its price tag of approximately
half a million dollars.53 Hence I have not really had a chance to see it, other
than a few excerpts available on YouTube. As an object that represents the
increasing appropriation of cinema by the commodity-based art world, it
enacts the opposite of the social experience of the nickelodeon.
Nonetheless, although I have not been granted the privilege of the full
experience of The Clock—especially its sense of duration—the snatches I
have glimpsed, as well as descriptions I have heard, indicate that the piece
strongly displays my two levels of time—the time of an emploted narrative
and the mechanical succession of clock-time, its running time. Somewhat
uniquely, clock-time predominates, given the fragmentary nature of the
narrative bits shown. The sense of the linear succession of moments marked
by the various clocks provides the piece’s dominant sense of progression,
rather than our narrative anticipation of the outcome of human actions. The
traditional plotting of beginning, development, and closure gives way to the
linear process of checking the clocks (and I imagine for most viewers,
double-checking their own watches).
While the progression of the clocks dominates the flow of images in
Marclay’s piece, many of the sequences I have seen from The Clock show
suspenseful moments where clocks mark an approaching danger or deadline
life—without, however, necessarily showing their outcomes. By evoking,
and then denying, our expectations, these sequences lay bare a primary
function that clocks play in narrative films. In such sequences the passing of
time, far from inducing boredom, captures a critical moment in a human
life. This heightened sense of time through an emotional involvement with
the outcome of a crucial action corresponds to Alfred Hitchcock’s classic
definition of suspense (given in his interview with Francois Truffaut) in
which the suspenseful portrayal of a bomb explosion relies on setting a
deadline and showing its approach with a clock: “The public is aware that
the bomb is going to explode at one o’clock and there is a clock in the
décor.”54 But in the fully narrativized scene, the chronicling of clock-time
has been subordinated to intensifying viewer affect. Nonetheless, as
Marclay’s treatment of such sequences reveals, the pure linearity of the
progression of the clock (“The public can see that it is a quarter to one”—
Hitchcock) shines through and plays an essential role. If the forms of many
(all?) films reflect in some way their relation to clock-time, the cinema’s
temporal dialectic comes from an attempt to beat the clock, to offer an
Erfahrung within the context of Erlebnis. At such moments, clock-time
dominates the viewer with a vengeance generating specific forms of filmic
syntax such as parallel editing. From D. W. Griffith’s 1909 nickelodeon
film The Fatal Hour through to the works of the master of suspense Alfred
Hitchcock, clocks have marked and intensified narrative progression and
viewer absorption.
Any film viewer can immediately recall such scenes of suspenseful time
passing. But I want to close this chapter by considering somewhat less
obvious evocations and transformations of clock-time. My first example
comes not from a thriller, but from a romantic comedy. I am particularly
fascinated by the role deadlines play in defining romance as a form of
temporal experience. A romance portrays a magical love story which
struggles with the difficulty and even the improbability of the union of a
couple. Obstacles are encountered and eventually overcome until finally
love triumphs. Film romances are often critiqued as vehicles of escape and
fantasy in which scenarios of wish-fulfillment provide compensation for the
empty lives of the “little shop girls” in the audience.55 However, a romance
never simply shows dreams coming true but rather establishes a distinct
period in which romance can exist usually against the grain of ordinary time
and its barriers to the fulfillment of desire. That time in which romance is
possible defines the duration of the film. Romance is therefore bounded in
the narrative by a temporal closure, the act of ending, which in fact
corresponds to the temporal running out of the film. The space and time of
romance therefore corresponds to the film’s running time, our actual
viewing and listening experience. Woody Allen’s The Purple Rose of Cairo
(1985) offers a self-conscious version of this logic. The movie screen that
serves as membrane between Mia Farrow’s character’s willing suspension
of disbelief and the realm of illuminated fantasy becomes breached for a
period of romance. At the end the cinematic hero/lover (Jeff Daniels)
resumes his place on the screen and Farrow overcomes her loss through a
cathexis with the screen as a temporary site of fantasy. While I find Allen’s
fable ultimately condescending, it renders vivid the structure of the cinema
romance. Romance exists within marked temporal boundaries, ultimately
bounded by the film ending. The film, like the romance, will run out of
time; it exists only within an interval, the period in which time has been
killed—the time of the film. If, as Doane claims, the narrative trajectory of
film reflects the irreversible progression of the film running through the
projector, narrative closure naturalizes this mechanical inevitability. The ur-
form of the romance determined by mechanical time appears in the fairytale
Cinderella (or, as it was renamed in the film Pretty Woman (Garry Marshall,
1990), “Cinder-Fucking-Ella”). As an archetypal romance, Cinderella
pivots around the stroke of midnight, the hour when magic dissolves.
Already in 1899, Georges Méliès’s film of the fairytale had marked this
moment of disillusionment by an imp that leaps from a clock striking
midnight. The deadline becomes a spectacular attraction as women holding
clock faces showing the fatal hour dance about in a typical Méliès ballet.
Midnight, when clock hands meet and time begins a new cycle,
traditionally generated a mythology in which the mechanical marking of
time encounters other dimensions of desire. Walter Benjamin describes the
myth of midnight as the “widespread notion that at this hour time stands
still like the tongue of scale,” making “the narrow frame of midnight, an
opening in the passage of time.”56 The witching hour imposes a dangerous
pause in clock-time. In a more secular world, midnight became a deadline, a
moment of waking from desire’s dream when the play of romance and
fantasy ceases with a brutal return to Cinderella’s rags. Hollywood films
offer multiple variations on this theme. Midnight supplies the title of an
underrated example of the romance genre scripted by Charles Bracket and
Billy Wilder and elegantly directed by Mitchell Leisen in 1939.
A penniless adventuress and a Parisian taxi driver (played by,
respectively, Claudette Colbert and Don Ameche) intrude into a weekend at
an aristocratic French country house, claiming to be the Baron and
Baroness Czerny, participating in a plot arranged for devious purposes of
his own by John Barrymore as a consummate fairy Godfather. The phrase
“it’s midnight” serves several times as a warning between Colbert and
Barrymore that masks are slipping and identities might be exposed.
However, the moment of exposure is delayed, as a comedy of remarriage
becomes a comedy of sham divorce.57 True to the romance tradition, the
couple’s pretend marriage cloaks their apparent hostility to each other,
which in turn cloaks the fact they truly love each other but can’t admit it.
(You will have to see the film for this all to make sense!) The couple, each
of them refusing to confess their mutual desire but maintaining the
masquerade of being married, is finally granted a divorce by a judge.
However, French law compels them to spend fifteen minutes alone together
in a court reconciliation room before separating. Don Ameche enters the
room shrugging, “Well, fifteen minutes to kill,” and then performs a new
charade that ends up cementing their romance and revealing their true
desires. As the couple leave divorce court, announcing their intention to get
married for real this time, a corridor door swings shut in the face of the
camera (and viewer) emblazoned with the ultimate temporal threshold of
the Hollywood film: the title, “The End.” This supposedly nondiegetic
announcement adhering to a diegetic prop typifies Hollywood’s ability to
not only acknowledge but flaunt its artificial nature. The film—and its
romance—are make-believe, contrived for our viewing and enjoyment. But
only for a time, only for the duration of the film. Thus the triumph of desire
on the screen entails a marking of limits, ultimately the act of the running
out of the film, to be followed by the reillumination of auditorium lights
revealing our path to the exit. During the classical period of film exhibition
most films were supplied with “exit music,” which continued to play on the
soundtrack after the projector lamp had been turned off, guiding viewers in
their transition from one time regime to another, from auditorium back out
to the street and their daily lives.
My second analysis of the way films play with the specificity of
mechanical recording of time may seem antipodal to the Hollywood
romance. The cinema of Peter Kubelka engages the mechanical nature of
filmic time directly.58 His metrical films find their beat in the sound
cinema’s pulse of twenty-four frames per second. Adebar (1957), a ninety-
second film, consists of brief shots in positive and negative, and a brief
fragment of sound, all in multiples of twelve frames. These regular
proportions, based on a precise frame count for each shot, transform the
unnoticed regular mechanism of cinema into a rhythm that sets the
viewer/listener’s senses dancing. The gem-like one-minute film
Schwechater (1958) makes us aware of the briefest unit of cinema, with
some shots lasting only a single frame. The alternation and alignment
between several threads of imagery, sound, and color create a temporality
that challenges the threshold of apparent movement and creates a
paradoxically complex sense of immediacy. Finally, Kubelka’s masterpiece
of abstract cinema, Arnulf Rainer (1960), consists solely of rhythmic
patterns of black or white frames in counterpoint to a soundtrack consisting
of either silence or “white” noise. This mathematically precise play of
primal opposites improvises on a mechanics of cinema, the shutter within
the projector that alternately reveals or eclipses cinema’s beam of
illumination. Kubelka’s metric cinema returns us to specificities of
cinematic time through precise articulation and rhythm, without any attempt
at narrative or even representation. Kubelka has claimed these films avoid
motion (certainly they lack Edison’s “movement of things”—with the
exception of a few brief moments). The patterns evoke musical forms or
mathematical ordering. Kubelka’s control of cinematic time does not record
an event but rather creates one, delivering an intensified experience of time
for the viewer. Kubelka’s elements are profoundly temporal and share their
play with time through cinema with the attentive viewer/listener.
Kubelka makes cinema’s temporal mechanisms visible. His films destroy
or kill ordinary time. Invoking music, ritual, and dance and the affects these
forms exert on our bodily senses, Kubelka has described his cinema as
creating ecstasy for its audience. Ecstasy frequently connotes a timeless
experience, a sense of liberation from temporal restraint, the apparent
opposite of the predictable and irreversible clock-time. Kubelka’s filmic
time avoids both the frozen instant and the progression of a story. But if
these films kill mechanical time, they also acknowledge their foundation in
the regularity of cinema’s clockwork. When I was Kubelka’s student in the
early 1970s, he often declared the pulse of twenty-four frames a second to
be a basic law of cinema. He delighted in the fact that both his cinema and
that of Cecil B. DeMille were subject to this same mechanical law. Kubelka
would imitate the sound of the projector as it rotated through it twenty-four-
frame-per-second regimen; “Brrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.” DeMille cloaks this basic
rhythm by immersing us in story and spectacle. But underneath all this,
Kubelka would claim, the viewer still senses cinema’s mechanical
articulation of time, its primal beat. Like the clatter of a machine gun,
killing time as it marks it.

T ’ U
 “Bombs will fall, civilizations will crumble … but not yet, please. What’s the hurry? Give us our
moment.”

—A very drunk Greta Garbo in Ernst Lubitsch’s Ninotchka (1939)

This chapter hasn’t attempted to propose a broad theory of cinematic time.
Rather, it explored the specific issue of cinema’s relation to the modern
abstract and mechanical nature of time I have called clock-time through an
intersection of its historical, technological, theoretical, and aesthetic
aspects. Cinema was both the product of these various factors and itself in
turn acted upon them. Therefore, cinema neither simply exemplifies clock-
time nor simply revolts against it. Rather, it reveals aspects of modern time
(whether clock-time in the form of the temporal anxiety generated by
deadlines and suspense or reconfiguring its potentially endless succession
through structures of narrative closure and resolution) and ways to struggle
against it. Cinema, as our limited examples have shown, can narrativize
time by configurating it into plots driven by human desires and anxieties, as
well as creating structures of formal play that evoke the metrics of cinema’s
mechanism, triggering new experiences of rhythm and even transcendence.
Movies were introduced at the beginning of the century as a modern way
of killing time. As a reaction against the discipline of clock-time, it
nonetheless bears the imprint of the tyranny it confronts, embodying the
paradoxes of modern technological media and the social concept of free
time. The limits and possibilities of this aspect of cinematic time indicate
the need for analysis of specific texts and practices rather than general
proclamations of either condemnation or celebration. The experience of
cinematic time is inherent to its technology, but its range of meanings and
uses come through the formal play and narrative structures employed by
specific texts and situations of their social and historically defined
reception.

N
1. In Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Vol. 3, 1935–1938 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2002), 126 n.21.
2. Mary Ann Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2002).
3. Thomas Edison, “Caveat No. 110, October 17, 1888,” reproduced in A Technological History
of Motion Pictures and Television: An Anthology from the Pages of the Journal of the Society
 of Motion Picture and Television Engineers, ed. Raymond Fielding (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1967), 92–94.
4. Ibid., 92.
5. André Bazin, “The Myth of Total Cinema,” in What Is Cinema? Vol. I (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 19), 17–22.
6. Edison, “Caveat,” 92, 93. See also Musser’s discussion of the relation between the kinetoscope
and the phonograph, Charles Musser, The Emergence of Cinema Vol I to 1907 History of
American Cinema (New York: Charles Scribner’s and Sons, 1990), 55–64.
7. Avital Ronell, The Telephone Book: Technology, Schizophrenia, Electric Speech (Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press, 1989), 316–17.
8. Marta Braun, Picturing Time: The Work of Etienne-Jules Marey (1830–1904) (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1992), 196.
9. Bernard Chardére, Le roman des Lumiére (Paris: Galimard, 1995), 303–15.
10. This claim was pioneered by André Bazin. See “The Evolution of the Language of Cinema,”
and “The Virtues and Limitations of Montage,” in What Is Cinema? Vol. I (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1967), esp. 27 and 50–51.
11. Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization (New York: Harcourt, Brace Jovanovich, 1963), 14.
First published 1934.
12. Ibid., 15.
13. Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space 1880–1918 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1983).
14. Daniel Nelson, Frederick W. Taylor and the Rise of Scientific Management (Madison:
University of Wisconsin Press, 1980).
15. Michael O’Malley, Keeping Watch: A History of American Time (Washington, DC:
Smithsonian Institution Press, 1990); Jimena Canales, A Tenth of a Second: A History
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011).
16. Georg Simmell “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” in The Blackwell City Reader, ed. Gary
Bridge and Sophie Watson (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2002), 13.
17. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), 477.
18. Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution (1911, repr. 1983; Lanham, MD: University Press of
America), 337.
19. Walter Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings,
Vol. 4, 1938–1940, 313–55. For a concise distinction between these two German words, both
of which can be translated as “experience,” see Miriam Bratu Hansen, Cinema as Experience:
Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin and Theodore W. Adorno (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2012), 306 n.18. See also Howard Caygill, Walter Benjamin: The Color of
Experience (London: Routledge, 1998).
20. Bergson, Creative Evolution, 272.
21. I will not engage here a full discussion of the limits and insights of Bergson for understanding
the cinema. This issue is central to Giles Deleuze’s approach to cinema in his two-volume
book Cinema 1: The Movement Image and Cinema 2 The Time Image (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1986). I differ in some respects from Deleuze: see Thomas
Gunning, “Animation and Alienation: Bergson’s Critique of the Cinématographe and the
Paradox of Mechanical Motion,” The Moving Image (Spring 2014): 1–9.
22. Kern, Culture, 29–30.
23. Benjamin, “Motifs in Baudelaire,” 335.
24. Martin Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics (Bloomington: University of
Indiana Press, 1995), 78–167.
25. Ibid., 97 (emphasis in the original).
26. Ibid. (emphasis in the original).
27. Ibid., 99.
28. In Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Vol. 4, 1938–1940, 395.
29. Gerhard Dohrn-van Rossum, History of the Hour: Clocks and Modern Temporal Orders
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 48–49.
30. E. R. Truitt, Medieval Robots: Mechanism, Magic, Nature and Art (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 2015), 146.
31. Dohrn-van Rossum, History of the Hour, 178–83; Truitt, Medieval Robots, passim.
32. See especially Laurent Mannoni, Etienne-Jules Marey: la memoire de l’oeil (Paris:
Cinematheque francais, 1999), 236–300.
33. Peter Kubelka, “The Theory of Metrical Film,” in The Avant-Garde Film: A Reader of Theory
and Criticism, ed. P. Adams Sitney (New York: New York University Press, 1978), 139.
34. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” third
version, in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Vol. 4, 1938–1940 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2003), 251–83.
35. The locus classicus of this critique comes in the discussion of the “Culture Industry,” in
Theodore W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, The Dialectic of Enlightenment (Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press, 2007), 94–136. See also the anthology of related essays The Culture
Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture, ed. J. M. Bernstein (London: Routledge, 1991).
36. “Free Time,” in Bernstein, Culture Industry, 168.
37. Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time: Volume 3: Cinematic Time and the Question of Malaise
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011).
38. Ibid., 9.
39. Ibid., 10.
40. Ibid.
41. Ibid.
42. See the influential 1970 essay by Jean-Louis Baudry, “Ideological Effects of the Basic
Cinematographic Apparatus,” trans. Alan Williams, Film Quarterly 28, no. 2 (1974–1975):
39–47.
43. John Kasson, Amusing the Million (New York: Hill and Wang, 1978); Roger Caillois, Man
Play and Games (Urbana Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2001), 23–26.
44. Vachel Lindsay, “The Substitute for the Saloon,” in The Art of the Moving Pictures (New York:
Livewright, 1970), 335–45. First published 1916.
45. The best treatment of the nickelodeon era is Eileen Bowser, The Transformation of Cinema
1907–1915 (New York: Charles Scribner Sons, 1990), esp. 1–20.
46. Tom Gunning, “The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde,” in
Early Film, ed. Thomas Elsaesser and Adam Barker (London: British Film Institute, 1989).
47. André Bazin, “The Evolution of the Language of Cinema,” in What Is Cinema? Vol. I
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 27.
48. See Tom Gunning, D. W. Griffith and the Origins of American Narrative Film: The Early Years
at Biograph (Urbana Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1991).
49. Lee Caruthers, Doing Time: Temporality, Hermeneutic and Contemporary Cinema (Albany:
State University of New York Press, 2016), gives a brilliant discussion of temporal plotting in
cinema, including Ozon’s 5X 2.
50. Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, Vol. I (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984); Paul
Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, Vol. II (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985, 1988); Paul
Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, Vol. III (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988).
51. Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, Vol. I, 3.
52. Carruthers, Doing Time, 2.
53. “The Clock,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Clock_(2010_film).
54. Francois Truffaut, Hitchcock (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1983, rev. ed.), 73.
55. Siegfried Kracauer, “The Little Shop Girls Go to the Movies,” in The Mass Ornament: Weimar
Essays (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 291–306.
56. Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama (London: NLB, 1977), 135.
57. On the comedy of remarriage, see Stanley Cavell, Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood
Comedy of Remarriage (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981).
58. Kubelka details the structure of these films in his essay “The Theory of Metrical Film,” in The
Avant-Garde Filme: A Reader of Theory and Criticism, ed. P. Adams Sitney (New York:
Anthology Film Archives, 1978).
 CHAPTER 2

INTERESTED AND
DISINTERESTED JUDGMENTS
Film Theory and the Valences
of the Aesthetic

DANIEL MORGAN

WRITING in 2003 on the state of film theory, Jennifer Hammett observed that
“for the last twenty-five years, the focus has been on the relationship
between the spectator and the cinematic text or apparatus, that is, on
questions of epistemology. Questions of aesthetics have consistently
languished in the background, implicit at best.”1 Hammett was talking
about a model of film theory that holds that what we see, what is given to us
through our senses, is suspect at both an epistemic and a political level.
Jean-Louis Baudry, for example, argued that the spectator’s perceptual
identification with the cinematic image precluded the possibility of a
“knowledge-effect” taking place, securing the intensity of cinema’s
ideological force.2 As a result, cinema was to be countered by an exercise
of critical reason and judgment. It is in this vein that Serge Daney criticized
the immediacy of cinematic effects—“the accumulation of images, hysteria,
carefully-measured effects, retention, discharge, happy ending: catharsis”—
and instead valorized the model of the “school … the good place which
removes us from cinema.”3
Some of the rationale for this theoretical orientation lay in broader
cultural trends, what Martin Jay has described as the historic suspicion of
the visible that led to an uneasiness about the value of visual media.4 As a
result, even when aesthetics was discussed, the focus was largely on the
aesthetic as a category of thought and how it functioned within broader
questions of politics and culture. Terry Eagleton thus describes his survey of
the history of aesthetics as “an attempt to find in the category of the
aesthetic a way of gaining access to certain central questions of modern
European thought—to light up, from that particular angle, a range of wider
social, political and ethical issues.”5 Or, there is Jacques Rancière’s project
of determining the “aesthetic regimes” of the modern world, the conditions
under which our perceptual attunement to the world is organized—a project
that, Davide Panagia argues, explicitly eschews familiar aesthetic categories
such as judgment.6 Even the “return to beauty” movement in the 1990s
focused primarily on the meaning and implications of the category of the
beautiful, emphasizing associations with pleasure, harmony, and even
equality rather than connecting beauty to a wider aesthetic program.7
Yet at the moment Hammett was lamenting the absence of aesthetics in
film theory, a major shift was beginning to take place, not just in film
studies but also in theoretical practices across the humanities. In 2000, for
example, Kaja Silverman put forward a “theory of appearance,” which
essentially amounted to a full-throated defense of aesthetics:
When we look, in the most profound and creative sense of that word, we are always
responding to a prior solicitation from other creatures and things. This solicitation is
aesthetic in nature: the world addresses us through its formal parameters. However, in
displaying their colors, shapes, patterns and movements to us, things do not merely request
us to turn our eyes toward them, or even to answer in kind. What the world of phenomenal
forms solicits from us is our desire.8

Silverman is clear that she is interested in the way things appear to us—and
not in their significance or their broader meaning. Arguing implicitly
against the history Jay outlines, she advances an interest in our encounter
with the world and the precision of our response to it. Aesthetics marks a
defense of our sensory engagement, what Theo Davis glosses as the “range
of ways to attend, relate, and respond to the world.”9 In the wake of such a
reorientation, and with a variety of theoretical models and buzzwords, the
past twenty years have seen the reemergence of aesthetics—enough that
Sianne Ngai, in a 2010 article, could simply allude to the “rise of
aesthetics” in literary studies.10 Nowhere is this trend more evident than in
the popularity of the use of aesthetics as a modifier: ornamental aesthetics,
Black aesthetics, relational aesthetics. migratory aesthetics, blockbuster
aesthetics, postcolonial aesthetics, proprioceptive aesthetics, and so on.
Part of what I want to do here is to show how these different versions of
aesthetics and aesthetic theory have come to play a role within cinema and
media studies. I do not intend to provide a comprehensive account of any
one of them, or of all the varieties of aesthetics at issue in contemporary
film theory, but rather to show how recent debates within cinema and media
studies emerge out of fundamental tensions—even aporias—within the
history of aesthetic thought more broadly. To show this, I isolate the
influence of a tension between a cognitive model of aesthetics, broadly
oriented toward an account of the cultural significance of art, and a sensory
model, attuned to the immanence of encounter and the dynamics of
nonconscious experience. As a way to bridge this divide, I suggest, a
number of theorists have recently turned to Hannah Arendt’s writings on
aesthetic judgment, using them to create a new link between aesthetics and
politics, but I argue that the terms of Arendt’s analysis prove curiously
incompatible with the powers and possibilities of moving-image media.
From the arguments about Arendt’s unique (and troubling) delineation of
the form of aesthetic judgment, I move away from a critical overview and
think through a different set of questions involving aesthetics and moving-
image media by turning to Orson Welles’s The Trial (1962). I argue that,
among other things, the film stages aesthetic judgments against a range of
other judgments, experiences, and speech acts, and that it suggests the terms
of a different model for the place of aesthetics within a broader account of
culture and society. Welles, I argue, is a filmmaker centrally involved in the
investments we have in and the various kinds of desire we have for images,
and in The Trial he works through the imbrication of aesthetics within a
range of other practices and forms of life. The disruptive style he offers in
the film raises a set of questions that provide a new avenue for aesthetic
thought within the domain of film and media theory. Welles offers, that is,
one way to get around the consequences of some of the legacies and
commitments that have attended the rise of aesthetics.
I begin with the post-Kantian revolution in aesthetic theory, since it sets the
stage for more contemporary debates. Hegel had enacted a turn in aesthetics
when he proclaimed that the “beauty of art is higher than nature,” and that
“Art liberates the true content of phenomena from the pure appearance and
deception of this bad, transitory world, and gives them a higher actuality,
born of the spirit.”11 This led to a widespread assumption that art was
essentially a mode of cognition, an aid to understanding the world. The
revival of aesthetics in the twentieth century in a sense begins with a
rejection of this position, starting in the postwar modernist era and gaining
force until it became dogma that “aesthetics is the realm of immanent,
noncognitive content.”12 With this move also came a renewed focus on the
body as the location of aesthetic response, an orientation that ranged from
critical theory to phenomenology to ecological theories of perception. One
of the central features in the turn to aesthetics was thus an interest in a
perceptual encounter with the world, over and against the privileging of
deeper structures that shape—but which fall outside of—that experience.
Perhaps the clearest instance of this shift in the location of aesthetic
theory involves the legacy of the Frankfurt School. Amidst a wider trend
away from the forms of cultural critique embodied by Max Horkheimer and
Theodor W. Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, the massive translation of
Walter Benjamin’s writings in the late 1990s and early 2000s produced a
shift in how that tradition was appropriated. Central to this was the
revaluation of the importance of the idea of “experience” in Benjamin’s
work, his discussions of the ways in which modernity produced a change in
how people inhabited the world. From the factory assembly line to the
bustle of cities to the spectacles in the movie theater, Benjamin saw new
possibilities and politics of experience in modern life—and positioned film
as the medium that was best able to negotiate, absorb, and transform them.
Drawing on Benjamin’s repeated invocation of Alexander Baumgarten’s
phrase, “the theory of perception that the Greeks called aesthetics,” for
example, Miriam Hansen argued that cinema presented audiences with a
“sensory-reflective horizon” within which to perceive and—at a distance—
negotiate the changes in their world.13 One implication of this move was to
see the politics of Benjamin and others less as a matter of their relation to
an avowed Marxism, or to the legacy of Brecht, and more in line with what
Benjamin called a “material anthropology,” a study of how the senses are
shaped by—and can in turn shape the reception of—industrial capitalism
and modern technologies.
 Pushing even further from the cognitive model was the rise of affect
theory, which argued that our baseline encounter with the world is
fundamentally nonconceptual, even noncognitive. As Melissa Gregg and
Gregory Seigworth put it, “Affect … is the name we give to those forces—
visceral forces beneath, alongside, or generally other than conscious
knowing, vital forces insisting beyond emotion—that can serve to drive us
toward movement, toward thought and extension, that can likewise suspend
us (as if in neutral) across a barely registering accretion of force-relations,
or that can even leave us overwhelmed by the world’s apparent
intractability.”14 Whereas emotions are conceptually saturated—centrally
imbricated in social forms, and in modes of communicative exchanges that
range from the verbal to the gestural—affect registers a visceral response to
the world that impinges on the self.15 Aesthetics emerges here as a mode of
attending to this register of experience. Again, this does not entail an
eradication of politics as much as a recalibration. As Lauren Berlant and
others have argued, an attention to the forms that underlie affect allows us
to understand both the trends in the broader social (and political) world and
the way that individuals receive them.16
Third, there is a trend of thinking grouped under the various headings of
speculative realism, object-oriented ontology, and a new materialism.
Rejecting models of epistemic and perceptual realism, on which what we
experience and know is correlated to things out in the world, this cluster of
theories turns instead to the uncertain modes of reference involved in
aesthetics. For example, in an argument against familiar models of causality
(e.g., as inhering in the nature of the universe), Graham Harman proposes a
model of connection that focused on indirect forms of relations, what he
calls “vicarious causation.” According to this model, as he puts it in a
polemical statement, “aesthetics becomes first philosophy.”17 As Scott
Richmond observes, what Harman does is to “reimagine aesthetics as the
ground of ontology,” a result of which is that the force of the philosophical
model itself “lies in its specifically aesthetic appeal.”18 Against
epistemology, against ontology: at the heart of the speculative realist model
is the sense that, as Steven Shaviro puts it, “the world is indeed, at its base,
aesthetic. And through aesthetics, we can act in the world and relate to other
things in the world without reducing it and them to mere correlates of our
own thought.”19 It is only by attending to what Shaviro calls “the realm of
immanent, noncognitive content” that we begin to gain access to a broader
sense of how we exist within a broader framework.
These are, then, three important models that indicate how aesthetics gives
purchase to the necessity of immanent experience as a central category for
critical thinking. Such models, however, have not been uncontested, and a
cluster of arguments and methods have emerged that push back against the
idea of an irreducibly personal and noncognitive model of engagement. It’s
perhaps put most polemically by Eugenie Brinkema in her arguments
against affect theory:
However thrilling it may be to write and even read the personal accounts of any theorist’s
tremulous pleasures and shudderings, it is a signature of work on affectivity that must be
resisted, for it tells us far more about being affected than about affects […] One suspects,
from these furiously recorded diaries, that the theoretical qualification for such work is to be
a better consumer of feelings; if affect does not need to be interpreted, just recorded, then
the most affected theorist wins.20

What’s needed instead, she argues, is an approach that treats “affects as

having and inhering in form,” a renewed formalism that emphasizes a kind
of close reading to discern the way that generalized affects are present in
and shape the texture of the film itself.21 The effect of such a shift is to
make affects, at least insofar as they are articulated in and by works of art,
something more than the dynamics of individual experience. They become
public, shareable—yet because of the irreducible grounding of affect in the
personal, Brinkema can still maintain the sense that what’s at stake is our
responsiveness to the world itself.
Another move away from the vagaries of individual experience comes in
Sianne Ngai’s articulation of “aesthetic categories.” Following from J. L.
Austin’s prompt to move beyond the burdened legacy of the sublime and
the beautiful, Ngai draws out cultural practices of categorizing aesthetic and
cultural objects and experiences. Indeed, she argues that aesthetic
judgments come to stand outside ourselves and enable us to make sense of,
and to organize, the world around us. Take Ngai’s discussion of the
category of the zany, in which she argues that it “is essentially the
experience of an agent confronted by—and endangered by—too many
things coming at her at once.”22 Yet if the zany is a way of giving a name to
a form of experience, perhaps a version of the sublime under the conditions
of modern capitalism, once the category is established within a cultural
imaginary the central question is what falls under it, and what criteria need
to be satisfied. The shift is critical. In a sense, Ngai dramatizes the
reification of aesthetic judgments, so that what matters is less my encounter
than the way a culture has already given me embodied and sanctioned
forms of judgment; no longer a question of finding words for my
experience, aesthetic categories provide ready-made frameworks that
organize my experience.23 To put it in slightly different (and older) terms,
Ngai argues that what seem to be aesthetic judgments are in fact
determinate judgments. It is in a culture’s use of aesthetic categories, the
way they are made to organize and make sense of the vagaries of
experience, that the political stakes of Ngai’s argument find their traction.
These (largely) familiar models, familiar theories, and familiar stories are
part and parcel of what (film) theory is today. In sketching out their
contours, I’ve been trying to set out a background of the way in which the
return of aesthetics into theory, and film theory in particular, operates on
two different lines. On the one hand, there is a focus on modes of
experience, the direct perceptual encounter with the world and the range of
intensities that result from that encounter. On the other, there are the supra-
individual categories or forms of aesthetic experience that can be analyzed
for an understanding of the operation of individual texts and/or modes of
cultural organization. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that these are
themselves the positions that drive the history of philosophical aesthetics,
the two features of aesthetics that Kant found wildly intriguing yet difficult
to reconcile: that aesthetic judgments are irreducibly personal, and that they
are ineradicably social and general.24
It’s not hard to see how key features of Kant’s account of aesthetic
judgment have shaped recent debates. The first is his notoriously tricky idea
that the feeling of pleasure that arises in an aesthetic encounter involves the
“harmony” of the faculties of imagination and understanding, yet a
harmony that takes place—unlike regular forms of empirical cognition—
without concepts in what he describes as “free play.” That is, there is a
cognition-like relation, but one in which the particular is not brought under
a concept.25 Although this activity is mental, it is not solely personal.
Because the pleasure involved in the beautiful is a result of a particular
alignment of the faculties of mind, and because—Kant argues—these
faculties are universal, I can demand that everyone who encounters an
object that I judge beautiful ought to respond in the same way that I do.
This demand is what Kant calls the “subjective universality” of judgment:
“if one then calls the object beautiful, one believes oneself to have a
universal voice, and lays claim to the consent of everyone.”26 I may not
expect everyone to agree—I have experiences of disagreement, after all—
but the form of my judgment demands it of them anyway.
If Kant forms the background to some of the tensions between divergent
strands of recent writing on aesthetics, he has also explicitly returned as a
critical touchstone in those debates. To an extent, this is because the
seeming groundlessness of aesthetic judgment that Kant describes matches
a general trend away from epistemic certainty. Thus, Shaviro draws on the
idea of the “free play” of the faculties to observe that, “For Kant, aesthetics
has no foundation, and it offers us no guarantees. Rather, it throws all
norms and values into question, or into crisis.”27 And for Ngai, the idea of
subjective universality provides a model for thinking about how internal
states can be converted into what she describes as “the rhetorical work of
aesthetic categories.”28 Jordan Schonig has recently used a Kantian
framework to describe what he calls “aesthetic category memes,” forms of
vernacular judgments created in online communities through “the sharing of
particular modes of aesthetic aspect perception—ways of seeing-
together.”29
Yet if two major strands of recent work on aesthetics involve the
competing aspects of Kantian aesthetics, the personal and the social, it
shouldn’t come as a surprise that another strand involves the ground on
which Kant aimed to reconcile them: the domain of judgment. This is not
itself a new proposal but part of a wider postwar context for aesthetic
theory. Stanley Cavell, for example, had isolated aesthetic judgment as
central to what he termed “modern philosophy,” seeing in its operation a
way to grasp the contingencies of our relation to the world, to language, and
to other people.30 Indeed, it is no coincidence that recent years have seen a
major surge in work on Cavell in film studies and across the humanities.31
 To Cavell we might add Hannah Arendt, who has had a steadily rising
profile in debates on aesthetics and political theory. I want to spend some
time on this surge of interest in Arendt, since it offers salutary lessons for
thinking about the place of aesthetics in discussions of moving-image
media. It will also provide a transition to the second half of the chapter, by
pulling out the way uncertainties within Arendt’s work suggest the critical
space for Welles’s own aesthetic models.
Arendt’s basic appeal is that of an alternate way of thinking about how
politics can be involved in aesthetic considerations. At the outset of this
chapter, I noted that the dominant trend of political film theory as it
emerged in the 1970s was to reject the seductiveness of the image and to
promote instead a “knowledge-effect” that would provide a critical
education of the spectator.32 At the heart of this position was the
assumption that the overwhelming sensory effects of the cinema actively
prevented critical thought, that cinema served (necessarily) as a form of
structural indoctrination into bourgeois ideology. The response, theorists
argued, was to reject the immersive pleasure of the image in favor of
“knowledge-effects” that would create a critical spectator. Arendt, by
contrast, folds the possibility of such critical thought into aesthetic
experience itself. As she puts it, “Culture and politics belong together
because it is not knowledge or truth which is at stake but rather judgment
and decision.”33 In a sense, Arendt offers a way around the antiaesthetic
structures of Theory yet without abdicating the political ambition that came
with it.
There are several versions of this project in her work, and thus in its
contemporary reception. One version is simply a defense of thinking itself
as a political activity. Both Jennifer Fay and Brian Price have recently
emphasized the political stakes of Arendt’s conception of thinking, seeing it
as “ ‘a kind of action’ against a malign public culture.”34 Insofar as cinema
models or provokes modes of thought, it enables a form of resistance. Linda
Zerilli draws on Arendt to argue that we can understand political actions as
following not so much the model of determinate judgments (i.e., models of
moral valuation) but rather contingent agreements, like judgments of
beauty, which can create and hold a community together.35 Here Arendt’s
interest in initiating “contact with other people’s thinking” provides a
central piece, an intersubjective connection she sometimes describes as the
project of “representative thinking.”36 Aesthetic judgment comes, in a
sense, to serve as a model of democratic politics, a political world held
together not by external force but by public and collective negotiations of
value. The ground for our agreement is not essential or inherent but
contingent.
A second version of Arendt’s project holds that the conceptual
ungroundedness of aesthetic experience opens up new avenues for a critical
imagination. The problem, as John David Rhodes argues, seems to be that
any judgment we make is never outside the “basis of prior knowledge … [in
which] we fundamentally condemn ourselves to insuring that nothing new
will ever come into existence.”37 Rhodes, following Arendt, will look to the
“the groundlessness of aesthetic judgment”—what he describes as the way
“judgment’s non-conceptual basis and its definitional plurality allow for the
emergence of the new”—to find space that will allow for new modes of
being, thinking, and acting.38 Part of the appeal here is to show how forms
of experience can resonate in political terms. Price, for example, focuses on
the feeling of regret to argue that our responses to the world are instances of
a kind of “political emotion.” Quoting Arendt’s remark that “thinking is
always out of order,” or disruptive, he argues that “regret describes the
moment in which we judge differently from within the situation of an at
least putative agreement.”39 This model, then, emphasizes the lack of
conceptual fixity in aesthetic judgment, the way it allows us to imagine an
opening up of the world to enable new modes of relations and experiences.
A third version expands these two readings to a broader, more overtly
political model, focusing on the intersubjective nature of aesthetic judgment
and the claim that—following Kant—we can demand but not expect
universal agreement. The logic of the judgment is here predicated on the
idea that we speak representatively, for others, but with awareness of the
fact that others will have differing experiences and views. In setting this
out, Arendt relies on a familiar model of disinterestedness. When Kant
argues that “a judgment about beauty in which there is mixed the least
interest is very partial and not a pure judgment of taste,” he isolates the idea
that pure judgments of beauty are the “only free satisfaction”—determined
neither by cognitive judgment nor by the strictures of reason and moral
action.40 Arendt will repeatedly return to this idea, though with a more
practical emphasis. She writes, for example, that the “attitude of
disinterested joy … can be experienced only after the needs of the living
organism have been provided for, so that, released from life’s necessity,
men may be free for the world.”41 When I no longer have to focus on what I
need for basic survival, I consider viewpoints beyond the terms of self-
interest; I can speak, that is, for others. As D. N. Rodowick puts it, “acts of
judgment …, bring us out of the solitude of thought; they are the very
medium through which we disclose ourselves and our thoughts by
performing them publicly like Socrates, as a citizen among citizens, doing
nothing, claiming nothing other than what every citizen should do and has a
right to claim…. In other words, acts of judgment bring us into the space of
the polis.”42 Aesthetic judgment becomes a training ground for entering the
world of deliberative discussion.
Despite the appeal of such arguments, it remains puzzling to me that
moving-image theorists have turned to Arendt. Take, for example, her
insistence on community, on the way that meaningful actions arise “only
because [people] can talk with and make sense to each other and to
themselves.”43 Freedom, Arendt insists, is contingent on the absolute
publicness of speech and action. There is a worry here, not surprisingly, that
most action—including political action—takes place outside the terms of
public discussion and conversation.44 Arendt is certainly aware of this issue
—it forms, not least, part of her analysis of the ossification of all
revolutionary movements (with the exception of the American Revolution).
Her solution, though, is to posit the community that matters as one that is
inherently partial and exclusionary, inhabited only by those who can emerge
into the public as qualified actors. This demarcation of a relevant public is
part of her argument in The Human Condition that people are free only
when they act with an intent to “transcend the life-span of mortal man,” to
speak for the ages as it were. Bound up with her emphasis on Greek thought
and life as a model for freedom, it accepts that only some people in a
society can ever be free—and that their freedom depends on a private,
nonpublic sphere of economy that is outside freedom.45 Such arguments are
present throughout Arendt’s work, as when she discusses Kant’s claim that
judgment “is valid ‘for every single judging person’.” Focusing on the use
of “judging,” Arendt argues that “it is not valid … for those who are not
members of the public realm where the objects of judgment appear.”46 Even
more starkly, she writes: “judgment … is never universally valid. Its claims
to validity can never extend further than the others in whose place the
judging person has put himself for his consideration.”47 The possibilities of
aesthetic judgment only matter for those who are in a similar situation, who
have been educated correctly, trained into a certain level of culture.
Such emphasis on an elite or exclusionary public has its own issues in
political theory, but the consequences for film are equally—if not more—
troubling. After all, one of the major appeals for cinema’s political potential
is its status as a mass democratic medium, an art form which is supposedly
available to and for everyone—and whose power resonates across class,
race, and gender in complex ways.48 Indeed, I have argued elsewhere that is
precisely the power of film’s mass appeal that forces Cavell to abandon his
focus on modernist categories of judgment to seek new models of analysis
that will be able to negotiate the kind of power that (Hollywood) cinema
has.49 Arendt isn’t thinking about film, of course, but it’s hard to see how
her revision of Kant’s universality into a mere generality matches the way
that film’s appeal is precisely to solicit a mass and seemingly open-ended
audience.
What these troubling arguments in Arendt do reveal, however, is the
importance of a topic that has received less overt attention, namely the
category of disinterestedness that is foundational to Kantian aesthetics.
There are certainly numerous (and celebrated) critiques of disinterest, from
Nietzsche to Bourdieu. But disinterestedness forms a centerpiece to
Arendt’s claims about the utility of Kant’s aesthetics, since the ability—or,
on Arendt’s terms, educated talent—to make a judgment without personal
investment serves as a model for how to think about historical
understanding and political action.
In the context of Arendt’s arguments, it is worth noting that even less
attention has paid to the notion of interest. Interest, Kant remarks, involves
“a satisfaction [that] always has at the same time a relation to the faculty of
desire.”50 Kant means to invoke forms of appreciation that revolve around
interest in an object: the agreeable, the charming, the pleasant, and so on.
But we can also think of desire more expansively, as part of our mental life
and our capacity to want things we do not have. Cavell glosses this under
the heading of fantasy: “Our imagination, our capacity for images, and for
the meaning and phenomenology of our images … are as a priori as our
other forms of knowledge about the world.”51 Such interest, or desire, is
fundamental to our way of inhabiting the world. Cavell’s formulation
articulates the extent of the complexity of aesthetic judgments, which Kant
acknowledges—though Arendt sometimes seems to forget—are rarely pure.
And his insight makes the idea of basing political judgments on aesthetic
judgments—as if the latter were a simple category, easy to achieve—
difficult to achieve, or at the very least rife with cautions. For the rest of the
chapter, then, I want to explore a model of aesthetic judgment that is based
around interest, which I understand in light of considerations of desire,
imagination, and fantasy. I’ll do so by looking at one of the filmmakers
most interest in the valences and seductiveness of interested judgments—
Orson Welles—as he pushes these questions against other forms of
judgment, political as well as aesthetic.
When Kant discusses the topic of interest, it is largely with the aim of
isolating the grounds for (subjective) universality of aesthetic judgments.
He has been insisting that a “pure aesthetic judgment” must have “no
interest for its determining ground,” but now he wants to think about ways
in which other forms of judgments become involved.52 The first area he
treats is empirical interests, namely, those that are “characteristic of human
nature,” and here he focuses on the sociality of judgments of taste. We are,
Kant thinks, inclined to pursue aesthetic ends only within a social context;
the pleasure we take in decoration or adornment matters when those actions
can be separated from practice use and oriented toward others. This topic,
though, is more in line with the concerns of his anthropology, and, he notes,
less about a critical investigation into aesthetics: “we must find that
importance only in what may be related to the judgment of taste a priori …
[as] a transition from sensory enjoyment to moral feeling … a mediating
link in the chain of human faculties a priori.”53
Kant then turns to the question of the a priori interest we have in
judgments of taste, “the intellectual interest in the beautiful.” Here he is
concerned to argue that an appreciation for the beautiful is related to moral
worth: “to take an immediate interest in the beauty of nature … is always a
mark of a good soul, and … if this interest is habitual, it at least indicates a
disposition of the mind that is favorable to the moral feeling.”54 The
argument roughly goes: Reason puts a demand on us to create a harmony
between our action and the moral law, the imposition that the maxim of our
action could become a universal law. What the beauty of nature provides, in
a pure aesthetic judgment, is an analogous harmony of the faculties in our
mind, a sense of order that undergirds our relation to the world. Reason thus
takes an interest in the beauty of nature because it displays a harmony that
assures us that the world is organized to match the demands of our mental
faculties.55 We have, that is, a desire for harmony in our experience of the
external world because it indicates the presence of a harmony that reason
demands for our own actions. “Because of this affinity,” Kant writes, “he
who takes such an interest in the beautiful in nature can do so only insofar
as he has already firmly established his interest in the morally good.”56
To this a priori argument, however, Kant adds a dimension of moral
psychology. Part of this involves what Henry Allison calls our
“ineliminable susceptibility to temptation.” As Allison sees it, our
appreciation of the beauty of nature can “serve as a ‘counterweight’ to the
tendency to ignore occasions for dutiful action … by reinforcing the sense
that nature is on our side and, therefore, that our moral efforts will not be in
vain.”57 But Kant is curiously interested in the problem of deception, a term
which emerges out of the discussion of why we take an “immediate interest
in the beautiful in nature.” Not surprisingly, Kant wonders whether an
interest in the beautiful in art has the same ground as the beautiful in nature.
He thinks it does not. The problem with art is that it is either an imitation of
natural beauty, in which “it is deceptive”—that is, it masquerades as
something that it is not—or that it “is obviously intentionally directed
toward our satisfaction,” overtly aiming to please.58 What interests me is
less Kant’s evaluation of art than the way that it leads him to make the
following observation:
 The song of the bird proclaims joyfulness and contentment with its existence. At least this is
how we interpret nature, whether anything of the sort is its intention or not. But this interest,
which we here take in beauty, absolutely requires that it be the beauty of nature; and it
disappears entirely as soon as one notices that one has been deceived and it is only art….
Yet there have been examples in which, where no such songbird was to be found, some jolly
landlord has tricked the guests staying with him to their complete satisfaction, by hiding in a
bush a mischievous lad who knew how to imitate this song (with a reed or a pipe in his
mouth) just like nature. But as soon as one becomes aware that it is a trick, no one would
long endure listening to this song, previously taken to be so charming.59

There is an important elision here between the beauty of nature and what is
taken to be the beauty of nature, yet what is so striking is how emphatic
Kant is about what happens when we discover that we have been tricked.
He imagines that the discovery of the trick is itself enough to make us
regard the situation with displeasure, and that the knowledge of mere
imitation is enough to make us vehemently reject the entire situation. Once
we know something to be the case, we can no longer experience it in any
other way.
It is a moment in Kant’s aesthetics where we can see the future of
aesthetic theory, and the ways in which his psychological account resonates
forcefully with discussions about “knowledge-effects” in 1970s film theory.
Aesthetic experience, the sensory encounter with the world, can be
fundamentally disrupted and transformed through knowledge. The
psychological claim is that once we recognize an illusion as an illusion,
once we see an artwork not as a natural phenomenon but as a production of
human labor, we no longer experience that illusion in the way we did. Our
desire, in all senses of the term, dissipates.
It is part of the genius of Orson Welles to have recognized, with a stage
magician’s canny, just how much we want to be tricked, that our illusions
do not necessarily vanish with the knowledge of the trick but can instead
become part of a web of artistic deceit that depends heavily on our illusions,
desires, and fantasies, at once political and aesthetic, about how the world
operates. What I want to explore, for the rest of this chapter, is how Welles
develops a cinema of interested judgments, that he not only undoes the
claims to disinterestedness and community that attend aesthetic judgment
but that, in so doing, he offers salutary lessons for how aesthetics is tied to
moral and political judgments in and through film.
 I’ve written elsewhere about the epistemic fantasies that underlie our
relation to cinema, especially the fantasy of being at a place we cannot be, a
place we are ordinarily barred from inhabiting. Filmmakers, I think, often
trade on an underlying desire we have to identify with the camera, to be
with it as it moves through the world, using that desire to create various
effects. Welles is a central figure of this story. Take Citizen Kane (1941),
which starts with a close-up of a faded “No Trespassing” sign: the camera
pauses, then begins to rise up the fence—a dissolve takes it higher up, still
climbing, then another dissolve to a new section of the fence adds to the
sense of scale, the enormity of the barrier. A third dissolve finally brings us
to the top, where we see Xanadu in the distance, a single lit window
drawing us in; the window remains in the frame across multiple shots until
the camera winds up inside the bedroom and we are given an extreme close-
up of Kane’s lips uttering the word “Rosebud.” As with the opening of
Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960), a window is used to incite epistemic
desire, a suggestion of the presence of something hidden from us that we
want to discover. The lure that leads us forward is likewise associated with
an image of a barrier—the “No Trespassing” sign, the half-shut window—
an almost ontological block that helps generate the fantasy that we will be
given access to special, private knowledge.60
Welles’s cinematic ambition is not least to subvert, take apart, and expose
the conventions of cinema—yet without pushing us out of the film. Two
famous tracking shots in Citizen Kane, both organized around Susan
Alexander’s nightclub, show how this works. The first comes immediately
after Thompson has been given his assignment to discover the meaning of
“Rosebud.” Welles cuts directly to a billboard of Susan, lightning flashing
and rain falling. Thunder rolls, and the camera lifts up, moving above a
rooftop, then tracking forward toward the neon sign of “El Rancho/Floor
Show/Twice Nightly”—somehow passing between the first two lines—and
continues onward towards a skylight behind. As the camera approaches it,
we can see the nightclub beneath; the shot starts to go out of focus, there are
several flashes of lightning, and then the camera is suddenly inside the
nightclub, still tracking toward Susan seated alone at a table. The lightning
flashes, which cover up the dissolve and so make an impossible movement
seem normal, are the magician’s wave of the hand, a brief distraction of our
attention that allows the trick to happen unnoticed.
But that’s not enough for Welles. He has to make it clear to us how we’re
being tricked at the same time still having us believe what we see. Later in
the film, we return to the nightclub, and Welles repeats the virtuosic shot
through the skylight. This time, the lightning flash is gone and the second
shot—from inside the club—is stationary; the bare bones of the trick are
exposed to our view. And yet we still “fall” for it, we still allow ourselves to
be led through the skylight. This is the art of the magician: Welles knows
how to manipulate our familiarity with conventions, knows how to show us
that we’re being manipulated and yet still have us absorbed in the game
being played in front of our eyes.
Or take a brief sequence from The Lady from Shanghai (1948). George
and Michael, driving toward the dock, are shown approaching a truck; miles
away, Elsa reaches forward to press an intercom button; as she does so,
Welles cuts back to the car crashing into the truck, injuring George and
providing the blood he will use to frame Michael. As George Wilson has
argued, the peculiarity of this sequence is that it appears as though Elsa
causes the accident to happen, that it is her action that makes the car crash
into the back of the truck. What Welles does is to construct an impossible
situation—Elsa literally cannot be causing this to happen—that nonetheless
matches our general impression of the film’s concerns: there is a strange
agency moving the machinery behind the plot. We feel Elsa’s power in
creating the accident, even though we know it is not true; Welles uses the
familiar machinery of Hollywood conventions, and their naturalizing formal
patterns, to create an impossible fold within the world of the film.61
These epistemic fantasies are located in difficult terrain, especially for
considerations of aesthetics. They involve the way an immediate impression
—of causality, of presence—determines our experience of a sequence. They
also involve more considered judgments and forms, whether in their use of
standard Hollywood conventions or their function as what Ngai might
describe as a “gimmick.”62 Most crucially, they involve aspects of judgment
—how we make sense of what we see—but are moments in which
judgment, as it were, goes wrong, when it needs to be recalibrated but is
unable to find the purchase. Another way to put it is that Welles creates
forms of interested aesthetic judgments, judgments that are fundamentally
impure—based on desire and fantasy as much as fact. At the same time, he
removes the community against which the testing of judgment—the
intersubjective exchange—might have taken place, so that we are left adrift,
drawn along by the play and ploy of the film.
While this dynamic is present throughout Welles’s career, it surfaces in a
striking way in his adaptation of The Trial (1962), as he uses Kafka’s text to
think through the ways in which fantasies are bound up with modes of
aesthetic and political experience. Made during the time of the Eichmann
trial, and explicitly shaped by the problem of adapting Kafka to a post-
Holocaust world, Welles’s film was released the year before Arendt’s
publication of her essay on the Eichmann trial in The New Yorker—and so
is one of the last works to engage these topics without awareness of
Arendt’s famous analysis.
Welles was a notoriously unfaithful adapter. In his Macbeth (1948), he
creates an entirely new character, a Celtic priest, in order to advance his
own understanding of Shakespeare’s play—cobbling together words from
other characters and in some cases simply writing new, quasi-
Shakespearean lines of his own. He is no less free in his adaptation of The
Trial. One of the most explicit divergences involve the final scene, where
Joseph K. is taken to a quarry and killed. In Kafka’s novel, the executioners
pass a knife back and forth across his chest, which suggests to K. that it is
his duty to “plunge it into himself.” He refuses: “He could not rise entirely
to the occasion, he could not relieve the authority of all their work; the
responsibility for this final failure lay with whoever had denied him the
remnant of strength necessary to do so.” K. sees a figure in a window and
stretches his arms out as if in appeal. But then, Kafka writes in the novel’s
concluding passage:
the hands of one man were right at K.’s throat, while the other thrust the knife into his heart
and turned it there twice. With failing sight K. saw how the men drew near his face, leaning
cheek-to-cheek to observe the verdict. “Like a dog!” he said; it seemed as though the shame
was to outlive him.63

In interviews, Welles remarked that he could not film the end of The Trial
in the way Kafka had written it: “After the death of six million Jews, Kafka
would not have written that. It seemed to me to be pre-Auschwitz.”64
Welles objected that K. was too passive, that he let himself be killed.
Instead of the “shame” that K. feels, and which seemed out of place after
Auschwitz, Welles draws out K.’s refusal. The executioners retreat, pull out
sticks of dynamite, light the fuse, and throw it into the quarry. K. picks the
dynamite up, seemingly to throw it back, but it explodes, and the film ends
on a series of explosions that resolve into a still image of an explosion that
resembles a small mushroom cloud.
Kafka’s novel has remained current for contemporary political theory,
especially in debates about authority that focus on “states of exception” and
the assertion of the absolute power of the sovereign authority over and
against individuals. The phrase “like a dog” has been especially important,
as it stages the law against its exact opposite, an animal that has no voice.
Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer, for example, links the “bare life” of
individuals and the “totalization of structures of modern power” in the state
and the law as two complementary tendencies in contemporary life.
Agamben reads Kafka’s novel as illustrating the absence of any positive
commandment issuing from the law: “Being in force without
significance…. What, after all, is the structure of the sovereign ban if not
that of a law that is in force but does not signify?”65 The sheer fact of
authority, the exercise of the law, does not require meaning (or want it) in
order to demonstrate its power and authority. As Eric Santner argues,
“creaturely life is just life abandoned to the state of exception/emergency,
that paradoxical domain in which law has been suspended in the name of
preserving law. And once again, what is included in the state of exception is
not simply outside the law but inside an outlaw dimension internal to the
law, subject not to law but rather to sovereign jouissance.”66 Indeed,
Arendt’s own retrospective essay on Kafka argues that law appears in The
Trial as if it were “representing a divine necessity,” hence “unchangeable
through the will of men”—something entirely external to any individual.67
Welles offers a very different vision, and we get a glimpse of what that is
by attending to the changes he makes to Kafka’s final scene. The first is
what K. says as he refuses the knife. “You,” he says, “you! You! You!
You’ll have to do it! You … you dummies!” The “you dummies,” especially
with Anthony Perkins’s voice, stands out within the film not just for the
words—a colloquial phrase more appropriate to mid-century America than
to the European world in which the story is set (and in which the film was
made)—but even more the tone in which it is uttered. The second is the
removal of the phrase, “like a dog.” In removing these words, Welles takes
away the role of animals that is so important to Kafka’s stories and novels,
and which has formed a key component in the debates on the idea of
sovereignty. To an extent, it’s a removal that shouldn’t be surprising. Unlike
contemporaries such as Luis Buñuel, Jean Renoir, and Robert Bresson,
Welles is not really interested in animals, whether as model, metaphor, or
location of sentiment. One way to understand this penchant is that Welles is
not a filmmaker interested in the problem of mute suffering, or in essential
inexpressiveness—he is a filmmaker of words and expressions, of the
human world.
He is also, fascinatingly, a filmmaker of human institutions, the middle
ground between the personal drama of the individual and the impersonal
authority of an abstract conception of the law. Welles cues us to this context
via the sticks of dynamite at the end of The Trial, which evoke the
beginning of his previous film, Touch of Evil (1958). In that film, an
explosion touches off an extensive inquiry into the law, but the law is not
something that stands wholly outside the characters; it constitutes a process
that must be negotiated. The conflict in Touch of Evil is between the anti-
hero, Quinlan, who abuses the process of the law in order to get the result
that he believes is correct—in a sense, to create a state of exception—and
Vargas, who follows the slow slog of the police process. Welles was always
clear about where he stood:
It’s a mistake to think that I approve of Quinlan at all. To me, he’s hateful: there is no
ambiguity in his character… The personal element of the film is the hatred I feel for the way
the police abuse their power… Quinlan doesn’t so much want to bring the guilty to justice,
as to murder them in the name of the law, and that’s a fascist argument, a totalitarian
argument contrary to the tradition of human law and justice such as I understand it.68

Welles’s position is of a left-wing liberalism, but what’s striking is that he

attempts to make The Trial into a version of this position, a view that, as he
acknowledges, is not Kafka’s own: “Kafka, of course, hates the law itself.
What I hate are the abuses.”69 Where Kafka pictures a world in which the
processes that Welles cares about are missing, Welles transforms Kafka to
picture what it is and what it feels like to be located in concrete
entanglements rather than faced by the law as such.
We can hear Welles’s project in a speech of K.’s toward the end of the
film. After a brief exchange with a priest, he is startled to see The
Advocate, who brings with him a magic lantern slide show that presents the
parable “Before the Law” (done in pinscreen animation by Alexandre
Alexieff and Claire Parker). K. interrupts him, saying he knows the story
already—“I’ve heard it all before. We’ve all heard it”—and begins to argue
about the nature of the law. The Advocate suggests that K. is trying to
pretend himself to be “the victim of some kind of conspiracy.” K. rejects the
idea that he is a martyr. “Not even a victim of society?”, The Advocate
queries. K replies, “I am a member of society,” and goes on to suggest that
the function of the court is to create a system in which everyone believes
themselves to be insane. “So I’ve lost my case. What of it? … Does that
sentence the entire universe to lunacy?” And he concludes on a kind of
understated credo: “Of course I’m responsible.”
Welles insists that K. cannot separate himself from the law, that whatever
guilt the law has is guilt that he shares as well. “He is also a little
bureaucrat. I consider him guilty,” Welles remarked of K., and goes to some
lengths to create symmetries between the court and K.’s own life. The
unsettling sexuality between Titoretti and the young girls who surround his
room becomes K.’s sexually ambiguous relation to his young cousin Irmy
(his supervisor assumes K. is having an affair—“Can’t be more than 16, if
that … My god”—and Irmy herself will later observe that “cousins get
married, too”). The court that makes him wait becomes K.’s boast that he
sometimes makes people wait for “weeks” before seeing them at his office.
And the law student running off with Hilda becomes K. seducing (and
being seduced by) Leni at The Advocate’s house. K. is every bit a part of
the world of the court.
But K.’s speech also gets to another major theme in the film: when, and
under what circumstances, are we in fact (legally, morally) responsible?
How are we guilty? Kafka is generally concerned with the nature of guilt
itself, with a sense that we must be guilty—of something, anyway. Welles’s
K., by contrast, is always moving toward specifics. “Why would you want
to get dressed in the hall?” he is asked by an inspector, and immediately
provides concrete reasons for his actions. K. attempts to specify, too, the
terms of the arrest: “Just exactly what is it I’m charged with?”; “Inspector,
what’s the charge?”; and, from Ms. Burstner, “What did they get you for?”
Even the opening phrase of Kafka’s novel, “Someone must have been
telling lies about Joseph K.,” is given now to Ms. Burstner a full fifteen
minutes into the film, who wonders if that’s the reason for K.’s arrest. “That
could be it,” he replies, taking it as a question to which there might actually
be an answer; “rumors … they’re always flying around for no reason.”
Welles’s K. aims to dwell in specific and specifiable contexts, in which he
tries to make sense of actions and consequences—and of his own
responsibility. As Joel Feinberg notes, “we do not ordinarily raise the
question of responsibility for something unless that something … [needs]
accounting for.”70 Indeed, K. first utters the line “I am responsible” only
after (finally) realizing that his actions during the morning of his arrest have
caused Ms. Burstner to be evicted from her apartment, and that he thus
bears responsibility for a state of affairs that he finds otherwise
inexplicable. Otherwise he will be lost. Mrs. Grubach remarks, “With your
arrest, I get the feeling of something abstract, if you see what I mean,” and
K. can only reply, “It’s so abstract I can’t even consider that it applies to
me.”
Yet K. does get lost, practically as well as morally (and even
epistemically), and Welles creates a style in which this disconnect is
paramount. Largely this has to do with space, and the way that, as Noël
Carroll observes, Welles picks up on Kafka’s own sense of “spatial
disorientation” as if to illustrate the idea that “one can be lost in a legal
system as in a labyrinth.”71 Sometimes this happens because spaces are
hidden away, tucked inside the rational organization of the modern world.
The supply closet at K.’s work, for example, first emerges as a place to
store a cake, but the next time we see it the two inspectors are being
whipped inside its cramped and dark enclosure. Welles’s editing inside the
space is frenetic, and the scene is lit by only a single light bulb; space is
hard to figure out, and so is the action. When K. finally exits the room,
moreover, it is seemingly in a different location: rather than a small room
tucked under the stairs, there is a large door—through which hands
desperately reach—framed against a massive blank wall. Where are we?
The room appears something archaic, sealed off from the world, perhaps the
space of childhood and fantasized punishments—part of what Welles once
described as a “dollar-book Freud” approach.72 At other times, perceptual
shock dislocates us. At The Advocate’s office, K. hears the sound of
breaking glass and goes to investigate; he walks by a wall filled with thin
mirrors, seeing himself reflected in them, but he suddenly notices Leni
staring at him through an empty panel, the glass shattered and her face—
and the depths behind it—disrupting the coherent organization of the room.
Most often, though, Welles uses editing patterns to make a character’s
movements seem impossible. In some scenes, this has to do with the
character’s rapid movement through spaces that seem disconnected or
impossibly related: the law student carrying the woman off through the
various spaces of the court, followed rapidly by a shot of the woman’s
husband walking toward K. across rafters just below the ceiling. K. will
himself traverse disparate spaces when he runs through The Advocate’s
apartment, trailed by Leni and Bloch, the coherence of space dissolving into
a series of sinuous tracking shots and rapid edits. Or there is Titorelli’s
office. As Carroll describes it,
when K. flees from the law offices, he passes through the self-same door he entered but he
does not re-enter Titorelli’s apartment. Titorelli’s room seems to have disappeared. The door
now seems connected to a series of different passageways including, fittingly, a sewer.
Initially, the scene is set on the top of a building. As it progresses we find ourselves in a
sewer with no acknowledgment in the editing of a movement from upstairs to downstairs. It
is impossible for the viewer to divine the geography of this sequence. How K. manages to
move from one space to another is felt to be incalculable because K’s movement appears
palpably incoherent.73

Sometimes the distortions are even more explicit. Receiving a note at the
opera house, K. exits the opulent theater only to find himself in an
intermediary space filled with stark concrete pillars. One of the inspectors
appears and leads him, and the camera, through the space, and through a
door into what looks like a small house; that turns out, though, to lead onto
a dark alley, which in turns leads into steel industrial structures. The long
takes, and the evocation of Hollywood conventions of continuity in action
and speech, suggest that no more than thirty seconds has passed—yet we
now seem to be in a wholly different part of the city. K. walks off, and
immediately is in the courtyard of the court, marked by a gigantic shrouded
statue, and men milling about, their nakedness and thinness, and the
numbers they carry, clearly signifying concentration camps.
Such indeterminacy poses traps for K. as he moves through the world. In
the opening scene, one of the inspectors points at a record player and asks,
“What’s that thing?” “That’s my pornograph,” K. responds, before
correcting his unsubtle Freudian slip.74 Language often goes awry for K:
words fail him, whether by lacking in meaning or by outstripping the
meaning he intends. Here, the slip sets the stage for K.’s sexuality—
something we may initially deny but which keeps showing through, from
his emphasis on his familiarity with burlesque shows to his multiple affairs
and seductions.
We can discern in this pattern the logic by which K. moves through what
he describes as the “formless” courts of law. Each time he enters a scene, he
immediately attempts to create a context, aiming to provide himself with a
firm foundation from which to speak, modulating his words in order to
achieve his ends. We see this in the first appearance in the courts, where K.
walks into the room, finds it filled to the rafters with people, and
immediately decides that it is a political rally—perhaps even an auditorium
of neutral supporters. It is, of course, part of the trial itself, and his
assumption that he understands where he is—and what he is looking at—
undermines what he aims to do. Elsewhere, he is surprised to discover that
behind Titorelli’s office are the courts of law, the archaic and perverse
persisting behind the rational and orderly. Or there are the sewers which he
runs through, giving way not (as they do in Carol Reed’s The Third Man
(1949)) to the seediness of the city but to the grandness of the cathedral.
Welles talked explicitly about the spatial disorientation of his film: “The
number of realistic elements were to become fewer and fewer and the
public would become aware of it, to the point where the scene would be
reduced to free space as if everything had dissolved.”75 This description
seems to find its emblem in the pinscreen drawings that are used to
illustrate “Before the Law,” and which are present as a prologue to the film
and in the climactic scene in the cathedral. These images, which are in
themselves plays of light and shadow, and which show the door to the law
as something through which light streams, suggest a kind of indistinctness,
even ambiguity. Ryan Pierson has noted how pinscreen techniques blur the
role of the line in animation, creating “soft-edged bodies” that have “no
fixed form.”76 It’s tempting to describe this as a kind of indeterminacy, to
connect the blurring of forms in the pinscreen to the blurring of spatial
orientation in the film. And perhaps that might lead to seeing aesthetic
indeterminacy as a model for ethical and/or political indeterminacy,
analogous to the disruption that Rancière valorizes: “Aesthetic experience
has a political effect to the extent that the loss of destination it presupposes
disrupts the way in which bodies fit their functions and destinations.”77 The
politics of ambiguity, or indeterminacy, would then reside in the breakdown
of the terms that enable means–ends calculations.
We can describe this point differently, picking up Welles’s description of
what he creates as “free space as if everything had dissolved.” Kant’s
aesthetic formalism, we can recall, is not just about a refusal of content but
an embrace of the form of an object. A judgment of beauty, that is, requires
that there be a stable representation to occasion the free play of the
faculties. Kant was aware, of course, that many things that occasioned
something like aesthetic pleasure did not carry such stability, and he labeled
them “beautiful views”:
taste seems to fasten not so much on what the imagination apprehends in this field as on
what gives it occasion to invent, i.e., on what are strictly speaking the fantasies with which
the mind entertains itself while it is being continuously aroused by the manifold which
strikes the eye, as for instance in looking at the changing shapes of a fire in a hearth or of a
rippling brook, neither of which are beauties, but both of which carry with them a charm for
the imagination, because they sustain its free play.78

Beautiful views lack formal order because of their protean movement,

which precludes our ability to fix a stable border, and for this reason they
undermine the possibility of the subjective universality of aesthetic
judgment: because of their ceaseless motion we cannot assume that anyone
could see them as we do. As Jordan Schonig notes, Kant “suggests a mode
of sensory experience that is somewhere between subjective hallucination
and empirical representation, an intermingling of inside and outside … a
private imaginative reverie that obscures the objects themselves.”79 These
are not pure aesthetic judgments—they are involved in interest, in charm,
even in desire—but through such beautiful views we start to “invent.” Lost
in the depths of a fire, contemplating a running stream, or pulled along by
the movement of the camera, our fantasies run wild.
At the outset of the previous section, I noted that Welles enjoys playing
with the epistemic habits of the audience, fantasies about being in the world
of the film in a way that is (ontologically) barred from us. Welles’s
seductive power, I said there, had to do with his ability to recognize how
deeply these fantasies go, and how much they are bound up with the
ordinary conventions of the (film) world. We require little to make us lose
sight of where we are, and what our broader orientation and commitment—
to the world, to others—actually is. Citizen Kane ends with the reporter’s
speech about no one thing being able to define a person’s life, the credo
about life’s ineradicable complexity, the claim that we are not mere jigsaw
puzzles. But then the camera starts to move, up and away from the group of
reporters and across the innumerable objects that Kane had collected until it
finally reveals the sled, providing the answer to the question that ostensibly
drove the plot of the film. We have just been told that it doesn’t matter, that
the answer is irrelevant, but now we’re hooked: the revelation of the sled is
something that only we, the audience of the film, can ever or will ever
know (its destruction confirms this). We forget ourselves in the fantasy of
style.
Welles produces a version of this at the end of The Trial. K. has just
given his speech to The Advocate, and then to the priest, rejecting the idea
that the world is fundamentally irrational and insisting that he is part of
society—and hence that, as part of society, he bears responsibility. But as
soon as he walks out of the cathedral the two men in gray flannel coats
accost him. As K.’s executioners, they stand immediately at his sides,
boxing him in, and proceed to walk rapidly through the deserted city-space
and the mists of dawn. It is a set of eerie images, made all the more strange
by their mode of walking, as the group moves toward the inevitability of the
quarry and K.’s death. And in following them, and in watching the bizarre
rituals, we quickly forget everything that K. has just said, or come to
realize. The world of the court is strange, we feel; it is alien; our hero could
never be part of it. Welles has carried us away, and the speed of the
progression through spaces dissolves the grounds with which we are able to
judge. We are left with our fantasies—of death, and of resistance—and the
final images of explosion, perhaps the threat of total nuclear destruction of
the world. This is the model of the sovereign exception, the pitting of the
isolated individual against the law, and it is far more seductive than the
mundane matters of responsibility and guilt that we were just taught.
Welles’s stylistic seductions are tricky, difficult to pin down and describe
—difficult to place under categories. The tension at the heart of them is part
of why they are so centrally bound up with questions of aesthetics, from the
hesitations and uncertainty (yet without utter contingency) to the
slipperiness of categories and concepts (yet without the abandonment of
generality). But Welles’s ambitions reach outward to allow us to think more
broadly about the place of moving-image media within the history of
aesthetics. What do we do with film, a medium that is both there in the
world and yet which is so bound up with our own fantasies? How do we
grasp its stable forms and idiosyncratic experiences? How do we bring any
kind of order, any form of judgment, to the amalgamation of images that
Siegfried Kracauer long ago placed under the heading of a “calico world”?
The terms of aesthetics, and of aesthetic theory, may only have recently
arrived in thinking about film and other moving-image media, but problems
these media pose are central to why aesthetics has come to be an important
lens for thinking about—and for trying to grasp—the appeals, fantasies, and
communities that emerge out of the shifting sounds and images.

N
1. Jennifer Hammett, “‘You Never Had a Camera Inside My Head’: The Masculine Subject of the
Postmodern Sublime,” Criticism 45, no. 1 (Winter 2003): 75.
2. Jean-Louis Baudry, “Ideological Effects of the Basic Apparatus,” in Narrative, Apparatus,
Ideology: A Film Theory Reader, ed. Phil Rosen (New York: Columbia University Press,
1986), 286–98.
3. Serge Daney, “The Therrorized (Godardian Pedagogy)” (1976), trans. Bill Krohn and Charles
Cameron Ball, https://www.diagonalthoughts.com/?p=1620.
4. Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).
5. Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), 1.
6. See, among many texts, Jacuqes Rancière, The Future of the Image, trans. Gregory Elliot (New
York: Verso, 2007); Jacuqes Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, trans. Gabriel Rockhill (New
York: Continuum, 2004), Davide Panagia, Rancière’s Sentiments (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2018), 7–10.
7. See Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
1999); Peg Zeglin Brand, ed., “Beauty Matters: A Symposium,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art
 Criticism 57, no. 1 (1999): 1–25; and Alexander Nehamas, “The Return of the Beautiful:
Morality, Pleasure, and the Value of Uncertainty,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 58,
no. 4 (2000): 393–400.
8. Kaja Silverman, World Spectators (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), 144.
9. Theo Davis, Ornamental Aesthetics: The Poetry of Attending in Thoreau, Dickinson, and
Whitman (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 3.
10. Sianne Ngai, “Our Aesthetic Categories,” PMLA 125, no. 4 (2010): 948.
11. Georg W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, 2 vols., trans. T.M. Knox (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1975), 1:2, 9. For some of these issues, see Robert Pippin, “What Was
Abstract Art? (From the Point of View of Hegel),” Critical Inquiry 29, no. 1 (2002): 1–24.
12. Steven Shaviro, The Universe of Things: On Speculative Realism (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2014), 148.
13. Miriam Hansen, “The Mass Production of the Senses,” in Reinventing Film Studies, ed.
Christine Gledhill and Linda Williams (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 341–42;
also see Susan Buck-Morss, “Aesthetics and Anaesthetics: Walter Benjamin’s Artwork Essay
Reconsidered,” October 62 (1992): 3–41; Howard Caygill, Walter Benjamin and the Color of
Experience (New York: Routledge, 1998).
14. Melissa Gregg and Gregory Seigworth, The Affect Theory Reader (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2010), 1.
15. On this distinction, see Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2002); Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (New York: Routledge,
2004); Martha Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2003).
16. See Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011).
17. Graham Harman, “Vicarious Causation,” Collapse II (2009): 221. Shaviro, Universe of Things,
145, remarks: “Harman’s discovery [is] that causal effects are partial and indirect, which is to
say aesthetic … this just is the way that causality actually works.”
18. Scott Richmond, “Speculative Realism Is Speculative Aesthetics,” Configurations 23, no. 3
(2015): 400.
19. Shaviro, Universe of Things, 156.
20. Eugenie Brinkema, The Forms of the Affects (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), 32.
21. Ibid., 36.
22. Sianne Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2012), 183.
23. Ngai notes this shift at several places. E.g., ibid., 231, 236, 241.
24. On Kant’s terms, the problem runs like this: “How is a judgment possible which, merely from
one’s own feeling of pleasure in an object, independent of its concept, judges this pleasure, as
attached to the representation of the same object in every other subject, a priori, i.e., without
having to wait for the assent of others?” Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment,
trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), §36,
5:288. One of the best treatments of these issues is Hannah Ginsborg, The Normativity of
Nature: Essays on Kant’s Critique of Judgment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), chs.
1–5.
25. Kant, Critique, §9, 5:217.
26. Ibid., §8, 5:216.
27. Steven Shaviro, Without Criteria: Kant, Whitehead, Deleuze, and Aesthetics (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 2009).
28. Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories, 40.
29. Jordan Schonig, “‘Liking’ as Creating: On Aesthetic Category Memes,” New Media & Society
22, no. 1 (2020): 42.
30. See, for example, Stanley Cavell, “The Aesthetic Problems of Modern Philosophy,” in Must We
Mean What We Say? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 73–96. Other important
works from that era include Frank Sibley, “Aesthetic Concepts,” in Philosophy Looks at the
Arts, ed. Joseph Margolis (New York: Scribners, 1962); Mary Mothersill, Beauty Restored
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984).
31. On this revival, see Jennifer Fay and Daniel Morgan, “Introduction,” in “Cinema, Modernism,
and the Perplexing Methods of Stanley Cavell,” special issue, Discourse 42, no. 1–2
(Winter/Spring 2020): 3–19.
32. See Rey Chow, “A Phantom Discipline,” PMLA 116, no. 5 (October 2001): 1386–95.
33. Hannah Arendt, “The Crisis in Culture,” in Between Past and Future (New York: Viking Press,
1961), 197–241; 223.
34. Jennifer Fay, “Thinking on Film: Arendt and Cavell” (talk delivered at the University of
Pennsylvania, February 12, 2020); Brian Price, A Theory of Regret (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2017), 8, 120.
35. Linda Zerilli, “‘We Feel Our Freedom’: Imagination and Judgment in the Thought of Hannah
Arendt,” Political Theory 33, no. 2 (2005): 171. Zerilli develops these arguments more fully in
A Democratic Theory of Judgment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016).
36. Hannah Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, ed. Ronald Beiner (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1982), 42; Zerilli, “ ‘We Feel Our Freedom’,” 175.
37. John David Rhodes, “This Was Not Cinema: Judgment, Action, and Barbara Hammer,” Film
Criticism 39, no. 2 (Winter 2014–2015): 115–36, 121.
38. Ibid., 121.
39. Price, Theory of Regret, 131, 105. For a slightly different reading, see Patchen Markell,
“Arendt, Aesthetics, and ‘The Crisis in Culture,’” in The Aesthetic Turn in Political Thought,
ed. Nikolas Kompridis (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 61–88.
40. Kant, Critique, Ak. 5:205, 210.
41. Arendt, “Crisis in Culture,” 210. There is a similar argument about the freedom from material
need allowing people to turn to questions of value in Stanley Cavell, Pursuits of Happiness:
The Hollywood Comedies of Remarriage (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981),
1–8. For a different account of disinterestedness, see David Bromwich, “Disinterested
Imagining and Impersonal Feeling,” in Metaphysical Hazlitt: Bicentenary Essays, ed. Uttara
Natarajan, Tom Paulin, and Duncan Wu (New York: Routledge, 2005), 17–29.
42. D. N. Rodowick, An Education in Judgment: Hannah Arendt and the Humanities (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2021), 25.
43. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 4.
44. See Michael Walzer, “Deliberation, and What Else?” in Deliberative Politics: Essays on
Democracy and Disagreement, ed. Stephen Macedo (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999),
58–69.
45. Arendt, Human Condition, 55. Also: “In ancient feeling … a man who lived only a private life,
who like the slave was not permitted to enter the public realm, or like the barbarian had chosen
not to establish such a realm, was not fully human.” Ibid., 38.
46. Ibid., 221.
47. Ibid.
48. See, for example, Jacqueline Stewart, “‘Negroes Laughing at Themselves’? Black
Spectatorship and the Performance of Urban Modernity,” Critical Inquiry 29, no. 4 (2003):
650–77.
49. Daniel Morgan, “Modernist Investigations: A Reading of The World Viewed,” Discourse 42,
no. 1–2 (Winter/Spring 2020): 209–40.
50. Kant, Critique, Ak. 5:204.
51. Stanley Cavell, The Senses of Walden, expanded ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1981), 103.
52. Kant, Critique, Ak. 5:296.
53. Ibid., Ak. 5:297–98.
54. Ibid., Ak. 5:299.
55. Kant’s formulation runs like this: “nature should at least show some trace or give some sign
that it contains in itself some sort of ground for assuming a lawful correspondence of its
products with our satisfaction that is independent of all interest.” Ibid., Ak. 5:300.
56. Ibid., Ak. 5:300.
57. Henry Allison, Kant’s Theory of Taste (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 230–
33.
58. Kant, Critique, Ak. 5:301.
59. Ibid., Ak. 5:302.
60. This paragraph and the next two are drawn from Daniel Morgan, The Lure of the Image:
Epistemic Fantasies of the Moving Camera (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2021).
61. See George Wilson, Narration in Light: Studies in Cinematic Point of View (Baltimore, MD:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 1–5.
62. See Sianne Ngai, “Theory of the Gimmick,” Critical Inquiry 43, no. 2 (Winter 2017): 466–505.
63. Franz Kafka, The Trial, trans. Breon Mitchell (New York: Schocken Books, 1999), 230–31.
64. Juan Cobos, Miguel Rubio, and J. A. Pruneda, “A Trip to Don Quixoteland: Conversations
with Orson Welles,” in Orson Welles Interviews, ed. Mark Estrin (Jackson: University of
Mississippi Press, 2002), 96–125, 96. Welles had in fact shown footage from concentration
camps in The Stranger (1946), the first time such images appeared in American cinema.
65. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 51.
66. Eric Santner, On Creaturely Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 22. For a
related reading of animals and debates on sovereignty, also see Magnus Fiskesjö, The
Thanksgiving Turkey Pardon, the Death of Teddy’s Bear and the Sovereign Exception of
Guantánamo (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003).
67. Hannah Arendt, “Franz Kafka: A Revaluation,” in Essays in Understanding: 1930–1954, ed.
Jerome Kohn (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1994), 69–80, 72.
68. André Bazin, Cahrles Bitsch, and Jean Domarchi, “Interview with Orson Welles (II),” in Orson
Welles Interviews, 50, 52.
69. Orson Welles and Peter Bogdanovich, This Is Orson Welles, ed. Jonathan Rosenbaum
(Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 1998), 198. On this issue in Touch of Evil, see ibid., 298–99.
Also see Robert Burns, Kafka’s Law: “The Trial” and American Criminal Justice (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2014).
70. Joel Feinberg, “Action and Responsibility,” in Philosophy in America, ed. Max Black (London:
George Allen & Unwin Ltd, 1965), 134–60; 144. The contrast is with the logic of shame:
“Shame … is held to concern not your actions but who you are.” Ruth Leys, From Guilt to
Shame: Auschwitz and After (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 11.
71. Noël Carroll, “Welles and Kafka,” in Interpreting the Moving Image (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1998), 196.
72. See Laura Mulvey, Citizen Kane (London: BFI, 1992), 66.
73. Carroll, “Welles and Kafka,” 200.
74. In which the words “in which we clothe our ideas, or the image in which we cloak them” are
not freely chosen but “made for other reasons, and that a deeper and often unintentional sense
shows faintly through in the form taken by the idea.” Sigmund Freud, The Psychopathology of
Everyday Life, trans. Anthea Bell (New York: Penguin Books, 2002), 206. For a discussion of
sexual dynamics in Welles’s film, see also John Orr, “The Trial of Orson Welles,” in Cinema
and Fiction: New Modes of Adapting, 1950–1990, ed. John Orr and Colin Nicholson
(Edinburgh, Scotland: Edinburgh University Press, 1992), 13–27.
75. Cobos et al., “A Trip to Don Quixoteland,” 99.
76. Ryan Pierson, Figure and Force in Animation Aesthetics (New York: Oxford University Press,
2020), 16.
77. Jacques Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, trans. Gregory Elliott (New York: Verso, 2011),
72
78. Kant, Critique, Ak. 5:243–44.
79. Jordan Schonig, “Contingent Motion: Rethinking the ‘Wind in the Trees’ in Early Cinema and
CGI,” Discourse 40, no. 1 (Winter 2018): 36.
 CHAPTER 3

MORAL PHILOSOPHY AND

THE MOVING IMAGE

BRIAN PRICE

IN the penultimate paragraph of his influential essay “Notes on Film Noir,”

Paul Schrader offers a provocation that is at odds with the taxonomy of
style he otherwise so fully details up to that point. There, Schrader tells us:
“Toward the end film noir was engaged in a life-and-death struggle with the
materials it reflected; it tried to make America accept a moral vision of life
based on style.”1 For many years now, readers of this essay, in classrooms
everywhere, have been entertaining a question about whether film noir is a
style or a genre. Schrader, of course, asks us to think of it as a style, but the
taxonomy of stylistic elements and their related thematic articulations—for
example, “an almost Freudian attachment to water”2—point, as we know,
just as easily in the opposite direction. Film studies, on the whole, has also
followed in the direction of iconic accumulation, especially in moments—
or in the name of such moments—when one is compelled to think, in
practical terms, about what film studies needs at a foundational level. What,
we ask ourselves, do our students need in order to understand film in a
deeper way than they did before, as something more than mere
entertainment? Hence, the establishment and reiteration of a formal
vocabulary of style (deep-focus long take, continuity editing) and histories
of style that are as homogeneous as they are diachronic (from German
expressionism to surrealism to film noir, from the tradition of quality to the
French new wave). Schrader’s essay has played no small part in the
elaboration of these two tendencies and thus in the development and
stabilization of the discipline in quasi art historical terms.
 But why hasn’t his conclusion struck us—at the level of method and
sensibility—as at least as important as, if not more important than, any
attempt to define the experience of film? How do we not notice that the
question follows after an extensive taxonomy of stylistic elements? What
would happen if we tended instead to the idea that “film noir attempted to
make America accept a moral vision of life based on style”? In asking this
question, Schrader pulls away the foundation of his own argument, lets the
“elements” fall where they may. This chapter is an effort, then, to ask what
it means to think of morality as a matter of style. My aim is not to simply
offer a reading of this passage from Schrader, though doing that is
important to what I want to say here. In thinking about the relation between
style and morality, I want to merely make some suggestions about what
moral philosophy has to offer film studies, and what film, in turn, has to
offer moral reflection. The terrain, thankfully, is not as bleak as it once was,
especially now that Stanley Cavell’s work is being taken seriously in film
and media studies, and also because of the recent and rather significant turn
to cinema in the work of Robert Pippin, whose reflections on aesthetics and
moral psychology I take to be indispensable to answering a question that
the field has ignored in the pursuit of two totalizing and incompatible
systems: neoformalist analysis, which continues to dominate undergraduate
instruction in the Anglo-American academy (and even, somehow, when our
research is at odds with that program), and the pursuit of the single defining
psychic mechanism that explains our relation to images, whether that be by
way of psychoanalysis, in its skeptical version or cognitivism in its more
scientistic and value-free appeals to internal norms of responsiveness and
evaluation.3 The question that I have in mind, and that I take Cavell and
Pippin to be especially responsive to, goes as follows: how can film
participate in the efforts we make to honor and acknowledge the
complications of ourselves—our psychology, our actions—as well as the
psychological complexity and actions of others as complicated? How, in
other words, does film allow us to reflect in even its most ordinary
instances on what we think good is and what our actions tell us both about
ourselves and what we make possible or impossible for others? And most
important, we will need to know how any answer to such a question
depends on our ability to address or to hold onto what remains or appears
conflicted, even contradictory, in what counts as a moral response worthy of
the name. A moral response, in other words, will need to be something
other than a reimagining of whatever it is that disappoints us in or about
another.
There is a risk in putting it this way, since the question does not in itself
clarify the difference that we need first to indicate, which concerns the
difference between morality and moralism. In tending to that difference, I
want ultimately to suggest a few ways in which the kinds of questions that
moral philosophers regularly ask can help us—as film scholars—to
understand what should remain in view even as technological shifts compel
theoretical distinctions that may be useful to understanding how
technologies work, but remain largely trivial to a more general
understanding of why we watch films most of the time. That is to say, the
questions that moral philosophers ask—What is shame? What distinguishes
envy from jealousy? What are norms? When are we obligated to another?—
compel us to see more clearly how the form and effects of film are
significantly related to the kinds of concerns that extend well beyond art
historically inflected surveys of style. Another way of saying this is that I
believe that for far too long film scholars have been answering questions
that only matter to film studies. We can do more.

M M
If I’m right in thinking that film studies scholars have ignored Schrader’s
provocation that film noir attempted to make America accept a moral vision
of life based on style, and that the history of style that continues to be told
—in conjunction with a formal vocabulary that is made and practiced in the
image of that history—is indebted to the taxonomy of style that precedes
this claim, then it is worth suggesting a few reasons why this may be so.
The provocation that Schrader makes, of course, is a moral one. But it is
a moral provocation that takes style to be inseparable from more
sophisticated forms of moral reflection, and in that way is entirely resistant
to moralism, or what Mary Midgley once described as our Enlightenment
inheritance, by which we continually come to expect that all things can be
settled in a “single move.”4 If we think of morality as the means by which
everything can be settled in a single move, then morality would be
inseparable from comprehension, so much so that morality comes to
indicate the force or imperative of knowing in the right way, thereby
doubling—quite significantly—the consequences of failure. To
misunderstand is not simply to be wrong in such a scenario: it is to be
wrong and bad. This view of morality—despite its ubiquity in everyday
experience, and despite the fact that it names the conceptual nexus at the
heart of Kant’s influential conception of morality—is, however, far from
settled business in contemporary moral philosophy. Indeed, following
Samuel Scheffler, we can say that morality, seen thus, is poorly—if also
pervasively—understood as overriding. Morality is understood as
overriding, Scheffler tells us, when “it can never be rational knowingly to
do what morality forbids.”5 Should we believe such things—namely, that
morality cannot be separated from understanding, and that it is irrational to
do what morality forbids—then moral philosophy would not get us very far
in our appreciation of fiction film, largely because it would compel a view
of the relation between form and content that is ultimately insensitive to
both formal and thematic variation. That is to say, if we understand morality
as overriding, then a moral response to film might be nothing much more
than the ongoing observation that characters routinely behave irrationally
from within an overriding form, in and as the content held by form, so
much so that form—understood here as the repetition of an unwavering set
of conventions—is what overrides. By contrast, content would have to be
understood as the realm in which irrational acts are featured and indicate, at
least initially, a disparity between the good, or what overrides, and what
shows itself as irrationally resistant to, or out of sync with, the good. What
overrides as form, or the unwavering constellation of conventions, would
have to be understood, in turn, as what compels a realignment of action
from the irrational to the rational. And in this respect one thing that I want
to make clear here is that the distinction between form and content is itself a
product of moralism, insofar as that tension only ever leads to the
arrogation of difference to sameness. And to be clear, it is not that I believe
that perception and action are to be conflated, or even that they can be.
Rather, what the alignment of form and content in this unrelenting manner
proposes instead, I wager, is the production of sense in aesthetic terms that
will always be betrayed by experience, in and out of a cinema: namely, the
idea that what appears before us can be framed, related, and explained in
always the same way, or even in recurrent ways.6
Is this not what compelled the early and enduring critiques of film by
Adorno and Kracauer? Is this not a formula, even if only tacitly
acknowledged, that has for so long compelled most accounts of “art
cinema” as a counter cinema, or the resistance to norms and conventions as
emancipatory? For instance, in Dialectic of Enlightenment, Adorno and
Horkheimer—concerned as they were with cinema as an industry that
trades in the quick legibility of reification, of character reduced to signs and
exchange—tell us that, in cinema:
The individual trait is reduced to the ability of the universal so completely to mold the
accidental that it can be recognized as accidental. The sulky taciturnity of the elegant walk
of the individual who happens to be on show is serially produced like the Yale locks which
differ by fractions of a millimeter. The peculiarity of the self is a socially conditioned
monopoly commodity represented as natural. It is reduced to the moustache, the French
accent, the deep voice of the prostitute, the “Lubitsch touch”—like fingerprint on the
otherwise uniform identity cards to which the lives and faces of all individuals, from the
film star to the convict, have been reduced by the power of the individual.7

What the “fingerprint on the otherwise uniform identity card” names so

well is a notion of form as overriding; form as what assimilates every last
instance of difference that it nevertheless displays, what would be irrational
not to yield to; style as something—if it can be said to exist at all here—as
what gives sway to form as that which has only been and, most importantly,
can only be. That is, if we accept morality as overriding, and see form as its
redundant, normalizing, aesthetic expression—or form as the name of what
comes by way of that redundancy—then all that would be left for style is
the work of mediation toward a known end. Another way of putting it—
albeit wrongly—would be to say that style indicates variability, while form
indicates what remains stable and stabilizing; form is mistakenly implied to
be what redirects variation to its opposite, redundancy. And if we put it this
way, style could only ever be understood as that which mediates and
preserves the form of forms.
In “The Little Shop Girls Go to the Movies,” Kracauer proposes just such
a conception, offers a similar account of the overridingness of film form—
the unwavering and yet transformative work that it does. Kracauer writes:
 They [contemporary films] give the blackest settings a pink tinge, and smear reds liberally
everywhere. But the films do not therefore cease to reflect society. On the contrary: the more
incorrectly they present the surface of things, the more correct they become and the more
clearly they mirror the secret mechanisms of society.8

Obviously, Kracauer is more concerned here with ideology than morality.

But the point, for Kracauer and Adorno and Horkheimer, is not to make a
strong distinction between ideology and morality, especially if we
understand morality as overriding—as what it would be to defy, whether
that defiance is understood in terms of desire or action or both. And I
suspect that the conflation of ideology and morality is a predominate theme
—or better to say, a fettered concept—among those who would resist a
moral account of film: if ideological, the story goes, then moral; if moral,
then also ideological. I tend to agree instead with Amanda Anderson’s
recent provocation that morality has been too often regarded as a “front for
ideology.”9 I hope to indicate, ultimately, and in agreement with Anderson,
that this is a mistaken account of morality; that morality properly
understood concerns our capacity to act in increasingly sensitive ways and
in place of an idea of morality as another name for mass deception and
stultification. But for now, I simply want to suggest that what both of these
accounts of film indicate is a paradox that “overriding” sustains; namely,
that form—as the arbiter of an unwavering, nonnegotiable value—must be
ideationally constant and transformative. Form, seen thus, gathers and
arranges all content in light of an a priori idea about how objects (people
included) are to be related and finds what can be magnetized in every
otherwise wayward sign. This is what leads Kracauer, for instance, to claim
that: “Members of the higher and next-to-highest classes may not recognize
their portraits in these films, but this does not mean there is no photographic
resemblance. They have good reasons not to know what they themselves
look like, and if they describe something as untrue, then it is all the more
true.”10 Photographic resemblance, in other words, bears no direct relation
to the content of the image (is not in the portrait), only its form, and form is
both transformative and constant. How else could the higher classes not
recognize themselves in what they see, even though the resemblance is, as
Kracauer insists, photographic?
 It will be important to indicate, as I do further ahead, how the quality of
writing in the work of critique is often hard to separate from the claim we
are expected to accept as true, and if true then also categorically stable.
How, in other words, to resist “the sulky taciturnity of the elegant walk”? I
admit to being always seduced by Adorno’s prose, but I don’t know that I
can wholly agree with his assessment of what film does, much as I am
moved by the insight, by the sheer force and elegance of thought. So, we
will need to ask what the work of description does at this level of writerly
sophistication. But for now I simply want to say that for a very long time in
film studies we have had in place a conception of form (and by extension,
cinema) that depends on a conflation of the moral and the ideological,
which is undergirded by an at least tacit understanding of morality as
overriding. This explains, in turn, the subsumption of the particular to the
universal as the work of form, as if that transformation could either be
understood in positive terms (i.e., by those who, unlike Adorno, want to
celebrate it) as understanding, and in that way, cinema as the realization of
Enlightenment ideals (and thus subject to the critique available in Dialectic
of Enlightenment). Or else, in negative terms, we can understand cinema as
a normative machine, the only way out of which is by way of a singular,
nonnormative conception of style as the force of liberation (and thus subject
to the critique available in Dialectic of Enlightenment).
An aesthetics of liberation, articulated always as one version of
countercinema or another, has certainly been the most frequently posed
solution to a conception of form as overriding and the conflation of
morality with ideology. But we need only consider Michel Foucault’s
skepticism about the notion of liberation in “The Ethics of the Concern for
the Self as a Practice of Freedom” to see just how quickly a notion of
liberation leads us straight back to an essentialism spoken merely with a
different vocabulary, and also the problem that beckons us here. There,
Foucault tells us:
 I have always been somewhat suspicious of the notion of liberation, because if it is not
treated with precautions and within certain limits, one runs the risk of falling back on the
idea that there exists a human nature or base that, as a consequence of certain historical,
economic, and social processes, has been concealed, alienated, or imprisoned in and by
mechanisms of repression. According to this hypothesis, all that is required is to break these
repressive deadlocks and man will be reconciled with himself, rediscover his nature or
regain contact with his origin, and reestablish a full and positive relationship with himself.11

It would not be difficult to identify a relatively long tradition of conceptions

of form, formlessness, and style that take liberation as their defining
function, and that also suppose—whether implicitly or explicitly—that what
alternative cinemas can do is give us access to human nature unfettered by
the alienating effects of cinema as an industry, an economy, and a moral
corrective, all of which are correlated in the ongoing work of ideology.12
One need only note the way that histories of film style have on the whole
tended to be written categorically, whether in affirmative or resistant terms,
and with an eye toward transformation as the motor of a regulative ideal.
As an instance of the affirmative one might consider David Bordwell’s
widely taught essay, “Art Cinema as Mode of Film Practice,” in which
ambiguity is understood as a style—and style as a form of mediation—that
lends conceptual coherence to films that are said to be otherwise resistant to
norms and that also appear to blend what should be an otherwise
contradictory (according to Bordwell) tendency toward realism and
authorial expressivity, at once.13 That is, what Bordwell sought in
ambiguity was an element that can relieve art cinema of the contradictions
that it entertains, potentially, at a formal level—between realism,
understood as objectivity, and authorial expression, understand as
subjectivity—on the idea, of course, that these things can be told cleanly
apart.
And in more skeptical terms, we have Comolli and Narboni’s
“Cinema/Ideology/Criticism,” where they rather famously divided films up
according to aesthetic categories that implied degrees of ideological
servitude or emancipatory potential, from A to G. The category A films are,
they imagine, the most common kind of films, the ones that are “imbued
through and through with the dominant ideology in pure and unadulterated
form.”14 At the other end of the ontological spectrum is the category G
film, where the director is said to be unsatisfied with the “idea of the
camera ‘seeing through appearances’ ” and which “attacks the basic
problem of depiction by giving an active role to the concrete stuff of his
film.”15 What is understood as emancipatory, in other words, is no less
beholden to categorical belonging than what is ideologically pernicious.
Not only is category G a category, but what counts here as radical is also
prescriptive and knowable as such in terms of categorical gradation, which,
as we will see shortly ahead, is precisely how properly moral questions—
difficult moral questions—get sidestepped as irrelevant. More simply put,
what radicalism requires is categorical certainty, despite the fact that what
the radical rejects is the convictions of another. Intended as much as a
manifesto for radical filmmakers as for socially progressive film historians,
what remains striking is just how diminished the role of human agency is as
a determinant of style, and thus of freedom. If liberation runs the risk of
implying, as Foucault indicated, a return to an original self, to one’s true
nature, one gets there only by way of categorical belonging, in which case
the formal determination of the self—whether as ideological interpellation
or emancipation—aligns with the formal determinations of style—style as
what is ordered in and by form. Whether one is making a work of art, or
simply experiencing it, all that is left for agency in both cases is the work of
correlation, or the arrogation of part to whole, this film to that mode or
tradition, with only a small allowance for difference, one that is sufficient to
show something as similar rather than identical. For if every part were
identical, then we would no longer know how to gauge or regard what
accumulates as same. It may be that we need the small difference that
Adorno and Horkheimer describe in critical terms as “the Yale locks which
differ by fractions of a millimeter.”
The trouble, then, appears to reside, at least in part, in our reliance on
categories in the realm of aesthetics. Art belongs nowhere, so it can be put
or understood anywhere, just not finally. But, unfortunately, the force of
aesthetic categories—what draws us to them, what makes it so difficult to
think outside of them—stems from a source that is other than the realm of
what we simply take to be our aesthetic preferences. Or rather, what we
articulate as an aesthetic preference is all too often a function of moral
belief, or else, a moral habit. Should we not wonder why the cold claims of
neoformalism are no less operative, no less immediate in the work they do
—and no less attractive to its adherents as master discourse of aesthetic
experience—than the hotter claims of an “emancipatory” aesthetics? How is
it, in other words, that this opposition seems never to diminish, despite the
fact that both resort to categorical accounts of style and the recognition of
difference as the spark of mediation that makes the whole possible? Perhaps
the most significant explanation I can offer here is that morality and
aesthetics are much more difficult to separate than we assume them to be
most of the time, and in large part because the way to a better, more
responsive relation to works of art, or even objects of ideological
redundancy, is through a better conception of morality, as opposed to a
more refined conception of aesthetic categorization. One reason for this, as
I address more fully ahead, is our tendency to think of art as something
distinct from life. In making a work of art, the artist steps away from life, or
else recognizes her alienation from it, but for the sake of life. The difference
that I have in mind, then, is the one that pertains between moralism—which
I take to be morality construed as overriding—and morality. The version of
morality I have in mind involves the reflective and contingent conception of
the self and thus (and it is the only “thus”) a responsiveness to the details
and idiosyncrasies of works of art. It is an aesthetic comportment that
matters just as much to, functions in much the same way as, the felicitous
acknowledgement of the idiosyncrasies of others: what it means for us to
remain generous in response to what our sensitivity shows for the first or
second or third time, even when it takes a second or third or fourth time to
sense what generous is, in and for each specific instance that summons our
readiness to keep less of what we think we have. But first, a few more
words about how categorization—or how the aesthetic, in its conservative
or radical instances, hews always in the direction of the structural overlap of
aesthetics and morality, when it is ill conceived as overriding: aesthetics as
what would appear to be, to paraphrase Scheffler, irrational to resist as an
experience of categorical belonging.16

C D ?
One of the best explanations we have of the difference between morality
and moralism—and what categorization has to do with such a distinction—
is Émilie Hache and Bruno Latour’s “Morality or Moralism? An Exercise in
Sensitization.” Hache and Latour “reconsider the premature and rather
strange confinement of the moral dimension to humans alone,”17 and the
idea that scholars involved in the field of science studies are beginning to
trouble the distinction between facts and values. What Hache and Latour
call for is an increased sensitivity to who and/or what obliges us to respond;
for an expansion of the field of beings that we feel obliged to respond to.
However, for Hache and Latour, expansion only comes—however
counterintuitively—by way of an ontological simplification that shows
itself as the opposite: the expansion of difference. The difference between
moralism and morality, they tell us, can be apprehended in two dimensions.
The first dimension [which defines moralism] entails varying the distribution of beings that
are capable of interpellating us, in accordance with the familiar division between humans
and non-humans. The second dimension [which defines morality] entails varying the
intensity of the interpellation required to produce a response, whatever the type of being
under consideration. Through this exercise, we should be able to see that the two dimensions
are often confused with each other and that a text taking a high moral stand from the first
perspective (because it maintains a distinction between moral subjects and mere objects)
may seem quite different from the second (because the text is insensitive to scruple).18

In the case of the first dimension, which they take to define moralism
against a more flexible conception of morality, the categories of being and
species are extended, and in that way, they achieve a great deal of
ontological specificity that shows itself as fine-grained difference. But it
does so only for the sake of being able to decide who is capable of obliging
us to respond, a decision enabled by the proliferation of distinctions where
we might expect a reduction of them. That is, in such a scenario, one
expands the range of categorical difference to justify and make simpler the
work of judgment—to make ontological distinctions so that epistemological
judgments can be “untroubled” by what the ontological sorts for itself as a
realm apart. It is to offer judgment the alibi of fine-grained difference, even
though the expansion of difference that follows from increased categorical
distinction only serves to lessen our sense of obligation. What spins out as
difference, in other words, is not what specifies the nature of our obligation;
rather, infinite difference is marked first as fact and then as that which
cannot oblige a moral subject to become responsive. What difference
actually does, in this case, is to appear as the work of due diligence when its
primary function is instead to stand as the predicate to ignorance.
Difference, in this case, merely marks the specified realm of nonhuman
objects. By contrast, values are said to belong exclusively to moral subjects,
precisely because moral subjects are uniquely in possession of reflection
and agency. Such a simplification is predicated, of course, on the idea that
one has been perspicuous and sensitive to what is meant to be understood in
a value-free way as insensitive. But as Hache and Latour argue, the
expansion of ontological difference is a reduction that leads to questions
much like the one they cite, in critical terms, from André Comte-Sponville,
who asks (in a way that we are meant to regard as obvious because
ultimately unrelatable as two terms of a question): “Which is worse: to slap
a child or to gouge out a cat’s eye?”19 The question, however, cannot really
be one in a moralistic framework—which Comte-Sponville presumes—
since cat as fact resides on the other side of the ledger from value. It is also
the way in which one might be led to assume that a category A film is only
to be understood in relation to a category G film for the aesthetic and
ideological distance between them rather than on anything else that might
come of the comparison. This is also why Hache and Latour want to
indicate the distinction as moralistic rather than moral since there is nothing
to search for in asking or reflecting on the question. What we regard as
difference, in a moralistic framework, is but mere proof of categorical
belonging, which exists strictly to simplify the reasons we give to ourselves
for acting as we do.
By contrast, for Hache and Latour, morality—as increased sensitization
to what obliges us—blurs the boundary between facts and values and makes
it difficult to understand facts independently of value. And in that way,
morality depends on a form of responsiveness that they very interestingly
regard as accessible to and by way of literary style. The second and more
challenging example they give of an account of morality as moralism,
which tends equally to the distinction between facts and values, objects, and
moral subjects, is derived from Kant’s Critique of Judgement. Hache and
Latour note the way that Kant acknowledges the noise of nature. They tell
us that “Nature is not silent for Kant: the noise it makes is for him frightful
and calls out with such force that humanity feels impotent, small, indeed
silent before it. For this reason, we must [in Kant’s view] learn to become
insensitive to its call. To become moral in the modern way, it is necessary to
take shelter from the world and to observe nature as a spectacle ‘all the
more fearful for its attractiveness.’ ”20 Hache and Latour take care to
emphasize the literary language Kant uses to describe nature: “for Kant the
rocks are ‘bold and overhanging,’ and the ‘thunderclouds [are] piled up …
borne along with flashes and peals.’ ”21 The trouble for Kant, then—in their
view—is that what he describes in literary terms is ultimately what must be
renounced for the sake of moral judgment; that is, Kant writes with great
literary felicity about what must be held back, what must be bracketed from
moral reflection for the sake of moral action: “For Kant, despite the
empirical and cognitive richness of the encounter with nonhumans, and
despite the promise of intellectual joy and mutual admiration in possible
meetings, the issue is one of obliging ourselves to give all that up, to turn
away from the temptation so as not to commit an error in judgment.”22 In
this sense, obligation—when it depends on a distinction between facts and
values, insensate objects, and moral subjects—is not derived from the
textures and complications of difference but from a will to submit those
textures to categorical placements that regard whatever is made
conspicuous in those differences as the line that divides beings capable of
obliging us and beings that cannot.
What Hache and Latour favor instead is a conception of morality that
begins with hesitation, with a pause before the divide between objects
(however infinitely varied and accounted for in their variation) and moral
subjects.23 Most importantly for our purposes here, hesitation follows from
the work that description does to make conspicuous what had not been
conspicuous before. And in that way, what closes the gap between facts and
values is the writerly work of anthropomorphism. But importantly, it is an
anthropomorphism that is not guided by or assimilated to anthropocentrism.
If it were, then the any description offered would simply return us to the
same place of judgement as Kant, who—at least in Hache and Latour’s
account—describes the world around him for the sake of deciding what the
will cannot include. Let us say instead that writerly description increases
our ways of understanding what it means to be human, which includes a
more refined sense of how objects cannot be easily separated, in moral
terms, from questions of human use, reflection, and sense of self, even if all
that that means is that we specify more descriptively what objects consist in
independently of what we project or fail to project onto them.24 Or, to put it
more plainly, what divides morality and moralism is what follows from
hesitation, in the case of the former, and its absence, in the case of the latter.
In Hache’s and Latour’s terms, if in hesitating before the storm (as
described by Kant) we regard the fear it summons as relevant to how we act
and understand our actions, then we have engaged in moral reflection and
likely a moral act, the predicate of which is increased sensitivity. If upon
hesitation we simply decide against what makes us hesitate as unworthy of
reflection, then we have been moralistic, insensitive to the differences that
we may even have described, just as Kant did, in a felicitous way.
In privileging literary style as the means by which the gap between facts
and values is closed, and as what frees morality from moralism, Hache and
Latour join a larger and rather significant strain of moral philosophy that
understands works of art as allied forms of moral expression and moral
philosophy; a tradition that perhaps finds its unity in the appeal each
philosopher makes to art as important correction to the schematic character
of a philosophy immune to the aesthetic effects of writing. For instance,
Martha Nussbaum importantly suggests that “Style itself makes its claims,
expresses its own sense of what matters. Literary form is not separable from
philosophical content, but is, itself, a part of content—an integral part, then,
of the search for and the statement of truth.”25 Nussbaum posits literary
style and its capacity to “emphasize the world’s surprising variety, its
complexity and mysteriousness, its flawed and imperfect beauty” against
“the language of conventional philosophical prose, a style remarkably flat
and lacking in wonder.”26 In this regard, Nussbaum can also be understood
to be answering a question raised by Bernard Williams in Shame and
Necessity. There, Williams writes:
Even when philosophy is not involved in history, it has to make demands on literature. In
seeking a reflective understanding of ethical life, for instance, it quite often takes examples
from literature. Why not examples from life? It is a perfectly good question and it has a
short answer: what philosophers will lay before themselves and their readers as an
alternative to literature will not be life, but bad literature.27

The reason that the philosopher’s example from life will not be life but bad
literature is related not only, one presumes, to a style flat and lacking in
wonder, as Nussbaum rightly indicates; it has also to do with the
philosopher’s reliance on symbolic notation—the that P, the if P, the X, Y,
and Zedness of the faceless example. What literary style opposes in
symbolic notation is significant: what style resists, or serves as a corrective
to, is the idea that the symbol indicates any being whatsoever of a subject
position understood as essential to definitive, iterative moral acts or
assessments. Symbolic notation does the work of form as overriding insofar
as one only occupies that position if one can occupy it completely, without
remainder. Symbolic notation rests on the side of moralism; style, by
contrast, is on the side of morality, and largely because it indicates more
complex ways of being responsive, of being attentive to what cannot be
easily reconciled, what does not show itself to schematics. If a situation can
be easily reconciled—if what we should do in the case of X, Y, or Z is so
plainly obvious—then in what sense can that situation even be said to raise
a moral question? Or, as Williams puts it: “Everyone knows that simply to
pursue what you want and to avoid what you fear is not the stuff of any
morality; if those are your only motives, then you are not within morality,
and you do not have—in a broader phrase—any ethical life.”28 All the more
instructive, then, is Hache and Latour’s characterization of Kant as someone
whose style emerges in the process of discovering what should not be taken
into account.
Seen thus, we can say that the problem of moralism is that it arrogates
style to a featureless generality, a move that follows from what we fear or
cannot know within one of the many categories for style that exist and came
to exist in the name of difference or variation. If we only accept as style
what it is that we already know and prefer, as when we declare ourselves to
be intolerant of this or that kind of film, then all we are doing is confusing
our taste with the limits of our sensitivity. Recall, for instance, what looks
like an idle remark that Cavell makes in The World Viewed but is in fact
anything but insignificant: “I have not made myself trace the experience
and the philosophy which led, say, Eisenstein to opt for montage and Bazin
for continuity; nor have I collected enough instances of the one and of the
other to know my mind on the topic. My excuse for speaking in ignorance
of this question is that I have a hypothesis about it, namely, that it is not a
question.”29 Not only is it not a question, but the impulse that Cavell could
anticipate but clearly could not follow—that is, an impulse to trace the
experience and the philosophy that led Bazin and Eisenstein to opt for the
styles that they privileged—is a common tendency among film theorists and
historians of style to move from a belief to a style, to have an idea of how
things are and then collect examples that supply evidence not of how things
really are but of the presence of a value that sets a limit on how style will
appear and why it will appear as it does. This is moralism.30 By contrast,
moral sensitivity—morality, proper—consists in the movement from style
to idea. If we can discover a philosophical context that gives birth to style,
then what we have is not style but values understood as facts that remain in
place whether or not that value is expressed by one or a thousand films, or
none at all. As categories proliferate they take the name of nouns that play
the role of facts that are themselves dressed in causes. Or else, strong
contextual motivations are expressed in the way that we would otherwise
(were we not lingering in the realm of aesthetics) regard as metaphysical
determination: German Expressionism as a necessary response to the
imposition of fascism; slow cinema as a necessary response to the absence
of leisure time in capital; parametric narration as what cannot but stem from
a belief, tacit or explicitly addressed, that art is what gives order to and in a
world that lacks it; countercinema as the sole antidote to representation and
normativity, as what gives us access to an authentic self. What we call
context, in these cases, bears no trace of the contingent arrangement of
signs, one way of looking among others. Rather, if context is necessary, the
signs cannot be read otherwise than they are. This is how both history and
activism become inseparable from moralism.

S S
If we countenance more fully that morality opposes the categorical logics of
moralism, we will have a way of regarding style in terms of singularity
rather than generality. And yet, it is not sufficient to regard singularity as
absolute difference, either, as something that remains enclosed in its
uniqueness so as to be unrelated and unrelatable to anything or anyone else.
We have already seen how easily singularity is arrogated to the ontological
realm of facts without values. In regarding style in terms of singularity, I
mean only to indicate singularity as the record of an aesthetic will, of a
decision made about what gets gathered in and as style and what gets left
out.31 Style consists of a particular relation between people and objects that
could be otherwise than it is, and that most often indicates from within—
and at the edge of—what is gathered, what that otherwise might include, in
part. What begins and ends as style—what is bound as a unique relation of
people, objects, and place—leaves behind some options that it also features
indirectly, or at least less emphatically.
To give you a sense of what I mean, consider the following two
examples, both of which are drawn from Abbas Kiarostami’s The Wind Will
Carry Us (1999), a film about a group of journalists from Tehran, led by
Behzad, the main journalist, who go to a small Kurdish town in hopes of
observing the mourning rituals of the community as they wait for an elderly
woman to die. And, rather importantly, she does not die in the time that the
journalists expect her to, and with reference to their work schedules and
domestic demands, need her to—insofar as the crew is heard to tell Behzad
that they have demands at home, that they have promised to be away for a
set period of time only. One of the recurrent jokes in the film involves
Behzad receiving a phone call, presumably from his editor in Tehran, which
he cannot receive clearly from within the space of the village. In each case,
he tells the person on the other line to stay on the line while he races to his
car and then drives his car quickly up to the top of the hill where he expects
better reception. In each instance of being summoned, Kiarostami cuts to an
extreme long shot of the top of the hill as Behzad’s car ascends to the
highest point (fig. 3.1).
The camera remains static in each instance of this recurrent composition,
which also records a recurrent act, and leaves the primary source of motion
in the scene to the car within the frame where Kiarostami otherwise tends
toward camera movement. That is, these static framings occur in a film
replete with long and greatly varied passages of camera movement. And,
yet, what the composition shows is the possibility of other movements,
other paths to the top of the hill. Behzad takes always the same road, a
visual repetition that rhymes with what can be discerned as Behzad’s
perceptual habit, his tendency to think that he knows what to expect and
what to do in and with this small Kurdish community. Kiarostami takes care
that we see in this hillside the grooves of at least one other path that has
been trod—likely more than once. And in that way, one cannot help but be
reminded of the fact that the land is almost entirely open and uncluttered by
trees; one could drive in nearly any direction to the top of the hill. What the
composition self-reflexively indicates is the way in which an instance of
style, as a single and singular relation of people, objects, and place, shows
what nevertheless remains as an alternative to what has been decided and
done. In other words, Kiarostami’s camera, just like Behzad’s car, could
also have moved between two different points than it does here.

Figure 3.1. The Wind Will Carry Us, 1999, Abbas Kiarstami.
Figure 3.2. The Wind Will Carry Us, 1999, Abbas Kiarstami.

The static framing of potential paths of movements—of shots not taken,

space traversed not in that way but this way—echoes, even in its stillness,
the extraordinary opening scene of the film in which Behzad and his crew
are seen in a series of traveling long shots as their car moves through a zig-
zag pattern that is the main road into town, as they look for what has been
described to them as a single tree on a hill. Once located, this single tree is
meant to indicate where they should turn (fig. 3.2).
But as Kiarostami’s mobile camera tracks the movement of the car
through the landscape, we see many instances of what might count as a
“single” tree, even when we see more than one tree in the mobile frame.
One question that this series of traveling shots raises, then, is how we know
when a tree can be regarded as single? How much distance between two
trees is required to know tree from trees? Three feet? A kilometer? The
salient point here is that Behzad and his crew will attempt to decipher
which tree is the single tree. They have to. They are expected in town. They
must decide because they are obliged to arrive, having asked, one presumes,
permission to be there—even though they show up under the alibi of being
engineers rather than journalists (fig. 3.3).
 Another way of saying this is that the crew goes by two names, even
though they think one a mere cover rather than a potentially different
description and a different way of being, as one would. They will, of
course, come to a decision about the tree, even if one still detects hesitation
in the voices from the car before, during, and after the decision is made.
Hesitation, here, does not imply a temporal pause, or at least not a complete
one. Rather importantly, the car keeps moving even as the men in it keep
moving and keep looking, just as we do as spectators watching a film. Do
we not, as spectators of a film, watch images pass us by while at times also
continuing to think about a scene or a shot that has passed while
nevertheless carrying on watching what continues to move? Kiorastami’s
camera follows them on the path they choose while also showing us other
trees, other ways that the car and the camera could have gone, could have
turned; a way, presumably, one could still go. Those alternative options—
expressed both in what is said and also in what is shown—only emphasizes
what remains of indecision in every choice we nevertheless make.
Figure 3.3. The Wind Will Carry Us, 1999, Abbas Kiarstami.

Style is the record of a decision, continuous with the one made by those
who appear in the frame. And what shows as style here also includes an
indication of what may also produce, or have produced, hesitation. Yet
another way of describing this in The Wind Will Carry Us is to regard a very
brief, single, stationary shot of Behzad and the young boy who leads him
around and serves as his most reliable informant. Farzad is reliable in the
sense that he never does what Behzad expects of him. For instance, at one
point Behzad goes to see Farzad at school where he is taking a test. Farzad
comes to the car and tells Behzad that he is stuck on a question, which
happens to be a moral question: what happens to good and evil people on
judgment day? Behzad, of course, answers that it is obvious: good people
go to heaven. But Farzad remains just as puzzled, if not more so, by
Behzad’s answer, as if to indicate that Behzad is nowhere near an
understanding of the complications running through young Farzad’s mind.
In this shot, however, we simply see man and child as they walk through a
narrow passageway in the village (fig. 3.4).
Kiarostami’s camera once again remains stationary as the two walk down
the road with their backs to the camera. As they walk, and as Kiarostami’s
camera remains still and patient behind them, we see on the wall to the left
moving shadows that index the people working just offscreen and to the
right. That is, Kiarostami follows the pair from point A to point B, but not
without acknowledging that the path from point A to point B is just one
way he and they could go; one particular movement of bodies in space that
his camera could capture and then feature. In other words, the shadows to
the left that index a body to the right (not to mention the offscreen voices
we hear) are a part of the shot, are included in any description we would
offer of this single, stationary long take. And yet, what those shadows also
mark is the possibility of a shot or camera movement that could have
occurred. There is something much more compelling at work here than an
economy of means. Kiarostami is teaching us about the relation between
style and morality, especially when morality means increased sensitivity
rather than an ontological expansion made for the sake of epistemological
clarity, despite the fact that “for” here ultimately means “without.”
Kiarostami is showing us what it might look like to accept a moral vision of
life that is based, as Schrader once put it, on style.
Figure 3.4. The Wind Will Carry Us, 1999, Abbas Kiarstami.

AM I S
What these examples from The Wind Will Carry Us indicate is how
singularity necessarily includes more than one in what it gathers as a
singular expression. One reason for this is obvious enough: We cannot
know something in singular terms without relatable objects of comparison.
And it is important to indicate that comparison is not prelude to judgment,
if by judgment we decide definitively in favor of one thing in the place of
another, one category as distinct from another category. Or as Susan Sontag
suggests: “What a work of art does is to make us see or comprehend
something singular, not judge or generalize.”32 But by singularity I also
mean something less obvious. If style names the gathering of objects,
people, and place in a particular way, such that we can also see at least
some of the other ways that once faced the artist as an option, then what is
gathered in and as one includes multiple things. In this respect, style and
relation are nearly synonymous terms, so much so that the concept of
“relational aesthetics” should appear to us as redundant. More importantly,
if every singular expression contains a multiplicity of people, objects, and
fragments of place, then how would we begin to assign this singularly
plural instance of style to a category, since what shows as multiple cannot
be reduced to something general, if by general we mean to indicate the
main features of something? In an expression of singularity, the main
feature of something is the very way in which particularity is arranged as
particular. The always more than one of what consists in any singular
expression, of what consists as singular, then, is also what blocks style from
typification. Likewise, if style shows what it also could have been—if what
was not pursued in what is nevertheless gathered as style remains evident as
what was decided against—then singularity does not name an ontological
enclosure. Rather, style is itself an acknowledgment of what it might also
be, or have been, and in that way style, if it exists, refuses the exclusivity of
categorical belonging. Style gains its dignity on the basis of inclusivity, not
exclusivity.
What style has to teach us about inclusivity, however, is that inclusivity
does not imply gathering always what shows in this or that way, or taking
on everything as one thing. Rather, inclusivity involves the
acknowledgment of what else we could have done or included, particularly
since the trace of what might have been remains present in what was
decided on. This is perhaps especially true for the moving image, but not
solely for it. If a condition of inclusivity is that we acknowledge the way
that we do not go, then what acknowledgment itself requires is that we have
imagined what the other possibilities were. Consider the problem in terms
of sculpture. If in looking at Henry Moore’s Reclining Woman (1930) I
notice a certain flatness of the head—not total, slightly rounded—it would
be difficult for me to not also be aware of something that was excised in the
making, namely, what was likely rounder in the acts of shaping that now
shows in the way it does. What curves ever so slightly as the back and top
of the head indicates also a decision about the relation between degrees of
flatness, degrees of roundness. And more broadly, in the case of film, the
very act of reframing indicates always the what-else-that-could-be—but
won’t be this time—of style. Inclusivity, then, is not the absence of
decision: it exists only when the trace of a possible otherwise also shows as
the trace of hesitation. Like Kant’s thunderstorms. And yet, in our case, the
problem can be put differently. Style cannot exhaust its resources, since
what it gathers or frames contains nodal points that block exclusivity, in
relational terms—signs, to paraphrase an idea of Bernard Williams,
understood as an “if” that implies no “must.”33
If we understand style as singular in the way that I have described it, two
possibilities for understanding generality—insofar as generality implies that
which overrides, and thus what glues together form, category, ideology, and
morality—should no longer remain as live options. For one, if something
singular shows within itself many different things, arranged and displayed
in a way that could be otherwise than it is, then categorization becomes
significantly less possible or plausible, at least not without an apology for
what will only ever count as an impure instance. Every instance is an
impure instance, and the nodal points that are partially present are also the
traces of a decision made and options considered. What we see in style is
both the possibility of relating like instances and also what precludes such a
gathering on the basis of absolute identity between two or more things. Of
course, this doesn’t seem to have ever stopped anyone from compiling
categories and lists, but what the disavowal of that difference indicates is a
deep-seated moralism that shows itself most plainly in the restriction of
aesthetic experience. Morality is better understood in the terms provided by
Sontag when she reminds us that “the moral pleasure in art, as well as the
moral service that art performs, consists in the intelligent gratification of
consciousness.”34
Likewise, if we take seriously the idea that style always indicates what it
does not fully include, then in regarding a film, or any work of art, we are
always asking ourselves a question about how this choice might be
understood against a whole series of alternatives—the traces of which we
often find within what was decided as and for style. Style, in other words,
teaches us about what it means to be more reflective about the choices that
we make, insofar as we are doing more than searching for the signs that can
be referred to what we already believe or value. And in the case of The
Wind Will Carry Us we can see how style becomes morality when morality
is best expressed as increased sensitization. We never see Behzad produce
the news report that he intended to produce, which could only have been a
document that would have been just as easy to produce in Tehran. Rather,
what he learns we also learn—that the first way to moral sensitivity is to
dispense with what we think we think as the only precondition we need to
begin to recognize difference and to contemplate, in turn, how our actions
might affect someone who is not already accounted for in what we believe
ourselves to care for or about. At one point, we see Behzad pause in his car
to take a picture of line of women walking to the home of the dying woman;
they scowl at the presence of the camera, and he stops. If he didn’t stop,
nothing would be learned, even if what that means for the journalist is that
less people will see the signs of this Kurdish mourning ritual. But in that
sense, more will have the chance to know something about it precisely
because one tries to reach less. If morally sensitive, we are not very likely
to speak as if all will understand what we say or do. “More” is, before all
else, a matter of time and sensitivity.
In putting it this way, I mean also to indicate the second of the two
problems previously indicated. If style is singularly inclusive, and in that
sense, relational, then it always contains more than one thing. And for that
reason, style is a singularity that includes always more than one. Not only
do we have, as a condition of style, the acknowledgment of other people,
things, places, and ways, but we also have the trace of an acknowledgment
that itself indicates a level of generality that is dense and makes no appeal
to exclusivity. Style, thus conceived, is not an indivisible thing that includes
no difference from or within itself. On the contrary, it moves always toward
more, just not everything. And this is a question that moral philosophers
face quite directly: must morality be applicable to all in each and every
context? Or does morality, in place of moralism, merely ask that we extend
our sensitivity to others, to individuals and social groups beyond what
counts for us as already known or valued in this or that way? For there is a
limit to what can be generalized for the sake of decision and valuation,
sensing as we do—in the traces left in, and behind by, every choice—that
what might be otherwise is also not definitively knowable. The only way
that the option indicated but not followed can be understood in definitive
terms is if style finds its other in the form of categorical exclusion.
If morality is conceived in the singular, morality is general enough. And
what “general enough” implies is a resistance to the transformative work of
categorization, especially as that work increases the distance between facts
and values, and the arrogation of part to whole as the singular that is
enlarged as same in the work of generalization. It may be that the
form/content distinction is itself part of the problem, insofar as the
separation of the two implies the work of transformation that gets done for
the sake of what returns always to same, as I have suggested. Hence the
problem of form as the place where ideology and morality cannot be easily
separated.
So, when Paul Schrader proposed that “toward the end film noir was
engaged in a life-and-death struggle with the materials it reflected; it tried
to make America accept a moral vision of life based on style,” he was, I
believe, offering an entirely different relation to film than the one he
pursued in the same essay, which I take to be itself an important moral
gesture. For what it asks us—what style asks us—is to think less about what
we are meant to believe about ourselves and others and to take more
seriously the idea that each film is yet one more way, still, and if one more
way still, then general enough. If general enough, style also shows what
else we might have believed about ourselves or what we see before us—it
may include, in Schrader’s terms, canted angles, scenes lit for night, images
of water. Style may indicate a tradition, a way of being general, but any one
instance cannot belong to it wholly or be endorsed by it, any more than we
should belong wholly to an idea of being, or be assimilated against our will
to an idea of being that betrays us because it includes so much of us to
acknowledge nothing of us.

N
1. Paul Schrader, “Notes on Film Noir,” Film Comment 8, no. 1 (1972): 8–13.
2. Ibid.
3. For Cavell, see especially, Stanley Cavell, Cities of Words: Reflections on a Register of the
Moral Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), and “The Good of Film?,” in
Cavell on Film, ed. William Rothman (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005),
333–48. For Pippin, see especially, Robert Pippin, The Philosophical Hitchcock: Vertigo and
the Anxiety of Unknowingness (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017); Robert Pippin,
Fatalism in American Film Noir: Some Cinematic Philosophy (Charlottesville: University of
Virginia Press, 2013).
4. Mary Midgley, Can’t We Make Moral Judgments? (London: Bloomsbury Books, 2017), viii.
5. Samuel Scheffler, Human Morality (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 25.
6. I have Kyle Stevens to thank for calling this problem to my attention.
7. Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments,
ed. Gunzeln Schmid Noerr, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,
2002), 125.
 8. Siegfried Kracauer, “The Little Shopgirls Go to the Movies,” in The Mass Ornament, trans.
and ed. Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 292.
9. Amanda Anderson, Psyche & Eros: Moral Life After Psychology (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2018), 4.
10. Kracauer, “Little Shopgirls Go to the Movies,” 292.
11. Michel Foucault, “The Ethics of the Concern for Self as a Practice of Freedom,” in Michel
Foucault, Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, ed. Paul Rabinow, trans. Robert Hurley and Others
(New York: New Press, 1997), 283.
12. For the record, I do not exempt myself from having made such moves. For instance, in “Color,
the Formless, and Cinematic Eros,” I was concerned to think about the way that color
abstractions from within the space of narrative films could be understood—in films by Claire
Denis, Paul Thomas Anderson, and Hou Hsiao-hsien, in particular—as a resistance to
moralistic dimensions of classical narrative style. I think I would argue it differently today. See
Brian Price, “Colour, the Formless, and Cinematic Eros,” Framework: The Journal of Cinema
and Media 47, no. 1 (Spring 2006): 22–35. The by now classic articulation of this tradition of
countercinema and the attendant theoretical discourses that privilege it is to be found in D. N.
Rodowick, The Crisis of Political Modernism: Criticism and Ideology in Contemporary Film
Criticism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995).
13. David Bordwell, “Art Cinema as Mode of Film Practice,” Film Criticism 4, no. 1 (Fall 1979):
56–64.
14. Jean-Louis Comolli and Jean Narboni, “Cinema/Ideology/Criticism,” trans. Susan Bennett, in
Cahiers du Cinéma, 1969–1972: The Politics of Representation, ed. Nick Browne (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 61.
15. Comolli and Narboni, “Cinema/Ideology/Criticism,” 64.
16. Despite the contrast with radical, by conservative, here, I do not intend a political meaning; I
have in mind only the idea of conservation, categories as the conservation of stylistic norms,
which includes a version of care within it, to be sure, just as we think of the work of
conservationists in the realm of art history to be involved in the protection of works of art.
17. Émilie Hache and Bruno Latour, “Morality or Moralism?: An Exercise in Sensitization,” trans.
Patrick Camiller, Common Knowledge 16, no. 2 (2010): 311.
18. Ibid., 312.
19. Ibid., 314.
20. Ibid., 317.
21. Ibid., 318.
22. Ibid.
23. Ibid., 315.
24. Ibid., 321. For an even more substantial account of the relation between anthropomorphism and
anthropocentrism—one that is likewise sensitive to the poetic and ontological dimension of
anthropomorphism—see James Leo Cahill, Zoological Surrealism: The Nonhuman Cinema of
Jean Painlevé (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019).
25. Martha Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1990), 3
26. Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge, 3.
27. Bernard Williams, Shame and Necessity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 13.
28. Williams, Shame and Necessity, 77.
29. Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1979), 73.
30. To be clear, I do not think that any relation of style to meaning is an instance of moralism;
rather, what I am suggesting here is that we regard style contextually, that we begin with what
we see rather than what we have seen before when beholding a work of art.
31. In one way, I am merely echoing Susan Sontag’s well-known—and by me, much admired—
provocation that “Style is the principle of decision in a work of art, the signature of the artist’s
will. And as the human will is capable of an indefinite number of stances, there are an
indefinite number of possible styles for works of art.” Susan Sontag, “On Style,” in Against
Interpretation (New York: A Delta Book, 1964), 32.
32. Ibid., 29.
33. Williams, Shame and Necessity.
34. Sontag, “On Style,” 24.
 CHAPTER 4

FILM|VIDEO|ESSAY

DOMIETTA TORLASCO

B N
LIKE its literary counterpart, the film essay belies definition—not any
specific definition but the very possibility of defining. So I would like to
begin this necessarily incomplete chapter on the film essay by suggesting
that the essay is a form of the border. I will later return to the term “form,”
as it plays a crucial role in both Georg Lukács’s and Theodor Adorno’s
influential texts, “On the Nature and Form of the Essay” and “The Essay as
Form,” but first I would like to pause on the term “border.” In “On the
Essay and Its Prose,” Max Bense offers the most stimulating account of this
“strange” area where a writer becomes an essayist, that is, one who
simultaneously criticizes and experiments. The essayist, writes Bense,
is at home in the border area [Confinium] between the creative and aesthetic state, on the
one hand, and the ethical state of persuasion, on the other hand. He does not fully belong to
either state, but resides in a border area, and sociologically speaking this expresses itself in
that, as type between categories and a contemporary between eras, he finds his companions
where open or secret revolutions, acts of resistance, and regroupings are taking place or are
being planned.1

For Bense, the essay’s hybridity is to be understood not as a sum of

components (poetry plus prose) but as a discrepancy or, rather, a
juxtaposition of which the in-between, the gap, forms a constitutive part.
Moreover, this radical in-between-ness entails at least a brush with power, if
not a more open confrontation with the existing system of norms and
regulations. Finally, it coincides with a zone not only between categories
but also between “eras,” which the essayist is called to inhabit, to live in,
and not simply to survey. It is in a here that is also indissolubly an
elsewhere, to anticipate Jean-Luc Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville’s
groundbreaking film, Here and Elsewhere (Ici et ailleurs, 1976), that the
essayist and his companions come to live together, in what Gilles Deleuze
would later describe (speaking about Godard) as a “multiple, creative
solitude.”2
All this does not amount to a positive definition. Indeed, it could not turn
into one: as Étienne Balibar has noted, “to mark out a border is, precisely, to
define a territory, to delimit it, and so to register the identity of that territory,
or confer one upon it. Conversely, however, to define or identify in general
is nothing other than to trace a border, to assign boundaries or borders.”3
Border and definition are mutually implicated, dependent upon each other
in what corresponds to a failure of orthodox thought, a breakdown in that
system of knowledge that wants to operate according to a method. Adorno
leaves no doubts in this respect: the essay repeatedly rebels against
Descartes’s Discourse on Method and its four rules, privileging opacity over
clarity, refusing to reduce an object to elementary parts, starting not with
the simplest but with the most complex, and renouncing any ambition to a
“general overview.” As it does not believe in the coincidence between the
order of things and the order of concepts, the essay sets out to liberate “the
irritating and dangerous aspects of the things that live in the concepts,”
aspects that the demand for procedural coherence systematically eliminates;
indeed, the essay pursues a utopian thread, as its presentation of reality by
fragments enables us to see beyond “what exists” or experience in the
narrow sense, to expand the object’s visibility in a gesture of almost
speculative critique.4 All in all, the essay “proceeds, so to speak,
methodically unmethodically.”5
But Bense’s passage also points to a bond between the aesthetic and the
existential—between writing and living in the mode of the experiment—
which I would like to explicitly connect to the research conducted by
Roland Barthes in his notes for a lecture course at the Collège de France
(1976–1977), published under the title How to Live Together. While often
overlooked in the literature on the essay, How to Live Together offers us a
remarkable example of essayistic thinking as plural, interstitial, and erratic.
The course is devoted to exploring “idiorrhythmy” as the fantasy of a life
lived with others and yet according to one’s own rhythm—a fantasy that
will upset our received notions of form and rhythm as they emerge in life,
literature, and film. To pursue this inquiry, Barthes returns to Nietzsche’s
distinction between method and culture as “training” (paideia): if method
“fetishize[s] the goal as a privileged place, to the detriment of other possible
places,” culture proceeds along the “eccentric path of possibilities,
stumbling among blocks of knowledge.”6 This openness to “erring” as both
straying and making mistakes (or, according to the Merriam-Webster,
“violat[ing] an accepted standard of conduct”) is precisely what will prompt
me to favor the term “erratic” in my treatment of the essay and its
idiosyncratic rhythm. Like the fantasy of idiorrhythmy, which always
situates itself in opposition to power, the essay as a form of the border only
becomes operative through what Barthes calls “nonmethod,” a refusal to
lock thought (and life) in preset enclosures, a propensity for the journey
perhaps akin to the nomadic. Indeed, I will venture to suggest that the essay
as a form of the border is inherently rhythmic in Barthes’s specific sense;
that is, it constitutes an irregular, intermittent, fleeting form, and yet “a form
nonetheless.”7 As such, it simultaneously inhabits and traverses the space
and time of the border; it resists power’s will to draw demarcation lines and
maintain a lasting separation between the enclosures it produces: territories,
concepts, genres, and—in cinema—shots.
What Adorno calls “think[ing] in fragments” upsets the artificial
continuity demanded not only by philosophy but also by cinema. Godard
and Miéville’s Here and Elsewhere stands out in the domain of the
audiovisual essay as it turns to the border as a “series of discontinuous
traits” rather than a theme, a zone that is at once geopolitical and discursive,
a fissure that marks a mode of critical engagement in politics as well as
cinema.8 “Borders have a history,” writes Balibar, and Godard and Miéville
(whose voice-overs alternate throughout the film) begin by saying: “In 1970
this film was called Victory; in 1974 it is called Here and Elsewhere and
elsewhere and.”9 The straightforward path, the line leading to a destination
determined in advance, has become a path of meanderings. The piece
presents the vicissitudes of its own making together with historical events
that have marked the Palestinian struggle in the years between 1970 and
1974 (Black September, the Munich Olympics, etc.); it combines footage of
Palestinian fighters in 1970, reenacted “documentary” scenes, and tableau-
like shots of a French family (mother, father, two children) in their home,
watching TV, sharing a meal, doing the dishes. What distinguishes the film
is a style of montage that repeatedly undoes what Barthes had called the
logic of the tableau. As the condition of representation in all dioptric arts
(theater, painting, cinema, literature), the tableau realizes the perfect
semiotic enclosure. Everything outside its borders is cast into nonexistence;
everything inside is made to share the privileges of light and knowledge, at
least insofar as the composition falls under a single point of view and its
parts come to constitute a unity. The tableau is certainly not incompatible
with revolutionary politics: after all, Barthes’s essay on the topic is
dedicated to Diderot, Brecht, and Eisenstein. And yet Barthes also
challenges us to strive for “another politics” and imagine a “dispersion of
the tableau,” a fragmentation, a “setting in movement” of the pieces that
does not aim at recomposing an organic whole.10
Here and Elsewhere takes up this challenge, deploying the tableau only
to open it up, to make it seep or even plunge into the fissure that now
visibly holds the shots together and apart: what Gilles Deleuze will call
“AND.” It is this AND that transforms all spatial and temporal relations,
turning the film plotted by Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin, Jusqu’à la
Victoire (Until the Victory) into Here and Elsewhere: here, in France, and
elsewhere, in Palestine; here, in Palestine, and elsewhere, in France … here,
in 1970 (the Palestinian Revolution), and there, in 1789 (the French
Revolution), and … In between France and Palestine, the French couple and
the group of Fedayeen, the border morphs, disrupting enclosures and
producing new configurations. It is Deleuze who first registers the force
expressed by this conjunction and its potential for both cinema and thought:
AND is neither one thing nor the other, it’s always in between, between two things; it’s the
borderline, there’s always a border, a line of flight or flow, only we don’t see it, because it’s
the least perceptible of things. And yet it’s along this line of flight that things come to pass,
becomings evolve, revolutions take shape.11

While answering a question about the television series Six fois deux,
Deleuze is already articulating that theory of the interstice that, in the Time-
Image, will become operative in relation to Godard’s cinema tout-court.
What he will name the “method of BETWEEN, ‘between two images’ ” and
“the method of AND, ‘this and then that,’ ” finds its pivot in this fissure—
an interstice or interval that is primary with respect to the images it brings
together.12 Indeed, the conjunction AND performs “not an operation of
association but of differentiation … or of disappearance,” producing
something novel and irreducible to the mere combination or sum of the
preexisting images.13 In the interview, Deleuze reminds us that it is not
about the number of images (two, three …) but the conjunction; later, in the
Time-Image, he will underscore that this assemblage does not constitute a
“chain of images”: on the contrary, it is precisely what enables cinema (and
us) to break out of the chain, to find a line of flight and flee, disappear into
the distance.14 I insist on this point against the tendency to regard the
“AND” of the editing cut as conjunctive rather than disjunctive, a tendency
that frequently returns in the contemporary literature on the film essay.15 In
fact, not only does it obscure one of Deleuze’s most vital intuitions about
the time-image, but it also domesticates the essay’s simultaneously
disruptive and creative potential. Without the force of disarticulation, the
essay would be resymbolizing the border rather than displacing it from
within.
On the other hand, as though they were following the “law of minimal
variation,” which, for Bense, characterizes true experimentation, Godard
and Miéville repeatedly morph the cinematic border par excellence—the cut
—exposing it as an interstice between images. This happens most
prominently in five consecutive scenes, altogether constituting a veritable
dramatization of montage that owes as much to Michelangelo Antonioni’s
Blow-Up (1966) as it does to Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera
(1929).16 The setting is deceivingly simple: a room with white walls where
five characters (including the French mother and father) proceed to arrange
and re-arrange five photographs or film stills showing images of the
Palestinian revolution. In the first scene, the five characters post the stills on
the wall, one by one, while Godard’s voice-over provides individual
captions of a sort (“Armed struggle”; “Political Work”; “Extended War”;
“Until Victory”), then they stand below the row of stills, their back to the
wall, facing the viewer. “OK, but here the images can be seen altogether,”
says Godard: “At the movies, this is impossible. One is obliged to see the
images separately, one after the other, which results in….” The second
scene shows the images full-screen and in succession, as if projected in a
movie theater, while the third one returns to the five characters, who are
now lined up one behind the other and take turns holding up their still in
front of a TV camera. Godard explains: “when one makes a film, things
happen really in this way. Each time, one image has just replaced another.
Each time the image that comes afterward expels the preceding image and
takes its place, keeping of course, more or less, the memory of it.” In the
fourth scene, the characters are positioned side by side and slide
deliberately in front of the camera, pictures in hand, so as to form a
continuous chain. Finally, the fifth scene presents yet another variation of
this assemblage, as each character takes a turn displaying their picture to the
camera and then moving behind it to stand again in a horizontal line before
a white screen, facing the viewer. Godard continues: “And on the whole,
time has replaced space, speaks for it, or rather: space has inscribed itself on
film in another form, which is not a whole anymore but a sum of
translations …” Mainstream cinema has turned space into time, but a
spatialized kind of time, the time of succession or linear progression, in
itself the result of a process that has depleted the deep time of duration,
reducing it to a sequence of points on a line—a chain.
By turning montage inside out in this strange room, which is at once the
site of production, editing, and projection, Godard and Miéville are “trying
to ‘see borders,’ that is, to show the imperceptible” and already relinking
images in a new system of thought.17 Space, the multifaceted, ambivalent
space of the struggle, is not subsumed to time as succession, the
straightforward time of history as chronology. Space makes its own
simultaneity visible “in time,” as the logic of either/or, according to which
one image replaces another is, dismantled and the AND, the interval, gives
rise to an eccentric constellation, rather than a chain of images. “Too simple
and too easy to simply divide the world in two,” repeats Godard. The
struggle is near and far away, ahead and behind, here and elsewhere.
Godard and Miéville will continue this reworking of the border by
presenting combinations of multiple images, all visible simultaneously
against a black background. For instance, shortly after the five-character
sequence, we see three small slide viewers set up next to each other: images
appear and disappear intermittently, each image accompanied by its own
soundtrack, while the black space around and between the images persists.
The slides alternate in accordance with a discernible internal logic: on the
left, political and military leaders from Adolf Hitler to Richard Nixon to
Moshe Dayan; in the center, tanks and a jet fighter; on the right, people
fighting for freedom, the Palestinians among others. And yet, the emerging
configurations exceed any predictable outcome: the black space separating
the images is not a void to be crossed over but the marker of that borderline
which Godard and Miéville are attempting to make visible—the differential
stirring their theoretical practice of montage.
This multiplicity of sounds and images cannot but contrast with the shot
of a Palestinian girl reciting a poem, “I shall resist,” amidst the ruins of the
city of Karame. The shot is deliberately constructed as a tableau, the girl
standing against what resembles a theatrical set and speaking in a loud,
emphatic voice. The scene is moving, if highly artificial, but Miéville’s
voice-over soon begins to criticize its implicit background, the longstanding
alliance between theatre and the French revolution: the risk of a
normalizing voice afflicts the discourses of both power and resistance. In
the preceding shot, the close-up of a sound synthesizer whose volume level
is continually raised and lowered by the filmmakers’ hands, Godard’s
voice-over set up the scene by engaging in an explicit self-critique. The
sound that accompanied the many recent protest or revolutionary
movements (May 1968, Prague Spring, Chinese Cultural Revolution, etc.)
was “always the same sound, always too loud … so loud that it ended up
drowning the voice it wanted to draw out of the image.” Again, it is the
relation between word and image, image and sound that falls under scrutiny,
the “double helix” that will preoccupy Godard throughout his career. André
Bazin’s notion of “horizontal” montage is not far behind, as it too privileges
the “lateral” relation between what is seen and what is said, rather than the
seamless concatenation of visual materials.18 However, Godard complicates
the terms of the relation by referring to a “voice” of the image: in this new
montage system, even the internal semiotic unity of the image as image is
called into question, its crevices brought to the fore. And yet the scene of
the Palestinian girl is part of Here and Elsewhere: the ruins of the film that
Godard and Gorin had planned, like the ruins of the revolution, belong to
the history of oppression and revolt that Godard and Miéville are
configuring in images and sounds.19 This is a history in which the border
endures as the site of both the strongest exploitation and the strongest
resistance: not this OR that but this AND that.20

E F
Again like its literary counterpart, the film essay unfolds by presenting its
materials in eccentric arrangements: combinations that eschew hierarchical
ordering in favor of juxtaposition. Both Bense and Adorno, in their focus on
the essay as form, adopt the term “configuration” to describe these
unorthodox layouts. Bense reminds us that “the essayist is a combiner, a
tireless creator of configurations around a specific object,” an experimenter
for whom the “ars combinatoria” has substituted logical criteria as a means
of epistemological discovery.21 While praising the essay’s “anti-systematic
impulse,” Adorno also confers on the term a key epistemological function:
All of [the essay’s] concepts are presentable in such a way that they support one another,
that each one articulates itself according to the configuration that it forms with the others. In
the essay discreet separated elements enter into a readable context; it erects no scaffolding,
no edifice. Through their own movement the elements crystallize into a configuration. It is a
force field, just as under the essay’s glance every intellectual artifact must transform itself
into a force field.22

As a force field, the configuration is at once more dynamic and more static
than any official ordering of thought: no longer deemed to be identical to
things, its concepts define each other relationally in a process of “reciprocal
interaction,” while the tension their movement generates is brought “to a
standstill” by dint of the same interaction.23 It is important to remark that
the resulting arrangement, caught between kinesis and stasis, remains
fragmentary, discontinuous, and that its image-like “stillness” cannot be
equated to the permanence of the concept. Indeed, earlier in the text,
Adorno emphasizes that “the essay revolts above all against the doctrine—
deeply rooted since Plato—that the changing and ephemeral is unworthy of
philosophy; against that ancient injustice toward the transitory, by which it
is once more anathematized, conceptually.”24 The essay as form frees
concepts from the domain of abstraction and their indifference to the
mutable world of things. So I would like to continue this chapter by
following the path opened by Adorno’s allusion to pre-Socratic philosophy
and suggest that the essay as form is a kind of rhythm—an erratic form, at
once fugitive and enduring.
Here, after Barthes’s example in How to Live Together, I adopt the term
“rhythm” in the sense proposed by Émile Benveniste and untie the question
of rhythm from that of music. Benveniste finds ample evidence that, in pre-
Socratic philosophy and in lyric and tragic poetry, the Greek term rhuthmos
(rhythm) meant “configuration,” “disposition,” “form.”25 Yet this form was
not fixed but “improvised, momentary, changeable.” One could speak of
rhuthmos in relation to the form of a letter, the arrangement of a garment,
and even a disposition of character or mood, as they appear in the process
of realizing themselves. Later, Plato would normalize rhythm by
appropriating the term rhuthmos to define the movement of human bodies
in a dance according to a metron or external measure. But, before becoming
order in movement, rhythm is a “particular manner of flowing,” one that
can be attributed to images, sounds, and affects alike. Barthes returns to this
marginalized notion while employing nonmethod to search for “subtle
forms”—modes of living in excess of normative power. Idiorrhythmy is for
him the form of a life lived according to one’s own rhythm. “Before
anything else,” writes Barthes, “the first thing that power imposes is a
rhythm (to everything: a rhythm of life, of time, of thought, of speech). The
demand of idiorrhythmy is always made in opposition to power.”26 As such,
it can also pertain to thinking, writing, painting … Indeed, on a journey that
takes us from accounts of the diaita (diet, lifestyle) of early monastic
clusters to Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, Thomas Mann’s The Magic
Mountain, and Emile Zola’s Pot Luck, Barthes turns his own lecture course
into rhythm as a subtle form, idiosyncratic and elusive—a site of
idiorrhythmic experimentation.
To say that the essay as a form is a rhythm in this ancient, forgotten sense
—a manner of flowing—will enable us to look at the audiovisual essay as a
potentially erratic form, that is, a form that wanders, roams creatively while
remaining vulnerable to error. In its erring or stumbling (as Barthes said of
nonmethod), the essay rejects the logic of linearity in both space and time:
it gathers itself and unfolds as a configuration that does not coalesce, a
configuration caught between succession and simultaneity. If earlier I
insisted on the disjunctive character of the conjunction AND, it was also to
preemptively deactivate the equation between “flowing” and “continuity.” It
is as rhuthmos that the essay affirms itself as a form or the border. However,
at least in the gravitational field of postwar European cinema, such a
“manner of flowing” is made up of abrupt interruptions, unresolved
ellipses, irrational intrusions. Again, montage will prove key to generating
this form that resists or even subverts the spatiotemporal constraints
imposed by conventional narrative or documentary cinema. Indeed, one
notices less of an opposition than a relation of mutual contamination
between the essay film and the films that Deleuze assembled under the
auspices of the time-image. As a temporary mode of articulation of the
perceptual field, the essay has repeatedly come to inflect films that might
otherwise be considered narrative, suspending and reshaping their flow at
specific junctures. Roberto Rossellini’s Journey to Italy (Viaggio in Italia,
1954) stands out as a sustained example of the essay inhabiting or
traversing more established film practices.27
It is Jacques Rivette who first alerts us to the wonders of this crossing. In
“Letter on Rossellini,” Rivette celebrates the director’s singular capacity to
see, comparing him to Matisse and suggesting that he draws with the
camera in the way the painter draws with the pencil. As a result, “a
temporal sketch is perpetuated before our eyes,” pulsating and incomplete,
and yet showing the accuracy of the design.28 If Rossellini is the “most
modern of filmmakers,” Rivette ultimately argues, it is because he has
restored “the possibility of the essay” in a medium that, unlike modern art
and literature, had left it behind. Yet Rivette’s enthusiasm still relies on a
traditional notion of authorship, evoking Montaigne’s Essays to support a
view of the film as a sort of “home movie” in which Rossellini “dares to
talk about himself without restraint.”29 While I agree on the effect of
informality, even improvisation, produced by Journey to Italy, I would like
to remark that what Barthes calls “the book of the self” is in fact the site
where the subject undoes itself or, rather, is undone by the writing it
performs.30 In its most daring sequences, Journey to Italy shows us less a
questioning and remaking of the subject than its at least temporary
dissolution. Here, form as rhuthmos, fluctuating rather than fixed, resists
being held in view as an object, provoking a blurring of boundaries between
subject and object of perception—a confusion that affects our experience of
both space and time.
Journey to Italy follows Katherine Joyce (Ingrid Bergman), a wealthy
English woman who is traveling with her husband Alex (George Sanders).
Upon their arrival in Naples, she is trapped in the cliché of the vista and the
film marks her encounter with the landscape through a series of
conventional shots/reverse shots. It is only as her marriage deteriorates and
she decides to take sightseeing trips on her own that the film begins to
restructure itself, looking for a viewpoint, a point of contact with the
Mediterranean landscape that is inseparable from the body of the actress
and yet in excess of it.31 The first sustained transformation of Bergman’s
(and the film’s) look occurs at the archeological museum. A montage
sequence of rare beauty shows a series of classic statues from a viewpoint
that at times coincides with or is close to Bergman’s actual position in
space, and at other times is high above it, suspended in midair as if it
belonged to another gigantic statue or simply to no one. The camera seems
to mime the movement of the eyes but this does not provide us with a clear
anchorage. Bergman’s look, together with ours, appears to be emerging
from the side of the statues, from a place “in time” that now feels oddly
familiar. It is as if the past were coming to us from behind our shoulders,
encircling us, so that we feel it before being able to see it on display in front
of us; as if the time of the ancient artifacts were being projected onto the
place that Bergman occupies without “filling” it, without erasing the fissure
between past and present. That Bergman is visible in many of the shots
showing the statues, closer and closer to them, depicts a permeability or
contamination between subject and object that pertains to both time and
space. Here vision takes on an impersonal, almost anonymous quality, one
that will return during Katherine’s other solitary excursions and in the
excavation scene at Pompeii, that is, in all those sequences where the mode
of the essay returns to infiltrate the narrative film.32
I would like to pause on this dispersal of vision, as it profoundly disturbs
the association between the essay and the subjective or, even more, the
personal, which marks several contemporary assessments of this mode.33 In
Contempt (Le Mépris, 1963), Godard takes up and transforms Rossellini’s
museum sequence, complicating its arrangement through a disorderly
multiplication of viewpoints, narrative lines, and textual references. A film
suspended between documentary and fiction, Contempt opens with a
“triptych” of settings in which the end of cinema is rehearsed on location
and with remarkable characters: first the studio lot, where Paul (Michel
Piccoli), a French screenwriter for hire, meets an uncouth American
producer (Jack Palance), together with his multilingual assistant (Georgia
Moll); then the projection room, where these three characters join a German
director (Fritz Lang, playing himself) as he screens the rushes of his current
adaptation of The Odyssey, which is failing the producer’s commercial
expectations and is to be revised by Paul; and finally, a wall covered with
peeling movie posters, in front of which Paul, his wife Camille (Brigitte
Bardot), Lang, the producer, and his assistant all cross paths.34 Every image
in this triptych presents a tightly woven texture of quotations from the
domains of cinema, painting, literature, and poetry, but it is the screening
room sequence that most keenly creates the conditions for a scattering of
the subject of vision.
The sequence intercuts shots of the characters with the rushes they are
watching: images of plaster statues—Penelope, Athena, Poseidon, and other
Greek gods—partially painted and filmed against the sky or an expanse of
grass as if they were about to come to life; actual human figures, heavily
made-up actors impersonating Penelope, Odysseus, and a slain suitor,
respectively, filmed against a yellow, red, and blue wall (the film’s primary
colors); and, finally, documentary-like images of a mermaid and Odysseus
swimming in the Mediterranean sea. Yet, what unfolds is more than a mise-
en-abyme of spectatorship. The sequence resists being held as an object,
grasped from the viewpoint of a subject that multiplies itself while receding
along a line of identifiable positions. Instead, its complex sensorial layering
constitutes a knot that cannot be unraveled, that is loosened and tied again
without ever dissolving or coalescing into a single, solid shape. Is Bardot a
modern Penelope? Does she play Camille as the unwilling protagonist of a
plot others have started to rewrite? Yellow, red, blue—this is as meaningful
a plot as any other in Contempt, a weaving of colors that return in the
painted eyes and lips of the statues as pellicles of seeing, and then in the
walls behind the mythical characters, and on the grass dotted with poppies
… Another plot—the camera moving in toward Lang and then toward the
first statue onscreen and then around the second statue, as if Lang and the
statues belonged to the same world; not a shot-reverse shot but a
superimposition of sorts, a muddling of the line connecting the eye to its
object, the opening of a transversal dimension in the fabric of time. And yet
another one—Delerue’s counterpunctual music, producing a sense of slow
inexorability, like a moving toward what is coming to us from the past,
while also presenting a cadence that remains unresolved, over the image of
the Neptune statue, like an interrupted return. One would be hard-pressed to
establish who is seeing or whose viewpoint we are given and whether it
finds its origin in the past or the present.
It is as if we were caught in a vision that emerges from more than one
place and at more than one time, radically testing our sense of subjective
cohesion and making it impossible to gather ourselves as subjects of
perception or memory. Indeed, two decades before making Scénario du film
Passion (1982) and appearing as a silhouette in front of a white screen,
Godard conjures up the forms of a memory in the process of being created.
I will call this memory impersonal because it emerges as a perceptual
configuration (rhuthmos) that finds no steady reference point—not in the
evanescent, repeatedly elusive composition of the sequence, not in the
characters (who already subsist at the crossings of multiple discursive
histories), and even less in the spectators. Simultaneously inside and outside
the film(s), we find ourselves arranged, configured in the texture of a
memory that does not belong to us and yet becomes ours—a memory that
pictures us, transforms us into moving pictures. If anywhere, Godard is here
with us, in this almost oneiric world, being pictured by the film he has
ostensibly created.35
This authorial mutation reaches further than the one described by Adorno
when he remarks that, in the case of the essay, “the thinker does not think,
but rather transforms himself into an arena of intellectual experience,
without simplifying it.”36 While renouncing a position of mastery and
opening himself up to the movement of thought, the subject still remains
distinct from the object of its inquiry. For Adorno, as for Bense, whom he
quotes, “he writes essayistically who writes while experimenting, who turns
his object this way and that, who questions it, feels it, tests it, thoroughly
reflects on it, attacks it from different angles.”37 The essay is an
experimental form of critique, the production of conditions under which
there materializes a novel relationship between critic and cultural artifact so
that “something becomes visible in the object which it is orthodoxy’s secret
purpose to keep invisible.”38 On the other hand, Godard steps beyond the
limits of the epistemological domain, attempting to make visible the
“contours” not of the object but of a mode of being that exceeds the
division between subject and object. Nonetheless, he remains a cultural
critic, alert to the dangers of turning history into nature, and this move
toward the ontological domain does not coincide with that return to the
origins against which Adorno had warned.39 Contempt’s intermittent,
irregular constellations conjure up, not an “experience without a subject,”
the return to a state of confusion prior to the split between subject and
object, but rather the experience of a differentiation that cannot be reduced
to such a split. This indeterminate articulation of experience comes to us
neither from a self-identical past nor from a future that simply lies ahead.
Instead, it tentatively emerges from a futural past, a derivative past, if you
will, a past in the process of becoming: The Odyssey will have become a
film. In the film essay, here and elsewhere, the invention of new modes of
being presents itself as a matter of archival inventiveness.40

T W , A
Whether written in words or sounds and images, the essay seems to
configure itself out of existing materials. Adorno leaves no doubt in this
respect, stating that the essay refutes the myth of creation ex-nihilo and,
quoting Lukács, that it “is always concerned with something already
formed, or at best, with something that has been; it is part of its essence that
it does not draw something new out of an empty vacuum, but only gives a
new order to such things as once lived.”41 The essay is essentially
concerned with the past as it draws on forms that have already made their
appearance in the world or, at least, with forms that were once there. What
does this entail, if we shift our attention from verbal to audiovisual
language? In a pioneering text on the film essay, which he calls “a new type
of documentary,” Hans Richter emphasizes the heterogeneity of the
materials that filmmakers are free to employ, as long as their aim is to
“visualize thoughts on screen.” “For example,” Richter writes, “he can
switch from objective representation to fantastic allegory and from there to
a staged scene; the filmmaker can portray dead as well living things, and
artificial as well as natural objects.”42 Richter’s remarks seem to expand the
range of materials available to the essayistic filmmaker almost indefinitely
and yet, I will suggest, if we read them together with Lukács’s, we find the
indication of a tendency or disposition. I will adopt the term “archive” to
point to the world out of which the audiovisual essay takes shape. Far from
confining itself to officially archival materials, the film essay relates to the
world of forms as the site of an imbrication between perception and
memory, a living archive, if you will, but also a ghostly one, irreducibly
caught between present and past. It is the world-as-archive, not the self or
the subject, that constitutes the essay’s true playground, an archive through
which what we call a subject is “opened up” and, in some cases,
transformed into a being of porosity, traversal, transgression.
“And yet it’s others I’m interested in, others I like to film…. This time, to
talk about myself, I thought, ‘if we opened people up, we’d find landscapes.
If we opened me up, we’d find beaches,’ ” says Agnès Varda at the
beginning of Beaches of Agnes (Les plages d’Agnès, 2008). Walking
barefoot on a wide beach in Northern France, Varda is about to embark on a
journey of self-portraiture that will repeatedly make her emerge, take shape
outside, in a landscape where perceptual forms always carry the weight of a
certain memory. Yet her cinematic writing, what she has called cinécriture,
remains strangely light. If Godard reminds us of Adorno’s essayist as the
speaker of a foreign language (or, following Deleuze’s suggestion, as “a
foreigner in one’s own language”), it is Varda who most dynamically mixes
the elements of “luck and play,” endowing the essay with “childlike
freedom.”43 In Beaches as in The Gleaners and I (Les Glaneurs et la
glaneuse, 2000), the filmmaker’s own body plays a crucial role in this
performative reconfiguration of the boundaries between subject and object,
inside and outside, body and world. In The Gleaners and I, perhaps the
most inventive film essay of the last twenty years, we see her face as she
looks into a mirror, her hands as she plays with the digital camcorder, her
entire body as she stands next to Breton’s famous painting, “La Glaneuse,”
the portrait of a lone woman holding a sheaf of wheat ears on her shoulder.
According to Raymond Bellour, video technology enables the artist to
pursue an expanded corporeality: her eyes no longer confined to the
viewfinder, the videomaker “writes with the hands.”44 Varda complicates
this scenario by repeatedly offering us the image of her right hand filming
her left hand—a precarious arrangement, playful and moving at once, a
configuration (rhuthmos) that turns the visible upon itself.
“I mean this is my project: to film with one hand my other hand,”
declares Varda at the end of a scene that persists as one of the film’s
impossible centers. Upon returning home from Japan, Varda opens her
suitcase and retrieves all sorts of objects, from ornamental boxes to
postcards and print fabrics. This is how she remembers, her voice-over
says, by “gleaning” souvenirs and bringing them back to her house. She
goes through the items at a fast pace but then lingers on something that, to
her amazement, she found in a Tokyo department store: beautifully detailed,
lustrous postcards showing Rembrandt’s portraits of himself and his wife
Saskia. We see her hands taking the postcards out of a white envelope and
delicately passing them in review. “Saskia, up close,” we hear over the
details of Saskia’s embroidered collar; “And then my hand up close.” Now
she is holding the camera herself, with one hand, while the other hand is
floating above the Rembrandt images, almost caressing them: “I mean this
is my project: to film with one hand my other hand. To enter into the horror
of it. I find it extraordinary. I feel as if I am an animal, worse, I am an
animal I don’t know. And here’s Rembrandt’s self-portrait, but it’s just the
same in fact, always a self-portrait.”45 The camera is so up close that the
creases and dark spots of her aging hand are turned into an alien landscape,
the maculation of a mysterious animal or of the earth itself. This is a body
beyond narcissism, a body whose skin does not coincide with the surface
limits of the individual body or ego (the “skin sack” of which Freud writes)
but extends to and intermingles with the skin of things.46
It is important to underscore that Varda’s performative exploration of
corporeality does not constitute the attempt to rediscover a primordial,
uncontaminated dimension. On the contrary, it takes place in a world that is
repeatedly presented as the repository of heterogeneous memory traces.
Whether she finds herself at home or on the road, her filming unfolds as an
archival gesture, a committing to memory of perceptual forms that are
already memory-laden. (It might be clear by now that such a gesture is
utterly performative, that is, it has no subject if not the one constituted by
the practice of gleaning itself).47 After all, gleaning is the gathering of what
is left behind (food, objects, images …), unaccounted for, stepped over, or
sent to the trash heap in a particular culture—at once what Varda films and
what she does by filming. I have argued elsewhere that Varda’s gleaning
affirms itself as form of heretical archiving, a mode of cultural preservation
and transmission that is at odds with the demands of the “patriarchal
archive.”48 Here, I will remark on the profound affinities between this
modality and the essay as erratic configuration. It is not without irony that
Varda opens her film by posing the question of definition—“G as in
gleaning,” “to glean is to gather after the harvest,” “a gleaner is one who
gleans,” she says, while turning the pages of the Larousse dictionary and
showing us reproductions of Breton’s and Millet’s paintings. In the rest of
the sequence, she gathers together images that constantly shift between
media (painting, printmaking, photography, and film) and historical periods
(the nineteenth century, the early twentieth century, and the turn of the
millennium to the twenty-first century). For Varda, to define is to undo
borders, as they mark the space and time of the modern archive, in order not
to redraw them but to keep them suspended, while exploring the creases
released by this dissolution of the straight, clear-cut line. If Godard writes
through (in) the AND of the interstice, Varda performs an interweaving of
materials that is not a suturing, but the production of audiovisual pleats or
folds that close upon themselves only to reopen and mutate into something
other. In this respect, The Gleaners and I appears less as a series of
variations on the practice of gleaning than as one self-differing
configuration, the impossibility to ever show what gleaning is in itself.
The constellations she draws are as precarious as the life of many of the
people she encounters in her journey through the city, the countryside, and
along the seashore. Their reasons for gleaning are as diverse as their
objects: gleaners glean for necessity, as an ethical stance, for pleasure,
picking unharvested wheat, odd-shaped fruit and vegetables, expired food,
discarded appliances, and abandoned toys. But, by gleaning, they reject or
step to the margins of the existing socioeconomic conventions, often
developing unusual, heterodox bonds with other people and the
environment in which they live. For her part, Varda reaffirms and expands
these other ways of living and remembering by creating new “visual bonds”
(to freely adopt Dziga Vertov’s formulation), bringing together people,
images, and sounds in a novel manner. She steps over, into the internal
borders that have parceled the space and time of our culture. It is precisely
by creating these miscellaneous, unpredictable alliances that the essay can
escape the logic of combination and recombination that, as Hito Steyerl
rightly points out, characterizes our neoliberal image economies.49 That the
essay (or, at least, the essay as heretical form) escapes this logic from
within, so to speak, by doing differently, subversively, what is most often
done in a conformist manner, only adds to the urgency of its endeavors.
What I would like to remark in this respect is that the essay’s resistance to
the preformed, “compulsory manufacturing of difference,” occurs through
the performance of what is also an archival gesture. Unlike their neoliberal
counterparts, Varda and Godard and Rossellini’s essays manifest the
capacity to form visual bonds, not only in space but also in time—to make
visible a depth of time or memory beyond chronology and official history.
I am reminded here of Bense’s image of the essayist as “a type between
categories and a contemporary between eras” and Barthes’s allusion to the
link existing between the untimely and contemporaneous. At the beginning
of his lecture course, Barthes remarks that Living-Together always occurs
in time. While fundamentally involving space, what he calls the fantasy of
Living-Together according to an idiosyncratic rhythm also unfolds in the
dimension of “contemporaneity”: “ ‘living at the same time as …’ ‘living in
the same time as …’ ”50 Barthes dose not further explore the question,
“Who are my contemporaries?” but notices that calendar time will not offer
much guidance in this respect, leaving open the possibility of a
concomitance that occurs across time or, rather, in a time that is an overlay
of past and present. Indeed, Barthes’s own gathering of literary texts and
historical records suggests that lifestyles can take shape by virtue of
semiotic encounters of all kinds. By privileging culture or nonmethod, that
is, an “eccentric path of possibilities” without a set destination, Barthes
turns his own lecture course into a place of anachronistic and creative
misalliances. The audiovisual essay might be said to pursue a version of this
particular fantasy, gathering images and sounds that come to us from a
heterogeneous, layered time. Rather than flattening out time, the essay finds
its vitality in a contamination that is also of past and present, as if here the
ghostly expressed an excess of life that demands to be lived. Jean-Pierre
Gorin, once Godard’s partner in the Dziga Vertov Group, claims that
animating the essay is an energy that cannot be reduced to the endeavors of
a questioning consciousness, and I could not agree more.51 But, rather than
embracing the image of a “termite art,” I will suggest that we maintain
gleaning as the figure for the work that the essay can still do at the margins
or in the furls of our global audiovisual culture. Like the tactics of “barter,
theft or appropriation” identified by Steyerl, gleaning points the essay
toward a domain that defies ownership and genealogy, interrupting the
proper lines of transmission and exchange—a domain beyond measure
where new ways of being and living together can be envisioned.

N
1. Max Bense, “On the Essay and Its Prose,” in Essays on the Essay Film, ed. Nora M. Alter and
Timothy Corrigan (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017), 55.
2. Gilles Deleuze, “Six Questions about Six fois deux,” in Negotiations 1972–1990 (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1995), 37.
3. Étienne Balibar, “What Is a Border?” in Politics and the Other Scene (London: Verso, 2002),
76.
4. Theodor W. Adorno, “The Essay as Form,” in Alter and Corrigan, eds., Essays on Essay Films,
70.
5. Theodor W. Adorno, “The Essay as Form,” New German Critique (Spring–Summer 1984),
Article 32, http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0094-
033X%28198421%2F22%290%3A32%3C151%3ATEAF%3E2.0.CO%3B2-C. Unless
otherwise noted, all quotes will be drawn from this translation.
6. Roland Barthes, How to Live Together: Novelistic Simulations of Some Everyday Spaces (New
York: Columbia University Press, 2013), 133.
7. Ibid., 35.
8. Ibid., 19.
9. Balibar, Politics, 77.
10. See Roland Barthes, “Diderot, Brecht, Eisenstein,” in Image, Music, Text (New York: Hill and
Wang, 1978).
11. Deleuze, Negotiations, 45.
12. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-image (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1989), 180. In the last two decades, Harun Farocki’s practice of soft montage has rekindled
 interest in Godard and Deleuze’s use of the conjunction AND. See Harun Farocki and Kaja
Silverman, Speaking about Godard (New York: New York University Press, 1998).
13. Ibid., 179.
14. On line of flight, see Brian Massumi, “Notes on the Translation and Acknowledgments,” in
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1980), xvi: “Fuite covers not only the act of
fleeing or eluding but also flowing, leaking, and disappearing into the distance (the vanishing
point in a painting is a point de fuite). It has no relation to flying.”
15. Among the otherwise valuable contributions I would criticize in this respect, see Alter’s
reading of Godard in Nora Alter, The Essay Film after Fact and Fiction (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2017) and Blümlinger’s reading of Farocki in Christa Blümlinger, “Memory
and Montage: On the Installation Counter-Music,” in Harun Farocki: Against What against
Whom, ed. Antje Ehmann and Kodwo Eshun (Cologne, Germany: Walter König, 2010).
16. In one of Blow-up’s most famous sequences, the photographer attempts to find the relay
between the woman’s look and the gun—the missing eye-line match which would solve the
puzzle—by arranging the photographs in the space of his studio; more specifically, by using
the ninety-degree angle formed by two walls to stage the optical encounter.
17. Deleuze, Negotiations, 45.
18. André Bazin, “Bazin on Marker,” in Alter and Corrigan, eds., Essays on the Essay Film.
19. At some point, Godard says: “Back in France, pretty soon you don’t know what to make of the
film; very soon the contradictions explode, including you.” On Here and Elsewhere as a film
“about ruins,” see Alter, ed., Essay Film after Fact and Fiction; on Rossellini’s Germany Year
Zero (1948) as a “ruinous film,” see Noa Steimatsky, Italian Locations: Reinhabiting the Past
in Postwar Cinema (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2008).
20. On the border as a daunting place of residence, Balibar writes: “It is an extraordinarily viscous
spatio-temporal zone, almost a home—a home in which to live a life which is a waiting-to-
live, a non-life. The psychoanalyst André Green once wrote that it is difficult enough to live on
a border, but that is as nothing compared with being a border oneself.” See Balibar, Politics,
83.
21. Bense, “On the Essay and Its Prose,” 57.
22. Adorno, “The Essay as Form,” 161.
23. Ibid., 170.
24. Ibid., 158.
25. Émile Benveniste, “The Notion of Rhythm in Its Linguistic Expression,” in Problems in
General Linguistics (Coral Gables, FL: University of Miami Press, 1971), 286.
26. Barthes, How to Live Together, 35. Following Benveniste’s interpretation, Barthes adds, the
term rhuthmos would suffice to suggest such a fluctuation: if it becomes necessary to attach
the prefix idios, it is because power has repeatedly appropriated rhythm, its definition, and its
manifestations.
27. On this complicated relation, which far exceeds the scope of this chapter, see Timothy
Corrigan, “Of the History of the Essay Film,” in Alter and Corrigan, Essays on the Essay Film
and Rick Warner, “Essaying the Forms of Popular Cinema: Godard, Farocki and the Principle
of Shot/Countershot,” in The Film Essay: Dialogue, Politics, Utopia, ed. Elizabeth Papazian
and Caroline Eades (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), 28–68.
28. Jacques Rivette, “Letter on Rossellini,” in Cahiers du Cinéma, the 1950s: Neo-Realism,
Hollywood, New Wave, ed. Jim Hillier (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985),
194.
29. Ibid., 196.
30. See Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text (New York: Hill and Wang, 1975).
31. For an expanded investigation of the role that Bergman’s corporeality plays in the films she
made with Rossellini, see Domietta Torlasco, “The Actress Is a Filmmaker: Ingrid Bergman
and Roberto Rossellini’s New Erotics of Vision,” World Picture (Fall 2012): Article 6.
32. Again, what I would like to avoid is a narrative of pure origins and would rather think of the
relation between the film essay and other kinds of cinema as one of constitutive contamination.
33. In this respect, I would draw a distinction between more and less complex treatments of the
vicissitudes and trials of subjectivity. See, for instance, the related but differently nuanced
accounts of Timothy Corrigan, The Essay Film: From Montaigne, After Marker (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2011), and Laura Rascaroli, The Personal Camera, Subjective
Cinema and the Essay Film (London: Wallflower Press, 2009).
34. See Laura Mulvey, “Le Mépris (Jean-Luc Godard 1963),” in Godard’s Contempt: Essays from
the London Consortium, ed. Colin MacCabe and Laura Mulvey (Malden, MA: Wiley-
Blackwell, 2012).
35. This reading took initial inspiration from Kaja Silverman’s proposal for a revised notion of
authorship in “The Author as Receiver,” October 96 (Spring 2001). Silverman maintains that,
in his late films, Godard positions himself not as a creator or a producer but rather as a
receiver, that is, as “the site where words and visual forms inscribe or install themselves.” Here
the artist himself seems to become the medium, and yet the fusion is never complete: “I am a
person who likes to receive,” Silverman quotes Godard saying, “the camera cannot be a rifle,
since it is not an instrument that sends out but an instruments that receives. And it receives
with the aid of light.” I further elaborate on this notion and the dispersal of Astruc’s caméra-
stylo that it entails in Domietta Torlasco, The Heretical Archive: Digital Memory at the End of
Film (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013). While drawing on Maurice
Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy, I propose a notion of cinematic writing as “writing of the flesh,”
an articulation of the perceptual field that occurs in between passivity and activity.
36. Adorno, “The Essay as Form,” 161.
37. Ibid., 164.
38. Ibid., 171.
39. Adorno writes: “the essay abandons the main road to the origins, the road leading to the most
derivative, to being, the ideology that simply doubles that which already exists.” Ibid., 161.
40. See Able Gance proclaiming, “Shakespeare, Rembrandt, Beethoven will make films,” quoted
in Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” in The
Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media, ed.
Michael William Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, MA: Belknap
Press, 2006), 22.
41. Adorno, “The Essay as Form,” 151; see Georg Lukács, “On the Nature and Form of the Essay,”
in Alter and Corrigan, eds., Essays on the Essay Film.
42. Hans Richter, “The Film Essay: A New Type of Documentary Film,” in Alter and Corrigan,
eds., Essays on the Essay Film, 91.
43. Adorno, “The Essay as Form,” 151; Deleuze, Negotiations, 44–45.
44. In “The Electronic Essay,” Michael Renov follows Raymond Bellour in contrasting video with
film and emphasizing the corporeality and temporal fluidity of the former, together with the
freedom it affords the essayist. However, I hesitate to oppose film to video along technological
lines. For instance, regarding the Bell and Howell 16 mm camera, Bazin wrote that it
constitutes “a projection of hand and eye, almost a living part of the operator, instantly in tune
with his awareness.” See André Bazin, “An Aesthetics of Reality: Neorealism,” in What Is
Cinema? Vol. II (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), 33. In addition, Varda
 connects her use of the camcorder to her previous “film” practice: “I had the feeling that this is
the camera [the more sophisticated of the amateur models [the Sony DV CAM DSR 300]] that
would bring me back to the early short films I made in 1957 and 1958. I felt free at that time.”
See “The Modest Gesture of the Filmmaker: An Interview with Agnes Varda,” Cineaste 26,
no. 4 (Fall 2001): 24.
45. For different readings of the self-portrait in film, see Silverman, “The Author as Receiver,” and
Raymond Bellour, “The Cinema and the Essay as a Way of Thinking,” in Alter and Corrigan,
eds., Essays on the Essay Film.
46. See my own adoption of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s notion of “narcissism of the flesh” in
Torlasco, The Heretical Archive.
47. On the performative and its relation to Nietzsche’s famous statement that “’the doer’ is merely
a fiction added to the deed,” see Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (London: Routledge, 1999).
48. See Torlasco, The Heretical Archive.
49. Hito Steyerl, “The Essay as Conformism: Some Notes on Global Image Economies,” in Alter
and Corrigan, eds., Essays on the Essay Film.
50. Barthes, How to Live Together, 5.
51. See Jean-Pierre Gorin, “Proposal for a Tussle,” in Alter and Corrigan, eds., Essays on the Essay
Film.
 CHAPTER 5

THE MEDIUM MATTERS! IN

DEFENSE OF MEDIUM-
SPECIFICITY IN CLASSICAL
FILM THEORY

MALCOLM TURVEY

THE doctrine of medium specificity holds that a medium can do something

that other media cannot, or that they cannot do as well, and it has a long
history in the theory, criticism, and practice of the arts. The first film
theorists, who today are often referred to classical film theorists, embraced
medium specificity in their attempt to demonstrate that film is a legitimate
art as great as, or perhaps greater than, the other arts. They believed that in
order to be accepted as a genuine art, they had to show that cinema can do
certain things either better than the other arts or that the other arts couldn’t
do at all. They therefore set about identifying some specific features of film
that putatively distinguished it as a medium from other media.
In the 1970s, medium specificity fell out of favor among film theorists,
especially those influenced by antiessentialism in postwar analytic
philosophy and poststructuralism, who tended to reject it as essentialist.1
Even theorists with no qualms about essentialism found the doctrine
wanting. Noël Carroll, for example, has proposed an essential definition of
the moving image—a definition in terms of a set of individually necessary
and jointly sufficient conditions—while eschewing medium specificity and
launching an all-out assault on it.2
Recently, medium specificity has enjoyed a resurgence in film theorizing
due, in part, to the advent of digital filmmaking. The replacement of
analogue filmmaking technologies by digital ones has led some to argue
that these analogue technologies possess one or more specific features that
cannot be duplicated by their digital successors. A candidate often proposed
for such a feature is “indexicality.” Mary-Ann Doane, for example, has
claimed that
within film theory, confronted with the threat and/or promise of the digital, indexicality as a
category has attained a new centrality…. One might go so far as to claim that indexicality
has become today the primary indicator of cinematic specificity, that elusive concept that
has played such a dominant role in the history of film theory’s elaboration, serving to
differentiate film from the other arts (in particular, literature and painting) and to stake out
the boundaries of a discipline.3

For Doane, “an emphasis upon film’s chemical, photographic base now
serves to differentiate the cinema from digital media.”4 Erika Balsom
agrees. Discussing Tacita Dean’s installation film Diamond Ring (2002),
she maintains that
the notion of the medium put forth by The Green Ray strongly invokes the concept of
indexicality, a category that has come to achieve crucial importance in recent discussions of
the analogue-digital transition. Against the much-feared capacity for manipulation that
resides in the binary basis of digital media, the idea of analogue film as an indexical sign
invokes a testimonial power and a sense of historicity that are seen to be weakened, if not
obliterated entirely, by the new media.5

Conversely, some theorists have made medium-specific arguments about

digital cinema. Berys Gaut, for instance, asserts that “distinct artistic
properties and values are achievable in digital cinema and this grounds the
claim that it constitutes a distinct art form,” a claim I shall revisit briefly at
the end of this chapter.6
Despite its resurgence, medium specificity remains a controversial
doctrine, and within film studies it has been subjected to powerful,
sustained criticism by Carroll, who has targeted and rejected its use in
classical film theory, concluding that “for many reasons [it] no longer
seems acceptable.”7 Those who currently appeal to it do so by and large
without attempting to defend it against Carroll’s criticisms. But if he is right
about its flaws, then contemporary film theorists, like their classical
predecessors, are wrong to do so, and their medium-specific assertions are
as theoretically suspect as the ones found in classical film theory.
Gaut is one of the few contemporary film theorists to mount an important
defense of medium specificity in the context of cinema. However, he
champions only a weak version of the doctrine, holding that, for the most
part, medium-specific features are “differential properties—properties that
distinguish one group of media from another group, but that are not
necessarily unique to any particular medium.”8 And, as we shall see, when
he does argue that there is something unique about the cinema, he does so
by defining the medium so broadly that it encompasses every kind of
moving image. The properties he views as specific to the cinema therefore
turn out to be differential features of moving image media rather than
unique ones, in other words, properties that distinguish moving-image
media as a group from nonmoving-image media.
In this chapter, I claim that Carroll’s hostility to medium specificity in
classical film theory is due to the unwarranted conflation of medium
specificity with a related but logically distinct doctrine, namely, medium
essentialism. Once the two are untangled, I show, medium specificity can
be defended against its detractors such as Carroll, whose real and legitimate
target, I suggest, is medium essentialism. Even though one might question
whether “indexicality” is specific to analogue film and successfully
differentiates it from digital cinema, contemporary film theorists such as
Doane and Balsom, like their classical predecessors, are therefore not
mistaken in their attempts to identify medium-specific features of film.9
In the following, I first clarify what is meant by “specificity” and
“medium.” Having distinguished medium specificity from medium
essentialism in classical film theory, I then demonstrate that medium
specificity does not entail ascribing a timeless essence to a medium, as
many have assumed. Medium-specific characteristics, I propose, are always
contingent and relative to a historical context and many classical film
theorists realized this. It is the failure to recognize this, I argue, along with
Gaut’s conflation of cinema with the moving image and his definition of a
medium as a practice, that gives rise to problems with his version of
medium specificity. Finally, I explain why medium specificity is worth
defending due to its continuing relevance to the contemporary appreciation
and theorization of cinema and other arts.

W I S ?
One way of clarifying what it means to argue that something is specific to a
medium is to turn to artistic practice, where artists routinely make medium-
specific claims about the materials they use. Cinematographers, for
instance, often assert that a particular celluloid film stock processed in a
distinctive way can produce a look not possible with other available film
stocks and processes. For Three Kings (David O. Russell, 1999), director of
photography Newton Thomas Sigel used Eastman Kodak Ektachrome 100
Professional Plus Film (EPP100) to shoot the scenes in which the
protagonists—three US soldiers stationed in Iraq during the first Gulf War
—leave their base camp to steal gold. This stock offers increased color
saturation, which Sigel and the movie’s director David O. Russell wanted in
order to convey “a very disorienting experience. We wanted to create that
feeling of being in a strange place, where all of a sudden you notice
everything because nothing looks familiar.”10 Sigel then had the stock
developed using “cross-processing,” a technique that had already been
employed in music videos and movies such as Fallen (Gregory Hoblit,
1998) and that creates a “uniquely skewed color palette and high-contrast
reproduction.”11 Other filmmakers had previously used a different type of
film stock, Eastman Kodak’s 5239, in tandem with cross-processing to
achieve a similar effect. In explaining his choice of EPP100 over 5239,
Sigel explained: “I really like what happens to the colors with the [Kodak]
EPP100 stock, more than any other stocks that I’ve cross-processed. I’ve
used the 5239—which is an old VNF film—and it just didn’t seem as if it
had enough of an effect to make it worth the effort. I prefer the EPP100 for
a project like Three Kings, because it has a more radical shift in the color
and in the contrast. Being a slower film, the EPP100 also has a finer grain
than the 5239, and seems to capture more detail in the shadow areas.”12
Such medium-specific arguments on the part of artists are not only found
in cinema or the visual arts. Violinists, for example, prefer some types of
strings to others due to the distinctive sounds they can create. Traditional
gut strings are widely thought to produce a warmer, richer sound with more
overtones than modern steel strings. Nor are medium-specific concerns
confined to artists as critics and connoisseurs can often perceive differences
between the materials used in art works. Fans of Jacques Tati’s masterpiece
Play Time (1967) rightly maintain that the film can only be properly
perceived and appreciated when projected in 70mm, the format in which it
was shot, due to its detail and richness of color, which allow audiences to
experience artistic effects intended by Tati that are obscured in smaller
formats.
These medium-specific claims might be dismissed as subjective, so here
is an independently verifiable example. Until recently, the highest
resolution format used by commercial digital filmmakers was so-called 4K.
With a horizontal pixel count of around 4000, a 4K image contains roughly
four times as many pixels (anywhere between 8 and 12 million depending
on the aspect ratio) as an HD image with the same aspect ratio. HD is the
format that was employed in the first digital Hollywood movies in the early
2000s, and it was widely seen as inferior to 35mm celluloid film in terms of
image resolution. This is not true of 4K, which, some have argued, rivals
the resolution of 35mm. Either way, until a few years ago, if one wanted the
highest image resolution possible when shooting digital films, as Steven
Soderbergh did when making Che (2008), 4K was better than other digital
formats with their lower pixel counts. This effect is, in this sense, unique to
4K and can be independently verified by a technical procedure that counts
the pixels in a digital image.
As these examples suggest, artists and critics often make medium-
specific arguments in the sense that they claim that, due to its distinctive
properties, a material (or combination of materials) can achieve an effect
either better than other materials or that other materials cannot attain at all
because of their particular characteristics, and at least some of their
assertions can be independently verified. Note that what is specific,
according to this version of medium specificity, is the effect realizable with
a material relative to the effects possible with other materials, not the
material itself, which is merely a means to an end. However, it is because of
the peculiar qualities of the material that the medium-specific effect it gives
rise to can be achieved. It was the “uniquely skewed color palette and high-
contrast” look made possible by Kodak EPP100 film stock, not the stock
itself, that was specific relative to the looks possible with other available
film stocks when Newton Thomas Sigel shot Three Kings, but this specific
look was due to the distinct attributes of this film stock, what Sigel refers to
as its “a more radical shift in the color and in the contrast” as well as its
“finer grain.” We might call this a functionalist conception of medium
specificity, as it is the function a material such as a film stock performs—its
effect—that is judged to be specific. Moreover, it is judged to be specific
relative to other, currently available materials and the effects that can be
attained with them, not for all time, a crucial point to which I will return
when I defend medium specificity.

W I M ?
So far, I have used the term “medium” to refer to the materials that
“mediate … the transmission of the content of an art work to a receiver.”13
However, some theorists maintain that a material is not a medium. Instead a
medium, they believe, consists of particular uses of materials. “The
medium is constituted by the set of practices that govern the use of the
material,” argues Gaut following Richard Wollheim. “These [practices]
determine which physical materials can realize” the medium.14 This is
because a variety of materials can be used to make works in a medium,
thereby making it impossible to individuate a medium by way of a material.
Sculptors have availed themselves of all sorts of substances and tools to
create sculptures, including celluloid film stock. Conversely, the same
material can be employed in more than one medium: some filmmakers have
made films by drawing or painting onto celluloid film stock, while strips of
celluloid have been incorporated into paintings and drawings. Moreover,
unless a material is used in a way constitutive of a medium, it remains
merely a material. A reel of undeveloped film in a canister is not a movie
until it is employed in a manner characteristic of the medium of cinema.
Nor is the paint inside a painting pot a painting until it has been applied to a
surface in a way definitive of the medium of painting.
However, while such arguments perhaps show that a material in and of
itself is not a medium, they do not demonstrate that the material can be
eliminated from the definition of a medium, as Gaut seems to do when he
suggests that “The medium is constituted by the set of practices that govern
the use of the material,” or that “the medium is how one uses the
material.”15 The philosopher David Davies usefully distinguishes between
what he calls the “vehicular medium,” which “is the kind of ‘stuff’ that the
artist manipulates,”16 and the “artistic medium,” which refers to “the
intentional manipulations of a vehicular medium” by an artist as well as
“the shared understandings as to how those manipulations are to be
characterized.”17 In addition to conforming to ordinary language usage, one
reason for retaining the concept of medium-as-material, or vehicular
medium, is that we sometimes differentiate between media on the basis of
their materials, not just the uses to which these materials are put, due to
their particular characteristics. As Gaut himself acknowledges, “when we
finely individuate media, the materials employed sometimes play a role in
this finer individuation.”18 Both 35mm and 70mm celluloid film stock can
be used identically—to shoot the same movie, for example, as when
Oklahoma! (Fred Zinnemann, 1955) was shot simultaneously in
CinemaScope (35mm) and Todd AO (70mm)—yet they are different
vehicular media with distinct qualities, much like watercolor and oil in
painting.
The same is true, according to theorists such as Doane and Balsom, of
celluloid and digital filmmaking media. Due to its material characteristics,
they believe, celluloid film allows for the indexicality that putatively
distinguishes it from digital cinema. Nor is it only when we finely
individuate media that we must make reference to their materials. Consider
two indistinguishable images of a person, one of which is a photograph, the
other a photorealistic painting. The materials of photography and painting
have been used in exactly the same way in both cases—to produce identical
representations of the person—but this does not mean the two images
belong to the same medium. What examples such as these show is that
practices alone cannot always individuate media because practices are
shared by media. Movies, plays, and literature can all be used to tell stories,
which is why we must appeal, in part, to the peculiar characteristics of their
vehicular media in order to differentiate between their forms of storytelling.
This is perhaps why, in spite of his definition of a medium as practice, Gaut
often reverts to distinguishing between media on the basis of their
materials, as when he claims that “the medium of the moving image
contains several other more specific media, such as traditional photographic
cinema, digital cinema, analogue video cinema and handmade cinema.”19
Nor is it true that the practices constitutive of a medium always
“determine which physical materials can realize it,” as Gaut argues, for the
opposite is also sometimes the case. The addition of a new material to a
medium can give rise to new practices, as happened when synchronized
sound was introduced to cinema in the late 1920s; and new practices that
become characteristic of a medium often emerge as artists experiment
through trial and error with materials, as occurred with the gradual
discovery of film editing in the 1900s and 1910s. Indeed, new uses of a
material are often alighted upon by accident, as was purportedly the case
when George Méliès’s movie camera jammed in 1896 and he chanced upon
stop motion when processing the resulting footage. And we often value
such breakthroughs, and celebrate artists who make them. To be sure, it is
only because of an already existing background of what Davies calls
“shared understandings” about art that artists seize upon such discoveries.
Doubtless Méliès began exploiting stop motion in his films because the
capacity to make things suddenly appear and disappear in art was already
valued in his artistic context. But the point is that the practices for using
materials that constitute a medium do not exist fully formed prior to, and
independently of, the actual utilization of materials by artists. They do not
float free of materials. Rather, those practices are, in part, shaped and
constrained by the properties of the materials being used and the discovery
of their distinctive features and capacities, which is one reason that the
practices characteristic of a medium evolve over time. This is also why the
introduction of new materials with novel qualities into a medium can
occasion heated debates about whether a new artistic medium has emerged
as a result or not, as has happened with digital cinema, a point to which I
shall return at the end of this chapter. Materials—what Davies calls
vehicular media—and their particular attributes therefore matter in giving
rise to the conventions, practices, and uses that become constitutive of an
artistic medium, and I shall argue that classical film theorists were right to
assert that there was something unique about the artistic medium of cinema
due to the distinguishing characteristics of its vehicular media.
 M S M E
C F T
As we have seen, artists and critics often make medium-specific claims in
the functionalist sense that they argue that, because of its distinctive
properties, a particular vehicular medium (or combination of vehicular
media) can achieve an effect in an artistic medium either better than other
vehicular media or that other vehicular media cannot attain at all due to
their particular characteristics. This, however, is a weak version of medium
specificity because it concerns the relative merits of vehicular media
employed within a single artistic medium, such as which stock to use to
shoot a film.
Classical film theorists proposed a much bolder, more interesting version
of medium specificity, which they inherited from philosophical aesthetics
and art theory. They, too, maintained that the vehicular media of cinema can
achieve one or more effects better than, or unobtainable with, other
vehicular media due to their peculiar attributes. But unlike the examples
from artistic practice I gave earlier, the other vehicular media they usually
had in mind were not those employed in making movies. In the case of 4K,
the assertion that it can produce the highest possible image resolution is
made relative to other digital moving image formats such as HD that are
currently available to filmmakers when making works of cinema. Classical
film theorists, however, typically compared the vehicular media used by
filmmakers to the vehicular media employed by other artistic mediums
when advancing medium-specific claims about film, and they did so in
order to differentiate the cinema as an art from the other arts.
Probably the most common medium-specific argument found in classical
film theory asserts that cinematic vehicular media allowed for better
perceptual access to phenomena than the vehicular media of the other
artistic media that existed when classical film theorists were writing. Due to
the movie camera’s capacity to record objects over time from varying
distances and angles onto celluloid, as well as the fact that celluloid can be
cut up into shots of varying lengths that can then be arranged through
editing, cinema, it was believed, could provide spectators with a clearer,
more detailed view of things than other media of the era. A subject can be
broken down or analyzed into relevant aspects which are displayed in a
succession of long, medium, and close-up shots that are timed and
organized to maximize visual clarity and intelligibility, thereby rendering
the subject perspicuous. Of course, the other visual arts of the period could
also offer clear, detailed representations of phenomena. However, relative to
the cinema they were limited in their ability to do so by their vehicular
media. As atemporal art forms, painting, photography, and sculpture cannot
present a succession of different views of phenomena in motion from
varying angles and distances. And while the theater is, like the cinema, a
visual and temporal art that has ways of drawing the viewer’s attention to
things, it lacks the degree of control over the viewer’s attention that
cinematic vehicular media possess by way of variable framing, as well as
the capacity to magnify details through the close-up and the size of the
projected image.
Many classical film theorists, some of who were also filmmakers, offered
versions of this thesis. Soviet theorist and filmmaker Vsevolod Pudovkin,
for example, maintained that
the Americans were the first to discover in the film-play the presence of peculiar properties
of its own…. They showed in their work that it was not only possible to record the scene
shot, but that by maneuvering with the camera itself—in such a way that its position in
relation to the object shot varied several times—it was made possible to reproduce the same
scene in far clearer and more expressive form than with the lens playing the part of a theatre
spectator sitting fast in his stall…. Now, for the first time, became apparent the difference
between the theatrical producer and his colleague of the film…. Guided by the director, the
camera assumes the task of removing every superfluity and directing the attention of the
spectator in such a way that he shall see only that which is significant and characteristic.20

It was this visual acuity, Pudovkin felt, that distinguished the cinema from
other artistic media: “It is upon this that the strength of the film depends,
that its characteristic speciality is the possibility of giving a clear, especially
vivid representation of detail.”21
The French filmmaker and theorist Germaine Dulac likewise claimed
that, because of the movie camera’s ability to record a person in close-up in
addition to the size of the screen on which cinematic works are projected,
cinematic vehicular media can be used to reveal mental states in much more
detail and with much greater clarity than can the vehicular media associated
with the other arts such as theater. Discussing her own film The Smiling
Madame Beudet (1923), she wrote: “Taken in long shots, Mme Beudet
shrugging her shoulders would not have the same meaning if she shrugged
her shoulders in a closer shot. When M. Beudet laughs, a laugh that sets his
wife’s nerves on edge, this laugh must fill the entire screen, the entire
auditorium, so that the spectators feel the same antipathy as Mme Beudet
does toward this vulgar husband.”22
The post-Cubist painter Fernand Léger believed the close-up to be film’s
most unique and important feature, remarking in his retrospective notes on
his and Dudley Murphy’s film Ballet mécanique (1924) that he “used the
close-up, which is the only cinematographic invention.”23 In his March
1923 reply to a survey by René Clair in the journal Film, he predicted that
cinema “will be everything … when film-makers develop the consequences
of the close-up, which is the cinematic of the future.”24 Léger opined that,
like modern painting, cinema should be a plastic art devoted to
foregrounding “the intrinsic plastic value of the object,” by which he meant
features such as the object’s shape, volume, color, and texture.25 Unlike
modern painting, film has the close-up which, he felt, is uniquely suited to
achieving this goal because it forces viewers to look closely at recordings of
real objects on a large screen for a controlled period of time.
This is a strong version of medium specificity. It asserts that because of
its distinctive properties, a vehicular medium (or combination of vehicular
media) in one artistic medium can achieve an effect better than, or
unobtainable with, the vehicular media in other artistic media due to their
particular characteristics. Thus, in exploiting this specific effect, artists do
something in their artistic medium that the other arts cannot do as well or at
all, at least with the vehicular media they standardly employ.
Classical film theorists also advanced another argument in tandem with
their medium-specific ones, which is sometimes called medium
essentialism. This is the view that, in the words of Noël Carroll, “each art
form has its own distinctive medium, a medium that distinguishes it from
other art forms,” and that “the medium qua essence dictates what it is
suitable to do with the medium.”26 Siegfried Kracauer makes a medium
essentialist claim about photography. “It may be assumed,” he writes, “that
the achievements within a particular medium are all the more satisfying
aesthetically if they build from the specific properties of that medium.”27
Defining the specific properties of the vehicular medium of photographic
film to be recording and revealing reality, which he calls realism, he avers:
“The photographer’s approach may be called ‘photographic’ if it conforms
to the basic aesthetic principle. In an aesthetic interest, that is, he must
follow the realistic tendency under all circumstances.”28 As the use of the
word “must” in this extract suggests, medium essentialism is normative not
descriptive. It argues not that an artist working in an artistic medium can
make use of an effect deemed to be specific to a vehicular medium
employed by that art, but that they should do so in order to create artworks
in that artistic medium. The medium essentialist takes what is purportedly a
medium-specific feature of the vehicular medium and elevates it into the
essential property of the artistic medium, declaring that all works in the
artistic medium have to exploit or exhibit this property. For Kracauer,
because he identifies realism (i.e., recording and revealing reality) as the
essential element of photography’s vehicular media, photographers must
use this feature if they wish to create genuine photographic art.
It is this kind of prescriptive, medium-essentialist claim with the
constraints it attempts to place on artistic practice, found in a great deal of
classical film theory and other medium-specific theorizing, that accounts, I
suspect, for much of the hostility to medium specificity. Certainly this is
true of Carroll in his attack on the doctrine.29 He has consistently and
persuasively argued that the cinema, like other arts, has multiple vehicular
media that have many, often divergent or contradictory, uses that are
underdetermined by the media themselves. For example, celluloid film can
be used to make a movie that records and reveals reality, as in Robert
Drew’s revolutionary documentary Primary (1960) about the Wisconsin
primary election between John F. Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey, while
digital media can be employed in movies to create fantastical worlds that
have no existence in reality, such as the Pandora moon in James Cameron’s
Avatar (2009). There is no good reason why one of these vehicular media
and its uses must constitute the essence of the artistic medium of cinema,
Carroll maintains. He has also pointed out that the uses of vehicular media
in artistic media cannot be fixed in advance, either because new uses might
be discovered for those vehicular media or because new vehicular media
might be introduced to artistic media with new uses, as sound technology
was to cinema in the late 1920s. In addition, he has shown that artistic value
in the cinema does not correlate with exploitation by the filmmaker of the
uses deemed to be specific to its vehicular media. A movie that makes
phenomena perspicuous using mobile framing and editing can be terrible,
while one that does not can be a masterpiece. Carroll’s basic and enduring
point is that vehicular media have no normative consequences for the
artistic media that employ them. As he puts it, “the physical medium does
not select a unique purpose, or even a delimited range of purposes, for an
art form.”30
Given the variety of vehicular media with their divergent uses that can be
employed to make works in an artistic medium, a definition of cinema that
is rooted in a specific feature of one vehicular medium or even several
seems likely to fail, and therefore Carroll is right to reject medium
essentialism. However, this does not mean that medium-specific claims
should also be abandoned. For the doctrines of medium essentialism and
medium specificity are logically distinct. One can, without contradiction, be
a medium-specificist about cinema, claiming, for example, that it has the
capacity to afford better perceptual access to phenomena than other artistic
media due to the particular properties of its vehicular media, without
making the medium-essentialist argument that this capacity constitutes the
essence of cinema and filmmakers must make use of it if they wish to make
cinematic works. In other words, the claim that a vehicular medium can
achieve an effect specific to its artistic medium does not entail that this
specific effect must be exploited in order to create an art work in the artistic
medium. Carroll at least sometimes seems to conflate the two doctrines:
“What is medium essentialism?” he writes. “Roughly it is the doctrine that
each art form has its own distinctive medium, a medium that distinguishes it
from other forms.”31 Elsewhere he defines medium specificity the same
way: “The idea of medium specificity is that each art form has its own
specific medium.”32 But if medium essentialism and medium specificity are
logically distinct, then it is possible that the classical film theoretical project
of identifying specific effects of cinematic vehicular media in order to
distinguish the artistic medium cinema from the other arts can be uncoupled
from the medium-essentialist one of defining the essence of the artistic
medium of cinema by way of the specific effects of its vehicular media.
 M S D
As we have seen, classical film theorists held that, due to their distinctive
properties, certain cinematic vehicular media can achieve an effect better
than, or unobtainable with, the vehicular media typically associated with
other artistic media. This argument is not a medium essentialist one, for it
does not claim that filmmakers must exploit this specific effect in order to
create cinematic art, merely that they can do so. It is descriptive, not
normative. However, it does argue that in exploiting this specific effect, a
filmmaker is doing something that cannot be done as well if at all in other
arts with the vehicular media they usually employ. For example, Pudovkin,
as we have seen, believed that cinematic vehicular media enable better
perceptual access to phenomena than the vehicular media associated with
the other arts due to variable framing and editing, and other classical film
theorists made similar arguments. Indeed, even Marcel Pagnol, a man of the
theater often accused of making theatrical movies, celebrated this use of
cinematic vehicular media, proclaiming at the beginning of the sound era
that “the talkie offers the writer quite different and, in some cases,
marvelously original resources.”33
These theorists were clearly right to make this argument. If one defines
“better perceptual access” to phenomena to mean a succession of views of
them over time from different distances and angles including close-ups that
reveal them in detail, then the combination of the capacity to record things
in motion with variable framing, editing, the close-up, and the size of the
projected image did, in Pudovkin’s day, enable cinematic vehicular media
to give viewers better perceptual access to phenomena than the vehicular
media associated with the other arts. Consider, as an example, the shots of
the grandfather clock in Jean Epstein’s late silent era film The Fall of the
House of Usher (1928). After several shots of the exterior of the clock,
slow-motion close-ups of its pendulum swinging are followed by extreme
close-ups of the movements of its internal mechanism. These reveal the
internal mechanism in such detail that, as the clock strikes on the hour, we
can discern dust particles falling off its bell. It is hard to see how another
artistic medium could have provided such a clear and detailed view of the
exterior of the clock as well as the movements of its internal mechanism at
this point in time.
 However, as the caveats “in Pudovkin’s day” and “at this point in time”
suggest, a qualification is in order. For as Carroll points out in his theory of
the power of movies, the other arts could find equivalents to this specific
effect of cinematic vehicular media by inventing new technologies.
Adaptations of stage technology, of course, could probably establish theatrical means that
would be functionally equivalent to [variable framing]. Magnifying mirrors might be used to
enlarge stage details at appropriate moments; the leg curtains could be motorized to
constantly reframe the action … revolving stages [could] rotate the important characters and
actions toward the audience.34

But, as he goes on to say, “these devices are not customary in theater as we

presently know it.”35 What this means is that the effect of a vehicular
medium can only be specific relative to currently available vehicular media.
Changes in other artistic media and their vehicular media, as well as the
invention of new vehicular and artistic media, might rob any vehicular
medium, and therefore the artistic medium with which it is associated, of its
specificity. Indeed, this has happened in the case of perceptual access to
phenomena on the part of cinematic vehicular media. Since Pudovkin’s day,
new vehicular media have been invented, such as video, which can be used
to record things in motion, and new artistic media, such as television and
installation art, have arisen that employ many of the same vehicular media
as cinema to grant perceptual access to phenomena of the kind found in
film.
Thus, I am defending a version of the doctrine of medium specificity that
argues that, due to its distinctive properties, a vehicular medium or
combination of media can achieve an effect in an artistic medium better
than other currently available vehicular media, including those associated
with other artistic media, and this does not seem to me to be objectionable.
For we often say that a tool has a specific use in the sense that due to its
particular physical characteristics, it can be employed to do something that
other tools cannot in the full knowledge that, in the future, new tools might
be invented that can do this thing better still. Judgments about the specific
uses of a tool are not typically absolute but are made relative to a particular
time and place. As I have already noted, if one wants to create the highest
resolution digital moving image possible, then 4K is better than other
digital formats with their lower pixel counts. This effect is, in this sense,
specific to 4K. This does not mean it will always be so, however; indeed,
research and development of 8K, which contains four times as many pixels
as 4K, is already well underway.
Classical film theorists who made medium-specific claims were, by and
large, also aware that new technologies would emerge that would rob the
cinematic vehicular media of their day, and therefore the artistic medium of
cinema, of their specificity. Epstein’s contemporary, the Soviet film theorist
and filmmaker Dziga Vertov, argued that, due to its capacity to record
moving images of people at work in different times and places and to link
these recordings together using editing, the cinema could reveal to working-
class viewers what they had in common with workers whom they could
never meet in person due to geographical distance, thereby fostering a sense
of international working-class solidarity between them. As he put it: “We
want to … give everyone working behind a plow or a machine the
opportunity to see his brothers at work with him simultaneously in different
parts of the world.”36 For Vertov, no other art could do this to the same
degree. Their vehicular media either lack editing, movement, recording, or
all three. Hence, while they can connect people and reveal what they have
in common, they cannot join separate, moving images of a range of people
at work in their working environments recorded in a wide variety of times
and places.
Nevertheless, Vertov was acutely aware that the vehicular media he was
using to achieve this medium-specific effect would be superseded by new
technologies and even artistic media better at achieving it, such as broadcast
television with its instantaneous electronic transmission of moving images
and sounds of workers around the globe, which he frequently looked
forward to: “Technology is moving swiftly ahead,” he wrote in 1925; “In
the future man will be able to broadcast to the entire world the visual and
auditory phenomena recorded by the radio-movie camera.”37 In claiming
that “cinema has not yet been invented,” André Bazin, too, signaled his
awareness that new technologies had and would continue to be invented
that would more perfectly realize than older cinematic vehicular media
what he saw as the founding nineteenth-century myth of cinema’s telos,
namely, “an integral realism, a recreation of the world in its own image.”38
 G M S
Berys Gaut is one of the few contemporary film theorists to have defended
the doctrine of medium specificity. However, there are some instructive
differences between us, and Gaut’s version of medium specificity, while
important and valuable, has certain limitations. For Gaut, “while there are
cases where distinctness (specificity) should be understood in terms of
uniqueness, the general understanding of this claim should be in terms of
differential properties—properties that distinguish one group of media from
another group, but that are not necessarily unique to any particular
medium.”39 Gaut argues that when evaluating artworks, or explaining their
artistic features, we often have to appeal to properties of their media that are
distinctive but not unique to them, as when we distinguish between visual
and verbal art forms or interactive and noninteractive digital media. In these
cases, we are discriminating between groups of media on the basis of
whether they share a characteristic or not, rather than ascribing a unique
feature to a single medium. This “differential” conception of specificity is
certainly one we employ, and Gaut is right to point to the important role it
plays in our practices with art. For instance, there are some nonfiction
television genres that don’t exist in cinema, and we must appeal to a
property of television that film lacks—its capacity to broadcast images and
sounds live—to explain this fact. But liveness is not a unique feature of
television, as radio can also broadcast live, and it is therefore specific to
television in what Gaut calls a differential rather than unique sense. The
same is true of the “indexicality” that theorists such as Doane and Balsom
view as the distinguishing feature of celluloid-based film, given that
indexicality is also a property of photography and is therefore not unique to
cinema.
Nevertheless, this is a weak version of medium specificity, and one might
question whether it is correct to call it medium specificity at all. After all,
the name of the doctrine is medium specificity, not media-specificity, and it
is usually taken to refer to uniqueness claims about a single medium, not a
group of media. As we will discuss in a moment, some but not all media
consist of moving images, but we wouldn’t normally think of being a
moving image as a medium-specific property of, say, video games or
television even though it is what Gaut calls a differential feature of these
media. Nor would we say that being a still image is a medium-specific
characteristic of photographs or paintings. But even if we are willing to
accept Gaut’s differential conception of specificity as a legitimate version of
medium specificity, it is not the one found in classical film theory, which I
have been concerned with defending here. Classical film theorists certainly
acknowledged that cinema shared many features with other artistic media
such as theater and painting. However, rather than locating film within one
group of media as opposed to another based on their differential
characteristics, they were concerned to distinguish cinema from all other
artistic media and legitimize it as an art form by showing that it could do
certain things either better than the other arts or that the other arts couldn’t
do at all. Classical film theorists by and large subscribed to medium
specificity, not media specificity.
Gaut recognizes this and also attempts to defend a stronger version of
medium specificity close to the one propounded by classical film theorists.
As he puts it, “For a medium to constitute an art form it must instantiate
artistic properties that are distinct from those that are instantiated by other
media.”40 Although Gaut uses the term “distinct” rather than “unique” in
this formulation, it leads him to make some uniqueness claims about
cinema.
Cinema is the medium of the moving image; so moving images are unique to it; and certain
of its devices are also distinctive, and indeed unique to it. Editing (in the sense of editing
together of motion shots) and camera movement occur only in cinema, for instance. A scene
can be edited in different ways … so that artistic properties can be achieved that are
distinctive to the medium. For instance, by accelerating the editing rhythm one can generate
increasing emotional tension and excitement.41

An obvious objection to this argument is that moving images are not unique
to cinema but are employed by many other artistic mediums such as
television and video games. However, Gaut is using the term “cinema” in a
nonstandard way to mean “the medium of the moving image,”42 and for
him cinema therefore “comes in many kinds,”43 among which Gaut
includes video games and television as well as shadow plays. Carroll makes
a similar argument, locating cinema within a much broader category he
calls the moving image and which he defines with an essential definition
that, as he happily acknowledges, encompasses many types of moving
image, “including kinetoscopes, video, broadcast TV, CGI, and
technologies not yet even imagined.”44
One problem with defining cinema as the medium or art form of the
moving image is that it fails to distinguish between cinema and other
moving image media. “We should at least know,” Carroll writes, “what we
are talking about when we say we are going to the movies, lest we find
ourselves at the ballet. For such reasons we need a definition or analysis of
cinema.”45 But most people would be surprised if, having declared the
intention to go to the movies, they found themselves watching an automated
flip book, which falls under Carroll’s definition of the cinema-as-moving
image, or sitting down to play a video game, which comes under Gaut’s.
Another problem is that it is not clear that there is such a thing as the
medium or art form of the moving image. Of course there are such things as
moving images, but this does not mean there is an artistic medium of the
moving image. For there to be an artistic medium, as we have seen, there
needs to be a distinct set of practices governing the uses of some vehicular
media. Hence, if there were an artistic medium of the moving image, we
should be able to point to a distinctive set of practices encompassing the use
of any and all moving image vehicular media. But is there one? After all, if
I said, “Let’s go and see a moving image today,” the response would
probably be, “Which kind? A movie? A TV show? A video game? A
shadow play?” There is, in other words, no place where something called
the medium or art form of the moving image is practiced or exhibited,
whereas there are places where video games, movies, and so on are
practiced and exhibited.
What this suggests is that we individuate moving image media, just as we
do other artistic media, in part by their vehicular media, by the materials
used to make and exhibit them, because these materials give them
distinctive and sometimes unique qualities. We distinguish between video
games and movies because the vehicular media of the former allow for
modes of interactivity that the latter’s vehicular media do not. Meanwhile,
the vehicular media of cinema can create audiovisual experiences that video
games cannot, and so on. It therefore seems senseless to speak of the
moving image as a particular medium just as it does the still image. There is
no such thing as the artistic medium of the still image, viz., a peculiar set of
practices governing the use of any and all still image media. Instead, there
are several different artistic media or sets of practices that, due in part to the
particular properties of their vehicular media, use still images in distinct if
overlapping ways, such as portraiture in photography and painting. The
same is true, I suspect, in the case of moving image artistic media. To be
sure, they overlap and share the property of being moving images. But this
doesn’t mean they are all part of the single artistic medium of the moving
image.
The most important objection to Gaut’s uniqueness claims about cinema,
however, is that they fail. It is simply not true that “Cinema is the medium
of the moving image; so moving images are unique to it; and certain of its
devices [such as editing and camera movement] are also distinctive, and
indeed unique to it.” For one thing, some of the media that fall under Gaut’s
definition of cinema, such as shadow plays, do not have editing and camera
movement, so these devices are at best only unique to some cinematic
media, not to cinema as the medium of the moving image (if such a thing
exists). For another, by defining the cinema as the medium of the moving
image, its putatively unique properties turn out to be merely differential
ones. Given that a group of media—the moving-image media that are
contained (or “nest”) within cinema as the medium of the moving image—
possess them, all that Gaut’s uniqueness claims in the context of cinema do
is to distinguish between moving-image media and non-moving image
media. Finally, according to Gaut’s own definition of an artistic medium as
practice, there are other artistic media or practices that employ moving
images containing editing and camera movement, such as performance art
and installation art. Unless one wants to broaden the category still further
and count these artistic media as instances of cinema too, it is not the case
that moving images are specific in the sense of unique to cinema given that
other media and art forms employ them as well. This is why it is important
to acknowledge, as I have done, that medium-specific characteristics are
always contingent and relative to a historical context. Changes in other
artistic media and their vehicular media might rob any vehicular medium
and the artistic medium with which it is associated of its specificity, and this
has certainly happened in the case of cinema. While it may have been true
that moving images and their properties were unique to cinema in the
1920s, this is no longer the case.
 C
The functionalist, historical version of medium specificity I am defending
argues that, due to its distinctive properties, a vehicular medium or
combination of vehicular media can achieve an effect in an artistic medium
either better than other vehicular media or that other vehicular media cannot
attain at all because of their particular characteristics, including the
vehicular media employed by other art forms. Hence this effect is specific
in the sense of unique to the artistic medium that uses the vehicular media
capable of producing it. Some might object that this version of medium
specificity, while perhaps true, is trivial and uninteresting. For I have had to
purge the doctrine of much that made it attractive to classical film theorists.
I have acknowledged that identifying effects specific to cinematic vehicular
media does not help define the essence of cinema as an artistic medium,
because I have uncoupled medium specificity from medium essentialism
and agreed that the art of cinema can employ a variety of vehicular media in
many different ways. Nor does my version of the doctrine allow theorists to
unequivocally differentiate the artistic medium of cinema and its vehicular
media from other artistic media, for it is hedged with a qualification about
specificity being relative to currently available vehicular media. Finally, I
have admitted that artistic value in the cinema does not necessarily correlate
with exploitation by the filmmaker of the effects deemed to be specific to
its vehicular media. So what’s the point of identifying them?
There are several reasons to do so. First, in addition to showing that
contemporary film theorists such as Doane and Balsom, like their classical
predecessors, are right to attempt to identify medium-specific features of
film, it helps us understand why classical film theorists believed that the
cinema was a revolutionary artistic medium in which artists could do
certain things better than, or unobtainable with, the vehicular media used by
other artistic media. While, to be sure, they sometimes exaggerated the
revolutionary nature of the cinema, and coupled their claims about its
specificity with less defensible ones, this does not mean they were wrong to
believe that the cinema had specific effects in the sense of specificity I have
defended here.
Second, it also helps us to understand why we continue to differentiate
the cinema and its vehicular media from the other arts and their vehicular
media. Although new technologies, such as video, and new artistic media,
such as television, have arisen that have robbed the cinematic vehicular
media used in Pudovkin, Dulac, Epstein, and Vertov’s time and
consequently the artistic medium of cinema of much of their specificity, this
does not mean that there aren’t still important differences between the
cinema and the other arts, due to the distinctive properties of its vehicular
media. Most obviously, movies are still exhibited on large screens in
darkened movie theaters with high quality images and sound. This is why,
presumably, people are still willing to pay money to go to the movie theater
where they can have an audiovisual experience unobtainable elsewhere, and
cinephiles continue to insist that certain movies must be watched in a movie
theater because some of their artistic effects can only be properly perceived
or appreciated there. While this may change in the future, the cinema is still
capable of creating unique effects and experiences due to the particular
characteristics of its vehicular media.
Third, while Carroll is right to assert that exploitation by an artist of an
effect deemed to be specific to an artistic medium is neither a necessary nor
sufficient criterion of artistic value, it remains an important and commonly
used one. That is, in appreciating art works, we often value the skill and
originality with which artists manipulate their vehicular media to achieve
effects that are specific to those vehicular media and hence the artistic
medium that employs them. Dulac and Epstein’s great contemporary, Abel
Gance, was widely praised for his innovative use of rapid, rhythmic editing
in a scene in La roue (1922) in which the railway engineer, Sisif (Séverin-
Mars), is driving a train carrying Norma (Ivy Close), the woman he loves,
to Paris to be married to another man. By increasing the speed of the editing
to the point that shots are under a second in length, Gance expresses both
the heightened emotions of his characters and imparts the visceral sensation
of the train’s motion to his viewers, and it was the originality and
uniqueness of this latter effect that particularly impressed commentators at
the time. As René Clair remarked, “We had already seen trains moving
along tracks at a velocity heightened by the obliging movie camera, but we
had not yet felt ourselves absorbed—orchestra, seats, auditorium and
everything around us—by the screen as a whirlpool.”46 In the 1920s, Clair
believed that this effect, which he referred to as lyricism, was both specific
to the artistic medium of cinema due to the properties of its vehicular media
—no other artistic medium could create such a powerful sensation of
movement by rapidly alternating views of a fast moving object—and that it
constituted the essence of cinema as an art, arguing that “pure cinema”
occurs “as soon as a sensation [of motion] is aroused in the viewer by
purely visual means.”47 While, as I have already noted, the latter claim is
wrong because it is medium essentialist, valuing the discovery and/or
skillful exploitation of an effect specific to a vehicular medium remains a
common feature of our appreciation of art works, one that would be
incoherent if medium specificity was not true and vehicular media and their
unique properties were unimportant.
Carroll has recently protested that when the scope of medium specificity
is restricted to just some explanations and evaluations of artworks, as I (and
Gaut) suggest it should be, it becomes “too underwhelming to claim lineage
from [classical film] theorists such as Arnheim and Bazin.”48 For Carroll,
only the normative argument that filmmakers must utilize cinema’s
medium-specific features in order to create genuine works of film art—
what I have called medium essentialism—counts as a medium-specific
claim proper of the sort found in classical film theory. However, it is
debatable whether classical film theorists universally and consistently
subscribed to such an extreme, medium-essentialist version of medium
specificity. As Carroll himself has noted about Bazin,
it is often pointed out that in his criticism Bazin relaxed the strictures of his theoretical
articles. It may be further argued that since Bazin reversed himself or was willing to
contradict his theory when confronted with a great film, that it is unfair to belabor the
inadequacies of his theory.49

Bazin, in other words, often praised films that did not exploit the
photographic realism he (sometimes) viewed as the essence of cinema,
thereby suggesting that his commitment to medium essentialism was not as
unwavering as Carroll suggests in his criticisms of more moderate versions
of medium specificity. Moreover, as Bazin’s example attests, the
nonessentialist version of medium specificity I have defended here seems to
much better track the medium-specific assertions of film critics. Indeed, we
might label it the “ordinary language” version of medium specificity. For
example, when the critic Nick Pinkerton, writing for Sight & Sound, calls
the Mission Impossible films “the most consistently cinematic franchise of
the last 25 years,” he is referring to their often skillful realization of the
same medium-specific effect that Clair admired in Gance’s La Roue, what
he calls their “celebration of streamlined speed.”50 Yet, Pinkerton also
thinks highly of films that do not employ this effect, thereby demonstrating
that, like most critics and appreciators of film, he does not believe that films
must exploit medium-specific properties in order to be considered great
works of art. Carroll might continue to insist that this is an impoverished
version of medium specificity relative to the medium-essentialist one
propounded at least sometimes by classical film theorists. But impoverished
or not, it is widely in circulation, and for good reasons, if I am right in this
chapter. Indeed, even Carroll sometimes appears to make medium-specific
claims of the sort I have defended here, as when he writes: “Computer-
generated imaging (CGI), considered as a material medium, stages battles
between superheroes and behemoths bent on conquering Earth better than
other media, notably theater and maybe even photographically based
cinema.”51
Finally, as Gaut and others have argued, it is only by identifying the
specific effects of a vehicular medium that we can tell whether a new
vehicular medium can do something better than or unobtainable with older
vehicular media and, furthermore, whether it gives rise to a new artistic
medium. Much is being made right now of the artistic and other changes
brought about by the introduction of digital media into filmmaking, and
some have argued that digital cinema is a new art because it enables
filmmakers to do new, artistically valuable things such as achieve genuinely
photorealistic animation. Gaut, for example, claims that “distinct artistic
properties and values are achievable in digital cinema and this grounds the
claim that it constitutes a distinct art form.”52 This is in contrast to new
vehicular media such as acetate safety stock which replaced nitrate stock in
the early 1950s and which, Gaut suggests, did not give rise to a new art
because “nothing artistically interesting and distinctive can be
accomplished in acetate film that cannot be accomplished in nitrate film,
and vice versa.”53 However, if the only criterion for a new artistic medium
is its vehicular medium’s capacity to do new, artistically valuable things,
then the replacement of black and white by color film, or silent by sound
film, or the academy ratio by wide-screen processes would all have
constituted new artistic media. Rather, for a vehicular medium to form the
basis of a new artistic medium, according to Gaut’s own definition of a
medium, it has to give rise to a new set of practices, to novel ways of using
materials which, in the context of filmmaking, one could argue that digital
media have yet to do.
While undoubtedly digital vehicular media can achieve certain effects
(such as photorealistic animation) much better than older celluloid-based
ones, such capacities are being employed in much the same way miniature
sets, matte paintings, animated models, and composite shots were in the
predigital era—to create unreal worlds and creatures in fantasy movies such
as The Lord of the Rings (Peter Jackson, 2001), or to accurately recreate
real locations as in Zodiac (David Fincher, 2007). Indeed, digital media are
enabling filmmakers, both nonfiction and fiction, both avant-garde and
mainstream, to continue practices that have existed since the 1910s if not
before. Like older cinematic vehicular media, these new vehicular media
can be used to record and connect variably framed moving images, enabling
contemporary filmmakers to make cinematic works today that are all but
perceptually indistinguishable from those made in older cinematic media.
For example, they allow filmmakers to continue giving viewers the sort of
perceptual access to mental states prized so highly by Pudovkin, Dulac, and
others, as well as the capacity to reveal what people who are unknown to
each other have in common so valued by Vertov.
The way we use the word “film” to refer to cinematic works made in new
vehicular media, Carroll suggests, is like the way we use the words “Coke”
for any cola or “Xerox” for any copying machine. “In these cases, the
names of the earliest, most popular entrants to a field get used—in an
inaccurate way, strictly speaking—to refer to their successors and even their
competitors.”54 But there is another reason that we continue to use the word
“film,” namely, as is the case with newer colas and copying machines,
because there are so many similarities and continuities between cinematic
works made in older cinematic vehicular media and those made in newer
ones. What would be truly surprising is if older, celluloid-based cinematic
media were being abandoned for new digital media that could not, for
example, replicate variable framing, or could not record moving images of
people in different times and places. If classical film theorists could sample
cinema today, they would no doubt be amazed at all the technological and
other changes it has undergone. But they would, I submit, still recognize
contemporary films as works of cinema.55 Whether I am right about this or
not, however, the question of whether digital cinema is a new artistic
medium is, in part, a medium-specific one about the extent to which digital
vehicular media can achieve effects that older cinematic vehicular media
cannot. Medium specificity remains as relevant in the digital age as ever it
was.

A
I thank Richard Allen and Ted Nannicelli for their helpful comments on
earlier versions of this paper. Thanks, as well, to Kyle Stevens for his
feedback.

N
1. See, for example, David N. Rodowick, The Virtual Life of Film (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2007), 31–41. “Moving image media are related more by a logic of
Wittgensteinian family resemblances than by clear and essential differences,” Rodowick
concludes (86). Rodowick nevertheless holds out the hope for a non-essentialist version of
medium specificity: “it should still be possible to invoke the concept of a medium in ways that
are not reducible to arguments concerning essence…. Much can be said about medium
specificity that is nuanced historically and without legislating what artists should or should not
do” (41).
2. Noël Carroll, The Philosophy of Motion Pictures (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2008), ch. 3. The
original version of the definition of the moving image proposed in this chapter was not an
essentialist one. See Noël Carroll, “Defining the Moving Image,” in Theorizing the Moving
Image (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
3. Mary Ann Doane, “The Indexical and the Concept of Medium Specificity,” Differences: A
Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 18, no. 1 (2007): 130.
4. Ibid., 132.
5. Erika Balsom, “A Cinema in the Gallery, a Cinema in Ruins,” Screen 50, no. 4 (Winter 2009):
417.
6. Berys Gaut, A Philosophy of Cinematic Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010),
305.
7. Noël Carroll, Philosophical Problems of Classical Film Theory (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1988), 81. On the recent return to classical film theory in cinema studies, see,
 “A Return to Classical Film Theory?” October 148 (Spring 2014); and, “What’s New in
Classical Film Theory?” Screen 55, no. 3 (Autumn 2014). Price provides an excellent
overview of the role of medium-specificity in classical and contemporary film theory in his
Brian Price, “The Latest Laocoön: Medium Specificity and the History of Film Theory,” in
The Oxford Handbook of Film and Media Studies, ed. Robert Kolker (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2008), 38–82.
8. Gaut, Cinematic Art, 291–92. Murray Smith has also defended a weak (or what he calls
“deflationary”) version of medium specificity in relation to cinema, arguing that “the
cinematic” refers to “features in a film which … are in some way characteristic or prototypical
of the medium” rather than unique to it (Murray Smith, “My Dinner with Noël, or, Can We
Forget the Medium?” Film Studies 8, no. 1 (Summer 2006): 146).
9. For criticisms of the view that “indexicality” distinguishes celluloid-based film from digital
cinema, Malcom Turvey, “Ken Jacobs: Digital Revelationist,” October 137 (Summer 2011):
113–17.
10. Quoted in Jay Holben, “Unusual Developments,” American Cinematographer 80, no. 11
(November 1999), http://vnweb.hwwilsonweb.com/hww/results/getResults.jhtml?
_DARGS=/hww/results/results_common.jhtml.35.
11. Ibid.
12. Ibid.
13. David Davies, “Medium in Art,” in Oxford Handbook of Aesthetics, ed. Jerrold Levinson
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 181.
14. Gaut, Cinematic Art, 288.
15. Ibid.
16. David Davies, “Categories of Art,” in The Routledge Companion to Aesthetics, 3rd ed., ed.
Berys Gaut and Dominc McIver Lopes (London: Routledge, 2013), 226.
17. David Davies, Art as Performance (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004), 60. The term “vehicular
medium” acknowledges that artworks are not only made with physical materials, such as strips
of celluloid, but also symbolic ones, such as words, as well as actions.
18. Gaut, Cinematic Art, 288.
19. Ibid., 290. Moreover, when he defends what he calls the “evaluative” version of medium
specificity or “MSV,” “which holds that some correct artistic evaluations of artworks refer to
distinctive properties of the medium in which those artworks occur” (292), Gaut often refers to
the properties of the material being used. For example, he cites Michelangelo’s fresco painting
in the Sistine Chapel. “Since it is a quick-drying medium,” he points out, “the artist has to act
decisively and boldly in order to make an image … [and] opportunities for touching-up are
limited” (293). Hence, “Understanding this feature of fresco painting makes Michelangelo’s
achievement all the more extraordinary; he had to get it pretty much right first time and to
work extremely rapidly” (294). Although being quick-drying is hardly unique to fresco, and is
therefore an example of what Gaut calls a “differential property”—“properties that distinguish
one group of media from another group, but that are not necessarily unique to any particular
medium”—his point is that, in order to correctly evaluate Michelangelo’s artistic achievement
in the Sistine Chapel, one must make reference to a property of its material, the fact that fresco
dries quickly.
20. Vsevolod Pudovkin, Film Technique and Film Acting (New York: Grove Press, 1976), 81–84,
86.
21. Ibid., 91.
22. Germaine Dulac, “The Expressive Techniques of the Cinema,” in French Film Theory and
Criticism, A History/Anthology, Volume 1, 1907–1929, ed. Richard Abel (Princeton, NJ:
 Princeton University Press, 1988), 310.
23. Fernand Léger, Functions of Painting (New York: Viking Press, 1973), 50.
24. René Clair, Cinema Yesterday and Today, trans. Stanley Applebaum, ed. and intro. R. C. Dale
(New York: Dover, 1972), 20.
25. Léger, Functions of Painting, 21.
26. Carroll, “Defining the Moving Image,” 49–50.
27. Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1960), 12.
28. Ibid., 13.
29. See Carroll’s essays “Medium Specificity Arguments and the Self-Consciously Invented Arts:
Film, Video, and Photography,” “The Specificity of Media in the Arts,” and “Concerning
Uniqueness Claims for Photographic and Cinematographic Representation,” in Noël Carroll,
Theorizing the Moving Image (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). See also the
essays “Forget the Medium!” and “The Essence of Cinema?” in Noël Carroll, Engaging the
Moving Image (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), as well as Carroll, Philosophy
of Motion Pictures, ch. 2.
30. Carroll, “Specificity of Media,” 28. It should be noted that Perkins was the first to make this
argument. See Victor Perkins, Film as Film: Understanding and Judging Movies (New York:
Penguin Books, 1972), 59.
31. Carroll, “Defining the Moving Image,” 49.
32. Carroll, Philosophy of Motion Pictures, 36.
33. Marcel Pagnol, “The Talkie Offers the Writer New Resources,” in French Film Theory and
Criticism, A History/Anthology, Volume 2, 1929–1939, ed. Richard Abel (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1988), 55.
34. Carroll, “Power of Movies,” reprinted in Carroll, Theorizing the Moving Image, 86.
35. Ibid.
36. Dziga Vertov, “Kino-Eye,” in Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov, ed. Annette Michelson
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 73–74.
37. Dziga Vertov, “Kinopravda & Radiopravda,” in Michelson, ed., Kino-Eye, 56.
38. André Bazin, “The Myth of Total Cinema,” in What Is Cinema?, Vol. 1, ed. and trans High
Gray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 21.
39. Gaut, Cinematic Art, 291–92.
40. Ibid., 287.
41. Ibid., 302.
42. Ibid., 12.
43. Ibid., 6. Gaut argues that media “nest” in the sense that one medium can contain other media.
Just as the “medium of print itself contains etchings, woodcuts, engravings, lithographs, each
of which can also be properly termed a medium,” so the medium of cinema contains “the
medium of digital cinema or photochemical cinema,” along with many other moving image
media (19). This is an important and useful conceptual innovation. However, it is unclear why
all moving image media should nest within the medium of cinema (as opposed to the moving
image), and it creates confusion, equating video games and shadow plays with cinema.
44. Carroll, Philosophy of Motion Pictures, 3.
45. Ibid., 54.
46. René Clair, Cinema Yesterday and Today, ed. and intro. R. C. Dale (New York: Dover, 1972),
55.
47. Ibid., 100.
48. Carroll, “Medium Specificity,” in The Palgrave Handbook of the Philosophy of Film and
Motion Pictures, ed. Noël Carroll, Laura T. Di Summa, and Shawn Loht (Cham, Switzerland:
Palgrave Macmillan/Springer Nature, 2019), 37.
49. Carroll, Philosophical Problems of Classical Film Theory, 9.
50. Nick Pinkerton, “Thrill of the Hunt: Tom Cruise and the Mission Impossible Franchise,” Sight
& Sound, August 6, 2018, https://www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/sight-sound-
magazine/features/tom-cruise-mission-impossible-franchise.
51. Carroll, “Medium Specificity,” 34.
52. Gaut, Cinematic Art, 305.
53. Ibid.
54. Carroll, Philosophy of Motion Pictures, 4.
55. For further criticisms of the view that digital technologies have fundamentally transformed
cinema, see Ted Nannicelli and Malcolm Turvey, “Against Post-Cinema,” Cinéma & Cie:
International Film Studies Journal 26/27 (Spring/Fall 2016): 33–44.
 CHAPTER 6

IN DEFENSE OF
PSYCHOANALYTIC FILM
THEORY

DAMON ROSS YOUNG

“THERE is a big secret about sex,” Leo Bersani once wrote: “most people
don’t like it.”1 What is true of sex is also true of theory, and no doubt
doubly so when it comes to psychoanalytic theory, which conjoins what
many would see as the worst aspects of each, specializing in claims (like
Bersani’s) that defy empirical verification and relentlessly turning up sex
everywhere—behind every tree a phallus, behind every pack of wolves a
Father.2 Psychoanalysis, cornerstone of the out-of-favor “hermeneutics of
suspicion,” allegedly knows in advance what it is going to find, then finds
it.3 In so doing, writes Steven Shaviro—in one of the most trenchant and
entertaining, now vintage, dismissals of psychoanalytic film theory, which
he describes as a “stultifying orthodoxy” akin to a “religious cult”—it
produces the very system it purports to explain.4 In this chapter, I argue that
cinema as a historically specific technical medium—indeed, the dominant
cultural medium of the twentieth century—requires a psychoanalytic
theory; which is in part because, as Jonathan Beller and others have
emphasized, cinema and psychoanalysis emerge at the end of the nineteenth
century, as part of the same techno-historical-economic assemblage (at the
same stage, for Beller, of industrial and imperial capitalism).5 In the
classical period of film theory, discussions of the “ontology” of cinema
focused on its material grounding in the photographic image. While
cinema’s technical (i.e., photographic) realism is surely fundamental to its
ontology, I propose that equally fundamental is that cinema is a technology
of fantasy—which means it invites a psychoanalysis.
This chapter is also about methodology. The tension between theoretical
speculation and empirical caution has shaped the history of Anglophone
film studies since the 1960s. Among the complaints about psychoanalysis
that pepper the discipline’s polemics is that its claims reflect nothing more
than the desire of the critic, are unverifiable, and frequently absurd.6 But
pace some of its critics, psychoanalysis traffics in its own kind of empirical
caution, scrupulously attentive to material evidence—albeit as what never
fully discloses its meaning—and convinced of the fallibility of every
critical method, including its own (note Freud’s constant reversals, dead
ends, and protestations of his method’s limits). If psychoanalysis posits
anything, it is a dimension of existence—the unconscious—that eludes
apprehension, giving the lie to a domain of appearance that therefore invites
meticulous scrutiny. For this reason, psychoanalysis is at its core a method
of close reading, one whose essential posture Paul Ricoeur rightly
characterized as suspicious.7 But to be suspicious about “what [a] text says
about itself,” to cite an influential manifesto for postcritique, is not the same
as following an orthodoxy, nor is it compatible with the blind faith of a
religious cult.8 Shaviro’s critique of psychoanalytic film theory, though
certainly not on the side of the empiricists, characterizes that theory as a
reductive set of dogmatic interpretations whose diagnoses of castration
anxiety, lack, and the Oedipus complex are known in advance. In their
place, Shaviro posits “affect” and “sensation” as irreducible facts of sensate
existence.
The aim of this chapter is not to challenge affect-based theories of
cinema, of whose importance, and limitations, Eugenie Brinkema has given
a convincing account.9 It is, however, to propose that the affects that
traverse the cinematic body are never as “immediate” as we may want them
to be. Indeed, that affect and perception as much as cognition and
representation are profoundly mediated and therefore non-transparent is one
of psychoanalysis’s key contentions, focusing as it does on the mediations
between soma and psyche that Freud calls “drives,” and on the mediations
of the perceptual-sensory apparatus (the sensate body) by the unconscious.
The psyche is a medium, and mediation is a principle of the world’s (as well
as the subject’s) non-coincidence with itself.
Precisely because of its positing of an unconscious dimension of
existence, by definition a dimension that eludes the self-evidence attributed
to “affect” and “sensation,” psychoanalysis maintains that all identity is
redoubled by nonidentity—and nowhere more so than in relation to gender
and sexuality, notoriously central to its worldview.10 It is thus not surprising
that, in its formative translation into the Anglophone film studies context,
psychoanalytic film theory was a feminist theory from the outset, just as it
has been fundamental to the adumbration of a queer theory of film—an
ongoing project to which this chapter hopes to contribute.11 Even the much-
discussed Oedipus complex is in Freud’s account far from the catchall
interpretive key it is presented as being in the caricatured view that has
come to define its place in film theory. In Freud’s own account, the Oedipus
complex is divided from the beginning into a “positive” and a “negative”
Oedipus complex, mirrored structures that operate together, leading to his
remark: “I am accustoming myself to regarding every sexual act as an event
between four individuals”!12 Bersani pushes Freud’s logic of redoubling
and multiplication to its logical conclusion, showing that rather than four,
there are actually six, eight, or ten figures involved to the point that every
sexual encounter becomes “a fantasmatic orgy.”13 This dizzying
proliferation of virtualities is, by definition, neither empirically concrete nor
perceptible but is, to borrow a phrase from Kara Keeling, “lying in wait”
within empirical experience.14 Far from confirming any positive and
pregiven interpretation, the reversals and negations, fantasmatic
condensations, and displacements constitutive of psychic life, according to
psychoanalysis, belie our deeply felt attachments to stable sexual or gender
identities and, as queer theory has demonstrated, show such attachments to
be essentially defensive.15 In other words, psychoanalysis throws empirical
experience into doubt in a quite specific way—negativizing our gendered
and sexual identities, revealing them to inevitably include (as defensive
negation) the very attributes and identifications they refuse. The corollary to
this work of negativization (which could also be termed “virtualization”) is
that psychoanalysis demonstrates the essential groundlessness of identities
that are nevertheless fully rooted in the biological body: that identities are
both biologically rooted and groundless is a paradox that psychoanalysis
sustains. If the body cannot stabilize the identities it houses, this is because
it is redoubled from the outset by the imaginary body, the body as projected
image, or what Freud calls the “bodily” nature of the ego.16
At the most general level, psychoanalytic theory pursues the rather
Hegelian thought that everything we experience (the manifest contents of
psychic life) contains within it the negated possibility of that which it is not,
which negatively defines it; unlike the “science” it sometimes claims to be,
the aim of psychoanalytic inquiry is the prising open of ambiguity rather
than the certainty of its interpretations. But nor is this simply a skepticism
at the level of ideas; often charged with “idealism,” psychoanalysis is in
fact quite radically a theory of embodiment. Its body, however, is not simply
material or biological, not simply physiological, perceptive, and
proprioceptive; it is perceptual but not reducible to perception, since what is
manifest in the body (a body that includes the brain) materializes out of a
sea of latency or virtuality that psychoanalysis refers to as the
unconscious.17 Therefore, the body cannot be simply mapped or described;
nor can any phenomenology based primarily on bodily perceptions avoid a
certain kind of tautology—akin to surface reading, telling us not “what the
text says about itself” but what our body tells us it perceives.18 The body of
psychoanalysis is a biological inscription of fantasy (for a tangible example,
think of a bodybuilder whose superb crafting of her or his body is in some
sense the inscription of a fantasy about masculinity or femininity), and the
body is also the source of fantasy. In both directions, the body is not a mere
instrument of perception and cognition; it is hypercharged with
signification, constructed as a coherent entity through fantasies that
function both negatively (defensiveness, repudiation) and positively
(identification, ego-ideal). Our language registers this fact—consider the
number of anatomical expressions in everyday speech. Insofar as the body
is a signifying system as much as it is a biological entity, it is inextricable
from a process of reading; it is itself an expression of this reading.
Psychoanalysis is one mode of such reading; cinema is another; we can
think of both as contemporaneous apparatuses of bodily semiotics, in which
the body comes into view as a signifying assemblage of which actual
speech may be only one part.
 Pursuing a related line of thought, in an essay on psychoanalysis and
melodrama, Peter Brooks observes that both take as their object “the body
wholly invested with meaning.”19 Brooks draws our attention to a passage
in Freud’s 1901 case study of Dora, written in cinema’s first decade, which
he sees as theatrical, but which seems to be more properly cinematic. In that
text, Freud writes: “He that has eyes to see and ears to hear may convince
himself that no mortal can keep a secret. If his lips are silent, he chatters
with his fingertips; betrayal oozes out of him at every pore.”20 Freud’s text
proliferates body parts, on both sides of the looking relation: eyes, ears,
lips, fingertips, and pores, each involved in a semiotic activity of
interrogation, dissembling, or disclosure. Note the scale at stake in this
description, evoking fingertips and pores that betray what lips won’t tell:
this parsing of the body at the level of micromovements, beneath the
threshold of perceptibility that operates on the theatrical stage, already
anticipates the cinematic close-up.21 In this protocinematic description,
sense organs (on both sides of the “screen”) do not deliver self-evident
perceptual experience or any substantive interpretive knowledge but only
the sense of something at odds with itself (“lying in wait”) within the
empirical–perceptual field.
What is in question here is not the “ideality of signification”—which
Shaviro opposes to the “materiality of sensation,” valorizing the latter as a
rejection of the former. The choice is a false one, since Freud’s description
is precisely of the materiality of sensation; however, not in a way that
mistakes either sensation or materiality for a self-evidence. What the sense
organs—“eyes to see” and “ears to hear”—disclose is the duplicity of that
very materiality, which is to say the limits of phenomenal experience. The
method at stake in Freud’s description is not one that entails a flight into
idealism but demands, rather, a closer look at the self-contradictions of the
signifying body. In projecting a cut, of sorts, from lips to fingertips, Freud’s
“eyes to see” are already cinematic eyes, and what they open onto is not
“the redemption of physical reality,” to cite the later Kracauer, but, on the
contrary, a nonredemptive vision of the phenomenal world as a site of
disjuncture.
This passage in Fragments of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria finds an
echo in Béla Balázs’s famous early essay, “The Close Up.” Balázs’s account
presents the close-up as the fundamental cinematic technique, and one that
generates a suspicious, bodily hermeneutics: “You may see a medium shot
of someone sitting and conducting a conversation with icy calm. The close-
up will show trembling fingers fumbling a small object—sign of an internal
storm.”22 Here, the different levels of cinematic syntax transmit conflictual
orders of meaning: the medium shot presents the everyday appearance of
“icy calm,” but the close-up retrospectively casts a shadow of a doubt (so to
speak) on what the medium shot records, negativizing the semantic contents
of the conversation, disclosing not the hidden truth those contents conceal,
in any positive sense, but the fact of their duplicity. All words, after all,
might mean what they say or might not, and the function of the close-up
here is to remind us of this doubleness, what Paul de Man calls the
fundamental irony of speech.23 The negativity in speech (the irreducible
fact that it may or may not mean what it says) is revealed by the close-up to
be lodged in the body, physically inscribed in the telltale grimaces and
unconscious tics that it is the unique vocation of the cinematic close-up to
register.24 The tension within words between affirmation and ironic
negation is transformed by the camera into a sensational tension at the
surface of the world.
The effect is not only a rupture at the level of words’ intended meaning.
While the close-up is typically considered to be a cornerstone of continuity
editing, “analyzing” a space conceived as homogeneous, in André Bazin’s
terms, the close-up in Balázs’s description produces a radical shift of
register, “abstract[ing its] object from all spatio-temporal coordinates.”25 It
is not only, then, that the close-up of a detail “analyzes” the space of the
scene by directing our attention within its empirical coordinates, for this
would imply that the space-time of cinema corresponded to that of the
empirical world and was not already fantasmatic. The close-up
fantasmatizes the physical world; its technological gaze manufactures a
heterogeneous body in a heterogeneous spatiotemporal field. At one level,
the close-up reveals what eludes ordinary perception, rendering “tiny
movements of facial muscles which even the most observant partner would
never perceive.”26 We can push this description further: becoming
perceptible in and through the close-up, here endowed with the intensity of
a psychoanalyst’s gaze, these mechanically rendered micromovements
register the nonidentity of bodily being, and by extension, of reality itself. It
is that disjuncture—that negativity at the heart of words and things—that is
revealed or produced through the sensory prosthesis of the cinema as
apparatus.27
The close-up, as a grammatical unit, thus generates a disjuncture in the
camera’s function of “recording,” a verb that suggests an operation of
mechanically registering the already-existent. Far from simply registering a
material reality that preexists that registration, the close-up, as a
fundamental modality of the cinematic apparatus, opens up an order of
being that belongs to the domain of vision, but not in the Cartesian sense in
which vision serves to orient the viewer in homogeneous space.28 The
close-up does not offer an analysis within space-time; in it, we are thrust
into the disjunctive dimension, in Balázs’s term, of “physiognomy”—not
only of humans, but of the world itself.29 (If this physiognomy remains
anthropocentric in Balázs’s account, it need not retain that humanist
conceit.) The close-up’s physiognomic operation does not integrate into a
coherent totality what it magnifies; it discloses the non-self-coincidence of
the empirical world—or differently put, the unconscious—just as in the slip
of the tongue, a void is opened beneath or within the semantic contents of
the uttered phrase. Close-up and unconscious, emerging from the same
technohistorical conjuncture, are conceptual and technological apparatuses
enframing disjunct registers of being; the virtual “lying in wait” (as a
positive reserve but also a determinate negation) within the empirical; the
non-self-enclosure of phenomenal time and space; the duplicity of allegedly
“immediate” affect and sensation; the noncoincidence of things with
themselves. As the resonances between Freud’s and Balázs’s statements
reveal, the very syntax of the narrative cinema that centrally includes the
close-up invites a “hermeneutics of suspicion”; such a hermeneutics is
native, as it were, to the apparatus that introduces the close-up as a key
syntactical unit, part of the same assemblage. It is not enough to say that
narrative films, in their syntactical form, betray every surface reading—
even more, they are about this very betrayal. Which is why I suggested
earlier that the “ontology” of cinema, such as it is, does not lie only in the
photographic basis of its images, in its technological process of registering
reality, but in its technological modulation of fantasy. In the sense that
Rosalind Krauss once argued that the “medium of video is narcissism”—a
formulation I will return to—I would contend that the medium of cinema is
fantasy.

T M C I F
Fantasy bears on cinema in at least two senses: first, in its properly
psychoanalytic sense, fantasy being, in Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand
Pontalis’s account, the “fundamental object of psychoanalysis.”30 For
Laplanche and Pontalis, fantasy is at the very basis of psychic life, located
at the division between biological need and the psychic displacements of
object and aim constitutive of sexuality. Fantasy inhabits a nebulous
ontological register: in the first place, the term designates a domain of
experience free from the constraints of reality-testing (in this, already, it is
akin to cinema), and thus belongs to a reality that is not empirical but
“psychic.” In different iterations, it might name an invented “fiction … (as
in daydreaming),” or “a construction contrary to appearances (as in screen-
memory)”—in other words, a counterfactual interpretation of or story about
reality, which is to say, a translation of reality into a fantasmatic register. At
other times, it is itself the unconscious material that requires translation into
consciousness, the “latent content … behind the symptom.” Laplanche and
Pontalis offer as an example that the symptom of agoraphobia might
conceal a repressed “fantasy of prostitution, of street-walking.” (Or, as a
related, cinematic example: in Luis Buñuel’s explicitly psychoanalytic Belle
de Jour (1967), Séverine’s aversion to sex conceals the fantasy, soon
actualized, of putting her body at the service of the enigmatic desire of
unchosen others: her frigidity conceals a sexual fantasy that is its hidden
analogue in that both concern a refusal to make desire her “own.”) Fantasy
need not be sexual, but it is the very stuff of sexuality. It holds reality
together, suturing its gaps, but it is also the virtual within the real, the
refusal to submit to the ontological sovereignty of what is. Fantasy can be
conscious or unconscious; in other words, it functions, write Laplanche and
Pontalis, “both as manifest data and latent content,” neither exclusively one
nor the other.31 Fantasy thus traverses all the major psychoanalytic
categories, right at their fault line. Significantly for our purposes, Laplanche
and Pontalis, in their careful tracking of the concept across the Freudian
corpus, settle on a theatrical and cinematic metaphor to gather together the
functions of fantasy, describing it as the “stage-setting of desire.”32 I will
return to this formulation.
Finally, fantasy, in this discussion, does not only arise from within nor
respond to endogenous causes (such as biological impulses or psychic
drives). It is also received from without; it is a translation of the enigmatic
demand of the other, in the retroactive temporality of Nachträglichkeit.33
This dimension of fantasy, deriving from the subject’s constitutive exposure
to the outside world, opens onto the second, less technical, sense in which
fantasy bears on theorizations of the cinema: the idea of “cultural fantasy,”
by which I do not mean anything like a “collective unconscious” but rather
the circulating narratives, significations, beliefs, or what Roland Barthes
calls “mythologies,” that are properly historical and also, of course,
ideological. Each of us makes sense of them in our own way, but it from
this cultural material that the self necessarily takes its reference points. For
this reason, in my own research, I approach cinema as a “technology of
cultural fantasy”—indeed, the predominant technology of cultural fantasy
in the twentieth century (Susan Sontag called cinema “the art of the
twentieth century”), displacing the novel.34
Cultural fantasy might involve, for example, the imaginaries around
masculinity and whiteness—the conjoined fears of femininity and racial
difference—that shaped the rise of fascism in interwar Germany, according
to Klaus Theweleit.35 Concerning the same period and in specific relation to
cinema, Kracauer’s From Caligari to Hitler, fittingly subtitled A
Psychological History of the German Film, aims to show how the cultural
fantasies that shape history are mediated through popular cinema.36 From
different contexts, what Lee Edelman calls “reproductive futurism” (in the
United States) or Camille Robcis “familialism” (in France) are, as varieties
of bourgeois republicanism, cultural fantasies about the centrality of the
biologically reproductive family to the existence of liberal society.37 This
last set of fantasies marks a crucial axis of continuity between the
nineteenth-century novel and mainstream narrative cinema of the twentieth
century, both of which imagine a subjectivity forged in the crucible of the
conjugal family.38
 If cinema is a dominant technology of cultural fantasy in the twentieth
century then the fantasies that give shape to twentieth-century subjectivity
and experience in many parts of the world take shape in relation to cinema
and through our encounters with cinema—here the idea of cultural fantasy
bears on the problematics of identification, a venerable topic of film
theory.39 This is what James Baldwin shows, for example, in his 1976 film-
centered memoir, The Devil Finds Work. In that text, Baldwin narrates his
childhood through the lens of his experiences at the cinema. As a child of
the cinematic century, the way he makes sense of a world to which he
belonged and did not belong, the way he imagined his place within it, takes
place through a cinematic process of gendered, racial, and class
identification and disidentification, desire, and repulsion.
Identification in Baldwin’s text is not a straightforward process. The book
opens with an image: “Joan Crawford’s straight, narrow, and lonely back.”
Baldwin’s gaze on the white, female star is idealizing, poetic (the back is
“lonely”), and sensuous. Crawford serves as a synecdoche for the cinema:
the seven-year-old Baldwin is “fascinated” by the “movement on, and of,
the screen … something like the heaving and swelling of the sea (though I
have not yet been to the sea)” and also “something like the light which
moves on, and especially beneath, the water.”40 Here, in a circular fantasy,
the cinema screen evokes a movement that itself evokes a sea that Baldwin
has never seen, except in the cinema. The sensory properties of water, light,
and movement characterize the encounter with the fantasmatic space of the
cinema in a book that begins with the words “Joan Crawford,” thus creating
a metonymic link from the white woman’s glamorous body, made
luminescent by the technologies of filming, to concrete and abstract
qualities of nature. This metonymic movement takes place in Baldwin’s
writing as a way of evoking the process of fantasy that the cinema enables.
Soon after, we learn that the most important figure of identification for
the young Baldwin was another white star of Hollywood melodramas, Bette
Davis.41 The young James encounters Davis near the beginning of his film-
going career in the 1930s, age 10, at a moment that corresponds to the
beginning of Davis’s acting career. In her study of race and early cinema,
Jane Gaines has unfolded the complex dynamics of Baldwin’s strange and
moving identification with Davis, which passes not through glamor or
beauty—on the contrary—and not through any sense of a positively shared
or aspirational identity but rather through a trope, “frog-eyes,” which is how
Baldwin’s father described his eyes, meant as an insult for his mother,
whose eyes Baldwin says he has.42 During a screening of a film he
remembers as 20,000 Years in Sing Sing (though from the description, the
film may actually have been Of Human Bondage), Baldwin finds himself
rapt in the spectacle of Davis’s “pop-eyes popping … [H]ere before me …
was a movie star: white; and if she was white and a movie star, she was
rich: and she was ugly.”43 The ugliness his father attributed to the young
James and to his mother is transvalued by Davis, teaching him that his
perceived infirmities “might be forged into weapons.”44 Eyes connect Davis
to James’s mother and to James via his father’s slur, their “frog-eyed”
quality ramifying across racial, gender, and class categories and also the
human/animal divide.45 In a circular chain, the metonymic displacement of
the insult from Baldwin’s mother to Baldwin facilitates his identification
with the white woman, Davis, and also serves to nestle and redeem the
identification with his mother. Cinema thus refracts his familial circuit of
identifications through the prism of a larger world. In a striking passage,
Baldwin then uses a racial epithet to describe his impression of how Davis
moves.46 His fascination with her is at once abjecting (calling her ugly and
using racial epithets—but these are also axes of his identification) and
idealizing. A future opens up for the young Baldwin through a cross-racial
and cross-gendered identification with a melodramatic femininity that is at
once somehow inhuman (“the white-greenish cast of something crawling
from under a rock”), abject, powerful, and glamorous.
Identification in this description lies at the juncture between cultural
(which is to say, historical) fantasy and the fantasies that anchor the
subject’s self-relation. It does not take the form of an affirming self-
recognition in a cultural representation; rather, it traverses unconscious and
conscious attachments and displacements, including the family in its
psychic circuit and folding the white star into the Black family, not
positively but as a figure of disjuncture: the “disaster of the lips,” the
fugitivity of the movement, the “pop-eyes popping” effecting an
identification precisely as what cannot be integrated into the coherent form
of an ego-ideal. In the twentieth century, cinema is the technology that most
extensively mediates the interface between the cultural and the personal, the
historical and the fantasy of the subject’s own history, the ideological and
the subjective. “[M]y first conscious calculation as to how to go about
defeating the world’s intentions for me and mine began on that Saturday
afternoon in what we called the movies, but which was actually my first
entrance into the cinema of my mind.”47 Finally arriving at the overarching
metaphor of the mind as cinema, cinema as mind, Baldwin’s text makes
clear that the cinema—though its material is the physical world and
perceptual modulation its mode of operation—is a psychic technology, one
that requires an account of fantasy.48

T V :P
In the discussion in the previous section, fantasy pertains mostly to the
content of films, but the fantasy structure of cinema is also technical or
technological, bound up in the voyeuristic architecture of a medium that
Stanley Cavell describes as “inherently pornographic.” The pornographic
ontology of the cinema relates, for Cavell, to the nonreciprocal structure of
the look it facilitates, whereby the spectator is “ontologically invisible” but
adopts a gaze that always holds out the promise of seeing more.49 The 1960
horror film Peeping Tom (Michael Powell), discussed below, thematizes this
ontological invisibility and its inherent perversity—as if anticipating all of
the so-called apparatus theory—along with its gendered and fantasmatic
dimensions. Before embarking on that discussion, I would like to turn to its
earlier namesake, the original Peeping Tom, released by Pathé in 1901, the
year of Freud’s case study of Dora. (The film was released as Peeping Tom
in the UK, whereas the French title was more literal: Par le trou de la
serrure (Through the Keyhole)). In French film textbooks, this film
furnishes an early example of the plan subjectif or “subjective shot,” in
which what the spectator sees is clearly marked as the view of a character in
the fiction—in this case, a male hotel clerk who peers through the titular
keyhole of four different doors (fig. 6.1).50 (The thematization of the
subject thus created by what functions here as an allegory for the cinema
apparatus will eventually mark the divide between classical and
contemporary film theory, shifting from a focus on film techniques and
aesthetics to a focus on the spectator.51) Through repeated use of a shot-
reverse shot syntax, of which it was an early pioneer, the film shows us
what the clerk sees, each time through a keyhole-shaped matte, whose
obtrusiveness creates a metaphor for the camera’s viewfinder, thus bringing
into view the camera as technical apparatus. In other words, the film uses
the innovative shot-reverse shot syntax to produce what Metz will later call
“secondary identification”—identification with a character in the fiction,
here the hotel clerk—while also thematizing “primary identification,” the
spectator’s identification with the camera. Looking through the keyhole
becomes, in this artifact of narrative cinema in its germinal state, an
allegory for cinematic looking. The film offers an autotheory of cinema as
technical apparatus—one which, anticipating Cavell, tropes toward the
pornographic.
The view through the first keyhole presents a woman in her
undergarments performing a series of actions: she combs and grooms her
hair, looks in a mirror, douses herself in perfume, and applies makeup (fig.
6.2). Both the diegetic content (a woman in a state of undress performing
the labor of self-ornamentation) and the structure (a man, whose view we
share, looking at this woman) illustrate a principle cinema inherits from a
longer history of Western art according to which, as John Berger formulates
it: “Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at.”52
Berger mentions the prevalence, in easel painting, of images of naked
women holding mirrors, thematizing a feminine Vanitas as a cover for the
paintings’ real function, namely, to inscribe a gendered system of power
relations mediated by the look.53 In Par le trou de la serrure, this familiar
image of self-regarding woman is presented to the film spectator only via
the identification of the spectator’s look with that of the camera and a male
character. The film thus directly diagrams what Laura Mulvey will later
refer to as the “three looks” of cinema, here in alignment. In staging a
diegetically literal “male gaze” at the very moment of the invention of the
subjective view, Par le trou de la serrure makes clear that the gendered
norms of cinematic looking were built into narrative film syntax long before
the classical period Mulvey refers to in her famous analysis.54
Figures 6.1. and 6.2. Subjective shot: Par le trou de la serrure, 1901.

Strikingly, at the very moment this primal scene introduces into the
grammar of narrative cinema a gendered structure of the look continuous
with a longer history of visual representation (and destined to become
paradigmatic), it exposes what we can think of, in Judith Butler’s terms, as
the performativity of gender, which is to say its nonnaturalness. The woman
in the first room, whose sexual desirability the hotel clerk indicates by using
his hands to mime the shape of her body, is seen engaged in a labor of
feminine self-construction using various technical instruments: the comb,
the mirror, the perfume, the makeup. Not only is the link between look and
apparatus reflexively indicated by the film’s keyhole matte, which calls
attention to the lens, the shot also discloses the prosthetic and technical
ground of gender. Within the diegesis, the woman is seen making herself,
through the artifice of makeup, perfume, hair styling, into an object of the
gaze (i.e., in the terms of this film and system, a woman). Moreover, the
diegetic performance of artifice is redoubled extradiegetically by the
obvious fakeness of her hair (an absurdly long and ill-fitting wig). The hair
is presented as central to the diegetic erotic spectacle, but a comic effect
derives from its status as obviously prosthetic, which makes it into a
signifier of desirability for a desire that is itself (only) performatively
indicated. Both desire and its object are technologically produced.
Even more strikingly, the masquerade of femininity exposed in the first
room as a labored and artificial construction is diegetically redoubled in the
view through the second keyhole, in which the hotel clerk gazes on a
“woman” engaged in the opposite process, reversing the labor of feminine
self-construction as she removes prosthetic breasts, teeth, and eyelashes,
revealing herself to “be” a man (fig. 6.3). This scene of the undoing of
gender through removing its prostheses provides a reverse mirror of the first
scene of normative and “natural” gender, thus retrospectively casting its
naturalness into further doubt. So at the moment within film history that the
gendered structure of the cinematic look is firmly encoded within the
syntactical forms of narrative cinema, that gendered structure is revealed as
performative and prosthetically generated. This in turn makes the cinematic
look—whose diegetic and nondiegetic perspectives are aligned through the
innovation of the “subjective shot”—structurally, but only artificially,
heterosexual. In other words, the subjective shot is normatively
heterosexual only insofar as both gender and cinematic looking are fully
technical apparatuses. “Technologies of gender,” indeed!
In the third room, the heterosexual couple is no longer split across the
nonreciprocal positions of the viewing apparatus but finally located on the
side of the spectacle, as the clerk observes a scene of courtship, in which a
woman sits on a man’s lap, drinking champagne. The clerk breaks away just
as the couple begins to embrace, his curiosity about what lies behind the
fourth and final door apparently outweighing his excitement for the scene of
coupling about to unfold. This breakaway at the moment of the kiss
anticipates the ellipses of later Code-era films—but it also highlights the
clerk’s perverse avoidance of heterosexual dénouement in favor of the
insatiable, voyeuristic look.55 That overriding desire to sustain the
voyeuristic relation finds its comeuppance—replacing sexual congress with
comic relief—as the man moves to look through the fourth keyhole (fig.
6.4). No sooner has he knelt down in his Peeping Tom position than the
door bursts open and a tall man wearing a top hat emerges, beating him
with a cane and chasing him offscreen as the film concludes (fig. 6.5).
Masculinity is itself prosthetic and performative here, conveyed through the
(with apologies to Shaviro—phallic) top hat and cane, and through the
action of beating. The man behind the fourth door emerges as performative
agent of a law which mandates the heterosexual structure of the look. As
Mulvey will put it in her analysis of classical Hollywood seven decades
later, “the male figure cannot bear the burden of sexual objectification,” a
principle of narrative cinema that this film reveals to be fully operational in
1901.56 Moreover, the aggression of the man in the fourth room prevents
masculinity from being fully subjected to the same dismantling operation of
the look that played out in the earlier rooms. Having discovered the
masquerade of feminine performance and abandoned heterosexual narrative
in favor of perverse looking, the film’s sequential structure would entail that
masculinity is next to be unmasked—but the violence that curtails any such
demystifying look is so decisively meted out that it suggests something is
really at stake.57
Figure 6.3. Technologies of gender: Par le trou de la serrure 1901.
Figures 6.4. and 6.5. The performance of prohibition: Par le trou de la serrure, 1901.

Cinema appears in this self-allegorizing film as an apparatus of

voyeuristic fantasy through the maintenance of a structural divide between
looking and being looked at; the keyhole both categorically divides the two
positions and facilitates the unidirectional visual passage that breaches that
divide. That division, as we have seen, positions gender as both structural
principle and content of the scenes: in the first scene, femininity as
masquerade; in the second, the artifice of not only gender but also sex; in
the third, the irresolution of heterosexual seduction as spectacle. The fourth
scene is promised by the film’s narrative and architectural structure but
withheld, installing a foreclosed (but therefore imagined) homoerotic
looking as fundamental to that structure, whose mere possibility precipitates
its collapse and thus the abrupt end of the film, but which is also the point
toward which the whole film leads. This very early narrative film, already
an allegory of the system that it helps formalize, makes clear that sex and
gender are at once firmly embedded in the structure of cinema’s
technologized look and form its manifest contents. It also makes
heterosexuality and the gender system it maintains into structural
necessities of cinematic narrative, while exposing them as factitious and
artificial. (This in turn suggests that gender is hardly a specialty or minor
topic within film theory.) In terms of the manifest narrative, gendered order
is restored through the violent foreclosure of the transgressive possibility of
a homo-look, men looking at men, but that foreclosure is itself
performative. As the narrative culmination of the film, the closing scene of
the hotel clerk’s being beaten by the man in room #4 provides more than a
comic displacement of any romantic or sexual end. It also resolves the
idealism of heterovoyeurism (in which the object of desire is held at a
distance, thus remaining “ideal”) into the materiality and physicality of
homotouch: in this film, it is only male-on-male bodily action that
“releases,” as it were, the protracted tension of voyeuristic looking which,
as Freud writes, does not aim at any particular end (this is why he calls it a
“perversion”).
To sum up, the gaze is structurally heterosexual in this film, with cinema
presented as the technological apparatus of a law of gender that is
established only in order to be transgressed. As what is proscribed, homo-
looking forms the fantasy substrate that must remain unconscious even as it
also serves as the pretext for an “end pleasure” of sorts, in which the
idealism of looking is resolved, in the narrative, into the “materiality of
bodily sensation.” If the film thus serves as an early example of the “male
gaze,” it just as clearly demonstrates that this gaze is technologically
perverse and only manifestly heterosexual, shadowed as it is by the
foreclosed structural possibility of homoeroticism which provides the film’s
only “end pleasure.” Just as Freud said every sexual encounter is “an event
between four individuals,” this film opens up several of the fantasmatic
permutations that underpin any form of coupling: men looking at women
(manifest narrative), men looking at men (foreclosed), men touching
women (perpetually deferred), and men touching men (violent release);
even as the categories of “man” and “woman” are both revealed to be
prosthetically constructed—dependent on technologies of gender—and
performative.58 What notably does not appear in this otherwise capacious
schema is the possibility of a female look that is anything other than
narcissistically self-enclosed, subject of a long series of debates in film
theory subsequent to the publication of Mulvey’s essay. And yet, by
extension of the same protean logic of fantasy, together with the film’s
denaturalizing of sex, it is not much of a leap to imagine that the titular
Peeping Tom, subjected to the beatings of room #4’s agent of the law, is
fantasmatically positioned as the very woman he thinks he is looking at. To
look, as we saw with Baldwin, is to identify as much as it is to desire. From
this perspective, the performance of undone feminine masquerade in room
#2 would offer an inverted mirror of the fantasy position of the Peeping
Tom himself, who only seems to be a “man.”
What the psychoanalytic apparatus of interpretation does here is to seize
on the film’s manifest logic, which—because it can never be fully
reconciled with its own textual expression—makes necessary the thought of
a latency that generates it. The operation is not one of reconfirming a
diagnosis known in advance (“castration anxiety,” though that does come
close to the manifest content of this film!) but rather of mining the tensions
introduced by film as a technology of montage and mise en scène, a
technology of cutting, following its chain of negations. Fantasy
characterizes this space of uncertainty, the virtual that nestles within the
actual, undermining (or, in a de Manian sense, ironizing) even the apparent
ideological content of the film.59

M A (H ) S
I would like to further illustrate this point about methodology by turning to
Freud’s particularly cinematic discussion of fantasy in “A Child Is Being
Beaten.” But before doing so, it is worth briefly revisiting the best-known
psychoanalytic account of the cinema apparatus, the one produced by so-
called French apparatus theory in the late 1960s and 1970s. That theory
enabled the development of feminist film theory—and, as I have argued
elsewhere, is queerer than it appears—but it also generated some enduring
misapprehensions about the kind of fantasizing subject interpellated by the
cinema.60
 For Jean-Louis Baudry, adapting Althusser’s essay on “ideological state
apparatuses” to the cinema, the cinema’s ideological effects are not to be
discerned primarily in the domain of representation but rather in the subject
position the apparatus constructs for the viewer, which corresponds to a
fantasy of God-like, transcendental power.61 As Christian Metz
reformulates it, the perspectival cinema image (on the model of
quattrocento painting) “inscribes an empty emplacement for the spectator-
subject, an all-powerful position which is that of God himself, or more
broadly of some ultimate signified.”62 The spectator’s structurally
embedded, voyeuristic position is thus narcissistic and megalomaniacal; “he
identifies with himself as look” that is “all-powerful, all-perceiving,” a look
that renders him “a transcendental, not an empirical subject.”63 The
spectator is freed from the empirical limits of his own body—one can see
why it became necessary for subsequent theorists to remind us of the
centrality of the “cinematic body” to the film-going experience—and the
world presented by the cinema screen takes on what Lacan calls, in the text
that first developed the notion of “the gaze,” the “belong to me aspect of
representations, so reminiscent of property.”64 As Joan Copjec summarizes
it, the premise of this (apparatus) theory is that the subject sees in cinematic
representations “not only a reflection of itself but a reflection of itself as
master of all it surveys.”65 So, premised on its Lacanian conception of the
subject split by the signifier, apparatus theory imagines the cinema as
providing a prosthetic and fantasmatic (idealist and imaginary) remedy for
this constitutive lack, an ego satisfaction through the illusion of coherence.
That illusion comes from the structural position of the spectator, adopting
the monocular perspective of easel painting, but freed from the limits of
fixed time and space and thus rendered “all-perceiving, all powerful.”66
This account is, of course, directly contradicted by the allegorical proto-
apparatus theory we have just considered in Par le trou de la serrure. Far
from “all-perceiving, all-powerful,” the horny hotel clerk, avatar of the
cinema spectator, can never get enough, which means he is never seeing
enough; moreover, he never quite sees what he wants to, driven to the next
door and then the next by this very frustration. This principle is made
hyperbolic in Michael Powell’s later Peeping Tom (1960), in which the
protagonist, Mark, is also a voyeur whose capacity for realized relations is
cut off through childhood trauma (the film’s narrative traffics in
psychoanalytic clichés, and the film even includes a heavily accented,
European Jewish migrant analyst). Those traumas turn, unsurprisingly,
around family scenes—specifically, mistreatment at the hands of his father,
who, ironically, is a kind of behaviorist psychologist studying affect, and
who subjects the young Mark to a series of Pavlov’s dog-style experiments
designed to elicit terror, which the father obsessively documents with a
camera thus marked as sadistic. Traumatized by these experiments, which
interrupt his “normal” development (toward realized heterosexuality, of
course), Mark transfers his interest onto the very instrument of his
oppression—the camera as apparatus and prosthesis—and finds a false
solace in its illusory compensations for what has become his lack (here
staying entirely within the film’s manifest narrative schema). Through the
lens, Mark feels “all-perceiving, all-powerful,” a sensation that is directly
correlated to a sadistic drive to murder women his camera also
fetishistically overvalues; all the tenets of apparatus theory, including
Mulvey’s feminist refashioning, are therefore present here in allegorical
form but a decade avant la lettre. The film even opens with a long sequence
in which, watching through Mark’s camera, we encounter every material
element of the cinema apparatus as technical system: the human eye; carton
from the film canister; cross hairs across the image indicating the lens (figs.
6.6 and 6.7); the projector; the screen; the darkened viewing room; and the
body in repose, lost in visual reverie, which is at once Mark’s and (through
the identification diegetically rendered through the film’s heavy-handed
allegory) our own.
Mark’s tragic error is to confuse the idealist and fantasmatic power of the
spectatorial position with material power; he grotesquely literalizes (and
thus deidealizes) the fetishistic and sadistic dimensions of the male gaze of
the apparatus by following and killing the women he films, installing a
knife on the camera that turns it into a murder weapon. Again, the
psychoanalytic cliché is evident: Mark, the film implies, is impotent, and
the camera replaces the phallic function, which is then further displaced on
the knife, creating a circuit: (castrated) penis—> camera—> knife. The
obvious point here is that the power Mark imagines the camera gives him
over his objects is fantasmatic, which is why he has to stupidly equip the
lens with an actual knife; camera and knife falsely and bloodily compensate
for the failure of the (unconsciously desired but impossible) sexual relation,
producing death in its place. As Kaja Silverman argues in her virtuosic
reading of the film, Mark’s own lack is displaced onto women, a dynamic
she finds repeated throughout cinema history.67 In The Cinematic Body,
Shaviro also examines the film, rightly pointing out that Mark’s “aggressive
act of filming is only a detour en route to the passivity and self-
abandonment of spectatorship,” values he hopes to claim for a renewed
theory of embodied spectatorship.68 This means that the psychoanalytic
focus on sadism, castration anxiety, and so on is misplaced since what the
film ultimately stages is the cinematic fantasy of masochism, and what it
allegorizes is the affectively intense passivity (not mastery) of the cinema
spectator.
Figures 6.6 and 6.7. The apparatus as prosthesis: Peeping Tom 1960.

As Shaviro puts it, “The question [for film theory] is ultimately one of
what affects and passions are constructed or expressed by the mechanisms
of the cinema.” For him, those affects and passions (terms that replace
fantasy, too conjoined to psychoanalysis) are “fascinated and distracted …
passive and not possessive.”69 The cinema does not produce a subject
seduced by the illusory experience of God-like power over all he surveys.
On the contrary, according to Shaviro, cinema is an apparatus of
(nonpsychic) masochism and self-dispossession. I would not disagree that
apparatus theory mistakes the fundamental cinematic fantasy for a fantasy
of plenitude, akin to the jubilation the child (falsely) experiences in Lacan’s
parable of the mirror stage. Yet if we reject that mistaken notion of how
fantasy operates in cinema, it does not follow that “what film offers its
viewers is … the blinding intoxication of contact with the Real”—though it
may offer the theorist such a fantasy!70 Film is, after all, a medium, a
system of representation. Any “contact” it offers is, by definition, mediated.
And the “raw sensation” it appears to “affirm” is not one able to operate
outside the fantasmatic cultural context of white supremacist patriarchy that
historically determines it as system (a context that includes, for want of any
better analytic figure, the enormous symbolic weight of the phallus)—nor is
any cinematic “raw” sensation or materiality able to escape the fractures of
signification, to directly seize the body without passing through the
mediation of the apparatus and the psyche, which means to be subject to a
certain idealization.71 We are not what Mark’s father took him to be, in
seeking a direct correlation between stimulus and affect; we are not
Pavlov’s dog. (Even Pavlov’s dog is not Pavlov’s dog.) It is hard to imagine
what “masochism” or “shattering” would name if we were not already
constituted through fantasy, which is to say possessed of a psychic life. In
the case of cinema, Derrida is right that il n’y a pas de hors-texte; affect and
sensation are technologized, which means mediated and textualized. And it
is fantasy that provides their setting, their mise en scène and their mise en
marche.

T D
Consider in this regard Freud’s analysis of the fantasy (dream or daydream)
that “a child is being beaten.”72 This example is particularly cinematic—
like all fantasy—and describes a scenario that replays in many films from
different countries and contexts. Freud’s object is not, of course, cinematic
representation; he says that this is a very common fantasy among those
suffering from hysteria or obsessional neurosis—that is, most everyone. (In
that sense it might be something like what I earlier called a cultural fantasy
—which turns out to be a culturally pervasive daddy fantasy.)
Freud’s famous account is an attack on empiricism from the very
beginning. First, he says that a lot of patients have this fantasy, but they
don’t know about it or won’t talk about it; it only emerges in analysis.
Second, he says that though it is a pleasurable or arousing fantasy, the
patients surprisingly turn out not to enjoy it at all when it becomes real,
when they see a classmate, for example, actually being beaten by a teacher.
And just in case we might assume, in the manner of a cognitive
psychologist, that the fantasy appears as a way of processing, for example,
real domestic violence, Freud notes his surprise in discovering that the
patients who develop this fantasy frequently come from the most loving
households, and it does not in any way correspond to their actual
experience. So: the fantasy does not correspond to a desire to actually see a
child being beaten or to an empirical experience of being beaten; it belies,
and even contradicts, both conscious desire and memory.
Note the curious formulation of the fantasy as it comes out in analysis:
“A child is being beaten.” Who is the child? It is impossible to say. It might
even be plural, some children. The fantasizer isn’t really clear about who is
being beaten in his fantasy, or by whom. All that is clear is that a beating is
taking place but not who the agent or victim of the beating is, or where the
fantasizing subject is in relation to the scene. It is thus not easy to describe
the fantasy, says Freud, as either sadistic or masochistic—since it’s not clear
who is doing the beating, and thus what the orientation, so to speak, of the
fantasy would be. Freud’s discussion goes on to track the genealogy of the
fantasy through three stages, at various degrees of latency: 1. “My father is
beating the child” (who is not me, and whom I hate). Note that here the
father appears out of nowhere. The beater turns out to be the father, but I am
definitely not being beaten.
In the second phase, there is a radical switch of positions: 2. Now, “I am
being beaten by my father.” This phase, Freud claims, is both the most
crucial and the one that remains fully repressed—in other words, it is a pure
construction of analysis, a “simulacral fabulation,” to appropriate a phrase
from Shaviro.73 In this phase, the fantasy consolidates into a masochistic
form, corresponding to a daddy fantasy in the most direct sense. In the third
phase, things have once again become despecified and impersonal: it is now
some children (“almost invariably boys, in the phantasies of boys just as
much as in those of girls”) who are being beaten by someone who is no
longer my father.74 But in this third and final phase the whole fantasy has
become unambiguously sexualized, leading to masturbation or arousal.
Freud then complicates things further by saying that with men, an original,
repressed fantasy, “I am loved by my father” reverses (defensively) into “I
am being beaten by my father” and then “I am being beaten by my mother.”
In the case of women, the “whipping-boys who represent them are boys
too”; in their fantasy, they have “easily abandon[ed] their feminine role.”75
This is one of the many places where Freud, while maintaining that
heterosexuality is a norm and homosexuality a form of perversion,
nevertheless hollows out heterosexuality, reversing it into its repressed
fantasy contents. (In other words, fantasy’s inevitable reversals just as
inevitably belie the coherence of heterosexuality, rendering it factitious, a
practical convenience.) In “A Child Is Being Beaten,” Freud seems to posit
a universal daddy fantasy (being loved/beaten by the father) which again
complicates the ostensible heterosexuality of the allegedly universal
Oedipus complex. (Deleuze and Guattari parody Freud’s installation of the
father as the ultimate object of every fantasy in “One or Many Wolves?”—
but I find it both a provocative description of the fantasy life of patriarchy,
and also quite a queer one, in that there is nothing necessarily straight or cis
about the daddy.76)
Virtually nothing that Freud describes in this paper concerns empirically
observable facts, though his discussion derives from an activity of careful
observation; the crucial step in the three-part fantasy remains necessarily
unconscious (because repressed), therefore by definition unavailable for
verification, and the clinical cases he alludes to are generalized and
unreferenced. Therefore the status of the paper in terms of any truth claim
must be a shaky one—if we believe that truth is only empirical. But
something has been advanced, by questioning. (Pay attention, you will
notice what appears; pay more attention, you will notice what doesn’t
appear: the virtual.) What the essay shows is how fantasy (and
psychoanalysis, as its interpretive system) deliteralizes, virtualizes, reality.
Like the unconscious, where it sometimes lives, fantasy works through the
condensation and displacement of reference and of psychic investment—
processes, as Lacan put it, of metaphor and metonymy—thus introducing a
necessary lability and motion into our psychic investments in the world and
our ways of making sense of it.
Fantasy is not about the subject achieving or finding any object; in
fantasy, as Laplanche and Pontalis write, those positions are hard to pin
down, and the subject “appears caught up himself in the sequence of images
… [The] subject may be [present] in a desubjectivized form, that is to say,
in the very syntax of the sequence in question.”77 The “syntax” is a
grammar, a structure, but in a specular register; in Laplanche and Pontalis’s
reference to “the sequence of images,” one hears the cinematic overtones.
Fantasy is theatrical, or given its voyeuristic and imagistic dimensions,
perhaps specifically cinematic, the apparatuses that generate each (fantasy
as a concept, and cinema as a technology) emerging into historical salience
concurrently. When one fantasizes, as the French say, “on se fait du
cinéma.”

T H A
Earlier, I mentioned Rosalind Krauss’s contention, in a contribution to the
inaugural issue of October, that the “medium of video is narcissism.”78
Krauss’s argument, though using psychological terminology, was technical:
she was referring, in relation to 1970s video works by artists such as Vito
Acconci and Lynda Benglis, to the simultaneity of the video projection that
allows a feedback loop between the subject and its image, to the exclusion,
she worried, of textuality (the displacements of meaning) and history. What
results is “the presentation of a self understood to have no past … as well
[as] no connection with any objects that are external to it.”79
Krauss’s formulation about video introduces the first substantive thought
of the postcinematic, the idea that a new apparatus of mediated spectacle
has displaced cinema, organizing a different mode of psychic experience.
The thought follows that of German critical theorists who, in different
ways, analyze media forms as materializations of a cultural logic related to
different stages in modern capital, arguably generating different forms of
subjectivity. For example, according to Habermas, the counterpart to the
emergence of a bourgeois public sphere in the eighteenth century is the
consolidation of a new bourgeois selfhood. The eighteenth century, he
writes, is “the century of the letter: through letter writing the individual
unfolded himself in his subjectivity.”80 The letter and the diary (“a letter
addressed to the sender”) are progenitors of the epistolary novel.81 The
conjugal family was both a privileged theme of this novel and crucible of
the bourgeois, interiorized subjectivity to which it gave expression—as the
“private” counterpart to an emergent public sphere. The epistolary novel—
finding its peak expression in Rousseau’s La Nouvelle Héloïse (1761)—
consolidates, writes Habermas, “a terrain of subjectivity barely known at
[the century’s] beginning,” forged through the letter, the diary, the novel.
And of course, psychoanalysis, centering the psychic drama of the
bourgeois family, would soon emerge as the explanatory apparatus of this
same “terrain of subjectivity.”82
What is the subject-form particular to cinema, as a historically specific
technical assemblage? This was the question for 1970s apparatus theory,
whose enormous insight was to include subjectivity itself among the
technical elements that comprise a media apparatus, and to analyze that
apparatus as not only a system of representation and aesthetics but also part
of an ideological–historical–economic–technological complex or
assemblage.83 As discussions of “postcinema” abound today, it is clear that
we have moved beyond what Beller called the “cinematic mode of
production.” In that mode, writes Beller, “to look is to labor”—in other
words, in the cinema and the culture of spectacle that it organizes, it is the
look that is hypercharged with affective intensity as well as economic value,
and it thus makes sense that the theoretical discourses that analyze the
cinema apparatus in its classical moment turn around the concept of the
look.84 (Meanwhile, Kittler points out that psychoanalysis is replete with
metaphors drawn from visual media technologies.)
Concerning the present and future of psychoanalytic film theory: in the
Instagram grid, for example, it is stating the obvious to point out we are no
longer immobilized in a darkened movie theater, and thus the viewing
conditions so dramatically diagrammed in Peeping Tom no longer obtain.
Devoid of film strip, camera, and projector—whose functions are collapsed
into the smartphone, a device that also modifies the distance inherent to
cinematic looking—we are at a different moment in the history of the
apparatus. While anyone who has used Instagram knows that it can still be
voyeuristic, it is no longer structured around the nonreciprocal look or
premised on what Cavell called an “ontologically invisible” spectator. On
the contrary, the user is immediately interpellated into a network, called
upon to produce an image of the self. Moreover, the grid form belies the
sense of a unitary spectacle, and thus the monocular perspective inherited
from easel painting. The subject here is configured within an aptly named
social media, and a new hierarchy intervenes, organized numerically, via
likes and comments; the organization of the apparatus is radically
equalizing (or flattening) in one sense, and thus a new kind of celebrity
emerges, no longer luminous and metaphysical (in the manner of Joan
Crawford in Baldwin’s reading) but relative, precisely quantified and
explicitly performing the monetization and commodification of the
quotidian. The affective modes that attend this solicitation include
resentment, envy, distraction, mirth, ego-pleasure …. If we think desire is
not crucially at stake here, we are in trouble! And yet, to track the
movement of the psyche here, its technological form, and its expression in
the form of symptoms—burnout, depression, anxiety—may require a
different explanatory apparatus.
This system fits within the purview of what Seb Franklin describes,
following Deleuze, as the overarching logic of control that operates as our
current stage of capitalism, and is related, for Franklin, to the rise of the
computer as a technology, metaphor, and figure of thought and social
imagination.85 For Franklin, control logic subsumes all media forms,
including the cinematic. As an example, he offers a reading of The Bourne
Identity (Doug Liman, 2002) and its sequels, arguing that they evince the
way the narrative subject of classical cinema has been superseded by a
notion of subject as “information processor” corresponding to the “decline
of [the] continuity mode” of editing in favor of what Shaviro, elsewhere,
has called “postcontinuity” editing, which aims not at creating the illusion
of spatiotemporal coherence but, in Franklin’s words, at “maximal
informational input.”86 The traditional (Aristotelian) form of narrative gives
way to something else: “The ideal viewer presumed by this type of image
regime does not synthesize impressions or images but rather, like Wiener’s
antiaircraft predictor, tracks movements and records outcomes.” Characters
within contemporary films as well as the viewers of the films no longer
narrative subjects but “programmable object[s].”87
Franklin finds in the Bourne films an “aesthetic formulation” of this
paradigm, both at the level of narrative, which concerns agents programmed
and “optimized to the psychological and physical demands of their work”
by the CIA, and at the level of what he calls an “executive style” which, in
a parallel manner, envisages “an idealized (and thus programmable) target
viewer,” one whose role is less to synthesize narrative information than to
“[track] movements and [record] outcomes.”88 As this description implies,
the film has absorbed the formal and narrative logic of video games that
themselves once absorbed cinematic logic.89 Featuring an avatar-like
protagonist, informational graphics overlaid in a computer-like font,
characters who appear in order to be destroyed, and accelerated motion in
fight scenes, the film channels the modularity and programmability of a
video game. But in emphasizing the interpellation of a “programmable”
viewer, Franklin may overlook what is hiding in plain sight: a residually
cinematic mode of subjectivation less related to the cultural logic of control
than to the perverse apparatus mapped at cinema’s origins in Par le trou de
la serrure. The Bourne Identity opens with a scene in which Matt Damon
lies naked on an operating table as a male doctor repeatedly penetrates his
flesh (with a scalpel), inaugurating two hours of the film’s rapt attention to
the physical capacities and limits of Damon’s body, playing out through a
profusion of scenes of male–male bodily contact. In contrast to this
relentless full-body contact, a single, brief scene of heterosexual kissing
occurs a full hour into the film, marking a structurally necessary plot point,
and conveniently also disbarring any de facto homoeroticism from the level
of narrativization (fig. 6.8). But this moment at which the film narratively
sutures over the queer potentialities of its gaze is also symptomatic of its
failure to perform such repair: moments into the scene that belatedly
heterosexualizes the Matt Damon character, it is he alone who removes his
shirt, and it is his naked torso, redoubled in a mirror, that fills the frame,
troubling the scene of heterosexual pairing with a supplemental
homodoubling, and remaining the focus of the scene for its (brief) entirety,
before the camera drifts away, unconcerned to follow the lovers even as far
as the bedroom. (We have to wait another whole hour for the only other
scene of heterosexual intimacy, in which the couple reunites in the kitchen
with a chaste hug before the film cuts to a wide shot of a Greek island—
Mykonos!—and then to black.) Regardless of any appeal to a studio
executive’s imaginary “female audience,” the gaze systematically
constructed throughout the film remains—just in the way Mulvey described
—resolutely “male.” Throughout the film, Bourne is looked at,
murderously, by men, or at least, channeling paranoia as a key affect, he
imagines that he is. (The structure of paranoia, according to Ferenczi: “I
don’t desire that man, he hates and wants to kill me!”90) Indeed, the men
Bourne constantly imagines are looking at him really are trying to kill him,
which simply confirms the point about fantasy’s indistinct ontological
registers, and the cinema’s unique, technological ability to generate a
perceptual intertwining of profilmic reality, narrative reality, and the
“reality of fantasy.”

Figure 6.8. Programmability: Matt Damon in The Bourne Identity, 2002.

At stake here, then, is a classically psychoanalytic split between what

Lacan called, following Jakobson, the énonciation and the énoncé: in the
story terms offered by the film, we remain enclosed in a world of hermetic
heterosexuality, arrayed around the poles of male presence/action, and
female absence/passivity. At the level of the énonciation—the film’s
technical means of narration, as in the scene described above—the film
betrays a “male gaze” always at risk of becoming queer, and thus in need of
a narrative cover story. This split between the saying and the said is
reflected within the narrative itself, which turns around the question of a
truth that remains necessarily inaccessible. The film’s premise is: what
happens if you don’t know what you really know? You are possessed by
impulses that come from within you but are not “yours”; they reveal the
activity of a foreign body, an “It,” a “Ça,” an “Es,” an Id that ruptures the
coherence of your apparently self-evident sense-perception, making it not
entirely “yours.” Franklin is right that this narrative premise serves the film
as an allegory of programmability, but it might equally serve as an allegory
of what Lacan calls extimacy: what is in you but not of you, or, in other
words, the unconscious.91
The Bourne Identity is a text poised between paradigms—the cinematic
and the programmable—housing competing ideological and fantasmatic
systems. It indexes the cultural rise of video games, biotechnology, and
networked computers, while also attesting to the persistence of the
cinematic mode of production, with the latter’s mechanisms of disavowal
and structures of fantasy intact.92 What Franklin calls “noise”—what, in
cybernetic theory, threatens the free flow of “information”—is akin to what
psychoanalysis names the unconscious, something that cannot be integrated
within the system it generates, cannot resolve into meaning within the terms
that structure what Rancière, in a different context, calls the “distribution of
the sensible,” but is detectable as a kind of interruption of the free flow of a
signal. In both cases, what is at stake is a stuttering of the order of
communication—of sensation, perception, language, and the materiality
those processes mediate.93 I have described this stuttering as a negativity
within phenomenality, that cinema, as a technology of disjuncture and
fantasy, registers.
The task of a psychoanalytic criticism today—a psychoanalytic film
theory for our resolutely and still postcinematic culture—must be to resist
the instrumental rationality of the control era, to explore the ways
psychoanalysis furnishes us with figures for a subjectivity split between, in
Freud’s account, the outside world, inner compulsions, and the punishing
faculty of self-monitoring he called the superego—or the tension, in Teresa
de Lauretis’s words, between life and “the corpse … latent within the living
organism.”94 The rubric of programmability and control conceals a fantasy
—whose?—of complete determination. Psychoanalysis is the theory of the
nondetermined, the noncoincidence of thoughts, identities, and things with
themselves. In an era in which instrumental rationality encroaches even on
the most intimate processes of subjectivation, our theories should not follow
suit in assuming an adequation between cause and effect, treating
perception as self-evident data, or fantasizing a relation to the world
uncontaminated by “idealization.” At this moment of its seeming
anachronism, the transformative and even revolutionary potential of
psychoanalysis lies in its negative insistence on what breaks the flow of
information, interrupts the signal, turns back on an abyss.

A
I am indebted to Kyle Stevens, Mario Telò, Nico Baumbach, John David
Rhodes, and Cole Moore for various forms of intellectual, moral, and
editorial support in the preparation of this chapter.

N
1. Leo Bersani, “Is the Rectum a Grave?” October 43 (Winter 1987): 197.
2. See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, “One or Many Wolves?,” in A Thousand Plateaus:
Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1987). “Are nature documentaries also about sex?,” a colleague in film studies once
asked me after a conference presentation on the cinematic theory of voyeurism. The question,
posed as rhetorical, can, however, be answered in the affirmative, since the genre’s dedication
to documenting “raw nature”—the biological processes of life’s reproduction uncontaminated
by human culture—turns around a fantasy of capturing the essence of sex in its “natural” state.
3. For a brief overview of the polemics against what Paul Ricoeur called the “hermeneutics of
suspicion”—that is, psychoanalytic and Marxist approaches to cultural texts, which go under
the names of “surface reading” and “post-critique”—see Nico Baumbach, Genevieve Yue, and
Damon R. Young, “The Cultural Logic of Contemporary Capitalism,” Social Text 34, no. 2
(127) (2016): 1–20. See also Nico Baumbach, chapter 7, in this volume.
4. Steven Shaviro, The Cinematic Body (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), ix.
5. Jonathan Beller, The Cinematic Mode of Production (Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press,
2006); Vicky Lebeau, Psychoanalysis and Cinema (New York: Columbia University Press,
2001). For a related argument, see also Paul Morrison, Classical Hollywood Cinema, Sexuality,
and the Politics of the Face (New York: Routledge, 2021).
6. See, for example, David Bordwell and Noël Carroll, eds., Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film
Studies (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996). “Reconstructing,” perhaps offered in
rhyming rejection of “deconstructing,” implies, of course, that the “theory” whose reign it
performatively declares over (with the prefix “post-”) is one that has left film studies in a
ruinous state.
7. “Why are you telling me you are going to Krakow when you really are going to Krakow?” This
is the (paraphrased) punchline of one of Freud’s famous jokes, which he categorized as
“skeptical.” See my discussion in Damon R. Young, “Ironies of Web 2.0,” Post45 (2019),
Article 2.
8. Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus, “Surface Reading: An Introduction,” Representations 108,
no. 1 (2009): 11.
9. Eugenie Brinkema, The Forms of the Affects (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014).
10. The most convincing criticism of psychoanalysis is that it has, as Warner writes, “totalized
gender as an allegory of difference.” Michael Warner, “Homo-narcissism; or, Heterosexuality,”
 in Engendering Men: The Question of Male Feminist Criticism, ed. Joseph A. Boone and
Michael Cadden (New York: Routledge, 1990), 201–2. Warner sees this as an “essentially
accurate description of the cultural mechanisms whereby gender and alterity are equated,”
though neither he nor the classic texts of psychoanalysis adequately theorize the relation of
race to alterity (even though racialized signifiers of alterity appear symptomatically in many of
Freud’s texts). I am compelled by Preciado’s recent argument that the psychoanalytic view of
sexual difference as a binary describes an anachronistic paradigm. Paul B. Preciado, Je Suis un
Monstre Qui Vous Parle (Paris: Grasset, 2020)). But psychoanalysis remains necessary to film
theory both for historical reasons, as I will briefly argue, and for its methodological
commitment to negativity, incompatible with any empiricism.
11. On the latter point, see works by Teresa de Lauretis, Earl Jackson, Jr., Lee Edelman, D. A.
Miller, and David Marriott. On the former point, Metz’s “The Cinematic Signifier” was
published, in English translation, in Screen in 1975, in the issue preceding the publication of
Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”; the two discourses, of feminist film theory
and psychoanalytic film theory, entered the Anglophone academy concurrently.
12. Sigmund Freud, Letter no. 113 to Fliess, August 1, 1899, quoted by Standard Edition of the
Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey, Vol. 19 (London:
Hogarth Press, 1961), 33 n.
13. Leo Bersani, “Against Monogamy,” in Is the Rectum a Grave? And Other Essays (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2009), 92.
14. Keeling uses the term “virtuality” in a Deleuzean (nonpsychoanalytic) sense, but to my mind,
the phrase “lying in wait,” which she uses to describe the temporalities at play in a Grace Jones
video, is an apt description of the unconscious as a nonspace of virtuality. See Kara Keeling,
Queer Times, Black Futures (New York: New York University Press, 2019), 158 and passim.
15. This defensiveness is the topic of seminal works in queer theory, for instance, Judith Butler,
“Melancholy Gender, Refused Identification,” in The Psychic Life of Power (Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press, 1997), 132–50, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the
Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), as well as José Esteban Muñoz,
Disidentifications (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999).
16. “The ego is first and foremost a bodily ego; it is not merely a surface entity, but it itself the
projection of a surface.” Standard Edition, Vol. 19, 26.
17. While I have Keeling’s reworking of Deleuze in mind, I take the idea of the unconscious as
virtuality also from Bersani. “The unconscious never is;” he writes, “it is perhaps an
essentially unthinkable, intrinsically unrealizable reserve of human being—a dimension of
virtuality rather than of psychic depth.” Leo Bersani, “Psychoanalysis and the Aesthetic
Subject,” Critical Inquiry 32 (Winter 2006): 169 (italics added).
18. See Best and Marcus, “Surface Reading: An Introduction,” 11.
19. Peter Brooks, “Psychoanalysis and Melodrama,” in The Cambridge Companion to Melodrama,
ed. Carolyn Williams (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 280.
20. Standard Edition, Vol. 7, 77–78; also quoted in Brooks, “Psychoanalysis,” 280.
21. Brooks does not make the connection to cinema with this passage but does so in relation to
Freud’s The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, written the same year (1901) which, he writes,
“looks forward to Hollywood ‘domestic melodrama’ … He that has eyes to see and ears to
hear can find the drama of the everyday, and give it the swelling music of film.” Brooks,
“Psychoanalysis,” 281.
22. Béla Balázs, Theory of the Film: Character and Growth of a New Art, trans. Edith Bone (New
York: Dover, 1970), 56.
23. Paul de Man, “The Concept of Irony,” in Aesthetic Ideology, ed. Andrzej Warminski
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 163–84.
24. Freud’s description also anticipates the opening to Jean Epstein’s “Magnification,” even though
the latter is resolutely uninterested in the psyche: “The lip is laced with tics like a theater
curtain…. The close-up is the soul of cinema.” Epstein’s promiscuous metaphors conjoin the
anatomical and the theatrical, consummated in the cinematic close-up. Translated in October 3
(1977): 9.
25. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara
Habberjam (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 96.
26. Balázs, Theory of the Film, 63. This is to give a more psychological spin to what Walter
Benjamin, nevertheless referencing Freud, called the “optical unconscious.” Deleuze’s point is
well taken, of course, that the close-up need not be of a face, since, as Deleuze puts it, the
“close-up is face.” Deleuze’s important corrective to Balázs’s humanism and psychologism
allows us to derive from the latter’s discussion, against the grain of that humanism, a reading
of close-up that nevertheless also differs from Deleuze’s, namely, as a negativizing of the
empirical field, a field that includes what Shaviro calls the “materiality of sensation.”
27. Cole Moore (in an email commenting on this chapter) offers this helpful formulation: “Cinema
and psychoanalysis call attention not to two levels or planes of reality (appearances and truth,
for example), but rather to an instability that plays out on the very surface of reality.”
28. I have in mind Merleau-Ponty’s critique of Descartes’s Dioptrics in Maurice Merleau-Ponty,
“Eye and Mind,” in The Primacy of Perception (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press,
1964).
29. Balázs, Theory of the Film, 57 and passim.
30. Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, “Fantasy and the Origins of Sexuality,” The
International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 49 (1968): 7. For an influential application of these
ideas to the study of cinematic “body genres” (horror, pornography, melodrama), see Linda
Williams, “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess,” Film Quarterly 44, no. 4 (Summer
1991): 2–13.
31. All preceding quotations in Laplanche and Pontalis, “Fantasy,” 7.
32. Laplanche and Pontalis, “Fantasy,” 17, translation amended. In French, the theatrical and
cinematic reference of this phrase is more explicit: “la fonction première du fantasme [est] la
mise en scène du désir.” “Fantasme originaire, fantasme des origines, origine du fantasme,” in
Les Temps Modernes (April 1964): 1868.
33. Belatedness. In Laplanche’s reading of Freud, the child’s early experiences of adult handling—
which may be real or imaginary—are retrospectively activated as enigmatic signifiers
betraying unconscious desire, though they had no sexual meaning at the time. See Jean
Laplanche, Nouveaux fondements pour la psychanalyse (Paris: PUK, 1987).
34. For an elaboration of this idea, see Damon R. Young, Making Sex Public and Other Cinematic
Fantasies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018).
35. Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies, Vol. 1 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987);
Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies, Vol. 2 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989).
36. Siegfried Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004).
37. Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2004); Camille Robcis, The Law of Kinship: Anthropology, Psychoanalysis, and the
Family in France (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013).
38. Cf. Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 1991), for the earlier origins of that model, which he locates in letter writing, the
diary, and the eighteenth-century epistolary novel.
39. For a retrospective overview of theories of identification in cinema, and a series of
contemporary interventions, see “Cinematic Identification,” ed. Elizabeth Reich and Scott C.
Richmond, special issue, Film Criticism 29, no. 3 (Winter 2014–15).
40. James Baldwin, The Devil Finds Work (New York: Vintage, 2011), 3.
41. On the cultural significance for gay men of both Joan Crawford and Bette Davis, see David M.
Halperin, How to Be Gay (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014). While some
have criticized Halperin for focusing his analysis on icons of an ostensibly white gay audience,
Baldwin’s narrative suggests that sexuality, gender, and race are complexly enmeshed in the
fantasy worlds these star figures evoke.
42. Baldwin, Devil Finds Work, 6. For Gaines’s slightly different account of this identification, see
Jane Gaines, “Green Like Me,” in Fire and Desire: Mixed-Race Movies in the Silent Era
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001).
43. Baldwin, Devil Finds Work, 7 (italics in original).
44. Ibid., 8.
45. Mario Telò pointed out to me the anamorphic resonance between “frog-eyes” and “forged”
weapons, “a forging that maintains a trace of amphibian abjection, as it were” (personal email
communication).
46. “Out of bewilderment, out of loyalty to my mother, probably, and also because I sensed
something menacing and unhealthy (for me, certainly) in the face on the screen, I gave Davis’s
skin the dead-white greenish cast of something crawling from under a rock, but I was held, just
the same, by the tense intelligence of the forehead, the disaster of the lips: and when she
moved, she moved just like a nigger.” Baldwin, Devil Finds Work, 7.
47. Ibid., 9.
48. While affect-based and phenomenological accounts of cinema describe important aspects of its
functioning and experience, they remain incomplete to the extent that they fail to account for
what is specifically psychic, which is to say fantasmatic, about cinema.
49. Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1979), 45. Cavell writes: “A woman in a movie is dressed … hence
potentially undressed.” Ibid., 44.
50. See “1900: Le Plan Subjectif,” in Marie-France Briselance and Jean-Claude Morin, Grammaire
du cinéma (Paris: Nouveau Monde, 2010). The Pathé film is easily locatable on YouTube, for
example at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NOguuJEk4GY.
51. See Joan Copjec, “The Orthopsychic Subject,” in Read My Desire: Lacan against the
Historicists (London: Verso, 2015), 57.
52. John Berger, Ways of Seeing (London: Penguin Books, 1990), 47.
53. Mirzoeff’s study of the “right to look” demonstrates, beyond the field of art, not only the
gendered but also the colonial and racist foundations of power mediated by the look. See
Nicholas Mirzoeff, The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2011). For an argument about African American women’s historical
exclusion from the looking dynamics embedded within racist and patriarchal systems of
cinematic representation, cf. also bell hooks, “The Oppositional Gaze,” in Black Looks: Race
and Representation (New York: Routledge, 2014), 115–32.
54. Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen 16, no. 3 (Autumn 1975): 6–
18.
55. In the “Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality,” Freud defines perversion as a deviation from
the “normal” aim of release through coitus; he puts it at the very basis of his theory of
sexuality, and it turns out to be quite more universal than exceptional, since in its repressed
 form, it appears as everyday neurosis. See Standard Edition, vol. 7. Freud’s examples of
perversion in that text include voyeurism, exhibitionism, fetishism, sadism, and masochism.
56. Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure,” 12.
57. Thanks to Cole Moore for his discussion on this point.
58. That all sex is prosthetic and technological is the argument of Preciado’s tongue-in-cheek but
also serious work: Paul Preciado, Countersexual Manifesto, trans. Kevin Gerry Dunn (New
York: Columbia University Press, 2018).
59. This propensity of ostensibly reactionary films to undermine the ideology they express is
addressed by Comolli and Narboni in their schematization of cinematic categories in Jean-
Louis Comolli and Jean Narboni, “Cinema/Ideology/Criticism,” in Cahiers Du Cinéma, 1969–
1972: The Politics of Representation, ed. Nick Browne (London: Routledge, 1990), 58–67.
60. See Damon R. Young, “The Vicarious Look, or Andy Warhol’s Apparatus Theory,” Film
Criticism 39, no. 2 (Winter 2015): 25–52.
61. Jean-Louis Baudry, “Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus,” trans. Alan
Williams, Film Quarterly 28, no. 2 (Winter 1974–75): 39–47.
62. Christian Metz, The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1986), 49.
63. Ibid., 48, 50.
64. Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (New York: Norton, 1998),
81 (italics in the original). Lacan’s point about the gaze, however, is that it interrupts this
fantasy of mastery rather than delivering it. Copjec, developing her critique of apparatus theory
along these lines, cites of a version of this passage in Read My Desire, 21. Copjec’s argument,
briefly stated, is that cinematic looking is driven not by the sense of mastery but by the feeling
that something is missing in every representation.
65. Copjec, Read My Desire, 21.
66. For the classic analysis of perspectival painting as constitutive of a subject-centered worldview,
see Erwin Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form, trans. Christopher S. Wood (New York:
Zone Books, 1996).
67. Kaja Silverman, The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 32–41.
68. Shaviro, Cinematic Body, 61. Shaviro concedes that “Peeping Tom thus amply indicates
cinema’s capacity to reproduce, or to serve as a relay for, traditional gender-coded patterns of
murderous domination. But it also shows how this capacity is subverted by the very
mechanisms that make it possible” (61). Strangely, this reading is ultimately quite similar to
Silverman’s. (I say strangely, given the general animus against Silverman in particular, and
feminist film theorists in general, throughout The Cinematic Body, which Shaviro himself
notices in a retrospective look back at his earlier work, “The Cinematic Body Redux,” Parallax
14, no. 1 (February 2008).)
69. Ibid., 53.
70. Ibid.
71. Ibid.
72. Sigmund Freud, “A Child Is Being Beaten: A Contribution to the Study of the Origin of Sexual
Perversions,” in Standard Edition, vol. 17.
73. I draw much inspiration from Shaviro’s discussion, toward the end of The Cinematic Body, of
writing theory as a “monstrous hybrid of empirical description and simulacral fabulation”
(266). Though Shaviro means it differently, this is, in fact, an apt description of “A Child Is
Being Beaten,” and indeed of psychoanalytic theory in general.
74. Standard Edition, vol. 17, 191.
75. Ibid.
76. See Jordy Rosenberg, “The Daddy Complex,” in Los Angeles Review of Books, March 11,
2018. “Of course, for both Freud and Lacan, the capital-F Father is just a figment—a symbolic
placeholder for some unattainable fantasy of satisfaction. So, really, technically, no one ‘just
enjoys’—not cis-men, not cis-women, not queer people, not trans people, not anyone.”
77. Laplanche and Pontalis, “Fantasy and the Origins of Sexuality,” 17.
78. Rosalind Krauss, “Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism,” October 1 (Spring 1976): 50–64.
79. Krauss, “Video,” 55. For a rethinking of Krauss’s essay in relation to the “narcissism” of
contemporary media, see a work-in-progress by Nico Baumbach, The Anonymous Image:
Cinema against Control.
80. Habermas, Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, 48.
81. Ibid., 50.
82. Ibid. Although I don’t have space to do it here, we could integrate into the story Kittler’s
reflections on, for example, the invention of photography which corresponds to a new
statistical and demographic science: everyone becomes a potential criminal. See Friedrich
Kittler, Optical Media (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2010).
83. For a reconsideration of the legacies of this theory and their stakes for political cinema today,
see Nico Baumbach, “The Politics of Film Theory and Its Discontents,” in
Cinema/Politics/Philosophy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018), 1–16.
84. Beller, Cinematic Mode of Production, 181 and passim.
85. Seb Franklin, Control: Digitality as Cultural Logic (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015).
86. Franklin, Control, 159–64. Shaviro develops the idea of “postcontinuity editing,” drawing on
David Bordwell, in Post-cinematic Affect.
87. Franklin, Control, 161.
88. Ibid., 160–61.
89. See Alexander Galloway, “The Origins of the First-Person Shooter,” in Gaming: Essays on
Algorithmic Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006).
90. See Michael Moon’s introduction to Guy Hocquenghem, Homosexual Desire, trans. Daniella
Dangoor (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 18. Freud concurred with Ferenczi’s
reading of paranoia as an essentially homosexual affect, for example in his analysis of
Schreber in Standard Edition, Vol. 12.
91. See the discussion of extimacy in Copjec, Read My Desire, 129. In Bourne, the titular
character’s “programmability” finds its limit in his encounter with the spectacle of paternity (in
this film with, strangely, no mothers). The narrative turns around Bourne’s failed mission,
located in the past, to complete a “programmed” assassination. We learn that it was the sight of
the victim with his children that caused a glitch in the program; an older kind of cultural
programming—that of reproductive futurism—trumping, as it were, the more recent “control”
variety.
92. Franklin suggests that the two paradigms (cybernetics and psychoanalysis) are themselves
historically enmeshed, effecting, he writes, “the reformulation of the unconscious as an
information processor.” Franklin, Control, 162. But that metaphor may not adequately capture
the negativity of the unconscious.
93. In Discognition (London: Repeater, 2016), Shaviro writes about the Maureen McHugh short
story, “The Kingdom of the Blind,” in which the computer system, SAMEDI, exhibits
behaviors that are inexplicable and seemingly incalculable. As a form of artificial intelligence,
it is this capacity for the incalculable that leads to the thought of a kind of consciousness at
work in the code—or, I would say, a certain conception of the computer unconscious.
94. Teresa de Lauretis, Freud’s Drive: Psychoanalysis, Literature and Film (Basingstoke, UK:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 13.
 SECTION II

FILM THEORY’S PROJECT OF

EMANCIPATION
 CHAPTER 7

FILM THEORY AS
IDEOLOGY CRITIQUE
(AFTER TRUMP)

NICO BAUMBACH

IN American academia, for roughly the last half-century, until quite

recently, the close association of film theory with ideology critique
may have seemed so obvious as to be scarcely worth mentioning. In
the writings of a range of major scholars, philosophers, and critics who
have been influential in film studies, whether Jean-Louis Comolli,
Peter Wollen, Richard Dyer, Robin Wood, Laura Mulvey, Fredric
Jameson, or bell hooks, “theory” has frequently been understood as
directed at offering the tools to interpret films—or the institutions of
cinema or television more broadly—as bearers of dominant (or, less
often, oppositional) ideologies.
But as ideology critique has itself increasingly become the object of
critique, it is worth remembering that in the decades preceding the
emergence of film studies as a recognized field in academia (the era
that is now known as classical film theory), film theory was far less
likely to be explicitly political. The dominant question was what makes
film an art, how it was similar to and different from other arts, and
what this entailed for its aesthetic possibilities. During this period, one
can find examples of ideological criticism in, for example, Sergei
Eisenstein’s writing on D. W. Griffith, André Bazin on Stalinist
cinema, or Robert Warshow’s famous essays on the gangster or
western, but reading film as a means for transmitting ideological
content tended not to be the approach of theoretical writing.1 It was not
until the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s and 1980s, that ideology
critique and film theory became so closely aligned as to be barely
distinguishable.2
As we enter the third decade of the twenty-first century, ideology
critique has hardly disappeared; one could almost go so far as to say it
is ubiquitous—some version of it, however diluted or mutated, is
familiar to anyone reading think pieces about superhero movies in
mainstream newspapers or magazines, wall texts in a museum or
gallery, and it has insinuated itself into the general vernacular of
cultural discussion throughout social media. An explicit theory of
ideology may be absent from these familiar forms of mainstream
discourse, but there is no lack of evidence to suggest that ideology
critique is more pervasive than ever.
Perhaps it has been too successful. This, at least, is the shared
position of right-wing conspiracy theorists who decry the bogeyman of
“cultural Marxism” as equivalent to the scourge of political correctness
and more centrist liberals (and even some leftists) for whom academic
critique and what is misleadingly called “postmodernism” opened the
door to post-truth or the fetish of identity politics.3 And, it should be
noted, these attacks on the legacy of ideology critique from the right
and center left alike share to some degree, however crudely, the logic
of the language game of critique itself by claiming to strip leftist anger
(now called political correctness, identity politics, virtue signaling,
etc.) of its power by baldly reducing it to its social function, the
presumed jockeying for position within the attention economy. Leftist
ideology is unmasked and the bad faith of outrage at inequality, racism,
imperialism, or misogyny is exposed by critique turned against itself.
Indeed, it is especially the right’s appropriation of the gestures of
ideology critique to undermine leftist ideology critique in a
battleground that takes place largely on social media that may be most
responsible for the sense that critical language has been reduced to so
many empty tactical weapons for commanding the shitstorms of the
online culture wars, whose relation to actual transformations in social
conditions is often far from clear.
 As much as online discourse may be fueled by feedback loops of
resentment built into the architecture of social media platforms, there’s
much to celebrate in the mainstreaming of leftist critical vocabulary led
largely by a new generation of politically passionate youth. Evidence
suggests that the “under 30s” in the United States right now are the
most left-wing generation since the 1960s if not in the history of the
country. Polls show them consistently giving higher favorability ratings
to socialism than to capitalism.4 What is meant by socialism is, of
course, not always entirely clear, but what is clear is that the signifier
“socialism” is a placeholder for a loss of faith in capitalism to deliver
the kind of world that this generation wants to live in, one not
delivered over to the fate of corporations, one structured on care
instead of competition, and devoted to preserving the planet and
curbing both the long-term and the more imminent effects of
environmental disaster on the world’s most vulnerable populations, a
world in which it would be absurd to imagine that a dozen or so
individual men could have the same wealth as 3.6 billion people, half
the global population. This is also a generation of unprecedented
progressive views about sexuality, gender, and race. In these views,
one sees the marks of traditions of left-wing critical thought, of
Marxist ideological criticism, of radical feminism, of queer theory, of
critical race theory, and of structuralism and poststructuralism.
It is then striking that in this same moment, as critique has become
increasingly mainstream, academic film and media studies has, by and
large, retreated from the project of ideology critique in recent decades.
The claim that the critique of ideology no longer dominates academic
film studies may seem surprising to some. Surely the analysis of class,
race and gender still are central to much academic film and media
theory. But I believe two points are central: (1) In recent decades, the
major trends of academic theory and philosophy are often in opposition
to ideology critique, if not always in its aims, at least in its methods.
(2) Insofar as ideological criticism persists, it is too often
undertheorized. Few theorists are still asking: what do we mean by
ideology and what underlies and justifies the methods of interpretation
that derive meaning from a text or platform? The old Marxist
problematic of how to think the relation between base and
superstructure or political economy and aesthetic forms has been
largely abandoned at the very moment that certain tendencies of
ideological criticism have become codified as common sense.
Going back to the 1990s, new theoretical and philosophical turns in
film studies have often been pitched in direct opposition to critique.
For example, cognitive theories and analytic philosophy have been
offered as ways of developing theories of film that are descriptive
rather than hermeneutic and not overdetermined by political
commitments. Abandoning critique was the explicit purpose of the
1996 book Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies, edited by David
Bordwell and Noël Carroll. The contributors to this volume agreed on
their rejection of what they called “grand theory” for more pragmatic,
verifiable forms of theoretical inquiry that sought to pose answerable
questions on the road to progressive knowledge about specific aspects
of how films function.5 Their objections to ideology critique were
framed primarily on epistemological not political grounds, though the
book was calling for a shift from the assumption that film theory was
necessarily political, a central axiom of much post 1968 film theory.
For the post-theory adherents there was no necessary correlation
between the goals of film theory and the critique of capitalist
ideology.6
But this shared commitment to apolitical middle-range piecemeal
theories over more abstract, speculative claims is only one example of
the retreat from ideology critique. In recent decades, even the film and
media studies traditions that remain speculative, avowedly political,
and indebted to traditions of continental philosophy, have—through the
influence of Gilles Deleuze, a return to phenomenology, or through a
focus on theories of affect—tended to avoid the vocabulary and
methods of ideological criticism to instead grasp aspects of cinema and
the experience of spectatorship that were thought to be lost in the
heavy-handed forms of interpretation associated with reading the
repressed ideological content of individual films.7 Other forms of new
philosophical inquiries, some influenced by Stanley Cavell’s cinema
writings and ordinary language philosophy, similarly take their
distance from the practice of critique.8 Meanwhile, new materialisms
and a wide range of new work focusing on technology, infrastructure,
and industrial practices have marked a shift away from ideological
analysis. In the humanities more generally, it has become a familiar
complaint that, as Bruno Latour put it, “critique has run out of steam.”9
New forms of reading of texts whether “reparative,” “surface,” or
“distant” are often posed in opposition to the tradition of ideology
critique.10
To take one recent prominent example, writing from literary studies,
Rita Felski urges us to be “postcritical”—to abandon the exclusive
search for “hidden causes, determining conditions, and noxious
motives” and, instead of suspicion, to find a way to talk about what we
love about a text and what it makes possible.11 Felski’s The Limits of
Critique, published in 2015, presents itself as an attempt to question
the hegemony of critique, but it is Felski’s position that I contend
increasingly represents the orthodoxy of the academic humanities. The
position that advocates for affirmation over negativity, for affects and
attachments over form and structures, for attending to surfaces and
description over depth and absent causes, for, in Felski’s words, the
text as a “co-actor” rather than a bad object—it is this position and not
ideology critique that is now hegemonic in the American humanities.
What Felski correctly identifies and rightly resists are the ready-to-
hand operations of critique that can be applied to almost any media
object with predictable results and have in many respects exhausted
themselves. But she rarely gets to the crux of the matter. I will provide
one example because I think it symptomatic of larger tendencies in
debates about criticism today that resonate throughout film and media
studies.
At one point, using Roland Barthes’s Mythologies and various
Marxist texts as examples, she asks the question “Why have nature, the
natural, and naturalizing gotten such a bad rap?”12 This kind of
question is frequently posed in her book, often in a slightly glib
humorous way, but rarely is there a serious attempt to answer it. What
is wrong with nature? Why should we assume that nature is a bad thing
such that everything must be denaturalized? The question certainly
seems like a fair one, and the assumption by so much academic work
that the familiar, the taken-for-granted, the ordinary (aligned in film
theory with Hollywood, the mainstream, and the popular) should
always be a source of suspicion is certainly worth taking issue with.
But if we turn specifically to the question of “naturalizing” as a target
by ideology critique, aren’t we required to broach the basic claims of
historical materialism as understood within Western Marxism?
Felski likes to point out that she is primarily looking at tendencies in
American academic criticism in recent decades and Marx, Freud, and
Nietzsche are not her real targets.13 That’s fine to a point, but
ultimately it’s a dodge. After all, the logic of ideology critique as it has
more often than not been practiced by the major figures in the history
of Marxist thought does not imply that nature as such is a bad thing. So
the question itself is a flawed one. It’s true there are critics who
privilege artifice over nature, but this is not the central move that has
been associated with critique. For a Marxist, the opposite of nature is
not artifice, it is history. The claim that Felski never addresses directly
is that certain ideas in a capitalist society tend to be perceived as
natural when they are, in fact, historical. And “historical” means that
they can be otherwise. What are some of these historical categories that
tend to get naturalized?: Whiteness, blackness, heterosexuality,
homosexuality, masculinity, femininity, the human, class positions, and
the logic of a capitalist society driven by the profit motive, which has
increasingly pervaded all aspects of our daily lives.
Felski might respond that I am not telling her something she is
unaware of, but if you are going to try to put pressure on the logic of
critique as an operation of denaturalizing, shouldn’t you be required to
address whether the tendency to naturalize differences between races,
genders, and classes is common if unconscious within mainstream
narratives, and if you grant that it is, why isn’t denaturalizing an
imperative political operation? The point of critical theory is not that
the natural is bad but that naturalizing, giving the appearance of
ahistorical nature to things which are not merely natural, is often a
violent operation. Postcritics would do well to actually challenge this
logic if they wish to go beyond critique. But to do this would be
engaging in critique. So instead they deracinate critique from its
theoretical logic and reduce it to a tiresome reflexive operation, which
admittedly it very often is. Felski is right to a large degree about the
superficial reflexive gestures that stand in for critique, but her book is
evidence of the need for more critical theory not less.
The celebration of a more healthy and affirmative postcritical stance
has become familiar though it rarely seems to escape the project of
anticipating its own arrival, which sucks it back into the self-canceling
vortex of the critique of critique. The postcritics, as they attempt to
illustrate the limits of critique, seem to always sound a bit too much
like the curmudgeonly critics they are trying to rid themselves of. It is
almost as if the critique of critique has itself run out of steam in the
generalized exhaustion that characterizes the increasingly precarious
academic life of the neoliberal all-administrative university. As the
critical and postcritical professors fight it out, tiny well-funded student
groups invite white supremacists to give speeches on campuses so that
when student groups protest, the New York Times opinion section can
light up with editorials about the threats to free speech from the
intolerant campus left. Welcome to the humanities in the post-Trump
era.
This chapter argues for the need for a revitalized ideological
criticism in the post-Trump age. The name Trump risks dating this
chapter, but the rather modest gambit is that the election of Donald
Trump to the presidency of the United States might be seen as
signifying a problem for how we think about the critique of ideology.
Even now that he is no longer in office, Trump may serve as a useful
tipping point in a certain crisis of legitimation related to the credibility
of political institutions and legacy media. Trump also represents the
culmination of a process in which politics gets blurred with media and
spectacle. For the purposes of this chapter, I am less concerned with
the ideology of Trumpism than the problems that Trumpism poses for
ideology as an explanatory concept. But regarding the former, the first
thing to say is that the claim that Trumpism is somehow radically new,
a break in the history of American politics is itself a dubious
ideological stance that ignores how American exceptionalism,
submitting politics to the transactional logic of business, not to
mention racism, anti-immigrant rhetoric and policy, macho bluster and
misogyny, are all central to America and American history. The history
of American film and media provide ample evidence of this.
The novelty of Trumpism within the history of American politics
was often overstated, but what felt new about the Trump administration
was the stripping bare of the façade that might require critique. In the
age of Trump, speaking truth to power is all too easy. Anyone with
WiFi access can reply directly to the president on Twitter and correct
his misinformation or just tell him to go fuck himself often to great
enthusiasm (measured in likes and retweets). This is the same media
ecology that gave us Trump in the first place. In this ecology, the
ability to self-brand and monopolize attention with one’s brand—
always Trump’s greatest skill, honed first in real estate and later as a
reality TV game show host—creates a new measure of power or
success no longer defined by popularity or accomplishments in the old
sense. Power for Trump has almost nothing to do with the ability to
generate consensus, to convince or deceive. He lies proudly and the
mark of power for him is not to convince the world of his lies but the
ability to lie with impunity. This is the distinct enjoyment that comes
from having money and power—that those with less power have no
choice but to take the insult of being nakedly lied to and subjected to
your presence. The open secret is that this is a prime source of what
Lacan called jouissance for Trump’s opponents as much as his
supporters. As Jodi Dean has argued, Trump facilitates enjoyment or as
Lauren Berlant has put it, Trump makes people feel free.14 He
facilitates the jouissance of racism, sexism, and inequality, which
accounts for the love he gets from his base. Meanwhile, he also allows
liberals to enjoy their outrage. This is what has not been fully
understood—the libidinal economy that sustains Trump is not only that
of his fans but also his purported enemies, and it is made possible by a
media ecosystem that may on the surface seem to reject him and to be
an object of his derision.
For Dean, the enjoyment Trump inspires is due to his “honesty.”15
This may seem like a strange way to describe Trump, but Trump’s
form of lying is implicitly honest about the libidinal economy of
plutocracy. Facts no longer matter when you live by what David
Keith’s character in John Carpenter’s They Live (1988) calls “the
golden rule: he who has the gold makes the rules.” This poses a
problem for ideology critique directed at revealing how the surface
consensual hegemonic truth obscures its function of reinforcing
institutional power. Success in the online attention economy is not
aided by believing what you say, but knowing how, as Jacques
Rancière has argued, to play on “the undecidable status of reality and
the status of ambiguous utterances which characterize the circulation of
media messages.”16 Rancière wrote these words in 1995, long before
the paranoia over fake news, deep fakes, and Russian bots.
This does not obviate the need for ideology critique, only the way
we may understand the concept. We need a new language of critical
thinking that revitalizes the tradition of critique without being a
wholesale return to the familiar gestures of academic critique that was
dominant in the 1980s and 1990s and that lives on today on social
media.
Ideology critique in film theory has tended to take one of two forms
—a more modernist or formalist version and a more populist or
utopian version. The modernist version focused on film form and how
the conventions of mainstream narrative cinema tended to reinforce or
naturalize capitalist individualism and the position of the (usually
white, male, heterosexual) spectator. Here films were valorized that
disrupted these conventions and made the viewer more conscious of
the film as a constructed object and their own position as spectators.17
The second form of ideological criticism tended to be more invested in
the content of films and how they circulated within the culture. From
this approach, the more subversive tendencies within mainstream
cinema and media were celebrated over avant-garde and art films with
their more limited audiences. Meanwhile, how films address spectators
through formal techniques was considered less important than how
groups make use of films for their own purposes.18
The task today is not to simply repeat the “political modernist”
discourse of the era of high theory or the cultural studies discourse that
supplemented and sometimes usurped it. While it would be a mistake
to assume in some totalizing way that both these traditions have been
outmoded or superseded, they nonetheless feel inadequate to the
political and media ecosystem we find ourselves in today. Critique
today has to recognize how the ideological indexes of the current
moment are taking new forms. Therefore, both cinema and criticism
have to be adequate to not only revealing the persistence of racism,
sexism, and the repression of capitalism, class struggle, and inequality
but also what is formally novel about their current manifestations. We
also need to be attentive to how race, gender, and class intersect and to
do so in a way that is not only about producing knowledge or
awareness but also directed toward the possibility of some other way
of being.
This requires taking stock of the history of ideology critique in film
studies, an awareness of the conceptual problems that haunt its most
familiar tendencies and a recognition of what is specific about how
ideology manifests itself in films and other media forms in our current
historical moment.
So, some propositions about the conditions of possibility of critique
today in film and media studies:
1. Today, skepticism not gullibility is the default approach to media. Therefore, the
critique of media can no longer be primarily oriented toward generating critical
distance where it didn’t exist before.
It has long been assumed in both film and media theory that
mainstream audiovisual objects come to us as if they are obvious and
commonsensical when they are anything but. One can think of the
feminist critique of the patriarchal unconscious of mainstream
narrative cinema or, in a very different register, Noam Chomsky and
Ed Herman’s analysis of the “manufacture of consent” in mainstream
media. For the film and media professor then, one of the first lessons is
helping students unlearn their immediate habits, biases, pleasures, and
epistemological assumptions so that they take a more critical approach.
The postcritics have pushed against this tactic. One of the most
familiar ways of generating consensus around the critique of critique is
to borrow Paul Ricoeur’s characterization of Marx, Freud, and
Nietzsche as prophets of a “hermeneutics of suspicion.”19 Surely, this
argument goes, we should not always approach aesthetic objects with
suspicion, and lovers of film and literature are quick to agree that this
tendency is part of some intellectual sickness or envy. Why not
approach works with generosity? Why not listen to Marie Kondo and
direct your focus to what sparks joy? A close cousin of this is Eve
Sedgwick’s notion of paranoid reading, implicitly psychologizing the
intellectual’s conspiratorial drives. There can be some virtue to
cautioning against beginning from the assumption that the theorist
always knows more than the work itself and there is indeed no shortage
of examples where the machinery of theory becomes incapable of
discovering a film in its richness because it seeks in advance to reveal
its hidden ideological motives. But can’t we all agree that a certain
suspicion, even paranoia, is not entirely unwarranted when we listen to
a speech by the American president justifying a military intervention,
or the coverage of that speech on Fox News or, for that matter, in the
New York Times? It is only a small step to extend that suspicion to the
latest American blockbuster constructed around good and bad wars,
heroes and villains, affirmed and disparaged values and forms of life.
What needs to be acknowledged in any conception of ideology
critique today is that the twenty-first-century information economy
breeds suspicion.20 The goal should not be to overcome it; nor should
it be to instill it. An awareness of this generalized suspicion should not
mean a return to sober empiricism or a fetishization of facts to combat
“post-truth.”
Latour’s influential 2004 essay, “Why Has Critique Run out of
Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern,” was widely seen
—depending on one’s affiliations—as a betrayal or a relief. A figure
once associated with critical theory, he was seen as an apostate by
some, posing as a native informant and giving ammunition to the
enemies of already embattled left-wing academic traditions.21 For
others, he granted authority to their own desire to escape the language
games of theory and get back to empiricism and aesthetic pleasure.
Couched in the post-September 11 rhetoric of clear-sighted, hard-
headed realism that was granted by the return to history (concepts like
spectacle and simulacrum now mere remnants of a late twentieth-
century postmodern culture that could hardly be relevant to the era of
the war on terror), he was right about at least one thing: whatever
media literacy means today, it no longer requires (if it ever did)
instilling suspicion and creating distance for overly credulous
spectators. Today, it is suspicion or skepticism and not credulity that is
the default position of the generation of digital natives.22
Latour noted the increasing popularity of conspiracy theories as one
manifestation of this:
Maybe I am taking conspiracy theories too seriously, but it worries me to detect, in
those mad mixtures of knee-jerk disbelief, punctilious demands for proofs, and free
use of powerful explanation from the social neverland many of the weapons of social
critique. Of course conspiracy theories are an absurd deformation of our own
arguments, but, like weapons smuggled through a fuzzy border to the wrong party,
these are our weapons nonetheless.23

Maybe he wasn’t taking conspiracy theories seriously enough. In the

age of #Pizzagate and QAnon on the right as well as some of the more
fanciful visions of #Russiagate from the anti-Trump “#Resistance,”
Latour’s concern has been confirmed.
But conspiracy theories are not ideology critique. They are, rather,
short circuits of it. At the same time, they are, as Fredric Jameson
argued, ideology, which is to say, a meaningful form of cognitive
mapping, attempts to make sense of our positions within an
increasingly unreadable global system, which is why they became
central to Hollywood cinema starting in the 1970s and are integral to
social media today. They are not good theories but grand narratives in
an age when grand narratives no longer have legitimacy. They are
therefore in need of theorization to understand what problems they are
seeking to solve. Conspiracy and suspicion need to be theorized and
not equated with critical theory. Theory, for its part, has to explain the
lure of conspiracy (without mocking it) as a symptom of how
information circulates today in accordance with the logic of
financialization and addiction.
2. Today, reflexivity is dominant and increasingly outmoded as a political gesture.
A central feature of 1970s film theory was the assumption that
mainstream films hid their own conditions of possibility and positioned
spectators as if they had unmediated access to the world, placed in the
position of the “invisible guest.”24 The codes and conventions of
dominant cinema reinforced the specific viewing conditions created in
the theatrical setting of the movie theater. For example, the refusal in
narrative cinema of people on film looking back into the camera
(common in the era now often called “the cinema of attractions” before
the hegemony of the cinema of narrative integration) was central to the
sense that the world depicted onscreen exists without the viewer or the
camera. Forgetting our own bodies in the dark, we identified our gaze
with the look of the camera and the characters.
Meanwhile, one way for a film to challenge the dominant ideologies
of mainstream cinema was to appeal to some sort of reflexivity that
violated the terms of the invisible guest. This could come in the form
of direct address or of some acknowledgement of the materiality of the
film itself, as, say, in the opening of Bergman’s Persona or in structural
materialist films in which the sprocket holes or deliberate scratches on
the emulsion make an appearance. Jean-Louis Baudry wrote of “the
return of the apparatus in flesh and blood” in Vertov’s Man with a
Movie Camera when we see the work of the editor or the
cameraman.25 Today, the position of the spectator as absent or invisible
is less endemic to our most ordinary interfaces with screens. Our media
is now participatory and reflexive without in any meaningful way
being critical. And reflexivity as a strategy—self-consciousness about
the apparatus—can no longer count as the return of the repressed. This
does not mean that nothing is repressed and we have entered an age of
full transparency. On the contrary, more is black boxed than ever
before.26 It means merely that the inscription of the technical
conditions of a given film or TV object is part of the dominant codes of
an age of ubiquitous media. New media objects tend to be more
exhibitionistic than voyeuristic, and their mode of exhibition far from
being hidden is now frequently part of their explicit identity as an
object.
3. There is no longer any need to give academic credibility to popular content.
One of the great achievements of cultural studies was to take
maligned and frequently feminized forms of cultural consumption
seriously. Think of Ien Ang’s work on soap opera or Janice Radway on
the romance novel.27 Film studies played an important role in this
history. Even la politique des auteurs in France in the 1950s and the
auteur theory in America, today often seen not without justification as
a masculinist or snobbish enterprise, once challenged elite forms of
taste that would have scoffed at the idea that Hollywood genre
filmmakers might be treated as artists. More recently, Henry Jenkins’s
notion of the aca-fan undid the model of the intellectual who, from
their ivory tower perch, condescended to analyze the alienated cultural
consumption of the masses from a distance, free of contamination.28
But the fan as knowledge producer is a position to be wary of. As
Stuart Hall, who may have done more than anyone to legitimize the
theoretical analysis of popular culture, stated in an interview in 2007,
“I really cannot read another cultural studies analysis of Madonna or
The Sopranos,” remarking that analyses of popular culture that fully
embraced their objects became complicit with commercial culture.29
Cultural studies was right that ostensibly “low” forms, from YouTube
videos to video games, are always worth taking seriously and should
not be condescended to, but we must question whose interests are
served when the academic is also a self-defined fan, rejects critical
distance, and has no room in his reading of a cultural object for the
twin categories of ideology and class.
4. Ideology critique comes without guarantees.
According to Latour, one problem with critique is that the critic is
always right. A similar claim is found in certain writings by Jacques
Rancière.30 The conditions of possibility of any object or argument can
always be pointed to as a blind spot. Latour and Rancière are right to
be concerned about the limits of ready-to-hand conventional Marxist
explanations of social phenomena.31 To suggest that the academic
critic is always situated in the position of mastery, inoculated from
ignorance, seems to forget the centrality of self-critique to critique or
the influence of Lacan’s maxim that “the non-dupes err.” Nonetheless,
what needs to be preserved from their critique of critique is the sense
that the object under the gaze of the critic has the capacity to shape the
critic’s perception. The analysis cannot be predetermined. As Stuart
Hall argues, there are no guarantees.
 In his essay “The Problem of Ideology—Marxism without
Guarantees,” Hall poses the question “And if ideology is the product or
function of ‘the structure’ rather than of a group of conspirators, how
does an economic structure generate a guaranteed set of ideological
effects?”32 For Hall, the question was rhetorical—the economic
structure does not guarantee a set of ideological effects, but it is the
strength of Hall’s analysis that he does not simply abandon Marxism
for failing to offer the analytic tools to be always right and always
predictable. Marx, as Hall argues, understood that the economy only
limits the terrain of operations, and he did not argue that someone’s
class position guarantees a certain set of beliefs and actions.
Nonetheless, “the terrain of operations” remains a vital field of study to
understand negotiated and oppositional readings, as well as hegemonic
ones.
5. Critique and affirmation are not opposed.
As Alain Badiou argues, following Deleuze, we must not only
critique the ideology of a given work but also ask, “What are the
artwork’s effects for thought?33 These are not mutually exclusive
projects. The effects for thought of a given work are also the work it
does on the ideological indicators of our moment.
I have already discussed how the rejection of ideology critique has
frequently been articulated in terms of a rejection of negativity.
Ideology critique, it is said, proceeds from the assumption that films
are first of all products of the culture industry and therefore serve its
interests, interests that the theorist exposes. The work is then a priori a
bad object and its false consciousness must be uncovered by analysis.
What is foreclosed in this analysis is the bourgeois idea of film as art,
capable of transforming our perception of the world. This is a
caricature of critique that no doubt fits some examples, but critique has
tended to reject the false consciousness model and has also sought an
immanent component informed by attachment, the possibility of a
utopian dimension or contradictions that undermine a work’s explicit
ideological work.
We need a more affirmative philosophy in line with critique, though
without accepting the terms of postcritique. One of Deleuze’s great
contributions to the study of cinema was to treat films as new relations
between sound and image, movement and time, which makes new
concepts possible. There was no critique, only the affirmation of films
that create new ideas through the means of moving images. But new
ideas in film, as Badiou argues, emerge not ex nihilo but out of work
done on common images, the generic and habitual tropes that form the
ideological indexes of our current historical moment. Affirmation in
this conception is affirmation of that which does not exist according to
dominant ideology.
This also means that ideology critique need not avoid evaluation
entirely. While a suspension of evaluation is frequently a useful
starting point for an immanent critique of the ideological
contradictions that make up any object, this does not mean that all
objects are equal. Ideological analysis requires being for or against
certain works and to affirm the potential of film and media to not only
hold a mirror up to ideology but also open up some new possibilities
for thought.
6. The object of critique has changed, and so too should the form of critique.
Ideology critique historically proceeded from a reading or
interpretation of a single film. Think, for example, of Cahiers du
Cinéma on Young Mr. Lincoln or Stephen Heath on Touch of Evil as
masterful and influential examples.34 Meanwhile, “reading” individual
films is itself an increasingly outmoded practice and cinema and media
studies has begun to shift focus to technologies and infrastructures, to
platforms and formats, to fan cultures and vernacular practices.
Of course, ideology critique was never restricted to the reading of
single texts. A major intervention into film theory in the 1960s and
1970s from Jean-Louis Comolli, Jean-Louis Baudry, Christian Metz,
and others was to focus on the apparatus as such, the industry, the
screening situation, techniques, and technology as bearers of ideology
before their instantiation in the text of a specific feature film. And
through Louis Althusser and Michel Foucault, the institution and its
embeddedness in capitalism, whether the museum or Hollywood,
became a major site of critique. Yet even in these more expansive
concerns, the individual text may be offered as one way to think the
questions of apparatus or institution by either reflecting the ideology of
the latter or exposing it in some way. The gap between the individual
text and the institution, which Fredric Jameson has suggested is “the
fundamental dilemma (if not aporia) of all contemporary ideological
analysis” is too often not treated as a dilemma at all.35
One issue today is the question of the text or the type of texts that
require analysis. The projected classical feature film in a theatrical
setting, the “super-genre” as Metz put it, is no longer the hegemonic
object.36 Film theory as ideology critique in the 1970s was closely
wedded to the analysis of the classical Hollywood film. Modernist and
avant-garde cinema could be positioned as a possible answer to the
dominant model if it wasn’t merely art cinema or mystificatory
bourgeois formalism. Today we need analyses of series, all manner of
online video genres (from Let’s Play to ASMR), gifs, macros, and so
on. This does not mean we should neglect feature films but that we
need to recognize that autonomous works hold less weight in new
viewing practices. Even regarding feature films, scenes, connections to
other films, and media and modes of circulation may be as important
today as looking at a given film’s formal techniques or narrative
structure.
7. Ideology is not false consciousness, it is cognitive mapping.
So let’s ask the question we’ve been trying to avoid: what is
ideology? Let’s begin with a few definitions. Stuart Hall: “by ideology
I mean the mental frameworks—the languages, the concepts,
categories, imagery of thought, and the systems of representation
which different classes and social groups deploy in order to make sense
of, define, figure out and render intelligible the way society works.”37
Quentin Meillassoux: ideology is “any form of pseudo-rationality
whose aim is to establish that what exists as a matter of fact exists
necessarily.”38 Ideology, in other words, is the denial of contingency.
Or, Fredric Jameson, who, following Althusser, defines ideology as “a
mechanism whereby the … individual biological subject situates
himself or herself within the collective social structure: ideology as
unconscious cognitive mapping.”39
Let’s accept that ideology is unconscious cognitive mapping, the
way a subject or group renders intelligible the way society works. It is
not then false consciousness as implied by Meillassoux. But
nonetheless it has a blind spot. Like all mappings or narratives, it
comes up against its own limits. As a sense-making operation, it
forecloses other possibilities. Ideology critique, in turn, always means
asserting that which was foreclosed. It always involves attempting to
articulate the relationship between the text and class/subject and the
larger global system or social structure, and its goal is always to wrest
potential from necessity. This is why ideology critique always needs to
be reinvented and attuned to the ideological indexes of the current
moment, the dominant tropes or imagery that become habitual or taken
for granted. Ideology is not “false” or “pseudo,” but it tends toward
naturalization or assuming the inevitability of the way things are.
Critique is the attempt to interrupt this inevitability.
Films and other media objects soak up ideological content and
perform work on it. The most obvious way that they do this is through
narrative—the way plots evoke and resolve dilemmas around common
values and aspirations. But ideology subsists as much in dominant
formal tropes and platforms as it does in narrative content. The films
and videos worth affirming are able to interrupt in some way the
ideological indexes of our shared current experience. At the same time,
any film whatsoever performs some unconscious cognitive mapping
that can be more or less revealing in its contradictions. The work of the
film theorist is not merely to play the killjoy, hunting and killing bad
objects, but neither is it to overromanticize the collective potential of
popular culture. It is to analyze the work of ideology, its libidinal
economy, but also the work on ideology that new cinematic ideas make
possible. In our social media era of surveillance capitalism, all
ideology critique today is necessarily a form of media theory and the
media theorist should become a critic of ideology.
Let’s be clear: ideology critique is not the answer to the question of
how aesthetic forms mediate the social and historical world and
political economy. It is the name of the discourse that poses the
question. As long as that question needs to be posed, we need to
reinvent the critique of ideology to affirm the possibility of some other
form of experience on the horizon. Films and other forms of art and
media are still where we find the resources for imagining other
possibilities for collective life.
N
1. See Sergei Eisenstein, “Dickens, Griffith and Film Today,” in Film Form: Essays in
Film Theory (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977). For Bazin’s more
ideologically inflected criticism, see Qu’est-ce que le cinéma? Tome III. Cinéma et
sociologie (Paris: Cerf. Bazin, A, 1962). See also Robert Warshow, The Immediate
Experience: Movies, Comics, Theatre, and Other Aspects of Popular Culture
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002).
2. For a good collection and overview of film theory from the late 1960s to the early
1980s, see Philip Rosen, ed., Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Theory Reader
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1986).
3. For a discussion of misleading uses of the word “postmodernism,” see Nico Baumbach,
Damon Young, and Genevieve Yue, “For a Political Critique of Culture,” Social Text 34,
no. 3 (June, 2016): 1–20.
4. See Felix Salmon, “Gen Z prefers ‘Socialism’ to ‘Capitalism,’” Axios, January 27,
2019, https://www.axios.com/socialism-capitalism-poll-generation-z-preference-
1ffb8800-0ce5-4368-8a6f-de3b82662347.html. Gallup polls have shown similar
numbers to the Harris poll. See Mohamed Younis, “Four in 10 Americans Embrace
Some Form of Socialism,” Gallup, May 20, 2019,
https://news.gallup.com/poll/257639/four-americans-embrace-form-socialism.aspx.
5. See, for example, David Bordwell, “Contemporary Film Studies and the Vicissitudes of
Grand Theory,” in Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies, ed. David Bordwell and
Noël Carroll (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996), 29.
6. This is most explicitly argued by Noël Carroll in “Prospects for Film Theory: A Personal
Assessment,” in Bordwell and Carroll, Post-Theory, 46.
7. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara
Haberjam (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), and Gilles Deleuze,
Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1989), have influenced a large number of books. For a
small sample, see D. N. Rodowick, Gilles Deleuze’s Time Machine (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 1997), Patricia Pisters, The Neuro-Image: A Deleuzian Film-
Philosophy of Digital Screen Culture (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012),
and Barbara Kennedy, Deleuze and Cinema: The Aesthetics of Sensation (Edinburgh,
Scotland: Edinburgh University Press, 2000). For the return to phenomenology, see
Vivian Sobchack, Address of the Eye (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995),
and more recently, Jennifer Barker, The Tactile Eye: Touch and the Cinematic
Experience (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), and Scott Richmond,
Cinema’s Bodily Illusions: Flying, Floating, and Hallucinating (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 2016). For an overview, critique of, and contribution to affect theory
in film studies, see Eugenie Brinkema, The Forms of the Affects (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2014). See also Brian Massumi’s claim that affect is “resistant to
critique” in Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 27–28.
8. See, for example, Film as Philosophy: Essays in Cinema after Wittgenstein and Cavell,
ed. Rupert Read and Jerry Goodenough (London: Palgrave, 2005).
9. Bruno Latour, “Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of
Concern,” Critical Inquiry 30 (Winter 2004): 225–48.
10. See Eve Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or, You’re So Paranoid,
You Probably Think This Essay Is about You,” in Touching Feeling (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2003); Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus, “Surface Reading: An
Introduction,” Representations 108: (2009): 1–23; Franco Moretti, Distant Reading
(London: Verso, 2013).
11. Rita Felski, The Limits of Critique (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 12.
12. Ibid., 71.
13. Ibid., 3.
14. Lauren Berlant, “Trump, or Political Emotions,” Supervalent Thought Blog, August 4,
2016, https://supervalentthought.com/2016/08/04/trump-or-political-emotions/; Jodi
Dean, “Donald Trump Is the Most Honest Candidate in American Politics Today,” In
These Times, August 12, 2015, http://inthesetimes.com/article/18309/donald-trump-
republican-president.
15. Dean, “Donald Trump.”
16. Jacques Rancière, “Cold Racism,” in Chronicles of Consensual Times (London:
Continuum, 2010), 14.
17. This category corresponds roughly with so-called 1970s film theory or Screen theory.
See Rosen, Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology.
18. This second category corresponds to the shift away from the so-called high theory of the
1970s to more cultural studies approaches in the 1980s and 1990s. Of course, this is an
overly schematic opposition and the two approaches blur together in various ways.
19. Paul Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation (New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 1970), 33.
20. For an argument about the fundamental suspicion through which the public approaches
media, see Boris Groys, Under Suspicion: A Phenomenology of Media (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2012).
21. For a good recent overview of some the responses Latour’s essay sparked, see Heather
Love, “The Temptations: Donna Haraway, Feminist Objectivity, and the Problem of
Critique,” in Critique and Postcritique, ed. Elizabeth S. Anker and Rita Felski (Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 2017).
22. For a useful argument about how the digital information economy breeds suspicion, see
Mark Andrejevic, Infoglut: How Too Much Information Is Changing the Way We Think
and Know (New York: Routledge, 2013).
23. Latour, “Why has Critique Run out of Steam?,” 230.
24. See Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” in Rosen, Narrative,
Apparatus, Ideology, 200.
25. Jean-Louis Baudry, “Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus,”
trans. Alan Williams, in Rosen, Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology, 295–96.
26. With platforms like Google or Facebook, we have no direct access to their algorithms
and can only analyze their effects. See, for example, Safiya Noble, Algorithms of
Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism (New York: New York University
Press, 2018).
27. See Janice Radway, Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991) and Ien Ang, Watching Dallas:
Soap Opera and the Melodramatic Imagination (London: Methuen, 1985).
28. Henry Jenkins entitled his blog, henryjenkins.org, “Confessions of an Aca-Fan.”
29. Colin McCabe, “An Interview with Stuart Hall,” in Perpetual Carnival: Essays on Film
and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 258.
30. SEE, FOR EXAMPLE, RANCIÈRE, “COLD RACISM,” 12–13,
OR “THE MISADVENTURES OF CRITICAL THOUGHT,” IN
JACQUES RANCIÈRE, THE EMANCIPATED SPECTATOR
(LONDON: VERSO, 2009), 25–49.

31. At the same time, they both tend to assume that class analysis has become common
sense, a position which is hard to maintain in the American context.
32. Stuart Hall, “The Problem of Ideology: Marxism without Guarantees,” in Stuart Hall:
Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, ed. Kuan Hsing-Chen and David Morely (New
York: Routledge, 2006), 31.
33. Alain Badiou, Handbook of Inaesthetics, trans. Alberto Toscano (Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 2004), 85.
34. See “Young Mr. Lincoln, texte collectif,” in Cahiers du Cinéma (August 1970), no. 223
and translated in Screen (Autumn 1972): 13:5–44; Stephen Heath, “Film and System:
Terms of Analysis, Part One,” Screen 16, no. 1 (Spring 1975): 7–77; Stephen Heath,
“Film and System: Terms of Analysis, Part Two,” Screen 16, no. 2 (Summer 1975): 91–
113.
35. Fredric Jameson, “Ideological Analysis: A Handbook,” in Valences of the Dialectic
(London: Verso, 2009), 339.
36. Christian Metz, “The Fiction Film and Its Spectator: A Metapsychological Study,” in
Apparatus, ed. Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (New York: Tanam Press, 1980), 402.
37. Hall, “Problem of Ideology,” 29.
38. Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, trans.
Ray Brassier (London: Continuum, 2008), 33–34.
39. Fredric Jameson, Allegory and Ideology (London: Verso, 2019), x.
 CHAPTER 8

BUDDHISM AND FILM THEORY

Beyond a Legacy

VICTOR FAN

FOR many years, the role Yogācāra, Tathāgatagarba, and Zen Buddhism played
in twentieth-century Chinese intellectual thinking on cinema has been grossly
underestimated.1 Meanwhile, its potential to enable scholars today to rethink
and reconfigure film theory and philosophy has been downplayed. Since the
1870s, Chinese Buddhism in China and the Sinophone regions, Japan, and
Korea has been appropriated and rewritten through the lens of Orientalism on
the one hand and via the language of nationalism on the other. Thus, historians
today are almost embarrassed to acknowledge its significance in bringing Euro-
American philosophy and classical Chinese studies into a comparative dialogue
during the late-Qing (1644–1911) and Republican (1911–1949) eras.2 In
addition, film and media scholars across the globe have very little knowledge of
Buddhism, for it has never been included in most East Asian—let alone Euro-
American—primary and secondary school curricula. It has also been looked
askance in Europe and North America as an esoteric and “spiritual” curiosity.
In this chapter, I argue that by acknowledging and addressing Buddhism’s
footprint in early twentieth-century intellectual discussions of cinema, we, as
film and media scholars today, can access a deeper register of how these
thinkers might have understood cinema ontology and the relationship between
its spectators and reality. In this chapter, I first address the question of why it is
important to designate Chinese film theory and criticism as part of the larger
topos in global film theory. I also outline the historical development of film
thinking and writing between the late-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries in
China. Then, I explicate the role of Buddhism in late-Qing and early-
Republican intellectual debates, and how some key concepts have made their
way into film criticism. With these contexts in mind, I illustrate how Buddhism
can offer us new insights into certain impasses in the current debates in film and
media studies.

AM T
Is there such a thing as Chinese film theory? Aaron Gerow argues against the
idea of calling critical writings on the cinema in East Asia during the first half
of the twentieth century “theory.” For him, Japanese critics and intellectuals
who wrote about film never conceived of their works as a theoretical system.
When scholars of Asian cinemas today claim that their countries of study—like
their Euro-American counterparts—have their own theoretical “traditions,” they
effectively graft these local bodies of knowledge onto the Euro-American
“canon.” In so doing, they ask East Asian film thinking and criticism to perform
what Euro-American theory has been historically expected to perform: to
universalize a body of knowledge that is particular to a set of historical
conditions in order to overdetermine what is deemed to be a legitimate
episteme.3 However, Gerow’s proposal to read East Asian film criticism only
within its specific historicity can be counterproductive. In so doing, Asian
theories would remain nationalized, territorialized, and set apart from the Euro-
American lingua franca as regional-specific discussions that are imagined to be
radically different from their “Western” counterparts.
These two issues—imposing the term “theory” onto an assemblage of critical
writings that were not meant to be theoretical and reterritorializing Asian
theories as a radical difference from their Euro-American counterparts—
therefore operate interdependently. But then, perpetually asking whether East
Asian film thinking is theoretical or not can become a pure taxonomic exercise.
Pragmatically, we need to find a way to foster a comparative dialogue by laying
out a topos from which intellectual debates on the cinema in Asia can be
rethought in theoretical terms, so that we can find areas where they can speak to
and speak with Euro-American theories. Most important, this topos will enable
us to reconsider what it means to theorize the cinema and media in the first
place.
Historically, in urban centers including Shanghai, Beijing (Peking),
Guangzhou (Canton), Hong Kong, and Macau, criticisms of individual films
and discussions of the moving pictures (broadly defined) as technologies and
sensory-perceptual experiences appeared in leisure magazines and newspapers
as early as 1897.4 However, as Zhang Zhen, Bao Weihong, and I have pointed
out, concerted efforts to comment on or study the cinematographic image as a
xianxiang (phenomenon) and its sociopolitical impact as a dazhong xiaoqian
(mass entertainment) did not become prominent until the 1920s.5 One reason
was the emergence of magazines devoted specifically to the moving image like
the Yingxi zazhi [Motion Picture Review], edited by screenwriter Gu Kenfu (c.
1890s–1932). Gu’s “Fakanci” [Inaugurating preface] for the first issue of
Motion Picture Review has been regarded by recent film historians as an early—
albeit inchoate—effort to examine the ontology of the cinematographic image.6
In the 1980s, scholars Chen Xihe and Zhong Dafeng argue that Gu’s early
“ontological” study differs radically from that of André Bazin (1918–1958).
Chen and Zhong argue that Gu and his cohort Hou Yao (1903–1942) regard the
cinema as a form of xiju (drama-theater), whereas Bazin considers the
cinematographic image as an imprint of reality. In Cinema Approaching Reality,
I argue that for Gu and Hou, the cinematographic image represents a dramatic
action not by means of mimesis but by capturing the lived reality of the
filmmakers. The image then posits the spectator in an affective milieu as though
they had been in the reality it represents. Understood this way, we can see that
Gu, Hou, and Bazin share a common ground: that the cinematographic image
invokes the presence of the absence of the living being or object in the
spectator’s sense-perception. Gu and Hou call this bizhen. This term is usually
translated as lifelike, though it is best understood as approaching reality.7 This
concept can be used to organize and analyze different critical debates in
Shanghai and Hong Kong between the 1920s and 1940s.
Meanwhile, in Fiery Cinema, Bao takes the idea of the cinema as an affective
medium to examine how these debates can be understood and evaluated in the
context of a media ecology that included print culture, architecture, séance and
other spiritual practices, wireless radio, telephone, and the theater.8 Bao and I
concur that none of these filmmakers, critics, and intellectuals consciously
thought of themselves as theorists. Nonetheless, as film historians, we can
retrospectively observe that some of these writers shared interests and political
opinions, while others worked in the same studios or wrote for the same
publications and, consequently, they fostered dialogues based on the same
epistemological or theoretical frameworks.9
We must bear in mind that these topoi are not bound up within a unified and
incontestable national territory. The two major sites of film production and
criticism during the Republican period, Shanghai and Hong Kong, were
colonies. These cities were juridically extraterritorial spaces, where laws,
governmental institutions, linguistic practices, and cultural discourses were not
tied to the land as a geopolitical whole but to individuals with diverse
ethnicities and nationalities, who formed a public sphere where their differences
were negotiated.10 Hence, Shanghai culture was neither indigenously “Chinese”
nor indigenously “Euro-American.” Rather, it was doubly occupied by both
juridicopolitical and cultural forces, though posited at the periphery or even
outside these two territories proper. Shih Shu-mei calls this mode of culture
“semicolonialism”; I call it cultural extraterritoriality.11
In this sense, even though what we call “Chinese film theory” was generated
from filmmakers and intellectuals on Chinese soil, the extraterritorial conditions
under which these conceptual frameworks were produced meant that they were
already configured as culturally and linguistically comparative spaces. For
instance, in 1930, in the Mengya yuekan [Seeding Monthly], novelist Lu Xun
(pseudonym of Zhou Shuren, 1881–1936) translated Japanese filmmaker
Iwasaki Akira’s (1903–1981) article “Senden • sendō shudan toshite no eiga”
[Propaganda: Film as a Tool for Incitation, 1928] and retitled it “Xiandai
dianying yu youchan jieji” [Modern Cinema and the Bourgeoisie]. In this
article, Iwasaki uses an unusual term: mokuteki ishiki (mudi yishi in Mandarin
or directed consciousness).12 This concept was formulated by Aono Suekichi
(1900–1961) based on Vladimir Lenin’s (1870–1924) distinction between an
“embryonic form” of consciousness (a general affective response to the
“antagonisms between workers and employers”) to a more informed
consciousness of the production relationships that constituted such antagonistic
feelings.13
Adapting and translating Lenin’s concept to the labor movement in 1920s
Japan, Aono made a distinction between shizen seichō (natural consciousness or
an awareness of one’s social position generated by affectivity) and “directed
consciousness”: an “organized, managed, and systematized” consciousness that
could be chūyū (instilled) into the workers’ bodies by the bourgeoisie and
militarists, through Japan’s state-controlled education and mass media.14 In his
redevelopment of Aono’s idea, Iwasaki argues that Hollywood cinema in the
1920s and 1930s was an instrument by which the bourgeoisie and militarists
instilled a directed consciousness into the spectators’ sentient bodies. Therefore,
cultural workers had the responsibility to seize the means of production in order
to redirect the consciousness of these spectators.15
 In his translator’s note, Lu Xun retranslates this term further. For him, like
their Japanese counterparts, Shanghai spectators were trained to believe that
capitalism was the only mode of living that could guarantee their pleasure and
survival. However, unlike the Japanese viewers, the Shanghai spectators were
overdetermined by imperialism to believe that their submission to the
colonizer’s power was a biopolitical necessity. When they watched a
Hollywood film, they desired the material and sexual pleasures their colonizers
enjoyed onscreen. Yet, they were also aware that as colonized objects, they
could never attain these capitalist pleasures. Instead of rebelling against
imperialism and seizing the opportunity to access these pleasures, their
consciousness was directed by Hollywood to enjoy their inability to attain these
pleasures. In other words, they enjoyed their own impotence and their state of
being colonized.16
In this example, we can see how a theoretical concept was translated from
one sociopolitical milieu to another. Each translation not only localized a
concept that was initially meant to be a “universal” one, but also critiqued,
complicated, and reconfigured the previous version by addressing certain blind
spots. In fact, these blind spots made visible the particularity of each act of
theorization and challenged the universalizing tendency of theory. In this sense,
Marc Steinberg and Alex Zahlten propose to use the term “theorization” to
replace “theory” in order to emphasize that theoretical productions are always in
the process of becoming and comparative. As a process, it also puts into
question the binary divide between universality and particularity.17

B M P
In response to the emergence of Marxist film criticism in the early 1930s,
screenwriter Huang Jiamo (1916–2004) and avant-garde writer Liu Na’ou
(1905–1940) started their own magazine Xiandai dianying [Modern Screen] in
1932. In their articles, they criticized such left-wing film theory as a form of
yingxing dianying lilun (hard film theory), which turned the cinema into a
didactic tool. For them, sociopolitical messages should not be preached in the
cinema. Rather, the cinema is an affective medium and an aesthetic experience.
In such an affective milieu, the spectators can grasp, of their own volition, an
understanding not only of their sociopolitical but also existential realities.18 It is
in this line of debate where we can find Buddhism’s conceptual footprints.
 Historically, Buddhism was reconfigured as a scholarly study between the
1870s and 1930s not as a revival of classical or “traditional” values but as a
modernity project. Between the eleventh and seventeenth centuries, syncretic
studies of Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism were institutionalized as an
academic discipline called lixue (ethics and metaphysics; more popularly
translated into English as neo-Confucianism).19 During the Qing dynasty, lixue
was largely replaced by Confucianism as a stand-alone study, and Buddhism
largely disappeared from academic studies. Tibetan Vajrayāna Buddhism was
practiced in court. However, their clergies and retainers refrained from teaching
philosophy to nonbelievers or to disciples whom they deemed unready.
Meanwhile, the Linji School of Zen Buddhists practiced hua tou: engaging
oneself in a dialogue of nonsequiturs. This was often treated as a witty
intellectual exercise among aristocrats and scholars, rather than a serious
intellectual investigation.20 As Buddhist scholar Tanxu (1875–1963) points out
in his memoir, by the beginning of the twentieth century most local priests in
China were unaware of the philosophical system behind the sūtras (transcripts
of Sakyamuni/Śākyamuni Buddha, c. 563 or 480 BCE–c. 483 or 400 BCE) and
śāstras (theoretical treatises composed by philosophers and logicians).21
In the 1860s, scholar Yang Renhui (a.k.a. Yang Renguang, 1837–1911) came
across a used copy of the Chinese translation of Mahāyāna śraddhotpādaśāstra
[Dasheng qixin lun or Awakening of Faith in the Mahāyāna]. This śāstra was
attributed to Aśvaghoṣa (c. 80–150 CE), who theorized the concept of
Tathāgatagarba (storehouse of Buddhahood).22 This concept came from an
earlier school of Buddhism called Yogācāra—or, in Chinese, Weishi
(consciousness-only). Like all other schools of Buddhism, Yogācāra and
Tathāgatagarba philosophers adhere to one single axiom: dependent
originations. This is formulated in SA-298 of the Saṃyuktāgama [Connected
Discourses] as: “The existence of a consequent depends on the existence of a
cause-condition; the origination of the consequent depends on the origination of
that cause-condition.”23 More specifically, the Yogācāra and Tathāgatagarba
philosophers argue:
 1. Images (including sights, sounds, smells, tastes, touches, and thoughts) are generated b
interdependent relationship between a potentiality to sense and perceive, and a potentiality to
sensations and perceptions into signs, from one moment to another. As these potentialitie
actualized, the perceptual-conceptual difference between the “internal” and “external” is generated
result of each contact, thus giving us the impression that there is a sentient body (an aggrega
internal forms) and a milieu (an aggregate of external forms). At each temporal point-instant,
aggregates of forms are also extinguished and virtualized again as potentialities.
2. All sentient beings and inanimate objects assume their forms and appearances in space and time o
an assemblage of interdependent relationships or causations.24

If we follow these ideas, there is neither a self nor an other, a subject nor an
object, as these positions are arbitrarily assigned when an attachment is
developed to the existence of a self and a corresponding attachment to the
existence of a phenomenon.25 For Yogācāra and Tathāgatagarba thinkers, the six
domains of the consciousness (or the six consciousnesses: namely, of the eyes,
ears, nose, tongue, body, and thought organs) are unified by manas: an impetus
(or more properly speaking, a layout of impulses) called karma. Karma is
generated by illusory attachments and is misrecognized as a self-consciousness,
or even a spirit or soul.26
Based on the axiom of dependent originations, the operation of the six
consciousnesses (which drive—and are driven by—manas) is related to yet
another consciousness: the ālaya-consciousness (storehouse consciousness).
This storehouse consciousness is a layout of potentialities. Potentialities or bījas
(seeds) are memories from the past, including those from one’s lifetime, from
previous generations (e.g., DNA), and from previous transmigrations. At the
zero-point-instant (smallest unit of time that is mathematically possible but
insensible, neither time nor timelessness), an assemblage of seeds is actualized.
This preinstantaneous actualization gives rise to an avalanche of awarenesses
that is informed by these memories, which underdetermines the framework
within which we experience them.27 For instance, for human beings, these
awarenesses are apprehended in a spatiotemporal continuum. Thus, each
sentient being, inanimate object, or even event is understood as having four
phases: formation (or birth), dwelling (growth and aging), deterioration
(sickness), and vacation (death). As human beings, we are unaware (ignorant)
of the fact that we blindly engage ourselves in cycles of life and death
(including our own). The impermanence of such cycles gives rise to desire,
frustration, and delusion (afflictions and sufferings). Yet, through knowledge,
meditation, and discipline, one is capable of developing prajñā (insight into the
operation of one’s consciousness), which enables some of these seeds to be
purified or rendered inoperative.28
Yogācāra and Tathāgatagarba scholars hold different views on the ultimate
reality or tathātā (the way it is). The ultimate reality is best understood not as
the “truth” in the Judaic-Christian sense. For these scholars, if we adhere to the
axiom of dependent originations, a monistic understanding of “truth” is
logically absurd. Rather, it is regarded as the pure relationality between
existence and emptiness, which is neither empty nor existent, neither not empty
nor not existent. It is also neither monistic nor pluralistic, neither not monistic
nor not pluralistic. For Yogācāra practitioners, the ālaya-consciousness
inevitably produces afflictions. Thus, the ultimate release (nibbana/nirvāna) is
the extinction of the ālaya-consciousness. For Tathāgatagarba practitioners, the
ālaya-consciousness never ceases to operate. However, the illusionary milieu
we sense and perceive as reality is a manifestation of the ālaya-consciousness in
operation (like an image in a mirror or waves of the sea). The actual ālaya-
consciousness is neither operative nor inoperative, existent nor inexistent,
temporal nor atemporal. Thus, it produces neither afflictions nor nonafflictions,
pleasure nor displeasure—comparable to the mirror itself or to the seawater.29 If
this is the case, the ālaya-consciousness is also the Tathāgatagarba: the
storehouse of Buddhahood.30
Yang’s rediscovery of the Awakening of Faith in the Mahāyāna in the 1860s
generated an interest among Chinese, Japanese, and Anglo-American scholars
in Buddhist hetuvidyā (logic and epistemology). During the same period,
philosophical works by Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) and Arthur Schopenhauer
(1788–1860) were also translated into Chinese both via their German texts and
Japanese translations. Intellectuals began to see that key concepts and methods
of argumentation of Yogācāra Buddhism could offer a possible means by which
these European works could be translated and reinterpreted. They also saw the
possibility of using Yogācāra texts to configure a mode of modernity that had
already had a long history of conversation with Chinese classical studies and
might open a comparative discourse with its European counterparts. In Nanjing
(Nanking), Yang established the Jinling kejing chu (Jinling Sūtra Publishing
House) in 1866. His student Ouyang Jian (a.k.a. Ouyang Jingwu, 1871–1943)
then redeveloped the publishing house into the Zhina neixueyuan (China Inner
Studies College) in 1911, attracting intellectuals who were or would soon
become leading scholars and writers in the twentieth century, including Ouyang
Jian, Liang Qichao (1873–1929), Wang Guowei (1877–1927), Feng Zikai
(1898–1975), and Thomé H. Fang (Fang Dongmei, 1899–1977).31

M I -
In Cinema Illuminating Reality [2022], I propose that Buddhism provides an
alternative method to rethink cinema ontology and ontogenesis, epistemology,
ethics, and aesthetics. Covering all these aspects would be beyond the scope of
this chapter. Hence, in the following pages, I will focus on the cinematographic
image’s relationship to reality from both ontological and aesthetic perspectives,
a line of thought that is by now strongly associated with the work of Bazin. I do
not want to suggest that such an ontology—which has been connected by Bazin
so specifically to the photographic medium—is the only cinema ontology that
matters. The following discussion is only meant to be an example that will give
us a taste of how Buddhism can offer a different theoretical approach in one
issue debated among film theorists.
As Bodhi and Kañukurunde Ñaṇananda argue, Buddhist philosophers regard
ontology as a papañca (perceptual-conceptual proliferation): a “propensity of
the worldling’s imagination to erupt into an effusion of mental commentary that
obscures the bare data of cognition.”32 Once the potentiality to sense and the
potentiality to turn sensations into signs are actualized interdependently,
phassa/sparśa (contact and the differentiation between internal and external
forms) and vedanās (affections) are dependently originated. For Bodhi and
Ñaṇananda, with affections, the sentient body (including the thought organs)
and its process of becoming (including the thought process) objectivizes what
the “body” believes to be a “subjective experience” into an ontology. Such an
ontology is in turn employed by the body as a framework to inform an
objectivized subjectivity. This is not to say that ontology is meaningless. Rather,
ontology addresses how forms are constituted, and as a method, ontology is part
of the formational process itself. Since forms are constituted out of dependent
originations, they exist in name only (nominal existence) and their existence is
therefore considered “empty of existential value.” As Fyodor Stcherbatsky
(1866–1942) argues, existence is best understood in this case as a “nominal”
value in a system of differences.33
In Cinema Illuminating Reality, I explain in detail the logical reasoning
behind this idea. Here, I would like to use a more accessible (and historical)
example to illustrate and think further how we may approach ontology through
the lens of Buddhism.
Chinese translations of Buddhist texts before and during the Six Dynasties
(220 or 222–589) borrowed terms and concepts from Taoism. The most
remarkable example is the idea of xieyi (sketching ideation), which has been
historically pitted against xieshi (describing reality). According to art historian
and aesthete Zong Baihua (1897–1986), sketching ideation and describing
reality have always coexisted in art. According to Taoism, sketching ideation
was understood as art’s ability to circulate qi (creative and vital energies) in a
milieu where the beholder’s body (and the embodied mind) can navigate
freely.34 For Zong Bing (375–443), through a few abstract brushstrokes, an
ideational painting enables both creative and vital energies to circulate, and
these energies inform an assemblage of configurative elements that constitute
an environment. In such an environment, a beholder can zhu (dwell) and
contemplate or you (wander or journey).35
The idea of vital energies is not part of Buddhism. Hence, during the Six
Dynasties, under the influence of Buddhist philosophy, sketching ideation refers
to a process of guanzhao (observation-illumination). Observation here refers to
an embodied—not simply visual—engagement in the formational process of the
body and its associated milieu, and illumination refers to a mindfulness of the
karmic impulses that drive—and are driven by—the formational process (of
dependent originations). The ālambana-pratyata (foundational condition) in
this process is the interdependent relationship between the ability to sense,
perceive, and recognize the ability to turn what one senses and perceives into
signs.36 The process of observation-illumination is explicated by Qingyuan
Xingsi (671–740) in a gatta:
A mountain is a mountain, water is water; A mountain is not a mountain, water is not water; A
mountain is still a mountain, water is still water.
In this process, the beholder first apprehends the image as an existent milieu
(e.g., a landscape painting is a landscape). Nonetheless, the highly abstracted
forms of the painted image then draw the beholder’s attention to the
brushstrokes, colors, tones, and other aspects of its composition, thus making
them aware that what they take as reality is made up of a set of interdependently
related forms. These forms have no existential value and are therefore śūnya
(empty). By entering this ideational milieu, contemplating and corporeally
engaging in the formational process of each specific spot, the beholder arrives at
a state in which forms and emptiness, reality and illusion, image and
imagination are neither the same nor different, neither not the same nor not
different.
As Hui Yuk argues, from Aristotle (384–22 BCE) to Martin Heidegger (1889–
1976), European philosophers and theologians have never had a unified
understanding of what ontology is. For Hui, the Buddhist approach to ontology
is closer (not identical to) Heidegger’s “fundamental ontology,” by
distinguishing the difference between the ontic and the ontological.37 For
Tanabe Hajime (1885–1962) and Fang, however, such a distinction is still a
perceptual–conceptual proliferation. For them, while Heidegger wishes to
investigate the emptiness of emptiness, Buddhism seeks to do the same while
being mindful that such an investigation is still an objectivized subjective
process. For Fang and Tanabe, a Buddhist investigation cannot be considered
ontological. Rather, it is better understood as a meta-ontology: what Fang calls
meontology and Tanabe calls metanoetics.38
In order to explain how a meontological investigation works in cinema and
media studies, I must engage in a more extensive and substantial discussion of
the philosophical debates among Buddhist scholars, which is beyond the scope
of this chapter. Here, I simply want to point out that Chinese film criticism
during the Republican period has a “meontological tendency.” As I point out in
Illuminating Reality, Bazinian ontology is a complex investigation that
navigates between different registers and understandings of ontology, and it is
certainly not reducible to a question of “indexicality” (a term Bazin himself has
never used).39 Interestingly, our impression that Bazin has been talking about
“indexicality” all along partly comes from a thought-provoking sentence: “The
existence of the photographed object participates … in the existence of the
model in the manner of a fingerprint.”40 For Bazin, what is at stake is not only
the fact that photographic technology enables the model to be imprinted as a
photographic image, but that in the process of imprinting, the photographic
object partakes of the same existence of the “existence of the model.”
Bazinian ontology can indeed be considered a perceptual-conceptual
proliferation. His understanding that every object has an existence is drawn
from a Euro-American epistemic lineage.41 In other words, the concept of
existence itself, subjectivized (or internalized) by Bazin as a value,
underdetermines how he objectivizes the subjective as an order of things. This
order of things, meanwhile, operates within the technicotechnological
conditions of 1940s Europe: the availability of the photographic technology
and, as Vivian Sobchack argues, the way photographic technology shaped—and
was shaped by—the way one understood existence through visuality.42
Let us compare Bazin with an earlier example. In September 1897, an
anonymous author in Shanghai reviewed an exhibition of Edison films in the
Youxi bao [Games post, 1896–1910], which, via the Vajracchedikā
Prajñāpāramitā Sūtra [Diamond Sutra], compared the cinema to “[a] dream, an
illusion, a bubble, and a shadow.”43 For this anonymous writer, the yingxi
(shadow play) was best considered a technological instantiation of the ālaya-
consciousness. It actualized the potentiality to sense and perceive and the
potentiality to turn sensation-perception into signs. In so doing, the motion
picture not only enabled the spectator’s body to be in an ideational environment
in which it could journey and “observe”; more importantly, for this writer, the
fact that movement was constructed out of the projection of a series of
photographs and the way the projector was made visible as a device that would
enable and disable the image’s process of becoming, attested to the Buddhist
notion that all sentient beings and objects one took for granted as reality were
empty and transient. In other words, the cinema facilitated this author to think
not ontologically but meontologically.

O -I
Between the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth century, philologist
Wang Guowei compared the concept of tathātā with the Kantian notion of Ding
an sich (thing-in-itself). For Kant, thing-in-itself is transcendental, which means
that it lies beyond the senses and is ungraspable by any sensuous media. Yet, by
the same token, things-in-themselves are manifested to us by those beings and
objects informed by an interaction between sense data and our sensory-
perceptual organs. Thing-in-itself is therefore transcendental only from the
perspective of the sensuous world, though logically, it is manifested as the
sensuous world and is immanent to us.44 Therefore, for Wang, the sublime in an
artistic experience does not reach out to something beyond the sensuous world.
Rather, the aesthetic experience disconceals to the beholder that the sensuous
world is the ultimate reality in operation. In Zen terms: the mountain is still a
mountain; water is still water.
Wang’s comparative reading between Buddhism, Kant, and Schopenhauer
constructs a discursive space that would eventually contribute to the critical
language of the soft film theory in 1930s Shanghai. For instance, in “Kongzi zhi
meiyu zhuyi” [Confucius’s Notions of Art Education], Wang translates Kant’s
term “spirit” or “soul” as xin (citta or heart).45 As I mentioned earlier, for
Yogācāra and Tathāgatagarba scholars, manas (often misrecognized as self-
consciousness) is merely a compulsion: an attachment that drives—and is
driven by—karma. To complicate matters, Kant’s notion of the spirit does not
refer to the self-consciousness (apperception) either. Rather, it refers to the
thing-in-itself from which our compulsion to unify discrete sensory–perceptual
data and responses into a single and unified self emanates.46
What Kant calls the spirit is therefore comparable to what Yogācāra scholars
call the ālaya-consciousness. In Pāli and Sanskrit, viññāṇa/vijñāna
(consciousness) refers to the formational process of the body (including the
thought organs and thought process) and its associated milieu as an ecology of
relationalities. In the Chinese translations of the Buddhist scriptures,
consciousness is rendered as xin, which in turn encompasses the ideas of
consciousness, mind, essence, and nature. Again, according to the Awakening of
the Faith of Mahāyāna, Tathāgatagarba is translated as sattva-citta (or in
Chinese, zhongsheng xin: the consciousness from which all sentient beings are
initiated).47 By translating the spirit as xin, Wang effectively creates what Lydia
Liu would call a “super-sign”: a semiotic unity constructed by throwing two
terms from different linguistic spheres with different values together. The result
is not a mistranslation but a creation of a new system of differences.48 In this
case, Wang grafts Kant’s understanding of “spirit,” which designates the
“faculty of presenting aesthetic ideas,” onto the notion of sattva-citta, which
designates a meontological process of observation-illumination.49 In other
words, what Wang regards as “aesthetics” is better understood as an “in-
aesthetics.” Here, I do not only refer to Alain Badiou’s understanding of the
term as a “relation of philosophy to art … as a producer of truths,” but also as a
process of illuminating or disconcealing the way it is.50
In his discussion of aesthetics, Wang argues that art can purify the heart so
that it can become a “meili zhi xin” (Beautiful Soul):
The great German philosopher Kant considers the pleasure of beauty as buguan lihai zhi kuaile
(Disinterested Pleasure) [literally, a pleasure that produces neither afflictions nor non-afflictions].
Meanwhile, Schopenhauer points out two principles in any given condition of observing beauty:
(1) the phenomenon observed is not a specific object, but the form of the kind of object being
observed; (2) the consciousness of the observer is not a specific self, but a wu yu zhi wo [self
without desire or volition].51
Wang advocates here that a beholder should adopt what Yogācāra scholars
would call rushi guan (observation in accordance with tathātā or the way it is).
For him, “The ontological ground of life is volition [manas], yet volition is
initiated from śūnyatā (emptiness).”52 To push this idea further, Schopenhauer’s
understanding of the will is also drawn from the concept of the ālaya more
popularly accepted by Theravādin practitioners: an affliction-generating drive
that draws all sentient beings into a cycle of life and death, pleasure, and
suffering.53 For Schopenhauer, all images (forms and appearances) are
representations of the will. However, while ordinary sentient beings and
inanimate objects are indirect representations through an interaction between
the subject and the object, art, as a direct representation of the will, enables the
beholder to become one with the will. It therefore suspends the difference
between the self and the other, pleasure and displeasure, time and
timelessness.54
Wang’s comparative aesthetics can be seen in Yingxi juben zuofa [Methods of
Writing a Shadow Play, 1926]. In this book, Hou Yao calls the cinema “renlei
dongzuo he jingshen de biaoxiang (Representation of human action and Spirit)”
and “jieshi renlei jingshen de (Interpretation of human Spirit).”55 Hou’s
understanding of the cinema, at first glance, seems impressionistic. However,
his use of the term biaoxiang (representation) refers explicitly to the way
Schopenhauer would use it—that is, that the cinema, as a plane of existence
constituted by forms and appearances, is best understood as the spirit/xin/ālaya-
consciousness in operation. Hou then calls the cinematographic image a
“purifying agency,” which enables the spectator to approach zhen (absolute
reality), shan (absolute benevolence), and mei (absolute beauty). These terms
stem from Yogācāra scholarship, which indicates anuttarā-samyaksaṃbodhi:
the plane of absolute purity, absolute equality (nondifferentiation) and absolute
rightness (noninversion), which is another understanding of tathātā.56
This is not to say that every cinematic experience is purifying. As I
mentioned earlier, in 1932, Huang Jiamo and Liu Na’ou complained that
Marxist filmmakers and theorists turned the cinema into a pure instrument of
education. Huang, himself a screenwriter at the Lianhua dianying gongsi
(United Photoplay Service or UPS), argues that if left-wing filmmakers and
critics truly believe in the need to use the cinema to constitute a politically
conscious dazhong (mass), they must first understand what their audience looks
for in the cinema and find out how it can be drawn into an aesthetic milieu in
which they can come to their own sociopolitical awareness.57
 Liu was born in Taiwan under Japanese occupation and was well-versed in
Japanese, French, Taiwanese, Chinese, and Latin. When he studied in Shanghai,
Liu was attracted to the Japanese Shinkankakuha (Xinganjuepai or New
Sensationism) and wrote short stories, poems, and essays in that style. In these
literary works, Liu breaks down the grammatical and logical coherence of a
syntax and juxtaposes contrasting, fragmented, and sensorially stimulating
words and phrases into a montage of images. The goal is to mimic and retrain
the equally incoherent senses of his readers, who needed to cope with the brutal
mechanization and fragmentation of life in urban modernity.58 In his theoretical
writing on the cinema, he employs the same writing style, so that his theory is
best understood as a cinematic form, or what he calls an instantiation of
écranesque.59 Recently, Donna Ong found one of his works and confirmed
Liu’s fascination with montage and rhythm in filmmaking.60
In his critical essays on the cinema, Liu focuses mostly on the question of
rhythm and temporality. Following the works of René Clair (1898–1981) and
Léon Moussinac (1890–1964), Liu argues:
The most important thing [feature in the cinema] is not “gaining velocity” but producing [new]
human affects as a result of “gaining speed.” The seduction of a roadster does not come from a
desire to possess its sensation of luxury but the sensorial pleasure its speed is capable of offering
to the human body. Human spirit is always hungry for speed, motion, excitement, and impulse.
Even though they are both melodies, the waltz and its era are now passé, whereas red hot jazz is
the music of the modern people. Ears that have been tuned to the noises of the metropolis no
longer need the harmony of a symphony.
Art is a reflection of time. Both its forms and contents move along with time. The seductive
power of a five-act sixteen-scene drama is extremely weak. The modern people are no longer
patient with the repetitiveness of a form of performance limited by a specific venue and a specific
time.
The key to success is an art form’s ability to control space, especially its ability to grasp the
beauty and artistic form informed by time. Among many obstacles that the cinema has managed
to overcome, the most important one is time. Because of this, the cinégraphique has replaced all
other plastic arts.
But what is the most important element of the cinégraphique? It is none other than rhythm, which
is founded upon time. Those nominations we have been using, including dianying (cinema),
yingxi (shadow play), and yingpian (film), have failed to encompass the meaning of the
cinégraphique. On the contrary, a few Euro-American terms are more capable of signifying time
instantly: movie, motion picture, Kinematograph, and cinema. All of these names contain within
themselves the idea of movement. The same can be said about the Japanese term katsudō shashin
(moving photographs or moving descriptions of reality). The origin of the cinema is dong
(motion), and changes in the velocity, direction, and power of motion produce rhythm. Motion is
the expression of life, as death is the cessation of motion. Therefore, rhythm is the life of cinema.
If we take away rhythm from a film, we would only have a shade (bare image): Film–Rhythm =
Shade.61
 Liu’s interest in montage and sensorial excitations seem to be at odds with
Buddhism, which is often associated with quietude and meditativeness. Liu’s
essay “Guanyu zuozhe de taidu” [On the Author’s Attitude] may offer us an
insight into what role Buddhism plays in his theory. In this essay, Liu argues:
When we observe a fact or a kind of lifestyle, we are able to do so freely from a number of
different perspectives. Those observers who adopt a historical perspective probably wish to learn
something about the present by revisiting the past. Those who adopt an economic perspective
probably have the ambition to become rich. These are not aesthetic methods of observation.
[With these methods,] one merely navigates on the surface of one’s observation instead of
stepping into the depth of the observed. Nonetheless, the aesthetic attitude of observation-
reflection is a unique kind of attitude, which seeks to grasp the core of the fact and dwell in a
state of quiet observation, thus enabling the author and the observed to become one. Such an
attitude does not carry any intellectual thoughts: it is a pure and naked jingdi (state or
environment). Therefore, the works created by those artists who can truly grasp such an attitude
are usually sharp and clear in their thoughts, deep and accurate in their descriptions, and apt and
powerful in their expressions. What most people would call an artist’s cruelty in fact emerges out
of this attitude. Since the artist stays within this state of pure observation, they are compelled to
dissect the personality and environment of their protagonist—with blood and gore—in order to
enhance the effectiveness of their work.62

In one register, this passage can be read as a critique of Marxist film

theorists’ “naïve” belief in the cinema’s ability to simply miaoxie (describe or
represent) reality. On a political level, Liu’s advice for screenwriters and
directors to become one with the others in fact resonates with socialist film
theories of a later time period. For Liu, by standing aloof from the working
class, filmmakers, who often came from the petit bourgeoisie, ended up
objectifying whom they claimed to represent or fight for as mere curiosities.
However, by suggesting that these filmmakers should adopt an observational
process (again, a fully embodied process) that would enable them to become
one with the observed, a naked jindi (state or environment) can be invoked. A
state like this can only be attained when this process of observation and
contemplation enables a sudden awareness or illumination of the ālaya-
consciousness from which the divide between the self and the other, subject and
object, time and timelessness are initiated.
Montage can therefore be considered an archive of memories, affects, and
sensations that are highly fragmented, which is akin to the way the ālaya-
consciousness actualizes the seeds in it into an avalanche of awarenesses. In this
sense, captivating snapshots of life and putting them together into a montage is
a modern way of sketching ideation. It does so by abstracting and distilling
forms from life and assembling them in a preontological and prechronological
manner. Spectators are therefore not expected to analyze the montage. Rather,
they are supposed to immerse themselves in an observational process so that
their six consciousnesses can be activated to call forth their own milieus.

C M T
Between the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth century, Buddhism
left an indelible footprint on the terrain of Chinese film theory and criticism. It
did so not as an overdetermining epistemological framework. Rather, it was
instrumentalized by intellectuals of the time to reconfigure European
understandings of cinema ontology and film aesthetics and constitute their own
critical vocabulary.
As I argue in Illuminating Reality, Buddhism fundamentally puts into
question our understanding of existence, temporality, spatiality, and movement
by arguing that they are not constitutive of our lived reality. Rather, they are
constituted by and they actively constitute those forms and appearances we take
as reality, an illusionary plane that is made up of an assemblage of
interdependent relationships. In this sense, both the cinema and our eagerness to
attach to its reality claims are symptomatic of our inability to grasp reality as
the way it is, and of our unshakable—and somewhat miserable—attachment to
individuality, subjectivity, and authenticity as demarcations and tools of
existential and political othering. Buddhism therefore provides us with a critical
paradigm that can help us rethink, enrich, and revise contemporary Euro-
American and global thinking on these issues. I am not suggesting that
Buddhism necessarily offers a better, wiser, or more holistic solution, nor am I
insinuating that philosophers in ancient India had anticipated our human
conditions today. But perhaps when we try to address and resolve those legacies
bestowed upon us by European Enlightenment, we can begin to acknowledge
that there are many sites of knowledge production that have had a long history
of conversing with (though utterly ignored by) their Euro-American
counterparts.

N
1. Yogācāra literally means yogic practice. As a school of philosophy, it is more commonly known as
“consciousness-only.” Meanwhile, Tathāgatagarba refers to the relationalities between an
assemblage or layout of potentialities, which constitute “the way it is.” In this chapter, I use the
standardized English nomination “Zen” to refer to Jhāna/Dhyāna Buddhism. For an introduction to
 these Buddhist schools, see Lo Shi-hin, Weishi fangyu [Introduction to Yogācāra Buddhism] (Hong
Kong: Dharmalakṣaṇa Buddhist Institute, 2008); Yin Shun, Dasheng qixinlun jiangji [Lectures on
the Mahāyāna śraddhotpādaśāstra, 1950], śāstra Aśvaghoṣa (?), trans. Paramārtha (?) (2010; repr.,
Beijing, China: Zhonghua shuju, 2014); see also Fok To-fui, Liuzu tanjing [Platform Sutra of the
Sixth Patriarch] (Hong Kong: Dharmasthiti Group, 2015).
2. For an early discussion of this issues, see Ouyang Jian, Faxiang zhulun xuhekan: Fodi jinglun xu
[An Integrated Study of the Various Śāstras of the Dharmakasana School: Introduction to the
Buddhabhūmi-sūtra-śāstra] (Nanking, China: Zhina neixueyuan, 1920). For a contemporary
discussion, see R. John Williams, The Buddha in the Machine: Art, Technology, and the Meeting of
East and West (New Haven, CT Yale University Press, 2014), 6–20.
3. Aaron Gerow, “Introduction: The Theory Complex,” in “Decentering Theory: Reconsidering the
History of Japanese Film Theory,” ed. Aaron Gerow, special issue, Review of Japanese Culture and
Society (December 2010), Article 22. Gerow’s view is a response to the “Asia as method” debate.
See Chen Kuan-hsing, Asia as Method: Toward Deimperialization (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2010), 211–56; see also Shu-mei Shih, “Global Literature and the Technologies of
Recognition,” special topic, “Literatures at Large,” PMLA 119, no. 1 (January 2004): 25–27. This
idea is also discussed in Yamamoto Naoki, Dialectics without Synthesis: Japanese Film Theory and
Realism in a Global Frame (Berkeley: University of California, 2020), 7–8.
4. Anon, “Guan Meiguo yingxi ji” [On Viewing the American Shadow Plays, 1897], in Bainian
Zhongguo dianying lilun wenxuan: 1897–2001 [Selected Essays from a Hundred Years of Chinese
Film Theory: 1897–2001], ed. Ding Yaping (Beijing, China: Wenhua yishu chubanshe, 2002), 1:4;
Emilie Yueh-yu Yeh, ed., Early Film Culture in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Republican China:
Kaleidoscopic Histories (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2018).The place names within
brackets were Chinese postal romanizations used between 1906 and 1964.
5. Zhang Zhen, An Amorous History of the Silver Screen: Shanghai Cinema, 1896–1937 (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2005), 118–50; Weihong Bao, Fiery Cinema: The Emergence of an
Affective Medium in China, 1915–1945 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015); Victor
Fan, Cinema Approaching Reality: Locating Chinese Film Theory (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2015), 17–42.
6. Gu Kenfu, “Fakanci” [Inaugurating Preface], Yingxi zazhi [The Motion Picture Review] 1, no. 1
(1920): 10; Zhang, Amorous History, 118–150; Gu Kenfu, “Fakanci” [Inaugurating Preface], Yingxi
zazhi [The Motion Picture Review] 1, no. 1 (1920): 10; Zhang, Amorous History, 118–50; Fan,
Cinema Approaching Reality, 17–42.
7. Hou Yao, Yingxi juben zuofa [Methods of Writing a Shadow Play] (Shanghai, China: Taidong shuju,
1926), 13–23; André Bazin, “Ontologie de l’image photographique” [1945], in Qu’est-ce que le
cinéma? (1958; repr., Paris: Les Éditions du Cerf, 2002), 14; Fan, Cinema Approaching Reality, 31–
33.
8. Bao, Fiery Cinema.
9. Fan, Cinema Approaching Reality, 7–8.
10. Miriam Hansen, “The Mass Production of the Senses: Classical Cinema as Vernacular Modernism,”
Modernism/Modernity 6, no. 2 (1999): 59–77; Jürgen Habermas, “The Public Sphere: An
Encyclopedia Article (1964),” trans. Sara Lennox and Frank Lennox, New German Critique
(Autumn 1974), Article 3, http://www.jstor.org/stable/487737.
11. Shu-mei Shih, The Lure of the Modern: Writing Modernism in Semicolonial China, 1917–1937
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 34–35; Victor Fan, Extraterritoriality: Locating
Hong Kong Cinema and Media (Edinburgh, Scotland: Edinburgh University Press, 2019).
12. Iwasaki Akira, Eiga to shihon shugi [Cinema and Capitalism] (Tokyo: Ōraisha, 1931), 97–124;
Iwasaki Akira, “Xiandai dianying yu youchan jieji” [Modern Cinema and the Bourgeoisie], trans.
Lu Xun, Mengya yuekan [Seeding Monthly] 1, no. 3 (March 1930): 1–33. For a detailed discussion
of this example, see Fan, Cinema Approaching Reality, 48–55.
13. Aono Suekichi, “Shizen seichō to mokudeki ishiki” [Naturally Generated and Directed
Consciousness], pts. 1 and 2, Bungei sensen [Frontline of Art and Literature] (September 1926 and
January 1927): n.p.; Vladimir Lenin, What Is to Be Done? (1902), trans. Joe Fineberg and George
Hanna (New York: Lenin Internet Archive, 1999), 16–31.
14. Aono, “Shizen seichō to mokudeki ishiki.”
15. Iwasaki, Eiga to shihon shugi, 102–3; Iwasaki, “Xiandai dianying yu youchan jieji,” 5–7.
16. Lu Xun, “Yizhe fuji” [Translator’s Notes], Mengya yuekan 1, no. 3 (March 1930): 27–33.
17. Marc Steinberg and Alexander Zahlten, “Introduction,” in Media Theory in Japan, ed. Marc
Steinberg and Alexander Zahlten (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), 1–5.
18. Huang Jiamo, “Yingxing yingpian yu ruanxing yingpian” [Hard Film and Soft Film], Modern Screen
1, no. 6 (December 1, 1933): 3; “Xiandai dianying yu Zhongguo dianyingjie” [Modern Screen and
the Chinese Film Profession], Modern Screen 1, no. 1 (March 1, 1933): 1; Liu Na’ou, “Dianying
jiezou jian lun” [On Film Rhythm], Modern Screen 1, no. 6 (December 1, 1933): 1–2;
“Écranesque,” Modern Screen 1, no. 2 (April 1, 1933): 1; “Guanyu zuozhe de taidu” [On the
Author’s Attitude], Modern Screen 1, no. 5 (October 1, 1933): 1; “Zhongguo dianying miaoxie de
shendu wenti” [Problems with the Depth of Description in Chinese Cinema], Modern Screen 1, no.
3 (May 1, 1933): 2–3. See Bao, Fiery Cinema, 153–96; Fan, Cinema Approaching Reality, 86–97;
Zhang, Amorous History, 244–97.
19. See Wu Kang, Song Ming lixue [Neo-Confucianism from the Song to Ming Dynasties] (1955; repr.,
Taipei, Taiwan: Huaguo chubanshe, 1962).
20. Don A. Pittman, Toward a Modern Chinese Buddhism: Taixu’s Reforms (Honolulu: University of
Hawaii Press, 2001); Liuzu tanjing [The Sutra of Hui Neng] (1930; repr., Hong Kong: Hong Kong
Buddhist Book Distributor Press, n.d.), pin 10 (80).
21. Tanxu, Yingchen huiyilu [Memoir of Shadow and Dust] (1969; repr., Hong Kong: Hong Kong
Buddhist Book Distributor, 2002)
22. Yang Wenhui, Deng budeng guan zalu [On Non-differentiation and Differentiation] (Taipei, China:
Xinwenfeng chuban gongsi, 1973); Lan Chi-fu, “Yang Renshan yu xiandai Zhongguo Fojiao” [Yang
Wenhui and Modern Chinese Buddhism], Hua-Kang Buddhist Journal (1972), Article 2.
23. Huang Jiashu, Za ahan jing xuanji [Saṃyuktāgama: A Selection], suttas trans. Guṇabhadra (1999;
repr., Taipei, China: Buddhall, 2017), SA-298 (178).
24. Jie shenmi jing [Saṃdhinirmocana Sūtra, or Sūtra of the Explanation of the Profound Secrets], trans.
Xuanzang (Putian, China: Guanghua si, 2010), §4 (35–39).
25. Huang Jiashu, Za ahan jing daodu [Saṃyuktāgama: A reading guide], sūtras, trans. Guṇabhadra
(1999; repr., Taipei, Taiwan: Buddhall, 2006), sūtras 1–7 (235–56).
26. “Bashi guiju song” [Verses on the Principles of the Eight Consciousnesses], in Weishi si lun [Four
treatises of Yogacārā Buddhism], trans. Chen Peng (Kaohsiung, Taiwan: Fo Guang Shan zongwu
weiyuanhui, 1998), 269–98; Dignāga, “Guan suoyuan lun song” [Ālambana-parīkşā], in Chen Na si
lun [The Four śāstras by Dignāga], trans. Xuanzang (Nanjing, China: Zhina neixueyuan, 1932), §4;
Dignāga, Qu yin jiashe lun, in Chen Na si lun, Qu 1–2; Han Yanjie, Weishi xue gailun [General
Concepts of Yogacārā Buddhism] (Taipei, Taiwan: Wenjin chubanshe, 1993), 190–295; Lo, Weishi
fangyu, 188–92; Xuanzang, Cheng weishi lun, §4 (24–31); Yin Shun, Dasheng qixinlun jiangji
[Lectures on the Mahāyāna śraddhotpādaśāstra, 1950], śāstra Aśvaghoṣa (?), trans. Paramārtha (?)
(2010; repr., Beijing, China: Zhonghua shuju, 2014), 59–61.
27. The term “underdetermine” can be considered the opposite of “overdetermine.” If overdetermination
refers to a superstructure that determines the formational process of a mode of existence,
underdetermination refers to an infrastructure that serves as a layout of potentialities that can be
actualized, including those interdependent relationships that often produce seemingly predictable
outcomes. See Thomas Lamarre, The Anime Ecology: A Genealogy of Television, Animation, and
Game Media (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018), 11–12.
28. Huang, Za ahan jing daodu, sūtras 293 (326–27), 296 (330–32), 300 (337–38), 364 (341–42), 373
(344–46), 388 (348), and 404 (353–54). For śāstras, see Asaṅga, Yujiashi di lun [Yogācārabhūmi-
śāstra or Discourse on the Stages of Yogic Practice], trans. Xuanzang (Taipei, Taiwan: Buddha
Educational Foundation, 2014), §9:16–20 (1:321–29); see also Nāgārjuna, Dazhidulun
[Mahāprajñāpāramitāśāstra or Great Treatise on the Perfection of Wisdom], trans. Kumārajīva
(Taipei, Taiwan: Shihua guoji gufen youxian gongsi, 2007), §5:35–36 (233–34). For a modern
discussion, see, for example, Fyodor Stcherbatsky, Buddhist Logic [1930–32] (1993; repr., Delhi,
India: Motilal Banarsidass, 2008), 1:119–45; see also Yen P’ei, Fojiao de yuanqi guan [On the
Concept of Nidānas in Buddhism] (1981; repr., Taipei, Taiwan: Tianhua chuban shiye, 1997), 1–32.
29. Yin Shun, Dasheng qixinlun jiangji, 85–87.
30. Stcherbatsky, Buddhist Logic, 1:1–47, 1:363–505.
31. Lan, “Yang Renshan yu xiandai Zhongguo Fojiao,” 100–103.
32. Bhikkhu Bodhi, Mahākaccāna: Master of Doctrinal Exposition (Wheel Publication, no. 405/406)
(Kandy, Sri Lanka: Buddhist Publication Society, 1995), 1204 n.229; Kañukurunde Ñaṇananda,
Concept and Reality in Early Buddhist Thought: An Essay on Papañca and Papañca-Saññā-Saṅkhā
(1971) (Colombo, Sri Lanka: Dharma Grantha Mudrana Bhāraya, 2012).
33. Stcherbatsky, Buddhist Logic, 1:119–45.
34. Zong Baihua, “Zhongguo shihua zhong suo biaoxian de kongjian yishi” [The Spatial Consciousness
Manifested in Chinese Poetry and Painting, 1949], in Meixue yu yijing [Aesthetics and Yijing]
(Beijing, China: Renmin chubanshe, 1987), 246.
35. Zong Bing, “Hua shanshui xu” [On Painting Mountains and Rivers], in Hualun congkan, [The
Collection of Essays on Painting], ed. An Lan (Beijing, China: Zhonghua shuju), 1:1; Lam Nin-
tung, “Zhongguo dianying de kongjian yishi” [The Spatial Consciousness of Chinese Cinema],
Zhongguo dianying yanjiu [An Interdisciplinary Journal of Chinese Film Studies] (1983), Article 1.
36. Chi Fa, “Yinyuan lun” [On Dependent Originations], in Fojiao genben wenti yanjiu [Studies of the
Fundamental Questions in Buddhism], ed. Chang Man-tao (Taipei, Taiwan: Dasheng wenhua
chubanshe, 1978), 1:87 and 95–96.
37. Yuk Hui, On the Existence of Digital Objects (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016),
75–105.
38. Hajime Tanabe, Philosophy as Metanoetics [1946], trans. Takeuchi Yoshinori, Valdo Viglielmo, and
James W. Heisig (1986; repr., Nagoya, Japan: Chisokudō, 2016), 73; Thomé H. Fang, Zhongguo
Dasheng Foxue [Chinese Mahāyāna Buddhism, 1974–75] (2012; repr., Beijing, China: Zhonghua
shuju, 2014), 1:14.
39. Thomas Elsaesser, “A Bazinian Half-Century,” in Opening Bazin: Postwar Film Theory and Its
Afterlife, ed. Dudley Andrew and Herve Joubert-Laurencin (New York: Oxford University Press,
2011), 3–12.
40. Bazin, “Ontologie de l’image photographique,” 16 (my translation). I do not use the Hugh Gray
translation because his text does not convey the same meaning as the French original.
41. Hui considers an understanding of ontology as such as largely Cartesian, although this point is
arguable; see Hui, On Existence of Digital Objects, 78–81.
42. Vivian Sobchack, “The Scene of the Screen: Envisioning Photographic, Cinematic, and Electronic
‘Presence’,” in Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2004), 138–47.
43. Anon., “Guan Meiguo yingxi ji,” in Ding, ed., Bainian Zhongguo dianying lilun wenxuan, 1:4; Lo
Shi-hin, Nengduan jingang borë boluo miduo jing zuanshi • Borë boluomiduo xin jing jianglu
[Vajracchedikā Prajñāpāramitā Sūtra: A Revised Edition with Interpretation • Prajñāpāramitā
Hṛdaya sūtra: Lectures] (Hong Kong: Dharmalakshana Buddhist Institute, 2007), 269 (Kumārajīva’s
translation).
44. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason [1787], trans. J. M. D. Meiklejohn (London: Henry G.
Bohn, 1855), 184–87.
45. Wang Guowei, “Kongzi zhi meiyu zhuyi” [Confucius’s Notions of Art Education], in Wang Guowei
meilun wenxuan [Selected Essays on Aesthetics by Wang Guowei], ed. Liu Gangqiang (Changsha,
China: Hunan renmin chubanshe, 1987), 4.
46. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 41.
47. Yin Shun, Dasheng qixinlun jiangji, 1–3.
48. Lydia Liu, The Clash of Empire: The Invention of China in Modern World Making (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2004), 12–13.
49. László Tengelyi, “The Spirit According to Kant,” Revues des sciences philosophiques et
théologiques 85, no. 1 (2001): 11–22
50. Alain Badiou, Handbook of Inaesthetics [1998], trans. Alberto Toscano (Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 2005), xii and 9–10.
51. Wang, “Kongzi zhi meiyu zhuyi,” 4; all the English words in parentheses are in Wang’s original text.
Here, Wang refers to Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgement [1790], trans. Paul Guyer
and Eric Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), §18–28; and to Arthur
Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Presentation [1818–19], trans. Richard E. Aquila (New York:
Pearson Longman, 2008), 1:31, Book 1, §1.
52. Wang, “Kongzi zhi meiyu zhuyi.”
53. Zengyi ahan jing [Ekottara āgama], trans. Dharmanandi into Pāli in 384 ce, in Taishō Shinshū
Daizōkyō [Taishō Tripiṭaka] 2, no. 125 (Taipei, Taiwan: Zhonghua dianzi fodian xiehui, 2002),
§10.19 (95). The term ālaya is not directly transliterated in this Chinese translation. This passage
corresponds to the original Pāli version, S.vol–1 (136). See James W. Gair and W. S. Karunatillake,
A New Course in Reading Pāli: Entering the Word of the Buddha (1998; repr., Delhi, India: Motilal
Banarsidass, 2001), 129.
54. Schopenhauer, World as Will and Presentation, 1§1 (1:31).
55. Hou Yao, Yingxi juben zuofa, 2 (his own English translation).
56. Ibid., 23. Nāgārjuna, Zhonglun [Mūlamadhyamakakārikā or Fundamental Versus on the Middle
Way], annot. and trans. Han Yanjie (Kaohsiung, Taiwan: Fo Guang Shan zongwu weiyuanhui,
1997), §1 (19).
57. Huang, “Xiandai dianying yu Zhongguo dianyingjie,” 1.
58. Leo Ou-fan Lee, Shanghai Modern: The Flowering of a New Urban Culture in China, 1930–1945
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 91. Bao disagrees that despite Liu’s association
with Modern Screen, he might have been a “closeted” Marxist. See Bao, Fiery Cinema.
59. Liu, “Écranesque,” 1.
60. Donna Ong, “Liu Na’ou and the 1930s Soft Film Movement: A New Approach in Revisionist
Chinese Film Historiography,” CINEJ Cinema Journal 2, no. 2 (2013): 67–81.
61. Liu Na’ou, “Dianying jiezou jian lun,” 1. For Liu’s inspirations, see René Clair, “Rhythm” [1925], in
French Film Theory and Criticism: A History/Anthology, 1907–1939, ed. Richard Abel (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), 1:268–70; see also Léon Moussinac, “On Cinegraphic
Rhythm” [1923], in Abel, ed., French Film Theory and Criticism, 1:281.
62. Liu, “Guanyu zuozhe de taidu,” 1.
 CHAPTER 9

FEMINIST FILM THEORY ON

THE BRINK OF LAUGHTER

MAGGIE HENNEFELD

FEMINIST film theory has been notoriously suspicious of laughter, and with
good reason. When laughs erupt onscreen, they are rarely helpful for
women, if not actively demeaning and disempowering. Classic and
canonical films ooze with sexist sight gags and pathologized hysterics, from
innuendos about date rape in beloved screwball comedies (Bringing Up
Baby [Howard Hawks, 1938], It Happened One Night [Frank Capra, 1934],
The Awful Truth [Leo McCarey, 1937]) to risible caricatures of unrelenting
evil—exemplified by the menacing cackle of “The Wicked Witch” in The
Wizard of Oz (Victor Fleming, 1938). It is no surprise that feminist film
theorists have favored virtually every other genre than comedy—
melodrama, film noir, Western, musical, thriller, the avant-garde, horror,
animation, porn—for sourcing their aesthetic invigoration and political
redemption. As Haskell tellingly argues in her foundational genre survey,
“Ambivalence toward women, if not misogyny, was practically the stock in
trade of silent comedy,” a generalization that she stretches into 1970s
romantic comedy and campy horror films alike.1
If feminist film theory has been wary of comedy, feminist comedy
studies, likewise, has been relatively uninterested in cinema. Key texts such
as Pretty/Funny, Uproarious, Queens of Comedy, Laughing Mad, All Joking
Aside, The Female Grotesque, and Hysterical! focus overwhelmingly on
stand-up comedy and television, with cinema often relegated to the role of
blind spot, bad object, or afterthought.2 The first major work to pay
sustained attention to the gender politics of film comedy was not published
until 1995, more than two decades after the assertion of feminist concerns
within film studies. The book in question, The Unruly Woman, also marks a
major methodological departure from the semiotic and psychoanalytic
approaches that set the agenda for feminist film theory in the 1970s through
1990s.3 Scholars such as Laura Mulvey, Mary Ann Doane, and Kaja
Silverman focused on the psychosexual politics of film language. It is only
through the cold hard light of rigorous analysis, they argued, that ideologies
of sexual difference could be uprooted from their grounding in the effortless
ease and pleasure of film viewing. For example, in her work on film sound,
Silverman emphasizes the maternal voice that “envelopes” the spectator—
drawing on Didier Anzieu’s notion of a “psychic envelope”—but without
addressing the specificity of female laughter and its potential to shatter the
“acoustic mirror.”4
Figure 9.1. The menacing cackle of “The Wicked Witch” in The Wizard of Oz (Victor Fleming,
1938).

Karlyn turns instead to Mikhail Bakhtin and his theory of the

carnivalesque as a raucous, subversive, and festive genre—a genealogy of
great interest to feminist historians, sociologists, and literary scholars
including Natalie Zemon Davis, Mary Douglas, and Mary Russo.5 Though
Karlyn discusses films such as Marleen Gorris’s A Question of Silence
(1982), in which a group of Dutch women burst into hysterical laughter
while committing spontaneous homicide against a misogynistic boutique
owner, she looks mostly at television and popular culture at large, without
disentangling cinema from other media forms. Unlike feminist film theory,
which highlights the viewing conditions of the apparatus (darkened space,
luminous screen, celluloid-cum-libidinal projection—even in their shape-
shifting digital contexts), such issues have always been tertiary to the
eventful outburst of laughter itself for feminist comedy scholars.
Disciplinary lines are thus drawn between the screen apparatus and the
televisual performative, as these modes traverse a vast variety of mediated
spaces and contexts.
It is my goal in this chapter to bridge the gap between feminist film
theory and feminist comedy studies, which have had extremely different
concerns despite pursuing often complementary aesthetic and political ends.
These fields are long overdue for a methodological reckoning. One might
say that feminist film theory has been on the brink of laughter since its
inception, and in contrast to the political optimism and subversive
enthusiasm of feminist comedy studies, feminist film theory has been
overwhelmingly focused on negative critique.
This approach is exemplified by Doane’s brief analysis of sexist jokes in
Femmes Fatales (not a book about comedy) when she considers the
ubiquity of tendentious gags in noir films and melodramas. Doane
compares the sexual politics of such jokes, which at once objectify and
exclude women, to the structural impossibility of female subjectivity in
narrative film spectatorship. As she puts it, “The one who ‘gets’ the joke
automatically, unthinkingly, colludes in the maintenance of the systems of
sexual oppression which support its meaning…. For the joke is the textual
instance which often seems most coercive in its production of reading
effects.”6 In other words, amusement at a sharp or disarming joke—no less
sexist for its success in provoking laughter—often erupts in spite of the best
intentions and commitments of the laughing film spectator.

F K .U W
Who gets to decide what is funny? It is a truth firmly established that
dominant sensibilities of humor empower male subjects (while demeaning
women) and further insinuate themselves under the cover of humor genera
(i.e., unmarked or universalized humor). To this end, feminists have
positioned their laughter against humor genera and its misogynistic
whimsies. In 1973, Laura Mulvey famously called for the “destruction of
pleasure as a radical weapon” to resist women’s systematic
disempowerment and objectification by mainstream cinema’s visual codes
of narrative representation.7 (Though Mulvey focuses on visual pleasure,
film laughter is often grounded in the image and its meaning arises in
reference to the visual realm.) Echoed by Doane, Silverman, bell hooks,
Teresa de Lauretis, Claire Johnston, and many others, this anti-pleasure
critique has been fiercely reclaimed by present-day feminist theorists of
affect and emotion, who address the more diffuse ways in which neoliberal
capitalism’s “mandate to enjoyment” coerces and constrains the gender
politics of happiness in everyday life.8 I would characterize this as the
“killjoy” line of feminism’s anti-laughter ethos, inherited from the anti-
pleasure polemics of second-wave feminism and carried forth into twenty-
first century feminist film theory.
In opposition to this gelotophobic tack,9 feminist comedy scholars have
repeatedly embraced the radical potential of unruly female laughter—both
onscreen and onto the audience—that exceeds the rigid constraints of
symbolic language and regulatory desire. Karlyn thus states her project in
The Unruly Woman: “This book investigates the power of female
grotesques and female laughter to challenge the social and symbolic
systems that would keep women in their place.”10 This is the wager of
numerous recent books, such as Hysterical!, Who’s Laughing Now?, Gender
and Humor, and Transgressive Humor of American Women Writers.11 Even
in genre studies not primarily focused on comedy, the mention of laughter
provides methodological license to suspend negative critique with utopian
suppositions of subversion.12
There is basis for this mirthful bait-and-switch. Hélène Cixous parlayed
endemic lack into transgressive desire in her foundational 1975 essay, “The
Laugh of the Medusa,” in which she wrests Medusa—that petrifying,
snake-haired Gorgon—from thinkers such as Sigmund Freud and Siegfried
Kracauer.13 As she proclaims, “That which is ours breaks loose without our
fearing any debilitation … laughs exude from all our mouths … we never
hold back our thoughts, our signs, our writing; and we’re not afraid of
lacking.”14 Though invigorating, Cixous’s polemic also deflects the concept
of semiotic subjectivity in language, which simply makes no sense without
fear of lacking (in other words, such subjectivity would be nonsignifying
and incommunicable). This is the premise of semiotic film theory, which
understands the spectator’s scopophilic drive for temporary control and
illusory mastery as a routine disavowal of constitutive lack (i.e., “castration
anxiety” as a metaphor for the animating terror of difference in all its
guises). Laughter, like visual pleasure, is one such tactic for pacifying the
eternal civil war between knowledge and belief: knowledge of
difference/lack versus belief in plenitude/omnipotence.
No source of gendered amusement, however, has had more transgressive
capital than that of the unruly woman or female-grotesque.15 Unabashedly
loud and often inappropriate, she flaunts her antinormative, excessive,
leaky, noisy, smelly, and generally disruptive corporeality against the
traditional decorum of femininity and female behavior. In contrast to the
feminist killjoy, who tells us explicitly not to laugh when the joke reinforces
oppressive relations of power, the unruly woman laughs anyway, but her
laughter ignores the patriarchal scripts of humor genera. Though evocative
and affirming, the unruly woman has dangerous critical limitations. She is a
disruptive presence, but she can only ever effect change on her own terms,
while largely sidestepping the gender politics of how women have
predominantly figured in histories and realities of popular comedy. She
abjects herself rather than risk objectification, placing herself beyond or
outside the ingrained libidinal economies of subjectivity, language, and
power.
The unruly woman has found solid footing in writings on early silent
cinema, which refers to filmmaking from the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries before cinema established its cultural prestige and
economic power.16 At that time, moving pictures were dominated by short-
form, spectacle-based happenings rather than by multireel, narrativized
storytelling.17 For example, a woman accidentally pours too much paraffin
wax onto the fire and spontaneously combusts out of the chimney in Mary
Jane’s Mishap (1903), and a Black woman spreads her laughter
contagiously through the public sphere in Laughing Gas (1907).18 Due to
its open-ended aesthetic possibilities and its vivid connections to
contemporaneous gender upheavals and political activism, early film
comedy has been a fertile terrain for archival research and theoretical
debate among feminist media scholars.
Early cinema’s versatile objecthood, as a medium on the brink of
institutionalization, is one such point of overlap joining the parallel interests
of feminist film theorists and feminist comedy scholars. I position my own
work at this crossroads, alongside writings by Jennifer Bean, Jane Gaines,
Miriam Hansen, Lynne Kirby, Anca Parvulescu, Lauren Rabinovitz, Karen
Redrobe, Shelley Stamp, Jacqueline Najuma Stewart, Kristen Anderson
Wagner, and many others.19 At the same time, the happenstance of early
cinema—as an adaptable object that can wear multiple hats (too many
hats!)—has covered over the deeper methodological problems at play. Why
is feminist film theory fundamentally suspicious of comedy? And why is
feminist comedy studies intrinsically less invested in cinema? It appears
that each field grows more hostile to its excluded object the more its own
identity solidifies around the boundaries or borders of its privileged terrain.
In other words, the antipathy stems from feminism’s essentially different
stakes in the very ideas of film and comedy.
What if we insisted on thinking promiscuously at the borders between
these two concepts—film and comedy—which have inspired two such
separate, thriving subfields of feminist media studies? Female laughter, I
argue, provides the missing link between the two—a wager that I pursue by
outlining a genealogy of representations of female laughter in film. I focus
on examples that are not necessarily genre comedies but that strikingly
thematize women who laugh. (The antagonism between comedy and
laughter remains a charged topic of feminist cultural debate into the present
day.20) This survey is by no means comprehensive or exhaustive.21 Rather, I
consider a range of cases that underscore what I deem to be four major
paradigms of female film laughter, which traverse short-form and feature-
length, big-budget and shoestring, domestic and transnational, conventional
narrative and experimental modes of filmmaking alike. They include: the
killjoy, the coquette, the prankster, and the hysteric.
These four categories are not definitive archetypes but persistent tropes
that pose provocations for further conversation and debate. Though there is
a certain amount of overlap among them—especially across specific
examples—they remain crucial in their distinctions. I find them to be
extremely helpful heuristics for getting to the bottom of female laughter in
film. As I will explain, these four categories revolve around issues of
power, sex, resistance, and language, respectively.
 T F P F F L
Who are the female laughers in cinema? First, the killjoy portrays
femininity as either shrill/humorless or abysmally evil—whether
withholding laughter at the right moment or laughing vociferously at the
wrong one, the killjoy laugher indexes an archetypal fantasy of female
enjoyment as an abject limit to effortless pleasure. Second, the coquette is
an extremely familiar trope: she is the protagonist of a screwball or
romantic comedy, whose frothy laughter organizes competing levels of
spoken and unspoken knowledge within the diegesis (the filmic universe).
Whether she is a mild flirt or a raging sparkplug, her laughter becomes the
locus of delightful innuendo but does not pose any real menace to the film’s
overriding structures of meaning or identification.
Third, the prankster follows in the vein of “the unruly woman,” or now
more aptly “the nasty woman.”22 Part dissident and part reveler, she abhors
social decorum and wields her gleefully inappropriate laughter as a fierce
political weapon. Her unbound hilarity threatens to expose the whole circus
of cinematic pleasure—its manipulative promise of symbolic mastery and
ego-driven morality. Last but not least, the hysteric emits laughter that is
never quite what it seems. Her laughter is a symptom, or a cipher, that
converts impossible triads of meaning, identification, and desire into
affectively inscrutable outbursts. It might appear joyful, grief-stricken, or
horrified, but even more so than that of the other three, it is an emanation
from the unconscious structures of filmic narration. Power, sex, resistance,
and language—the respective stakes of these four laughing characters come
to a head at their descent into laughter.

The Killjoy

Margaret Atwood famously remarked, “Men are afraid that women will
laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.”23 Kill or be
killed, the killjoy trope transcends filmic genre: she is the wicked witch
(Wizard of Oz) or evil stepmother (Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs [Walt
Disney, 1937]), the inconvenient wife (Divorce Italian Style [Pietro Germi,
1961]), the domineering boss (Devil Wears Prada [David Frankel, 2006]),
the fire-hose wielding tyrant (Reform School Girls [Tom DeSimone, 1986]),
or a villainized sociopath (Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? [Robert
Aldrich, 1962]). Above all, she reveals the pervasive and extremely wide-
ranging efforts to pathologize female laughter as evil, selfish, demonic,
abhorrent, and anathema to the well-being of others.
For example, Baby Jane (Bette Davis), a former child star turned
vindictive old recluse (who still believes that she is a beloved child star),
serves her paraplegic sister Blanche (Joan Crawford) a dead rat on a silver
platter (in the process of starving her) and laughs sadistically at Blanche’s
audible screams from the next room. First Baby Jane covers her mouth and
muffles her laughter, then she closes the door and indulges in a full-throated
eruption: maniacal grin, spasmic bodily convulsion, gargled and guttural
sound effects.24 Her explosive laughs threaten any possible basis of sensual
pleasure in sensible reason, as per the campy-horror tone of the film.
Rather, her laughs are caught in a zero-sum game between empathy and
amusement.
In recent years, feminist theory has appropriated the slur “killjoy” as a
rallying cry for contesting the power politics of enjoyment. Feminists are
often derided as “shrill,” “humorless,” or “spoilsports” when they refuse to
laugh in chorus at explicitly misogynistic or offensive punch lines. Sara
Ahmed, self-avowed “feminist killjoy,” refers to this as “The Promise of
Happiness.” She explains: “Certainly to be a good subject is to be perceived
as a happiness-cause, as making others happy. To be bad is thus to be a
killjoy. This book is an attempt to give the killjoy back her voice and to
speak from recognition of how it feels to inhabit that place.”25 Though
Ahmed is altogether skeptical of laughter (she views it as inextricable from
offensive or belittling humor), it is tempting to embrace the killjoy’s laugh
as one such location for asserting “her voice.” At the same time, throaty
cackles like Baby Jane’s also function as sight gags (or sound gags) and
offer easy fodder for fetishistic exploitation—for laughing derisively at the
madwoman’s twisted laughter. Neither transparently redemptive nor
guilelessly cathartic, the spectacle of killjoy laughs teeter on the brink of
empowerment and degradation.
Due to their fraught status and inherent fascination, killjoys have been
ripe terrain for political allegory, particularly in contexts of cultural crisis
and contested national sovereignty. It is fitting that they would run rampant
in interwar Weimar German cinema. Der Blaue Engel [The Blue Angel]
(Josef von Sternberg, 1930) depicts the exploits of Lola Lola (Marlene
Dietrich), a sizzling cabaret dancer who catches the eye of a stern-faced
gymnasium teacher, Immanuel Rath (Emil Jannings). When Rath proposes
to Lola, she laughs hysterically at his offer, her eruption marking both
imperious joy and portentous foreknowledge. She repeats the word “wife”
from his hopeful proposal, and before she can continue, her language
unravels into the paradigmatic sound effects of the “evil witch” howl:
“Mhuahahahaha!!!!!” Though she eventually accepts his offer, her killjoy
laugh incisively forebodes the rapid decline of their marital bliss into utter
misery and burlesque. He cannot hold onto her, and he even loses the
dignity of his position as an educator to play the role of a clown in Lola’s
cabaret troupe. In the end, he dies, killed by her rapacious joy. Any
temporary power achieved through laughter comes at the ultimate price of
mutual destruction.
Divorce Italian Style offers a very different take on the problem of female
laughter and its incitement to misery. A dark comedy of remarriage, the
film centers on the plight of Ferdinando (Marcello Mastroianni), an
effeminate baron married to a mustached vixen, but in love with his much
younger cousin, Angela. The wife, Rosalia (Daniela Rocca), is seen as
unattractive because she has upper lip hair and is age-appropriate. But her
worst offense is undoubtedly her exuberant laugh, which torments her
husband, who fantasizes about murdering her in various ways—drowning
her in quicksand, boiling her in a cauldron and turning her into soap, or
shooting her into outer space in a rocket ship. Since divorce was still illegal
in Italy in the 1960s, Ferdinando schemes to entrap her into having an
adulterous affair with another man, so he can murder her in a jealous rage
and then get off with only a light prison sentence due to the Sicilian
criminal code’s allowances for “honor killings.”
This film is ostensibly a comedy, wherein Rosalia’s laugh repeatedly
becomes the butt of the joke. The gag of gender role reversal in a tedious
marriage (self-assured wife and effeminate husband) is supplemented by
her episodic laugh track. In one scene, she plucks a rogue white hair from
his scalp and laughs piercingly at her observation that now he’ll “get seven
new ones.” The sound of her laugh is agonizing to her husband, an audible
blight on his masculinity and libidinal promiscuity. In the end, he kills her
joy by means of homicide, and then runs away with his younger cousin
after serving a three-year prison sentence. In a very different vein, the
townsfolk in the British satire Hot Fuzz (Edgar Wright, 2007) confess to
murdering a local resident, Eve Draper (Lucy Punch), due primarily to her
annoying laugh. She and her lover, Martin Blower (David Threlfall), are
decapitated by the Neighborhood Watch Alliance after a local stage
production of Romeo & Juliet, in which they play the lead roles. From star-
crossed lovers to lovelorn laughers, Draper and Blower are the parodic
victims of mass gelotophobic hysteria, triggered by specific intonations of
female enjoyment—a dog whistle for endemic misogyny.
Killjoy laughter, above all, is about power politics. Who laughs last and
who becomes the butt of the joke? A famous and widely debated example
arrives at the climax of Dance, Girl, Dance (1940), Dorothy Arzner’s
backstage musical about a fast-talking female dance troupe. (It is relevant to
note that Arzner was one of the only female—let alone lesbian—
filmmakers to thrive in the heyday of classical Hollywood.) In a pivotal
scene, Judy (Maureen O’Hara), an aspiring ballerina, is forced to play the
stooge in a revue act, burlesquing for laughs as (what else?) the abject
laughingstock. Judy’s anger prevents her from accepting her undesirable
role and drives her to claim the mantle of killjoy. She confronts the howling
audience: “Go on. Laugh! Get your money’s worth … I know you want me
to tear my clothes off so’s you can look your 50 cents worth…. We’d laugh
right back at the lot of you, only we’re paid to let you sit there and roll your
eyes and make your screamingly clever remarks.” Though Judy’s laughter
here is implied, and not actualized, it is easy to imagine.
This scene has been of great interest to many feminist scholars, including
Claire Johnston, Judith Mayne, Lucy Fischer, Pam Cook, Janet Bergstrom,
and Patrice Petro, who have debated the limits and potentials of Judy’s
subversive refusal. Mayne argues that Judy’s outburst goes beyond
disruption (i.e., killing the audience’s joy), instead, creating “another kind
of performance” that draws attention to the internalized misogyny of the
female audience members.26 As Mayne notes, “Women squirm
uncomfortably in their seats just as surely as men do,” creating a palpable
ambiguity about whom precisely Judy’s killjoy conniption serves or
thwarts: the women or the men?27 Or perhaps its recognition exceeds the
binds of gender conformity. Beyond these abiding tensions between
gendered subject positions and lived bodily identities, I would further
emphasize the fluidity between anger and elation that animates Judy’s bold
outburst.
The collision between anger and joy has been a vital issue for Black
feminist media studies. If white female killjoys are derisively pathologized,
killjoys of color are often systematically suppressed. As bell hooks notes in
“Killing Rage,” “black rage has no place and everyone knows it.” She
reflects: “I remember my first feelings of political rage against racism … I
felt as though I were a marked woman. A black person unashamed of her
rage, using it as a catalyst to develop critical consciousness, to come to full
decolonized self-actualization, had no real place in the existing social
structure.”28 The racial semiotics of killjoy laughter bear further discussion,
as there appears to be a relative paucity of female killjoys of color in
popular cinema. Instead, the angry Black woman stereotype makes a sight
gag of killjoy refusal. Inherited from the “Sapphire” caricature of blackface
minstrelsy entertainment, as Melissa Harris-Perry writes, “the angry black
woman has many different shadings and representations: the bad black
woman, the black ‘bitch,’ and the emasculating matriarch”—all of whom,
she notes, evoke descriptors such as “sassy,” “mouthy,” “aggressive,”
“loud,” “smart-ass,” and “humorous.”29 Unlike white female killjoys,
whose anger is tolerable insofar as it can be ridiculed, Black female anger
has been muffled by naturalizing its affective force through crude
stereotyping. Marcyliena Morgan and Dionne Bennett thus note: “The
stereotype of the angry, mean [and laughing] Black woman goes unnamed
not because it is insignificant, but because it is considered an essential
characteristic of Black femininity.”30 That affective silencing further strips
Black laughter of its killjoy potential.
Radical Black feminist theorists emphasize the affective instability
between anger and joy, invoking the antiracist killjoys of Civil Rights
activism. For example, Audre Lorde associates such unrepressed rage in the
face of racism with joyful community-building: “The angers between
women will not kill us if we can articulate them with precision.”31 Lorde’s
avowal of anger, the killjoy’s hallmark, is also a matter of sheer affective
survival, for, she writes, “I have suckled the wolf’s lip of anger and I have
used it for illumination, laughter, protection, fire in places where there was
no light, no food, no sisters, no quarter.”32 But where are these Black killjoy
laughs that convert anger into refusal in cinema?
A striking analog to hooks’s “Killing Rage” and Lorde’s “Uses of Anger”
flashes up in the “No, No, No” scene of Get Out, Jordan Peele’s 2017
horror-comedy film about the afterlives of slavery amid the neoliberal
subjugation of Black life. The film’s title is a reference to: A) The ill-
heeded wisdom of screaming spectators, who volubly shout “Get Out!!!!” at
doomed, tokenized black characters in horror movies, and B) What the
protagonist Chris (Daniel Kaluuya) needs to do immediately, when he
discovers that his girlfriend’s family members are slave traders hell-bent on
auctioning him off to the highest bidder. They run a black market in the
traffic of Black bodies that serves a clientele of wealthy, infirm white
capitalists. There is a strict division of labor in the family. First, the son and
daughter entrap unsuspecting Black prey—the son by physical force and the
daughter through her powers of seduction. Then the mother hypnotizes
them using a spoon and teacup, relegating their Black being to a “sunken
place”: a Fanonian nightmare.33 Finally, the father neurosurgically
transplants white clients’ agency into negated Black bodies. The family’s
Black maid, Georgina (Betty Gabriel), is slowly revealed to be the “dead”
white grandmother, piloting the body of the daughter’s lesbian ex-girlfriend
—whom we can only imagine herself dwells in “the sunken place.”
Figure 9.2. Georgina’s “No, No, No” laugh. Get Out (Jordan Peele, 2017).

I elaborate this context to underscore the killjoy racial politics of the

film’s most haunting scene, “No, No, No,” which is Georgina’s unnerving
reaction when Chris confides in her that too many white people make him
feel nervous. Georgina fights to hold back tears, which gush forth anyway
as she stares intently at Chris, and then punches out several sharp,
consecutive, staccato laughs while uttering the word “no” repeatedly. The
exchange is depicted through a series of shot/reverse-shots, filmed from a
side angle in extreme close-up. The visual effect is jarring and viscerally
uncanny, underscoring the knowledge that Georgina’s laughter is not her
own but an old white lady’s two-faced laughs emitted from a young Black
woman’s negated body (perhaps also evidence of the real Georgina’s
tortured efforts to surface from the sunken place). The experience of this
laughter is anathema to joy—Georgina’s laugh is stiff and austere, further
underscoring Chris’s mounting alarm and existential terror. The laughter
manifestly evokes Black social death, defined by Orlando Patterson in
Slavery and Social Death as the condition of domination, dehumanization,
and disempowerment to which Black bodies and beings have been
systematically confined.34 Further petrifying, Georgina’s Medusan laughter
audibly echoes Chris’s creeping recognition of the ordinary, material
realities of prolonged enslavement that leech on neoliberal regimes of
racialized social inequality.
Like Perseus, who stunned and decapitated Medusa by wielding his
shield as a reflective mirror, Chris arms himself with flash photography (a
metonym for viral visibility) as a temporary reprieve from “the sunken
place.” In the final sequence of cathartic violence, Georgina’s killjoy
double-consciousness becomes a deus ex machina for Chris to grasp at
miraculous life. Laughing Georgina is murdered by the momentarily
liberated consciousness of Walter (Marcus Henderson): the Black body held
captive by the white grandfather, who then kills himself. The police sirens
blare, an audible warning of social death, but they signal the friendly fire of
Chris’s buddy Rod (Lil Rel Howery), the film’s primary source of comic
relief, who is also a TSA agent. Georgina, like so many laughing female
killjoys, dies for the future to remain a site of possibility and optimism—in
an anti-racist twist, with Rod all the while shouting, “T-S-Motherfucking-
A!”

The Coquette

Laughter is often a libidinal substitute for sex. As Sigmund Freud argued in

Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, “The repressive activity of
civilization brings it about that primary possibilities of enjoyment … are
lost to us. But to the human psyche, all renunciation is exceedingly difficult,
and so we find that tendentious jokes provide a means of undoing the
renunciation and retrieving what was lost.”35 Or, as Billy Wilder has
described the innuendo-laden filmmaking of Ernst Lubistch, “He could do
more with a closed door than most directors could do with an open fly.”36
The capacity for laughter to compensate for social censorship or the
momentary blockage of sex is the vocation of the coquette, an archetypal
protagonist of the romantic comedy genre. As Mae West once quipped,
“Virtue has its own reward, but no sale at the box office.”37 Though Freud,
in his sexist and heteronormative theoretical armature, argued that women
tend not to enjoy jokes that border on obscenity, while men need such jokes
as reparation for the sexual unavailability of women’s bodies, the romantic
comedy genre belies Freud’s insights. Female jokesters and laughers alike
emit coded, enigmatic signifiers of their unbridled pleasure—their humor
effectively navigating the genre’s strictures of sexual decorum and the
laughing spectator’s perception of rampant obscenity.
For example, in Bringing Up Baby, an eccentric coquette, Susan
(Katharine Hepburn), pursues an introverted paleontologist, David (Cary
Grant), who is on a hunt for his missing “bone”: the intercostal clavicle of a
Brontosaurus skeleton. Since David is engaged to be married to a
respectable woman with stern affect, Susan must prevent the wrong
marriage at all costs, herself hiding his clothes, her dog hiding his coveted
dinosaur bone, and the two of them landing in jail alongside an escaped,
feral circus leopard, whom they accidentally mistake for a tame Brazilian
leopard, Baby, who is placated by hearing the song: “I Can’t Give You
Anything But Love.” The film’s zany devices and booby-trapped plot twists
lead up to a climactic moment when Susan laughs in David’s face at his
insistence that he intends to go ahead with his marriage to the mirthless
woman. It is a soft, lilting, melodious laugh that drips into her interrogation,
“What for?”
Film and comedy scholars have focused on the connection between
Susan’s laughter (which is sonically distinct here from her other laughs in
the film) and David’s subsequent accident, tripping and falling in the street.
What is significant to me is the apparent eruption of Susan’s laugh as a
vigorous marker of the unknowable. Her laughter does not just compensate
for the endless deferral of sexual intercourse—just as the killjoy’s laugh is
always more than an immediate substitute for political power or physical
domination. In other words, laughter rarely means exactly what we think it
does, and never directly replicates the coded desires or intentions that it
ventriloquizes. In its proximity to the unrepresentable, Susan’s laughter
resides in that slippery liminal zone between suspended disavowal and
topsy-turvy upheaval. When innuendo—such as “But Susan! You can’t
climb into a man’s bedroom window.” “I know, it’s on the second floor!”—
hits its limit, female laughter keeps up the whole ruse, conjoining the zippy
banter of spoken dialogue to the sexual coding of filmic language.
Laughs such as Susan’s are leitmotifs of the romantic comedy film,
providing a body for the corporeal representation of this genre’s incessant
yo-yoing between risqué innuendo and conservative convention. The
numerous examplars includes The Awful Truth, The Lady Eve (Preston
Sturges, 1941), Some Like It Hot (Billy Wilder, 1959), Annie Hall (Woody
Allen, 1977), When Harry Met Sally (Rob Reiner, 1989), Pretty Woman
(Garry Marshall, 1990), Groundhog Day (Harold Ramis, 1993), Clueless
(Amy Heckerling, 1995), Bridesmaids (Paul Feig, 2011), Trainwreck (Judd
Apatow, 2015), Crazy Rich Asians (Jon M. Chu, 2018), and too many
others to name. To be clear, this laughter is not just about sex but the
expression of any corporeal element that would pose a significant threat to
the ideological organization of the narrative. As many feminist scholars
have observed, though women act out within the strictures of this genre—
behaving excessively, transgressing social norms (even shitting in public
while wearing a bridal gown)—its loose ends are almost always tied up by
the climax, with the outcome of marriage or some other confirmation of
(usually white, middle- or upper-class, ableist, heterosexual) coupling.38
Thus, in Sleepless in Seattle (1993), Nora Ephron’s amusing homage to An
Affair to Remember (Leo McCarey, 1957), we know that single dad Sam’s
girlfriend Victoria will not be a viable wife/mother figure because “she
laughs like a hyena.”
Ninotchka (1939), Ernst Lubitsch’s sex farce about Soviet jewel thieves,
advertised itself with the enticing tag line: “Garbo Laughs!” A humorless
comrade if ever there was one, Ninotchka (Greta Garbo) bursts into
laughter at a crucial moment in the film. Her wild explosion further evokes
what Sergei Eisenstein described in 1937 as “militant humor,” based dually
on “the comic quality of a social mask and the devastating force of social
ridicule,” which “will be the inevitable form of [Soviet] laughter.”39 In this
scene, Ninotchka refuses to laugh at her love interest Count Leon
d’Algout’s (Melvyn Douglas) corny joke, humiliating him by making him
repeat it several times to the point that he butchers his own punch line. (It’s
a familiar frame-breaking gag, wherein the laugh derives from a given
character’s nonsensical perception of reality, perfectly logical only within
the context of its absurd illogic.40) Eventually, in frustration, Leon accuses
Ninotchka that she has “not a laugh in” her, and then falls back in his chair,
upturning a table and tumbling onto the floor. His Bergsonian slapstick
antics send the laughless Soviet into a fit of hysterics: an uproarious belly
laugh that leaves her breathless and convulsive, thumping the table and
quaking in concert with the rest of the party.

Figure 9.3. Garbo Laughs. Ninotchka (Ernst Lubitsch, 1939).

At face value, this laugh could be deemed militant—it stems from her
refusal of Leon’s inane joke (his “social mask”) and her assertion of
physical superiority through the “devastating force of social ridicule,” to
invoke Eisenstein. In contrast, others have aptly read Ninotchka’s laughter
as a sign of her submission, a harbinger of her warming to Western
capitalist values and of herself falling in love with Leon. Her reverse-
coquetry, like Leon’s joke about “coffee without cream,” inverts the order
of absence and desire (i.e., you want the thing you don’t have because you
don’t have it; the thing that you have doesn’t suddenly disappear because
you no longer want it). To repeat Leon’s joke, “A man comes into a
restaurant. He sits down at the table and he says, ‘Waiter, bring me a cup of
coffee without cream.’ Five minutes later, the waiter comes back and says,
‘I’m sorry, sir, we have no cream. Can it be without milk?” Whereas the
seductress Susan’s laugh in Bringing Up Baby precedes rather than
resulting from the sight gag of a man falling, Ninotchka’s bellicose
foreplay, in the wake of Leon’s accident, simply reverses the order of sexual
withholding and inappropriate desire, rather than posing a transformative
threat to either. It is a coquettish female laugh par excellence because it
merely toys with the inscrutable logic of the system (Hollywood fantasy,
Western capitalism, white patriarchy) without laying it bare by laughing
militantly in defiance of it.
Some female laughs assert a more direct relationship to gender violence
and sexual predation. In The Awful Truth, a wife, Lucy (Irene Dunne),
separated from the right husband and engaged to the wrong suitor, makes
erotic banter with her fiancé while her soon to be ex-husband hides behind
the bedroom door. The fiancé, Dan (Ralph Bellamy), recites a cheesy love
poem (“For you would make my life divine if you would change your name
to mine”), while her estranged husband, Jerry (Cary Grant), elicits her
laughter by repeatedly poking her with a pencil. This injunction to
enjoyment is physically coercive, but also on cue with Lucy’s and Jerry’s
mutual recognition of the poem’s laughable buffoonery, which becomes an
alibi for the coded metonymy between Lucy’s laughter and her ticklish
prodding. If Cary Grant lacks a stick as David in Bringing Up Baby, he
regains it here in The Awful Truth.
What are the gender politics of sexually charged jokes in classical
Hollywood cinema? This very question was a fierce topic of debate among
feminist film theorists, who disagreed, of all things, over matters of timing.
Thus Doane critiques Tania Modleski’s optimistic takeaway from the
closing images of Alfred Hitchcock’s Blackmail (1929), which according to
Modleski make “the spectator himself [into] the final butt of the film’s
humor” by withholding an ultimate reverse shot.41 Against this wishful
humor, Doane emphasizes the gap between subversive pleasure and
involuntary laughter, further accusing Modleski of conflating the difference
between “getting” (understanding the joke) and “reading” (critiquing it). It
makes a difference whether feminist counter-laughter is perceptible upon
initial viewing in order for this laughter to do the political work that it is
often tasked with achieving.
Though jokes take root in the violation of normative expectations,
parlaying sudden surprise into uproarious delight, they also dictate and
reinforce social relations of power. For Doane, the dynamics of tendentious
film jokes are epitomized by Robert Doisneau’s iconic photograph, “Un
Regard Oblique,” in which a woman stares longingly into a shop window
while her husband gazes lustfully at the nude portrait behind her. Doane
cautions: “Our desire to laugh must not blind us to the still pervasive
ideological ordering of the sexual.”42 Her wager, as a matter of timing, is to
mind the gap—the “outlets, blind spots, and excesses in the image”—and
pay attention to the pointed differences between what it means to
understand the joke on its own terms versus reading it according to the
political goals of feminist critique.43 Though gaps in the image are precisely
what authorize feminist counter-laughter, they become blind spots in the
first place due to the ingrained power structures that allow grotesque
double-standards and absurd injustices to fly under the radar and remain
socially invisible.
To Doane’s point about the differences between complacent viewing
versus thoughtful critique, coquettes rarely laugh last—or succeed in
tethering their own desire to the manifest meaning of their laughter. For
example, the sex worker Vivian (Julia Robert) laughs repeatedly at her
john-cum-paramour, Edward (Richard Gere), in Pretty Woman, all the while
refusing to kiss him on the mouth (a cardinal rule of the oldest profession).
The consummation of the kiss incites the muffling of her laugh, as she
prepares to metamorphose from exploited “call girl” to bourgeois
housewife. Coquettish laughter erupts at the limit of what is sexually
representable within the narrative. The specific prohibitions vary depending
on stylistic norms and historical context, but the tendency remains the same.
For example, queer sexuality cannot be openly acknowledged in coded texts
such as West Point (Edward Sedgwick, 1927), I Was a Male War Bride
(Howard Hawks, 1949), or Some Like It Hot but is the manifest premise of
countless films that now make up the thriving romantic comedy canon of
queer cinema: from The Wedding Banquet (Ang Lee, 1993) to But I’m a
Cheerleader (Jamie Babbit, 1997) to Tangerine (Sean Baker, 2015). This
does not mean that the latter examples lack formal prohibitions or
ideological limitations—there is always a frame for the utopian imagination
of sexuality. Repeatedly, the unthinkable of sex hovers around the burst of
cachinnation.
Classical Hollywood is particularly helpful terrain for analysis because its
visual conventions are so rigorously codified around the crafty depiction of
sexuality. In a pre-Code Hollywood film, Baby Face (Alfred E. Green,
1933), an ambitious woman serially seduces and ruins wealthy men in her
climb to the top. Prostituted by her father who dies in a distillery explosion,
Lily (Barbara Stanwyck) breaks free of her working-class fetters after
receiving some Nietzschean wisdom from a local cobbler, who counsels her
to “Use men!” and to “be a master, not a slave,” while leafing through a
copy of Will to Power. Throughout the film, Lily and her Black maid/friend,
Chico (Theresa Harris), are extremely close. Chico’s voice audibly signals
the barely disguised subtext of Lily’s sexual exploits. Just before Lily will
sleep with yet another man, Chico sings “The St. Louis Blues,” which can
only mean one thing: SEX. Yet, it is Chico’s laughter that first incites Lily
to defiance: from exploited daughter to self-enterprising sex worker. Lily
throws hot coffee at a leering john after Chico laughs at her cynical joke:
Chico: “He’s a big politician, ain’t he?”
Lily: “A big something, and it ain’t a politician.”
Chico: [laughing loudly] “Honey, you makes me tickle!”
The women’s mocking banter supplements their lack of visual agency in
this scene, which is prefaced by a fetishistic close-up that slinks up Lily’s
body—from her legs to her crotch to her breasts and eventually her face.
Like the coquette’s laugh, Chico’s voice marks the limit of narrative
recognition in the film’s vigorous traffic between women’s bodies and
solicitious images. In the case of Chico’s laughter, the relation couldn’t be
clearer.

The Prankster

In Léontine Guards the House (1912), the final episode of a French silent
film series produced on the brink of catastrophic global war, a sadistic
tomboy named Léontine (or Betty in the US and UK) goes on a violent
rampage—destroying her house, terrorizing her neighbors, and wreaking
mayhem in the streets.44 Such hellraising prankster comedies were very
popular in the 1910s, and often featured characters like Léontine, along
with Tillie the Tomboy (UK), Lea (Italy), Rosalie (France), and Mabel (the
United States). The prolific production of these anarchic prankster exploits
resonated with the rise of suffragette and anti-capitalist movements at the
time. Laughter at gendered farcical antics, such as a female sheriff who
orders her own husband’s mock execution, energized the climate of
mounting political activism and public debates about women’s rights and
social equality. Films with titles such as The Consequences of Feminism
(1906), Fighting Suffragettes (1909), Cousin Kate’s Revolution (1912), and
How They Got the Vote (1913) envisioned the potentials of protest and civil
disobedience unleashed by feminist laughter and its rebellious politics.
Laughing female pranksters intermingle joyful celebration with violent
self-abandon, often yielding serious material consequences. They are
exemplified by the Maries (two women both named Marie) who go on a
voracious, destructive rampage in Vera Chytilová’s Daisies (1966), filmed
in Czechoslovakia two years before the Prague Spring and subsequently
banned by the Czech authorities. The Maries both laugh extravagantly
throughout the film, feasting on everything in sight and wreaking havoc in
any milieu and space they inhabit, which ranges from a nightclub to the
private apartment of a “butterfly collector” to a rundown factory. In the
most iconic scene of the film, they stumble upon a lavish banquet meant for
communist party leaders and indulge in a violent, lurid, and extremely
carnal food fight. Their bodies exist to extract pleasure from every physical
object or confection in their proximity. Chytilová films this scene
experimentally, alternating close-ups of chomping mouths with tracking
shots of demonic high heels trampling over the elaborate culinary décor on
a long dining table.
Such feminist pranks are not just about heedless destruction or unbridled
pleasure, and their politics certainly go beyond the momentary disruption
they enact. Their carnal abandon enlists the powers of cinema to provoke
laughing spectators to imagine living differently or otherwise, against the
rampant double standards and rigid constraints of dominant gender and
sexual norms. This festive spectacle of physical liberation (eating, pissing,
shitting, fucking, destroying, licentiously enjoying) is core to the corporeal
politics of the female prankster, who in many ways embodies Bakhtin’s
theory of “the carnivalesque”: that festive, collective, mock revolution that
has inspired feminist scholars including Mary Russo (“the female-
grotesque”), Kathleen Karlyn (“the unruly woman”), Natalie Zemon Davis
(“the woman on top”), and Alison Kibler (“rank ladies”).45 A variant on
these laughing rabble-rousers, the prankster emits joyful laughter that
fosters utopian thought despite her whiplash of apocalyptic violence and
world-shattering destruction. Like the medieval folk festivals (such as “The
Feast of the Ass”) that inspired Bakhtin’s theorization of carnival, prankster
laughter converts terror and isolation into communal joy and social
regeneration.
To take another example, in Girls Trip (Malcolm D. Lee, 2017), a
comedy about Black female friendship in the age of social media, Lisa
(Jada Pinkett Smith), a shy and uptight nurse, finds herself suspended from
a zip line at a wild party in New Orleans just as her bladder explodes due to
excess alcohol consumption. It evokes the scene in François Rabelais’ Life
of Gargantua and Pantagruel where the giant Gargantua provokes
collective hilarity by drowning the people of Paris in buckets of his own
urine (which is how Paris comes to be named “Par-Ris,” i.e., “By
Laughter,” according to Rabelais).46 In the film, the spectacle of abjection is
an occasion for mass euphoria and the communal release of corporeal
inhibitions. Dina (Tiffany Haddish) follows Lisa across the zip line,
laughing uproariously while relieving her own bladder and spraying the
partygoers with a raucous night’s worth of urine. Though their antics might
be offensive or even cruel, the laughter these figures unleash is not meant to
be punitive or further isolating but promiscuously visionary and genuinely
reparative.
Roseanne Barr’s career trajectory is instructive toward articulating this
distinction between disciplinary mockery and redemptive pranks. The
poster child for Karlyn’s Unruly Woman (featured on the book jacket), Barr
has since become a notorious alt-right troll. In 1990, Barr famously grabbed
her crotch while singing “The Star-Spangled Banner” at a San Diego Padres
game in front of President George H. W. Bush, and in 2018 lost her contract
with ABC by describing Valerie Jarrett as an “ape” and an Islamic terrorist
in a racist tweet that went viral. The difference here boils down to the
intentional politics of how “unruly” or “nasty” women appropriate their
own abjection to provoke and license broader displays of carnal upheaval.
From agitator to aggravator, Barr now deploys similar corporeal tactics but
to very different ends. Partly, it is about power: “punching up” against
authority versus “punching down” at the already dispossessed. Beyond
“good” and “evil” (or aggressor and victim), the prankster’s Dionysian
laughter attempts to target institutional or systemic norms rather than
individual victims. This laughter stems from a mode of affect that abandons
hollow comfort in order to pursue radical new corporeal configurations
between the isolated self and the communal social body. In contrast, the
troll preys on such strategies for the purpose of self-isolating amusement,
usually achieved through bigoted or offensive humor.
It is important to emphasize that the prankster is not a troll, which would
be the domain of the killjoy. Trolls derive predatory “lulz” from the pain
and aggravation of others, whereas pranksters (despite their inevitable
collateral damage) laugh to foster and invigorate the bonds of social
community. (Again, Barr is no longer a prankster: she is now a troll.) The
killjoy’s refusal to laugh—or deployment of laughter to thwart the
predatory joys of others—is all about power politics. In contrast, the
prankster’s laughs aim to effect institutional change, beyond interpersonal
spoils, through joyful energy that obliviates all fear and isolation.
In this regard, the prankster gets to the heart of the rift between feminist
film theory and feminist comedy studies. If the transgressive gravity of
laughter has reigned in feminist comedy studies, it has repeatedly been cast
out as a bad object of feminist film theory. For example, Linda Williams
excludes comedy in her crucial essay on gendered “body genres” (i.e.,
horror, melodrama, and porn), because, she argues, “the reaction of the
audience does not mimic the sensations experienced by the central
clown.”47 In other words, there’s no love lost between laughing spectator
and hapless comic. Whereas Williams focuses on the bodily disciplining
enforced by slapstick laughter, many feminist scholars emphasize the
broader political limitations of momentary disruption—the subversive trap,
whereby liberatory laughter preempts meaningful transformation rather than
paving the way for it.
 This critique is exemplified by the antiracist shit pie scene in The Help
(Tate Taylor, 2011), a comedy-drama about a white female writer who
“liberates” oppressed Black servants in the Jim Crow South by
appropriating their stories. Minny (Octavia Spencer), a rebellious maid,
feeds “chocolate pie” to her racist employer, Hilly (Bryce Dallas Howard),
and then laughs in Hilly’s face upon revealing that the secret ingredient is
Minny’s own feces. (Hilly had demanded the use of segregated toilets in her
home.) The “Eat My Shit!” scene is radical within the constraints of the
film. As Kyla Wazana Tompkins argues in Racial Indigestion, “the
assimilation of the black body through the white mouth is also accompanied
by images of sticky resistance or even digestive upset … to the point at
which it becomes a fecal absolute.”48 And there is no “fecal absolute” more
horrific to a stone-cold racist like Hilly than eating the excrement of a
woman of color—particularly when this scene of ingestion is amplified by
racially defiant laughter. Yet, at the same time, Hilly’s “racial indigestion”
becomes an alibi for the film’s vapid celebration of its blatant racial
appropriation. In other words, The Help’s laughing spectator will continue
“Eating the Other” (to invoke bell hooks’ epithet for white supremacist
capitalism), even if Hilly literally eats the Other’s shit.49
Minny would further epitomize Sianne Ngai’s notion of “the zany” in
Our Aesthetic Categories, a touchstone of feminist affect theory. In many
ways, feminism’s ongoing turn to affect theory has inherited 1970–1990s-
era film theory’s suspicion of celebratory subversion. According to scholars
such as Lauren Berlant, Carolyn Pedwell, Mel Y. Chen, and Elizabeth
Povinelli, spirited laughter—regardless of its apparent social politics—
merely greases the wheels of an all-consuming capitalist machine that
rampantly preys upon affect and emotion. Like Minny, the zany
“personifies nonstop acting or doing”: she is “hot under the collar, hot and
bothered, hot to trot.”50 Though ostensibly political and amusingly
inappropriate, Minny’s fecal antics also mistake the symptom for the cause,
imagining a world in which racial equity could be achieved one shit-pie at a
time. Whether fecal or fecund, the Other’s output is rapaciously swallowed
up by an exploitative capitalist system.
Minny represents a version of the carnivalesque prankster in her defiant
disregard for the boundaries between official decorum and grotesque bodily
upheaval. At the same time, her misalliance of opposites fits all too well
with postmodern late capitalism’s utter lack of discrimination between high
and low forms. What would it mean for cinema to enact temporary civil
anarchy through joyful, communal laughter along these lines? As Julia
Kristeva articulates the political ideals of carnival, “It is a spectacle, but
without a stage; a game, but also a daily undertaking…. That is, two texts
meet, contradict and relativize each other.”51 Between aesthetic form and
viewing context, truly rebellious prankster laughter takes root in (female-
authored) experimental filmmaking, particularly works exhibited in
nontraditional venues that incorporate debate, discussion, and other
opportunities for critical enjoyment. In these films, pranksters often hover
on the brink of laughter and something else—anger, rapture, hysteria,
violence, catharsis. This liminal laughter is exemplified by Chantal
Akerman’s absurd long-takes of Delphine Seyrig doing housework in
Jeanne Dielman (1975) or by Martha Rosler’s satirical deconstruction of
everyday household objects in Semiotics of the Kitchen (1975).
Lizzie Borden’s Born in Flames (1983), a mock documentary about
gender oppression in the wake of class revolution, uses joyful humor as a
springboard for envisioning a radical feminist counterpolitics. Female
activists in this film frequently smile widely and emit other such noisy
outbursts. In one scene, a troupe of feminist bicyclists blaring loud rape
whistles attack a group of men who are in the process of assaulting a Latinx
woman. In an incisive montage of female hands at work, the packaging of
raw chicken is juxtaposed to a sex worker unrolling a condom along the
shaft of a penis. Both aesthetically and corporeally, implicit laughter is
essential to Borden’s depiction of the entrenched gender and racial
hierarchies that persist in the wake of alleged class transformation.
As Honey (Honey), Black lesbian host of the pirate Phoenix Radio
network puts it, “We have stood on the promises for too long now that we
can all be equal under the cover of a social democracy where the rich get
richer and the poor just wait on their dreams.” Zella Wiley (Flo Kennedy,
the Civil Rights leader and activist) often bears a wide, confrontational,
open-mouthed smile. Wiley advises Adelaide Norris (Jean Satterfield), a
fellow Women’s Army organizer, in using militant tactics, dryly comparing
“the right to violence [to] … the right to pee—[you] gotta have the right
place, the right time, and the appropriate situation.” Rather than urinating
from a zip line, the film aptly ends “in flames” with the explosion of a
phallic skyscraper. In an uncanny finale, the Women’s Army blows up a
radio tower atop the World Trade Center to disrupt a propaganda broadcast,
which had been preaching austerity to angry and dispossessed socialist
party members. Civil disobedience and anarchic violence, here rendered
through playful absurdity and joyful collectivity, represent necessary forms
of female prankster laughter. Though rarer in cinema than in television, web
series, or stand-up comedy, laughing female pranksters find immense
traction in oppositional modes of filmmaking that allow for greater degrees
of political expression and aesthetic experimentation.

The Hysteric

Hysteria is essentially a conversion disorder, parlaying inadmissible

knowledge or impossible speech into inscrutable corporeal symptoms, such
as epilepsy; double vision; temporary paralysis; or even yawns, barks,
hiccups, and laughs. In the context of these four film tropes of female
laughter, I approach hysteric laughter as a textual conversion disorder,
whereby the laugh comes to represent anything other than its own direct
motivation: a character’s personal desire, open expression, creative
enjoyment, and so forth. If killjoy laughter is about power, while coquettish
laughter points to sex, and prankster laughter unleashes joyful rebellion,
then hysteric laughter is really a placeholder for anything other than itself.
“The wish to include in oneself as an object the cause of the desire of the
Other is a formula for the structure of hysteria,” notes Doane in Femmes
Fatales, quoting Moustafe Safouan.52 The laughing female hysteric takes
Safouan’s insights to their narrative conclusions, offering her laughter as an
emanation from a kind of textual unconscious: a treasure trove of possible
utterances rooted in the overarching libidinal conflicts and the ideological
contradictions of the film. Her laughter means too much.
Figure 9.4. Laughing Anne (Herbert Wilcox, 1953).

For example, in Laughing Anne (Herbert Wilcox, 1953), a woman named

“Laughing Anne” (because she has a very distinctive laugh) gradually
learns to discipline her laughter by symbolizing it as a coded warning to her
doomed lover, rather than unleashing it as an expression of her underlying
pleasure. When Captain Davidson (Wendell Corey), the man who traded his
smile for “that laugh of hers” (according to the narrator), first meets
Laughing Anne (Margaret Lockwood), she confuses him by laughing at his
drink order, explaining: “Oh it is not funny, I just like to laugh, do you
mind?” Like her ambiguous racial origin (“possibly Creole?”), the impetus
for Anne’s mirth is a point of obsessive unknowing, signifying every which
way. Though laughter is her trademark characteristic, it is not surprising
that she laughs only sparingly during the film, which uses other sensory
audiovisual cues—her smile, her screams, her tears—to plot Anne’s
complex backstory involving her romance with a prize fighter (who loses
both his hands in a violent accident) and her ensuing affair with Captain
Davidson. “That laugh of hers was known in every bar on the Java coast,”
comments the narrator, whose voice is quickly displaced by the portentous
symbolism of Laughing Anne’s laugh. All text and no body, she laughs on
cue to alert the Captain to handless Jem Farrell’s (Forrest Tucker)
murderous arrival, losing her own life in the process. In the end, her
laughter is “raised into the symbolic,” as Mulvey would have it, echoed in
the unmistakable chortle of her bastard son, who sails the high seas with his
presumed father, Captain Davidson.53
What makes Anne’s laugh “hysteric,” rather than hysterical in the
colloquial sense, is its abiding confusion between placeless meaning and
narrative utility. On an individual level, her laughter is a symptom of her
inarticulable longing; on a textual level, it is an empty vessel for filmic
signification. This collision between impossible desire and productive
articulation has long made hysteria a fascinating and fertile topic of
discourse for feminist theorists. Key texts such as The Newly Born Woman,
The Female Malady, In Dora’s Case, and The Madwoman in the Attic
further inflected the 1970s–1990s debates of feminist film theory, which
drew extensively on semiotic concepts of sexuality and language to critique
cinema’s visual positioning of gender subjectivity.54 At stake is whether the
hysteric’s theater of bodily protest makes its mark on symbolic inscription,
or if its eruption of impossible meaning falls by the wayside of patriarchal
power—an indecision about the potency of subversion that mapped all too
neatly onto feminist film theory’s ambivalence about female protagonists in
“women’s films,” such as medical thrillers or maternal melodramas. Like
coquettes of comedy, hysterics of women’s films rarely laugh last. At best,
such hysterical pathos gives way to ecstatic jouissance—yet unlike laughter,
which erupts in reference to some delightful slip or surprising reversal of
meaning, female jouissance is necessarily unmoored from symbolic
language.
In contrast to feminist film theory’s Freudian underpinnings, feminist
comedy scholars understand “hysteria” in its colloquial sense, as the
ordinary pleasure of joyful hilarity. Since the late nineteenth century,
“hysterical laughter” has widely signified that happy burst of amusement
rather than pathologized malaise (though laughter was itself an overlooked
symptom of clinical hysteria). In their recent collection, Hysterical! Women
in American Comedy, Linda Mizejewski and Victoria Sturtevant open by
noting the double meaning of their title, which refers to both uproarious
comedy and outdated diagnosable illness. However, they quickly (and
aptly) mock the latter connotation, discarding it as a nefarious ailment “that
doctors attributed to a blocked or malfunctioning uterus.”55 I do not mean
to imply that feminist comedy scholars are incorrect to debunk the sexist
fallacies of how hysteria has been medicalized to gaslight and subordinate
women. Rather, I underscore this point to emphasize the essential cross-
purposes of these two fields, feminist film theory and feminist comedy
studies, which have long held diametric interests in the signifier “hysteria”
both connotatively and methodologically.
Like Laughing Anne, these seemingly amused protagonists of genre-
hybrid filmmaking do not laugh for themselves but as narrative vehicles for
the textual hysteria of a film’s surplus signification. As Veronica Fitzpatrick
puts it, “hysteria may be evident not only in film content, but in a film’s
capacity to deploy form hysterically, in excess of narrative meaning.”56
Fitzpatrick focuses on the choreography between visual experimentation
and audible motifs of humming/gasping female laughter in Mélanie
Laurent’s Breathe (2014), a film about female friendship and coming-of-age
respiration (i.e., breathing on the brink of sexuality). Similarly, in Carnal
Knowledge (Mike Nichols, 1971), a tongue-in-cheek drama about
masculinity and sex, Susan (Candice Bergen) laughs continuously for one
hundred seconds, as Kyle Stevens remarks, “not only the longest shot of the
film, but the most important. The effect of watching Susan’s face transform
from delighted giggles to outlandish, weird contortions hovers over the rest
of the movie.”57 Across an extremely broad range of film examples, the
emblematic excess of female laughter that borders on hysteria makes good
on its semiotic surplus, converting ambiguous female affect into ecstatic
narrative capital.
The vivid power of this trope, and its importance for cinema, is borne out
by the depth and scope of its most striking examples, which range from
New Hollywood auteurism to Chinese social realism. In The Goddess
(Yonggang Wu, 1934), a fallen woman (Rian Lingyu) is forced into
prostitution against her own will and aspirational drive. In a pivotal scene, a
gang of criminals invade her home and demand her total submission and
subservience, as both domestic slave and exploited streetwalker. Her
reaction is startling: half lit and half in shadow, she throws back her head,
bares her teeth, and convulses her body in an agonizing outburst of
hysterical laughter that gives corporeal form to the film’s visual plotting of
her social damnation. As Jason McGrath describes this scene, “Like
Griffith’s muse Lillian Gish, of whom Balázs celebrated the ‘crazy rapidity’
with which emotions played across her face, Ruan seemed to have the
uncanny ability to communicate contradictory emotions almost
simultaneously.”58 A portent of tragic fate and expression of dramatic irony,
her laugh converts grim desperation into affective contagion, as the men
mistake her emotions for joyful submission and then laugh in chorus.
Shaped by her own impossible subjectivity, her pregnant laugh provides a
hinge between the hollowing out of her character and its plenitude of
unspoken implications for the narrative.
Even initially joyful and unburdened laughs give way to tragic pathos, as
the libidinal script of the plot collapses in on the promise of agency for the
female character. In Mamma Roma (Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1962), a reformed
prostitute is given a new lease on life as a vegetable monger attempting to
raise her estranged teenage son. The film begins auspiciously at the scene of
a wedding, where Mamma Roma (Anna Magnani) swoops into the opening
shot with a triumvirate of pigs and raucously entertains the guests by
repeatedly insulting the bride and groom: her former pimp, Carmine
(Franco Citti), and his homely bride, Clementina (Maria Bernardini). The
wedding scene is quintessentially carnivalesque as Bakhtin describes it: a
“grotesque symposium” that has no “respect [for] hierarchical distinctions;
it freely blends the profane and the sacred, the lower and the higher.”59
Pasolini stages the banquet to resemble the Last Supper, while summarily
blaspheming its iconic quotation. “Before Mamma Roma,” notes Cesare
Casarino, “there was Mamma Circe,” or “Kirke—the treacherous witch
who transforms men into pigs, the paradigmatic and threatening figure of
feminine excess and female sexuality in Homer’s Odyssey.”60 Like Kirke,
Mamma Roma compares the bride and groom to her three swine, whom she
also describes as “whores,” addresses a small boy as a “future pimp,” and
sings of her own joy, harmonizing with the unruly peals of laughter: “And if
I told you the whole story, it would ruin this celebration.”
Figure 9.5. “You’re laughing your head off, tell us what’s so funny.” Mamma Roma (Pier Paolo
Pasolini, 1962).

Mamma Roma’s hilarity teeters on the brink of comedic and clinical

designations of hysteria. She laughs loudly, festively, and with corporeal
self-abandon. Her laughter steals the show, provoking one guest to warn her
that she’ll “choke to death” if she doesn’t “calm down,” all the while
soliciting her to reveal the source of her mirth: “you’re laughing your head
off, tell us what’s so funny.” Both inscrutable and unflappable, and like the
unholy iconography of the wedding itself, her gleeful rapture is gradually
yoked to the chains of narrative symbolism. Carmine croons in response to
her profanations of joy, “You laugh and joke and act like a whore, but your
heart is bursting with rage.” From singsong insult to narrative node,
Carmine exerts ruthless control over Mamma Roma’s body throughout the
film, as he reclaims the mantle of her pimp and is complicit in ruining her
son, Ettore (Ettore Garofolo), who dies in a Christlike pose in a prison
hospital. Though Mamma Roma’s laughter echoes throughout the film, it is
systematically harnessed to the subtext of ironic fate and Pasolini’s
obsession with heretical allegory. Her laughs are no longer of her own body
and Mamma Roma ends—where else?—with her tears.
Hysterical female laughers of cinema render their inscrutable emotion
into inadmissible knowledge. It is impossible to determine whether their
laughter ultimately comes from a place of happiness or misery, though it
often portends the latter. This ambiguity of affective motivation provides
visual and narrative capital for inciting any imaginable twist and turn in
filmic signification. After all, it is not the woman herself who is hysteric but
the whole damn apparatus.

“C -D ,S A ”F
L
As I write this chapter, the Tasmanian lesbian stand-up comedian Hannah
Gadsby’s Netflix special, Nanette (2018), has just gone viral and provoked
intense debate about the feminist politics of comedy and laughter. A filmed
stand-up performance released through a dominant streaming platform,
Nanette defies its audience to laugh in the face of Gadsby’s suffering and
humiliation. Refusing her long-standing shtick of self-deprecating humor,
Gadsby recounts in vivid detail her traumas of experiencing homophobic
oppression and sexual violence. Melena Ryzik declared Nanette to be “a
comedy-destroying, soul-affirming” work of art for its “lacerating fury” that
“doesn’t invite people to laugh at” Gadsby’s abjection.61 To be precise, it is
Gadsby’s denial of the audience’s laughter—not of her own laughter—that
has marked Nanette as a groundbreaking paradigm for feminist political
comedy in the #MeToo era.
Though not quite a film (rather, a filmed stand-up show) and polemically
opposed to the outburst of laughter, Nanette exemplifies the exuberant
potentials of transgressive comedy laced with negative critique. It thereby
demands a confrontation between the cross-purposes of feminist film theory
and feminist comedy studies. The point of Nanette is that, too often, the
license to laugh is excruciatingly at odds with the desire to feel amused.
Whether we see Gadsby as a dangerous killjoy, a queer coquette, an
unruly prankster, or a knowing hysteric, she is definitively a feminist
comedian on the brink of laughter. She provokes us—we, critical viewers of
female film laughter—to look beyond the rigid genre tropes and stifling
conventions that have long strangled, obfuscated, and pathologized our
feminist enjoyment of laughter’s acoustic mirror. When we laugh last, as
per Gadsby, it will be on our own terms: each among us and all together.

N
1. Molly Haskell, From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1974), 68.
2. Linda Mizejewski, Pretty/Funny: Women Comedians and Body Politics (Austin: University of
Texas Press, 2014); Susan Horowitz, Queens of Comedy (London: Routledge, 1997); Bambi
Higgins, Laughing Mad: The Black Comic Persona in Post-Soul America (New Brunswick,
NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2007); Rebecca Krefting, All Joking Aside: American Humor
and Its Discontents (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014); Mary Russo, The
Female Grotesque: Risk, Excess, Modernity (London: Routledge, 1994); Linda Mizejewski
and Victoria Sturtevant, eds., Hysterical! Women in American Comedy (Austin: University of
Texas Press, 2017); Cynthia Willett and Julie Willett, Uproarious: How Feminists and Other
Subversive Comics Speak Truth (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019).
3. Kathleen Rowe Karlyn, The Unruly Woman: Gender and the Genres of Laughter (Austin:
University of Texas Press, 1995);.
4. Kaja Silverman, The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 72; Didier Anzieu, The Skin-Envelope (New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989).
5. Natalie Zemon Davis, “Women on Top,” in Society and Culture in Early Modern France:
Eight Essays (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1975); Mary Douglas, Purity and
Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge, 1966); Mary
Russo, The Female Grotesque: Risk, Excess, Modernity (London: Routledge, 1994).
6. Mary Ann Doane, Femmes Fatales (London: Routledge, 1991), 41.
7. Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” in Film Theory and Criticism, ed. Leo
Braudy and Marshall Cohen (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 834.
8. For several examples, see works by Sara Ahmed, Sianne Ngai, Lauren Berlant, and Melissa
Gregg.
9. Gelotophobia refers to the terror of being laughed at.
10. Karlyn, Unruly Woman, 3.
11. Mizejewski and Sturtevant, Hysterical!; Delia Chiaro and Raffaella Baccolini, eds., Gender
and Humor: Interdisciplinary and International Perspectives (London: Routledge, 2014);
Sabrina Fuchs Abrams, Transgressive Humor of American Women Writers (New York:
Springer International, 2018). Jenny Sundén and Susanna Paasonen, Who’s Laughing Now?:
Feminist Tactics in Social Media (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2020).
12. For relevant examples that extend the geopolitical gamut, see Myra Mendible, ed., From
Bananas to Buttocks: The Latina Body in Popular Film and Culture (Austin: University of
Texas Press, 2007); Srimati Mukherjee, Women and Resistance in Contemporary Bengali
Cinema (London: Routledge, 2016); Sonora Jha and Alka Kurian, eds., New Feminisms in
 South Asia: Disrupting the Discourse Through Social Media, Film, and Literature (London:
Routledge, 2017).
13. It is unlikely that Cixous had read Kracauer’s writings on Medusa at the time, but she was
certainly familiar with Freud’s. See Sigmund Freud, Medusa’s Head, trans. James Strachey
(dated 1922 and published posthumously in 1940), in The Medusa Reader, ed. Marjorie Garber
and Nancy J. Vickers (London: Routledge, 2003). Siegfried Kracauer, “The Head of the
Medusa,” in Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1997), 305–06. First published 1960.
14. Hélène Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa,” Signs 1, no. 4 (1976): 878.
15. I use the terms “woman” and “female” partly in their historical contexts, stemming from
formative debates in feminist theory and media studies that were unaware of or inadequately
attuned to the emergence of trans feminism. However, any female-identified or feminist-
aligned instance of laughter is definitively relevant to my concerns in this chapter. I hope that
trans feminist scholars will find this work useful toward thinking through the place of trans
laughter in feminist theory and in the history of film and media representation.
16. Since the “historical turn” in film and media studies (initiated by the 1978 International
Federation of Film Archives (FIAF) Conference in Brighton), critical theories of film
subjectivity and psychosexual difference have been gradually displaced by concerns with
archival research and historical contextualization.
17. See Tom Gunning, “The Cinema of Attraction: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde,”
Wide Angle 8, no. 3–4 (1986): 63–70.
18. For more on these and many other early slapstick comedienne films, see Maggie Hennefeld,
Specters of Slapstick and Silent Film Comediennes (New York: Columbia University Press,
2018).
19. Key works of feminist historiography on silent film comedy include Miriam Hansen, Babel
and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1994); Lauren Rabinovitz, Electric Dreamland: Amusement Parks, Movies, and
American Modernity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012); Jacqueline Najuma
Stewart, Migrating to the Movies: Cinema and Black Urban Modernity (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 2005); Kristen Anderson Wagner, Comic Venus: Women and Comedy in
American Silent Film (Detroit, MI: Wayne State Press, 2018).
20. This debate has come to a head around Hannah Gadsby’s provocative stand-up show and
Netflix comedy special, Nanette, in which she refuses to capitalize on her own pain in order to
provoke easy punch lines for the audience. See Rebecca Krefting, “Hannah Gadsby Stands
Down: Feminist Comedy Studies,” Journal of Cinema and Media Studies 58, no. 3 (Spring
2019): 165–70.
21. A brief note about my methodology—I discovered many of these examples of female laughter
thanks to friends’ thoughtful responses to my posts on Facebook and Twitter and to a group
Gmail thread. I would particularly like to acknowledge invaluable input from Nicholas Baer,
Annie Berke, Eugenie Brinkema, Vanessa Cambier, Cesare Casarino, Ellen Cheshire, Mary
Desjardins, Veronica Fitzpatrick, Mark Fuller, Katherine Fusco, Alla Gadassik, Hunter
Hargraves, Pamela Hutchinson, Lisa Jacobson, Sebastian Köthe, Alison Kozberg, Murray
Leeder, Michelle Lekas, Jason McGrath, Kristi McKim, Melanie Selfe, Jasper Sharp, Michael
Siegel, Seth Soulstein, Aurore Spiers, Kyle Stevens, Jocelyn Szczepaniak-Gillece, Justin
Vaccaro, Mike Zryd, and many others.
22. “Nasty woman” has become a feminist rallying cry and viral hashtag, giving rise to the iconic
pink pussy hats. It represents the joyful, collective appropriation of a slur originally muttered
by Donald Trump at Hillary Clinton during a 2016 Presidential Debate.
23. Margaret Atwood, “Writing the Male Character,” Hagey Lecture, University of Waterloo,
February 9, 1982.
24. As Pamela Wojcik puts it in her video essay about Bette Davis, “L is for Laughter.” See: The
ABCs of Bette Davis, https://vimeo.com/283967534.
25. Sara Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness (Durham, NC: Duke University Press), 19–20.
26. Judith Mayne, Directed by Dorothy Arzner (Bloomington: Indiana University Press), 145.
27. Ibid., 145.
28. bell hooks, Killing Rage: Ending Racism (New York: Henry Holt, 1995), 15–16.
29. Melissa Harris-Perry, Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in America (New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013), 88–89.
30. Quoted in ibid., 89; from Marcyliena Morgan and Dionne Bennett, “Hip-Hop & the Global
Imprint of a Black Cultural Form,” Daedalus 140, no. 2 (Spring 2011): 176–96.
31. Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Berkeley, CA: Crossing Press, 2007), 131.
First published 1984.
32. Ibid., 133.
33. Peele’s depiction of the “Sunken Place” resonates uncannily (and was no doubt influenced) by
Frantz Fanon’s writings on blackness and negation. See Frantz Fanon, “Black Skin White
Mask, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press, 2008),.
34. Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study with A New Preface
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018).
35. Sigmund Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, trans. James Strachey (New
York: Norton, 1960), 120–21.
36. Maurice Zolotow, Billy Wilder in Hollywood (New York: Limelight Editions, 2004), 327.
37. 34. David Wallace, Hollywoodland (Los Angeles, CA: LA Weekly Books, 2002), 181.
38. See Hilary Radner: Neo-Feminist Cinema: Girly Films, Chick Flicks, and Consumer Culture
(London: Routledge, 2010); Mari Ruti, Feminist Film Theory and Pretty Woman (London:
Bloomsbury, 2016); Angela McRobbie, “Post-Feminism and Popular Culture: Bridget Jones
and the New Gender Regime,” in The Aftermath of Feminism: Gender, Culture, and Social
Change (London: SAGE, 2009), 11–23.
39. Sergei Eisenstein, “A Few Thoughts about Soviet Comedy,” in Notes of a Film Director,
Original trans. X. Danko (New York: Dover, 1970) First published in USSR 1937.
40. Leon’s joke: “Maybe the trouble isn’t with the joke, maybe it’s with you. I’ll give you one
more chance. When I first heard this joke, I laughed myself sick! Here goes. A man comes into
a restaurant. He sits down at the table and he says, ‘Waiter, bring me a cup of coffee without
cream.’ Five minutes later, the waiter comes back and says, ‘I’m sorry, sir, we have no cream.
Can it be without milk?’ ”
41. Tania Modleski, The Women Who Knew Too Much: Hitchcock and Feminist Theory (London:
Routledge, 2005), 27.
42. Doane, Femmes Fatales, 41.
43. Ibid.
44. There were approximately twenty-four episodes of the Betty/Léontine series (produced in
France and exhibited internationally) between 1910 and 1912. For more information, see
Hennefeld, Specters of Slapstick, 268–70.
45. M. Alison Kibler, Rank Ladies: Gender and Cultural Hierarchy in American Vaudeville
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), and see Silverman, Acoustic Mirror;
Anzieu, Skin-Envelope.
46. Francis Rabelais, “How Gargantua Was Sent to Paris, and of the Huge Great Mare That He
Rode On: How She Destroyed the Oxflies of the Beauce,” Gargantua and Pantagruel Book 1
 Ch. 1.XVI (Derby, UK: Moray Press, 1894).
47. Linda Williams, “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess,” Film Quarterly 44, no. 4 (1991):
4.
48. Kyla Wazana Tompkins, Racial Indigestion: Eating Bodies in the 19th Century (New York:
New York University Press, 2012), 115.
49. bell hooks, “Eating the Other: Desire and Resistance,” in Black Looks: Race and
Representation (Brooklyn, NY: South End Press, 1992).
50. Sianne Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2015), 7.
51. Julia Kristeva, “Word, Dialogue, Novel,” The Kristeva Reader, ed. Toril Moi (Hoboken, NJ:
Wiley Blackwell, 1991), 48–49.
52. Doane, Femmes Fatales, 46.
53. Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure,” 58.
54. Hélène Cixous and Catherine Clemont, The Newly Born Woman, trans., Betty Wing
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986); Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady:
Women, Madness, and English Culture, 1830–1980 (London: Virago Press, 1987); Charles
Bernheimer and Claire Kahane, eds., In Dora’s Case: Freud-Hysteria-Feminism (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1990); and Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in
the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven,
CT: Yale University Press, 2000).
55. Mizejewski and Sturtevant, Hysterical!, 1.
56. Veronica Fitzpatrick, “Unbearable Lightness: Melanie Laurent’s Breathe,” Cléo: A Journal of
Film and Feminism 4, no. 2 (Summer 2016), http://cleojournal.com/2016/08/18/unbearable-
lightness-melanie-laurents-breathe/.
57. Kyle Stevens, Mike Nichols: Sex, Language, and the Reinvention of Psychological Realism
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 123.
58. Jason McGrath, “Acting Real: Cinema, Stage, and the Modernity of Performance in Chinese
Silent Film,” in The Oxford Handbook of Chinese Cinema, ed. Carlos Rojas (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2013), 408.
59. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Helene Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1984), 285.
60. “Nation, Pigs, and Cha-cha-cha in Pasolini’s Mamma Roma.” Die Revolution findet trotzdem
statt: Das Kino von Pier Paolo Pasolini (lecture series), Deutsches Filmmuseum in
collaboration with Goethe Universität, Frankfurt am Main, Germany, July 9, 2015.
61. Melena Ryzik, “The Comedy-Destroying, Soul-Affirming Art of Hannah Gadsby,” The New
York Times, July 24, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/24/arts/hannah-gadsby-comedy-
nanette.html.
 CHAPTER 10

THEORY FOR THE MASSES;

OR, TOWARD A VERNACULAR
CRITICISM

NOAH ISENBERG

“If classical Hollywood cinema succeeded as an international modernist idiom on a mass basis, it
did so not because of its presumably universal narrative form but because it meant different things
to different people and publics, both at home and abroad. We must not forget that these films,
along with other mass-cultural exports, were consumed in locally quite specific, and unequally
developed, contexts and conditions of reception, that they not only had a levelling impact on
indigenous cultures but also challenged prevailing social and sexual arrangements and advanced
new possibilities of social identity and cultural styles; and that the films were also changed in that
process.”

—Miriam Hansen1
A little over two decades ago, in an essay published in the journal
Modernism/Modernity, film scholar Miriam Hansen introduced the notion
of the “vernacular” as a means of thinking about, and indeed writing about,
classical Hollywood cinema from the 1920s through the 1950s. At that
point in time, Hansen, whose early work on spectatorship in American
silent film had made an enduring mark on the field, opted for “the
vernacular” over “the ideologically overdetermined term ‘popular’ ”
because, as she put it, “the term vernacular combines the dimension of the
quotidian, of everyday usage, with connotations of discourse, idiom, and
dialect, with circulation, promiscuity, translatability.”2 Even if her own
writing style may suggest to some readers—certainly to those outside the
academy—a more scholarly rhetorical tradition, the multivalent gloss that
she offers in her influential essay helps not only to describe the celebrated
Hollywood movies of that era but also to capture the spirit of much of the
film criticism written in America and abroad during the same period.
 In her panoramic, international approach to the topic, Hansen moves
swiftly across the conceptual terrain, citing such critical catchwords as
Victor Shklovsky’s notion of “cinematic pulp fiction,” Jean Renoir’s
“cinematic classicism,” and André Bazin’s “genius of the system,” before
arriving at the less affirmative, and decidedly more opaque, post-1968 film
theory that emerged in the pages of such journals as Cinéthique, Screen, and
Camera Obscura.3 But what interests me more than the debate concerning
classical Hollywood cinema—whether one happens to side with Hansen or
with David Bordwell and company, or to fall somewhere in between—is the
kind of writing, perhaps a brand of film theory avant la lettre, that was
indeed vernacular in nature and, much like the Hollywood pictures these
critics tended to favor, aimed at a mass audience.4 Admittedly, this audience
was in the main more literate than the crowds that filled movie houses in
the first decades of the twentieth century—after all, these were devoted
readers of The Nation, The New Republic, and other little literary
magazines, not to mention the numerous daily tabloids and broadsheets—
though often without any high-brow pretentions or specialized language
employed by the intellectual elite.
We can thus trace this line, rather productively, through the American
cultural scene at mid-century and even up to the present, looking at the
work of representative film and cultural critics writing on movies for a wide
and diverse audience. But before we get there, and before we wade through
some of the most exemplary writings of critics of that era, it’s important to
examine in a more sustained fashion how this tradition first took root in
Hansen’s native Germany, where in the late 1920s critics like Lotte Eisner
and Siegfried Kracauer fixed their gaze on the movies and, in their wide-
ranging work, offered up a potent blend of intellectual heft and journalistic
breeziness. What I have chosen to term “theory for the masses” is indeed a
reflection of the writing—or, as we might say in today’s digital world, the
content—of these two pioneering critics, both of whom got their start
during the second half of the Weimar Republic.
Born in Imperial Berlin, in 1896, Eisner started off as a student of art
history in the age of expressionism and quickly rose to become one of the
first prominent female film critics on the international scene. She served as
a full-time writer at Film-Kurier, Weimar Berlin’s daily trade paper, and
later, after migration to France in flight from Hitler, contributed to such
influential English-language publications as Film Culture and Sight and
Sound. Similarly, Kracauer, born in Frankfurt in 1889, and trained in
architecture and sociology, got his start as an editor and critic at Weimar
Germany’s leading liberal broadsheet, the Frankfurter Zeitung, where he
contributed a steady stream of film pieces in the late 1920s and early
1930s.5 After his migration to America in 1941, he continued to work as a
freelance film and cultural critic for the Anglo-American press.6 Both
Eisner and Kracauer went on to write highly acclaimed books on German
cinema between the wars—The Haunted Screen (originally published in
France as L’écran démoniaque in 1952 and in English translation nearly
two decades later) in the case of Eisner and From Caligari to Hitler
(published in the United States in 1947) in the case of Kracauer—as well as
other important works on the history and theory of cinema.7
Although comparatively less well known today, Eisner was enormously
prolific and among the most renowned critics of her day. She had begun
writing in the mid-1920s, mainly book criticism for Die literarische Welt
and interviews for the Berliner Tageblatt—among her favorite interview
subjects, she remarked in a 1979 documentary Die langen Ferien der Lotte
H. Eisner (The Long Vacation of Lotte H. Eisner), by Iranian filmmaker
Sohrab Shahid-Saless, were the juggler Enrico Rastelli and Grock the clown
(also profiled in Berlin’s popular press, in 1927, by another young journalist
named “Billie” Wilder)—and soon after, at the encouragement of Film-
Kurier editor Hans Feld, found her way to the cinema.8 As a young girl, she
especially prized the original Rin-Tin-Tin movies, which she watched
together with her father, and developed an early obsession with Charlie
Chaplin, who had taken movie-going audiences of Weimar Germany by
storm.9 What she brought to Film-Kurier, and to her later work as a film
historian, was an acute sense of formal detail, learned perhaps in her art
history studies, and to the wider aesthetic tradition of theater (from Bertolt
Brecht, with whom she formed an early friendship, and from the highly
influential impresario Max Reinhardt, to whose legacy she dedicated her
book on Weimar cinema), and the visual arts more broadly conceived.
In recent years, her early film criticism has begun, somewhat belatedly, to
reach an Anglo-American readership, with several selections of her
Weimar-era journalism included, in English translation, in the 2016
anthology The Promise of Cinema.10 These few articles provide a
preliminary sense of her style and range as a critic. In one illustrative piece,
“A New India Film: A Throw of Dice,” taken from an August 1929 issue of
Film-Kurier, Eisner zeroes in on a contemporary film trend, the turn toward
India and South Asia, sparked by the success of Joe May’s Das indische
Grabmal (The Indian Tomb, 1921). Her focus ostensibly lies on the release
of Franz Osten’s Schicksalswürfel (A Throw of Dice, 1929), but her musings
on the film open up far larger questions concerning Orientalist fantasies and
cultural appropriation in silent cinema, drawing a critical distinction
between Osten’s film, which boasts a cast of South Asian actors including
his Indian collaborator Himansu Rai, and other, less noble European
productions of the period. In her words, Osten and his colleagues “did not
falsify the Indian atmosphere or force the Indian actors to adopt Western
methods,” adding further that they somehow managed to avoid
“mawkishness and false Oriental pomp.”11 In her lapidary prose style,
moving freely from formal to cultural analysis, Eisner speaks to her readers
at Film-Kurier, a mix of film professionals and movie fans, drawing
attention to the overall achievement attributed to the filmmakers, the
individual actors, and the initial reception by the audience (which
“responded to the film with appreciative cheers”).12
Another piece from Film-Kurier, also reprinted in The Promise of
Cinema and originally published in 1928, appears in the form of an
interview—harkening back to Eisner’s initial work as a journalist—with
dance theorist Rudolf von Laban on the intimate ties, and future potential,
of cinema and dance. Laban anticipates an even more dynamic relationship
between the two media with the advent of sound, something that was
otherwise largely feared by theorists and filmmakers during the late-silent
era and that at this point in time had not yet been adopted in Germany.13
Although the musical as a genre was still in its infancy (The Jazz Singer had
debuted just one year earlier), Laban envisions an allegiance that had not
yet realized its full power. “Generally speaking,” he tells Eisner, “film and
dance must become even more intertwined. Today, film directors do not see
clearly enough how far the mutual influence of endeavors in cinema and
dance can lead us.”14
 As part of an attempt to gauge the interest in cinema among German
youths, the Film-Kurier had Eisner survey young members of the Weimar
Left in 1928. “They want to talk,” she writes in a piece called “The New
Youth and Film,” in which she notes the extended influence of Marx in the
early twentieth century. “But they quickly remember their party’s
watchwords. They become suspicious. They believe that as long as
censorship and capitalism prevail, they have nothing to expect from film,
nothing to say in its favor.”15 For them, she goes on to observe, “film is just
a propaganda tool,” a vehicle that is inherently ideological. She quotes from
one of her interviewees, who appears to give a nod of approval to the
contemporary aesthetic trend in Weimar cinema, the so-called Neue
Sachlichtkeit (New Objectivity)—the best-known example of which is
perhaps Walter Ruttmann’s Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Großstadt (Berlin:
Symphony of a Great City, 1927)—with its penchant for realism, for
newsreel montage, and for the quotidian: “We must do away with film’s
false ‘happy ending,’ and show life as it really is.” To be sure, that
vernacular style of filmmaking, with its emphasis on naturalism over
artifice and on low-budget independent production over the big-studio
confections of UFA, Weimar Germany’s dominant film studio, came to full
articulation roughly a year later in Menschen am Sonntag (People on
Sunday, 1930), made on a shoestring budget, co-directed by Robert
Siodmak and Edgar G. Ulmer, and scripted by Wilder. Eisner would go on
to review that film for the Film-Kurier in March 1930 and would hail its
depiction of everyday life, alluding to the Soviet precursors that she held in
equally high esteem.16 Because of her prominence as a critic at Film-
Kurier, she was soon targeted by the Nazi Völkischer Beobachter as a
“Jewish Bolshevik journalist” and threatened with murder.
Upon her flight from Hitler, leaving on a night train for Paris in the
spring of 1933, Eisner was taken in by her sister and French brother-in-law.
When she arrived at the station on April 1, 1933, her brother-in-law
apparently mistook her unplanned journey as an April Fool’s joke,
suggesting she’d perhaps come to Paris for a vacation, to which she tartly
replied, “It’s going to be a very long vacation.”17 After the Nazi occupation,
in summer 1940, Eisner was rounded up and sent to the Gurs internment
camp, the same camp at which Hannah Arendt would later be interned. She
managed to procure a forged ID from the British Secret Service in Marseille
and to survive the Vichy years under an assumed name. As Eisner recounts
in Mark Horowitz’s short documentary Lotte Eisner in Germany (1980), she
took with her into hiding precious film prints of Eisenstein’s Battleship
Potemkin and Chaplin’s The Great Dictator. Her collector’s impulse
continued to serve her well into the postwar years when, together with
Henri Langlois, she worked as a chief archivist and curator helping to
amass a voluminous film collection for the nascent Cinémathèque Française
in Paris while also completing her three major book projects: on German
cinema between the wars and critical biographies of filmmakers F. W.
Murnau and Fritz Lang.
“I think critics should somehow help the people,” observed Eisner in
conversation with filmmaker Shahid-Saless in the 1970s. “For me it was
always important to discover new talents. This made me happy.” She claims
to have written only two harsh reviews over the course of her extended
career: one on Gustav Gründgens’s performance as Mephistopheles in Peter
Gorski’s Faust (1960)—Gründgens had remained in Germany under Hitler,
capitalizing on the lucrative opportunities afforded to him and in turn
making him persona non grata to Eisner—and the other a critique of Josef
von Sternberg’s Anatahan (1952), a film set in Japan, which she found
insufferable. “I much rather made discoveries, such as Peter Lorre, whom I
saw on stage and wrote that he will become a great actor one day … What
matters is recognizing creativity; you must have respect for creativity.” Late
in life, Eisner became something of a spiritual guide for the New German
Cinema, championing the work of directors like Wim Wenders and Werner
Herzog, the latter of whom credits her with an obstinate belief in his ability
—or, in Herzog’s telling, his destiny—to become a filmmaker. She would
provide voiceover narration for Fata Morgana (1971) and visit the young
director on the set of Jeder für sich und Gott gegen alle (The Enigma of
Kaspar Hauser, 1974), a film that Herzog dedicated to her. In 1974, Herzog
famously walked on foot from Munich to Paris, as a form of maniacal
pilgrimage, to pay his respects to Eisner and, as he rather audaciously
claimed, to stave off her death (she died in Paris in 1983).18
The case of Kracauer is somewhat distinct from that of Eisner but also
bears notable affinities. Over the span of a decade, from roughly 1941 to
1951—or from the moment that he first managed to relocate himself from
Vichy France to New York City to the time that his writing became more
exclusively focused on his Theory of Film—Kracauer contributed more
than a dozen freelance essays and reviews to the American popular press.
He wrote literary and film criticism for such magazines as The Nation, The
New Republic, Commentary, and Harper’s; he contributed pieces to the
New York Times, the Saturday Review of Literature, and the Kenyon Review;
and he published a few longer, more scholarly articles for Social Research,
the flagship journal of the New School for Social Research (then still
appropriately known as the University in Exile) and for Public Opinion
Quarterly. The first half of Kracauer’s extended stint as an American
freelancer overlapped with the writing of his famous study of Weimar
cinema, From Caligari to Hitler, his best-known work, but the diversity of
assignments was such that Kracauer did not always have the leeway or the
authority to treat subjects of his own choosing. The predicament of the
freelancer, fending off heavy-handed editorial guidance while staying in
good standing with assigning editors and trying to eke out a living in a
competitive marketplace, prompted the exiled Kracauer to take on a variety
of assignments that came his way.
During his first years in America, while operating from his perch on New
York’s Upper West Side, Kracauer frequently directed his gaze onto
Hollywood. Two pieces in particular, both from May 1942, stand out in this
vein: in the pages of Social Research, he filed a short review of Leo
Rosten’s Hollywood, The Movie Colony—The Movie Makers, a generally
positive evaluation of Rosten’s effort to debunk the “Hollywood Legend,”19
and in the industry trade publication, National Board of Review Magazine,
he quickly adopted the collective pronoun in “Why France Liked Our
Films,” his survey of A-list Hollywood pictures (directed by Raoul Walsh,
Frank Capra, Howard Hawks, William Wyler, and others) that were warmly
received by pre-Vichy French intellectuals on the other side of the
Atlantic.20 For different reasons, which I will enumerate below, both pieces
warrant deeper consideration, especially with respect to the idea of the
vernacular, as reflected in the work of Eisner as well.
In his review of Rosten’s book, Kracauer lavishes upon The New Yorker
short story writer and future Hollywood screenwriter—whose credits
include a string of anti-Nazi films, early crime thrillers by Douglas Sirk,
and other wartime noirs—the kind of praise he may well have hoped for
himself and for his later work as a film historian. “[H]e combines the
faculty of immediate observation with a far-reaching sociological
background,” Kracauer remarks, “a vivid concern for each specimen of this
peculiar human fauna with an ability, if necessary, to keep a distance, the
talents of a writer with the capacity of a scholar—gifts that are seldom
found together.”21 As a veteran of the cultural pages, the acclaimed
feuilleton section of the Frankfurter Zeitung, Kracauer knew to rate such
gifts, those same talents as a writer and the reach of a scholar. “[Rosten’s]
point of view is near enough to let him discriminate and characterize the
multifold traits of the movie world,” he asserts, “and at the same time is
sufficiently remote to free him from the fetters of intimacy and permit him
to look at Hollywood as a whole.”22 Without the full frontal assault of Budd
Schulberg’s infamous novelization of the movie industry in What Makes
Sammy Run? (published the same year as Rosten’s book), Rosten sees
Hollywood as the “quintessence of nouveau riche,” the kind of place where
eager ladder-climbers like Schulberg’s unsavory protagonist Sammy Glick
might thrive.23 In Kracauer’s estimation, the end result of Rosten’s book is
“a reliable topography of Hollywood’s psychic structure,” a formulation
that, were the variable of “Hollywood” to be replaced with “Weimar
Germany,” would signal what Kracauer was himself seeking to offer in
From Caligari to Hitler, which would later be fittingly tagged in his
Harper’s author ID as “a study of the German mind as expressed in German
films between the wars.”24 Finally, he observes, “[Rosten] explains the
optimism that movie-makers exhibit as their cloak for a deep-rooted
anxiety, for the subconscious conviction that luck cannot last and that
catastrophe may come at any moment,” a remark that almost seems to have
slipped out of his Caligari file.25
Although Kracauer may have thought of himself differently in America,
neither the methods of his analysis nor the style of his writing changed as
dramatically as did his sense of national identity. As he wrote in 1932
concerning the task of the film critic, “His mission is to unveil the social
images and ideologies hidden in mainstream films and through this
unveiling to undermine the influence of the films themselves wherever
necessary.”26 While Eisner tended to zero in on aesthetics and film form,
Kracauer favored the politics of cinema and their sociological implications.
A major focus of Kracauer’s early writings in America, beyond the field of
Hollywood film productions, was the German newsreel and propaganda
films (perhaps most famously, in 1942 he published his Rockefeller
Foundation-sponsored report, “Propaganda and the Nazi War Film,” with
the Museum of Modern Art and, soon after, contributed a related article to
Social Research).27Aimed at a larger audience, in 1944, Kracauer published
“The Hitler Image” in The New Republic, a brief essay in which he
dissected the rhapsodic, highly choreographed depictions of Hitler in Nazi
newsreel footage. He examined how these films endeavor to “assign the
traits of a savior to Hitler” (how, in certain instances, as if following each
cue in Goebbels’s script for him, Hitler himself “behaves exactly like a
popular movie star”) and, in turn, he uncovers the various masks worn by
Hitler: “savior as genius,” “lord of hosts,” man of the people, guarantor of
“victory of German arms” and healer-in-chief.28 Kracauer offers close
formal analysis, intricately laid out, combined with a touch of American
journalistic panache. “He enters a room full of severely wounded soldiers,”
observes Kracauer of Hitler, “and as he strides from bed to bed, his raised
arm seems to exorcise all infirmities, while cripples and invalids look at
him with an excitement that implies their faith in his thaumaturgical
faculties.” Then shifting attention from the visual to the audio track, he
tacks on: “ ‘They live to see the proudest day of their lives,’ the
commentary modestly adds.”29
Today Kracauer’s reputation may rest largely on his writings on cinema,
both pre- and post-Hitler, but his most widely read essay from his first years
in America is called “Hollywood’s Terror Films,” published in Commentary
magazine in August 1946.30 In it, Kracauer offers a kind of crypto-noir
meditation with “terror films” as a place holder for film noir (on Alfred
Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt, Robert Siodmak’s Spiral Staircase, and
Billy Wilder’s Lost Weekend, among others). “Kracauer describes all of the
principal textual, thematic, and narrative traits identified with the film noir
cycle,” remarks Ed Dimendberg in his analysis of the essay, “shadowy
mise-en-scène, postwar anxiety, and narratives of crime, sadism, and
transgressive sexuality.”31 In addition, the piece shares, in terms of
approach, remarkable affinities with Kracauer’s other work, in particular,
From Caligari to Hitler. Kracauer contends among other things that the
“tide in Hollywood has turned toward sick souls and fancy psychiatrists”
(Kracauer would go on to write a separate piece for Commentary on
Hollywood’s boom in psychological films).32 In a characteristic formulation
from the “Hollywood’s Terror Films” piece, Kracauer insists that “movies
not only cater to popular demands; they also reflect popular tendencies and
inclinations.”33 Indeed, this thorny issue lay at the heart of his study of
German film between the wars—where Kracauer famously argued, “It was
all as it had been on the screen. The dark premonitions of a final doom were
also fulfilled.”34
Kracauer’s work for hire in the mid-1940s for Commentary and other
magazines was not something he would have necessarily chosen for himself
had there been other options—his first-ever piece for the American press
was a freelance review of Dumbo (1941) for The Nation.35 As he wrote to
his friend the cinematographer Eugen Schüfftan, whom he met aboard the
S.S. Nyassa on his trans-Atlantic passage, asking about prospects in
Southern California, “What I don’t want at any price is to live again as a
freelance writer, as I already got my fill of that in Paris. Please make a little
P.R. for me in Hollywood.”36 In a similar vein, in the correspondence
addressing the publication of his article on “Hollywood’s Terror Films,” we
are able to glean additional insight into some of the challenges faced by a
transplanted critic. As Kracuaer writes in a letter to his editor at
Commentary, Clement Greenberg, “I left you yesterday with a heavy heart.
I had to rush over your version and could not grasp it and discuss it with
you as fully as I would have liked to. I wish you would give me a chance to
go over your rewritten article more thoroughly.”37 According to Kracauer,
Greenberg, who was twenty years his junior and had already established
himself in the vanguard of American modernist criticism and theory, had
deployed very little tact or judgment when editing his manuscript. “Why
not send me a copy to my vacation address?” he asks in the same letter.
“You would really put me at ease … Being a writer yourself, you will
doubtless understand my feelings.” Then, however, realizing that his wishes
might come across as an unwelcome intrusion, he adds, almost sheepishly,
“Of course, on the other hand, I do not wish to make things difficult for
you. Therefore, if you cannot send me the copy for some reason, we will
simply have to live with it as it is. (What about galley proofs, in this
case?)”38
Two days later, Kracauer wrote to his friend Barbara Deming, whose
Partisan Review essay, “The Artlessness of Walt Disney,” he cites in his
piece. “I had a nasty experience,” he confides in her, “the editor of
Commentary has completely rewritten my article on sadism: it has become
flat, explicit and vulgar in style. I was tempted to withdraw the piece, but
the thought of having to try again to sell it frightened me so much that I
agreed after having made a few hasty changes.”39 When reading the two
versions of the text, the typescript and the printed article, back to back, the
changes to which Kracauer alludes may seem rather small today: a matter
of style (“vulgar” in Kracauer’s eyes), a massaging of the text here and
there by a native-speaker and writer of English known for his own refined
sense of style. The only major substantive change is the reworking of his
conclusion and the addition of a paragraph on French existentialism. Yet, as
his letter to Deming attests, Kracauer was loath to retract the essay, given
the difficulty of peddling it elsewhere and perhaps given the import of
appearing in a relatively high-profile venue like Commentary.40
Kracauer’s sociopsychological model of film analysis was eventually
shared by others, including Deming, who tended to take it a bit more in the
direction of national archetypes in American cinema. For example, in the
extensive research she conducted at the Library of Congress during the
wartime years, later published as Running Away from Myself, she looked at
Humphrey Bogart’s portrayal of Rick Blaine in Casablanca as the
consummate “reluctant war hero” and one of many 1940s protagonists who
represent a “deep crisis of faith,” something reflected in American culture
offscreen as well. “At the film’s beginning,” she observes, “the hint is
dropped that the hero may be speaking words he does not mean. He is
presented as a cipher, a man with a mask, and the film poses the question: if
it should come to a trial, might he not possess a fighting faith more real than
all the rest?”41
Similarly, writing in the pages of Partisan Review, Robert Warshow
famously examined the archetypal figures of the gangster as a “tragic hero”
and his counterpart the “Westerner” as kindred spirits in terms of loneliness
and propensity toward melancholia. “The two most successful creations of
American movies,” Warshow argued, “are the gangster and the Westerner:
men with guns. Guns as physical objects, and the postures associated with
their use, form the visual and emotional center of both types of films. I
suppose this reflects the importance of guns in the fantasy life of
Americans; but that is a less illuminating point than it appears to be.”42 For
Warshow, these two figures, as he conceives them, help to understand a
broad swath of Hollywood films of the period. However, the larger point in
glossing the work of critics like Deming and Warshow is to emphasize not
only their vernacular style but the force of their ideas. Sure, they advance a
theoretical argument, but they do so in a way that an educated reader,
regardless of background or specialized training, can grasp.
“They created their distinctive idioms,” writes David Bordwell of the
four other mid-century American critics—Otis Ferguson, James Agee,
Parker Tyler, and Manny Farber—whose careers he chronicles in The
Rhapsodes, “out of the turbulent, knockabout language of a country that
came up with snafu and hokum and hen fruit and the Ameche (for the
telephone, because Don Ameche invented it, as Barbara Stanwyck’s
character Sugarpuss O’Shea explains in Ball of Fire, 1941).”43 Operating
on a short deadline, Ferguson presented his ideas on film on a weekly basis
in The New Republic, while Agee covered them at a similar pace for The
Nation—and would later hone his craft as screenwriter, furnishing scripts
for The African Queen (1951) and The Night of the Hunter (1955), among
others. Their work has been anthologized widely and, even if less
fashionable today, continues to reach students of film and media. Tyler and
Farber were both a bit more idiosyncratic in their approach. A painter by
training, Farber had a style that was entirely his own, occasionally pushing
syntactical and cultural conventions to their limit. He wrote as a
professional film critic for The New Republic, Time, The Nation, and
elsewhere, and his famous essay “White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art,”
published in Film Culture in the early 1960s, remains something of a classic
in certain film circles. Similarly, Tyler wrote two popular books on
Hollywood that he published during and soon after World War II, The
Hollywood Hallucination (1944) and Magic and Myth of the Movies (1947),
in addition to a critical meditation on Chaplin, while also contributing
pioneering tracts on a wide range of subjects. His articles, often on
underground and avant-garde cinema, appeared in Film Culture, Film
Quarterly, and other, comparatively small-circulation journals, and he later
published a groundbreaking book on homosexuality and cinema.
Of the four critics featured in Bordwell’s study, Tyler is arguably the least
well known today—he hasn’t quite enjoyed the kind of renaissance that
either Farber or Agee have, thanks in large measure to the recent volumes
of their work included in the Library of America, or for that matter
Ferguson—but to my mind he is, in numerous respects, the most intriguing
of the lot.44 “As a reader,” observed Richard Schickel in his introduction to
the 1970 reprint of Tyler’s debut work, “I am peculiarly, indeed fatally,
attracted to the special kind of critical daring practiced by Parker Tyler in
The Hollywood Hallucination and Magic and Myth of the Movies. This
daring consists of two major elements: a willingness to risk
overinterpretation of specific objects (the popular films and film stars that
catch his endlessly roving eye) and the courage to build on these fragile and
transitory creations a towering theoretical structure (a structure from which,
it should be added, one can gain a unique view of the way one of our most
significant cultural institutions actually works—or used to work at the
height of its powers—on us).”45 Tyler’s writings on classical Hollywood
surely demand our attention, but so too do his equally idiosyncratic and
highly illuminating reflections on European art cinema. Tyler is not always
kind (“Mr. Lubitsch can allow Jack Benny, dressed like a Vassar girl as
Romeo, to mince six or seven steps away from the camera and then, seen
face to the audience, recite the first words of the ‘To be or not to be’ speech
like a timid actress in the role of Goethe’s Marguerite,” he writes of To Be
or Not to Be. “In comedy, it is necessary to take one thing seriously: the
comedy.”), but his animated prose, vernacular to the core, zips along
buoyantly, punctuated by the occasional snarky aside or what today we’d
likely call throwing shade.46 For Tyler and his “magic-lantern
metamorphoses,” as he dubs the picture palaces of his day, the movies serve
as “the psychoanalytic clinic of the average worker’s daylight dream.” “The
secret power of Hollywood gods and goddesses,” he continues, “is that they
seem to do everything anyone else does except when they die—in movies—
they die over and over; when they love, they love over and over. Even as
the gods do, they undergo continual metamorphoses, never losing their
identities, being Rita Hayworth or Glenn Ford no matter what their movie
aliases.”47
Tyler offers up a kind of passionate, even rhapsodic, criticism that never
loses sight of the emotional investment that we, as moviegoers, tend to
harbor. Admittedly, this may require a bit of conjecture on the part of a
critic, but that’s where some of the most playful intellectual labor takes
place. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar; not for Tyler, however, especially
when discussing Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity (1944). The perpetually
matchless Keyes (Edward G. Robinson), whose unlit cigar tends to favor
the hand of Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray), elicits ample attention. “From
the mellow tenets of psychology,” he observes of the recurrent cigar-
lighting gesture, “we know that very small habits of this sort become rituals
through the deliberate, even if veiled-from-the-self cultivation of the person
who receives the favor.” As something of an aside, an off-the-cuff remark
placed slyly behind m-dashes, he notes, “there is no evidence that Keyes is
married or has women,” before continuing to apply further analytic pressure
to the match-striking ritual and the erotic “spark” that it purportedly
represents. “On the surface it is an empty form,” he adds, “and it may be as
a mere symbolic form that Keyes accepts it—just as a lady secretly in love
with the doorman of her hotel may derive a subtle, withal empty,
satisfaction from his touch as he hands her into a cab.”48
Tyler possesses similarly acute powers of observation when it comes to
art-house cinema from across the Atlantic. His 1962 volume Early Classics
of the Foreign Film reads like a jaunty set of film-society program notes
written by an unusually savvy, wise-cracking movie companion. “It is
curious to think that sex—not nominated or rationalized sex, sex romantic
or picturesque, but sex—came into its own in the movies only when
Marlene Dietrich appeared as Lola in The Blue Angel,” begins one of his
more exemplary entries. “The Blue Angel, so innocently, theatrically,
earnestly sexy, has come to mean, to veteran film audiences, simply
Dietrich in a sardonic story of the power of bedroom lust. [ … ] Only
Dietrich, one gathered, could make Cupid into a plausible juvenile
delinquent.”49 Perhaps more than any other subject, sex occupies precious
mental space in Tyler’s critical imagination: whether writing on Liontine
Sagan’s Mädchen in Uniform (1931), which he hails as “A chaste ode to
sexuality”; or on Hedy Lamarr in the intensely erotic Ecstasy (1933)—“the
camera follows and watches her somewhat like a voyeur, but more like an
aesthete thrilled body and soul by having stumbled on a lady who has just
undressed for a dip in the water”; or, finally, on the torrid romance between
Emanuelle Riva and Eiji Okada in Hiroshima, Mon Amour (1959), “We
know what the stakes are in this game of love—which is a great deal to
know if l’amour be still a legitimate power.”50
Tyler’s work is on the whole more personal, irreverent, and anecdotal
than encyclopedic or academic. He does not propose an evaluative or
unified taxonomy like the Village Voice critic Andrew Sarris’s The
American Cinema, which would arrive on the scene a little over half a
decade later. But, like the work of Sarris and others before him, it was a
kind of film writing that spoke to a certain generation of movie-goers eager
to learn from the movies and from the critics who helped to decipher their
meanings to pique further interest. Perhaps there really was a “golden age”
of criticism, as some critics and scholars have recently suggested, fueled in
part by a vaguely nostalgic notion of an idealized past and an undeniable
wave of intense cinephilia espoused by those “public critics” à la Sarris and
Pauline Kael.51 “I loved that she wrote the way most people talked,”
remarks Daniel Mendelsohn in his reappraisal of Kael’s work, “her now-
famous second-person-singular address made me feel included in her fierce
and lengthy encomia or diatribes—and made me want to be smart enough
to deserve that inclusion.”52 Mendelsohn goes on to make what I see as a
rather important point concerning the place of such “public critics” vis-à-vis
film scholars then beginning to inhabit the academy: “It wasn’t that these
people were Ph.D.s, that the experience and authority evident on every page
of their writing derived from a diploma hanging on an office wall. I never
knew, while reading Kael, whether she had a degree in Film Studies (even if
I’d known such a thing existed back then).”53 In the late 1960s and early
1970s, when Kael and Sarris were attaining even greater cultural currency
and holding even greater sway among moviegoers, the field of film studies
was becoming more firmly established—with some of the earliest
undergraduate and graduate programs sprouting up at universities from
California to Iowa, Texas to Wisconsin, New York, and beyond.54
 In the introduction to his anthology When Movies Mattered, former
Chicago Reader critic Dave Kehr locates another celebrated moment in
film culture (“before journalism and academia went their wildly different
ways,” as he puts it, “and it was briefly possible to write about films with
serious intent for a wide, popular audience”), the years 1974–1986. It was,
as Kehr goes on to say, “a period that saw the emergence of both the so-
called film generation—bred out of campus film societies and busy
commercial art theaters—and the so-called alternative press, an extension
of the underground newspapers of the flower power era into for profit
respectability.”55 That period, romanticized as it may be, has clearly passed
—or at least has morphed or been revised—and, in Kehr’s estimation, the
state of film criticism in the twenty-first century has paid a dear price.
Roughly a decade before, in an interview with the Australian online journal
Senses of Cinema, the critic Manohla Dargis, then at the Los Angeles Times,
struck an equally dark, pessimistic chord: “Frankly, I am pretty bored with
most of the film criticism I read, to the point that I am beginning to think
we need to start re-examining what it is and what it’s good for, if anything.
Of course, most of what’s out there isn’t really criticism but a degraded
form of reviewing—just thumbs up, thumbs down, with a heavy dose of
plot synopsis.”56 From the vantage point of critics like Dargis and Kehr, a
crisis point had certainly been reached by the first decade or so of the
twenty-first century. “At the moment,” Kehr asserts, “American movie
criticism seems divided (with some exceptions) between two poles: quick-
hit, consumerist sloganeering on Internet review sites and television shows,
and full-bore academia, with its dense, uninviting thickets of theoretical
jargon.”57
The seemingly insurmountable divide highlighted by Kehr and others
may not be quite as binary, or as dire, as initially imagined. Sure, the
internet aggregator Rotten Tomatoes may actually receive upward of 55
million page views per month, as noted in one recent study, and film
criticism of that variety may rightly appear more as Consumer Reports-style
ratings than as thoughtful, idea-laden journalism of yore, but it’s far too
early to pronounce the death of film criticism.58 In fact, the same year that
Kehr published When Movies Mattered, the Chicago Sun-Times critic and
former Sneak Previews television co-host Roger Ebert offered something of
a rejoinder in an op-ed piece published in the Wall Street Journal.59 Despite
the increased number of unemployed film critics, sacked by their former
print newspapers—and tallied, somberly, by former Salt Lake Tribune
movie critic Sean Means on his Movie Cricket blog—the internet has not
signaled the final death knell but rather has ushered in what Ebert
pronounced another “Golden Age of Film Criticism,” one that is
considerably younger, more diverse, and more international. “More
filmgoers are reading more good writing about more films, new and old,
than ever before,” Ebert insisted. “They are also reading more bad writing,
but there you go.”60
Concerns about unevenness in quality notwithstanding, there has been
something of a liberating and possibly democratizing effect in the move
from print to digital. As film and media historian Mattias Frey has recently
noted, “ ‘Anyone’ with a keyboard and internet connection can set up a blog
within a minute and become a critic.”61 Yet, that is precisely how some of
today’s most talented critics, many of them practicing their own updated
version of vernacular criticism, have started out. Take, for instance, Farran
Smith Nehme and her terrifically informative Self-Styled Siren blog, not to
mention her superb series of liner notes for the Criterion Collection and her
debut novel Missing Reels. She is a sterling example in this vein, while in
his op-ed piece, Ebert singled out for special praise the remarkably rich and
prolific collaboration between David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson in
their blog davidbordwell.net.62 “Their names are known from their
textbooks [e.g., Film Art],” he writes of Bordwell and Thompson, “studied
in every film school in the world. But they are not users of obscurantist
gobbledygook employed by academics who, frankly, cannot really write.
They communicate in prose as clear as running water.”63
The friction between journalism and academia that critics like Kehr and
Ebert have identified has existed for many decades now, at least since the
time that film and media became more firmly ensconced in higher
education as a respectable discipline of study. “Currently, well over twenty
thousand people are studying film and television,” writes Andrew Dowdy in
the final chapter of his popular book of 1973, Movies Are Better Than Ever.
“Of those studying film about as many want to write about them as want to
make them. The implications are clear. We are well along toward
institutionalizing our response to film and creating an elite body of
consumers capable of discussing jump cuts and freeze frames with the
authority of a film editor on a busman’s holiday. […] Soon it will be mostly
for university-trained historians brandishing doctorates on the Dark
Imagination of Edgar Ulmer.”64 What Dowdy bemoans, in addition to the
institutionalization of film studies as an academic discipline, is the
forbidding language in which such studies are occasionally presented. He
cites as Exhibit A a study of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey from
1968, in which the unnamed author delivers a kind of jargon-laden,
scholarly formulation that was beginning to become more commonplace in
academic film circles: “The elegant simplicity of the architectural
trajectories is the harmonic opposite of its galactic polymorphism.”65 As
today’s film and media scholars will surely attest, many of them with
legitimate concern, cherry-picked excerpts like this make for too easy of a
target.
Still, the world of academia has historically had an uneasy relationship
vis-à-vis excessive clarity and mass appeal. Its relationship to journalism
has been no less troubled. In his study of 2003, Clueless in Academe,
Gerald Graff described a widespread perception among academics that they
could put their careers at risk if they wrote too accessibly. At the same time,
however, he pointed to a what he called a journalistic turn in academic
writing (in the past, to be branded “journalistic” was to be regarded as
shallow, underresearched, even phoned in). He locates a more belletristic,
often autobiographical tendency in such prominent scholars as Henry Louis
Gates, Jr., Alice Kaplan, Andrew Ross, Frank Lentricchia, Jane Tompkins,
bell hooks, and others—what he calls a “new vernacularism,” a kind of
accessible prose that is stripped of any mystifying terminology.66 In
graduate school, at Berkeley in the early 1990s, we used to joke that those
of us who developed an unhealthy addiction to theoretical jargon might
later require a twelve-step program. “My graduate training taught me that
for my writing to qualify as scholarly and academic,” observes Graff, who
attended grad school at Stanford in the 1950s, “I had to sound markedly
different from how I sounded when I conversed with nonacademics or even
with my academic colleagues in informal situations. ‘Sophisticated’ was the
word most frequently used to denote the tone you were to strive for.”67
What, then, does this new turn signify? To Graff, it suggests that
“academics can now get away with writing readably, that their career will
not inevitably suffer for it. ‘I had to write that way to get a job’ or to get
tenure is no longer a legitimate excuse, if it ever was.”68 The larger point is
that there may indeed be a bright future for the “new vernacularism,” even
one without fear of professional recourse.
As for the world outside the academy, the grim forecasts of the death of
film and film culture may also be somewhat misplaced or, at the very least,
premature. In her provocatively titled piece “The Decay of Cinema,”
published in the winter of 1996, Susan Sontag bemoaned not only what she
saw as an inexorable decline of motion pictures but also of the particular
brand of cinephilia that she and those of her ilk had once espoused. “It was
born of the conviction that cinema was an art unlike any other,” she writes
somewhat wistfully, “quintessentially modern; distinctively accessible;
poetic and mysterious and erotic and moral—all at the same time … for
cinephiles, the movies encapsulated everything.”69 In her estimation, there
was indeed a golden age of moviegoing, an age when the grand picture
palaces—in a seeming wicked fulfillment of the deepest, darkest fears of
Joseph Breen and the enforcers of the Production Code—took the place of
denominational churches. “Until the advent of television emptied the movie
theaters,” she contends, “it was from the weekly visit to the cinema that you
learned (or tried to learn) how to walk, to smoke, to kiss, to fight, to grieve.
Movies gave you tips about how to be attractive. Example: It looks good to
wear a raincoat even when it isn’t raining.”70 For Sontag, it was not just the
decay of cinema that she forecasted but also the decay of cinephilia.
“Cinephilia itself has come under attack as something quaint, outmoded,
snobbish. For cinephilia implies that films are unique, unrepeatable, magic
experiences.” She ended her polemic on a strikingly plaintive note. “If
cinephilia is dead, then movies are dead too … no matter how many
movies, even very good ones, go on being made. If cinema can be
resurrected, it will be through the birth of a new kind of cine-love.”71
How fitting then that in the spring 2019 issue of Film Quarterly, critic
and blogger Girish Shambu published a manifesto “For a New Cinephilia,”
a cinephilia that is markedly different from the one that Sontag had
prematurely mourned.72 It would not be a cinephilia authored by straight
White men, skewed largely to classic Hollywood and European art-house
directors, but rather a far more inclusive cinephilia that embraced formerly
neglected work of women, queer, non-European, and non-White directors.
The “glory period of moviegoing and appreciation” in the 1960s and 1970s,
as Molly Haskell has recently noted, “seems downright parochial by
comparison. Hardly any mainstream women directors or Black filmmakers,
and international cinema restricted mostly to European.”73 The “new
cinephilia” should serve as something of a corrective to those conspicuous
absences, bringing an element of advocacy to the fore. “It is no
coincidence,” writes Shambu, “that so many filmmakers valued by the new
cinephilia—women, queer, indigenous, people of color—have an interest in
activism, and view cinema itself as part of a larger cultural-activist
project.”74 But activism and advocacy have served foundational reflexes
among critics, professionals, and bloggers alike for a number of
generations. In the epilogue to his Better Living through Criticism, a section
he titled “The End of Criticism,” film critic A. O. Scott offers a formulaic
summation that jibes with a critical lineage that extends all the way from
Lotte Eisner to Girish Shambu: “a critic is a person whose interest can help
activate the interest in others.”75
Let us return for one last moment to the instructive piece by Miriam
Hansen that served as my point of departure here. “American movies of the
classical period,” she asserts late in that essay, “offered something like the
first global vernacular.”76 They spoke to audiences around the world, telling
them stories and bringing them characters—and the stars that inhabited
them—that would forever shape them. It is perhaps too much to expect that
written texts disseminated in a print or even an electronic medium could
have the same profound impact. And yet the kind of writing, theoretical and
critical alike, which I propose under the rubric of the “vernacular,” does
have some demonstrable reach. “Vernacular modernism is—it has to be—
grounded in criticism,” remarks Daniel Morgan in his reappraisal of
Hansen’s essay a decade and a half after it originally appeared, “in all its
contradictory and contingent appeal, and in all its successes and failures.”
Or, as he puts it still further, “Pressing vernacular modernism into the orbit
of criticism does not simply give us a better understanding of its operation,
a more precise account of how theory links to its objects (although it
certainly does that). When Hansen quotes Kracauer to say that the best
modern art, from painting to literature to cinema to revues, involves a ‘play
with danger’ [i.e., Kracauer’s shorthand for slapstick comedy], she means
that modernity itself has an aspect that causes worry.”77 Following Hansen,
we might recoup the vernacular once and for all, recognizing it as a vital
strain in the history and theory of motion pictures, informing the work of
writers and critics from the 1920s all the way up to today.

N
1. Miriam Hansen, “The Mass Production of the Senses: Classical Cinema as Vernacular
Modernism,” Modernism/Modernity 6, no. 2 (April 1999): 68.
2. Ibid., 60. See also Miriam Hansen, Babel & Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991).
3. Hansen, “Mass Production of the Senses,” 62–63.
4. See David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema:
Film Styles & Modes of Production to 1960 (New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985).
5. See Siefried Kracauer, The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, ed. and trans. Thomas Y. Levin
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995).
6. See Noah Isenberg, “This Pen for Hire: Siegfried Kracauer as American Cultural Critic,” in
Culture in the Anteroom: The Legacies of Siegfried Kracauer, ed. Gerd Gemünden and
Johannes von Moltke (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2012), 29–41.
7. See Lotte H. Eisner, The Haunted Screen: Expressionism in the German Cinema and the
Influence of Max Reinhardt, trans. Roger Greaves (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1969), and Siegfried Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of German
Film (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1947). See also Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of
Film (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1960); Lotte H. Eisner, Murnau (1965; repr.,
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973); and Lotte H. Eisner, Fritz Lang, trans. Gertrud
Mander (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977).
8. See Sohrab Shahid-Saless, Die langen Ferien der Lotte H. Eisner (The Long Vacation of Lotte
H. Eisner), available in an unsubtitled version on YouTube. See also Naomi DeCelles,
“Mediating Displacement: Lotte Eisner’s Exile on Film,” Quarterly Review of Film and Video
37, no. 4 (Fall 2020): 384–97. Finally, see Billy (then still “Billy”) Billie Wilder, “Grock, The
Man Who Makes the World Laugh,” in Billy Wilder on Assignment: Dispatches from Weimar
Berlin and Interwar Vienna, ed. Noah Isenberg, trans. Shelley Frisch (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 2021), 134–37.
9. See, for example, Hansen’s discussion of Chaplin and his impact on Weimar-era critics and
thinkers in her posthumously published magnum opus Miriam Hansen, Cinema and
Experience: Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor W. Adorno (Oakland:
University of California Press, 2011); see also my review, Noah Isenberg, “Illuminations,”
Bookforum (April/May 2012): 32.
10. Anton Kaes, Nicholas Baer, and Michael Cowan, eds., The Promise of Cinema: German Film
Theory 1907–1933 (Oakland: University of California Press, 2016).
11. Lotte H. Eisner, “A New India Film: A Throw of Dice,” trans. Nicholas Baer, in Kaes et al.,
eds., Promise of Cinema, 63. See also Veronika Fuechtner, “The International Project of
National(ist) Cinema: Franz Osten in India,” in The Many Faces of Weimar Cinema, ed.
Christian Rogowski (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2010), 167–81.
12. Eisner, “New India Film,” 63.
13. Lotte H. Eisner and Rudolf von Laban, “Film and Dance Belong Together,” trans. Alex H.
Bush, in Kaes et al., eds., Promise of Cinema, 139–41. See also S. M. Eisenstein, V. I.
Pudovkin, and G. V. Alexandrov, “A Statement” (1928), in Film Sound: Theory and Practice,
ed. Elisabeth Weis and John Belton (New York: Columbia, 1985), 83–85.
14. Eisner and von Laban, “Film and Dance Belong Together,” 141 (emphasis in the original). On
the larger history of the musical, from the silent period to the present, see Jeanine Basinger,
The Movie Musical! (New York: Knopf, 2019).
15. Lotte H. Eisner, “The New Left and Film,” trans. Alex H. Bush, in Kaes et al., eds., Promise of
Cinema, 359.
16. Lotte H. Eisner, Rev. of Menschen am Sonntag, Film-Kurier, March 22, 1930. See also Noah
Isenberg, “Young People Like Us,” https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/1904-people-on-
sunday-young-people-like-us.
17. Filmmaker Sohrab Shahid-Saless takes the title of his 1979 documentary from this statement
by Eisner. More recently, Timon Koulmasis’s new television documentary Ein Leben für den
Film: Lotte Eisner, an Arte/ZDF co-production, premiered at the 2021 Berlinale Festival.
18. See Werner Herzog, Of Walking on Ice: Munich-Paris, 23 November-14 December 1974, trans.
Martje Herzog and Alan Greenberg (1978; repr. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
2015). See also Noah Isenberg, “Werner Herzog’s Maniacal Quests,” The Nation, 7 January
2016.
19. Siegfried Kracauer, “Rev. of Hollywood, The Movie Colony—The Movie Makers by Leo
Rosten,” Social Research 9, no. 2 (May 1942): 282–83. See also, more recently, the anthology
of Kracauer’s English-language criticism, Siegfried Kracauer’s American Writings: Essays on
Film and Popular Culture, ed. Johannes von Moltke and Kristy Rawson (Oakland University
of California Press, 2012).
20. Siegfried Kracauer, “Why France Liked Our Films,” National Board of Review Magazine 17,
no. 5 (May 1942): 15–19.
21. Kracauer, “Rev. of Hollywood,” 282.
22. Ibid.
23. See Budd Schulberg, What Makes Sammy Run? (New York: Random House, 1941). On
Schulberg and the critical reception of the novel, see Noah Isenberg, “Made in Hollywood,”
Paris Review Daily, December 19, 2014.
24. See Siegfried Kracauer, “Those Movies with a Message,” Harper’s Magazine 196 (June 1948):
567.
25. Kracauer, “Rev. of Hollywood,” 283.
26. Siegfried Kracauer, “The Task of the Film Critic,” The Weimar Republic Sourcebook, ed.
Anton Kaes, Martin Jay, and Edward Dimendberg (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1995), 635.
27. See Siegfried Kracauer, “The Conquest of Europe on the Screen: The Nazi Newsreel, 1939–
40,” Social Research 10, no. 3 (September 1943): 337–57. The larger study serves as a
supplement to From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film, ed.
Leonardo Quaresima (1947; repr. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 275–307.
28. Siegfried Kracauer, “The Hitler Image,” The New Republic 110, no. 1 (1944): 22.
29. Ibid.
30. Siegfried Kracauer, “Hollywood’s Terror Films: Do They Reflect an American State of Mind?”
Commentary 2, no. 2 (August 1946): 132–36.
31. Edward Dimendberg, “Down These Seen Streets A Man Must Go: Siegfried Kracauer’s
‘Hollywood Terror Films’ and the Spatiality of Film Noir,” New German Critique 89
(Spring/Summer 2003): 124.
32. Kracauer, “Hollywood’s Terror Films,” 133. See also Siegfried Kracauer, “Psychiatry for
Everything and Everybody,” Commentary 5, no. 3 (March 1948): 222–28.
33. Kracauer, “Hollywood’s Terror Films,” 135.
34. Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler, 272.
35. Siegfried Kracauer, “Dumbo,” The Nation (November 8, 1941): 463.
36. Siegfried Kracauer, letter of April 28, 1946 to Eugen Schüfftan, in Nachrichten aus Hollywood,
New York und anderswo: Der Briefwechsel Eugen und Marlise Schüfftans mit Siegfried und
Lili Kracauer, ed. Helmut G. Asper (Trier, Germany: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag, 2003), 66.
37. Siegfried Kracauer, letter of July 25, 1946 to Clement Greenberg, cited in Siegfried Kracauer,
Werke vol. 6, no. 3, ed. Inka Mülder-Bach (Frankfurt am Main, Germany: Suhrkamp, 2004),
485.
38. Ibid.
39. Ibid.
40. On the incompatibility between the so-called New York Intellectuals and their Frankfurt-born
counterparts, see Mark Krupnick, “Criticism as an Institution,” Crisis of Modernity: Recent
Critical Theories of Culture and Society in the United States and West Germany, ed. Günter H.
Lenz and Kurt L. Shell (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1986), 156–76.
41. Barbara Deming, Running Away from Myself: A Dream Portrait of America Drawn from the
Films for the 40s (New York: Grossman, 1969), 11.
42. Robert Warshow, The Immediate Experience: Movies, Comics, Theatre, and Other Aspects of
Popular Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 105.
43. David Bordwell, Rhapsodes: How 1940s Critics Change American Film Culture (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2016), 5.
44. See Michael Sragow, ed., James Agee: Film Writing and Selected Journalism (New York:
Library of America, 2005), and Robert Polito, ed., Farber on Film: The Complete Film
Writings of Manny Farber (New York: Library of America, 2009).
45. Richard Schickel, “Introduction,” in Parker Tyler, Hollywood Hallucination(New York: Simon
and Schuster, 1970), v.
46. Tyler, Hollywood Hallucination, 213.
47. Parker Tyler, Magic and Myth of the Movies (1947; repr. New York: Garland, 1985), xii and
xviii.
48. Tyler, Magic and Myth of the Movies, 180.
49. Parker Tyler, Early Classics of the Foreign Film (New York: Citadel Press, 1962), 52–53.
50. Ibid., 65, 91, and 224.
51. See Mattias Frey, The Permanent Crisis of Film Criticism: The Anxiety of Authority
(Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2015), especially his central chapter, “The Anxiety
of Influence: The ‘Golden Age’ of Criticism, the Rise of the TV Pundit, and the Memory of
Pauline Kael,” 101–23.
52. Daniel Mendelsohn, “A Critic’s Manifesto,” The New Yorker Page-Turner blog, August 28,
2012. Accessed April 26, 2021.
53. Ibid.
54. On the prehistory of film studies in America, see Dana Polan, Scenes of Instruction: The
Beginnings of the U.S. Study of Film (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007).
55. Dave Kehr, When Movies Mattered: Reviews from a Transformative Decade (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2011), 1.
56. Cited in Jim Emerson, “The Critic: Manohla Dargis on Film Criticism,” www.rogerebert.com
June 13, 2006. For a slightly rosier outlook, though tempered by intermittent gloom, see the
recent book published by Dargis’s current counterpart as chief film critic at the New York
Times: A. O. Scott, Better Living through Criticism: How to Think about Art, Pleasure, Beauty,
and Truth (New York: Penguin Press, 2016).
57. Ibid., 2.
58. Frey, Permanent Crisis of Film Criticism, 129, 138.
59. Roger Ebert, “Film Criticism Dying? Not Online,” Wall Street Journal, January 22, 2011.
60. Ibid.
61. Frey, Permanent Crisis of Film Criticism, 138.
62. See http://selfstyledsiren.blogspot.com as well as the Criterion liner notes posted at
https://www.criterion.com/current/author/480-farran-smith-nehme and Farran Smith Nehme,
Missing Reels (Woodstock, NY: Overlook, 2014).
63. Ebert, “Film Criticism Dying? Not Online.”
64. Andrew Dowdy, Movies Are Better Than Ever: Wide-Screen Memories of the Fifties (New
York: Morrow, 1973), 222. As for his prognosis that there would soon be dissertations on
Ulmer, I feel somewhat implicated by the charge as the author of a book on Ulmer. See Noah
Isenberg, Edgar G. Ulmer: A Filmmaker at the Margins (Oakland: University of California
Press, 2014).
65. Dowdy, Movies Are Better Than Ever, 225.
66. See Gerald Graff, Clueless in Academe: How Schooling Obscures the Life of the Mind (New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 120. See also Noah Isenberg, “Theory Out of
Bounds,” Raritan 27, no. 1 (Summer 2007): 82–103.
67. Graff, Clueless in Academe, 121–22.
68. Ibid., 133.
69. Susan Sontag, “The Decay of Cinema,” New York Times Magazine, 25 February 1996, 60. “In
short,” observes Jonathan Rosenbaum in his tribute to Sontag after her passing in 2004, “what
I think Susan taught me and countless others by her example was her way of being in the
world. What she had to say about film was ultimately an extension of that.” Jonathan
Rosenbaum, Goodbye Cinema, Hello Cinephilia: Film Culture in Transition (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2010), 291.
70. Sontag, “The Decay of Cinema.” On this period of intense cinephilia à la Sontag, see the
recently published memoir by former cinema owner and film distributor Daniel Talbot, In Love
with Movies: From New Yorker Films to Lincoln Plaza Cinema, ed. Toby Talbot (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2022).
71. Sontag, “The Decay of Cinema.” See also Noah Isenberg, “Reflections on Cinephilia,” The
Threepenny Review (Winter 2016): 22.
72. Girish Shambu, “For a New Cinephilia,” Film Quarterly (Spring 2019): 32–34.
73. Molly Haskell, “Moviegoing Then and Now,” The Film Comment Letter, May 10, 2021.
74. Shambu, “For a New Cinephilia,” 32.
75. Scott, Better Living through Criticism, 256.
76. Hansen, “Mass Production of the Senses,” 65.
77. Daniel Morgan, “‘Play with Danger’: Vernacular Modernism and the Problem of Criticism,”
New German Critique 122 (Summer 2014): 69–70, 81–82. See also Pamela Wojcik,
“Vernacular Modernism as Child’s Play,” New German Critique 122 (Summer 2014): 83–95.
 CHAPTER 11

“THE FOLD OF OLD WOUNDS”

DAUGHTERS OF THE DUST,
EVE’S BAYOU, AND MISSISSIPPI
DAMNED AS CINEMATIC
BLACK FEMINIST THEORY

KARA KEELING

“There’s a thought … a recollection … something somebody remembers. We carry these

memories inside of us. Do you believe that hundreds and hundreds of Africans brought here on
this other side would forget everything they once knew? We don’t know where the recollections
come from. Sometimes we dream them. But we carry these memories inside of us.

”—Nana Peazant to Eli1

We’re the daughters of those old dusty things Nana carries in her tin can … (Pausing)

We carry too many scars from the past. Our past owns us. We wear our scars like armor … for
protection. Our mother’s scars, our sister’s scars, our daughter’s scars…. Thick, hard, ugly scars
that no one can pass through to ever hurt us again. Let’s live our lives without living in the fold of
old wounds.

—Eula2
HOW can a group of people whose sense of belonging together as a group
has been forged in a crucible of violence and alienation craft a collective
mode of existence? How can the project avoid replicating the alienation and
violence to provide a vehicle for resistance and redress, if not radical
transformation, of those past violences? Julie Dash’s 1991 film Daughters
of the Dust poses these questions, which have been central to Black
existence, in cinematic terms. The epigraphs evince the tension between
Nana Peazant’s (Cora Lee Day) insistence on the power in recollections and
memories and Eula Peazant’s (Alva Rogers) appeal to break the cycle of
repeating old traumas. They illustrate a broader conflict between the call for
Black diasporic peoples to continue the practices and traditions that
colonization and enslavement sought to erase and the insistence that those
same peoples break with the past and its pain.
This tension arises from a temporality of decolonization and liberation
that, as David Marriott has explained,
turns on the difference between, on the one hand, a confined, institutional meaning [of
history] … in which power is violently exercised on colonial subjects, and on the other, a
space of endless self-creation, in which self and world can be reinvented, and in which,
implicitly at least, “history,” for the subject, can be given another meaning, a future in which
time, reference, and reality can acquire new values.3

While Marriott referred to Frantz Fanon’s formulation of such a temporality

in the final chapter of Black Skin, White Masks, Daughters of the Dust
expresses the same temporality, thematically, stylistically, and narratively.
Daughters of the Dust does not merely enact this temporality. It reveals a
theorization of it, positing that a way to undermine the confined
institutional meaning of “history” is to introduce an African conception of
time, which is available within cinematic temporalities.4
Set at the beginning of the twentieth century, in an era that witnessed the
birth of film technologies as well as the Great Migration, Daughters offers
ways of thinking of the temporality of Black liberation in the United States
as a Black diasporic project that focuses specifically on the centrality and
significance of those who claim and are claimed by the category of “Black
woman.” It makes this offering in cinematic terms—that is, it poses the
centrality of Black women to the temporality of Black liberation as a
cinematic problem through the images and signs of film. By doing so, it
makes available cinematic forms and images through which to craft a
politics, in which life affirming, joyful relations might be facilitated,
supported, and sustained over time.
To claim that Daughters thinks cinematically is to assert, following Gilles
Deleuze, that filmmakers “think” with cinematic images. Deleuze’s two-
volume taxonomy of cinema rests on the premise that “the great directors of
the cinema may be compared … not merely with painters, architects, and
musicians, but also with thinkers.”5 For him, filmmakers think with
cinematic images rather than with concepts. He writes: “the cinema still
forms part of art and part of thought, in the irreplaceable autonomous forms
which these directors were able to invent and get screened.”6 Taking
Deleuze’s claim seriously requires that we approach individual films as
contributions to thought. Films “think” with the images and signs generated
through cinema. How and what they think do not simply map onto what has
been thought through other modes of knowledge production. Yet, films
often are in conversation with those other modes. Thus, it remains possible
to engage in a scholarly manner with what is generated in films, just as it is
clear that filmmakers engage in their films with that which is generated in
modes other than through filmmaking.
The idea that scholarship and filmmaking can mutually enrich each other
is not new. To take just one example from the history of Black film, in the
early 1990s, filmmaker Haile Gerima advocated for the importance of what
he termed “triangular cinema,” wherein scholars, activists, and filmmakers
collaborate to create the conditions for the sustenance of a Black
independent cinema movement.7 Following Deleuze, for those of us
engaged in creating the concepts that comprise film theory, the proposition
that filmmakers think with cinematic images provides an opportunity to
consider what the body of Black films (forged through whichever logic of
classification) “grasps and reveals” that might be put into relation with
those things philosophy and other creative scholarly modes make
“understandable for us,” and with “what the other arts uncover for us.”8
Sidestepping the ongoing debate within film studies about how to assign
texts to the category of “Black film,” I narrow my focus here to a selection
of films that have been significant to the production and understanding of
Black feminist films: along with Daughters, Kasi Lemmon’s 1997 film
Eve’s Bayou, and Tina Mabry’s 2009 film Mississippi Damned. I seek in
this chapter to make understandable some of what those films “grasp and
reveal” that might contribute to existing efforts to think historical
continuity, historical rupture, and the ongoing cinematic production of
“Black women.”9
At this point in the history of American cinema, enough Black feminist
films have been produced that it is possible to experiment with received
conventions of film criticism by producing a mode of film scholarship that
is routed through the logics of those films themselves. In other words, as a
film theorist and critic, I experiment here with a mode of scholarly
engagement with a selection of Black films that takes Daughters as itself
the “theory” that might offer additional insights into selected issues raised
across the body of films named above.10 Although each of the films I
discuss certainly could support a chapter on its own, here I mean to draw
out a set of themes and concerns shared among them.11
This chapter has two foci. The first is how time and the organization of
time, temporality, participate in a cinematic project having to do with
Blackness, violence, and gender that these films share. The second, related
to the first, addresses the ways that these films forge cinematically the
concept “Black woman” to bring sexual violence to the fore as a
constitutive violence of white supremacy. I argue this reveals that, in the
United States, if not elsewhere in the Black diaspora, White supremacy is
inseparable from, though not entirely coextensive with, sexual violence and
misogyny.12
One of the implications of this insight (which many others made before
Daughters, but which takes a renewed form in that film) is that any effort to
resist or abolish white supremacy must simultaneously confront the ways
that misogyny (the hatred and contempt of women and/or of femininity,
terms which cannot be collapsed into each other) works to support and
perpetuate white supremacy and anti-Black racism. Any attack on or stance
against white supremacy that does not also target misogyny misses the fact
that misogyny and white supremacy mutually reinforce and can grow from
each other. In other words, any effort to combat white supremacy that does
not also simultaneously take aim at misogyny and gender violence
wherever it occurs leaves a core of white supremacy unscathed and ripe for
renewal. The same is true for attempts to combat misogyny that do not
simultaneously target white supremacy. Daughters makes these claims
perceptible by expressing ways that efforts to create relations in which
Blackness as a form of love can grow from a valorization of femininity and
Black women. The voiceover at the beginning of Daughters puts this claim
more poetically:
 I am the first and the last.
I am the honored one and the scorned.
I am the whore and the holy one.
I am the wife and the virgin.
I am the barren one, and many
are my daughters.
I am the silence that you can
not understand. I am the
Utterance of my name.

At the beginning of the film, a “woman’s voice” issued from out of the
visual field calls attention to the limits and failures of existing
epistemological and ontological categories in the face of the mode of
existence claimed by the woman’s voice. Her claim to be “the silence that
you can / not understand” is not a claim that she is the silence without
meaning, but that the silence she is posits a limit to existing categories of
apprehension and comprehension. Similarly, when Daughters references
rape and other forms of violence against women, those violences do not
show up in the film in the forms in which many viewers have been
habituated to recognize them.13
Eula Peazant’s exhortation to the women underscores the film’s interest
in opening possibilities for different relations between “Black women” to be
forged, which inevitably also invoke different relations between “Black
women” and “Black men” as well as between masculinity and femininity.
The fact that the Unborn Child that Eula is carrying may have been
conceived when Eula was raped and the objections that the rest of the
Peazant women have to Yellow Mary (Barbara-O) because she has been
“ruined” animate an exploration of themes central to the film. Meditations
on the prevalence of sexual violence against Black women historically, and
the range of possibilities to redress such violence, are central to the ways
that Daughters is reframing the category of “Black women” and reforging
that category cinematically.
By claiming “Black woman” and an attendant “Black women” are
concepts that are being forged cinematically, I am pointing to the
imbrication of identity categories with the material and conceptual logics of
cinema in this historical moment. Though the relationships between identity
and cinema have customarily been understood in terms of “representation,”
the language of “representation” obfuscates the extent to which what
becomes visible in, or, to put this in another critical register, what is indexed
by, cinematic images are existing material relations along with the range of
currently perceptible possibilities for those relations to be organized in ways
other than they currently are. In other words, if cinematic images
“represent” anything, it is the accumulated set of material relations
presently perceptible in the image in any given time and place.
The cinematic image itself, however, is not what it presently “represents”
because it is, in Deleuze’s words, “the system of the relationships between
its elements.”14 It is a set of relationships of time and space “from which
the variable present only flows.”15 The distinction is important because it
means that cinematic images contain more than we perceive in any given
present perception of them. They therefore carry a capacity to “grasp and
reveal” elements in the world that challenge existing perceptions of the
world in ways that might make perceptible the potential for existing
material relations to be organized differently.
Elsewhere, I have advanced an understanding of the cinematic image as
“common sense” according to Antonio Gramsci’s understanding of the
term.16 For the Italian activist and thinker, “common sense” consists of a
sedimentation of past knowledges, experiences, and practices generated by
groups of living beings as part of the process of hegemony, where the
consolidation of hegemonic relationships involves techniques of force
and/or domination mixed with strategies for gaining consent to those
relationships. Though the balance between consent and force varies in
hegemonic relationships, the role of consent is important for offsetting a
need for sheer, unrelenting, and impenetrable force.17
Daughters of the Dust innovates within the cinematic perception of
“Black women.” It stands as a singular achievement in the history of
American cinema, in part because it was even produced and distributed at
all. It is the first feature film by a Black American woman to have a
theatrical release. The range of questions, issues, themes, and theories that
Daughters puts into circulation reverberates throughout the body of
American film in which we currently recognize “Black women.” Through
aesthetic innovations, Daughters grasps and reveals elements within
Blackness and Black women that have become resources for subsequent
attempts to grapple with the histories of violence and the strategies for
joyful living and survival that continue to inform the lived experience of
Blackness and to produce viable alternative expressions from within those
histories. By doing so, Daughters creates resources that have fed
subsequent filmmakers, even those who make films that only assimilate
Dash’s formal innovations into those dominant aesthetic modes and logics
through and with which theatrical feature films most often work.18
Though it may be possible to create a genealogy of Dash’s direct
influence on specific filmmakers, in this chapter I claim that Daughters, as
a mode of Black feminist thought, revealed new aspects in the cinematic
image of “Black women” that cleared a space for subsequent filmmakers to
enter into and contribute to Black feminist thought. In particular, Eve’s
Bayou and Mississippi Damned evidence that Daughters serves as a
touchstone for subsequent Black thought within and through the cinematic.
As Daughters has gained in popularity and won inclusion in the canon of
American cinema, it has been solidifying a shared sense of Black diasporic
existence and cultural politics that filmmakers and other theorists working
to address the pressing questions and issues of their times may now need to
unsettle.19 The theoretical conversations filmmakers have with Daughters
through their work can reveal aspects in Daughters that might not be
commonly perceptible today, yet exist as troubling or promising or
seemingly neutral or insignificant elements of that film.
Innovations on the level of film form and style are central to Daughters’s
project. Toni Cade Bambara observes the very first sequence of the film
reveals that Dash “intends to heal our imperialized eyes.” The image of a
Black woman arrayed in white and wearing a veiled hat reverses a familiar
image of a White woman settler or plantation owner and troubles what
Bambara terms “dominant cinema’s colonialism-as-entertainment genre.”20
It frustrates our efforts to make sense of Daughters according to
preexisting, dominant cinematic images and alerts us to the fact that
watching Daughters will be an education in different ways to perceive
Blackness.21 For Bambara, healing our imperialized eyes is a formal
operation; inducing viewers to see familiar images differently and thereby
opening viewers’ capacity to perceive new images involves not only
making a different image perceptible in the existing organization of things
but also organizing presently perceptible images differently. Simply
introducing a “better image” of “Black women” into a conventional
organization of images is not enough. First, no qualitative judgment of
images perceived as representatives of entire groups of living beings could
be made without violence. Second, such an introduction would not
challenge the common senses perpetuated through, and laboring in the
service of, the official organization of things. Those common senses have to
be disrupted, forged anew, and directed toward the production of another
organization of things.
Bambara provides a clear description of several of Daughters’s formal
characteristics and how they challenge the common sense reified by
dominant film aesthetics. She writes:
In Daughters, the emphasis is on shared space (wide-angled and deep focus shots in which
no one becomes backdrop to anyone else’s drama) rather than dominated space
(foregrounded hero in sharp focus, others Othered in background blur); on social space
rather than idealized space (as in westerns); on delineated space that encourages a
contiguous-reality reading rather than on masked space in which, through close-ups and
framing, the spectator is encouraged to believe that conflicts are solely psychological not,
say, systemic, hence, can be resolved by a shrink, lawyer, or a gun, but not say, through
societal transformation.22

The formal innovations of Daughters exist now as tools and resources for
filmmakers taking up aspects of the political and thematic concerns about
which Daughters thinks. In other words, though Daughters drew inspiration
and ideas from other films, what it achieved in terms of independent Black
filmmaking in the United States was itself without precedent. Independent
filmmakers and others can generate images recognizable as “Black women”
within Daughters’s paradigm, crafted through oppositional film practices,
and they therefore might carry forward the logics those practices have been
produced to support.
As Bambara, among others, points out, Daughters stands as “a historical
marker, independent Black cinema come of age.” In Dash’s account of
making Daughters, the intense difficulties that Dash had in attracting
funding and, later, a distributor for the film, are notable. Regarding her
efforts to fund the film, Dash recalls that:
 Hollywood studios were generally impressed with the look of the film, but somehow they
couldn’t grasp the concept. They could not process the fact that a Black woman filmmaker
wanted to make a film about African-American women at the turn of the century—
particularly a film with a strong family, with characters who weren’t living in the ghetto,
killing each other and burning things down. And there weren’t going to be any explicit sex
scenes, either. They thought the film would be unmarketable. They believe that they knew
better than we did about what moved Black people…. Every major studio either passed on it
or didn’t respond at all.23

The dominant logics of the Hollywood film studios could not predict
Daughters’s significance or its success.24 Dash recalls that European
studios were similarly unable to generate a conception of the world in
which Daughters would be profitable. To bring the film to market,
therefore, Dash and her co-producers had to both fund the film so that it
could be made and consolidate a market for the film by working outside the
existing mechanisms of distribution. Rather than working within a familiar
film form and style which organized and perpetuated the very logics that
failed to perceive Daughters as a viable commodity, Dash and Arthur Jafa,
her co-producer and director of photography (DP), innovated within
oppositional formal logics available in existing Black independent and other
global cinemas. This body of work has forged organizations of cinematic
images that make perceptible the existence of (or at least a range of
possibilities for) sets of social relations that do not perpetuate hegemonic
relations of exploitation and domination.
The style and form of Daughters are inseparable from the film’s thematic
and narrative concerns. Through its cinematography, its Africentric mode of
storytelling; its insistence on framing characters who speak a Gullah
dialect; the confrontation it stages formally and narratively within
modernity; its embrace of and experimentations within a film aesthetic
consistent with the goals and demands of an oppositional cinema; and the
questions it asks about the historical uses, constraints, and possibilities of
photography (and by extension other visual media), among other elements
of the film’s form, style, and narrative, Daughters revealed new aspects in
the cinematic upon its release. To take just one example, Daughters
revealed an aesthetic capacity of 35mm film; Jafa and Dash experimented
with different film stock and lighting techniques in order to create an image
that presents Black skin in its rich varieties. Because film stock was created
for and tested with White skin, lighting and filming Black skin tones
historically proved difficult for cinematographers invested in their craft and
interested in Black aesthetics as politics.25
Daughters contributes to existing theories about film that reveal that
stylistic and narrative conventions that have become standard and that
authorize and maintain the existing organization of things are not natural or
inherent to the medium, even though, as in the case of film stock, choices
by corporations and individual filmmakers may continue to reinforce them.
Such conventions simply are those most adequate for valorizing the
conventional styles, narratives, and the worldviews they perpetuate.
Formally, Daughters innovated an aesthetic calibrated to insist that African
cultural traditions that have been carried by Black people into the so-called
New World sustain a range of epistemologies and ontologies through which
white supremacy and imperialism might be destroyed. Lighting is not the
only way Daughters accomplishes this; as Bambara points out, Daughters
offers a spatial logic through the composition of each shot that is consistent
with collective values rather than individualistic ones, and at times it uses a
nonconventional film speed more appropriate for telling stories that center
on African peoples and Black epistemologies.
Drawing on a history of experimentation with what celluloid film can do,
Daughters assembles an aesthetic that serves its project of valorizing
Blackness and Black women and, by extension, Black peoples. It creates a
diasporic space-time in which Black existence forges a different
sociopolitical and cultural order.26 This aesthetic is a primary way
Daughters advances a film theory for blackness through the images and
signs it puts into circulation.27 Subsequent attempts to express Black
epistemologies and valorize Black existence have taken on this aesthetic. In
what follows, this chapter focuses on elements of this aesthetic shared
between Daughters, Eve’s Bayou, and Mississippi Damned in the interest of
conceptualizing how they project a cinematic image of “Black women and
girls” through which invention might be introduced into existence.
 EULA
(In a rush of emotions)
As far as this place is concerned, we never enjoyed our womanhood…. Deep inside, we
believed that they ruined our mothers, and their mothers before them. And we live our lives
always expecting the worse because we feel we don’t deserve any better.
(A few beats, then)
Deep inside we believe that even God can’t heal the wounds of our past or protect us from
the world that put shackles on our feet.28

On the terrain of cinematic images perceptible as those of “blackness”

and, in particular, “Black women and girls,” Daughters stages a material
struggle for Black peoples’ bodies and imaginations. It does this by forging
an oppositional film aesthetic and practice designed to challenge hegemonic
forms of blackness that puts into circulation cinematic images that its
viewers can recognize as those of “Black women.” Further, Daughters
seeks to make perceptible histories of gendered and sexual violence that
have affected those who claim or are claimed by the categories “Black
men” and “Black women.” Entering a cinematic terrain on which “Black
women” and “Black girls” appear as always already sexually available
(through the work of “the Jezebel” or “the Sapphire” stereotypes, for
example), Daughters deploys aesthetic strategies to “heal our imperialized
eyes” and those other parts of our sensory motor apparatuses that have been
trained by conventional film aesthetics. By so doing, it enables its audience
to perceive that forms of sexual violence continue to secure hegemonic
conceptions of blackness and of Black women and girls. According to these
conceptions, Black women and girls appear as those whom cannot be raped
or sexually violated because they are always already sexually available.
Their bodies are not their own; they have been owned by others, legally
during chattel slavery and extralegally as part of the resilient structure of
White supremacy and anti-Black racism in the United States.
Daughters, Eve’s Bayou, and Mississippi Damned work to subvert those
hegemonic common senses through which “Black women” and “Black
girls” are perceived and to underscore the ways those common senses
rationalize sexual violence. Daughters does this by putting Eula’s rape and
Yellow Mary’s ruination at the center of its narrative. Eve’s Bayou gains a
central narrative tension from the emerging sexuality of the adolescent
character, Cisely (Meagan Good), and the responses of the adults around
her to her coming of age. Mississippi Damned’s protagonist was sexually
abused at age eight by her male cousin, who himself was sexually abused as
a teenager by an adult man he knew.
All three films show that the hegemonic construction of Black women
and girls rationalizes sexual violence against them and therefore must be
destroyed. They struggle to forge a new common sense of “Blackness” and
of “Black women and girls.” They reject the historical separation between
sexual violence and misogyny and the other violences through which White
supremacy has maintained itself. Apart from the centrality of these forms of
violence to the continuity of various forms of Black existence in the United
States over time, sexual violence and misogyny are structurally necessary to
the perpetuation of white supremacy and anti-Black racism. Any strategy
for combatting White supremacy and other forms of anti-Black racism,
therefore, must simultaneously confront and combat the ways that sexual
violence and misogyny have informed hegemonic conceptualizations of the
categories “Black women” and “Black girls” over time and how these
categories continue to inform present perceptions of them.
Innovating from within an acknowledgment of the centrality of gendered
and sexual violence to the constitution of Blackness in the United States,
then, Daughters, like Eve’s Bayou and Mississippi Damned, generates
expressions of “blackness” and “Black woman” capable of valorizing forms
of Black existence. These forms may serve as vehicles through which the
temporal tension between historical continuity and historical rupture
evident in the two epigraphs at the beginning of this chapter can be
addressed. If for Nana Peazant we “carry inside of us” the memories of the
Africans brought as slaves to the so-called New World, Eula remarks upon
the ways the past enslaves her and the Peazant women. She says to them,
“our past owns us.” The political, cultural, and ontological tensions
Daughters stages are spatiotemporal: how can a group of people whose
logics of belonging together include historical recollections of genocide,
enslavement, and extreme physical violence create the conditions to “live
our lives without living in the fold of old wounds?”
The response Daughters offers to Eula’s question involves, as we have
seen, a politicized aesthetic. Through this aesthetic, Daughters produces, as
Sara Clarke Kaplan puts it, a “historical geography of diaspora through the
performance of a collective cultural memory capable of linking
contemporary individual and familial struggles to the historic trajectories of
imperialism and white supremacy.” By doing this, the “film demonstrates
how, through the open-ended engagement with a shared history of
subjugation and opposition, formerly enslaved people and their descendants
produce and sustain situated practices and places of Diaspora capable of
intervening in contemporary material and discursive structures of racism.”29
While Daughters’s project is diasporic, the film’s setting is decidedly
specific; it takes place on the Sea Islands and focuses attention on the
Gullah cultures supported by the relative isolation of those Islands. The
move from the Sea Islands to the mainland by members of the Peazant
family marks a geographic shift with implications for the cultural continuity
of Gullah culture (which itself is diasporic insofar as it is a mixture of
beliefs, traditions, languages, and so on, that retains African influences even
as it responds to present demands in the United States). The impending
geographic shift that provides one of the narrative tensions in the film calls
forth the temporality mentioned previously.
Lemmons’s film Eve’s Bayou and Mabry’s Mississippi Damned each
explicitly reference a geographic location in its title, calling attention to the
significance each film attributes to the place in which the film is set. Eve’s
Bayou is set in Louisiana in the latter half of the twentieth century, where
the presence of the French colonizers of the “New World” is perceptible in
the Creole language of the descendants of their slaves and in the light skin
tones of the privileged Black middle class. As in Daughters, chattel slavery
provides a historical context for the film’s actions. Eve’s Bayou leaves open
a question about whether the children that a slave woman named Eve bore
for her former owner were conceived “in gratitude,” out of coercion, or for
another reason.30
Similar to the way the geographic specificity of Daughters’s setting
allows for a focus on the Gullah culture of the Sea Islands, the specificity of
Louisiana and its bayous trains Eve’s Bayou’s lenses on the Creole culture
of Louisiana, particularly its mixture of African religious and spiritual
beliefs with those of French Catholicism. By doing so, both films
underscore the significance of the particularities of place for existing modes
of Black existence in the United States and challenge a tendency to conflate
all Black experience by flattening out or ignoring the regional differences
that shape it. Eve’s Bayou assigns the perpetuation of traditional ways to its
female characters by making them, however clandestinely, vehicles for the
reproduction of healing practices and ways of knowing associated with the
African lineage of the Creole culture. The film’s patriarch, Louis Batiste
(Samuel L. Jackson), on the other hand, holds official, medical knowledge,
which the film presents as inseparable from the privilege accorded him
within a patriarchal system structured by White supremacy, a system that
underwrites the skin color logics of the class stratification evident in the
film.
Though none of the characters expresses an interest in leaving, Cisely is
sent away from Eve’s Bayou after her father violates her trust in an
ambiguous incident in which they share a lover’s kiss. The night of his
murder, he had been in a bar on the other side of the train tracks. Cisely’s
sister, Eve, narrates, via voice over at the beginning and the end of the film,
the summer of their father’s death from a temporal distance.31 At the
beginning of the film, this distance shows up aesthetically through the
unfocused pans of the bayou that later mark the viewer’s entry into the
visions of Eve (Jurnee Smollett) or Mozelle (Debbi Morgan). In these
visions, hegemonic organizations of time and space collapse. The visionary
(variously Eve or Mozelle) learns things she could not have known except
through the power of her visions. The end of the film offers this exceptional
spatiotemporal knowledge formation inhabited by Eve and Mozelle as a
resolution to the trauma Cisely experienced. A presentation of an eccentric
orientation within space and time, this cinematic resolution highlights the
significance of audiovisual technologies to the proliferation and resolution
of the problems posed in the film in ways that implicate the story told in the
film itself. In this way, the film calls attention to its status as a recollection,
a retelling set in an unspecified but recent past.
The year in which Daughters is set, 1902, on the other hand, is a specific
time of great significance. Others have pointed to the importance of the date
to African Americans because of the Great Migration. Jacqueline Stewart,
for example, refers to Daughters in her study of Black spectatorship during
the Great Migration. She argues that, in narrating the Peazant family’s
migration from the rural Gullah Islands to the urban Northern United States,
the film highlights the significance of film and other media to the changes
underway and impacting Black people in the United States in 1902. Stewart
refers to the brief scene in which the Unborn Child “looks through a
stereoscopic viewer and sees images of urban life on the mainland” and
points out that “the girl looks at the city images while many of her relatives
prepare to move from the rural South to the urban North where they will
attempt to build modern lives around new kinds of labor and leisure,
including the cinema. This is one of several scenes in which the girl, called
the Unborn Child, foreshadows her family’s migration by interacting with
modern technologies of visual representation (stereoscope, kaleidoscope,
camera).”32
Dash highlights technologies of visual representation throughout
Daughters, calling attention to the centrality of those technologies to the
transformations and tensions staged throughout the film. Those
transformations and tensions—between tradition and modernity, life on the
mainland and life on Gullah Island, the possibilities and challenges of living
their lives “without living in the fold of old wounds”—implicate Dash’s
cinematic project in them. As Stewart explains: “While many viewers read
Daughters of the Dust as a nostalgic, lyrical homage to a Black southern
rural past, the film is also explicitly about Black confrontations with
modernity. The presence of various ‘modern’ objects of visual fascination
call our attention to the presence of Dash’s camera, her self-consciously
cinematic intervention in the representation of a Black premigration past.”33
In the historical context of Daughters’s cinematic meditation on
blackness and on Black women’s relationship to their bodies, questions of
memory, recollection, temporality, cultural continuity, and historical rupture
are central problematics. At the turn of the twentieth century, film and other
visual technologies were increasingly entangled with the changing ways
that time and temporality were being understood, measured, and lived. In
this context, the close historical relationship between film and temporality
has implications for understanding how Daughters and Eve’s Bayou
variably frame the tensions between “recollection” and the need to “heal the
wounds” of the past.
Film technology emerges during a period when global forces were
rationalizing and organizing time in a way that we take for granted today.
As Mary Ann Doane points out, the invention of cinema in the late 1800s
and early 1900s becomes part of a widespread transformation in the ways
that people were experiencing and understanding time. She writes, “One
could argue more generally that at the turn of the century time became
palpable in a quite different way—one specific to modernity and intimately
allied with its new technologies of representation (photography, film,
phonography). Time was indeed felt—as a weight, as a source of anxiety,
and as an acutely pressing problem of representation.”34
A world standardization of time that set the exact length of the day and
established time zones took place during the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries.35 Doane explains that in this period, “time becomes
uniform, homogeneous, irreversible, and divisible into verifiable units….
[T]his rationalized time is a time in complicity with notions of the
inevitability of a technologically induced historical progress. It is
Benjamin’s ‘homogenous, empty time.’ It is also time’s abstraction—its
transformation into discrete units, its consolidation as value, its crucial link
to processes of pure differentiation and measurability.”36 Focusing on the
significance of film to the transformation of time, Doane argues that:
the rationalization of time characterizing industrialization and the expansion of capitalism
was accompanied by a structuring of contingency and temporality through emerging
technologies of representation—a structuring that attempted to ensure their residence
outside structure, to make tolerable an incessant rationalization. Such a strategy is not
designed simply to deal with the leakage or by-products of rationalization; it is structurally
necessary to the ideologies of capitalist modernization.37

Doane’s argument is a helpful rejoinder to existing analyses of the centrality

of temporal schemas to Daughters. She calls attention to the connections
between contingency, chance, the ephemeral, and the rationalization of
time; she also insists that those elements are in concert rather than in
tension with or distinct from each other. Further, Doane insists that such
connections are “structurally necessary” to the maintenance of capitalist
relations. Daughters offers a way to conceptualize the entanglements of
blackness with capitalist modernization in and through the cinematic as
well as the ways that certain expressions of Blackness and Black women
continue to escape such rationalizations. Seen from this angle, Daughters
calls attention to the temporalities of the foundations of the United States—
the genocides of indigenous peoples and Africans and the economies that
accompanied settler colonialism and chattel slavery. In particular,
Daughters frames relations within the Gullah society. There, Native
Americans and Blacks fall in love with each other and ride off into a
landscape that itself is alive, vital, and connected to all that is, ancestors
return to commune with the living in times of need, and meals are prepared
and shared among many as a spiritual offering that sustains collective
material relations.
Daughters frames an intervention into cinematic time (i.e., modern
temporalities) that seeks to recalibrate cinematic time using the
temporalities it makes available so that cinematic time might serve and
support Black feminist projects. By setting Daughters in a period of the
rationalization and standardization of time, Dash places the film’s formal
innovations and thematic concerns within a set of discussions about and
experimentations within cinematic time happening during the time period
presented in the film, continuing throughout the twentieth century, and still
active today. Insofar as modern temporalities can accommodate those
mechanisms for making tolerable the “incessant rationalization of time,” the
formal innovations in Daughters should be understood as constituted within
the cinematic, even when they rely upon a temporality through which we
might glimpse alternatives to hegemonic organizations of time.
In particular, ritual in Daughters introduces a different temporality by
calling an Afrocentric cosmology into existence cinematically. The way in
which it makes possible a conceptualization of Black diasporic existence as
a renewable resource, entangled with cinematic time, yet not fully
assimilated into the dominant logics of Western time and space, bears
directly on this chapter.
The character of “the Unborn Child” links the past to the present in ways
that bind both to an unpredictable future that coexists with the present.
Kaplan explains that in Eula’s “time of need, the ‘old souls’ send her one of
their own in the form of her unborn child.” “The Unborn Child,” therefore,
serves not simply as a marker of an investment in the future but, more
significantly, as evidence of the cyclical nature of time and of the survival
in the present of the past in general. A resource, the past, like the future,
exists now in the child. During this time of great transformation for the
Peazant family and for many Black folks in the United States, “the Unborn
Child,” existing in the film as a figure of potentiality, renders the past and
future open to unforeseeable change expressed now. Bambara writes with
pleasure about Jafa’s choice as cinematographer to question “whether the
standard of twenty-four-frames-per-second rate is kinesthetically the best
for rendering Black experience.” She explains:
A particularly breathtaking moment begins with a deep focus shot of the beach. In the
foreground are men in swallowtail coats and homburgs. Some are standing, others sitting.
Two or three move across the picture plane, coattails buffeted by the breeze. They speak of
the necessity of making right decisions for the sake of the children. Across a stretch of sand
glinting in midground, the children play on the shore in the farground. Several men turn to
look at the children. In turning, their shoulders, hips, arms, form an open “door” through
which the camera moves; maintaining a crisp focus as we approach the children. The frame
rate changes just enough to underscore the children as the future. For a split second we seem
to travel through time to a realm where children are eternally valid and are eternally the
reason for right action. Then the camera pulls back, still maintaining crisp focus as we cross
the sands again and reenter the present, the grownups’ conversation reclaiming our
attention.38

By manipulating the frame rate, Jafa breaks the conventional ordering of

time by film and allows Bambara and others to perceive another temporality
within it, one in which past, present, and future coexist in the image of the
children playing on the shore. In doing so, Jafa’s cinematography makes
perceptible a spatiotemporal ethics for which the existence of children qua
children, and nothing else, is an anchor.
The significance of the children in the sequence Bambara discusses, like
the role of “the Unborn Child” in general, lies in the way they seem to exist
in perpetuity as a marker of an open-ended yet cyclical accumulation of
time.39 While any individual child might grow up and claim a narrative of
childhood, children in general continue to exist in the present and might
serve as vehicles through which ancestors return from the dead to the living,
and the future is simply the unknown now.
Eula’s insistence that the Peazant women live their lives without living in
the fold of old wounds is a call for a mode of production that might
interrupt a simple reproduction of the past. She calls for a type of
recollection that collects not just what existed in the past but even those
possibilities of the past that have not existed yet. It collects the stories,
superstitions, the “old dusty things,” and the other knowledges Africans
who were brought in chains to a so-called New World carried. It collects
that which was thought to be destroyed as part of the effort to consolidate
the historical rupture that is the three-century practice of genocide of Black
Africans.
Black women’s ability to “enjoy our womanhood” is one of those things
that need to be recollected. The cycle of violence against Black women is a
constitutive element of that practice of genocide. As I discuss below, it
continued into the 1980s—the time period in which Dash and Jafa crafted
Daughters—through the 1990s when Eve’s Bayou is produced and the
second half of Mississippi Damned is set, and it continues today. Now,
however, the acknowledged perpetrators of that violence, the practitioners
of the genocide of Black Africans, include, in addition to those recognizable
as White men, a range of other living beings.
No character bridges the gulf between the African ancestors and the
Creole Black folks living on Eve’s Bayou. Yet, Eve’s ability to harness the
ways of knowing and of healing passed down to her from the powerful
medicine woman for whom she was named, marks a subterranean line of
continuity to which characters who can claim and are claimed by the
category “Black women” might respond. Growing into her “gift of sight” at
the end of the film, Eve offers her sister, Cisely, a way to recollect and to
share images of what happened between their father and Cisely by
accessing an audiovisual space-time holding that event. The sisters
portrayed in Eve’s Bayou, who are, of course, daughters too, draw on the
gift of sight that likely can be traced to the slave woman Eve in order to
recollect, recall, and remember. In their portrayal, Lemmons invokes the
significance of images to memory, and hence of cinematic technologies, to
Eve’s Bayou’s feminist project.
No clear account of the kiss between Cisely and her father exists by the
end of the film. It is clear that Louis violated his daughter’s love for him
and that, as Cisely explained to Eve, he “hurt” her emotionally. Eve and
Cisely destroy Louis’s account of it in his letter to Mozelle. Cisely’s
account of it exists only as her memory of it. Eve can access it as a
seemingly objective third-person vision, yet no resolution springs from it,
any more than the narrator’s suggestion that “perhaps in gratitude” the
Batiste’s ancestor, the formerly enslaved Eve, bore sixteen children to the
White man who had her freed after she saved his life with her “powerful
medicine” provides clarity.
 Louis’s violation of Cisely sparked Eve’s desire for her father to die and
led to a series of actions through which, according to the voice-over
narration, the young Eve “killed her father” by revealing the affair Louis
was having with Matty Meraux (Lisa Nicole Carson) to Matty’s husband. A
story of Eve and Cisely’s coming of age, Eve’s Bayou associates sexual
abuse with the temporal rupture in their lives caused by their father’s death.
It extends Daughters’s meditation on Black women’s sexual autonomy by
asking how Eve and Cisely (and their mother and brother) can live their
lives without “living in the fold of old wounds.” In this, it asks how others
who have experienced the feminization commonly associated with
experiencing sexual violence can live, too. It does so without needing to
resolve the status, either of the kiss between Cisely and her father or of the
reason their ancestor bore eleven children to a White man after her
emancipation. The past need not appear clearly or accurately in recollection
for it to harbor present resources through which to introduce invention into
existence.
Mississippi Damned adds to the constellation of thought advanced by
Daughters and Eve’s Bayou about place, temporality, sexual violence, and
Black existence in the United States by setting its story in a poor rural town
in Mississippi during two time periods; the first is 1986, and the second is
1998. Though the film never directly references slavery, the title, which
recalls the song “Mississippi Goddamn,” Nina Simone’s musical
condemnation of racism in Mississippi recorded in 1964, invokes the
legacies of anti-Black racism and White supremacy long associated with the
state of Mississippi.
The narrative tension in Mississippi Damned hinges on what it takes to
escape the cycles of violence, abuse, and poverty that characterize the
milieu in which the film’s characters live in order to go elsewhere (in the
case of the main character of the film, that elsewhere is New York
University) and what it means to leave family behind or to lose them.
Centered, like Daughters, on the prospect of leaving home and family,
Mississippi Damned gives a more contemporary texture and context for
Eula’s observation about the Peazant women at Ibo Landing: “As far as this
place is concerned, we never enjoyed our womanhood…. Deep inside, we
believed that they ruined our mothers, and their mothers before them.”
While in Eula’s statement, the “they” seems to point outside of the Peazant
family to implicate white people, in Mississippi Damned, the women are
also “ruined” within the family through physical, emotional, and sexual
violence that the film presents as entrenched and cyclical, but not all
encompassing.
Where Daughters seeks to craft cinematic images of Black women that
subvert hegemonic images by innovating on the levels of film form, style,
and narrative logics, and Eve’s Bayou embraces conventional narrative form
in order to grasp and reveal sexual autonomy in the cinematic image of
Black women and girls, Mississippi Damned mines hegemonic images for
what they still can convey about the characters portrayed through and
captured by them. Based on a true story, Mississippi Damned does not seek
to offer “better” Black images; instead, it grasps and reveals the poetics,
beauty, and tragedies of interiors, of what occurs inside private homes,
behind closed doors, in offscreen space, and in the inner lives of its
characters.
The film’s first frames establish a place through a piano lightly playing
and sky and trees and orderly rows of crops. There are trailer homes with
clotheslines outside, and an abandoned farmhouse in need of repair. Young
men sit on a porch outside a home. A car drives by a man walking along the
street in a basketball jersey shirt and jeans. A young boy and girl play and
laugh outside in the yard of a home that can be seen in the background.
Using a similar technique as Daughters in the scene Bambara describes,
the frame rate is manipulated for the children; it is slowed down, especially
for the young girl, Kari Peterson (Kylee Russell and Tessa Thompson), who
will be the film’s main character. She will grow up over the course of the
film and make the difficult decision to leave her home and family in rural
Mississippi in order to attend university in New York City. At age eight, she
will be raped by her male cousin, Sammy (Malcolm David Kelley and
Malcolm Goodwin). She will witness the immediate aftermath of her Aunt
Charlie’s (Jossie Thacker) violent attack on Charlie’s lover’s mistress.
Twelve years later, Kari will put her sister Leigh (Chastity Kershal
Hammitte) in a mental institution. She will find her other aunt, Anna (Simbi
Kali Williams), in a diabetic and ultimately fatal coma. Kari will discover
that Anna stopped taking her insulin as a last resort after being laid off from
the job at which she had worked for decades and finding that she is too old
to get another job. She will help her father to care for her mother after they
learn that Kari’s mother has cancer, but she will leave even though she still
feels needed.
The sequence that introduces Kari as a child is followed by the framing
of the interior of a home, where money is on the table, bets are being taken,
and text on the screen conveys that it is the year 1986. The adults are
playing cards at a house party. Like Eve’s Bayou, Mississippi Damned
introduces viewers to the complexity of the social milieu depicted in the
film during a party scene early in the film. While the opening party
sequence in Eve’s Bayou highlights the bourgeois trappings and manners of
the Batiste family, Mississippi Damned illuminates a working-class home
and the modes of sociality of a Southern Black working-class and poor
community.
Mississippi Damned eschews its inheritance of a “burden of
representation” that has been placed on Black films—a burden to produce
and put into circulation “positive” images and resist entanglements with
existing stereotypes. It produces a Black feminist narrative by refusing to be
silent about the sexual and gender violences that exist in Black
communities. Instead, it depicts a cycle of such violence by portraying the
rape of the main character, Kari, by her cousin Sammy as part of a cycle
that includes Sammy’s sexual abuse by an older man in the community.40
Mississippi Damned rarely references the political context of the time
period in which it is set.41 However, one character, Tyrone (D. B.
Woodside), indirectly references the centrality of anti-Black racism in the
United States in limiting the range of life chances and possibilities for the
film’s characters when he indicts the racism displayed by his union. Anna’s
loss of her job for not being fast enough on the assembly line likewise
invokes the economic policies of the Reagan administration.
Even though Mississippi Damned does not make available an overt
political commentary that illuminates the reasons for the lack of financial
and other resources available to the characters in the film, aesthetically and
through its narrative, it offers a nuanced depiction of its characters and the
events in which they participate. This serves to undermine existing
conservative narratives that blame poor people for their economic
conditions. While several of the characters do objectionable or violent
things, none are simply villainized, and everyone except Sammy’s abuser
has a backstory that provides a context for their actions, even the most
harmful and violent ones (e.g., Sammy’s abuse of Kari in 1986 and of his
children’s babysitter in 1998, or Tyrone’s abusive actions toward Anna).42
Rather than justifying these characters’ violent actions, Mississippi Damned
contextualizes them within a set of socioeconomic conditions that are
presented as endemic to the Mississippi town in which the film is set.
The use of a mobile camera, which offers a sense of immediacy to the
actions without driving or determining them, implicates the film’s viewers
in the film’s unfolding and encourages a relational engagement with the
film’s characters. By alternating between Kari’s point of view and an
objective one, for example, the mobile camera involves its spectators in the
actions as they unfold. This encourages a spectatorial mode through which
the relationships between the characters, rather than the motivations and
actions of any particular character, gain significance and value. Similar to
Daughters, Mississippi Damned produces a sense of shared, social,
contiguous-reality space. Unlike Daughters, however, which conveys a
sense of a vast shared, natural space, many of the spaces of Mississippi
Damned are either exterior establishing shots of the existing organization of
things in the small rural Mississippi town or cramped interiors of homes or
cars or institutions. Even when shooting exteriors, of the Petersons’ yard,
for example, where Junior Peterson (Adam Clark) works on his car or
Kari’s mother and Aunt Anna sit outside the house and scale fish, the
mobile camera’s frequent alternation between long shots and close-ups
reinforces a sense of tightly controlled spaces. Taken together, these shots
make perceptible a social, contiguous-reality space whose boundaries and
borders seem systematically defined and impenetrable at the same time as it
establishes a sense of collectivity and interrelation between the members of
Kari’s family.
Kari is the film’s main character and a proxy for the film’s director, Tina
Mabry, on whose life the film is based. Still, the struggle depicted
stylistically and in the film’s narrative is between individual aspirations and
group, in this case familial, possibilities whose resolution affirms a set of
individual aspirations that might generate new possibilities for the group. In
its depiction of the difficult decisions involved in leaving home to pursue
something different, Mississippi Damned poses, with Daughters, the related
questions that I characterized at the beginning of this chapter as ones that
have been central to Black existence in the United States. Namely, “How
can a group of people whose sense of belonging together as a group has
been forged in a crucible of violence and alienation craft a collective mode
of existence? How can the project avoid replicating the alienation and
violence to provide a vehicle for resistance and redress, if not radical
transformation, of those past violences?” The characters in Mississippi
Damned respond by investing collectively in Kari’s university education
and sending her outside of the spaces to which they are confined. Though
Kari ventures from her home alone, like those members of the Peazant
family who choose to leave the Sea Islands for the mainland, she does so
carrying a collective hope that her leaving home will provide a way to
escape the pull to live “in the fold of old wounds.”
Where the temporality that animates Daughters reflects film
technologies, the temporal rhythms of television are significant to
Mississippi Damned. The film finesses its transition from 1986 to 1998 by
training its viewers’ attention on television snow. In the last scene that takes
place in 1986, Sammy has moved into the Peterson’s home after his mother
went to prison for attacking her lover’s mistress. Sammy’s father, who
never appears in the film, has just cancelled plans to take Sammy to the
movies. Disappointed, Sammy finds eight-year-old Kari in her bedroom,
watching television. Kari recognizes his disappointment and tries to console
him, and he quietly rapes her. As in Daughters and Eve’s Bayou, the sexual
violence takes place offscreen, but it can be inferred through the soundtrack
as the camera focuses on the snow on the television screen.
Focusing on the television screen during the sexual assault on the main
character calls attention to the temporalities of domestic space, and to what
was not accounted for in the socioeconomic logics that underwrote the
rhythms of television’s temporalities in 1986. Snow came on the television
after the network’s regular programming ended every night and remained
on the screen until the programming began the next day. An audiovisual
technology designed for domestic space instead of the public theaters
characteristic of film, the temporal rhythms of television were animated by
calculations about who would be home during specific times of the day, and
what they would be doing there. Snow appeared on television sets late at
night, at a time when the types of reproductive labor entrusted to the
domestic space were not thought to be as amenable to incorporation into the
rhythms of television.43
That sexual violence is associated with televisual snow in Mississippi
Damned underscores the ways naming, making perceptible, and redressing
such violence eludes the cinematic visual logics through which Black
women and girls appear, since a capacity for sexual violence already
structures several stereotypes of Black masculinity and a perception of
sexual availability already structures several of Black femininity.44
Focusing visually on the snow and audibly on muffled sounds of a child
being raped, Mississippi Damned produces a cinematic image of sexual
violence against a young Black girl that refuses incorporation into the logics
of cinematic spectacle. It also calls attention to the ways that incest and
sexual violence exist in the interstices of filmic and televisual time. The
mobile camera pulls in toward the television until televisual snow fills the
entire frame of the film for a time. Then, the camera pulls back from the
televisual snow to reveal a figure sitting in front of the screen, staring at the
snow. Slowly, that figure becomes recognizable as Kari, but she is much
older.
Text on the screen conveys that it is 1998. The shot of television snow
fills the space of twelve years in Mississippi Damned’s time. In this way,
Mississippi Damned makes sexual violence perceptible as part of Kari’s
character structure as a young adult. She has lived for twelve years in its
folds. Through circumstances that are both of their own making as well as
being due to the actions of other members of the family, Sammy kills
himself at the end of the film rather than be taken by the police for raping
another child, and Kari leaves Mississippi to attend university in New York
City. Both of these actions interrupt the cycles that have characterized the
lives of the characters in the film to that point.45
In Daughters, Dash interrupts the common sense held by the Peazants
about Black women’s sexuality through Eula’s admonition to the Peazant
women for scorning Yellow Mary because she’s been “ruined.” To do so,
Eula calls attention to her own rape and asks whether the Peazant women
believe that she is ruined too:
 ANGLE ON—EULA
Her anger, quick movements, and advanced state of pregnancy are causing her noticeable
distress. Eula fights to hold back the bitter bile rising in her throat.
EULA
If you’re so ashamed of Yellow Mary ‘cause she got ruined…. Well, what do you say about
me? (Gesturing to her pregnant stomach) Am I ruined too?
The women freeze in mid-motion, their mouths open, gaping. Sexual abuse, a legacy of
slavery, is a part of their unspoken history. Hearing Eula’s words, the women are “shamed”
for Eli and respectfully turn their faces away from him.46

A legacy of slavery, sexual abuse has continued to form part of the

“unspoken history” of individual Black American women and girls long
past the end of chattel slavery in the United States. With Daughters of the
Dust, Dash offers subsequent filmmakers a cinematic theory of sexual and
gender violence, insisting that interventions into the continuing existence of
those violences as structuring logics of Black womanhood become part of
any response to broader questions about the possibilities and potentialities
for introducing invention into existence, as framed through Eula’s plea to
“live our lives without living in the fold of old wounds.”
Eula, Eli (Adisa Anderson), and Yellow Mary choose to remain at Ibo
Landing rather than go to the mainland, as if to insist that renewal can occur
organically right where they are. Eve’s Bayou and Mississippi Damned each
offer different responses to Eula’s plea, yet they also valorize the
perspectives and experiences of the girls and women at the center of those
films. Mississippi Damned ends with an image of Kari’s profile as she
drives her car out of Mississippi. After passing a “Welcome to Mississippi”
sign, Kari looks back at it briefly and smiles, before looking forward toward
the open road. Eve’s Bayou ends with an image of connection to place,
family, past, and future. As the two sisters, Eve and Cisely, hold hands by
the bayou, a man mutely witnesses their connection, music swells, and the
camera pans out to reveal the vast beauty of the place they inhabit. Now.

N
1. Julie Dash, Daughters of the Dust: The Making of an African American Woman’s Film (New
York: New Press, 1992), 96.
2. Ibid., 157.
3. David Marriott, “Inventions of Existence: Sylvia Wynter, Frantz Fanon, Sociogeny, and ‘the
Damned,’” CR: The New Centennial Review 11, no. 3 (2012): 46–47.
 4. In 1999, Sheila Smith McKoy argued that Black diasporic cultures share a concept of time that
she refers to as “limbo time.” See Sheila Smith McKoy, “The Limbo Contest: Diaspora
Temporality and its Reflection in Praisesong for the Widow and Daughters of the Dust,”
Callaloo 22, no. 1 (1999): 219–20.
5. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara
Habberjam (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), xiv.
6. Ibid., xiv.
7. Haile Gerima, “Triangular Cinema, Breaking Toys, and Dinknesh vs. Lucy,” in Questions of
Third Cinema, ed. Jim Pines and Paul Willemen (London: British Film Institute, 1989), 65–89.
8. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), xii.
9. Since the completion of this chapter, others have remarked upon the influence and significance
of Daughters of the Dust for Black feminist media making. See, for example, Josslyn Luckett,
“The Daughters Debt: How Black Spirituality and Politics Are Transforming the Televisual
Landscape,” Film Quarterly 72, no. 4 (June 1, 2019): 9–17.
10. The claim that cultural texts theorize is not a new one. Barbara Christian’s well-known
assertion that “our theorizing (and I intentionally use the verb rather than the noun) is often
found in narrative forms, in the stories we create, in riddles and proverbs, in play with
language, since dynamic rather than fixed ideas seem more to our liking” is perhaps the most
widely cited. Recently, Régine Michelle Jean-Charles included this quote from Christian in an
essay that uses Aishah Shahidah Simmons’ documentary, NO! The Rape Documentary (2006),
as itself a form of theorizing. Focusing on the representations of rape in Lee Daniels’s Precious
(2009), Jean-Charles identifies “Simmons as a theorist of race, class, sexuality, gender, and
violence whose exploration of rape makes room for privileging black women’s own
perspectives, emotions, and perception of their violations. Using her work in this way as both a
model and a theoretical tool for analyzing representations of sexual violence in Precious is also
a gesture that attempts to diminish the divide between theory and praxis.” Régine Michelle
Jean-Charles, “‘I Think I Was Rape’: Black Feminist Readings of Affect and Incest in
Precious,” Black Camera 4, no. 1 (Winter 2012): 142.
11. I have left for others the task of more fully engaging each film in ways that tend more to their
differences than I have here.
12. Black women have been making this argument since at least the late 1890s, when Ida B Wells,
Anna Julia Cooper, Mary Church Terrell, Pauline Hopkins, and others pointed out that
lynchings of black men often were presented (however falsely) as retribution for the alleged
rape of White women, while the rape of Black women by White men was sanctioned and
justified by a construction of “Black woman” that precluded any notion of “virtue.” For a
discussion of the ways Black feminists have understood race, gender, and sexuality to be
historically coconstitutive, see, for example, Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, “African-
American Women’s History and the Metalanguage of Race,” Signs 17, no. 2 (1992): 251–74.
13. In a dialogue with bell hooks, Julie Dash explains, “I did not want to say the word ‘rape’ ever,
so a lot of people are angry because I don’t just spell it out. I wanted to say ‘rape’ without
saying ‘R-A-P-E.’ So the dialogue goes, ‘she got forced.’ ‘Some man was riding her.’ ‘Did you
tell him?’ “Did you ever tell Eli?’ It’s the way black women talk about this kind of thing. They
don’t just come out and say it. Even today, lots of women don’t just come out and say it. They
work around it.” Dash, Daughters of the Dust.
14. Deleuze, Cinema 2, xii.
15. Ibid.
16. See Kara Keeling, The Witch’s Flight: The Cinematic, the Black Femme, and the Image of
Common Sense (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007).
17. I take seriously Frank Wilderson’s claim that “From the coherence of civil society the black
subject beckons with the incoherence of civil war. Civil war, then, becomes that unthought but
never forgotten spectre waiting in the wings—the understudy of Gramsci’s hegemony.” My
use of common sense here is focused on the extent to which conceptions of the world must be
shared among groups for them to be able to communicate. The vast disagreements among
groups of people about the value and significance of certain images, to the extent that they can
communicate with each other about those images, are indicative of the availability of a range
of common senses in any present image. See Frank Wilderson III, “Gramsci’s Black Marx:
Whither the Slave in Civil Society?” Social Identities 9, no. 2 (2003): 239.
18. Though a full consideration of the much discussed visual resonances between singer Beyoncé’s
2016 visual album Lemonade and Daughters of the Dust are beyond the scope of this chapter, I
call attention to them here to underscore the ongoing influence of Daughters’s aesthetic
innovations and thematic concerns.
19. Thanks to Daphne Brooks and Jacqueline Stewart for helping me to arrive at this formulation
of my argument.
20. Toni Cade Bambara, “Preface,” in Dash, Daughters of the Dust, xii.
21. Dash explained in an interview that she “wanted to take the African-American experience and
rephrase it in such a way that, whether or not you understood the film on the first screening,
the visuals would be so haunting it would break through with a freshness about what we
already know.” Kevin Thomas, “Filmmaker’s Unique View of the Black Experience,” Los
Angeles Times, March 20, 1992, F15–F16, quoted in Joel R. Brouwer, “Repositioning: Center
and Margin in Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust,” African American Review 29, no. 1 (1995):
5.
22. Bambara, “Preface,” xiii.
23. Dash, Daughters of the Dust, 8.
24. In limited theatrical release, Daughters of the Dust sold out in theaters in the United States and
grossed $1 million in the first year of its release. It has become widely acclaimed as among the
most significant American films ever made. Greg Tate, for example, has referred to Daughters
as “an unparalleled and unprecedented achievement in terms of both world cinema and African
aesthetics.” Greg Tate, “Of Homegirl Goddesses and Geechee Women: The Africentric
Cinema of Julie Dash,” The Village Voice, June 4, 1991, 72.
25. For information and an analysis about the bias for whiteness built into most film stocks, see
Richard Dyer, “Lighting for Whiteness,” anthologized in Images: A Reader, ed. Sunil
Manghani, Arthur Piper, and Jon Simons (Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE, 2006), 278–84.
26. For thorough descriptions of this aesthetic, see “Dialogue Between bell hooks and Julie Dash,
April 26, 1992,” in Dash, Daughters of the Dust, 27–67, and the previously cited essay by
Bambara, “Reading the Signs, Empowering the Eye.” Other discussions of the aesthetics of
Daughters can be found in Joel R. Brouwer, “Repositioning: Center and Margin in Julie
Dash’s Daughters of the Dust,” African American Review 29, no. 1 (1995): 5–16; Angeletta K.
M. Gourdine, “Fashioning the Body [as] Politic in Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust,”
African American Review (2004): 499–511; and Michael T. Martin, “I Do Exist”: From ‘Black
Insurgent’ to Negotiating the Hollywood Divide—A Conversation with Julie Dash,” Cinema
Journal (2010), among others.
27. Though I arrived at this formulation before reading Michael Gillespie’s recent book Film
Blackness, I believe my work with films in this essay complements the method of reading
 Gillespie calls “film blackness.” See Michael Boyce Gillespie, Film Blackness: American
Cinema and the Idea of Black Film (Chapel Hill, NC: Duke University Press, 2016).
28. Dash, Daughters of the Dust, 156.
29. Sara Kaplan, “Souls at the Crossroads, Africans on the Water: The Politics of Diasporic
Melancholia,” Callaloo 30, no. 2 (2007): 512.
30. For a discussion of this, see Keeling, Witch’s Flight, 139.
31. Space does not permit me to discuss the similarities between the use of voice-over narration in
Eve’s Bayou and in Daughters of the Dust. Yet, as an anonymous reader of this chapter pointed
out, doing so would lend further support for my arguments.
32. Jacqueline Stewart, “Negroes Laughing at Themselves? Black Spectatorship and the
Performance of Urban Modernity,” Critical Inquiry 29, no. 4 (June 2003): 650. See also
Stewart’s discussion of Daughters in Jacqueline Najuma Stewart, Migrating to the Movies:
Cinema and Black Urban Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005).
33. Ibid., 650.
34. Mary Ann Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 4.
35. Ibid., 5.
36. Ibid., 6–7.
37. Ibid., 11.
38. Bambara, “Preface,” xv.
39. This formulation is informed by my reading of Ian Baucom, Specters of the Atlantic: Finance
Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005).
40. Confrontations with and arguments against the sociopolitical injunction to produce “positive
images” have been part of film theory and criticism for quite some time, yet they remain part
of the common sense of Black film reception. Though a fuller elaboration of how film theory
and criticism can continue to open different avenues of analysis and conceptualization than
those which rely upon an understanding of “representation” is beyond the scope of this
chapter, the present discussion builds upon my work in The Witch’s Flight, in order to offer
other ways of thinking about the politics of cinematic images. See also Gillespie’s related
argument in Film Blackness, for an argument against reading Black films as sociological rather
than as art.
41. In this regard, the film has affinities with Lee Daniels’s acclaimed film Precious, which also
was released in 2009; is set in the 1980s; and contributes to a cinematic conversation about
cycles of poverty, incest, violence, and Black existence. Mississippi Damned opens onto a
different set of concerns and interests that I have been arguing in this chapter can be traced
through a line of Black woman filmmakers that includes Julie Dash and Kasi Lemmons, and
that participates in a cinematic construction of Black women in which sexual and gender
violence appears as a violation of Black women’s autonomy over the use of their bodies.
Though a full discussion of Precious and Mississippi Damned is beyond the scope of this
chapter, my thinking about Mississippi Damned has benefited from my reading of the
contributions to the special issue of Black Camera on Precious. See “Close Up: Precious,” in
Black Camera 4, no. 1 (2012).
42. Mississippi Damned won the Grand Jury Award for Outstanding US Dramatic Feature at Los
Angeles’ LGBT film festival, Outfest, in 2009, even though it did not present especially
“positive images” of lesbian or gay characters—the film’s out lesbian ends up in the psych
ward, and the homosexual contact between men presented in the film is coerced, not
consensual. I leave for another project a discussion of the ways that Mississippi Damned fits
within what I understand to be a postrepresentational film and media practice.
43. See, for example, Nick Browne, “The Political Economy of the Television (Super) Text,”
Quarterly Review of Film & Video 9, no. 3 (1984): 174–82, and Lynn Spigel, Make Room for
TV: Television and the Family Ideal in Postwar America (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1992). For a foundational consideration of the significance of television to the
commonsense Black cultural politics navigated during the 1980s see Herman Gray, Watching
Race: Television and the Struggle for Blackness (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
2004). For a study of African American women and television that offers analyses of the kinds
of television shows featuring Black female characters that aired during the 1980s, see Beretta
E. Smith-Shomade, Shaded Lives: African-American Women and Television (Hoboken, NJ:
Rutgers University Press, 2002).
44. An interesting counterpoint to pursue here would be the centrality of television to the abuse
Lee Daniels’s Precious suffers.
45. It would be interesting to pursue this formulation of escape across other films set in the same
historical time period, such as, for example, John Singleton’s Boyz n the Hood (1991). I thank
Jacqueline Stewart and Daphne Brooks for pointing this trajectory in Black cinematic thought
out to me.
46. Dash, Daughters of the Dust, 155.
 SECTION III

APPARATUS AND PERCEPTION

 CHAPTER 12

LESBIAN PHOTOGRAPHERS
Affect and Cinematic Self-
Discovery

MARTA FIGLEROWICZ

IN Parables for the Virtual, Brian Massumi describes the film camera as a
tool of self-discovery. This self-discovery is achieved through a paradox:
the person who watches himself onscreen improves his understanding of
himself by seeing the incoherence and contradictoriness of his bodily
expression. To illustrate this point, Massumi examines how a film camera
captured Ronald Reagan in the process of acquiring his artistic and political
persona. A character began to emerge out of his scattered, accidental
gestures. The camera caught this act of transformation; indeed, it appears to
have enabled it in the first place. It served Reagan as a tool of enhanced
“proprioception.”1 Watching himself onscreen, Massumi claims, allowed
Reagan to perceive and gradually harness a new version of who he was—a
version that had previously been unconscious and unnameable.
Reagan’s story, as Massumi tells it, does not simply boil down to the
attainment of self-mastery. Instead, the camera makes Reagan feel
perpetually fragmented and incomplete. It makes him acutely aware of the
irreducibility of his being to any single identity or perspective. New
expressions, desires, and needs might continue to emerge within him—and
the way in which they are captured, if at all, is not introspective but
“relational.” Massumi puts this point as follows:
 Seeing oneself as others see one in fact means occupying an axis of vision on a tangent to
self and other, both as actual entities and as conditions of identity. It is to enter a space that
opens an outside perspective on the self-other, subject-object axis. The tangent point at
which movement-vision meets mirror-vision and diverges from it is the space between the
subject-object poles, superposed, fractured, multiplied.2

Massumi’s phrasing is quite abstract. Put less abstractly, the camera helps
Reagan see himself as always more present and more expressive than he
knows. It makes him aware of his body as only definable in a constant,
interminable process of Argus-like attention. From this discovery of his
unsounded expressive richness, Reagan supposedly derives his famous
performative charisma: a confidence that not even he himself can predict
how curious and appealing his presence might become to others.
Massumi’s analysis of the film camera as a tool of proprioception echoes
Friedrich Kittler’s Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. In this earlier book,
Kittler describes film as the site of discovering the psychoanalytic
imaginary: a penumbra of potentialities, contingencies, and loose ends by
which our sense of ourselves and our reality is always fringed.3 Massumi’s
reading of Reagan also goes back, even further, to Hugo Munsterberg’s and
Eadweard Muybridge’s understanding of film as a medium of superhuman
documentation that allows us to capture the world around us with a
precision that exceeds our senses.4 Parables of the Virtual also, just as
importantly, complicates a long line of criticism that shows how the camera
can predetermine the ideological content of our gaze, whether for politically
reactionary or subversive ends.5 Massumi does not simply replace the
notion of the categorizing cinematic gaze with Gilles Deleuze’s
understanding of film as pure movement and fragmentation.6 Instead, he
holds these two perspectives in tension with each other. He suggests that the
film camera allows us to become simultaneously aware of the unbounded
flow of sensory information that emerges from our environments and
selves, and of the limitedness of the cares that bind us to some bodies over
others—and to our own body most of all. In Massumi’s reading of Reagan’s
relationship to the camera, the proprioception it enables constantly thwarts
Reagan’s attempts at a coherent self-analysis but also constantly invites
introspective curiosity. It lets him recognize himself both as a particular
human body toward which other people’s attention might be directed and as
a being whose self-expression is never final; someone who cannot be
summarized or predicted on the basis of any single past pose or gesture.
When it came out in 2003, Massumi’s Parables for the Virtual was
acclaimed as an early introduction of affect theory, and affect-based
aesthetic analysis, to visual and textual media. Since then, affect theory has
continued to influence film studies from several directions. Eugenie
Brinkema’s Forms of the Affects finds in film a capacity to turn embodied
human feelings into visual and auditory abstractions.7 In Carnal Thoughts,
Vivian Sobchack highlights the embodied affective responses that viewers
have to film and other visual media.8 Many other scholars have pursued
cinema as the site of expressing, and codifying, particular affective styles.
Some examples of this work are Maggie Hennefeld’s recent study of female
physical comedy and Sianne Ngai’s exploration of affective expression in
Our Aesthetic Categories and Ugly Feelings.9
These authors have collectively shown how useful the concept of affect
can be to film studies. But they have generally shied away from the more
provocative suggestion made by Massumi’s analysis: that cinema, and the
reflexive experiences it enables, have something to tell us about affect
itself, and can usefully frame our relationship to awareness and selfhood.10
This essay takes Massumi’s hypothesis more seriously, accepting film as a
tool of insight quite as earnestly as he does.11 I also find reflections of this
instrumentally introspective view of cinema in several films’ own
metatextual accounts of themselves. Such an argument might have been
relatively easier to make about experimental documentaries or
autobiographical auteur productions. To showcase its applicability even to
much more mainstream narrative cinema, I focus on a group of films that
represent romantic relationships between women: Lisa Cholodenko’s High
Art (1998), Todd Haynes’s Carol (2015), and Sebastián Leilo’s
Disobedience (2017). As I show, an account of film as a site and standard
for affective proprioception is crucial to all three works’ aesthetic as well as
to their provocative, unusual politics of queer self-formation.
All three films reflect on their medium as a site for capturing and
reflecting on desires that do not have clear social patterns of identification
and expression. Rather than simply diagnose the women they represent as
socially repressed lesbians, these films theorize their characters’ affects as
processes that are too fluid to ground any stable self-understanding. In so
doing, they develop a notion of queerness, and queer selfhood, constituted
around the kind of “relational” proprioception Massumi describes. They
suggest that, to be genuinely open to discovering our bodies, we need to
challenge not only other people’s but also our own capacity to reliably
categorize and cognize ourselves. We also need to accept our bodies’
irreducibility to any single nameable orientation or drive, sexual or
otherwise. Film, as these works depict it, is a site of recognizing and
highlighting limits to one’s bodily and affective awareness, which turns out
to be no match for our varied and often surprisingly revealing affective
expressivity.12 Film also constitutes a site where sexual identity itself
becomes an increasingly subverted and fluid category. That is not simply
because of the sexual polymorphy of these films’ characters, but also
because sexual desire, as they depict it, is not the origin and endpoint of all
human needs and relations.
These three films all use the photographic camera as a foil for the film
camera, to signify and reject a more clear-cut way of representing and
identifying one’s sexuality. The trope of the lesbian photographer has
become a clichéd fixture of films about love between women, as much so as
the lesbian plumber. Critics have previously commented on these pervasive
photo cameras as phallic objects: they give lesbian desire a prominence and
explicitness that social norms conventionally fail to accord it.13 I suggest
that these photo cameras also highlight the more complicated affective work
of the film camera. Photo-taking gives these characters a false sense of
finality that obscures, rather than answers, the questions that their ongoing
bodily expression continues to raise. Coming to terms with the irreducible
multiplicity of our wants and needs—a multiplicity irreducible even to
nonnormative terms such as “bisexual” or “lesbian”—constitutes, in High
Art, Carol, and Disobedience, a more difficult challenge than simply
coming out to oneself and others. The moving image—fringed with
recurrent temptations to arrest it—illustrates both its epistemic difficulty
and its existential necessity. For their characters, photo cameras represent a
hope of catching a portrait of their desires and these desires’ objects that
could be definitively framed and labeled. These still cameras are set in
tension with the implied moving image cameras through which we receive
these characters’ bodies within temporal narratives, and in which the
seemingly clear categories photographs offer melt into nebulous clusters of
gestures, affects, and intentions. Embracing this nebulousness, the three
films depict it as a more reliable and honest, if less easily actionable, vision
of the desiring, expressive self.
Roger Hallas describes queer cinema as defined by “a rejection or neglect
of narrative linearity and trajectory,” in favor of “a fetishistic preoccupation
with the moment, the detail, the fragment.”14 These films, I would suggest,
express their queerness in their insistence on time as a succession of such
moments that is perpetually open, and only freeze-framed in fantasy or
idealization. Linear time, in which our identities emerge and take shape,
does not stop with our chosen expression of them. The ways in which we
try to arrest ourselves reveal limits to our self-mastery and self-awareness,
as well as the arbitrariness with which we look to some events over others
as the definitive signs of our present and future being.
It is significant that the queer self-theorizing these films undertake
proceeds through representations of female bodies and gazes. But the
conceptual work they accomplish does not amount simply to a reversal of
gender categories and an empowerment of the female body and gaze against
male dominance and objectification.15 These films lean into prevalent social
stereotypes of lesbian sex as less easily categorizable and “sexual” than
heteronormative or gay male sex. They play with cultural notions of female
desire as supposedly more elusive and passive than male desire, and as
more easily assimilable into friendship or companionship even when it
involves direct physical intercourse.16 In the process, they show how
arbitrary, in general, are the gestures and situations that we tend culturally
to frame and highlight as signs of our “true” identity and sexual expression,
or as breakthrough moments when our feelings and tendencies are
definitively asserted. In this way, the three films use Massumi’s seemingly
apolitical notion of cinematic proprioception to launch into quite profound
meditations on the limits of sexual identity as a concept by which queer
self-awareness and empowerment are measured. Acknowledging the
changeability of one’s priorities and orientations, and even the inconsistent
centrality of sexuality itself to one’s life—as well as incomplete control we
have over the tone and purpose of our self-expression—becomes, for them,
a much more significant goal than the pursuit of supposedly clearer sexual
self-discoveries and affirmations.
High Art takes its narrative energy from the process of emotional and
intellectual self-discovery through the eyes and cameras of strangers. An
older, openly lesbian photographer named Lucy (Ally Sheedy) rekindles her
work at the inspiration of a young journalist named Syd (Radha Mitchell).
Both women push each other to expose themselves to public scrutiny.
Meanwhile, they also become lovers. When the film begins, Syd is in a
straight relationship. A recently promoted assistant editor at Frame, she
brings her senior editors scones and coffee. Lucy has had some major
successes but burned her bridges with the New York art world a decade
earlier, and has since been living abroad with a drug-addicted failed actress
(Patricia Clarkson), both of them in a more or less permanent heroin haze.
Syd’s and Lucy’s professional and romantic stasis is shaken by the
discovered porosity and mutual perceptibility of Syd’s and Lucy’s social
worlds. Lucy’s leaking bathroom pipe sends Syd upstairs, where she meets
Lucy as her new neighbor. This leak produces repeated communication
between them, and turns them into a dyad of mutual observers and
admirers. Upon seeing Lucy’s work hung around the apartment, Syd
encourages her to bring it to an even larger public. Conversely, Lucy’s
admiration for Syd as an intellectual and physical presence makes Syd
aware of herself as someone who could take up other people’s mental space.
As the two women become enamored of each other’s gazes—and of the
public eye these gazes bring with them—the order of priority or primacy in
their professional and romantic self-discoveries also becomes increasingly
difficult to distinguish. Clearly, this encounter allows both women to
appreciate previously obscured or forgotten facets of their minds and
bodies. But it is hard to tell whether this is a love affair to which mutual
career advancement is incidental—or whether we are watching a younger
woman take professional advantage of an older one, or vice versa. Critics
tend to disagree about these questions vehemently, and different opinions
are offered even within High Art itself. Lucy’s lover Greta continues to
warn her about Syd’s supposed manipulativeness. Lucy herself confesses to
her mother that she is not sure whether she is embarking on a new love
affair or not. Part of the point of the film is that Syd and Lucy both seem
unable to acknowledge—or to recognize within the photographs they take
and analyze—the possibility that the motivations that draw them together
are manifold, and mutually contradictory, in a way that can leave them
feeling more torn and incoherent than the pictures they take of each other
seem to suggest. In both the first and last minutes of the film, Syd runs into
a young woman who is currently working as Frame’s secretary—a position
that, if the other editors are an indication, provides an uncertain
steppingstone toward higher editorial positions. This woman sits at the
office entrance awkwardly reading Dostoevsky. “What did you need to do?”
she asks Syd in the opening shots, and in the last shot she looks at Syd as if
she now has the answer: what you need to do, it turns out, is sleep with a
major player in your field. Resolving this affective contradiction would
have stabilized the tone of the film, in a way that many of its early
reviewers asked for: it would have turned it more definitively into a
romantic drama or a more cynical film about women in the workplace and
the corporate glass ceiling. However, with self-conscious obstinacy, High
Art refuses to settle into such a resolution.
The psychological and narrative unresolvedness of the film is reinforced
by the blandness of the film’s dialogues. (This blandness, and High Art’s
many silences, also highlight that its main sensory opposition is between
stillness and motion rather than between the visual and the auditory.) The
words its characters exchange tend to be merely pragmatic or elliptical. The
narrative moves along through simple verbal negotiations of future plans:
the characters plan journal issues, invite each other to parties, decide to
move or stay in an apartment. More emotional conversations, such as those
Lucy has with her mother and with Greta, are left unfinished. Much time is
also spent in silence, driving, or in a heroin haze. Narrative tension is
produced, instead, by the process of entering and leaving each other’s fields
of vision, in waves of affective shifts that are palpable but unnamed and
unresolved: as when Syd appears at Lucy’s doorstep, time and again, while
Lucy had expected someone else; when Lucy’s mother leaves the room
mid-conversation; when Syd and Lucy disappear into the latter’s bedroom,
to gaze intensely into each other’s eyes, while Syd’s boyfriend looks around
the rest of the apartment for her; or when Syd repeatedly tries to draw her
editors’ attention to Lucy, and the latter reciprocates by drawing these
editors’ attention to her.
 The photographs Lucy takes of the people around her, and then of Syd,
constitute the fulcrum of this ambiguity. Her photos of Syd during their
weekend together, which end up on the cover of Syd’s journal, depict them
as lovers in a way that is unquestionable, and apparently moving, even to
Syd’s chilly chief editor Dominique. Placed on the cover of a prominent
magazine, they also seem to advertise their love boldly and earnestly to
anyone. But as viewers of the whole film, we are made to realize that this
intimacy is an aesthetic effect Lucy knows how to repeat and sell: an effect
that, moreover, she has produced with many other models whose
attachment to her we have been made to question. Collapsing into each
other the professional and romantic dimensions of these two women’s bond,
these photos also obscure the fact that, when these photographs are printed,
Lucy is already dead from a drug overdose. To follow Lucy’s gaze onto
these photographs in the film’s final shots is to be reminded of how much
they fail to show, and how many of the romantic and professional questions
they are supposedly answering for Syd in fact remain hopelessly muddled.
These juxtapositions of photos and their narrative subversions point to
the film camera as a medium that captures these women’s mutual feelings
and intentions in a way that is capacious and open-ended. It helps us notice
not only these women’s attempts at a self-controlled, sleek intimacy but
also the awkwardness of the emergent interpersonal and self-centered
tensions amid which these efforts at clarity and self-control emerge. Many
of the photographs Lucy takes repeat the framing of the film’s own shots of
her apartment and of the motel she and Syd end up sharing. In one early
apartment scene, Greta bends her head back in a way that echoes the
photographs of drugged party guests Lucy has hung in her bathroom. In
another scene, Syd has sex with her boyfriend in a way that leaves them
spooning on top of one other in an almost exact prefiguration of the shared
postcoital photo Lucy will take of Syd and herself (fig. 12.1). But to notice
these geometrical echoes and repetitions is also to acknowledge how little
these still and moving images relate to each other in terms of tone and
context. The photographs Lucy displays distill her figures into expressions
of love, desire, or stupor. Compared to the much more ambivalent
interpersonal dynamics amid which they emerge, they seem excessively
earnest and definitive in their stillness.
 The New York Times’s Janet Maslin criticized High Art, upon its release,
for its excessive slickness: “the film sacrifices any hope of raw edges and
real emotion to its own chic sensibility, which is so studiously alluring that
it overwhelms the story. In its own fashionably nonchalant way, ‘High Art’
proves every bit as sleek as Frame, the film’s emblem of poisonous
commerce corrupting creative purity.”17 But much of this sleekness seems
cannier than such criticism allows. As it follows its characters’ gazes and
their attention-seeking gestures, High Art continually highlights the
difficulty of actually maintaining such a sleek image, and making it seem
persuasive. When Syd tries to fit into Lucy’s friend circle and drapes herself
on the sofa in mimicry of Greta’s drugged portraits, the effect remains
clumsy and oddly self-conscious. Immediately after Syd and Lucy take a
picturesque rest stop, and Lucy starts to take romantic, gentle pictures of
her, the two get into a fight that leaves them distant and shaken.

Figure 12.1. Lucy and her boyfriend, 1998.

In a way, what we are watching here are women pretending to be the

photographs they take of each other. Their inability to achieve this end
brings out the falsity of this dream as well as some of the reasons why it is
so tempting. It also implicitly protests a vision of the world in which these
sexual and professional urges, and their unresolved intertwining, seem so
unacceptable; a world in which one needs to trace back one’s desires to
some pure inner motivation that could be straightforwardly depicted and
arrested. It is possible to be both a lover and an ambitious editor or artist, as
Syd exclaims to her then-boyfriend early on in the film. To let oneself be
partly undone by the acknowledged multiplicity of these motivations is not,
High Art suggests, a moral or ethical failing. Indeed, it constitutes one of its
characters’ most dearly won insights.
Carol poses these questions about the proper means and outcomes of
self-knowledge even more overtly. Like High Art, to which it frequently
alludes, Carol explores the pleasures and terrors of being seen in a way that
is surprisingly persistent, acute, and continuous. It also highlights the
difficulty, in the face of such intense attentiveness, of maintaining the
illusion of having some coherent and consciously chosen personal identity.
As Marcia Landy aptly puts it of Haynes’s filmmaking in general, “his
characters remain on the surface … But [Haynes also] invites speculation
about how to locate a different sense of the relationships that penetrate the
nature and effects of that artifice.”18 Lynne Joyrich describes the characters
of Safe as “figured less as a media consumer than a mediated image,” in a
way that also applies to the careful social performances of Carol.19 This is
not to call Haynes’s characters artificial. Rather, it is to note within their
presentation what Rob White has called a “something empty … an I’m-not-
there-ness.” A desperation lurks behind their gazes that has to do with the
intensity with which they try, and inevitably fail, to maintain a stable and
acceptable social image of themselves.20 The fact that, as Tim Robey has
noted, Carol begins by moving up from a sewer grille into a manicured
space in which we cannot hear the brilliantly exposed, yet clearly strained
protagonists, signals these characters’ tense, only tenuously maintained
polite superficiality.21 In the flashback that immediately follows this
opening, Therese (Rooney Mara) sees Carol (Cate Blanchett), and Carol
notices Therese looking at her. For the rest of the film, both women struggle
to articulate and solidify what it is that they see in each other, and what
these mutual gazes reflect to them about their own bodies that they had tried
to hide. They make a series of dramatic, abrupt decisions: to meet each
other, to go on a road trip together, to have sex, to leave each other, and then
to live together. These decisions’ apparent finality is constantly set against
the extreme social precariousness, and imperfect self- and mutual
knowledge within which they are made, and by which their effects are
continually undone.
As does High Art, Carol plays with the power imbalances between its
two female protagonists, and a great deal of its romantic ambiguity derives
from these imbalances. Carol is older and wealthier than Therese, and more
sexually experienced. She is usually the one who provokes, asks, or offers
herself, with Therese often merely assenting to her intensity. An allusion to
Sunset Boulevard early on in the film—Therese watches it shortly before
her first lunch date with Carol—makes this power dynamic and its possible
darker implications more pointed. The heroine of Sunset Boulevard, played
by Gloria Swanson, finds a younger lover who helps her maintain illusions
about her glamor, fame, and continued youth. The film then depicts her
spiraling into madness in pursuit of this impossible fantasy. Carol, as
Blanchett plays her, is not Swanson’s character. But she is clearly desperate,
in a way that often comes out most clearly, as it does in Swanson’s Norma,
during her performances of glamorous self-control. Part of this desperation,
as Carol depicts it, comes from how little control, in spite of all her
advantages, Carol actually has over Therese’s relationship to her. Her sense
of a viable future for herself rapidly comes to depend on a series of
recognitions and assents she cannot quite expect, and at first cannot even
ask, of her younger lover.22 To underscore this point, Carol, like High Art,
plays with the possibility that this younger lover’s interest in the elder one
is ultimately instrumental. With the help of her new camera and her
romantic road trip pictures, Therese gets a job at The New York Times. Her
relationship to Carol proves more pragmatically useful, in this regard, than
the aborted affair that a New York Times journalist tries to have with her.
Carol further emphasizes the precariousness and breakability of Carol’s
and Therese’s mutual dependencies by fragmenting its melodramatic
tension onto many small, inconclusive scenes that steal the thunder away
from more conventionally momentous narrative climaxes. Mary Ann Doane
points out that “pathos, the central emotion of melodrama,” defined by “the
disproportion between the weakness of the victim and the seriousness of the
danger … is not so much used as a tactic within the films of Todd Haynes
… as it is signified, without cynicism.”23 Indeed, for all its romantic
urgency, the film devotes much more attention to the erotics of these
women’s as yet issueless mutual overtures than to the conventionally
decisive acts that take place between them. The film’s sex scene, for
instance, has rightly been described by critics as surprisingly subdued.24 Its
intensity is rivaled by seemingly much more casual moments when, in an
apparently throwaway comment or look, one of the women appears to
recognize the other’s feelings in a way that does not immediately lead to a
socially definitive act. As a result, there is something open-ended and
nontactical about Carol’s and Therese’s swinging, unspoken mutual
balances of power. Throbbing with potentiality, the film does not point to
any single event or image as this potentiality’s satisfying, climactic
fulfillment. Instead, it allows its various forms of intensity to coexist with
each other on the same plane: rather than simply build up to one major
emotional and expressive climax, the film enjoys multiple small
semiclimaxes one after the other, as if each one might be the final instance
of partial connection Carol and Therese achieve and no further, definitive
explanation of what they mean to each other might be found. In a sense,
Carol thereby plays into the notion of female eroticism as defined by
multiple centers of repeatable pleasure, rather than by a single phallic object
poised toward a central moment of fulfillment. But the point also goes
deeper: the film also begins to question the assumption that all of its
frissons are implicitly or aspirationally sexual, rather than emotional or
affective in a much more dispersed, nonteleological sense.
One striking instance of such an unresolved semiclimax comes when
Carol is booking herself and Therese a hotel room, early on in their trip, and
a hotel staff member offers them a discounted shared luxury suite. Carol
says no without looking back at Therese. The latter counters quickly—
perhaps, she says quasi-innocently, it is a good deal. Carol opens her mouth
and her eyes widen as she turns back to Therese looking at her (fig. 12.2).
For a moment, an understanding seems to emerge between them. All the
same, they will not actually have sex until weeks later. The scene is
analogous to the film’s dramatic ending, in which Therese and Carol lock
eyes at a crowded dinner party. In both cases, the gazes they exchange, and
their aroused looks, do not function simply as metonymies for more direct
intimacy and intercourse. Instead, their thrill comes from the way they
refuse to transform into more conventional expressions of affection or
commitment. Carol and Therese savor them greedily as if they might turn
out to be all they have. David Sims aptly observes that “Carol would be …
described as a film where feelings run very deep—and its power comes
from watching them emerge on the surface, if only for an instant,”
describing it further as a film about “the terrifying experience of falling for
someone without knowing how they feel about you.”25 At least as much
terror comes, in Carol, from the ways in which one’s tightly repressed
actions still feel extremely “bold,” as Carol’s husband Harge puts it when
he sees Carol and Therese taking tea together in Carol’s house, even though
nothing definitive seems to be happening.26
The film’s preoccupation with these scenes of suddenly intense,
unexpected emotional communication is especially striking given its
simultaneous interest in documentation and recording of a far more
definitive-seeming sort. Therese wants to be a photographer for the nation’s
major daily newspaper. The photographs she takes of Carol end up
becoming part of a professional portfolio that is more about information-
gathering and record-keeping than about the kinds of intimate unspoken
communication in which Carol and Therese traffic. In this regard, the
photographs she takes of Carol during their road trip chime uneasily well
with the audio recordings that a private detective also makes of their
conversations and sex. There is an air of false completeness and evidence to
these documents even as they cannot, in fact, guarantee or stabilize their
lives and their interpretations of their fates as much as they might like. In
the end, the recordings do not suffice for Harge to force her to stay with
him. The photographs of Carol that Therese takes, and painfully revisits
after their temporary break in a scene that doubles some of the final shots of
High Art, can neither explain Carol’s behavior to her nor prepare her for
Carol’s dramatic reentry into her life. This is not merely because they lack
language—although that is also the case—but more basically because they
pretend to arrest into clarity Carol’s and Therese’s never quite decided,
always-still-unraveling impulses and affections.
Figure 12.2. Therese takes the initiative. Carol, 2015.

The film offers a metatextual commentary on these failures of framing

when Carrie Brownstein’s unnamed character approaches Therese to flirt
with her by exiting one window frame and entering another. There is
something comical about these moving pictures. They might remind one of
Méliès’s stills coming to life, or of the animated photographs in the Harry
Potter universe. They offer an ironic take on these women’s lives as taking
place in a world where expression is not easily containable and
categorizable, and where one cannot change or fix one’s attachments
through a convenient still picture. As does High Art, Carol heightens this
effect further through its consistent avoidance of meaningful dialogue.
Indeed, even compared to High Art, Carol pushes this lack of dialogue to its
limits. Dramatic conversations do of course happen in the film. But they
concern negotiating and changing one’s contexts and spatial arrangements:
going in a car together, spending Christmas together, visiting the in-laws
together, moving into the same apartment: shifts of frame whose finality the
window-frame shots ironize. The main conceptual challenge posed by High
Art consists in accepting the unresolvable commingling of our sexual needs
with nonsexual ones, such as professional ambition. Carol makes an
analogous point about the ways in which various kinds of physical and
nonphysical, explicit and implicit, emotional and erotic expression are not
subordinate or reducible to each other, or to any coherent affective or sexual
label.
Disobedience continues these reflections on hierarchies between sexual
and nonsexual, consummated and unconsummated desires in ways that are
comparatively more subdued and less melodramatic. A woman who has
been exiled from her Orthodox Jewish community comes back to her old
neighborhood for her father’s funeral, and then rekindles the love affair that
caused her to be ostracized by this community in the first place. Ostensibly,
Lelio’s film is a lesbian romance, both in its plot and in its marketing. But
even though Disobedience includes an explicit sex scene and dramatic
confessions of continued attachment from both women, their relationship
continues to be rivaled, and nearly obscured, by other concerns. The affair
does not lead these two women, the renegade Ronit (Rachel Weisz) and the
demure Esti (Rachel McAdams), to elope together. But meanwhile, it forces
both women, as well as their former shared best friend, now Esti’s husband,
Dovid (Alessandro Nivola), to reckon with other preconceptions they have
each held onto about themselves. Ronit acknowledges how much, for all her
supposed love of freedom, she misses the sense of familial belonging she
has left behind. Dovid discovers that he does not actually want to serve as
the old rabbi’s, Ronit’s father’s, replacement, and the community’s new
leader. Esti realizes that she no longer wants to be married to Dovid, and the
two embark on the process of separation. In a broader sense, Disobedience
highlights the impersonality and self-centeredness of the reasons why its
characters expose themselves to others, and the outcomes of such acts of
exposure. It focuses on the ways these characters try to rely on other people
to stabilize their precarious sense of themselves. Eventually, these other
people’s uncontrollable presence forces them to accept the irresolution and
ambiguity of their own desires and feelings.
As many critics have noted, social repression, hidden love, and rebellion,
are underlined by Disobedience with an almost comical allegorical
intensity. Sheila O’Malley comments that
 it’s the kind of movie where teachers are shown giving lectures which directly comment on
the action of the movie. Dovid and his young rabbinical students discuss sensuous love and
its importance, and Esti discusses “Othello” with her students…. [T]o break an awkward
silence with Esti, Ronit spins the dial on the radio and stops on The Cure’s “Love Song,”
which just so happens to narrate perfectly the emotions of the moment. These obvious
choices really stick out.27

Bodily comedy also occasionally reinforces these all-too-visible attempts at

self-regimentation, as has been noted by Manohla Dargis: for instance,
“Ronit walks amid a procession of mourners in which everyone seems
arranged by height.”28 Dargis and O’Malley interpret these moments of
excessive physical and cultural alignment as clumsy attempts at aesthetic
framing and reinforcement. They also criticize them as bad substitutes for a
deeper and more particularized look into the Orthodox Jewish faith. While
the latter point is well taken, I would also read these visual and cultural
rhymes more generously as ironic expressions of skepticism toward the
social labels and distinctions that its characters attempt to preserve. Far
from identifying with these all-too-clear expressions of emotional clarity
and expressive resonance between these characters’ inner lives and their
surroundings, Disobedience continues to undercut them. However, it also
shows how difficult it is to let go of such easy frames and labels—maudlin
as they are—in the accounts one tries to give of oneself.
As in High Art and Carol, characters’ transitions toward a more
complicated sense of themselves proceed through juxtapositions of filmic
against photographic camera. Away from her London community, and
living in New York, Ronit has become an esteemed portrait photographer.
Her status as an established photographer and the supposed independence it
gives her are constantly emphasized both by defensive sarcasm of her
family and by Ronit herself, when she gives them a book of her pictures in
a gesture that is half-conciliatory but also half-aggressive. But the actual
security Ronit takes from photographs, economic as well as emotional, is
wishful and shaky. In economic terms, her eagerness for her father’s
inheritance—which she does not obtain—highlights the relative precarity of
her New York career. And in emotional terms, the photographs cannot help
her prepare for, or cope with, the shock of reentering her home
environment. Unlike in High Art or in Carol, we do not actually see any of
the pictures Ronit takes of the film’s central figures. Their absence
highlights the way in which these photographs serve Ronit as a kind of
idealized coping mechanism: a means more of asserting, than of actually
establishing, a sense of clarity and stability about her life.
The film begins with Ronit taking pictures of a man who is not her father
but seems to be the father’s age. Half-naked, the man is covered in tattoos,
which Ronit admires. She talks to him coaxingly, trying to get him to relax
and smile for her. Mid-session, the phone rings, and Ronit receives news of
her father’s decease. She is not shown photographing again until two
successive occasions: once, where she takes postcoital shots of Esti and a
second time, when she takes a nonportrait of the soil freshly covering her
father’s coffin (fig. 12.3). The shots she takes of Esti suggest the potential
longevity of their relationship, but then despite their mutual promises
nothing comes of it. The photograph of her father’s grave registers merely
her parent’s absence and his refusal to forgive or reconcile with her before
his death. Promising some symbolic clarity or definitiveness, these
photographs never yield it. Instead, the implied hopes or promises they
carry are continually deferred or broken as the film’s characters flee, miss,
or abandon each other.

Figure 12.3 A portrait of the father Disobedience (2017).

These photographs’ unreality, and the fragility of the resolutions they

promise, is further highlighted by the film’s overall narrative and visual
movement. The film’s defining motion is one of breaking frames, whether
by abruptly exiting or entering them. Ronit flees those she loves, and then
awkwardly barges in on them, in recurrent rhythms of imposition and
abandon. She puts on wigs and slinks into corners, but then abruptly
touches people she is not supposed to, like Dovid. Esti also continues to run
and hide, both metaphorically and in the memorable scene where she and
Ronit are caught kissing in a tennis court. The two lovers only have sex
after they escape the Orthodox Jewish part of London on the tube. The new
surroundings make their community seem strange and distant; they also
make the sex they have seem oddly mechanical and solipsistic, in a way
that is underlined by the rarity with which the camera catches the two naked
women within the same frame. Dovid poignantly shares in Ronit and Esti’s
hesitant escapism. As David Rooney has pointed out, there is a noticeable
ambivalence to his physical attitude toward the two female figures, as in
theirs toward him:
Dovid, a holy man of growing stature within the community, shrinks from the impropriety of
a hug from Ronit, yet as she’s lighting a cigarette, he shields the flame with a tenderness
that’s almost intimate. By contrast, the nervousness with which Esti kisses her husband and
gently strokes his beard that night suggests a conscious effort to demonstrate her feelings for
him. And perhaps to remind herself of them.29

These behaviors produce a fidgety affective tone analogous to the tense

silences and understatements of Carol. The heart of these characters’ self-
knowledge, it soon starts to seem, lies not in any of the definitive-seeming
gestures into which they impulsively compose themselves—gestures of
rebellion, love, desire, fulfillment—but in the way they gradually admit
how uncomfortable and restless they feel when they assume any of these
positions for too long. Rather than work toward something like a self-
portrait in an identity that had been previously forbidden to them, these
characters strive to acknowledge that they do not in fact have any single
grand emotional goal in their lives. Instead, their bodies are pulled to and
fro in many smaller Boolean movements that do not add up to any sense of
conclusiveness or certainty; ones in which sexual desires and motivations of
friendship, parental love, or simply self-love are co-present without clear
hierarchies or distinctions.
 As in Carol, the poignancy with which Disobedience allows its tense but
ambiguous scenes of intimacy to linger—without resolving their balances
of interpersonal and personal feeling—underscores that affirming such
ambiguities, rather than making them seem due merely to immaturity or
outward repression, is one of the film’s larger aesthetic aims. Richard
Lawson has described Disobedience as comparatively “staid and
measured,” and therefore unable “to deliver the intended emotional wallop”
its title promises.30 Indeed, he continues, one comes to feel that “perhaps
Ronit and Esti were initially drawn together simply because they were the
only two such outliers in their community, and were thus solely bonded out
of necessity.”31 I would argue that Lawson is right, though in a different
sense than he appears to intend—and in a way that squares with Peter
Travers’s seemingly contrary impression that “Weisz and McAdams cut so
deep into their characters you can almost feel their nerve endings.”32
Abandoning the great romances of forbidden love, proud succession, and
unrepentant rebellion is the anticlimactic but poignant resolution toward
which Disobedience inexorably leads.
Through their flirtations with, and epistemic subversions of, photography,
High Art, Carol, and Disobedience represent the moving image as a
paradoxical source of queer empowerment and self-knowledge precisely
because it refuses to affirm a consistent, nameable vision of our sexual
selves. Building on an understanding of affect’s relationship to cinema that
is much like Massumi’s—one in which film can not only capture, but
actively enable, a certain form of affective self-exploration—these films
show how misleading it is to see the clues affects give us into ourselves as
all leading back to the same, deepest point of origin; to believe, as in a
simple reading of Sigmund Freud, that what we desire and are defined by is
ultimately some singular past or future primal scene. Privileging everyday
acts of mutual observation and vulnerability over more conventionally
momentous social statements, events, and acts, these films offer a model of
queerness that accepts and acknowledges the intertwining of our sexual
passions with nonsexual longings and needs. In the process, they force us to
rethink both our specific expectations about cinematic representations of
sexuality as well as our broader views of their medium as a tool of self-
documentation and exploration. In most general terms, they also question
our conventional notions of what genuinely subversive, nonnormative self-
scrutiny and affirmation should consist in, and what results it should yield.
They provocatively suggest that identity, normative or otherwise, is little
more than a freeze frame. Fractally divisible and less predictable or
hierarchical than we might wish, our sense of self can and should have as
many origin stories as the objects, people, and experiences to which we are
or might sometime be drawn.

N
1. Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 51.
2. Ibid., 51.
3. Friedrich Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,
1999).
4. See Hugo Munsterberg, The Film: A Psychological Study (1916, repr., New York: Dover,
2012).
5. See Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen 16, no. 3 (1975): 6–18, as
well as expansions and complications of her argument in Tania Modleski, The Women Who
Knew Too Much (New York: Routledge, 1988); Carol Clover, Men, Women, and Chain Saws
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993); Mary Ann Doane, Femmes Fatales (New
York: Routledge, 1991); Linda Williams, Screening Sex (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2008), and Linda Williams, ed., Viewing Positions (Rutgers, NJ: Rutgers University Press,
1993); Jack Halberstam, Skin Shows (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995); Kaja
Silverman, Male Subjectivity at the Margins (New York: Routledge, 1992), and Kaja
Silverman, The Acoustic Mirror (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1988), and many
others.
6. See Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1986), and Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2, trans. Hugh Tomlinson
and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989).
7. Eugenie Brinkema, Forms of the Affects (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014).
8. Vivian Sobchack, Carnal Thoughts (Berkeley: University of Calfiornia Press, 2004).
9. Maggie Hennefeld, Specters of Slapstick and Silent Film Comediennes (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2018); Sianne Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2012), and Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2007).
10. The only partial exploration of this hypothesis remains D. A. Miller’s Hidden Hitchcock, which
proposes that the film viewer might identify with the camera to the point of exceeding, and
perhaps undercutting, the conscious intentionality with which the film was made by its director
and production team. Miller focuses on the ways in which not only human bodies, but also
represented environments, can never subordinate their reality to the aesthetic view of the
master-director; the ways in which they exceed these intentions in a way that opens them up to
a surprisingly nominalist, fragmented viewing in which any act, detail, or expression becomes
a potential source of insight. D. A. Miller, Hidden Hitchcock (Chicago: University of Chicago
 Press, 2017). See also a response to Miller’s book, Tania Modleski, “Remastering the Master:
Hitchcock after Feminism,” New Literary History 47, no. 1 (2016): 135–58.
11. As compared, for example, to Kittler’s own greater cynicism about the medium, or to
arguments voiced by Mary Ann Doane in The Emergence of Cinematic Time (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2002). I do not mean to suggest that cinema is an empirically
trustworthy source of insight about the human mind and body, but I do highlight the
unexpected conclusions to which it leads us when we take it seriously as a tool of self-
fashioning and phenomenological self-exploration. Paradoxically, our contemporary ability to
stop, replay, and make gifs out of films might enhance—rather than undercut—this dynamic,
pace Laura Mulvey, Death 24x a Second (New York: Reaktion Books, 2014).
12. Somewhat analogous arguments have previously been made of 1980s photography—see, for
instance, James Guimond’s “Auteurs as Autobiographers: Images by Jo Spence and Cindy
Sherman,” Modern Fiction Studies 40, no. 3 (1994): 573–91.
13. See, e.g., Patricia White, Uninvited: Classical Hollywood Cinema and Lesbian
Representability (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1999).
14. Roger Hallas, “AIDS and Queer Cinephilia,” Camera Obscura 18, no. 1 (2003): 85–126. See
also Dana Luciano, “Coming Around Again: The Queer Momentum of Far From Heaven,”
GLQ 13, no. 2–3 (2007): 249–72, Jose Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia (New York: New
York University Press, 2009), Lee Edelman, No Future (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2004), and others.
15. Hélène Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa,” trans. Keith Cohen and Laura Cohen, Signs 1, no.
4 (1976): 875–93.
16. See, for example, Sharon Marcus, Between Women (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
2008), and Karen Hollinger, In the Company of Women (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1998).
17. Janet Maslin, “Film Review: Jaded Artist and Ingenue in an Arty Spider Web, The New York
Times, June 12, 1998, https://www.nytimes.com/1998/06/12/movies/film-review-jaded-artist-
and-ingenue-in-an-arty-spider-web.html.
18. Marcia Landy, “‘The Dream of the Gesture’: The Body of/in Todd Haynes’s Film,” boundary 2
30, no. 3 (2003): 125.
19. Lynne Joyrich, “Written on the Screen: Mediation and Immersion in Far from Heaven,”
Camera Obscura 57 (2004): 195.
20. Rob White, Todd Haynes (Springfield: University of Illinois Press), 2.
21. Tim Robey, “Cate Blanchett Will Slay You,” The Telegraph, November 26, 2015,
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/films/2016/04/14/carol-review-cate-blanchett-will-slay-you/
22. As Mike Powell describes it, “the greatest mystery threatening Carol and Therese is what might
happen to them if they fall in love.” Mike Powell, “The True Love Story Behind the Making of
Carol,” The Rolling Stone November 20, 2015, https://www.rollingstone.com/movies/movie-
news/the-true-love-story-behind-the-making-of-carol-57626/.
23. Mary Ann Doane, “Pathos and Pathology: The Cinema of Todd Haynes,” Camera Obscura 57
(2004): 4–5.
24. See, for example, Anthony Lane, “Secret Lives,” The New Yorker, November 23, 2015,
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/11/23/secret-lives-the-current-cinema-anthony-
lane.
25. David Sims, “Why Carol Is Misunderstood,” The Atlantic, January 15, 2016,
https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2016/01/carols-misunderstood-
coldness/424419/.
26. Ibid.
27. Sheila O’Malley, “Disobedience,” Roger Ebert, April 27, 2018,
https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/disobedience-2018.
28. Manohla Dargis, “Review: The Flesh Is Willing in ‘Disobedience’,” The New York Times, April
25, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/25/movies/disobedience-review-rachel-
mcadams.html.
29. David Rooney, “Review: Disobedience,” The Hollywood Reporter, September 11, 2017,
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/review/disobedience-tiff-2017-1037840.
30. Richard Lawson, “Disobedience Review: A Strangely Staid Story about Hidden Passions,”
Vanity Fair, September 11, 2017,
https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2017/09/disobedience-movie-review-rachel-weisz-
rachel-mcadams.
31. Ibid.
32. Peter Travers, “Disobedience Review,” The Rolling Stone, April 26, 2018,
https://www.rollingstone.com/movies/movie-reviews/disobedience-review-forbidden-love-
romance-is-scorching-and-feast-for-its-stars-630516/.
 CHAPTER 13

NOTES ON SOME FORMS OF

REPETITION

HOMAY KING

IS there such a thing as noncompulsive repetition? I asked this question in a

chapter of my book Virtual Memory: Time-Based Art and the Dream of
Digitality. I answered it in the affirmative, through readings of video works
by Victor Burgin. Burgin’s gallery videos are structured as loops: they are
designed to play on repeat, and while they suggest loose narratives, they
lack a clear chronology. Several of them are inspired by Hitchcock’s 1958
film Vertigo, a work that Chris Marker once described in the following way:
“Double entendre … All the gestures, looks, and phrases in Vertigo have a
double meaning. Everybody knows that it is probably the only film where a
‘double’ vision is not only advisable but indispensable for rereading the
first part of the film in light of the second.”1
In Virtual Memory, I argued that Burgin’s video loops (and I will reprise
myself for a paragraph here)
do not repeat the circular theme compulsively; they forge a path beyond the automatism of
the merry-go-round view of history. In Burgin’s hands, the video loop provides a refreshing
critique of infinitely recursive forms and the stagnation that accompanies them. In place of a
future that is met with eager anticipation only when it offers an exact replica of what has
already been, Burgin’s loops seem to say that desire need not be a one-way ticket to an
irrecoverable lost object. As if in answer to the question posed by the forms of self-enclosed,
obsessive repetition so carefully rendered by Hitchcock, Freud, and others, Burgin offers
another kind of spiral: a four-dimensional one, open at both ends, designed not to return to
zero, but to swirl up an ever-expanding range of inter-connected times, places, people, and
texts.2
 Burgin’s seventeen-minute video loop The Little House (2005) was my
first case in point (fig. 13.1). The story its narrator tells, based on an
eighteenth-century French libertine novella, involves a Vertigo-like circuit
of seduction, pursuit, evasion, and defeat. But Burgin sets this tale in the
modern Schindler House in Los Angeles, with nonsequitur images of a
woman reading from Mao’s Little Red Book and other anachronous details
that relate to the French text in only the most open and ambiguous ways.
These details, I argued, disrupt the centripetal force of the seduction story,
pulling its two-dimensional circle open to other times and places, such that
each viewing of the loop—instead of reinforcing a fatalistic, closed view of
history—complicates one’s initial interpretation, retrospectively rewriting
it. Burgin’s video loops, I suggested, operate as refrains or reprises rather
than identical repetitions: the temporalized equivalent of what Leo Bersani
calls “inaccurate replications.”3 An echo of the initial viewing is gradually
overlain with new, distinct layers. They cannot dispense with the past, but
rather than yearning endlessly for former times, they are future-oriented.
Figure 13.1. The Little House (Victor Burgin, United Kingdom, 2005).

This is a rather optimistic take on repetition, a bright alternative to the

one that Freud bequeathed his readers in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. For
Freud, at his darkest, the subject ruled by the death drive is doomed to
repeat actions ad infinitum, “which include no possibility of pleasure,” as if
ordained by “some demonic power,” and these actions take the form of “a
passive experience over which [the subject] has no influence.”4 Burgin’s
loops partake of a form of repetition much closer to one described by Gilles
Deleuze: repetition as “in essence symbolic, spiritual, and intersubjective or
monadological.”5 We can see repetition as poetry, art as the displacements
of moving Eros or its sublimation; we can see it as materially conditioned,
mechanically programmed, stupidly reflexive. There must be other forms in
this taxonomy, though, and this chapter is an attempt to chip away at partial
descriptions of some of them, at times in new ways, at times by revisiting
material I have written about in the past.

F I C

Figure 13.2. Anna Karina and Eddie Constantine in Alphaville (Jean-Luc Godard, 1965).

In his essay “The Cinema of Poetry,” Pier Paolo Pasolini celebrates a

curious editing pattern in the work of certain filmmakers of the European
New Wave: the repetition of two or more versions of the same image or
event, which are “scarcely different from each other.”6 He describes this
pattern as a “succession of two shots which frame the same portion of
reality first from close in, then from a little farther away; or else first head-
on, then a little obliquely; or … on the same alignment but with two
different lenses.”7 Although Pasolini does not use this particular example,
one might think of a scene in Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville (1965) in which
Natacha Von Braun (Anna Karina) opens the door to her hotel room to
allow Lemmy Caution (Eddie Constantine) to enter (fig. 13.2).8 She
“repeats” this action three times in succession before they proceed with
their dialogue. A continuity-editing literalist would read the repetitions as
editing mistakes; the sequence has the air of a glitch about it. As in
Pasolini’s description of the cinema of poetry, Godard offers three slightly
different takes depicting “the same portion of reality,” first in a medium
two-shot, then from slightly farther away, and so on.
Pasolini suggests that redundancies with a slight difference comprise a
form of “free indirect discourse” in cinema. In literary studies, free indirect
discourse refers to a type of writing in which the narrator of a fictional text
channels the speech, thoughts, or mood of a character without directly
attributing those words or thoughts to that character—without, for example,
using quotation marks or a tag such as “she thought” or “he said.” Absent
these markers of attribution, it becomes difficult to separate out the
narrator’s speech and point of view from that of the characters. As a result,
the enclosed space of the diegesis and the external, quasi-transcendent
space of the author begin to intertwine: the characters glimpse the
possibility of access to agency over their own fates, and, in turn, the
possibility occurs to us that the author might be no more (or less) than one
of his own characters. Something similar happens, Pasolini claimed, with
these cinematic repetitions: it is as if the closed film world cracks slightly
ajar, and we realize that these events might have gone another way, might
have been shown in another way. Godard seems to be saying something
like, “Everything you see in this film is provisional.” There is no single
authoritative version of the story. Repetition, here, is the vehicle that carries
us toward the possibility of difference, namely, that not everything is
predetermined, scripted, or demonically ordained to play out the same way
that it has in the past.
Deleuze writes about the free indirect mode in Cinema 2: The Time-
Image. “In the cinema of poetry,” Deleuze writes,
 the distinction between what the character saw subjectively and what the camera saw
objectively vanished … to achieve the very special form of a “free indirect discourse” … A
contamination of the two kinds of image was established, so that bizarre visions of the
camera (alternation of different lenses, zoom, extraordinary angles, abnormal movements,
halts …) expressed the singular visions of the character, and the latter were expressed in the
former, but by bringing the whole to the power of the false…. Objective and subjective
images lose their distinction, but also their identification, in favour of a new circuit where
they are wholly replaced, or contaminate each other, or are decomposed and recomposed.9

Deleuze does not include repetitious shots in his parenthetical list of

techniques, but we may include it among his “bizarre visions of the camera”
that operate to undermine the distinction between the objective and the
subjective, calling the authority of the camera’s vision into question. Do
Alphaville’s three versions of Natacha opening the door represent three
different, subjective ways of seeing or remembering the event? If so, to
whom does each belong? Is one of them the authoritative or true version? If
so, what makes the others false, and why include them at all? Godard does
not permit us to make any such determination.
Free indirect cinema provides a way out of the critique of cinema
famously proffered by Henri Bergson, which Deleuze visits in the opening
sections of Cinema 1: The Movement-Image. According to Bergson, the
cinematograph “gives everything at once”: it corresponds to a Newtonian
understanding of the universe as clockwork, and as a closed system.10
Enclosed in its cannister, the film’s stories have been scripted from the start;
they do not admit of anything new. This view so horrifies Bergson that he
dismissed the cinematograph in general as its purveyor. Deleuze calls this
objection “strange” and “odd.”11 He then uses the Bergson of Matter and
Memory against the Bergson of Creative Evolution to argue that cinema
only appears to participate in this illusion. Cinema only appears to be a
closed system: the movement in motion pictures relates its objects to open
duration and a changing whole, and thus brings about qualitative changes.12
As Deleuze puts it, “Bergson … makes possible another way of looking at
the cinema, a way in which it would no longer be just the perfected
apparatus of the oldest illusion, but, on the contrary, the organ for perfecting
the new reality.”13 The two hefty volumes that follow from this chapter are
essentially a detailed catalog of techniques and styles by which cinema has
achieved this break from a philosophy based on closure, eternity, and
sameness to one based on openness, polychrony, difference, and the
creation of conditions in which the new and unpredictable may appear.
Interestingly, but perhaps not surprisingly, repetition is mobilized in the
service of the latter.

R
Reenactment is a technique familiar to students of contemporary
performance and video art who have encountered the work of Terry Adkins,
Jeremy Deller, Omer Fast, Sharon Hayes, and others who have restaged or
filmed others’ restagings of historical events, including battles, protests, and
speeches.14 Students of an earlier era might recall Andy Warhol’s Since
(1966) and Ant Farm’s The Eternal Frame (1975), both of which depict
reenactments of John F. Kennedy’s assassination. This form of repetition is
familiar in a more everyday guise from true crime television and
documentary films that employ actors and sets to restage events for which
archival footage is lacking or talking heads are deemed insufficient.
Scholars and curators such as Robert Blackson and Kodwo Eshun have
written about reenactment in contemporary art. A 2007 exhibition entitled
History Will Repeat Itself at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt was one of
several organized around this technique. Reenactment has particular appeal
as a way to approach a traumatic past and historical incidents of violence
for several reasons. First, when archival documents, photographs, and films
are limited, have been destroyed, or never existed, how does one tell a
story? There is also an ethical component: when the past has been written
by history’s winners, and when the informational address and authoritative
structures of the documentary genre fail to do justice to the complexity of
events, what options exist for representing them? Certain kinds of truths
may be better gotten at through a framework that not only owns up to its
contamination by fiction but goes a step further, to embrace, work with, and
reperform the fictions that are already there.
Restaging may actualize through performance something that was
already there in the past, but that has remained, up until this moment, latent,
buried, or virtual. In its best form, restaging does not betray or distort
history, but nor does it purport to offer it up exactly verbatim: rather, like
Pasolini’s cinema of poetry, it asks us to take seriously the idea that things
might have gone another way, that other outcomes were possible. It may
invite us to speculate about potential outcomes for which it might not yet be
too late. It prompts us to consider historical and future events that remain
hidden or unimaginable and to fabulate about the meetings and
relationships that might ensue within these alternate spaces and times.
Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing (2012) is a documentary film
that broke a long silence on Indonesia’s 1965 state-sanctioned massacres, in
part through the fictional restagings it contains as short films within the film
(fig. 13.3). Oppenheimer spent several years in North Sumatra,
unsuccessfully attempting to persuade survivors and their descendants to
testify to the war crimes witnessed, but they would not speak on camera due
to fear of reprisal from the regime, which was still in power. They
suggested that he interview the perpetrators instead, some of whom agreed.
As there was no archival footage or photographs of the crimes,
Oppenheimer offered them the opportunity to script and reenact memories
and scenes from the past for his camera.

Figure 13.3. The Act of Killing (Joshua Oppenheimer, Denmark-UK-Norway, 2012).

 Oppenheimer deploys reenactment to different ends than are typical for
this practice. In the true crime genre, reenactment often serves simply to
illustrate. As in the case of Revolutionary War reenactors, it may
commemorate or monumentalize. As with Adkins’s reanimation of
moments from the Abolitionist Movement, it may remind us of the
similarities between current events and events understood as belonging to
the past—or help us to see that in fact, the situation that occasioned them is
not yet fully past. It may also have a therapeutic, cathartic, or activist value
for makers, performers, and viewers, which was in part the undertaking of
The Act of Killing—successfully, some would say, since it put the 1965
events onto a global public stage and thereby paved the way for a sequel,
The Look of Silence (2015), in which Oppenheimer interviewed survivors of
war crimes who now had sufficient protection to speak openly.
Viewing Oppenheimer’s films, one has the sense that even if his primary
goal was to initiate a political process of truth and reconciliation, he is
equally interested in exploring the psychic afterlife of violence in a way that
is less directly practical or instrumental. He seems interested in the way
that, for both victims and perpetrators of violence, certain gestures can
remain inscribed in the body like scripts, persisting like preprogrammed tics
even when the events that occasioned them have been jammed into the
unconscious. Such tics and gestures can even be passed on to subsequent
generations of trauma survivors, who may play them out without ever
knowing their original context and without understanding their traumatic
significance. A director working as a facilitator can ferret them out.
Rithy Panh’s film S21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine (2003) is a
documentary that revisits events of the Cambodian genocide of the late
1970s. Panh brings several former prison guards back to the disused killing
camp and asks them about their time there. In a striking scene, a former
guard reenacts his daily routine: entering a cell with keys, shouting orders at
imaginary prisoners, searching them for contraband, and beating them. The
cell block is decayed and long unoccupied; the prisoners and enemies he
interacts with are but ghosts. The former guard pantomimes the actions he
performed in the same room from sheer motor-memory. Panh describes
how he “directed” this scene: “I simply said ‘so show me your work, show
me how you worked.’ And that’s what opened up the bodily memory, if you
like, in a chronological way” (fig. 13.4).15
One way to understand this notion of bodily memory would be through
Freud’s repetition compulsion: the buried choreography and pantomime
would then be the result of the trauma of serving in war, of being an
unwilling participant in events that are repressed from consciousness but
not forgotten, which then resurface in the form of a compulsive repeated
movement, like the game of fort-da played by Freud’s nephew in his
attempt to gain mastery over trauma.16 Indeed, in response to the question,
“Do you see yourself as victims?,” one of the former prison guards answers,
“We’re like people who’ve had an accident.” The traumatic repetition
explanation, however, fails to account for something peculiar about these
gestures: the “bodily memory,” as Panh puts it, rote performance of
movements, “learning by heart” as it were, something that was practiced
daily or even hourly, perhaps even half-consciously in years past, which is
in no way completely repressed or forgotten, but for which the precise dates
and context cannot be recalled (as one subject in S21 says, “I can’t
remember his name … We were in the same unit outside”). The sequence of
movements remains stored like a computer program somewhere in the
sensory-motor complex of muscles and nerves. As in the phrase “like riding
a bicycle,” these gestures involve a kind of memory which is neither
conscious nor strictly unconscious in Freud’s terms, and neither voluntary
nor strictly involuntary, in Proust’s. The sequence can be reenacted on
command—“Show me how you worked”—and once activated, the script
seems to take over the body in a semiautomated way.
Figure 13.4. A former prison guard reenacts his daily routine in S21: The Khmer Rouge Killing
Machine (Rithy Panh, Cambodia-France, 2003).

The events are not a complete mystery, as in the style of fully repressed
memory resulting in a somatic symptom of uncertain origins that Freud and
Breuer discuss in Studies on Hysteria.17 The historical source—serving as a
guard at Tuol Sleng—is known, undisguised. But the subjects cannot recall
the exact dates, times, or frequency of the beatings; the names and identities
of victims and coworkers; or other factual details. This aspect of bodily
memory renders it potentially useless as evidence. While vividly affirming
the existence of systematic and ongoing violence, the subjects can only
reproduce the events in pantomime. The memories lack precise data, having
been repeated so often that they merge in the mind into a single, free-
floating protocol. Were one to translate them into verbal language, one
would have to employ the habitual aspect of the simple past tense: “I would
take the keys out of my pocket, I would open the cell door, I would shout at
the prisoners.”

H R R
These kinds of actions fall under the category of what William James, in
The Principles of Psychology, called “habit”: movements repeated or
practiced so often that a reflex-path is carved out, which may remain until
the end of life like a scar. Among such activities, James includes “standing,
walking, buttoning and unbuttoning, piano-playing, talking … [things]
which may be done when the mind is absorbed in other things.”18 As James
puts it, “Which valve of my double door opens first? Which way does my
door swing? I cannot tell the answer; yet my hand never makes a mistake.
No one can describe the order in which he brushes his hair or teeth; yet it is
likely that the order is a pretty fixed one in all of us.”19 As with Panh’s
“bodily memory,” the ability to reperform the action sequence exactly the
same way may remain long after any details and facts accompanying its
learning have been forgotten, if they were even known, consciously, in the
first place.
Bergson offers a similar idea with his distinction between “habitual
recollection,” which he also calls “motor memory,” and “spontaneous” or
“independent recollection.”20 He compares the first of these to memorizing
a lesson, and suggests that it actively inhibits the second. If someone were
to ask me when I learned to play Bach’s two-part invention number one on
the piano, I would reply, probably around the age of fourteen. Or was it
fifteen, or twelve? Did I play this piece at a recital? How many times did I
practice it? I have no idea and would be useless if put on the stand to testify.
And yet, my fingers know every note of this piece. I can’t transcribe it in
musical notation, and I can’t isolate out particular portions or measures of it
and play them out of order. I can only play it from start to finish, “in a
chronological way” as Panh put it, whole cloth. Somehow it is still there,
like the beginning of the prologue to the Canterbury Tales in Middle
English that I memorized roughly around the same time. It’s permanently
sealed in, even as I struggle to recall more useful information like internet
passwords and phone numbers.
Is procedural memory—things known “by heart”—voluntary or
involuntary, in Proust’s sense? Can we call it up on demand, like searching
an entry in a calendar or database, or does it elude us only to come flooding
back when awoken by a chance perception? Is it closer to the repetition
compulsion, or to rote memory? Why do some things committed to memory
through rote repetition lodge permanently in our brains, whether we wish
them to or not, while others vanish, regardless of how sincerely we desire to
retain them? Does it work like a computer, like a tattoo? Is this form of
memory digital or analog? It exists “all at once,” in a continuous sequence,
as if on a single strip of tape, the way Bergson describes a melody, or a
figure drawn with a single unbroken stroke of the brush. This would seem
to make it analog, vital, and organic. And yet, it also feels mechanical and
automated, like an action that could be performed by a wind-up doll. Player
pianos, too, can play Bach, and never forget a single note. Which is it?

A C R
A prime example of mechanical repetition is provided by the well-known
assembly-line sequence from Charlie Chaplin’s 1936 film Modern Times,
the scene that opens the film. In a tragicomedic reaction to the insalubrious
effects of Taylorist factory work, the Little Tramp has tightened bolts for so
many hours that he can’t stop making the motion (fig. 13.5). He develops a
repetitive stress injury, a tic in which he continues to flick his wrenches
involuntarily, twisting every bolt-like object in his path. These include his
coworkers’ noses, fire hydrant closures, and the buttons on a busty woman’s
dress. The joke’s final punch line arrives when Chaplin dashes back—again
out of sheer habit—to clock in with his punch card before reentering the
factory, even though he has been fired and is being chased by the police.
Figure 13.5 The assembly line in Modern Times (Charlie Chaplin, United States, 1936).

In his essay on Chaplin in What Is Cinema? Volume I, André Bazin

writes that “mechanization of movement is in a sense Charlie’s original
sin.”21 In Bazin’s reading, Chaplin’s repetitions—his “mechanical cramps,”
his “spasmodic” tightening of bolts—have to do with a certain
anachronicity, being stranded in time. Bazin writes that Charlie “continues
to offer the solution proper to a previous moment … to project into time a
mode of being that is suited to one instant” (that, concludes Bazin, “is what
is meant by ‘repetition.’ ”).22 His error or “sin,” in other words, is “to
presume that the future will resemble the past.”23 Chaplin is out of step with
modernity; his critique thereof takes the form of a refusal to step forward—
or, to step forward badly, in a way that sabotages or merely gums up the
machine works. As Michael North dryly puts it, “Chaplin seems in Modern
Times to regret the Industrial Revolution in its entirety.”24
In his short text on laughter, Bergson suggests that all comedy is in some
way an effect of repetition—specifically, a type of repetition related to
things mechanical. Humor arises, according to Bergson, in situations where
one would expect to find alert, conscious activity, “the adaptability and
living pliableness of a human being,” but instead we are confronted with
“automatism and inelasticity,” “a certain rigidity of body, mind, and
character,” or “an artificial mechanization of the human body … something
mechanical encrusted upon the living.”25 The Little Tramp’s involuntary
repetition of the twisting motion of his wrenches, even when it no longer
serves any practical purpose, is comical for this reason. He has become part
machine, like the jack-in-the-box that Bergson lists as one of his examples
in this essay.
While not all repetitions are comical, all comedy, in Bergson’s view, is
the result of a repetition with something mechanical and automated about
it.26 He claims that classic stock characters, types, and caricatures are also
the product of repetition: a condensation of prior images that have
crystallized into a generality. He writes that comedy extracts out “the ready-
made element in our personality, that mechanical element that resembles a
piece of clockwork wound up once and for all and capable of working
automatically…. It is comic to fall into a ready-made category.”27
Bergson is a vitalist: he understands matter, both organic and inorganic,
to be in a perpetual state of movement, change, evolution, and entropy: in
short, becoming new and other than itself at the very moment we attempt to
pinpoint its properties and stabilize its outlines. Mechanical things are
funny for him because they are contrary to vitalistic motion: machines
attempt to freeze-frame the inherently animate, or, as Bergson puts it, to
“immobilize the intelligently varied movements of the body in stupidly
contracted grooves.”28 “The truth is,” Bergson concludes, “that a really
living life should never repeat itself.”29 In Jokes and their Relation to the
Unconscious, Freud approvingly references this passage of Bergson’s:
“What is living should never, according to our expectation, be repeated
exactly the same. When we find such a repetition we always suspect some
mechanism lying behind the living thing.”30

Z
The word “easel” first appears in the English language in 1634. The word
derives from the Dutch ezel, meaning ass or donkey. The invention of the
easel led to a revolution in image production, allowing for painting en plein
air rather than in a studio, and instituting the upright, perpendicular, eye-
level point of view as standard. The easel is, in a way, also a beast of
burden: a wooden mule that carries tools and supplies. It is an example of a
skeuomorph, an object deriving its design characteristics from a previously
existing artifact. More precisely, it is a zoomorph, an inanimate object
designed to resemble an animal, in this case, a donkey, in both form and
function.31 Like a donkey, it has legs and can carry things from one site to
another. Its portability serves as a reminder of the link between animals and
animation. The easel, in a way, turns the picture into screen: it is the first
portable viewing device.
The earliest known use of the word “mouse” in reference to a computer
pointing device occurred in 1965, in a paper by a computer engineer
working in Menlo Park, California (fig. 13.6).32 Two years later, the Logo
computer programming language debuted. An early 1980s version of this
language operated through the manipulation of a small, triangular icon
called a “turtle,” which could be moved and made to draw shapes using
keyed commands (fig. 13.7). A 1977 computer model made by Commodore
went by the acronym PET (for Personal Electronic Transactor). It seems
that in its early stages, the personal computer drew from a lexicon of small,
domesticated animals for its naming conventions and principles of design.
Figure 13.6. Computer mouse c. 1965, shown as a figure in W. K. English et al., “Computer-Aided
Display Control.”
Figure 13.7. Logo turtle graphic c. 1985.

Apple Computer’s Macintosh operating system has gone through

numerous names and associated design elements with each update to the
software. The classic Mac OS, introduced in 1984, was simply referred to
as “the System” and represented upon boot-up by a simple icon, a line
drawing of a smiling computer monitor. Subsequent versions of the System
bore the same name and were numbered in ordinal fashion, until the arrival
of OS X. At this point, Apple began to name its software after large wild
cats: Cheetah, Tiger, Snow Leopard, Mountain Lion. Here, Apple’s
branding began to mimic strategies used in former times to market
automobiles, with animal names that evoked not the mute, toolish stupidity
of the donkey, nor the neutered, infantilized, and domesticated world of
mice and turtles but rather more masculinized, even predatory notions of
speed and power (Mustang, Colt, Jaguar). The core component of Apple’s
system software was still called “Darwin,” a name that grafts notions of
biological evolution and the fiction of ever-greater robustness and progress
onto the sort of updates that are in fact primarily driven by the capitalist
demand of planned obsolescence, combined with the need to acquire
perpetually refreshed consent to end-user-licensing agreements.
Apple broke from the large cat pattern in 2013 with the introduction of
Mavericks, named for a popular big-wave surfing spot near Northern
California’s Half Moon Bay. Version 10.10 of the Mac operating system,
released in June 2014, was called Yosemite. Located in the Sierra Nevada
Mountains, Yosemite National Park is a wilderness preserve on land that
was inhabited for nearly three thousand years by the Ahwahneechee. The
park is famous for its stunning views, rare glacier geology, tall sequoia
trees, and richly diverse vegetation. We see here a sort of multi-year loop
undertaken by computer skeuomorphism: from cute computer mice and
turtles to the Orwellian System of 1984; from the System, to wild cats
prowling the Savannah and snowy mountains; and from these cats to their
habitats, including the sublime landscapes of the rugged American West. A
path is traced from the tame and nonthreatening to the dystopically
omnipresent, only to retreat back into yet another romanticized idea of
nature.
Once, tall trees were used as signal towers by which to send messages.
Chopped down, they served as firewood for fuel. Later, wooden poles and
metal towers were erected, designed to carry electrical power lines and
telephone wires across great distances. These proudly proclaimed their
man-made artifice. Today, though, cell phone signal towers are sometimes
built to mimic the form of sparsely foliaged trees, in a halfhearted attempt
to camouflage them into a woodland environment (fig. 13.8). This
environment, though, barely exists anymore, especially in places with
strong cellular signals. Tree-shaped cell phone towers are thus an accidental
memorial to the diminishing forest lands that industry is helping to destroy.
New technologies sometimes begin by miming their analogs in nature. As
they continue to develop, they may begin to disavow their relationship to
the natural world, shedding the embarrassing iconic resemblance. But in a
nostalgic gesture, though, they come full circle when they model or name
themselves once more after their real-life counterparts, at times replacing or
elegizing these just at the point when their passing seems imminent.
Figure 13.8. A cellular signal tower disguised as a tree.

T C C GIF
Walt Disney’s Pinocchio (1940) is a treasure chest of ideas about the
relationship between the inanimate and the animate, the mechanical and the
organic. Ostensibly a story about the journey from the former to the latter, it
frequently undercuts the distinction between them, celebrating the world of
mechanical imitations. Pinocchio was the first film to employ synthesizer
music. A Novachord, an early form of electric organ that made its début at
the 1939 World’s Fair in New York, was used to create the sound of the
Blue Fairy. Pinocchio himself is hardly the film’s only spirited dummy:
Geppetto’s workshop is a carnivalesque party whose guests are raucous
automata (fig. 13.9).
Here, cuckoo clocks sound the hour, sometimes with scenes of attempted
slapstick brutality—a man repeatedly shoots a cork at a bird, a woman beats
a child, a man attempts over and over again to decapitate a turkey with an
axe. In each case, the target evades defeat and the struggle commences over
again on the hour. There are also music boxes in this film that run in loops:
an elephant with a man, an angel with cherubs, birds, two figures dancing.
Many of the inanimate objects in Geppetto’s house are anthropomorphized:
his candlestick, bedposts, and pipe all have faces, seeming to anticipate
Béla Balázs’ postulate of film art that “not an inch of any frame should be
neutral—it must be expressive, it must be gesture and physiognomy.”33 The
film explores the thinness of the border between the living and the
nonliving, as well as between those who enjoy freedom of action and those
who have been preprogrammed. Eisenstein infamously praised the
plasmaticness of Disney’s early animations, as seen in Merbabies and the
Silly Symphonies. The automata that populate Geppetto’s workshop have
not yet “triumphed over the fetters of form” or become “capable of
assuming any form” in this manner: they are stuck to their shelves, and their
raucous movements can only occur at the intervals designated by their
clockwork.34 However they are halfway there, somewhere between the
status of petrified, static objects and the mobile, animal elasticity of the sea-
creatures. Pinocchio is thus self-reflexive, an animated film about
animation.
Figure 13.9. Still frame from Pinocchio (Ben Sharpsteen and Hamilton Luske, United States, 1940).

Pinocchio’s animated clocks and music boxes behave like proto-gifs or

vine videos. The gif or Graphics Interchange Format of digital image was
released in 1987 by CompuServe as a low-bandwidth, 8-bit file format that
could still accommodate color and animation. It was a response to the need
to compress electronic files into a smaller form for easier and wider
distribution—a reduction of a much richer, more complex image that
allowed it to be broadly replicated and shared. Bergson can help to explain
the seeming inherent humor of this file format, which stilts smooth
movement into jerky segments, animated at a lower frame-rate, and then
repeats them ad absurdum.
The gif is associated with internet media cultures of the early twenty-first
century, for example, its use as a reaction image in internet comment
forums. Interestingly, this popularity is both retro and nostalgic: the gif
originated in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, when fiberoptic infrastructure
could not accommodate today’s bulkier formats. Its frequent pronunciation
with a soft “g” sound (whether correct or incorrect) originated with an
advertising campaign that played upon the popularity of the Jiff brand of
peanut butter and an associated advertising campaign during those years
(“Choosy developers choose gif”). The file format also looks back to the
silent film era, formally resembling and preferring subjects similar to those
chosen by its great physical comedians, Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton,
and Harold Lloyd among them, whose gags often pitted man against
machine. In The General (1926), Keaton hops treacherously across moving
train cars; in Safety Last! (1923), Lloyd dangles precariously from a clock-
tower. Finally, the gif looks back to proto-cinematic genres of the 1890s.
Thomas Edison’s Kinetoscope, a nickelodeon-like viewing device, featured
short films that were stored on 22-millimeter looped reels. Among the
popular subjects, we find brief slapstick vignettes, naughty children’s
pranks, stunts performed on bicycles, and, similar to today, animals doing
tricks or caught in humorous situations.
Figure 13.10. Edison Kinetoscopic record of a sneeze in Fred Ott’s Sneeze (William K.L. Dickson,
United States, 1894).

Edison’s studio produced an early kinetoscope reel known as Fred Ott’s

Sneeze (1894) (fig. 13.10). The sneeze must have struck the technicians as
appropriate subject matter for the kinetoscope. For one, sneezes often come
in a series: the loop reel format lends itself nicely to this repetition. Given
that cinematic technologies were used for scientific purposes at this time to
dissect rapid movement in segments, as in Muybridge’s motion studies, the
sneeze would also have been a logical subject of interest for analyzing its
component instants and breaking them into frames. The sneeze also has
value from the perspective of entertainment: as an involuntary, automatic
reflex, it emblematizes what Bergson called the “artificial mechanization of
the human body” to potentially amusing effect. In this way, it might even be
thought of as a cousin of the classic cuckoo clock, in which a bird, which
brings to mind the natural and the free, as in the expression “free as a bird,”
is conscripted into a mechanical role, that of robotically announcing the
time on the hour, much like a human being succumbing to a motor reflex.
Like the gif format, the Kinetoscope reel involves a kind of
standardization; like a stereotype, it simplifies something complex into a
reproducible, lower-bandwidth format. Standardization allows for
something to be reproduced, which in turn means that it can be
commodified, and made into units that can be tallied up, stock-piled, and
ultimately rendered computable. With computability comes the ability to set
ratios and algorithms. With the cuckoo clock, that ratio is once per hour; for
Edison’s Kinetoscope, one nickel per viewing; for the gif, eight bits per
pixel.

P I-IV
Harun Farocki’s Parallel I-IV (2012/2014) is a video essay installation
about the changing representation of landscapes, physics, and behaviors in
video game worlds. The first installment, Parallel I (2012), is a two-
channel video that begins with a meditation on the graphic rendering of
trees in games from the early 1980s to the approximate present. Initially, the
creators of video game worlds were limited to vertical and horizontal lines
in a single color against a black background, later to the use of
progressively smaller squares. “Now,” the video’s female narrator says, “the
leaves sway lightly in the winds. Birds fly through the image, some just as
shadows … The leaves and branches have barely learned to move, and
already the question is whether they move too steadily.” As the narrator
speaks these words, we see a succession of images of increasingly photo-
realistic quality, followed by an image of a game designer clicking a mouse
in one frame while what he sees on his monitor appears in the other.
Parallel I unfurls a series of images that reveal a quick and steady
progress toward photo-verisimilitude in computer-generated water, foliage,
wind, fire, smoke, and clouds (fig. 13.11). But the narrator invites us to
question the idea of a linear journey toward realism. “Most painters of the
modern age,” she says, “rejected the official history that early representative
art was limited and only advanced later after some setbacks, right up to
photography.” Later in the video, she says, “The Egyptians could build
pyramids. The Middle Ages created cathedrals. But neither was capable of
representation in perspective. This is what we learned in school.”
Farocki’s film undermines this school-book story—a story that, as Bazin
famously noted in “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” climaxes
with the invention of photography and cinema, which “freed the plastic arts
from their obsession with likeness” and thereby paved the way for abstract
painting.35 One way of understanding the development of computer-
generated imagery would be to tell a story of progress from the primitive
and flat to the advanced and three-dimensional. Farocki encourages us to
see this history in another way, as a journey from abstraction to concretism
and literalism. According to this view, the history of computer imagery
reverses rather than recapitulates the history of modern painting: from
abstraction to photo-realism, the reverse direction of the journey undertaken
in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as described by Bazin.

Figure 13.11. Computer-generated bodies of water in Parallel I (Harun Farocki, Germany, 2012).

Parallel II (2014) explores the terrain and borders of computer game

worlds. Farocki explores a series of game maps with different styles of
boundaries: the seemingly infinite plane of Minecraft, navigated as a god
smoothly scanning from above; the bounded world of a fighter pilot, whose
aircraft is obliterated when he attempts to fly out of bounds; a world shaped
like a flat sheet, which recalls the “pre-Hellenic view” of the world. In a
scene set in Red Dead Redemption (Rockstar Games, 2010), a western-
themed console game, we bask in a photo-realistic rendering of mountains
and deserts in the American southwest as our hero, a cowboy on horseback,
gallops toward a receding horizon, the sun invisible but casting shadows
behind him (fig. 13.12). The narrator wonders, “How far can the rider ride?
Where does this world end?” Suddenly the hero encounters an unexpected
sheer cliff: he and his horse tumble to the ground below, the imperfect game
physics making them ricochet less like solid objects than like flimsy sheets
of rubber. A wipe slashes across the image in the form of an animated black
paintbrush stroke, and an intertitle appears reading “DEAD” in capital
letters. “This wild west world,” the narrator dryly comments, “has natural
borders.”
Farocki’s signature brand of wry, dark, slapstick humor flowers in the
installation’s last two installments, in which the player begins to test the
boundaries and physics of game worlds. In Parallel III (2014), we see
Farocki’s hero attempt to swim under a mountain, revealing to his surprise
that “it lacks the characteristic of being visible from both sides,” as the
narrator puts it (fig. 13.13). A glitch in the 3D rendering is described as if it
were a natural feature of the landscape, discovered by an alien explorer. We
see the hero—clearly a novice at using the double-sticked, multibuttoned
console controller—strafe vigorously alongside walls and cliffs as the
narrator notes “the ease of sideways movement” in this universe. Unlike
even the nimblest human, the avatar can move forward, backward, and
sideways with identical speed and agility, never stumbling or slowing
down, but looking ludicrous in the process. In a Grand Theft Auto franchise
game world, the hero jogs ridiculously in place against a wall, then zig-zags
wildly back and forth across the pavement, rotating his third-person camera
in circles as the world spins around him. It is the console-game equivalent
of a toddler learning how to walk, or a child to ride a bicycle. Later,
Farocki’s player-character assumes the guise of a policeman and
commandeers a car from a civilian. He proceeds to drive it straight into a
concrete barricade, not once, but twice. Farocki’s hero finds himself
suddenly in a terrain where he lacks the conditioning required to perform
habitual movements like walking, turning one’s head, or operating a motor
vehicle.
Figure 13.12. Parallel II (Harun Farocki, Germany, 2014).

Figure 13.13. Parallel III (Harun Farocki, Germany, 2014).

 In Parallel IV (2014)—having explored the representational conventions,
terrain, and physics of video game worlds—Farocki turns to their social
conventions. As in the previous section, the hero learns the ways of this
world by trial and error. In Grand Theft Auto IV, set in a fictional version of
New York City, he inadvertently invades the personal space of a character
governed by an automatic script. His proximity prompts her to say, “Listen,
buster, back off,” and a few variants of the same sentiment, which are
repeated in randomized fashion each time Farocki’s hero retreats and
recrosses the proximity threshold. Other nonplayer characters stream past
him in predictable patterns, then cower or flee when bumped by the hero,
even gently. In this world, social politeness essentially means learning to
avoid tripping the invisible wires that set off the less sentient characters’
automated fight or flight protocols.
Farocki’s films in general suggest an ongoing interest in scripts and
protocols, some gamely followed, others unknowingly assimilated and
acted out. He films time-based processes that have been abstracted into
repeatable formulas. The title of an early work, How to Remove a Police
Helmet (1969), suggests an interest in the procedural: sequences of
directions, instructional manuals and videos, the effects of the imperative
tense. In a 1997 film, The Interview, Farocki films a series of coaching
sessions for candidates practicing for job interviews. The coaches provide
detailed instructions for everything from correct frequency of eye contact to
the precise wording one ought to use in a salary negotiation. As Thomas
Elsaesser puts it in an interview with Alex Alberro, Farocki was fascinated
by “the function of role-play, test-drives, drills … in short, performative
approaches to social life … rehearsing (for) living.”36 The mock interviews
are followed by debriefs in which fellow students critique their peers, each
offering two positive comments and one negative. A young candidate is told
not to use the word “only” in reference to her three years of experience. A
man seeking work as a biotechnician is told that he uses the word “creative”
too often.
Double standards come to light under the camera’s lens. A confident man
is described as “self-assured,” while a woman with a similar demeanor
comes across as “too cold.” One has the sense that for Farocki such
revelations are politically necessary. In a way, though, they emerge as
surplus insights. His primary interest is in the protocol in general: how sets
of mannerisms, modulations of voice, precise timings and pressures of
handshake, and so on become compulsory comportments of the human
body—indicators of its ability to navigate a video game (as in Parallel IV),
or, with higher stakes, to “win” a war (as in Serious Games), or to
demonstrate one’s fitness for wage labor (as in The Interview). Farocki
films the job-seeking subjects of The Interview with avant-garde touches of
sympathy, occasionally rewinding and repeating their slight missteps in
slow-motion, situationist détournement-style, with a distorted soundtrack
that highlights the injustice of their plight. As Jan Verwoert puts it, “It is in
these moments of imperfect performances that the grip of ideology on
reality can be felt, precisely because reality still eludes that grip to some
extent.”37

Figure 13.14. Parallel IV (Harun Farocki, Germany, 2014).

In one particularly telling scene in Parallel IV, Farocki’s hero pulls a gun
on a sales lady in a shop (an appropriate action in the logic of the game
story). She runs screaming out the door, only to turn around suddenly and
calmly reenter, returning to her cashier station as if nothing had happened
(fig. 13.14). Farocki’s hero activates and watches her repeat this pattern
several times. As the narrator of Parallel IV explains, “The sales lady has a
short memory. As soon as she is outside the door, she forgets that the hero
pointed a gun at her.” When she is threatened, she is programmed to flee,
but once she is outside, her script requires her to go back to work, and so
on. She is stuck in a loop, a worker forever leaving her station only to come
back to it.
The shopkeeper’s repetitious behavior, says the narrator, “reveals to the
hero the limitations of human freedom of action.” In conveying this
message, the video game script resembles a cuckoo clock, a gif, or a
disgruntled factory worker clocking into his shift. Here, we see that Farocki
was perhaps a Bergsonian as well as a Marxist. His films reveal an abiding
fascination with the repetitions by which habits become habits; the long
historical processes that miraculously congeal into standard operating
procedures. Like a line repeated from a film one just can’t help quoting,
there is a comedy of the involuntary, and within those products of mindless,
semiautomatic repetition, only a limited interval of free will within which to
interrupt their patterns. If Farocki’s films obsessively revisit this theme,
perhaps it was because he was always searching for that interval, as am I,
and it will be up to the reader to decide whether I have succeeded or merely
repeated myself.

A
Versions of this chapter were first delivered in talk form at the University of
Oregon in February 2016, at Swarthmore College in April 2016, and at the
University of California, Santa Barbara in April 2016. Versions of the
section on Harun Farocki were delivered as talks under the title “An Image
Is Being Produced: Procedure and Cliché in Some Films by Harun Farocki”
at Temple University’s Documentary after Farocki Symposium (September
2017) and at the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present
(Oakland, CA, October 2017). I am grateful to my hosts and interlocutors
for spirited discussion and suggestions at all these events. Finally, several
sections of this chapter contain revised portions of previously published
texts: I thank the publishers and editors for permission to reproduce and
have cited the earlier publications in the endnotes.

N
1. Chris Marker, “Free Play: Notes on Vertigo,” Positif 400 (June 1994): 79–84.
2. Homay King, Virtual Memory: Time-Based Art and the Dream of Digitality (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 2015), 100–101.
3. Leo Bersani, “Sociability and Sexuality,” Critical Inquiry 26, no. 4 (Summer 2000): 651.
4. Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, trans. James Strachey (New York: W. W.
Norton, 1961), 21–24.
5. Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1994), 26.
6. Pier Paolo Pasolini, “The Cinema of Poetry,” in Movies and Methods: Volume 1, ed. Bill
Nichols (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 552. For more on free indirect
cinema, see Homay King, “Free Indirect Affect in Cassavetes’ Opening Night and Faces,”
Camera Obscura 19, n. 2/56 (Summer 2004): 105–39.
7. Pasolini, “Cinema of Poetry,” 552–53.
8. This film sequence is also discussed in Kaja Silverman and Harun Farocki, Speaking about
Godard (New York: New York University Press, 1998), 74–75.
9. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 148–49.
10. Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell (New York: Dover, 1998), 340.
11. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara
Habberjam (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 2–3.
12. Ibid., 11.
13. Ibid., 8.
14. Parts of this section were previously published in Homay King, “Born Free? On Fantasy and
Repetition in The Act of Killing,” Film Quarterly 67, no. 2 (March 2014).
15. Rithy Panh, quoted in Joshua Oppenheimer, “Perpetrators’ Testimony and the Restoration of
Humanity: S21, Rithy Panh,” in Killer Images: Documentary Film, Memory, and the
Performance of Violence, ed. Joram ten Brink and Joshua Oppenheimer (New York:
Wallflower Press, 2012), 245.
16. Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 13–15.
17. Sigmund Freud and Josef Breuer, Studies on Hysteria, trans. James Strachey (New York: Basic
Books, 2000).
18. William James, The Principles of Psychology (New York: Henry Holt, 1890), 5–6.
19. Ibid., 115 (emphasis in original).
20. Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, trans. N. M. Paul and W. S. Palmer (New York: Zone
Books, 1988), 79.
21. André Bazin, What Is Cinema? Volume I, trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1967), 151.
22. Ibid., 151.
23. Ibid., 152.
24. Michael North, Machine-Age Comedy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 186.
25. Henri Bergson, Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic, trans. Cloudesley Brereton
and Fred Rothwell (Breinigsville, PA: Kessinger, 2011), 6, 9, 10, 22.
26. As North notes, “Comic theorists from Lutz to Benjamin have also tended to contradict
Bergsonian prejudice by insisting that repetition is funny in and of itself,” independent of its
associations with the mechanical. Machine-Age Comedy, 199.
27. Bergson, Laughter, 62.
28. Ibid., 13.
29. Ibid., 16.
30. Sigmund Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, trans. James Strachey (New
York: W. W. Norton, 1960), 259.
31. Earlier versions of this section and those on Pinocchio and Parallel I-IV were originally
published as “The Lion in the Ass’s Skin,” in Exchanging the Nose for the Yesses, ed.
Benjamin Tiven and Per-Oskar Leu (Rome: CURA Books, 2015).
32. W. K. English, D. C. Engelbart, and Bonnie Huddart, “Computer-Aided Display Control,” a
report prepared for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Menlo Park, CA:
Stanford Research Institute, July 1965), 6.
33. Béla Balázs, Theory of Film: Character and Growth of a New Art, trans. Edith Bone (New
York: Dover, 1970), 92.
34. Sergei Eisenstein, Eisenstein on Disney, trans. Alan Upchurch (New York: Seagull Books,
1988), 4, 21.
35. Bazin, What Is Cinema?, 12.
36. Thomas Elsaesser and Alex Alberro, “Farocki: A Frame for the No Longer Visible: Thomas
Elsaesser in Conversation with Alex Alberro,” e-flux journal 59 (November 2014): 9.
37. Jan Verwoert, “Production Pattern: Associations on the Work of Harun Farocki,” Afterall 11
(Spring/Summer 2005): 75.
 CHAPTER 14

EMPIRICISM AND FILM

THEORY
On the Moviola’s Political
Ontology

DAVIDE PANAGIA

IN 1920, Jean Wahl published his agrégation de philosophie entitled Les

philosophies pluralistes d’Angleterre et d’Amérique, which was
subsequently translated into English in 1925 as The Pluralist Philosophies
of England and America. That work, along with the yet untranslated Vers le
concret (1932), inaugurated a philosophy of pluralism and radical
empiricism into the French intellectual and cultural landscape that would
have lasting and enduring effects throughout the twentieth century.
Considered by many contemporary French thinkers as one of the most
important philosophers in France, Wahl introduced French philosophy not
only to the radical empiricism of Anglo-American pragmatism but also to
phenomenology, existentialism, and British empiricism. “Apart from Sartre,
who remained caught nonetheless in the trap of the verb to be,” asserts
Gilles Deleuze, “the most important philosopher in France was Jean Wahl.
He not only introduced us to an encounter with English and American
thought, but had the ability to make us think, in French, things which were
very new; he on his own account took this art of the AND, this stammering
of language itself, this minoritarian use of language, the furthest.”1
Central to Wahl’s understanding of the Anglo-American tradition of
radical empiricism were the philosophies of William James and Alfred
North Whitehead. But it is William James and his attack on Kantian
idealism that Wahl would repeatedly embrace and ultimately transmit to his
students at the Sorbonne where he taught for three decades (1936–1967).
Wahl cites James’s assertion that pragmatism should sidestep Kant and his
“evasions and artifices” with much satisfaction.2 This said, he retained an
acute awareness of the philosophical limits of these traditions, at one point
going so far as to characterize them as forms of “empirical romanticism.”3
The emphasis on empiricism, and its role in rethinking pluralism,
continuity, relationality, and substance, is what I wish to emphasize in the
following pages. Wahl’s influence on the postwar ideas I will discuss was to
make radical empiricism and pluralism available as sources of philosophical
richness and aesthetic reflection for thinking about film. And, I want to
suggest further, this eventually made itself manifest in a specific kind of
attention that was given to technical objects as sites and sources for a series
of aesthetic considerations in film theory. Simply put, the pluralism and
radical empiricism made available in Wahl’s writings and teachings helps
put into view a minoritarian empiricist strain in postwar film theory that has
at times been noted but has yet to be brought into focus.
In the following pages, I offer evidence for a radical empiricist mode of
film theory.4 I limit myself only to a few authors and rely on the genre of an
annotated summary that looks to superimpose a series of views,
enunciations, perceptions, and valuations about the practices of theorizing,
film, aesthetics, and politics.5 Thus, the annotated assays in the second part
of this chapter focus on Gilbert Simondon, Jean-Luc Goddard, and Gilles
Deleuze, and expose how each contributes to an empiricist film theory that
explores different formulations of the stammering and of pluralism and
radical empiricism. These contributions are at once philosophical, aesthetic,
and political. They are philosophical in their elaboration of a process
philosophy of becoming, they are aesthetic in their attempt to overturn
representation, and they are political in their refusal to accept any specific
form of belonging as natural. What each share, in other words, is a refusal
to accept that relations between peoples, objects, and views is necessary and
continuous, and thus they refuse the ideal that associations are determined
by a transcendental principle of identity and recognition.
 Crucial to these considerations is a concerted attention to how the
concrete operations of technical objects participate in the formulation of
ideas. This is perhaps the most explicit characteristic of the radical
empiricist film aesthetic I’m exploring. That is, empirical concreteness is
considered not in terms of the rawness of data that the body receives (as is
the case in traditional accounts of epistemological empiricism) but in terms
of the concrete operations of technical objects. These concrete operations
are not the result of a deterministic account of the medium, nor are their
effects idealized and treated as symptomatic of a set of assumptions about
the psychology of machines and their influence.6 Rather, attention is given
to what Simondon (in the title of one of his major works discussed below)
aptly refers to as the mode of existence of technical objects.
The question that structures my investigation throughout regards how we
might theorize the relation between politics, aesthetics, and film differently.
Differently, that is, from more traditional approaches that look to the
semantics of the image in order to underscore its ideological operations. In
this regard, I share Stanley Cavell’s emphasis on the ontology of film as
being an important site of phenomenological and aesthetic investigation.
But I also want to show how the ontological status of technical objects
affords (indeed, did afford to the figures I discuss) the possibility of making
a series of claims about the political potential of film. For this reason, I
focus on the moviola and thus on the claims made of and about editing,
cutting, pasting, duration, repetition, continuity, and relationality in film—
all practices and ideas that are part of the art of moviola editing. First used
as an editing machine in 1924, the moviola was originally invented as a
home viewing device in 1917 by the electrical engineer Iwan Serrurier. Its
costs for home viewing, however, were prohibitive and it was thus adapted
for editing in movie studios, remaining the standard editing machine until
the 1960s when flatbeds came into widespread use.7 But its media
archaeology merely scratches the surface of the theoretical claims that have
been made on its behalf and that have been purposed toward an
understanding and appreciation of empiricist theories of film. Such theories
are, as Wahl had shown with regard to empiricism in general, also pluralist
theories about the political possibilities of film. In other words, the aesthetic
possibilities that moviola editing makes available source a series of claims
about film’s pluriverse that rest on at least two important insights:8 (a) film
is an art of and about relations (of views, of time, of perceptions, of things);
and (b) no relation is natural to an object (in the case of film, the object is
the film reel). This means that the political dimension of film, and of this
empiricist tradition in film theory, does not rest on a semiotics of meaning
or on an account of domination as the privileged power of the lens. That is,
from the perspective of an empiricist theory of film, the site and purpose of
analysis do not lie in the mimetic function of the work of art and its
putatively stultifying operations but on the capacity of a work to generate
relations of attachment and detachment in the form of perceptibilities,
attunements, and dispositions. In other words, technical objects and the
works they produce are more importantly sentimental media than they are
representational ones. And “sentimental” here should be understood in its
eighteenth-century sense which, crudely put, refers to ways of ordering
worlds, or to what James Chandler has recently referred to (in the context of
his study of film) as “the sentimental mode” or “the sentimental
disposition” that produces what he describes as “relays of regard virtualized
in a medium.”9
Before I proceed to the Simondon/Godard/Deleuze tryptic, I will provide
an abbreviated account of the cultural milieu of postwar France that matters
to the emergence of this empiricist aesthetic in film theory. This will
include an account of both the intellectual stakes in the refusal of
Aristotelian mimesis as well as the cultural and political stakes in the
rejection of idealism, both of which are important tendencies implicit in an
empiricist theory of film.10 Next I offer an annotation of how Simondon,
Godard, and Deleuze focus their attentions on technical objects and the
empiricist aesthetic that emerges from such reflections. Finally, I conclude
by showing how an empiricist film theory offers insights into the
intermediality of a pluralist political imaginary that develops within the
French context I am addressing.

T -C G E
C
As Anthony Pagden has shown, one of the characteristic features of the
sentimental critique of Aristotelian Thomism in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries regarded a dismantling of the idea of a natural law of
association between peoples, and thus on the idea that our understanding of
the law of nature was made available and possible by innate ideas and an
innate sense of law that transcended human existence.11 Recall how
Aristotle had, in the Politics, determined that the development of political
society relied on a natural inclination in humans that was innate to our
willingness and propensity to reproduce.12 From the association of the
family, the association of society evolves, and this eventually develops into
an association of communities that is the polis. Thus, the innate law of
biological reproduction generates the state.
This basic Aristotelian insight implies that a natural law could be the
basis of a universal moral code.13 What it further suggested was that all
forms of association could be treated as both natural and derivative of a
general law of association, whether divine or human. But in the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries, this idea of a natural law of association came
under unrelenting attack on all sides. Hobbes, Grotius, Locke, Hume, and
Shaftesbury—each in their own distinct and not always congruous ways—
developed “a theory of the human mind which, while it dispensed with the
vision of a natural law whose principals were innate, also provided some
denser, richer account of the human person than one ruled wholly by
sensation or guided only by unenlightened self-interest.”14 In other words,
what was offered was an account of sociability that did not rely on a natural
law of association. What the empiricism of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-
century moral sentimentalists elaborated was an understanding of human
sociality independent of a theory of being.
It is this insight, and its pluralist ambitions, that Wahl discovers in Anglo-
American empiricism. “We will say,” he affirms, “that empiricism is
defined by its affirmation of the nondeducibility of being, by its affirmation
of the datum, that is, its affirmation of something immediate [n. 18 And
something particular, at least most of the time.], which is welcomed,
received.”15 And he will go on to ascribe to the philosophies of James,
Whitehead, and Gabriel Marcel a shared commitment to the unintelligibility
of being. “Being for them is a feeling rather than an idea, something that
rebels against reason; it is not at all the essence of reason. The being that is
the essence of reason is entirely different from being such as they conceive
it. The theory of being that we discover in the background of these
philosophies is opposed to that of Saint Thomas as well as to that of
Descartes.”16 This sentiment insists on a pluralist political ontology at the
heart of the radical empiricism Wahl explores. That pluralist political
ontology is grounded in the claim that concreteness (something that you can
only gesture toward, hence the “vers” in Vers le concret) is unattainable, but
it is felt, or, as he affirms, it is immediate. The thrust of this dichotomy will
inform Wahl’s readings of James, Whitehead, and Marcel. Though Wahl is
speaking about nineteenth- (and early twentieth-)century empiricists, he is
indebted to a modern tradition of moral sentimentalism that, at its heart,
relies on an empiricist sensationism for many of its commitments (both
intellectual and social). To denounce the essence of being, as he does in
those introductory pages of Vers le concret cited above, is to attack the idea
of a natural law of association and to affirm the importance of a stochastic
account of being as a disaggregated association—as he says, a
“nondeducibility of being” that is “immediate” and “particular,” not unlike
the frame of a film reel (as Hugo Münsterberg, the psychologist, author of
The Photoplay, and a collaborator of William James, had also noted).17
This was 1932. By 1942, Wahl escaped Europe on the last refugee ship to
leave France, landing in Baltimore and settling at first in New York and
then at Mount Holyoke.18 By the time Wahl returned to France after the
war, an intellectual milieu had emerged that proved ever more receptive to
Wahl’s empiricist investigations. His ideas took on an entirely new and
fresh approach throughout the 1950s when the realism and concreteness
that Wahl drew from empiricism sourced a series of considerations on the
ontologies of technical objects. Just like the human, which Wahl’s
empiricism considered undetermined and thus not beholden to an innate
theory of being, technical objects too were undetermined and
“nondeducible” in their modes of existence. This reappreciation of the
political ontology of empiricism proved fruitful to a new generation of
scholars and artists willing to break with a political and cultural past. To
make such a break they, like their eighteenth-century counterparts, took it
upon themselves to attack and dismantle the vestiges of an Aristotelian
scholasticism still embedded in bourgeois French cultural life.
Kristin Ross has shown how French culture of the 1950s was a time of
intense reordering. Two political events played a key role: the Vichy regime
and the Algerian War. Both events demanded a rethinking of the forms and
ideals of associationism that France had inherited. Vichy represented for
many the failure of the progressive ideals of history, and thus a
disillusionment with the promises of the victory of reason that a
commitment to Hegelian dialectics in the interwar period in France had
promised. The Algerian War, on the other hand, represented “the great
divorce.”19 Marriage was the structuring metaphor to describe the colonial
relationship between France and Algeria: the union between the two
countries was viewed as free but indissoluble.20 “The Algerian revolution,”
Ross explains, “was experienced by the French as ‘the destruction of the
household’ [la ruine du ménage] with all the attendant woes accompanying
violent breakups—for example, familial dirty laundry might be aired in
public.”21 In other words, within a Catholic French culture, the Algerian
revolution wasn’t simply an overturning of colonial rule; it stood as the
dissolution of a sacred union established by god, a divorce that affirms the
human desire to break with the law of god. It is in no uncertain terms an
original sin expressed as human disobedience in wanting to dissent from a
natural law of association augured by divine omnipotence.22
In tandem with this culture of reordering relations was the arrival of
everyday household objects made available thanks to the Marshall Plan.
Prior to the outbreak of World War II no one had a refrigerator; after the
war, everyone did. There was a palpable “coming of objects—long-scale
consumer durables, cars and refrigerators—into their streets and homes,
into the workplaces and their emplois du temps. In the space of just ten
years a rural woman might live the acquisition of electricity, running water,
a stove, a refrigerator, a washing machine, a sense of interior space as
distinct from exterior space, a car, a television, and the various liberations
and oppressions associated with each.”23 In other words, Ross points to the
radical transformation of everyday life in France with the arrival of
automation, and specifically of technical objects unavailable until after the
war. Thus, along with the geopolitical reordering of associations and their
sense of naturalness there was a domestic reordering of everyday space,
life, and time—an ontological gestalt, if you will—all of which made
possible a rethinking of both associationism and the diurnal modes of
existence of technical objects.
A case in point: Roland Barthes’s publication of Mythologies (1957)
provides a mythic theory for everyday objects: the Citroën, detergents, toys,
plastics, margarine, and so forth. To be sure, for Barthes these are all
signifiers of an overarching semiological system that points to the
mythification of bourgeois ideology. But to the extent that Barthes treats
these everyday technical objects as signifiers, they are arbitrary signifiers,
as is the case with the Saussurean signifier in general; that is, they are not
beholden to innate laws of ordering.24 These are objects, then, that point to
the undetermined reorganization of everyday French culture—a culture that
now has to confront, almost from one day to the next, the fact of
cohabitation with automated devices, technical objects, and other concrete
instruments. And Barthes’s powerful book is testament to the desire of
making sense of such new forms of diurnal living. Of toys Barthes quips
that they are “made of graceless material, the product of chemistry, not of
nature. Many are now moulded (sic.) from complicated mixtures; the plastic
material of which they are made has an appearance at once gross and
hygienic, it destroys all the pleasure, the sweetness, the humanity of
touch.”25 Such observations are markers of a familiar critical ideal that
identifies bourgeois life as a form of distorted living, and the nature/science
axis upon which the observation rests is testament to this. But beyond the
critical ambition of the insight itself, one can’t help but note a fascination
with the working of concrete mechanical devices as formal objects within
an automated system of signification; a fact, I want to suggest, that despite
the idealism inherent in the hermeneutic achievement of Barthes’s readings,
betrays a desire to contend with the concreteness of objects and their yet
undetermined forms of existence. Writing in 1957, Barthes was in a good
position to notice the diurnal, immediate, and concrete presence of
mechanicity in everyday French life and culture.
The lineage of radical empiricist film theory I outline in these pages
shares Barthes’s fascination with the arrival of technical objects, and the
need for adjustment and accommodation (in both living and thinking) that
such imports invite. But the ambition for a radical empiricist aesthetics of
film is not that of discovering a new semiotic reality. It is, rather, to break
with an Aristotelian account of mimesis and reproduce, almost verbatim,
the political, aesthetic, and theoretical arguments and criticisms of the
eighteenth-century sentimentalist philosophers and their more modern
empiricist counterparts.
Recall what was noted earlier: one of the characteristic features of
eighteenth-century empiricism is a break with an Aristotelian inheritance of
innate laws of character, politics, and mimesis.26 With regard to character,
Aristotle insists throughout the Nichomachean Ethics that virtue is to be
defined according to a tight correspondence between action and right rule.
To be virtuous for Aristotle means to do the right thing at the right time.
This is one of the central insights of his account of politics, of poetics, and
of individual moral worth. In all these cases there is a commitment to the
innateness of the good which is expressed in terms of fit: do the right thing
at the right time to produce the right effects.27 Aristotle admits the
impossibility of determining exact methods for what right rule is, as any
account of these is “lacking in exactness; for they do not fall under any
precept but the agents themselves must in each case consider what is
appropriate to the occasion, as happens also in the art of medicine and
navigation.”28 In other words, what the right rule is, is a matter of
judgment. That said, to be disposed to act according to the right rule is
decidedly not a matter of judgment, but is the definition of virtue and good
character: “Now, that we must act according to the right rule is a common
principle and must be assumed.”29
In the Poetics, Aristotle determines not only that acting according to the
right rule is necessary, but that right rule regards the placing of the right
action at the right time, and in the right sequential order of continuity. That
is, Aristotle makes plot (i.e., muthos) the central determinant of a good
work because a good plot offers the occasion to imitate virtuous action.
“Tragedy,” he says, “is essentially an imitation not of persons but of action
and life, of happiness and misery … Character gives us qualities, but it is in
our actions—what we do—that we are happy or the reverse.”30 More
importantly, Aristotle famously asserts the unity of plot as the central
characteristic of a good work and chastises those works that he deems as
merely episodic: “The truth is that, just as in the other imitative arts one
imitation is always of one thing, so in poetry the story, as an imitation of
action, must represent one action, a complete whole, with its several
incidents so closely connected that the transposal or withdrawal of any one
of them will disjoin and dislocate the whole.”31
What I’m pointing to here is something that will become a site of
criticism (philosophical, aesthetic, and political) to an emergent radical
empiricist film aesthetic in 1950s Paris: an account of appropriateness
inherent in the appeal to mimesis.32 Stephen Halliwell notes that such an
account of appropriateness in Aristotle “derives from the belief in a strong
link between moral character and the objective conditions of life, including
age, sex, social origin and status.”33 Appropriateness is thus a principal
virtue in Aristotle’s philosophy that extends throughout his oeuvre, from his
ethical writings to his aesthetic writings to his political theory and to his
metaphysics. And this principle belies a metaphysics of innate movement of
all things toward the good where the task of philosophy is not, as in the case
of Plato, to determine (as much as possible) the truth of an idea but is,
rather, the attainment of the good. This form of movement (toward the
good) takes the shape of a plot (in life as much as in the arts) that is
predicated on an ideal of continuous and innate association (i.e., teleology):
the elements of action, if they are good and worthy of imitation, are so not
because of their content but because of their emplotment, governed by a law
of continuity that determines the consequence of any action from a previous
plot event. In short, a good action is one that is “necessary or probable, of
the antecedents.”34 The virtues of necessity and probability ultimately
enable Aristotle to affirm that plots and actions that are episodic “are the
worst. I call a Plot episodic when there is neither probability nor necessity
in the sequence of its episodes.”35

E F T :A A A
A principal feature of the empiricist mode of film theory and filmmaking
that I illumine is a commitment to the radical empiricism of the episodic as
a way of undermining any classical account of innate association. The
possibility of broaching such an empiricist film theory requires the work of
collecting and assembling an archive of insights and formulations, as well
as practices and observations, that are peppered throughout the authors I
discuss below. Following Carlo Ginzburg, I thus offer a “conjectural
paradigm” for a radical empiricist aesthetics of film in the form of the
annotated assays that follow.36 Such a conjectural paradigm shows the
extent to which an empiricist theory of film is also a political philosophy of
difference where difference is articulated and defined expressly as the
metaphysical unavailability of natural forms of belonging between objects,
views, sights, people, and perceptions.

F A :G S
The proliferation of technical media in everyday life in France during the
immediate postwar period is the context for Simondon’s studies on
technical cultures as well as the development of his philosophy of
ontogenesis and the critique of Aristotelian metaphysics therein.37 With
regard to the latter, Simondon argues two important points: the first is to
establish that Being is not substance. Thus he will affirm that “Instead of
supposing substances in order to account for individuation, we take the
different regimes of individuation as the foundation of domains such as
matter, life, spirit, society … [so that] the notions of substance, form and
matter are replaced by the more fundamental notions of initial information,
internal resonance, metastability, energy potentials, orders of magnitude.”38
The second crucial point that Simondon introduces is that relations
themselves are independent variables: that there is no necessary relation
like causation, or continuity, or equivalence, or (importantly for the French
context) dialectics. So not only is there no innateness of substance, but there
are no innate relations between substances, and thus no innate movement of
relations either (i.e., teleology). Within the context of an empiricist theory
of film, this means that the filmic frame is not a substance and that the
relation between frames is not determined. Thus, the sequential movement
from substance to collective unity through emplotment is broken up, and it
is broken up by affirming that the relational forces that conjoin parts to
produce a sequence like a scene are not necessary to the whole but are
themselves forces in-formation. Simondon’s theory of individuation thus
affirms that “substance is no longer taken to be the model of being.”39
Rather, a substance is not a unity but is matter in a perpetual state of
metastable formation, or in-formation, and the movement that propels this
metastable state of in-formation is a force that advances “in constantly
variable steps.”40
In short, what Simondon discovers is the power of the episodic, that
Aristotle had dismissed as bad taste, as an ontological form of becoming
that he calls “ontogenesis,” and which he uses “to designate the character of
becoming of being, that by which being becomes, insofar as it is, as
being.”41 Being is thus neither essence (Aristotle) nor existence (Sartre), but
process (Wahl). In an Aristotelian world of being qua substance there can
only be an opposition between being and becoming that renders each
independent of the other, or, to put it more concretely, that renders them in
contradiction to one another. But Simondon refuses the ontological
distinction (and contradiction) between being and becoming and asserts
ontogenesis (his term for the becoming of being, or being in-formation, or
individuation) as “a dimension of being corresponding to a capacity of
being to fall out of phase with itself, that is, to resolve itself by dephasing
itself … this division of being into phases is becoming. Becoming is not a
framework in which being exists, it is a dimension of being, a mode of
resolution of an initial incompatibility that is rich in potential.”42 Simondon
is quick to affirm that the dephasing of being that is the ontogenetic force of
becoming (that he will otherwise also call individuation) is not an effect of
being—a consequence or sequential arrival of being. It is, rather, “the
operation itself in the process of accomplishing itself.”43 The logic seems
circular, because it is: individuation is an automated repetition with no final
phase other than the process of becoming itself. The point is that what
Simondon will call “concrete being” (recalling Wahl’s Vers le concret) is
not a unity, or a substance, or a thing. It is wholly process, a dephasing.
The next step that Simondon introduces is the analysis of technical
objects in their modes of existence. In his 1958 prospectus to this project he
is clear about his ambition: “A gap manifests itself in our civilization
between the attitudes provoked in man by the technical object and the true
nature of these objects; from this inadequate and confused rapport a set of
mythological valuations and devaluations arises in the consumer, the
manufacturer, and the worker; in order to replace this inadequate rapport
with a veritable relation, one has to become aware of the mode of existence
of technical objects.”44 We should not confuse the expression “true nature”
with the idea of an absolute reality of the object, a technological essence.
And the reason we should not confuse it is because Simondon’s ontology
denies us the possibility of thinking essences, substances, and the like as
truth claims about reality. What then is the nature of this “true nature” of the
technical object? On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects is an
attempt to work through an answer to that question in light of the empiricist
and pluralist ontology he provides. This is accomplished by a series of
studies on the concreteness of technical objects and their relationship to
space and time, including various circuits, engines, turbines, and other such
modes of cultural technics. What becomes apparent throughout the work,
and throughout Simondon’s writings in general, is that the force of
ontogenesis applies as much to the instruments of technicity as it does to the
individuation of the human: “The different aspects of the technical being’s
individualization constitute the center of an evolution, which proceeds via
successive stages, but which is not dialectical in the proper sense of the
term, because, in regard to it, negativity does not play the role of an engine
of progress.”45 What does play a role in this process of individuation is a
kind of circuit of repetition between a future and present state that he will
call the “associational milieu” of the technical object “through which the
technical object conditions itself in its functioning. This milieu is not
fabricated, or at least not fabricated in its totality; it is a certain regime of
natural elements surrounding the technical being, linked to a certain regime
of elements that constitute the technical being. The associated milieu
mediates the relation between technical, fabricated elements and natural
elements, at the heart of which the technical being functions. Such is the
case of the ensemble constituted by oil and water moving in and around the
Guimbal turbine.”46
What interests me for the purposes of an empiricist film theory is
Simondon’s emphasis on the associational and relational dynamics that
constitute the modes of existence of technical objects. His solution to
getting beyond the problems of an ontology of being for technical objects
(i.e., the treatment of them as tool-substances with a determined purpose) is
to assess how technical objects operate at the level of relationality, or, as he
asserts in the passage above, at the level of their associational milieus. The
associational milieu is not simply what the technical object offers; it is its
concreteness that takes effect automatically and independent of any
historical process of causation. As Brian Massumi duly explains, “A
technical invention does not have a historical cause,” according to
Simondon. “It is an ‘absolute origin’: an autonomous taking-effect of a
futurity; an effective coming into existence that conditions its own potential
to be as it comes.”47 It is an absolute origin because a technical object has
no concreteness other than the associational milieu that emerges at the
moment of its coming into effect. In other words, technical objects exist in a
metastable state and are only actualized, not applied. Such is the process
ontology of the modes of existence of technical objects.
Simondon’s ontology of technics is rooted in a rebuttal of the
metaphysics of techne and movement inherited from an Aristotelian
tradition that imagined technical instruments as “organons” (i.e., machines)
that formed the basic structure of the entirety of the philosopher’s system of
thought (“organon” being the title under which Aristotle’s logic is
systematized, but also the Latin term (organa) used to translate Aristotle’s
theory of movement where he likens the organs of animal motion to the
parts of war machines).48 For this reason, we arrive at what seems a
surprising—indeed stunning—assertion: “The dynamism of thought is the
same as that of technical objects; mental schemas react upon each other
during invention in the same way the diverse dynamisms of the technical
object will react upon each other in their material functioning. The unity of
the technical object’s associated milieu is analogous to the unity of the
living being; during invention, the unity of the living being is the coherence
of mental schemes, obtained by the fact that they exist and deploy
themselves in the same being; those schemas that are contradictory confront
and reduce one another. The reason the living being can invent is because it
is an individual being that carries its associated milieu with it; this capacity
for conditioning itself lies at the root of the capacity to produce objects that
condition themselves.”49 The analogy between the individuation of ideas
(i.e., creativity and invention) and the individuation of technical objects is,
indeed, striking and undoubtedly problematic; although not wholly
problematic from an empiricist perspective that—since Hume—understood
the faculty of the imagination as an image-generating machine.50 What is
also compelling is the assumption that the concrescence of individuation is
emergent and, in a sense, automatic (and if not automatic, impersonal in that
there is no personhood prior to the emergence of the individual and/or
technical object). Such an affirmation has several consequences, not the
least being the absolute rejection of an antecedent cause as necessary for the
emergence of any object. It’s not that there are no causes but that there is no
one law of causation that can explain individuation.
In the case of radical empiricist film theory, then, Simondon’s ideas
inform many of the postulates articulated in the previous sections—with
one notable addition: now we have an ontological theory of the image as
concrete individuation emergent from the associational milieu of a technical
object. Like images in the mind that are generated automatically from
external impressions and thus have no necessary cause or, indeed, relation
to any other mental image (as Hume, James, and Wahl believed), so is it the
case that the cinematic image is emergent from an associational milieu of
intermedial forces that includes, but is not limited to, the camera, the
director, the actors, the staging, and the moviola.

S A :J -L G
On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects was originally published in
1958 as the complementary thesis to Simondon’s doctoral dissertation that
he defended at the Sorbonne, also in 1958. Two years earlier, Godard
penned and published “Montage, mon beau souci” (translated as Montage
My Fine Care) in the pages of Cahiers du cinema and would release, in
1960, À bout de souffle. Much has been made of this period of Godard’s
oeuvre, and its continued relevance to his late career.51 Marie-Claire
Ropars-Wuilleumier, for instance, characterizes the 1960 film in fully anti-
Aristotelian terms, as “filled with holes, allusions, and interferences, and in
which Godard emphasizes high points and low points while using elliptical
techniques to slough off the preceding action as well as the consequences of
a given event, a storyline takes shape in opposition to a narrative tradition
that was originally invented in order to overcome the inherent discontinuity
of cinematic expression by establishing an invisible continuity in which the
theoretical logic of a narrative superimposed its own syntax over the true
language of the cinema.”52
Godard had anticipated his own commitment to discontinuity in Montage
My Fine Care—a text that, as Michael Witt correctly notes, can be treated
as a kind of manifesto for Godard’s career but also, and more importantly,
as the formulation of a central hypothesis that structures Godard’s
appreciation of cinema as an art.53 Here he expresses his dissatisfaction
with the idea that the creative practice of editing is simply reducible to
continuity editing. Godard will pluralize the capacities of montage by
insisting on cinema as an assembly of technomediatic forces that include
the camera, but also the moviola, celluloid, glue, and so on—thereby
putting on display the process nature of discontinuity as a material fact
about the organon of the celluloid film strip. As Witt notes, “montage is
integral to the cinema, not just as the grammatical basis to filmic expression
(the combination of shots) but also at the micro-level of the interstice
separating photogrammes on the celluloid.”54 In short, cinema is many
things, but by bringing cinema into the editing room, as Godard does in
Montage My Beautiful Care, we discover an empirical concreteness via the
moviola that affirms a commitment to an ontology of discontinuity
characteristic of the radical empiricism I have been describing. Quite
simply the moviola and the associated materialism of the editing room
milieu make available the conjoining of episodic, celluloid fragments
according to no external criteria that will govern the “how” or “why” of
relating. In the terms introduced by Wahl’s empiricism, what the moviola
affords Godard is an undetermined account of relationality; undetermined,
that is, because not beholden to any account of ontological necessity or
innate ideas about movement and sequence. “Invention and improvisation
takes place in front of the moviola just as much as it does on the set”
Godard declares. “Cutting a camera movement in four may prove more
effective than keeping it as a shot. An exchange of glances, to revert to our
previous example, can only be expressed with the sufficient force—when
necessary—by editing.”55
Such a manifesto, subsequently put on display in À bout de souffle, shows
Godard enmeshed in an empiricist mode of film thinking that is less
interested in the expressiveness of images than it is in reordering the
relation of movement and unity of form—a reordering that we see theorized
in Simondon’s philosophy of individuation. The ontological force of the
empiricist claim lies in the capacity of a technical object to rethink and
reconfigure relationality by exploiting the stochasticity of parts in the film,
and in the making of film. In other words, Godard discovers that the
practices of assembly formation in cinema are not fixed, and neither is the
capacity of the filmmaker. She can be a director as much as an editor, an
actor, a writer, or a stylist (this is the ultimate conceit of auteurism—that
there is no single author, but a free-indirect discourse; and this too is why
Deleuze will speak of a “free indirect vision” in Godard).56 The creative
assembly of worlds that cinema puts on display is untethered to any specific
sense of form, or way of doing. Thus, when Godard concludes his essay by
affirming that “a director should closely supervise the editing of his films”
and “the editor should also forsake the smell of glue and celluloid for the
heat of the arc- lamps,” what he is confirming is a materialist aesthetic of
film that, in turn, affirms the fact that relations are not innate to any form of
expertise, style, or capacity.57 This is not surprising, given Godard’s own
admittance that his cinematic education, early in life, was, like many of his
contemporaries, thoroughly cinephile and thus informal and autodidactic.
Add to this the fact that his real entry into the world of film was not through
the viewing of films but through the reading (and viewing) of film journals,
and pictures in magazines.58 In all this, Godard seems to be affirming,
through both text and cinematic works, that the lines of relation which
establish divisions of labor, of practice, and of identity—indeed, of a
cinematic education and its forms of classification—are not innate to any
system of organization, or, in Simondon’s terms, relationality is an
individuating force that has no hylomorphic necessity.
It is in this more capacious, empiricist manner that we might begin to
appreciate the full force of what otherwise would seem like a reductionist
move on the part of Godard—that is, of reducing film to montage. Montage
for Godard isn’t simply cutting and pasting; the moviola stands as a
technical object (in Simondon’s sense of the term) whose mode of existence
generates an associational milieu of potential relations between events,
between temporalities, between views, between auralities. What’s more, the
moviola introduces another bodily organ into the ensemble of filmmaking:
the hand. As Witt astutely notes, “Godardian thought has been consciously
channeled through a physical, sculptural engagement with his material (‘To
think with ones hands’, as Godard suggests through reference to Denis de
Rougement in Fatale Beauté).”59 In this respect there isn’t just a reordering
of perception, of time, and of events with the discovery of an empiricist
film theory via the moviola, there is a reordering of the organoleptic
relations that constitute the ontology of film and that take it beyond a
merely visual and scopic medium. It is within this radical empiricist
aesthetics, I believe, that we should appreciate the full force of Godard’s
assertion that “cinema was popular, it developed a technique, a style or a
way of doing things, something that I believe was essentially montage.
Which for me means seeing, seeing life.”60

T A :G D
The case of Gilles Deleuze’s relationship to an empiricist theory of film is
perhaps the simplest to annotate, though this is not an indication of the
simplicity of its thought. Quite the contrary. But it was Deleuze who (as
noted) affirmed the profound influence of Wahl’s empiricism and his
elaboration of the value of empiricism in thinking of and about the
undetermined nature of all relationality, the “stammering AND” of
empiricism as he describes it. In this respect, if Simondon declares that the
mode of existence of technical objects is to be experienced in the process of
individuation of an object’s associational milieu, and if Godard similarly
announces that he is first and foremost a combiner and that for him, cinema
is montage, then Deleuze is the one who affirms the empiricist discovery
that mind is montage and that any form of association between ideas is
independent of the nature of the idea itself.
It is in this spirit, I think, that we might appreciate one of Deleuze’s last
public reflections on film (entitled “What is a creative act?” and also
delivered at FEMIS—the French School of cinematography—two years
prior to Godard’s lecture) where he affirms that “The question then
becomes what connects these little pieces of visual space if their connection
is not predetermined. The hand connects them.”61 Like Godard, Deleuze
will think with the hands in order to think a radical empiricist aesthetics of
relationality in film. And to think with one’s hands means, in the context of
Deleuze’s commitment to empiricism, to think both materially and
relationally. Here we must appreciate the full force of the French term that
will be used repeatedly: agencement (to link, dispose, associate, or adjoin—
typically is translated as “assemblage”).62 To think with one’s hands is to
think the AND of agencement—it is to think all relations as non-
subsumable to any one term or to any one series of signifiers. In his famous
chapter on “Thought and Cinema,” that consolidates his version of an
empiricist theory of film and elaborates the innovations of Godard’s and
Antonin Artaud’s montage thinking, Deleuze says that “the ‘unlinked’
image (this was Artaud’s term) becomes serial and atonal in a precise
sense.”63 That precise sense was already theorized in “Sixth Series on
Serialization” in The Logic of Sense where he affirms that series exist in
“perpetual disequilibrium vis-à-vis each other” which, for the purposes of
his discussion, means that they do not exist as determined by any one law of
signification or association.64 “What is signified,” he will further affirm in
that same chapter, “is never sense itself.”65
The issue here regards a further tenet of an empiricist theory of film I
wish to annotate as a central contribution that Deleuze makes: namely, that
a series (of visual images, in the case of film) is not conjoined or adjoined
(i.e., agencement) by an overarching theory of meaning that will at once
determine and explain the “how” and “why” of adjacency. Hence Deleuze’s
turning to Charles Peirce’s semeiotics throughout his cinema books, but
especially in Cinema 2: The Time Image. Deleuze’s approach to cinema was
radically acute in relation to the dominant forms of semiotics available at
the time (especially that of Christian Metz). Deleuze did not accept the
premise that one needed a theory of meaning in order to classify images and
explain their modes of signification. “He did not agree that film could be
defined as a language, because this amounted to ignoring what identifies an
image as movement and time,” explains François Dosse.66 Hence Peirce
and his semeiotic system that emphasizes a pragmatics of the sign based on
its uses as actions. This system for classifying events of action in cinema
allows Deleuze to eschew any reliance on organic unity or (once again)
innate relations.67 Deleuze is committed to the idea that forces are not
determined by qualities and thus elaborates an empiricist film theory that
focuses on the ways in which things, peoples, affects, and events can relate
without having the form of relation be scripted.
Allow me to elaborate this sensibility, then, with reference to those pages
in Deleuze’s Cinema 2 where he expands his own aesthetic in-formalism
vis-à-vis Godard’s early work.68 Notably he begins Cinema 2 by situating
his reader in the midst of Bazin’s Cahiers du Cinema arguments about
realism—here is that first sentence, from the first chapter entitled “Beyond
the movement-image”: “Against those who defined Italian neo-realism by
its social content, Bazin put forward the fundamental requirement of formal
aesthetic criteria. According to him, it was a matter of a new form of reality,
said to be dispersive, elliptical, errant or wavering, working in blocs, with
deliberate weak connections and floating events.”69 The new reality, the
new realism, is episodic. And this dimension of the episodic is what
Deleuze identifies as the first aspect of the new cinema, “the break in the
sensory-motor link (action-image), and more profoundly in the link
between man and the world (great organic composition).”70 What enables
this break is the automaticity of cinema itself which was always already
there, but which is rediscovered as part of the moviola’s associational
milieu. The question, he goes on to explain, “is no longer that of the
association or attraction of images. What counts is on the contrary the
interstice between images, between two images: a spacing which means
that each image is plucked from the void and falls back into it.”71 Like
Hume, who “shows that representation cannot be a criterion for the
relations,” so too does the new cinema, in discovering the fact of
automaticity in and of film, the fact that cinema is a technical object whose
mode of existence is at once serial, disconnected, and stochastic also
discovers that associations are not prior to cinema but emergent from the
interstice that exists between every frame of celluloid, twenty-four frames
per second.72 In short, what the new cinema discovers by entering into the
editing room (as Godard had announced) is an ontology of differentiation
that keeps the representative function of association at bay and that
emphasizes the becoming-movement (i.e., Simondon’s individuation)
between two images. “It is not a matter of following a chain of images,
even across voids, but of getting out of the chain or association,”73 Deleuze
will explain and then add: “It is the method of BETWEEN, ‘between two
images’, which does away with all the cinema of the One. It is the method
of AND, ‘this and then that’, which does away with all the cinema of Being
= is.”74
This observation returns us to Wahl, to his pluralist empiricism, and to
the main tenets of a radical empiricist theory of film aesthetics I introduce
in these pages. Recall how Deleuze had affirmed the importance of Wahl
and his having introduced empiricism into the French context by affirming
the “art of the AND, this stammering of language itself.”75 “Thinking with
AND,” he also declares in that same paragraph, “instead of thinking IS,
instead of thinking for IS: empiricism has never had another secret. Try it, it
is a quite extraordinary thought, and yet it is life.”76 After 1945, for all of
the reasons I discuss above and more, Deleuze admits that the cinematic
image can no longer be a unity; he affirms, in fact, the stochastic
serialization of cinema once film encounters the moviola and confronts its
sculptural materiality. The power of postwar film is located in the vitalism
of the empiricist AND that reorganizes a pluralism of relations “that do not
begin to live except in the middle.”77 Thus “Godard’s strength is not just in
using this mode of construction in all his work (constructivism) but in
making it a method which cinema must ponder at the same time as it uses
it…. For, in Godard’s method, it is not a question of association. Given one
image, another image has to be chosen which will induce and interstice
between the two. This is not an operation of association but of
differentiation, as mathematicians say, or of disappearance, as physicists
say: given one potential, another one has to be chosen, not any whatever but
in such a way that difference of potential is established between the two,
which will be productive of a third or of something new.”78 In short, what is
“new” in Nouvelle Vague is the discovery, via an empiricist theory of film,
of intermediality as cinema’s realism.
Deleuze’s Godard takes us very far from either Aristotle or Hegel, from
either teleology or dialectics, from necessity or negation—that is, from a
theory of movement and association dependent on antecedent causes and a
progressive ideal of futurity. In the stochastic interstices of a radically
empiricist film aesthetics and film theory, concreteness is expressed as the
material fact of indetermination made palpable by the filmic handling of the
moviola. As suggested earlier, the moviola’s associational milieu demands
the presence and function of the hand AND the eyes; its mode of existence
is empiricist through and through. And as Simondon suggested, the
associational milieu is the source of an individuation of forces, a
concretization of elements, an intensity of agencement.

I
To summarize, here are the ideas that source the aesthetic, political, and
ontological position available in a radical empiricist film theory: (a) the
dismantling of any natural law of association; (b) the stochasticity of the
frame whose relationship to other frames in the series is undetermined and
discontinuous; (c) the ontological concreteness of difference empirically
verifiable in the interstice between frames that are the material site and
source of discontinuity (i.e., cinema’s realism); (d) the rejection of
difference as negation, and thus the concreteness of difference as
independent and undetermined by a natural movement towards resolution
qua identity; (e) the rejection of an Aristotelian metaphysics of substance in
favor of a pluralist ontology of becoming; and (6) the commitment of
cinema to reenter, as if for the first time, the editing room.
In the preceding pages I claim that in the postwar period in France, a new
way of thinking about the intermediality of film emerges that parallels the
articulation of empiricism and sentimentalism of the eighteenth century.
The French cultural context was ripe for such an emergence. From the
introduction in French society of a dizzying array of new machinic devices
with gears, engines, valves, and screens to the realization that traditional
ways of understanding everyday relations and geopolitical allegiances were
insufficient to current events, all these elements helped to create a context
for experimenting with relations anew.
At the forefront of such experiments was the radical empiricist aesthetic
insight (introduced by Wahl via Hume, James, and Whitehead) that
agencements are not determined by innate ideas or natural laws but are the
product of automatic forces of repetition. What the film making and film
thinking of the 1950s (and beyond) makes manifest is the discovery, in the
concrete materiality of a technical object like the moviola, this radical
empiricist aesthetic. And what this aesthetic procures is an idea of cinema
as an intermedial force, a power of in-betweenness. The dark spaces in
between frames of celluloid become the object of an ontological
reconfiguring of space, time, and criteria for ordering. All these elements
(i.e., space, time, and order) are discovered as stochastic and indeterminate;
stochastic, in the sense that they are concrete parts, and indeterminate in
that there is no overlaying rule of association like resemblance, or
commonality, or continuity (i.e., Aristotelian muthos) that will assign
belonging to things. In short, what is discovered in this emerging empiricist
film theory is the idea that the participation of parts in an enterprise of
coordination is undetermined by any natural principle of association.
With that discovery comes the affirmation of the free form of the middle
term; in brief, the intermedial. This intermedial force is what Deleuze called
the stammering AND of empiricism that allows him to come to the
conclusion that “Relations are external to their terms.”79 Godard discovers
the free form of intermediality in the editing room with the moviola, a
machine whose technical dynamics were designed to put on display not so
much the image as the spooling of frames that, when handled in the manner
that the moviola’s associational milieu invites, made palpable the fact that
no scene had a natural beginning or end, and that the relation between
scenes were “external” (Deleuze) to the scene themselves. External how?
External in the sense that they were not determined by an innate law of
association, especially not the law of mimesis that Plato and Aristotle had
inaugurated and that French classicism had perfected. Relations without
ideas; or to paraphrase a Godardian aphorism (from Vent d’est, 1969, but
according to Godard, originally borrowed from Jean-Pierre Gorin) there is
no just image, there are just images.80
In one of the appendices to The Logic of Sense, Deleuze pushes Godard’s
aphorism to the nth degree. What do we learn from Plato’s ontology of the
image? Deleuze asks. Simply, that there was never a rejection of the image
tout court. For Plato, there are two types of images: the copy and the
simulacra. The one is the true image, the other is a false image. And the
difference lies in the fact that the copy is beholden to a law of
resemblance/mimesis that relates the image permanently to the idea. The
simulacra exists independently of any such allegiance (it is, following
Porter, the stoicheion).81 Hence its original sin: “If we say of the
simulacrum that it is a copy of a copy, an infinitely degraded icon, an
infinitely loose resemblance,” Deleuze explains, “we then miss the
essential, that is, the difference in nature between simulacrum and copy, or
the aspect by which they form the two halves of a single division. The copy
is an image endowed with resemblance, the simulacra is an image without
resemblance.”82 This, ultimately, is what Platonism founds as the ground of
critical thought: namely, a philosophy of the image “defined not by an
extrinsic relation to an object, but by an intrinsic relation to the model or
foundation.”83
The radical empiricist aesthetics and film theory I elaborate in these
pages inverts this founding moment and discovers the power of the
simulacra, of the stochastic image without an intrinsic relation to a law of
mimesis. That power resulted in new ideas about selection, participation,
and division in the composition of parts (of a reel of film). In short, what
was discovered was the radical democratic potential of the image. By this I
don’t mean democratic in the sense of a state form but democratic in the
sense of a mode of arrangement and assembly independent of a common
measure for the alignment of a collectivity. Here participation in a collective
like the demos is not determined by ideal qualifications of belonging. In
short, what an empiricist film theory makes available are intermedial modes
of democratic participation not governed by a law of association. Therein
lies the democratic status of the simulacra that generates forms of
agencement (i.e., association, adjoining, or assemblage) heretofore
unassayed.
This returns us to Wahl’s original insight regarding the tradition of
empiricism he introduces in France. What the radical empiricism of Hume,
and subsequently James and Whitehead, offers film is a pluralist account of
agencement rooted in a process ontology. Therein lies the power of the
nouvelle. Simondon had made this a priority in his critique of Aristotle’s
hylomorphism as well in his cultural technics; that is, the elaboration of the
process of individuation for an ontology of becoming, including the
becoming/individuation of the associational milieu of technical objects
themselves. Hence his claim that “Individuation corresponds to the
appearance of phases in being that are the phases of being.”84 Godard will
take up Simondon’s claim indirectly by discovering in the moviola a
technical object for the dephasing of the being of the image, thereby
displaying its full force of becoming—to wit, an intermediality without
resemblance. Finally, Deleuze will transform this pluralist empiricism into a
political ontology that refuses the authority of a law of relation, of
belonging, of identity—that is, difference in itself.85 In short, a radical
empiricist film aesthetic and theory as it develops in the decolonial, postwar
period in France offers a way to reconceptualize and rework the function of
authority vis-à-vis forms of organization and association. No longer
beholden to an innate law governing how things ought to assemble and thus
resemble, a new, radically democratic, intermedial theory of the image
emerges from the pluralist technical ontology of the moviola.

A
I wish to thank Daniel Morgan and Kyle Stevens for their insights on earlier
drafts of this chapter. An earlier version of this chapter was presented at the
Association of Political Theory (2015), the Western Political Science
Association (2016), the Society for Cinema and Media Studies (2016), the
Film Theory and Visual Culture Workshop at Vanderbilt University (2016),
and the Forms of Authority conference at Australia National University’s
Humanities Research Center, (2016). Thank you to all participants for their
helpful comments and criticisms. I am grateful to Will Christie and Fiona
Jenkins for their hospitality, and to the Visiting Fellow’s Program of
Australia National University’s Humanities Research Center for providing
research support for the development of this project.

N
1. Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogues II (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007),
43.
2. Jean Wahl, The Pluralist Philosophies of England And America, trans. Fred Rothwell (London:
Open Court, 1925), 89.
3. Ibid., 280.
4. Recently, Richard Grusin has formulated his own radical empiricist theory of mediation in
“Radical Mediation,” Critical Inquiry 42, no. 1 (2015): 124–48. Importantly, he too is indebted
to a radical empiricist tradition rooted in William James’s pragmatism.
 5. Here I loosely follow the annotative style of John Guillory, “Genesis of the Media Concept,”
Critical Inquiry 36, no. 2 (2010): 321–62.
6. Cf. Victor Tausk, “On the Origin of the ‘Influence Machine’ in Schizophrenia,” Journal of
Psychotherapy Practice and Research 1, no. 2 (1992): 185–206.
7. See Paul Schrader, “Game Changers: Editing,” Film Comment, December 2014,
https://www.filmcomment.com/article/game-changers-editing/.
8. For an informed treatment of the radical empiricist pluriverse, see Kennan Ferguson, William
James: Politics in the Pluriverse (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007), and especially
the chapter entitled “La Philosophie Américaine: James, Bergson, and Reverberations of
Intercontinental Pluralism.”
9. James Chandler, An Archaeology of Sympathy: The Sentimental Mode in Literature and
Cinema (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 13.
10. Due to reasons of space, I am unable to expand on the philosophical tradition of empiricism
that I draw from. However, much of that work is available in my Davide Panagia, Impressions
of Hume: Cinematic Thinking and the Politics of Discontinuity (Lanham, MD: Rowman &
Littlefield, 2013).
11. Anthony Pagden, The Enlightenment: And Why It Still Matters (New York: Random House,
2013).
12. Aristotle, Politics, Book 1, Chapter 2, 1252a 25–30.
13. Pagden, Enlightenment, 52.
14. Ibid., 69.
15. Jean André Wahl, Transcendence and the Concrete: Selected Writings (New York: Fordham
University Press, 2017), 38.
16. Ibid., 39.
17. Hugo Münsterberg, Hugo Munsterberg on Film: The Photoplay: A Psychological Study and
Other Writings (New York: Routledge, 2013).
18. Wahl, Transcendence and the Concrete, 2–9.
19. Kristin Ross, Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture,
4th ed. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 123.
20. Ibid., 124.
21. Ibid., 125.
22. Matthew 19:5–6 reads as follows: “For this cause shall a man leave father and mother, and
shall cleave to his wife: and the twain shall be one flesh? Wherefore they are no more twain,
but one flesh. What therefore God hath joined together, let no man put asunder.” The Bible:
Authorized King James Version, ed. Robert Carroll and Stephen Prickett (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2008).
23. Ross, Fast Cars, 5. Michael Witt makes much of Godard’s debt to television, especially of its
influence in his films of the 1950s and 1960s. See Michael Witt, Jean-Luc Godard, Cinema
Historian (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), 135–89.
24. Roland Barthes, Mythologies: The Complete Edition, in a New Translation (New York:
Macmillan, 1972), 111–13.
25. Ibid., 54.
26. Though it is beyond the scope of this chapter, it is important to note here James Porter’s study
of ancient aesthetics, and his discussion of the radical empiricism that predates the cognitivist
accounts of aesthetics emerging in fifth-century Athens. Central to this account is the status
and materiality of the stoicheion and componential analysis in pre-Socratic aesthetics that is
undone by Plato and Aristotle’s cognitivist formalism that distances materialism and sensation
 from aesthetic appreciation. But prior to and after this moment, there is great attention given to
the “radical aesthetics of the particular”: “The effect that this pre- and post-Platonic
conception of aesthetics achieves is to undo the notion of teleologies by obliterating them: a
sense perception overwhelms any concern we might have for longer-term gratification; it gives
us all grounds we need to cast a judgment of aesthetic value here and now. Such a conception
of aesthetics at the same time grounds aesthetic evaluation in the materiality of an object and
its perception, or more precisely, in the materiality of the experience of an object. Attaching
itself to this experience here, beauty (or aesthetic value under some other name) becomes a
concrete thing, non-transferable, non-generalizable, and non-universal: it is truly idiosyncratic
(an idion).” James I. Porter, The Origins of Aesthetic Thought in Ancient Greece: Matter,
Sensation, and Experience (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 245–46.
27. See Davide Panagia, Rancière’s Sentiments (Durham, NC: Duke University Press Books,
2018), and especially my discussion of Aristotle’s decorum therein (44–51).
28. Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, Bk. II., 2:1104a5–10.
29. Ibid., 2:1104b31–33.
30. Aristotle, Poetics, 1450a16–20.
31. Ibid., 1451a30–35.
32. In the French context, this appeal to appropriateness is naturalized under Louis XIV and will
remain a cornerstone of French classicism well into the twentieth century (as Antonin Artaud
bemoans in “The Theater of Cruelty” by referring to Racine’s works as “the misdeeds of the
psychological theater.” Antonin Artaud, The Theater and Its Double (New York: Grove Press,
1958), 84. What Erich Auerbach calls “the elevated style” sublimed the Aristotelian rules of
unity so as to create coherence on stage. Auerbach explains that in Racine’s time it was
considered improbable that within the limited space of the stage and the limited time of any
theatrical performance, events far removed from the immediacy of the performance should be
either acknowledged or represented on stage. Once this principle became accepted as
convention, then “the events of a play had to be organized in subservience to these premises,
and this is precisely the realm in which Racine is a master. With him the action falls smoothly
and naturally into a fixed pattern. And if he went further than anyone else in isolating the scene
and secluding the action from everything low, extrinsic, and accessory, there is no doubt that,
under the given conditions of the rules of unity, his doing so promotes the naturalness of the
resulting effect.” Erich Auerbach and Edward W. Said, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality
in Western Literature (new and expanded ed.) (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
2013), 389.
33. Stephen Halliwell, Aristotle’s Poetics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 159.
34. Aristotle, Poetics, 1452a19.
35. Ibid., 1451b33–35.
36. Carlo Ginzburg, Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method (Baltimore, MD: JHU Press, 2013),
118.
37. Though Simondon’s work is only beginning to receive attention in Anglo-American circles,
thanks in large part to recent new translations of his works, he was a significant figure
throughout the postwar period in France whose work was of central importance to Gilles
Deleuze as well as contemporary thinkers like Bruno Latour and Bernard Stiegler.
38. Gilbert Simondon, “The Position of the Problem of Ontogenesis.” Parrhesia (2009), Article 7.
39. Ibid., 10.
40. Ibid., 11.
41. Ibid., 5.
42. Ibid., 6.
43. Ibid.
44. Gilbert Simondon, On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects (Minneapolis, MN:
Univocal Publishing LLC, 2016), xv.
45. Ibid., 59.
46. Ibid., 59.
47. Brian Massumi, “‘Technical Mentality’ Revisited: Brian Massumi on Gilbert Simondon,”
Parrhesia Journal 7 (2009): 40.
48. See Georges Canguilhem, “Machine and Organism,” in Knowledge of Life (New York:
Fordham University Press 2008), 79.
49. Simondon, Technical Objects, 60.
50. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. David Fate Norton and Mary J. Norton (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2000), 164–71.
51. See Daniel Morgan, Late Godard and the Possibilities of Cinema (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2012), and Witt, Jean-Luc Godard.
52. Quoted in Royal S. Brown, ed., Focus on Godard (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1972), 93.
53. Michael Witt, “Montage, My Beautiful Care, or Histories of the Cinematograph,” in The
Cinema Alone: Essays on the Works of Jean-Luc Goddard 1985–2000, ed. James S. Williams
and Michael Temple (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2000), 48.
54. Ibid., 37.
55. Jean Luc Godard, Godard on Godard: Critical Writings by Jean-Luc Godard (Boston: Da Capo
Press, 1986), 40.
56. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1989), 183.
57. Godard, Godard, 41.
58. Here is Godard on this point: “Perhaps my interest in pictures comes from the fact that it was
pictures that awakened my interest in cinema. Even before I had seen any films I would look at
the pictures in art and film magazines. And it was a photo from a film by Murnau, whom I’d
never heard of, that made me want to make a film. I wanted to get more closely involved with
the cinema; up to then all I knew of it was a printed extract.” Cited in Witt, Jean-Luc Godard,
159.
59. Witt, “Montage,” 33–34.
60. Godard’s lecture on montage at the French National Film School, FEMIS, 1989, cited in ibid.,
35.
61. Gilles Deleuze, Two Regimes of Madness: Texts and Interviews 1975–1995 (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2006), 315.
62. See John Phillips, “Agencement/Assemblage,” Theory, Culture & Society 23, no. 2–3 (2006):
108–9.
63. Deleuze, Cinema 2, 183.
64. Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 41.
65. Ibid., 37.
66. Francois Dosse, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari: Intersecting Lives (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2011), 410.
67. On the matter of a Peircean semeiotics and its relationship to meaning for Deleuze’s signaletics
of cinema, Roger Dawkins says this: “Meaning in this sense is identified with the particular
way the signaletic material is embodied in an image; for example, the way qualities, shapes,
colours and sounds are embodied in the image of a snarling dog. Meaning is not the end result
 of relating the image of a snarling dog to a code (snarling dog = rabies); meaning resides
strictly in the nature of the embodiment.” Roger Dawkins, “Deleuze, Peirce and the Cinematic
Sign,” Semiotic Review of Books 15, no. 2 (2005): 8.
68. Now, it’s true that Deleuze’s Cinema books were published in the 1980s, and so we are very far
away from the period I’m discussing. But let us recall several relevant things. The 1950s were,
of course, an important period of Deleuze’s intellectual formation and mark the beginning of
his writing career. In this period he continued the work on empiricism and pluralism he had
started while a student with Wahl, publishing an important study on David Hume. Gilles
Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity: An Essay on Hume’s Theory of Human Nature (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1991). But more than such biographical facts, the structure
of Deleuze’s two Cinema books is organized around what he situates as a historical
discontinuity between pre-war cinema (Cinema 1, and the Movement-Image) and the 1950s
and beyond (Cinema 2: The Time-Image). And much of the difference between these two
tomes rests on the different valuation given to continuity editing.
69. Deleuze, Cinema 2, 1.
70. Ibid., 173.
71. Ibid., 179.
72. Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 120.
73. The metaphor of the chain is the dominant metaphor of continuity in the early-modern period
that Hume undoes throughout his Treatise of Human Nature by showing the inferential
interstices (i.e., discontinuities) in between links of a chain (of reasoning), and by ultimately
replacing the chain metaphor with that of the “train,” as in “train of thought,” that emphasizes
motility over locked links of continuity. Thus he famously affirms what can only be described
as a montage theory of mind: “The mind is a kind of theater, where several perceptions
successively make their appearance; pass, re-pass, glide away, and mingle in an infinite variety
of postures and situations.” Hume, Treatise of Human Nature, 1.IV.6.
74. Deleuze, Cinema 2, 180.
75. Deleuze and Parnet, Dialogues II, 43.
76. Ibid., 43.
77. Ibid., 41.
78. Deleuze, Cinema 2, 179–80.
79. Deleuze and Parnet, Dialogues II, 41.
80. See Witt, Jean-Luc Godard, 24.
81. Porter, Origins of Aesthetic Thought, 220–35.
82. Deleuze, Logic of Sense, 257.
83. Ibid., 259.
84. Simondon, “Problem of Ontogenesis,” 6.
85. Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1995), 28–69.
 CHAPTER 15

FILM THEORY AND MACHINE

VISION

ANTONIO SOMAINI

THE history of visual cultures is periodically marked by the appearance of

new images and technologies of vision: images that introduce new forms of
representation and technologies that introduce new ways of seeing,
extending, and reorganizing the field of the visible. In some cases, such
changes produce only marginal transformations, whereas in others the
transformations are vast, tectonic shifts. The latter is what happened during
the 1990s and early 2000s, when digital visual technologies gradually
replaced analog ones, and a faster transmission of data across the internet
opened the way for an enormous circulation of digital images. And it is
happening again today, as artificial intelligence (AI)—in particular, that
area of AI known as machine learning—is profoundly transforming the
ways that images are produced, modified, circulated, and seen.
Three phenomena in particular deserve our closest attention: the new
technologies of machine vision based on artificial neural networks; the
presence on the internet of trillions of images that are machine-readable, in
the sense that they can be processed and analyzed by technologies of
machine vision; and the genuinely new types of images that may be
produced through processes of machine learning.
Considered from the perspective of a history of images and visual media,
the appearance of these three phenomena raises a large series of aesthetic,
epistemological, historical, and political questions. Their impact on
contemporary visual culture is so deep that we must ask ourselves what we
mean by the notions of “vision” and “image” in the age of machine
learning.
These phenomena also raise significant questions for film theory. The
very status of moving images, as well as their various forms of production,
editing, and reception, are being affected. The traditional boundaries
between fixed and moving images are put into question, as is the distinction
between images that are the result of optical recording and those that are
entirely computer-generated. Key concepts in film theory, such as realism,
need to be reevaluated when dealing with technologies that entirely
reconfigure the relationship between images and profilmic reality.
I will begin with an overview of the main transformations that
technologies of machine learning are introducing into contemporary visual
culture, in order to then examine the theoretical questions they raise. I will
adopt a media-archaeological approach in order to examine those moments
in which film and media theory have tackled the implications, hopes, and
fears related to the possibility of seeing through the mechanical eye of a
machine and to the appearance of new forms of automated perception.
Finally, I will look at the notion of operational images theorized and
analyzed by Harun Farocki in his texts, films, and video installations, and
then the work of three contemporary artists—Trevor Paglen, Hito Steyerl,
and Grégory Chatonsky—who are exploring the impact of machine learning
on visual culture and, more specifically, the domain of moving images.

T I M V T
First tested in the late 1950s with image recognition machines such as the
Perceptron (invented by Frank Rosenblatt at the Cornell Aeronautical
Laboratory in 1957), and then developed during the 1960s and 1970s as a
way of imitating the human visual system in order to endow robots with
intelligent behavior, machine vision technologies entered a new phase with
the development of machine learning processes and the possibility of using
immense image databases, accessible online, as both training sets and fields
of application. The training sets are organized according to precise
taxonomies—such as ImageNet, in which fourteen million images are
arranged according to 21,000 categories derived from the WordNet
hierarchy (a large lexical database of English nouns, verbs, adjectives, and
adverbs), which allow a rapid increase in the precision of all operations of
machine vision.1
Among such operations we find pixel counting; segmenting, sorting, and
thresholding; feature, edge, and depth detection; pattern recognition and
discrimination; object detection, tracking, and measurement; motion
capture; color analysis; and optical character recognition (this last operation
allowing for the reading of words and texts within images, extending the act
of machine seeing to a form of reading). For several years now, these
operations have been applied to the immense field of machine-readable
images. A field whose dimensions can be imagined only if we understand
that any digital image—whether produced through some kind of optical
recording, or entirely computer-generated, or a mix of the two, as is often
the case—may be analyzed and transformed by vision technologies based
on processes of machine learning, such as generative adversarial networks
(GAN).2
In recent years, smartphone producers have equipped their devices with
cameras and image processing technologies that turn every photo we take
into a machine-readable image, and internet giants such as Google and
Facebook, as well as a host of state agencies and private companies, have
developed machine vision systems. Taken together, these systems are
turning the contemporary digital iconosphere into a vast field for data
mining and data aggregation. Faces, bodies, gestures, expressions,
emotions, objects, movements, and places may be identified, labeled,
stored, organized, retrieved, and processed as data that can be quickly
accessed and activated for a wide variety of purposes: from surveillance to
policing, from marketing to advertising, from the monitoring of industrial
processes to military operations, from driverless vehicles to drones and
robots, from the inspection of the inside of the human body (medical
imaging) all the way to the study, through satellite images, of the Earth’s
surface and climate change.
In order to fully understand the impact of AI and machine learning on
contemporary visual culture, we need to add those images produced by
processes that either transform pre-existing images in ways that were
impossible until quite recently or create entirely new images, never before
seen.
Examples of transformation include producing 3D models of objects
from 2D images; altering photographs of human faces in order to show how
their appearance might change with age (as with FaceApp) or be merged
with another face (Faceswap); animating the old photograph of a deceased
person in a highly realistic way (Deep Nostalgia, developed by
MyHeritage);3 and taking any given video and upscaling it by increasing its
frame rate and definition. An emblematic example of this last application,
which in the long run may alter significantly our experience of visual
documents of the past, are the videos realized by Denis Shiryaev in which,
through a machine learning process, a Lumière film such as Arrival of a
Train at La Ciotat (1896) is transformed from the original sixteen frames
per second to sixty frames per second, from the original 1.33:1 format to a
contemporary 16:9 format, and from the original, grainy 35mm analog film
to a 4K digital resolution.4
Other examples of transformation are far more radical, as happens with
the so-called deepfakes: videos that use neural networks such as
autoencoders or GAN to manipulate the images and sounds of preexisting
videos, producing new videos that have a high potential to deceive, thereby
further destabilizing our trust in recorded images. Among the many
examples that can now be found across the internet, videos in which faces
of celebrities are placed onto the bodies of porn actors, or speeches by
public figures such as Barack Obama and Queen Elizabeth,5 the content of
which has been completely altered in such a way that the movements of
their mouths, thanks to a program called Face2Face, perfectly match the
invented words uttered by someone else.
In the case of image creation, we are dealing with entire images or
sections thereof: examples include modeling patterns of crowd motion in
films and videogames, producing photorealistic images of objects and
environments for advertising, and inventing highly realistic faces of people
who do not actually exist.6
To these widespread applications of machine learning we may add the
hybrid, unprecedented imagery produced by the popular computer vision
program Deep Dream Generator, created in 2015 by the Google engineer
and artist Alexander Mordvintsev.7 This is a program that uses neural
networks in order to enhance patterns in any given image, creating a form
of algorithmic pareidolia (the impression of seeing a figure where there is
none) generated by a process which repeatedly detects and enhances
patterns and shapes that the machine vision system has been trained to see.
The result of such a recursive process are images that recall a psychedelic
iconography that spans cinema, photography, the visual arts, and even art
brut: images presented as a dream belonging to the machine itself.

AN S Q T
The widespread diffusion of machine vision technologies, machine-readable
images, and the new images produced by processes of machine learning
raises a series of theoretical questions. Some of these are related to the
broad field of a theory of media and visual culture, whereas others are
specifically related to film theory.
What is vision when the human psychophysiological process of seeing is
reduced, in the case of machine vision technologies, to entirely automated
operations of pattern recognition and labeling, and when the various
applications of such operations (face and emotion recognition, object and
motion detection) may be deployed across an extremely vast visual field (all
the still and moving images accessible online) that no human eye could ever
attain? By using the term “vision” within the concept of machine vision, are
we mistakenly using an anthropocentric term that should be discarded in
favor of a different set of technical terms, specifically related to the field of
computer science and data analysis?
Artist-researchers such as Francis Hunger and scholars such as Andreas
Broeckmann (with his notion of “optical calculus” as “an unthinking,
mindless mechanism, a calculation based on optically derived input data,
abstracted into calculable values, which can become part of computational
procedures and operations”), Adrian MacKenzie and Anna Munster (who
speak of a “platform seeing” operating within “image ensembles” through
an “invisual perception”), Fabian Offert and Peter Bell (according to whom
the “perceptual topology” of machines is irreconcilable with human
perception), have all argued for the necessity of moving beyond
anthropocentric frameworks and terms, highlighting the fact that machine
vision poses a real challenge for the humanities.8
Can we still use the term “image” for a digital file, encoded in some
image format,9 which is machine-readable even when it is not visible by
human eyes, or becomes visible on a screen as a pattern of pixels only for a
small fraction of time, spending the rest of its indefinite lifespan circulating
across invisible digital networks? Can concepts such as that of “iconic
difference,”10 which highlights the fundamental perceptual difference
between an image and its surroundings (its “off frame”), still be applied to
machine-readable images? And how to assess the various attempts—
through concepts such as “iconic turn” and “pictorial turn”—to underline
the necessity of developing concepts for image and visual culture theory
that are not derived from language-based disciplines such as semiotics,
when the new technologies of machine vision are entirely based on a strict
interrelation between words and images?
And what is the status of the entirely new images produced by processes
of machine learning? These are images not produced through traditional
forms of lens-based analog or digital optical recording, or through
traditional computer-generated imagery (CGI) systems, but rather through
processes belonging to the wide realm of AI. What do such images
represent; what kind of agency do they have; what is their temporal status;
and how do they mediate our visual relation to the past, the present, and the
future?
To this series of questions related to the vast field of a theory of images
and visual culture, we may add questions that are more specific to film
theory. How to assess the impact of the new images produced by processes
of machine learning on filmmaking and film viewing? The different forms
of computational filmmaking that are becoming more and more widespread
—technologies that allow cameras to add, in real time, stock images, filters,
digital artifacts, and effects to what they are recording—redraw the fine line
that separates optical recording from CGI, and redefine traditional forms of
editing. What happens to the contingent, unpredictable movements that
cameras once captured in the profilmic world—the movements of crowds,
the fluttering of leaves, the rippling of waves—when such movements are
simulated through AI?11 In what ways is the material and temporal status of
historical audiovisual documents altered by machine learning processes that
allow us to upscale them? What kind of realism can be detected in images
that have a high degree of resemblance and trustworthiness, at the same
time being entirely deceptive?
Other important questions for film studies are raised by machine vision
technologies. Are these technologies going to change the way in which we
study cinema history (as they are currently changing art history) by
allowing researchers to tackle vast corpuses of films? Will we be able to
scan through archives, through traditions and genres, searching for faces,
expressions, emotions, objects, spaces, environments, atmospheres, frame
compositions, color schemes, light configurations, camera movements,
editing styles? How are such technologies transforming our relation to film
archives? The EYE Filmmuseum in Amsterdam, for example, recently
developed a project aimed at “bring[ing] film heritage to the algorithmic
age.” The project is called Jan Bot, capable of generating several found
footage videos every day (inspired by trending topics in the news), editing
images stemming from the films preserved in this archive.12

AM A A
A media archaeology perspective endeavors to reconstruct the multiple,
interwoven genealogies in which all these developments are inscribed.
How, for instance, do deepfakes sit within the tradition of optical media
aimed at producing different forms of illusion and deception, from trompe-
l’œil paintings to 3D simulations and various forms of digital animation?
More specifically, how does machine vision, as a new form of automated
seeing, relate to the ideas, hopes, and fears that appear throughout the
history of film theory concerning the experience of seeing through the
nonhuman eye of a machine and the possibility of producing new forms of
automated perception? The idea that some kind of mechanical vision may
either extend the field of human vision beyond the limits of the organic eye
or displace and decenter the human viewpoint by introducing a different,
nonhuman perspective has triggered reactions dating back to the early years
of cinema.
 In his essay on cinephobia in early film culture, Francesco Casetti
explores a wide spectrum of adverse reactions to the experience of film
viewing, among them a series of anxieties directly related to cinema’s
mechanical nature. “Film’s technology was […] often experienced as a
burden: authors and spectators felt framed or trapped by an apparatus; their
gaze had to conform to an artificial mode of perception; their initiative
needed to obey the rules of a device; their own bodies had to follow the
rhythms of a machine.”13 Writing in 1919, the German scholar Wilhelm
Stapel denounced the fact that “the cinema is constructing a new human
type, inferior in both its intellectual and moral capacities: the homo
cinematicus.”14 Three years later, the Italian lawyer Piero Pesce-Marinieri
highlighted the “disorders to sight, to the nervous system, and to all the
organs of our perception and sensibility” that cinema could cause.15 And in
1930, in a passage of Scènes de la vie future that will later be quoted by
Walter Benjamin, Georges Duhamel writes: “I can no longer think what I
want to think. My thoughts have been replaced by moving images.”16
At the opposite end of the spectrum, between the 1920s and 1940s we
find entirely different reactions to the experience of seeing through a
mechanical eye. Figures including Dziga Vertov, Jean Epstein, László
Moholy-Nagy, Walter Benjamin, and Siegfried Kracauer underline the
aesthetic, epistemological, and political potential of images produced by a
mechanical optical medium (i.e., the camera) capable of extending the field
of vision beyond the limits of the eye and introducing ways of seeing from
a decentered point of view.
Such ideas form the core of Vertov’s writing beginning in the early
1920s. In his “Kinoks: A Revolution” (1923), the kino-eye—his name for
the camera in its connection to other parts of the film apparatus (editing
table and projector)—is presented as the instrument for a new “sensory
exploration of the world through film.” The camera should not be reduced
to a state of “subordination to the imperfections and the shortsightedness of
the human eye,” since, as Vertov writes:
[The kino-eye is] more perfect than the human eye, for the exploration of the chaos of visual
phenomena that fills space. […] [It] lives and moves in time and space; it gathers and
records impressions in a manner wholly different from that of the human eye. […] We
cannot improve the making of our eyes, but we can endlessly perfect the camera.17
 Half way through his text, Vertov introduces a surprising, rhetorical shift
that reflects his way of interpreting the kino-eye’s agency, its “growing in
strength and potential to the point of self affirmation”: Vertov’s writing “I”
is suddenly replaced by the “I” of the kino-eye itself. Rather than an inert
assemblage of technical instruments or a prosthetic extension of the human
eye—as suggested by the famous image in Vertov’s Man with a Movie
Camera (1929), of the eye superimposed onto the camera lens—the kino-
eye becomes an autonomous subject. Speaking in the first person, it affirms
its own power, its own capacity to move autonomously, roam freely across
time and space, connect different points in the visible universe, introduce a
new sensory perception of the world. “I am kino-eye, I am a mechanical
eye. I, a machine, show you the world as only I can see it. [ … ] My path
leads to the creation of a fresh perception of the world. I decipher in a new
way a world unknown to you.”18
The interpretation of the camera as a mechanical object endowed with its
own agency, a quasi-subject, can also be found in the texts of Jean Epstein,
from Bonjour Cinéma (1921) to The Intelligence of a Machine (1946) and
Alcohol and Cinema (written 1946–1949). In Bonjour Cinéma, Epstein
describes his camera, a Bell-Howell, as “a metal brain, standardized,
manufactured, distributed in thousands of copies, which transforms the
world outside of itself into art.” The camera is “a subject which is an object,
without conscience, that is to say without hesitations or scruples, without
venality, nor complacency, nor possible error.”19 In “The Lens Itself”
(1926), the camera is presented as “a non-human eye, without memory,
without thought,” and Epstein underscores the importance of “taking
advantage of one of the rarest qualities of the cinematographic eye, that of
being an eye beyond the eye, escaping the tyrannical egocentrism of our
personal vision.” He adds: “Why force the sensitive emulsion to only repeat
the functions of our retina? Why not seize with eagerness an almost unique
opportunity to order a spectacle in relation to another center than that of our
own visual ray?”20
In The Intelligence of a Machine (1946), Epstein comes to the conclusion
that the cinematograph—a “small society of machines”21 that includes the
camera, the projector, and the techniques for the recording and the
reproduction of sound—has to be considered as a mechanism or apparatus
endowed with its own personality, its own psychology, and subjectivity,
therefore capable of elaborating its own “image of the universe.”22 It
becomes the source of a new, unconscious mechanical thinking, a new
“mechanical philosophy.”23
Cinema is one of these intellectual robots, still partial, that fleshes out representations—that
is to say, a thought—through photo-electrical mechanics senses and a photochemical
inscription. One can here recognize the primordial frameworks of reason, the three Kantian
categories of space, duration, and causality. This result would already be remarkable if
cinematographic thought only did what the calculating machine does, to constitute itself in
the servile imitation of human ideation. But we know that the cinematograph, on the
contrary, marks its representation of the universe with its own qualities, with an originality
that makes this representation not a reflection or a simple copy with conceptions, of an
organic mentality-mother, but rather a system that is individualized differently, partly
independently, which contains the incitements for a philosophy so far from the common
opinions, the doxa, that one should perhaps call it an anti-philosophy.24

We find similar ideas in László Moholy-Nagy. His Painting Photography

Film (1927) sees, in the photographic and the cinematographic camera, the
source of an “impartial vision”25 that is unconnected to the cognitive
faculties of the human mind and therefore not subjected to the adjustments
and the distortions caused by such faculties. The photographic medium,
according to Moholy-Nagy, has to be used in a “productive” rather than a
“reproductive” way. Its potential has to be fully explored and tested, and
only in this way photography becomes a “new instrument of vision”
capable of introducing new ways of seeing: abstract (represented in
particular by the camera-less “photograms”), exact, rapid, slow, intensified
(via microphotography, filter-photography, even infra-red photography),
penetrative (X-ray), simultaneous (“transparent superimposition”), and
distorted (produced through prism, mirrors, or “mechanical and chemical
manipulation of the negative after exposure”).26
The idea that photography and cinema could reveal a visual world
inaccessible to the human eye is also at the center of the writings of Walter
Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer. In “News about Flowers” (1928),
Benjamin celebrates the way in which photography—in this case, the close-
up of plants that Karl Blossfeldt gathered in the 120 plates of his Art Forms
in Nature (1928)—will, together with cinema, “alter our vision of the world
in as yet unforeseen ways”: “Whether we accelerate the growth of a plant
through time-lapse photography or show its form in forty-fold enlargement,
in either case a geyser of new image-worlds hisses up at points in our
existence where we would least have thought them possible.”27 Three years
later, in his “Little History of Photography” (1931), Benjamin refers to the
techniques of slow motion and enlargement to introduce the notion of an
“optical unconscious” which we find again in “The Work of Art in the Age
of Its Technological Reproducibility” (1935–1936). There, Benjamin refers
to slow motion and close-up as techniques that give us access to regions of
the visible previously inaccessible to the human eye, and that demonstrate
that sensory perception does not remain unaltered through history but rather
keeps on transforming through its interaction with technical media:
With the close-up, space expands; with slow motion, movement is extended. And just as
enlargement not merely clarifies what we see indistinctly ‘in any case,’ but brings to light
entirely new structures of matter, slow motion not only reveals familiar aspects of
movements, but discloses quite unknown aspects within them. […] Clearly, it is another
nature which speaks to the camera as compared to the eye. ‘Other’ above all in the sense
that a space informed by human consciousness gives way to a space informed by the
unconscious. […] It is through the camera that we first discover the optical unconscious, just
as we discover the instinctual unconscious through psychoanalysis.28

In “Photography” (1927), Kracauer writes that “for the first time, the
inert world presents itself in its independence from human beings.” This
nonhuman vision is for Kracauer rich in epistemic and political
implications. Fragmented and dispersed by the proliferation of photographic
images, the existing structures of the visible world reveal their contingency:
thanks to photography, one becomes aware of the “provisional status of all
configurations,” and “the images of the stock of nature disintegrated into its
elements are offered up to consciousness to deal with as it pleases,” for
example, by “combin[ing] parts and segments to create strange constructs”
through the operation of montage, one of “the possibilities of film.”29
In the preparatory texts for Theory of Film (1960), Kracauer insists on the
nonhuman nature of the optical access to visible reality that is provided by
film. In the Marseille Notebooks (1940), film is presented as an
“indifferent,” “non-anthropocentric medium” that “records what the eye
cannot perceive” and penetrates into the deepest layers of the “the material
dimension of reality,” the domain of the “nonhuman,” where material
entities exist and move “without being subjected to any intentional
construction.” This is the realm of the “residues” and the “scum” of factual,
contingent, fragmentary matter, where the “mere being” captured by an
“indifferent” camera is still “devoid of intention.”30 In “Tentative Outline
for a Book on Film Aesthetics” (1949), an “unfeeling camera tends to
remove (disintegrate) subjective frames of reference, laying bare visible
complexes for their own sake” and revealing a “material world” which is
“no longer structured by ideas, value judgments, and desires.” Cinema, adds
Kracauer, records a world of “alienated phenomena,” which are “alienated
from ego-involved frames of reference.”31 This idea is at the center of
Theory of Film, where Kracauer insists on the gravitational force that seems
to lead film downward toward physical reality. Through the “recording and
revealing functions” inherited from photography, film captures a whole
series of phenomena that remain invisible to the unmediated human eye: an
entire spectrum of movements, things normally unseen, “phenomena
overwhelming consciousness,” “special modes of reality” that include the
unstaged, the fortuitous, the endless, the indeterminate, and the flow of life.
Taken together, these aspects of the material world point to “nature in the
raw, nature as it exists independently of us,” “life at its least controllable
and most unconscious moments, a jumble of transient, forever dissolving
patterns accessible only to the camera.”32

O I
Seventy-five years after Man with a Movie Camera and Vertov’s
celebration of the self-affirmation of a kino-eye capable of developing its
own dimensions of time and space, the German theorist-filmmaker Harun
Farocki, in his video installation Counter Music (2004), presented a
reflection on the direction this self-affirmation has taken in a society
characterized by the pervasive presence of increasingly autonomous
cameras.
Farocki’s double-projection begins in a sleep laboratory, in which
sleepers connected to various sensors are being monitored; it continues by
editing together images recorded by the numerous surveillance cameras
scattered across the city of Lille, inspecting and controlling the different
city spaces and transportation flows. As Farocki underlines in the texts
accompanying Counter Music, if in Vertov the day begins with the
production of images, in his own case it begins with their reproduction. In
Counter Music the city has become a transparent field for visual
surveillance and data capture. Vertov’s kino-eye, roaming through streets
and squares, factories and mines, workers’ clubs and soccer fields—an “eye
of matter” [œil de la matière] according to Gilles Deleuze33—has morphed
into the 1,200 surveillance cameras of the Lille metro network with its
control room. “Vertov’s dream […] to tell the story of a day in the life of the
city,” as we read in one of the intertitles of Farocki’s installation, has
become a panoptic nightmare in which no corner of the urban space falls
outside the scope of a pervasive surveillance.
From Vertov to Farocki, the connection between the body and the
camera, between human vision and machine vision, has been profoundly
transformed. Vertov’s film oscillates between a prosthetic understanding of
the camera as an extension and heightening of human vision, and a
celebration of the camera’s autonomous agency, which echoes—in the
famous sequence of the camera coming out of its box, connecting to the
tripod, and walking out of frame—various images of self-moving
automatons and machines seen throughout the film. In Farocki’s
installation, surveillance cameras have proliferated across the city space.
Their images either remain invisible or are displayed in control centers on
monitors that are too numerous to be observed by human eyes. Humans—as
we read in another text accompanying archival images of workers attending
semiautonomous textile machines—have become “appendages of the
apparatus,” and the images captured are not there to contribute to a new
“sensory exploration of the world through film” but rather to control
movements, behaviors, and transportation flows.
In his writings, Farocki introduced and theorized the idea of operational
images.34 The primary function of these images is to participate in
operations of detecting, inspecting, measuring, geolocalizing, tracking,
targeting, overseeing, and activating—across fields including law
enforcement and surveillance, driverless guidance, flight simulation,
automated industrial processes, machine-aided surgery, the monitoring of
transportation flows, and military operations. The emblematic example is
the point of view from laser-guided bombs that were widely broadcast
during the First Gulf War of 1990–91. Being operational means that these
images are, in a real sense, active: they prolong and renew, in different
ways, the long history of the power or agency of images by acting as
instruments, interfaces, instructions for actions, and sources for data mining
and aggregation.35
The question of operational images begins to appear in Farocki’s work in
films such as As You See (1986) and Images of the World and the
Inscription of War (1988). The former takes the example of the
mechanization of textile work upon the invention in 1801 of the Jacquard
loom and its perforated cards. It deals with the gradual expulsion of the
human body and its sensory organs from work and production processes.
The latter film addresses the different meanings and implications of the
German term Aufklärung (enlightenment, reconnaissance, clarification) in
fields (including the history of ideas) and military operations. Farocki
highlights a genealogy that leads from Albrecht Dürer’s perspectival
instruments in his 1525 treatise to the development of descriptive geometry
for the technical reproduction of objects during the nineteenth century,
through the practice of photogrammetry across the nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries and the different forms of aerial reconnaissance during
World War I and World War II, culminating in contemporary machines for
computer-aided drawing, flight simulators, and the first forms of machine
vision for the detection of bodies, objects, and movements. Later video
installations such as Eye/Machine I, II, III (2001–2003), Counter Music,
Deep Play (2007), and Serious Games (2009–2010), as well as films such
as War at a Distance (2003), focus entirely on operational images.

T I :T A
P
From the 1980s to the early 2000s, Farocki’s work on operational images
developed in parallel with the appearance of a series of publications that
highlighted the pervasiveness of technical images and the increasing
presence of forms of automated perception.
 In his For a Philosophy of Photography (1983) and Into the Universe of
Technical Images (1985), Vilém Flusser analyzes a new generation of
images—the technical images of analog photography, cinema, television,
video, and then the digital images that were being developed during the
1970s and early 1980s—that are radically different from traditional images.
Technical images introduce a major turning point in the history of human
culture that is comparable in scale to the invention of linear writing, since
they profoundly transform “the way in which we experience, know,
evaluate and act.” They are images produced by apparatuses, of which the
photographic camera is a paradigmatic example. Apparatuses are based on
multiple, intertwined programs; they tend to function in a “mindless and
automatic” manner as “artificial intelligences,” thus contributing to the
increasing “robotizing of all aspects of our lives.”36 Though more and more
pervasive in contemporary society, apparatuses tend to disappear from our
field of vision by becoming either too vast or too small to be perceived.
Rather than being tools that extend and prolong human organs and human
senses, they act as machines that are autonomous from humans.
When tools in the usual sense became machines, their relationship to human beings was
reversed. Prior to the Industrial Revolution the human being was surrounded by tools,
afterwards the machine was surrounded by human beings. Previously the tool was the
variable and the human being the constant, subsequently the human being became the
variable and the machine the constant. Previously the tool functioned as a function of the
human being, subsequently the human being as a function of the machine.37

Considered in this perspective, the photographic camera is a seeing

machine. Its images, whether analog or digital, composed of grains or
pixels, partake in the “atomized, punctuated structure that is characteristic
of all things relating to apparatuses,” and their contribution is crucial in
implementing the goal of “programming society” through widespread
“robot-like actions,” turning society itself into “a feedback mechanism for
[their] progressive improvement.” “The photographic camera is the ancestor
of all those apparatuses that are in the process of robotizing all aspects of
our lives, from one’s most public acts to one’s innermost thoughts, feelings
and desires.” Photographers tend to become an “extension” of their camera,
their actions are “automatic camera functions,” and the images they produce
“form a camera memory, a databank of automatic functions,” of
“automatically realized camera possibilities,” in such a way that only
critically-minded photographers may deviate from the program of the
apparatus and “oppose the flood of redundancy with informative images.”38
The question of the increasing automation of perception is also at the
center of the writings of Paul Virilio during the 1980s and early 1990s.
After publishing a book on the architecture of the German bunker along the
French coast (Bunker Archaeology, 1975), Virilio focused on the way in
which military technologies, beginning with World War I, transformed the
optical field in War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception (1984) and
The Vision Machine (1988). The process that unfolds from the early forms
of photographic and cinematographic aerial reconnaissance via flying
balloons, zeppelins, and airplanes, through to satellite imagery, drone
cameras, and night vision, is one in which the battlefield is increasingly
captured, recorded, monitored, scanned by visual technologies that end up
producing a “logistics of perception.” Such logistics, such automation of
perception, then migrates from the military to the social field, introducing a
new kind of “sightless vision.”39
The final chapter of The Vision Machine begins with a quotation from
Paul Klee’s Notebooks: “Now objects perceive me.” Virilio introduces a
dimension in which human vision is decentered, and apparently inert things
begin to see. He foresaw many of the transformations we are currently
witnessing. On the one hand, the widespread presence of surveillance
cameras, via a reference to Michael Klier’s film The Giant (1983), which is
entirely composed of footage stemming from various surveillance cameras
in different cities of the then West Germany. On the other hand, the gradual
development of a new technology that Virilio calls “visionics”: an artificial,
synthetic vision, operated by computers, which began with pattern
recognition devices such as the already mentioned Perceptron, and which
seals “the solemn farewell to the man behind the camera,” and “the
complete evaporation of visual subjectivity.” The next step will be a new
generation of synthetic images “produced by machines for other machines,”
a “mechanized imaginary from which, this time, we would be excluded.”40
Influenced by both Flusser and Virilio, Friedrich Kittler presents yet
another analysis of the gradual automation of perception in his
Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (1986) and Optical Media (2002). Technical
media, according to Kittler, form a vast, historically determined, technical a
priori: a “schematism of perceptibility” which determines what can and
what cannot be perceived.41 Rather than prolonging Marshall McLuhan’s
anthropocentric understanding of media as “extensions of man,” Kittler
considers technical media to be autonomous from so-called Man. What
Kittler considers as the “founding age of technological media” is the
invention of “storage technologies that can record and reproduce the very
time flow of acoustic and optical data. Ears and eyes have become
autonomous.” Both the photographic camera and the phonograph (or
gramophone) escape “the mirror of the imaginary” and “the grid of the
symbolic,” in order to capture “the bodily real,” “the physiological
accidents and stochastic disorder of bodies”: “The phonograph does not
hear as do ears that have been trained immediately to filter voices, words,
and sounds from noise; it registers acoustic events as such.”42
The three fundamental media operations that Kittler highlights in
Gramophone, Film, Typewriter—the storing, processing, and transmitting
of signals—are also the ones he focuses on in his overview of the historical
development of optical media. Over time, the production and reception of
images becomes increasingly technicized and automated until it culminates
—in a rather linear and teleologically oriented vision of history—with the
computer. Optical media are gradually decoupled from human vision under
the influence of military technologies that Kittler, like Virilio, considers a
crucial factor in the development of autonomous forms of machine vision.

“U S L H ”
Beginning in the 2010s, a gradual turn takes place in the field of technical
and operational images. If the texts of Flusser, Virilio, and Kittler, and the
installations of Farocki, well captured the different aesthetic,
epistemological, and political implications of visual technologies
characterized by an increasing degree of automatism, the arrival of new
systems of vision based on machine learning and trained through vast
databases of networked images raises the very idea of machine vision to
another level.
 In “Operational Images,” published the year of Farocki’s death (2014),
the artist and researcher Trevor Paglen writes that he “was one of the first to
notice that image-making machines and algorithms were poised to
inaugurate a new visual regime.” But the full deployment of such a regime
has occurred since then, with the advent of a new generation of machine
learning systems capable of “seeing” and analyzing images without them
ever becoming visible to human eyes.43 Now the images produced by
cameras participating in the monitoring of industrial processes or in the
motion tracking and pattern recognition systems installed on military drones
do not need to be visualized on screens in order to be processed. Nor do the
billions of images that are currently uploaded on the internet, analyzed by
technologies engaged in vast processes of data collection.
Two years later, in “Invisible Images (Your Pictures Are Looking at
You),” Paglen describes the new visual regime as a “tectonic shift”
occurring in contemporary visual culture. He argues that what we are
currently experiencing is a vast transition from human-seeable to machine-
readable images, a condition in which “we no longer look at images, but
rather images look at us.” In this condition, images “no longer simply
represent things, but actively intervene in everyday life.”
Human visual culture has become a special case of vision, an exception to the rule. The
overwhelming majority of images are now made by machines for other machines, with
humans rarely in the loop. The advent of machine-to-machine seeing has been barely
noticed at large, and poorly understood by those of us who have begun to notice the tectonic
shift invisibly taking place before our very eyes. The landscape of invisible images and
machine vision is becoming evermore active. Its continued expansion is starting to have
profound effects on human life, eclipsing even the rise of mass culture in the mid 20th
century.

Paglen adds: “If we want to understand the invisible world of machine-

machine visual culture, we need to unlearn to see like humans. We need to
learn how to see a parallel universe composed of activations, keypoints,
eigenfaces, feature transforms, classifiers, training sets, and so on.”44
We need to unlearn to see like humans. But how? Accomplishing this
apparently impossible task has been the goal of both Paglen’s texts and his
artistic works over recent years. In texts such as “Excavating AI: The
Politics of Images in Machine Learning Training Sets,” written with the
Australian social data scientist Kate Crawford, Paglen analyzes image
databases such as ImageNet that are used in order to train machine vision
systems, exposing their various social and political biases.45 Installations
such as From Apple to Kleptomaniac (Pictures and Words) (2019) and
exhibitions such as Training Humans (2020) pursue this same goal, tackling
the training of systems of voice recognition and machine hearing. Works
such as the performance Sight Machine (2017, in the collaboration with the
Kronos Quartet) or the installation Machine-Readable Hito (2017) expose
all the ambiguities of face, age, gender, and emotion recognition systems,
while Frantz Fanon (Even the Dead Are Not Safe) (2017) highlights the
possibility of applying such systems to the analysis of images from the past.
The series Adversarially Evolved Hallucinations (2017) explores the
form-generating potential of processes such as GAN. Paglen establishes
original training sets, extracting images from the ImageNet database and
gathering them in categories such as “allegories of capitalism,” “omens and
portents,” “Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams,” “eye-machines,” “from
the depths,” and “American predators.” These training sets are then fed into
the Discriminator, while the Generator begins, from random noise, to
produce images that try to resemble those of the training set. Paglen
intervenes at some point to extract, from the multiple iterative exchanges
between the Generator and the Discriminator, a series of images deemed to
be “adversarially evolved hallucinations”—that is, a hallucination of the
machine vision process itself.
Hito Steyerl and Grégory Chatonsky have also explored the form-
generating potential of neural networks, focusing especially on the temporal
status, documentary nature, and type of realism of the images produced.
Their videos present us with new kinds of transition and morphing from
image to image—new forms of montage.
In This Is the Future (2019), an installation conceived as an expansion of
the exhibition Power Plants (2018) at London’s Serpentine Gallery, Steyerl
arranges, on different raised walkways, a series of nine single-channel
videos in which we recognize flowers blossoming and plants growing in
height and width. We read in the artist’s presentation of the work at the
Serpentine Gallery that “digital flowers created by an AI appear and
dissolve on the screens like an algorithmic fantasy.” These recall, in a
strange way, the time-lapse images of flowers in films by Wilhelm Pfeffer,
Franck Percy Smith, Max Reichmann, Jean Comandon, or Jan Cornelis
Mol. Today, the tradition of time-lapse imagery focusing on the rhythms of
the natural world continues, often used to bring a particular kind of
temporality closer to the human scale: the gradual melting of glaciers, with
its impact on global warming.
Beyond these similarities, a fundamental difference separates both
historical and contemporary time-lapse imagery from Steyerl’s images. If
traditional time-lapse is a way of accelerating the unfolding of previously
recorded phenomena, what interests Steyerl in neural networks is the
predictive nature of machine learning: the possibility of using machine
learning processes in order to predict and produce “future images” from a
set of given ones.
The central video of Steyerl’s installation is This Is the Future: A 100%
Accurate Prediction. It consists of images produced in collaboration with
the programmer Damien Henry, head of the Google Arts & Culture Lab and
author of a video entitled A Train Window.46 For that work, a machine
learning algorithm was trained with a database of images of landscapes seen
from the window of a moving train. Once the algorithm had been trained to
produce similar images, Henry fed an initial image that he had filmed from
a train into the GAN, leading the algorithm to then produce those that
would follow. This established a feedback loop in which each output image
became the input for the next step in the calculation. In this way, after
intentionally producing only the first image, all the following ones were
generated automatically, without any human intervention.
This Is the Future is a video entirely made up of images “predicted” by
neural networks and located, as we read in the text running through the
video, “0.04 seconds in the future.” It is presented as a type of imagery that
can simultaneously predict and document the future—as paradoxical as this
may seem. The video begins with the text: “These are documentary images
of the future. Not about what it will bring, but about what it is made of.”
The sections of the video take us to a future landscape of images that morph
sample images stemming from ImageNet categories such as sea, fish,
flower, rose, or orchid; each of them is produced by a neural network that,
as the electronic voice accompanying the video tells us, “can see one
fraction of a second into the future.” Machine learning systems are here
presented as part of a wider realm of prediction systems (be they financial,
social, political, meteorological, environmental, etc.) that may now tackle
the entire spectrum of contemporary visual culture as a field for data mining
and analysis.
Grégory Chatonsky’s Second Earth (2019) takes another route into the
iconosphere produced by GAN-driven machine learning. What interests
Chatonsky is the idea of an “artificial imagination,” capable of visualizing,
through the means of AI, “the hallucination of a senseless machine, a
monument dedicated to the memory of the extinct human species.”47 Taking
care himself of the production and coding of the various elements and
media mobilized in his work—videos, sculptures, machine-written texts,
machine-generated voices—Chatonsky works on what he calls the chaînage
or sequencing of different AI systems that, taken together, produce a
cascade of new forms. The metamorphical universe we see in Second Earth,
a work that Chatonsky presents as an “evolving installation,” evokes the
idea of a form-generating power that was once rooted in nature and is now
taken over by machines. The “motto” accompanying the work reads:
“Accumulate data. Outsourcing our memories. Feed software with this data
so that it produces similar data. Produce realism without reality, become
possible. Disappear. Coming back in our absence, like somebody else.”48
Like Paglen’s Adversarially Evolved Hallucinations, the images of
Second Earth have a hallucinatory, oneiric, surrealistic quality. Their
“postphotographic realism”—a concept that Chatonsky has developed in a
series of conferences and texts—resides in the fact that they offer different
kinds of morphing, produced by machine learning, of preexisting images
stemming from sources such as ImageNet.49 Those initial images are
realistic photographic images, produced through optical capture of a
profilmic reality, while the new images produced by the generative
adversarial networks are postphotographic, since they stem from processes
of statistical induction. They are therefore characterized by a different kind
of realism. They point to a future in which humans will be extinct, and
machines (AI) will endlessly reelaborate the iconic traces that humanity has
left behind: a “hypermnesic” mass of accumulated data that includes not
only images but also texts, sounds, and everything uploaded on the internet.
 With Chatonsky’s Second Earth we are in the domain of anticipation
rather than prediction: the exploration of a nonhuman artificial imagination,
rather than in the denunciation of the pervasive presence of systems of
control and surveillance. At the basis of the work we find the observation
that “the machine was becoming capable of automatically producing a
phenomenal quantity of realistic images from the accumulation of data on
the Web. This realism is similar to the world we know, but it is not an
identical reproduction. Species metamorphose into each other, stones
mutate into plants and the ocean shores into unseen organisms. The result:
this ‘second’ Earth, a reinvention of our world, produced by a machine that
wonders about the nature of its production.”50
The works of Paglen, Steyerl, and Chatonsky present us with an initial
series of explorations of the ways in which processes of machine learning
are gradually transforming the domain of moving images—their relation to
profilmic reality, their temporal status, and the ways in which they can be
edited through montage. This field is evolving quickly: artists and
filmmakers are beginning to test the possibilities that AI introduces, raising
questions that theories of film, media, and visual culture will need to
continue addressing.

N
1. ImageNet, http://www.image-net.org/.
2. Generative adversarial networks are a class of machine learning frameworks that were first
designed by Ian Goodfellows and his colleagues in 2014. See Ian J. Goodfellow, Jean Pouget-
Abadie, Mehdi Mirza, Bing Xu, David Warde-Farley, Sherjil Ozair, Asron Courville, and
Yoshua Bengio, “Generative Adversarial Nets,” Proceedings of the 27th International
Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems 2 (December 2014): 2672–80.
3. FaceApp, https://www.faceapp.com/; FaceSwap, https://faceswap.dev/; Deep Nostalgia,
https://www.myheritage.fr/deep-nostalgia.
4. On the work of Denis Shiryaev, see https://neural.love/. The upscaled version of Arrival of a
Train at La Ciotat (1896) can be accessed at https://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=3RYNThid23g.
5. The deepfake video of Barack Obama can be accessed at https://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=cQ54GDm1eL0. The Queen Elizabeth deepfake video can be accessed at
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IvY-Abd2FfM.
6. On this last application, see http://doppelGANger.agency.
7. The program is now open source; see, for example, the website Deep Dream Generator
https://deepdreamgenerator.com/. Mordvintsev’s website is https://znah.net/.
 8. Andreas Broeckmann, “Optical Calculus,” paper presented Images Beyond Control, FAMU,
Prague, November 6, 2020 (recording at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FnAgBbInMfA);
Adrian MacKenzie and Anna Munster, “Platform Seeing: Image Ensembles and Their
Invisualities,” Theory, Culture & Society 36, no. 5 (2019): 3–22; Fabian Offert and Peter Bell,
“Perceptual Bias and Technical Metapictures: Critical Machine Vision as a Humanities
Challenge,” AI & Society (October 12, 2020), https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00146-
020-01058-z.
9. On the theory of formats, see Marek Jancovic, Alexandra Schneider, and Axel Volmar, eds.,
Format Matters: Standards, Practices, and Politics in Media Cultures (Lüneburg, Germany:
Meson Press, 2019).
10. On the concept of “iconic difference,” see Gottfried Boehm, “Ikonische Differenz,”
Rheinsprung 11. Zeitschrift für Bildkritik 1 (2011): 170–76.
11. On the status of contingency within CGI, see Jordan Schonig, “Contingent Motion: Rethinking
the ‘Wind in the Trees’ in Early Cinema and CGI,” Discourse 40, no. 1 (2018): 30–61.
12. Jan Bot, https://www.jan.bot/livelog.
13. Francesco Casetti, “Why Fears Matter: Cinephobia in Early Film Culture,” Screen 59, no. 2
(Summer 2018): 150.
14. Wilhelm Stapel, “Homo cinematicus,” in The Promise of Cinema, ed. Tony Kaes, Nicholas
Baer, and Michael Cowan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015), 242–43, quoted by
Casetti, “Why Fears Matter,” 146; originally published as “Der homo cinematicus,” Deutsches
Volkstum no. 10 (1919): 319–20.
15. Piero Pesce-Marinieri, I pericoli sociali del cinematografo (Turin, Italy: Lattes, 1922), 10–11,
quoted by Casetti, “Why Fears Matter,” 146.
16. Georges Duhamel, Scènes de la vie future (Paris: Mercure de France, 1930), 52; English
translation America: The Menace. Scenes from the Life of the Future (Boston: Houghton
Mifflin, 1931), 27. Benjamin quotes Duhamel in the third version of Walter Benjamin, “The
Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” in Selected Writings Volume 4–
1938–1940 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 267–68.
17. Dziga Vertov, “Kinoks: A Revolution,” in Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1984), 14–15.
18. Ibid., 17–18.
19. Jean Epstein, “Bonjour cinéma” (1921), in Ecrits sur le cinéma. Volume 1–1921–1953 (Paris:
Seghers, 1974), 92 (my translation).
20. Ibid., 128–29 (my translation).
21. Jean Epstein, “L’Intelligence d’une machine” (1946), in Ecrits sur le cinéma. Volume 1–1921–
1953 (Paris: Seghers, 1974) online edition,
http://www.uqac.uquebec.ca/zone30/Classiques_des_sciences_sociales/index.html, 47 (my
translation).
22. Ibid., 74 (my translation).
23. Ibid., 45 (my translation).
24. This passage from “L’Intelligence d’une machine” is translated in English in Sarah Keller and
Jason N. Paul., eds., Jean Epstein–Critical Essays and New Translations (Amsterdam:
Amsterdam University Press, 2012), 311–12.
25. László Moholy-Nagy, Malerei Fotografie Film (Munich, Germany: Albert Langen, 1927), 5
(my translation).
26. László Moholy-Nagy, “A New Instrument of Vision” (1933), in Krisztina Passuth, Moholy-
Nagy (London: Thames and Hudson, 1987), 327.
27. Walter Benjamin, “News about Flowers” (1928), in Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the
Age of Its Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2008), 272.
28. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” 2nd
version (1936), in Benjamin, The Work of Art, 37.
29. Siegfried Kracauer, “Photography” (1927), in The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 62–63.
30. Kracauer, “Marseiller Entwurf zu einer Theorie des Films” (1940), in Werke, Vol. 3 (Frankfurt,
Germany: Suhrkamp, 2005), respectively, 545, 533, 543, 549, 591–93, 534, 541, 591 (my
translation).
31. Kracauer, “Tentative Outline for a Book on Film Aesthetics” (1949), in Siegfried Kracauer–
Erwin Panofsky, Briefwechsel 1941–1966 (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1996), 83–84.
32. Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1997),, 18, 31.
33. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1. The Movement-Image (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1986), 81.
34. Some major texts by Farocki on operational images: “Phantom Images,” Public no. 29 (2004),
and “War Always Finds a Way,” in HF/RG [Harun Farocki/Rodney Graham] (Paris: Jeu de
Paume/Blackjack Editions, 2009), 107.
35. On Farocki’s operational images as “instructions for actions,” see “Farocki: A Frame for the
No Longer Visible. Thomas Elsaesser in Conversation with Alexander Alberro,” e-flux
(November 2014), Article 59, https://www.e-flux.com/journal/59/61111/farocki-a-frame-for-
the-no-longer-visible-thomas-elsaesser-in-conversation-with-alexander-alberro/.
36. Vilém Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography (London: Reaktion Books, 2000), 17, 13,
64, 31, 70–71.
37. Ibid., 23–24.
38. Ibid., 65.
39. Paul Virilio, The Vision Machine (London: BFI, 1994), 73 (italics in original).
40. Ibid., 59, 59–60, 47, 60.
41. Friedrich Kittler, Gramophone Film Typewriter (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,
1999), xli.
42. Ibid., respectively xxxix, xl, 3, 16, 12, 16, 23.
43. Trevor Paglen, “Operational Images,” e-flux (November 2014), Article 59, https://www.e-
flux.com/journal/59/61130/operational-images/.
44. Trevor Paglen, “Invisible Images (Your Pictures Are Looking at You),” The New Inquiry 8
(December 2016), https://thenewinquiry.com/invisible-images-your-pictures-are-looking-at-
you/.
45. Kate Crawford and Trevor Paglen, “Excavating AI: The Politics of Training Sets for Machine
Learning” (September 19, 2019), https://excavating.ai.
46. The videos are available at https://magenta.tensorflow.org/nfp_p2p.
47. See the presentation of the work on Chatonsky’s website: http://chatonsky.net/earth/.
48. See Grégory Chatonsky, http://chatonsky.net/earth/.
49. Grégory Chatonsky, “Après le réalisme: L’espace abstrait de l’intelligence artificielle”
(http://chatonsky.net/realisme-ia/); “Hyperproduction: les machines à réalisme”
(http://chatonsky.net/hyperproduction-realisme-unige/).
50. See Grégory Chatonsky, http://chatonsky.net/earth/.
 CHAPTER 16

HEADPHONES, CINEMATIC
LISTENING, AND THE FRAME
OF THE SKULL

KYLE STEVENS

YVONNE Rainer’s 1985 film, The Man Who Envied Women, is deeply
concerned with acts of listening. Each scene depicts auditory concentration,
but more specifically we repeatedly see, or rather hear, the voices of men
dominating the ears of women, as in classroom lectures and interviews, or
inserting themselves into women’s spaces, as in offscreen phone calls or
lengthy answering machine messages. Yet there are moments when
Rainer’s covetous man listens, too. He haunts New York City
eavesdropping on women through unusual headphones that symbolize his
“monitoring and mastering behavior,” to quote Rainer.1 Rather than
protecting his internal subjective privacy, these headphones somehow
enable him to invade others’, as he overhears conversations about sex,
dating, homosexuality, and so on. Women have no privacy under patriarchy,
and, as the title suggests, the man wants to possess the women’s voices, to
claim them for himself by stealing them and locking them away in his own
mental bunker. Crucially, the man cannot bear for his ears be open to their
voices, even as he’s desperate to hear what they say. Although he’s usually
close enough that he might simply overhear conversation, he requires a
technological apparatus, a chastity belt for his cochlea.
Rainer directs us to consider how headphones enable a fantasy of control,
that listening is a political act, subject to conditions of power, and that
headphones invite complicated questions about the relation of bodies to
world, and how our bodies extend into space or retreat from it. Her
depiction feels increasingly timely, too. Aside from the fact that headphones
are one of the principal technologies of our time, ubiquitous tools for
listening to music, video games, television, films, and podcasts, their
presence in streets, subways, and stores echo Rainer’s idea: they often now
are used as much as a dam to prevent the sound waves of others from
crashing inside us—both to hear and not to hear. That is, headphones are
often worn not in order to listen to, say, music, but to listen to music in
order to not hear the world around. There is no mistaking the fact that
Rainer’s purpose was also to ask her audience, us, to reflect on how we
listen to movie characters, too—she frequently includes images of
Hollywood figures behind her own speaking characters—and even though
she asked the question thirty-five years ago we’ve still not answered it.
I want to explore one possible way of doing so by contemplating the
kinds of cinematic listening afforded by this new modality of embodiment:
what happens when we use headphones to listen to movies, as we might
when encountering a film on a range of domestic and mobile devices, or
when we ask students to watch films on their own, which is now standard
practice in the discipline? What happens when a film’s sonic world is no
longer part of a shared world? And what are the political and philosophical
consequences of an aesthetic experience that feels like it unfolds inside our
heads? The effects are deeper than we might think. Gone is the robust, full-
bodied experience of cinematic sound, the registration of vibrations in the
gut, the feet. Gone is the lack of control over volume and intrusive chatter
from candy wrapper-rattling audience members. Gone is the importance of
the proximity of speakers, or the placement of speakers behind the screen to
create the illusion that sounds issue primarily from their visual source.
Perhaps most important, if the sound occurs inside the listener, rather than
the listener occurring in the space of the sound, then gone is the sense of
being immersed in a sonic environment.
I want to make the case here for the importance of attending to
headphones and their concomitant mode of listening, for taking this mode
seriously as a formal structure of films. This chapter is divided into two
parts. First, I sketch the history of film sound technology, as well as theories
of film sound experience, in order to not only demonstrate just how radical
the use of headphones to listen to movies is, but also to reclaim an original
dream of cinematic listening. Second, I want to describe an aesthetic mode
—what I call intracranial aesthetics—that curiously suits headphones.
These aims come together in a proposal that headphonic listening may,
ultimately, constitute a new medium of cinema.

H F S
“Because listening is never neutral,” Nina Sun Eidsheim writes, “but rather
always actively produces meaning, it is a political act,” and so it is vital that
we consider the values that allow and support forms of listening at the
cinema.2 Indeed, the history of film sound as a concept is also a history of
power. Artists, critics, and scholars have asked whether sound or image is,
or should be, dominant over the other, and whether sound, if redundant of
the image, is aesthetic waste. It has been common for theorists to cling to
the idea that cinema is at heart a visual art, and in doing so, to support a
model of audience experience that maintains binaries of subject and object,
looking and looked at, self and Other—models of being that have gradually
been understood to do considerable social and political damage.
At the same time, conversations about film sound have been historically
rare. Only relatively recently is the topic receiving more attention, though
the aim is usually to tell technological history rather than to theorize
audience experience. The study of Hollywood film sound in particular
(which in many ways spearheaded the global transition to talkies) has
leaned heavily in this direction, as in the work of Rick Altman, John Belton,
Jennifer Fleeger, Douglas Gomery, Helen Hanson, Mark Kerins, James
Lastra, Alison McCracken, Neil Verma, and others. These scholars are
careful, too, to point out that film was never really silent due to the presence
of gramophones, pianists, onsite narrators (such as the Japanese benshi),
and so forth. As Altman writes: “Everyone knows that Edison intended
sound and image reproduction as a synchronized pair.”3 Friedrich Kittler
similarly reminds us that due to early incarnations such as the Black Maria,
“sound film preceded silent film.”4 While different histories focus on
different periods, modes of recording and playback, and so forth, they
present a shared picture of film sound history: phonographs and tubes gave
way to optically printing onto filmstrips; carbon mics gave way to a
condenser for distribution prints; then came the magnetic mode of
encoding, which afforded multiple channels and, despite improvements,
remained largely the same until the advent of Dolby systems in the latter
1970s. The study of film sound technology after the 1970s is essentially the
study of Dolby, including digital surround sound (e.g., the 1990s’ 5.1 or
current Atmos systems), which are regarded as advances upon prior systems
and not as paradigm shifts. According to sound designer and editor Walter
Murch, “You could divide film sound in half: There is BD, Before Dolby,
and there is AD, After Dolby.”5 This scholarly emphasis on technological
history tends to follow the Hollywood industry’s own attempts to brand
sonic changes as “progress,” implying that sonic realism is the built-in end
game.
Eric Dienstfrey shows that Dolby followed, and sought to capitalize
upon, the 1960s/1970s bourgeois pride in domestic sound technology and
the concomitant emphasis on listening as its own rightful pleasure. The late
1970s Dolby luminaries, namely, Star Wars (George Lucas, 1977) and
Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola, 1979), were an attempt “to
recreate the multitrack soundscapes that permeated home stereos and rock
recordings,”6 and, “by aligning themselves with home stereo’s
sophistication, [Hollywood sound] practitioners distinguished their own
sound tracks as essential to the creation of quality cinema.”7 Notably,
headphones were often integral to home stereo systems, which staked their
reputation on getting as close as possible to the “aural reality” of live
musical performances. (Amusingly, in a prophetic 1926 address to the
Royal Musical Association, famed musician and scholar Percy Scholes
bemoans, “There is less reading and thinking going on. It is amazing to find
how many people spend the whole evening in listening to broadcasting …
Many seem to have the headphones permanently attached to themselves.”8)
Trying to trace headphonic film sound specifically, though, poses a
problem for historians, since there is no analogous first film that was heard
with headphones on a mass scale—no Warner Brothers shorts, no Don Juan
(Alan Crosland, 1926) or The Jazz Singer (Alan Crosland, 1927). At the
same time, headphones have long been used in the recording, editing, and
mixing of films, and so have arguably been a part of film history far longer
than we typically think (and perhaps listening with them is even better
suited to replicate a sound designer’s aims for that reason). Film sound
pioneer George Groves tells of the early days in Hollywood, when he would
go back and forth from the scoring stage to the production mixers and
“walk around with a pair of headphones.”9 Early Edison kinetoscopes had
synchronized phonographs built into them, connecting to the patron’s ears
through rubber tubes: “its basic principles are not really much different
from taking in a video on an iPhone with headphones.”10 Using headphones
to listen to movies on airplanes became common in the mid-1960s, yet
commercial air travel was not available to most cinephiles.11 While
listening to music via headphones became common in the 1980s, notably
through the Sony Walkman, it was not until the early 2000s that portable
media players such as video iPods and smartphones suffused middle-class
culture in the United States and attained widespread visibility, making
listening to screen fictions with headphones a regular practice.12 For this
reason, headphonic film sound tends to pair with smaller screens than Film
Studies scholars typically imagine when theorizing the medium. And
although the richness of reproduced sound varies across different kinds of
headphones, for now, in order to develop a theory available to further
nuance, I imagine something of an ideal pair of headphones, ones that
provide a maximally robust soundtrack and minimal interference.13

H F S T
Besides constituting a new direction in the history of film sound
technology, headphones challenge several points of consensus in film sound
theory. My goal in moving through these points is not to chide past theorists
for failing to accommodate unforeseeable technologies, or to suggest that
theatrical exhibition is nearing its end (some people will always want to get
out of the house, and some genres, such as comedy, will always benefit
from being seen with others). Rather, I will use them to bring out affinities
and contrasts between theatrical and headphonic sound in order to better
understand the latter.
First, sound has predominantly been considered in relation to the image.
In part, this is because an awareness of cinema’s technological past leads to
developmental accounts of its ontology: silent film preceded sound film,
and so the image track remains the art form’s core, its body—anything
beyond is clothing or accessory. This is certainly true, and understandable,
of those writing as sound film first became dominant, such as René Clair,
Béla Balázs, and Sergei Eisenstein, Vsevolod Pudovkin, and Grigori
Alexandrov. Yet given that feature-length silent fiction films only lasted
about ten to twenty years before the advent of sound (depending on the
definition of “feature-length”), maintaining a binary silent/sound distinction
speaks more to the cinephile’s affection for silent film than to any truths
about the medium. Nevertheless, a hierarchy between sound and image
persisted in the discipline of film studies across the twentieth century.
Christian Metz writes that sound verifies the image, a view subsequently
endorsed by Dudley Andrew in his influential Concepts in Film Theory.14
Mary Ann Doane writes of the art’s “material heterogeneity,” and argues
that sound is supplemental to and “anchors” the image.15 Following Doane,
John Belton asserts that “sound defines itself in terms of the temporality
and spatiality of the image,” which leads him to the view that, “What the
sound track seeks to duplicate is the sound of the image, not that of the
world.”16 And Michel Chion’s well-known concepts the acousmêtre and
spatial magnetization entail the logic that sound affixes itself to the image.
Second, theorists largely rely upon metaphors of space and distance,
buttressed by the presupposition of the cavernous auditorium, to contrast
image and sound. For instance, Doane and Kaja Silverman instrumentalize
psychoanalytic metaphors (likening the auditorium to the mother’s womb),
as Steven Connor points out, by building on “Didier Anzieu’s conception of
the primal ‘acoustic envelope.’ ”17 Connor also writes that underpinning
such theories is “the operative dream of reducing sound to spatial
coordinates, to some representable space relative to the space of the
screen.” To this end, James Lastra reminds us that even one’s position in the
auditorium inflects one’s listening experience.18
Third, the idea of the auditorium subtends the consideration of scale and
volume considered suitable to the image (implicitly assuming the primacy
of the image). Belton argues that sound technology develops to
accommodate image size, such as Cinerama and CinemaScope.19 The same
logic informs IMAX sound today. For example, the volume that director
Christopher Nolan requested his Dunkirk (2017) be played at when
screened in 70mm received widespread complaint, a volume nearing an
injurious threshold (and ironically undermining the film’s antiviolence
stance by threatening its audience with permanent physical damage, since
hearing cells do not regenerate). World War II veterans of Dunkirk even
groused that the movie sounded louder than the event itself!20 There are
several assumptions at work here: that a loud sound “fits” a large screen;
that louder equals bigger; that bigger is better for invoking a feeling of
immersiveness. But each link in this chain is spurious. A whisper can be as
absorbing as a shout, and is generally more so.21
Finally, scholars concur that mainstream film sound pursues the kind of
transparency that Bertolt Brecht would abhor. Doane writes emphatically of
the ways that film sound works to become “invisible,” that it adheres to the
formula that “the less perceivable a technique is, the more successful it
is.”22 Belton views “[the evolution of sound technology] as an ideologically
determined progression toward self-effacement,” which demonstrates
political conservatism, because “the basic apparatus reflects the actions of
bourgeois ideology in general, which seeks to mask its operations and to
present as ‘natural’ that which is a product of ideology.”23 Mark Kerins
believes that Dolby extends this practice to an extreme, uniting the
spectator’s perception with representation to achieve realism.24

I
At the core of these discussions of spatial envelopment, loudness, and self-
effacement is an insistence on immersion as cinematic sound’s inherent
aesthetic purpose—and its worth. This is what allows Chion to claim that
film sound has no frame, and what classical film theorist Bela Balázs meant
when he wrote that “sounds throw no shadow,” “have no sides,” and
“cannot be blocked out.”25 Paul Grainge explains that “the Dolby name
became a means through which exhibitors could … appropriately
distinguish the immersive potential of cinematic sound from the flatter
audio effects of domestic television.”26 Here, as branded by Dolby,
“immersive” is synonymous with “the cinematic.” “Sound saturates space,
like vapour,” Connor writes; “there is also no ‘framing’ of sound in the
metaphorical sense either: no way to put the hearing of sound into a frame
and overhear it.”27 The lack of an aesthetic frame as epistemic scaffold
leads to the shared view that film sound depicts and invites subjective states
more readily than the image (with the persistent contrast of a subject-I that
looks at an object). For Doane (building on editor Helen Van Dongen), film
sound imparts “I feel, I experience” rather than “I know” or “I
understand.”28 Sound proffers “another order of reality” to be grasped, an
intuited reality rooted in shared mood or ambience. Values of “intelligible
and sensible, intellect and emotion, fact and value, reason and intuition” are
thus respectively projected onto image and sound.29 (There is lurking here
the twinned binaries of reason/masculinity and emotion/femininity, and
there’s no point pretending that sound has not been theorized less frequently
because of this.)
Connor stresses that such formulations tend to confuse the “material fact
of sonorous diffusion” in the theater with the audience’s experience of film
sound. He argues that in a theater “we do not experience hearing as material
coming to a point, whether in us or anywhere else…. Sound is mapped
across the whole body, rather than converging cone-like on one organ of
entry.”30 Vivian Sobchack also underlines the historical underestimation of
the bodily experience of cinematic sound, quoting Don Ihde, who states
plainly, “Phenomenologically, I do not hear with my ears. I hear with my
whole body.”31 She also cites Sean Cubitt: “We do not, and it is impossible
to, distinguish between the vibration of the air, the vibration of the eardrum,
and the bones (the feet, after the ears, are our most sensitive receptors,
especially of bass notes; the collarbone and the chest respond more to
airborne sounds…. Sound events create a space with no respect for the
sacrosanctity of the epidermis.”32 (I can recall as a child the magic of
Jurassic Park (Steven Spielberg, 1993), the first film released in Dolby’s
then-new DTS 5.1-channel surround sound system. The ripples in the cup
of water as the T-Rex approached became iconic because we experienced
exactly what the characters did: a booming sound and tingling feet. Our
ground quaked just as the movie’s did.)
Sobchack’s purpose is not just to recognize the full-bodied experience of
theatrical film sound but to argue that digital sound threatens to upend
previous accounts of sound-image relations. She writes that “Whereas it
was once a given that vision was the dominant and most nuanced (and
hence poetic) element of cinematic experience, of late that dominance has
been challenged by shifts of emphasis and attention in both sound
technology and our sensorium.”33 In “thunderous percussive” Dolby sound,
“reverie is not a phenomenological option” according to Sobchack, because,
and here the rationale is implicit, loudness eventually overtakes the
audience member’s conscious life (as in the phrase “it was so loud I
couldn’t hear myself think”).34 This is a fascinating claim for many reasons,
not least of which is the fact that it entails thinking of consciousness as
sonic, and that it suggests a subject’s capacity for thought is vulnerable to
aesthetic volume.35 (One wonders whether each individual’s standard for
loudness is formed in relation to the “volume” with which one “hears”
one’s conscious “voice.”)

I ’ A Y H
For Sobchack, sound needs to be just so loud before it ousts conscious
thought. Yet with headphones this menace is ever-present, given the sense
that the sound is already “in our heads.” I will return to this notion, but first
I want to synthesize the ways that headphonic film sound diverges from
previous theoretical consensuses. It does not provide an experience of
sound enveloping the body. It does not affect our collarbones and feet, nor
is it screen-centric, and nor does it seem to emanate from the image.
Optimal seating no longer matters, and sound remains consistent even if
one turns one’s head. Given that the distance between speaker and ear is
minimal, headphones alter the demands of localization (the coordinated
efforts of brain and ears to determine sound and distance). The ability to
toggle one’s own treble and bass also affects this experience, since in the
theater higher pitches are easier to locate than low (because wider sound
waves wrap around the head and reach both ears). When sound waves are
pumped directly into the ear, this is not so.
However, headphones also share in several of the aesthetic aims
delineated above, particularly the notion that cinematic sound should pursue
an aesthetic of self-effacement, the kind to which Belton objects and
ascribes to Dolby, which he believes achieves this “ideal to a fault”:
 The soundtrack has become artificially quiet, pushing beyond the realism of the outside
world into an inner, psychological realism. The soundtrack duplicates what sound recordist
Mark Dichter and sound designer Walter Murch refer to as the sound one hears in one’s
head, a sound that has not been marked by any system noise nor by transmission through
any medium, such as air, that might alter fidelity to an ideal.36

He repeats: “Developments in the area of sound recording—especially in

the use of radio microphones and Dolby—point, as we have seen, in the
direction of the ideal: they culminate in the sounds one hears in one’s
head.”37 Whereas Sobchack is concerned that film sound may overtake
conscious thought, Belton suggests that it seeks to model it.
Headphones further pursue this aim. They offer an experience of sound
as suspended between our ears in that imaginary space which is often the
metaphorical location of the mind. Without air and objects around to
function as relata for frequencies, sound and body are experienced as
indivisible. There seems to be no interaction at all. When one takes the
speakers out of one’s ears and holds them away, one does not—or at least
should not—hear anything. In contrast to prior theatrical audiences,
vulnerable to penetration or being smothered, headphones restore the skin,
the body’s borders. If sound must come from somewhere, as Stanley Cavell
writes, it seems to come from within us, no longer anchored by the image,
but it is not anchored by us, either.38 Rather, it creates a space in our heads,
a sonic room within us as large as it needs. Thus, it is headphones that give
us, and for the first time, a material frame for cinematic sound: the skull.
Headphonic listening is thus a new kind of listening. In his well-known
treatise Listening, Jean-Luc Nancy writes that sound relies on the
registration of resonance, of a distance between self and sound, such that
listening becomes listening to one’s self listening. He describes a
metaphysical loop: it “produces nothing less than the resolution of presence
to self at the same time as that of the sensibility of intelligibility and of the
intelligibility of the perceptible.”39 For Nancy, the search for sound
meaning requires a space that affords resonance. But that is not so with
headphones.

F W
Another way to understand how headphones establish a frame is to turn for
a moment to their treatment in sound studies more broadly. Although these
studies address listening to music rather than to film, there is a fascinating
proclivity within their ethnographic accounts to describe the experience of
going about quotidian activities while wearing headphones (usually while
flaneuring urban settings) as somehow resembling a movie, and
understanding this sentiment tells us something about how headphonic
listening is in harmony with the idea of the cinematic. In “iPod Culture: The
Toxic Pleasures of Audiotopia,” Michael Bull interviews one user who
states that, “It feels as if I’m in a movie at times. Like my life has a
soundtrack now.”40 Another confesses that “I find when listening to some
music choices I feel like I’m not really there. Like I’m watching everything
around me happening in a movie … I see people like I do when I watch a
movie … there is a soundtrack to my encounters.”41 And a third affirms: “I
live in my own self-imagined movie, instantly tailoring the soundtrack to
fit, or inspire, my emotions.”42 In her history of the personal stereo,
Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow notes the common invocation of cinema as a way
to understand the experience of the Walkman, quoting early adopters who
claimed to feel oddly outside their own reality yet still present to it.43 These
assertions cannot be explained simply by the idea that headphones affix
sound to the world in the way a musical soundtrack typically works in
fiction film. For one thing, portable music players had been available for
decades (transistor radios, boomboxes, etc.). The surprise expressed by
Walkman and iPod users is specific to headphones, earbuds, and the like.
They suggest that they feel power over their world, like movie directors.
The cinematicization of the world seems to have less to do with layering
sensations and more to do with a sense of delimitation, of enframing the
world for consideration. Perhaps it is in part because, as at a movie or a
play, one hears things that the people one watches do not, yet unlike in a
traditional play, there is no sense of a proscenium. By using the resonators
and cavities of the skull—that icon of human finitude—we feel expansive,
able to house the sonic world of the film. At the same time, as our skulls are
occupied they also take on the occupation of frame, whose borders are clear
and yet imaginary. We need to believe that this world continues to exist
beyond its/our borders, not made aware of our solipsistic position. This is a
very cinematic idea, where unlike, say, a painting’s, we believe the world
keeps going beyond the rectangle of the frame. Philosophically speaking,
this is radical internalism. Headphonic listening blurs the boundaries
between inner and outer, everting flesh and bone until the body threatens to
contain the world.
In fact, anxiety about the potentially solipsistic nature of headphones has
been present from the beginning of this technology. In his well-known 1984
article “The Walkman Effect,” Shuhei Hosokawa describes the
apprehension that accompanied “the ultimate object for private listening”44
at that time: questions about the relation of subject to world (“whether men
with the Walkman are human or not”), whether users feel alienated,
“suffering from incommunicability … self-enclosure and political
apathy.”45 Hosokawa argues, though, that the Walkman encourages
autonomy, not alienation, and operates according to Deleuzian notions of
“compossibility” and “positive distance.” That is, Walkmans
decontextualize users’ reality but do not remove them from it. Hosokawa
explains this by turning to a cinematic example, from the film La Boum 2
(Claude Pinoteau, 1982): “At a party, a boy hesitates to approach the girl he
loves, but finally manages to dance with her. He silently approaches her and
puts a headphone on her head playing the same music as his. Their own
exclusive music begins flowing between them. The happy pair dance to the
different music, to the different rhythm. Is their dance an escape from
reality? No.”46 I disagree. Engendering their own temporality, even if not
spatiality, does suggest a different plane of existence. They half-remove
themselves.
Similar scenes have occurred in countless films since, including Begin
Again (John Carney, 2014), when two characters tenderly bond by sharing
music on the subway (through a dual connection that allows them each their
own set of headphones). This contrasts to common depictions of characters
playing music for each other without headphones, as in Twentieth Century
Women (Mike Mills, 2016). A man trying to woo his landlord plays a Black
Flag record, and we see him attend to her as the hardcore punk besieges
them. We know he enjoys the music, but as he strains to imagine what she
hears, he hears the song differently, too (she does not, it turns out, care for
it). (I expect many readers will have had a similar experience of playing
music for someone. It is perhaps the simplest measure of the distance
between listening alone and listening with others.)
In Begin Again, we are to understand that each hears only what the other
does, that they have overcome the skeptical threat that we may never really
know the contents of another’s interior life. Here they not only know but
experience it, and at the same time. It is an intense picture of intimacy, and
if we also experience the film via headphones, we, too, share in their
moment. This familiar staging can also be disturbing. For instance, in A
Quiet Place (John Krasinski, 2018), we learn we share a husband’s
audiovisual perspective as he approaches his spouse who is dancing to
music. He/we hear nothing until she puts one earbud in his ear and his/our
heads fill with sound, and we suddenly realize that the default position of
hearing in the film is his and not hers—and further implying that he had no
inner life until headphones supplied one. The idea that headphonic sound is
all-consuming is so widely accepted as to be exploited to enable dramatic
events. In Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (Martin McDonagh,
2017), a racist cop (somewhat inexplicably) listens to operatic diva Renée
Fleming sing an aria from the 1847 opera Martha so loudly that he fails to
hear the Molotov cocktails exploding around him.
This is not the space to monitor the appearance of headphone-like devices
throughout film history, though as far back as L’Atalante (Jean Vigo, 1934)
a character listens to music via an on-ear contraption that is then
broadcasted onto the street. War and science fiction films often feature
communication through helmets and headsets, as do the familiar scenes of
telephone operators weaving wires and connecting calls. However, these
films do not typically build realistic shifts in sonic perspective into their
sound design—even in films ostensibly about listening. For example, in
David Lean’s The Sound Barrier (1952), no sonic distinction is made
between pilots wearing headphone-like “ear guards” in cockpits, control
tower workers, or folks listening to the same events on their radios. The
same is true of most films about musicians recording songs in studios, such
as Hustle and Flow (Craig Brewer, 2005). Sometimes, as in Blow Out
(Brian De Palma, 1981), a movie that is about a sound technician, there is
inconsistent variation in playback and recorded sound; sometimes sound is
muffled as though we hear it mediated through technologies and sometimes
it is not.
 But I do want to take a moment to consider Edgar Wright’s 2016 pseudo-
musical blockbuster hit Baby Driver. The titular character’s vintage 2009
iPod sparked widespread nostalgia for the device, and the film’s use of
music and portrayal of headphones received a great deal of attention. In this
film Baby (Ansel Elgort) suffers from tinnitus, a residual effect of and
metaphor for his childhood trauma of losing his parents, which motivates
him to listen to music on headphones at all times (shutting out the noise of
the world is to shut out its pain). The movie opens as Baby selects the right
song to accompany a bank robbery on his iPod. Then, over the ensuing
opening credits, Baby moves through the Atlanta cityscape with his earbuds
firmly inserted. We share only Baby’s auditory perspective as he performs
his walk-dance (a sort of perambulatory sprechgesang), and the world
around him reflects the lyrics and rhythm of the song. Words that he hears
appear as graffiti, street signs, window dressing, and so forth. Here,
listening is private, but it is precisely not immersive.
Contrast this case to an early scene of the classic musical The
Bandwagon (Vincente Minnelli, 1953). Tony Hunter (Fred Astaire) walks
along a train platform humming and singing “By Myself,” a song that
underscores the character’s isolation. He is not exactly of the diegetic
world, emphasized by the fact that no one around him notices his singing.
Like Baby’s, this walk invites questions about the relation of walking to
dancing, or, rather, how to determine where one ends and the other begins,
and of interiority and expression. This scene suggests that what is going on
in the head spills out of it via song. Thinking must be rendered audible in
the social, external world. We share Tony’s first-person position, yet this
interiority is precisely now not the Cartesian position once thinking has
become song. The Bandwagon’s image of solitude relies on the magic of the
generic convention whereby we accept that while he is singing, only he
hears the sound of his voice (and orchestral accompaniment).
We might think, too, of another famous Hollywood opening scene of a
white cishet male and another Tony: Tony Manero (John Travolta) strutting
down the street in Saturday Night Fever (John Badham, 1977). In this
tracking shot of Travolta’s character’s feet walking in time to the Bee Gees’
“Stayin’ Alive,” lines between walking and dancing are again blurred. We
know that neither he, nor the various shopkeepers with whom he interacts,
hear the song. He is wholly ignorant of it. His superego lies just out of his
reach, but it is strong enough to make this diegesis about his swagger for us.
He’s not commander of this world and remains engulfed in it.
Unlike these cases, in which characters—and we—inhabit the world of
the sound—even when that world is a projection of character subjectivity,
in Baby Driver, the sound that inhabits the subject constitutes the world.
That is, Baby is not isolated within the song so much as his sonic solitude
determines his environment. He does not provide a soundtrack to the world;
rather, the song he listens to shapes and prefigures that world. The world
begins and ends within his head, and he needs never listen to anyone else to
navigate it. (One wonders whether Baby’s whiteness—amidst a gang
comprised largely of people of color—ensured audiences saw this picture of
listening as an image of freedom rather than the suggestion that sound
colonizes the head. The song, not incidentally, is “Harlem Shuffle” by Black
duo Bob & Earl.)
Baby’s headphones realize a solipsistic fantasy, and one that I think helps
explain why the movie struck a chord with young audiences. Choosing to
experience aesthetic technology as a retreat inward comports with a world
in which solitude is a deeply felt dynamic—one can be physically alone and
interact with thousands of people every day via social media, and yet we
have no privacy from government or corporations. This model of
headphone use may also sit well in an era in which the world becomes a
portrait of our capitalist selves (who one knows, what one buys, to whom
one expresses one’s self to, and so forth is increasingly comprised of
individualized algorithmic determinations). In this context, we might see
headphonic sound as a rejoinder to the zeitgeist’s imperative to connect—
even if only within respective echo chambers—by sealing in the one, the
singular. To speculate a bit further: if headphones do afford a feeling of
power over our environment, do we, when using them to “watch” a movie,
feel power over the text, especially when screens are diminutive, upending
traditional theories that hypothesize a spectator in awe of, or overpowered
by, a large image?

T A H
Beyond the question of the representation of headphones onscreen, I want
to describe an aesthetic sensibility by focusing on films, like Baby Driver,
that comport with headphonic sound, on those that seem to appeal to it, or it
to them, by involving dynamics of inner and outer.47 These are largely films
that take up subjectivity as a problem: when questions of the self and its
presentness to the world rise to the surface. These are films that I suggest
display a category of sonic aesthetics I call “intracranial.” Intracranial
sound occurs when it matters that we, as the audience, completely share the
sonic perspective of a character, or sometimes the film itself.
Intracranial aesthetics are increasingly common, evident in such tropes as
a camera swirling around a character while we hear the robust sounds all
around them. More and more common, too, are movies that start with black
screens to establish the world as heard first, and which thus suggest the
nonspace of consciousness as their “establishing shot.” Recent films as
diverse in style and quality as Judy (Rupert Goold, 2019) and Portrait of a
Lady on Fire (Céline Sciamma, 2019) do, for instance. Fritz Lang’s
masterwork M (1931) does, putting us in the mind of a child, aligning us
with victims, but also informing us that this movie will be about how to put
ourselves in the minds of others—criminals, beggars, cops. The Piano (Jane
Campion, 1991) begins with a black screen and the sounds of the words
“The voice you hear is not my speaking voice but my mind’s voice,”
similarly establishing the heroine’s subjectivity as the film’s main concern.
Her (Spike Jonze, 2013) also opens with a black screen and whispered
speech. The main character falls in love with the voice of a conscious
computer operating system that he hears via earphone, and we may find
ourselves more sympathetic to his situation if we are also hearing voices we
regard as conscious in the same way. This logic extends to other stories of
being trapped in characters’ heads, such as Being John Malkovich (Spike
Jonze, 1999), where characters can pay to inhabit the skull of the famous
titular actor. In Marie Antoinette (Sofia Coppola, 2006) we hear murmured
gossip as Marie (Kirsten Dunst) walks the Versailles gardens, reinforcing
the impression that the sources of the nefarious rumors are unknowable,
ubiquitous; they surround her and bother her by getting “in her head.” Or
maybe we have just that much more compassion with the automobile
passenger at the beginning of Touch of Evil (Orson Welles, 1958) who can
hear a ticking and is told it’s in her head when it is, in fact, a bomb in the
trunk. The use of headphones may jar, too. The opening of Le Plaisir (Max
Ophüls, 1952), for example, begins with a black screen and a narrator’s
voice, which would seem to be a perfectly solipsistic mode for headphones,
until the voice utters “I’m delighted to speak to you in the dark, as if seated
right beside you … and perhaps I am,” reminding us that this film was
made to be viewed in a space where one may hear the voice of the other
next to one.
A movie like Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal (1957) might improve
with the private, introspective experience of headphones, what with the
intimacy of the avowedly profound questions being posed inside the main
character’s head. We might also call Andrei Tarkovsky’s The Mirror (1975)
intracranial, with its first-person voice-over narrating scenes from a body
we never know, one not anchored in particular spaces and times.
Experiencing such voices as inside us, as occupying us as well as the film,
suggests that it is our first-person voice in a way that collective viewing
does not.
Listening this way allows us to better appreciate some films, too, or at
least to understand them in a new way. Director Lynne Ramsay is to my
mind a master of intracranial aesthetics. Her film Morvern Callar (2002)
expresses the stakes underlying the presence and absence of language and
voice in several ways, from long telephone calls to the suicide note
Morvern’s boyfriend leaves behind (which, aligned with her point of view,
we read in our own conscious voices when the text fills the screen). The
story follows the taciturn and ambiguously sociopathic Morvern (Samantha
Morton), who is “attached” to her headphones. We typically share
Morvern’s aural perspective, and when she wears headphones, what she
hears takes over the soundtrack.48 Nothing of the world is allowed in,
whether she is grocery shopping or carving up her boyfriend’s body in the
bathtub. The film ends with Morvern dancing alone in a club listening to
her headphones. Headphones are integral to both the disassociation of
which Morvern is capable and the sense of freedom she relentlessly
pursues. Bringing isolation and escape together—suggesting that they may,
in fact, be the same thing—arguably echoes our own situation if we
experience the film with headphones. (As with most films, headphones
were also used in the recording and editing of the film, suggesting a
symmetry between design and outcome.49)
Less literally, Ramsay’s You Were Never Really Here (2018) further
reflects on how a sociopath (who is also arguably the most moral figure in
the film) listens. This film also begins in blackness so that the thoughts we
hear articulated are locationless, and we share this nonposition as the
thoughts “occur to” us in our heads. The premise is that a hitman, Joe
(Joaquin Phoenix), is employed to rescue a politician’s young daughter,
who has been kidnapped by sex traffickers. The movie bitterly exposes the
misogynistic conventions of a genre known for skull-shattering violence,
the Liam Neeson-type savior thriller, by pushing it to its limits, meditating
on the cranium’s fragility, and the anxiety that it may be little more than
mere membrane, hardly a formidable defense. Most obviously, Joe carries a
peg hammer and consistently bashes heads with it. More subtly, in one
scene, a nosebleed breaches a cranium’s borders from within. Seen and
heard this way, shots that may appear random begin to make sense. For
example, as Joe ruminates on his actions, we see his fingers in extreme
close-up squishing a Kelly-green jellybean, the shell at once hard and
fragile, barely a container, merely a hardening of what is inside. We also
repeatedly witness Joe as a child hiding from his abusive father in his closet
and playing with the edges of suicide by pulling a plastic bag over his head.
These memories are signaled with sonic shifts, but I want to focus on the
bag as an image of a child’s desire to seek safety by creating a second skull:
to attempt to transform the flimsiest polyethylene into a barricade between
mind and world, to enclose the head and let nothing else in but the sounds
already in one’s head (in this case, his breath). Of course, the bag cannot
provide a second consciousness, a different life, and as audience members,
we feel for this child. We crave that he will not suffocate, and that this
second skull will be porous, and then are disturbed by the immediately
following image of one that has tragically proven to be, his mother’s, killed
by thugs, who we previously met while she was watching Alfred
Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), itself concerned with the mismatched inner
voices of a killer. Moreover, as the title suggests, these moments are
connected to anxieties about presence and absence, to ourselves more than
anyone, a point movingly demonstrated by the girl who ultimately kills the
villain and saves herself. To survive her traumas, she must learn to
disassociate and evacuate her body.
In formulating the concept of intracranial aesthetics, I am in part
extending a well-known rationale in the history of film theory, namely, that
character identification is often predicated upon the technological and
aesthetic alignment of spectators’ and characters’ perspectives. But beyond
that, when listening is dramatized as fully occupying a film or a character,
and we listen to the text with headphones, a reflexive quality surfaces that
suggests we risk misunderstanding a text if we are not attending to its
structures of sound and listening.
With this in mind, let’s consider one final example. Imagine remediating
the British melodrama Brief Encounter (David Lean, 1945) with
headphones. This film has been understood without exception as being
about a woman who almost has an affair but does not, a beacon of either
British upper-middle-class propriety or repression, depending on the critic.
However, when we listen with headphones, we might well awaken to the
fact that the film is about her mental life. It is not, as has been said, a film
made up of flashbacks. We see and hear her imagining telling her husband
about the affair. Her thoughts are suspended between recalling what
happened and considering how she might tell her husband about it (what
version she might justify).
Let’s listen to an early moment, after the first scene of the film, when she
has just said goodbye to her paramour, a goodbye interrupted by the
garrulous Dolly (Everley Gregg). Laura (Celia Johnson) sits across from
Dolly in the train, heartsick but unable to show it. Slowly the camera closes
in on Laura, a horn-forward melody surfaces, and we hear Laura’s thoughts
as she mourns the loss of her lover and complains about Dolly’s wittering
away. At one point we even hear her think “I wish you were dead. No, I
don’t mean that. That was silly and unkind. But I wish you’d stop talking.”
After Laura convinces Dolly to let her doze for a bit, Laura nods off only
for the train to arrive at its destination, and we realize that the time Laura
wasn’t conscious while sleeping is elided from the story. With headphones,
we may be more attentive to the fact that the world of the story is inside her
head, with a space and time of its own. We will be that much more sensitive
to the fact that the voice we hear is her inner voice, that she feels she is
unable to tell her husband about her desires, that the realm of actual
expression is beyond her and that she is relegated to imagining hearing even
herself in her socialized, public voice. That even her inner voice is
acculturated is part of what aches about this scene. Her middle-class
propriety and prudishness, her internalization of the value of equanimity,
exist in her mind. This is slightly controversial, as we tend to believe that
we only enter the realm of culture when we express ourselves—we want to
allow for the possibility of originality, of difference, of otherness—but it is
compelling, too. And that’s my point. When headphones imbue an
intracranial aesthetic, questions about the voices in our head and our
responsibility for them emerge. This is why I also find Laura’s rapidly
recanted murderous wish so compelling. Which thoughts do we claim as
our own, and which do we disavow? What is the relation of propositional
thought and intention and private voices? These are questions of real
philosophical interest, and they echo the form of headphonic film dialogue
as words pass through our heads that we definitely do not claim as our own.
In this way, we might think of headphonic dialogue as having the form of a
perpetually fleeing thought, like half-conscious expression.
When we listen this way different aspects take on significance. The train
arriving at the station as the film begins, the whistle we so often hear when
Laura drifts off into her reverie: these take on the familiar metaphorical
quality of a “train of thought” carrying her away. All the discussions of
timetables and schedules contrasts with the overarching “mental time” of
the story. (We will in fact learn when the film ends that her whole doleful
daydream has occurred within the span of a Rachmaninoff concerto, one
that frequently intrudes upon her imagined diegesis.)
You might argue of course that this reading is available without
headphones. Maybe so, and I’ve written a bit on this voice-over and
portrayal of consciousness.50 What seems undeniable, though, is that when
using headphones, some films come to invite reflection on the subjective
nature of listening as a limit and condition of their medium—but not the
traditional picture of the film medium in a theater. Whether we say a
medium is the means of transmitting a work of expressive culture, or
whether we say a medium is something more complicated, that an aesthetic
medium is a set of parameters drawn by delineating the means with which
senses are arranged by and toward an object, headphonic film sound
challenges the idea that there is a single film medium. With the proliferation
of digital technologies and practices, we might have more than one.
Furthermore, in questioning their own limits and conditions, films such as
Brief Encounter or You Were Never Really Here, take on a modernist
character where objects model philosophical self-inquiry. In this way,
taking the advent of headphones as a mode of exhibition seriously suggests
the possibility of rewriting the history of film style and aesthetics,
particularly given that the valorization of modernist strategies of reflexivity
are at the heart of the European and East Asian mid-century New Wave
cinemas that so influenced what counts as “art film” all over the world.

N
1. Yvonne Rainer, The Films of Yvonne Rainer (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989),
42.
2. Nina-Sun Eidsheim, The Race of Sound: Listening, Timbre, and Vocality in African American
Music (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019), 24.
3. Rick Altman, “The Evolution of Sound Technology,” in Film Sound: Theory and Practice, ed.
Elisabeth Weis and John Belton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 45.
4. Friedrich Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (Redwood, CA: Stanford University Press,
1999), 171.
5. Quoted in Eric Dienstfrey, “The Myth of the Speakers: A Critical Reexamination of Dolby
History,” Film History 28, no. 1 (2016): 169. Dienstfrey notes that this conception remains
largely shared, though an important exception is Michel Chion, who pointedly writes: “Dolby
is not Jesus Christ, allowing for the writing of history in a before-and-after narrative.” Michel
Chion, Film, A Sound Art, trans. Claudia Gorbman (New York: Columbia University Press,
2009), 118. Dienstfrey also proves that Dolby provided a difference in degree, rather than kind,
from its predecessors, chiefly for two reasons: first, the name “surround sound” is misleading
as the sound remains “screen-centric” (Dienstfrey, “Myth of the Speakers,” 185); and second,
because the testimonies of suddenly immersive surround sound were largely mythical,
“inadvertently mistaking an aesthetic ideal for actual practice” (ibid., 173).
6. Dienstfrey, “Myth of the Speakers,” 168.
7. Ibid., 182.
8. Percy A. Scholes, “Broadcasting and the Future of Music,” Proceedings of the Musical
Association 53rd sess. (1926): 19.
9. George Groves, “Oral History with George Groves,” interview by Irene Kahn Atkins, Center
for Advanced Film Studies, Beverly Hills, CA (1975), 35. My thanks to Eric Dienstfrey for
pointing me to this reference.
10. James Buhler, Theories of the Soundtrack (London: Oxford University Press, 2019), 6.
11. Stephen Groening examines the discourse of captivation that framed the introduction of
headphonic listening to movies as in-flight entertainment in the 1960s, where the choice to
listen to the projected film was marketed as a ticket out of commercial air travel’s feeling of
confinement. Groening emphasizes a hierarchy between sound and image that becomes
 inverted in advertisements for in-flight movies, which presume that “those who wish to view
the film need to listen to the soundtrack, and therefore enter the film via the headset,
suggesting that the auditory defines and delimits the cinematic.” Stephen Groening, “‘No One
Likes to Be a Captive Audience’: Headphones and In-Flight Cinema,” Film History 28, no. 3
(2016): 129.
12. Apple introduced an iPod capable of video playback in 2005, the same year YouTube appeared.
Within a few years, smartphones, such as the iPhone (as well as concomitant portable devices
like the iPod touch) supported mobile browsers and video streaming. For an example of the
sort of confusion and paranoia that accompanied the emergence of mobile viewing
technologies, see John Carey and Lawrence Greenberg, “And the Emmy Goes to … A
Mobisode?” Television Quarterly 36, no. 2 (2006): 3–8.
13. There may well be good reasons to craft theories specific to different types of headphones,
such as noise-canceling or binaural. (Noise-canceling headphones are especially interesting for
adding more frequencies into the ear in order to cancel out unwanted infiltration, thus
providing a fascinating instance of more-is-less.) Moreover, the proliferation of binaural
microphones is an enormous advance in the expression of spatial dimension for headphonic
listening. However, I have an abstract idea of headphones in mind, similar to how we often
theorize movie screens without qualification, despite a range of materials and sizes across
exhibition spaces. For now, we might simply say that headphones are devices inserted over or
into the ear that afford the listener control of volume, generally foreclosing the world’s sound
in favor of the text’s.
14. Christian Metz, The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema, trans. Celia Britton,
Annwyl Williams, Ben Brewster, and Alfred Guzzetti (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1982); Dudley Andrew, Concepts in Film Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984).
15. Mary Ann Doane, “Ideology and the Practice of Sound Editing and Mixing,” in Weis and
Belton, Film Sound, 60.
16. John Belton, “Technology and Aesthetics of Film Sound,” in Weis and Belton, Film Sound, 66.
17. Quotations from Connor’s “Sounding out Film” are taken from the version published on his
website here: http://www.stevenconnor.com/soundingout/, which does not include page
numbers. An altered version appears in The Oxford Handbook of Audiovisual Aesthetics.
18. James Lastra, Sound Technology and the American Cinema (New York: Columbia University
Press, 2000). Soundtracks often have spatial effects built into them so that spatial
configurations are represented, but this is different than being surrounded by such sound
designs in an acoustical auditorium.
19. Belton, “Technology and Aesthetics.”
20. Chris O’Falt, “Dunkirk Is Too Loud for Some Viewers, but Christopher Nolan says That’s the
Way He Likes It,” IndieWire, July 26 2017, https://www.indiewire.com/2017/07/dunkirk-too-
loud-christopher-nolan-1201860027/.
21. For more on the experience of loudness and injury, see Michael C Heller, “Between Silence
and Pain: Loudness and the Affective Encounter,” Sound Studies 1, no. 1 (2015): 40–58
22. Doane, “Ideology,” 54. This is qualified, though, since Doane maintains the distinction
between sound film and talkie that was vital to filmmakers like René Clair when the industry
adopted sonic technologies: “The Hollywood sound film operates within an oscillation
between two poles of realism: that of the psychological (or the interior) and that of the visible
(or the exterior)…. The truth of the individual, of the interior realm of the individual (a truth
most readily spoken and heard), is the truth validated by the coming of sound. It is the “talkie”
which appears in 1927 and not the sound film.” Ibid., 59.
23. Belton, “Technology and Aesthetics,” 63.
24. Mark Kerins, Beyond Dolby (Stereo): Cinema in the Digital Sound Age (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 2010).
25. Michel Chion, The Voice in Cinema, trans. Claudia Gorbman (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1999), 22; Bela Balázs, “Theory of the Film: Sound,” in Weis and Belton, Film Sound,
121–23.
26. Paul Grainge, “Spectacular Sound: Dolby and the Unheard History of Technical Trademarks,”
Lowering the Boom: Critical Studies in Sound, ed. Jay Beck and Tony Grajeda (Champaign:
University of Illinois Press, 2008), 257.
27. Connor, “Sounding out Film.” This is why Connor goes on to describe sound as closer to touch
or smell than sight, and seems to allow some manner of synesthesia.
28. Doane, “Ideology,” 56.
29. Ibid., 55. Claudia Gorbman’s work on film music declares quite boldly that “music appears in
classical cinema as a signifier of emotion” and is able to express the irrational. Claudia
Gorbman, Unheard Melodies: Narrative Film Music (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1987), 79.
30. Connor, “Sounding out Film.”
31. Quoted in Vivian Sobchack, “When the Ear Dreams: Dolby Digital and the Imagination of
Sound,” Film Quarterly 58, no. 4 (Summer 2005): 10.
32. Quoted in ibid., 10.
33. Ibid., 2.
34. Ibid., 10.
35. Theodore Gracyk asserts that “[L]oud music can break us out of our sense of detached
observation and replace it with a sense of immersion, for it is literally around us (or, with
headphones, seemingly inside our head). Where traditional aesthetic theories have often
offered an ideal of disinterested contemplation of ‘psychical distance,’ the presence of noise
can overcome the respectful, reverential aspects of distancing.” Quoted in Heller, “Between
Silence and Pain,” 45.
36. Belton, “Technology and Aesthetics,” 67.
37. Ibid., 71.
38. Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1979), 18.
39. Jean-Luc Nancy, Listening (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007), 77.
40. Michael Bull, “iPod Culture: The Toxic Pleasures of Audiotopia,” in The Oxford Handbook of
Sound Studies, ed. Michael Bull (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 533.
41. Ibid., 533.
42. Ibid., 532.
43. Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow, Personal Stereo (New York: Bloomsbury, 2017), 47.
44. Shuhei Hosokawa, “The Walkman Effect,” Popular Music 4 (1984): 168.
45. Ibid., 165.
46. Ibid., 170.
47. Some filmmakers explicitly advocate for headphones, such as David Lynch, who named his
Twin Peaks: The Return a film and recommended headphones as the proper way to experience
it. (Pieter Dom, “David Lynch’s Personal Recommendations On How To Watch Twin Peaks
Properly,” June 23 2017, https://welcometotwinpeaks.com/news/david-lynch-how-to-watch-
twin-peaks-recommendations/).
48. Sue Thornham writes that, because the tape recorder was given to Morvern by her boyfriend, it
“acts to sever her connection with the everyday while preserving a dialogue with him … what
 it liberates is her own power to see, to touch, and to journey.” Sue Thornham, What If I Had
Been the Hero?: Investigating Women’s Cinema (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2012), 111.
49. Per email with Paul Davies, the film’s sound designer.
50. Kyle Stevens, “Toward a Theory of Voice-Over through Brief Encounter,” World Picture
Journal, 2015. http://www.worldpicturejournal.com/WP_10/Stevens_10.html.
 SECTION IV

AUDIOVISUALITY
 CHAPTER 17

THE AUDIO-VISUAL
NONRELATION AND THE
DIGITAL BREAK

LUKA ARSENJUK

T D B N S
TO distinguish themselves from the perhaps overconfident treatments of the
image, the discussions of sound in film theory have traditionally begun by
noting a certain deficit and an acknowledgment of neglect. A by now
classic example, from 1980:
More than half a century after the coming of sound, film criticism and theory still remain
resolutely image-bound. Early filmmakers’ skepticism about the value of sound has been
indirectly perpetuated by generations of critics for whom cinema is an essentially visual art,
sound serving as little more than a superfluous accompaniment. In recent years the reasons
underlying this hegemony of the visual have continued to multiply. With each new visually
oriented analysis, with each new image-inspired theory, film study’s exclusive image
orientation gains ground.1

One may even propose that a declaration of this fundamental injustice and a
desire to wage a war of position from the margins within a field
hegemonically determined by the enemy—in this case the study of the
image or the visual—function as crucial genre features of most writing
about film sound. In some way or other, either explicitly or indirectly, such
writing necessarily touches on the striking fact that audio-vision, the
presence of sound-image assemblages rather than the experience of images
alone, has been just as dominant in the history of cinema as it has been
absent from most of its accounts. The fundamental feature of writing about
sound in cinema could therefore be seen as an effort to overcome this
absence (the devaluing of sound) and to produce in its place an account
adequate to the actual importance of sound as a source of value in cinema.
In our own historical moment, such a general statement of a fundamental
injustice needs to be qualified in at least two ways. First, the remarkable
amount and quality of research on sound in cinema over the recent decades
makes it possible to suggest that sound is no longer simply the weak or
subordinated aspect but that it has been fought for and successfully put on
the path toward winning equality with the image in our understanding of
cinema. As Mark Kerins writes in the opening pages of his Beyond Dolby
(Stereo): Cinema in the Digital Sound Age, lamenting the neglected status
of sound “no longer seems necessary, not only because this complaint has
been repeated too often but also because current scholarship is increasingly
working to address it.”2 This cheerful recognition is, however, quickly
followed by the observation that such optimism should remain historically
localized, since the insurgence of the interest in sound has so far trained its
ears almost exclusively to the theoretical and historical questions stemming
from the period of the late 1920s and early 1930s, while it has had relatively
little to say about the specific problems of sound in our own (digital)
historical moment. So that, second, “even as interest in film sound in
general has exploded, scholars have thus far failed to tackle the unique
features of today’s digital surround-equipped films. In part this is because
most work on film sound has focused on the period surrounding the
introduction of sync sound: relatively little has addressed more modern
practices.”3
It is indeed striking to be reminded of how thoroughly the historical
narrative about cinema’s transition into a digital medium has been
dominated by the focus on the image. The silencing of sound in this
narrative, which has put forward an argument about digital technology as
the cause of a radical transformation in the cinematic image’s (“indexical”)
relationship with reality, has had the effect of erasing from the picture of
this moment of transition much of the dialectical tension that could have
been mapped out were scholars more inclined to observe simultaneously
not only the processes affecting the image but also those affecting the
sound. As a result, the narrative of the digital break has typically managed
to present a rather flat kind of discontinuity, suggesting a chronological and
successive replacement of one type of cinematic medium (of the analog,
photographic image) with another (the medium of digital imagery), but seen
as a univocal rather than an internally fractured event and thus a mutation
drained of much historical sense.4 A rather straightforward, if not simply
false, picture of change has thus emerged in place of a more properly
historical inquiry, which would figure the digital break as itself something
broken up and internally divided, constituted by the coexistence of different
temporalities and rhythms without any obvious common measure.

A - D
As a possible corrective for the silencing of sound in the dominant
narratives concerned with the emergence of digital cinema, let us suggest
that film, having been taken out of them, may instead be reconsidered
according to its place within the larger “audio-visual discourse” or in the
context of a more general dispositif of audio-visual media—terms that are
perhaps most famously introduced by the German media theorist Siegfried
Zielinski in his book Audio-Visions: Cinema and Television as Entr’actes in
History. According to Zielinski, who combines Michel Foucault’s
archaeology and the Frankfurt School’s concept of the “culture industry,”
what is required is a “concept of apparatus with cultural dimensions,”5
which in turn allows one to produce an integrated historical account of the
“materiality of media within the triadic relationship of technology—culture
—subject.”6 Informed by such a triangulation, the audio-visual discourse
encompasses the entire range of praxes in which, with the aid of technical systems and
artifacts, the illusion of the perception of movements—as a rule, accompanied by sound—is
planned, produced, commented on, and appreciated. This special discourse is both
embedded in and defined by the superordinate process of an ongoing attempt at culture-
industrial modeling and subjugation of the subjects.7

In this account, cinema appears as one specific “historical concretion” of

the audio-visual discourse, alongside television and what Zielinski calls the
“advanced audio-vision” of contemporary media. Any audio-visual
discourse “overlaps with other specialist discourses and partial praxes of
society, such as architecture, transport, science and technology, organization
of work and time, traditional plebeian and bourgeois culture, or the avant-
garde.”8
The most salutary effect of Zielinski’s approach, especially when
contrasted with the more narrowly conceived, image-centered accounts of
the digital break, stems from its ability to change our grasp of cinema
simply by placing it within an expanded set of historical trajectories and
formations in modern media culture. Nowhere is this more visible than in
the relative deprivileging of photography, which has to be one of the main
consequences of Zielinski’s approach from the perspective of current film
studies. While any historical narrative about the appearance of digital
cinema that privileges the image must almost by default place at its center
the question of photography or the photographic, the approach focused on
the question of audio-visual discourse refreshingly dramatizes cinema’s
history as something that unfolds primarily in relation and in tension with
other technological and cultural configurations. Among these, television is
the most important in Zielinski’s historical panorama and is defined by him
as “the institutionalization of a broadcast flow of illusions of motion
controlled from outside for a scattered audience in the private sphere.”9 The
project of television, which like cinema may be traced back into the heart of
the nineteenth century, is here not understood as something that follows
cinema in the manner of chronological succession. The two concretions of
the audio-visual are instead thought of as “interlocking,” “overlapping,” and
at once “repelling” and “attracting each other.”10 Rather than the questions
of the photographic ontology of the image and of the loss of this ontological
guarantee, what comes into view when cinema is considered in its interplay
with television are the dimensions of social praxis and collectivity, which
crucially determine the nature of spectatorship and provide the conditions
for the processes of subjectivation. Cinematic and televisual audio-vision
differ in the type of collective audience their respective situations manage
to produce. Cinema’s audience may be understood as a collective of
intimacies gathered in the protective envelope of public space. The
collectivity constituted by television and its broadcasting of audio-visual
flow into domestic space is, on the contrary, one of remarkable atomization
and privatization, creating a situation in which the fragile dialectic of
intimate solitude and publicness maintained by the movie theater falls apart.
While they share in the mediation of a continuous audio-visual event,
cinema and television thus determine this practical condition in entirely
different ways. In cinema, time is intimate and publicly shared; in the
televisual situation, intimacy becomes privateness, experienced mostly as
spatial separation, while the shared dimension of projected time mutates
into a geography of isolated islands whose temporal aspect, a kind of
timeless present, is shaped by the fantasy of direct address and the sense of
instantaneity that accompanies the “real time” transmissions conveyed by
the mass medium.
Things change, however, once cinema and television, or the cinematic
and the televisual, become subdiscourses of the integrated system of
“advanced audio-vision” characteristic of our own historical moment. On
one hand, what Zielinski calls “advanced audio-vision” coincides with the
introduction of video and computer technology and further intensifies the
fragmentation of collective time-space, a process that was already at work
in the privatizing dynamic of television. On the other hand, something new,
present neither in cinema nor in television, appears at the level of social
praxis. The latter is, according to Zielinski, fundamentally changed by the
fact that the video and computer technologies of advanced audio-vision
offer their users the possibility not only of receiving but also storing,
manipulating, and replaying parts of the audio-visual flow, thus confronting
any audio-visual event with:
the discontinuity in its viewing. The centralized organization of an Aristotelian audience by
means of technology was broken up into many decentralized viewing events at different
times and in different places…. Power of disposal over audio-visual constructs was no
longer only in the hands of the producers, rental firms, and distribution companies of the
electronic distribution channels…. For the first time in the history of synthetic illusions of
motion, it was possible for the subject who was to be illusionised to intervene in their syntax
in a major way. They could be sped up and slowed down to a complete standstill, freezing
individual images; they could be viewed almost frame by frame or their colour could be
changed; stroboscopic effects were possible; sequences or shots could be skipped or
repeated at will; the order of the elements of a text could be changed.11

It is surely such disordering of time, made possible by the new media

technology of advanced audio-vision, which furthermore takes place in the
remarkably fragmented and atomized social forms of global capitalism, that
has contributed to the sense of crisis or break in the history of cinema far
more than the supposed loss of the cinematic image’s “indexical” bond with
reality—even if we conceive of this reality in temporal terms: as duration,
for instance. What has been lost, in other words, is not so much the intuition
of temporal duration made possible by the moving image as cinema’s
privileged position as a social and cultural practice capable of shaping,
ordering, and giving form to time. Cinema perhaps no longer occupies for
us the role of what Antoine de Baecque has called the “historical form”:
namely, the discursive form most capable of articulating for some figure of
collective humanity the stakes, the contradictions, and the “sense of living
in their times.”12 While it was once, in the twentieth century, the hegemonic
concretion of audio-visual discourse and thus the privileged site of
“modeling and subjugating of the subjects,” cinema (along with its time-
shaping capacities) is now part of larger circuits of advanced audio-vision
whose systemic grip may be recognized in the process of a general temporal
disintegration, which is what in fact lies at the base of all other current
discontents—including the phenomenologically driven case of nostalgia for
the cinematic image’s intimate bond with reality.13

H D C F
Zielinski’s book allows us to observe and analyze a series of audio-visual
discourses, which are presented as discontinuous and constituted by breaks.
Yet these breaks and the nature of discontinuity itself do not appear as
successive, nor do they form a chronological sequence. They may to some
extent be thought of in successive terms, but they also “overlap” and
“interlock,” which significantly expands the notion of the break, presenting
it as something in itself heterogeneous, multiple, and ultimately irreducible
to a single form (succession or chronology). At the same time, however,
Zielinski’s project of media archaeology does not seem to truly question the
internal coherence of the audio-visual discourses of cinema, television, and
advanced audio-vision. While they exist in complex discontinuity in
relation to each other, each appears internally stable. This stability or
internal coherence of the various historical concretions of audio-visual
discourse stems from the stability of the basic relation between image and
sound in Zielinski’s conception: the moving image is, “as a rule,
accompanied by sound.” The next step may therefore consist of suspending
the assumption of precisely such a rule and to take up not merely the
heterogeneity between the different audio-visual discourses but also the
heterogeneity and discontinuity that can be found at the heart of any audio-
visual discourse as such. It is instructive on this point to compare Zielinski’s
work with that of the Frankfurt School—next to Foucault, Zielinski’s key
inspiration—in which the relation between image and sound, between
seeing and hearing, is questioned on the grounds of its own discontinuity
and heterogeneity.
In their classical text, Composing for the Films, Hanns Eisler and
Theodor Adorno point out how hearing and seeing, sound (primarily in the
form of music) and image, should themselves be grasped as differently
affected by the processes of historical change. The ear and the eye do not
share a homogeneously unified history:
The human ear has not adapted itself to the bourgeois rational and, ultimately, highly
industrialized order as readily as the eye, which has become accustomed to conceiving
reality as made up of separate things, commodities, objects that can be modified by practical
activity. Ordinary listening, as compared to seeing, is “archaic”; it has not kept pace with
technological progress. One might say that to react with the ear, which is fundamentally a
passive organ in contrast to the swift, actively selective eye, is in a sense not in keeping with
the present advanced industrial age and its cultural anthropology.14

The historical break—here figured as the transformation introduced by the

scientific technological rationality of modern capitalism—not only
constitutes the present as an “after” distinct from a “before” of the past but
also splits or breaks up this very present itself, insofar as what comes
“after” the break may now be divided between that which belongs to its
new tendencies (its progressive side; the active; vision) and that which, in
the break, clings to the past and appears outmoded (its regressive side; the
passive; listening). That both the progressive and the regressive belong to
the present precisely by dividing it may be seen in the way the regressive
term or the “archaic” register of experience (sound; the ear) can in turn
become the far more rigorous embodiment of the very rationalizing and
technologizing logic that was initially set in opposition to it. The break,
which first separated the “before” and “after,” and subsequently split the
“after” of the historical present into its progressive and regressive
tendencies, now cuts up the regressive element of listening itself, finding
alongside its “archaic” function also the height of the progressive or
rationalizing tendency:
[Music may] serve as a means to create retrogression and confusion, all the more so
because, despite its non-conceptual character, it is in other respects rationalized, extensively
technified, and just as modern as it is archaic. This refers not only to the present methods of
mechanical reproduction, but to the whole development of post-medieval music. Max Weber
even terms the process of rationalization the historical principle according to which music
developed. All middle-class music has an ambivalent character. On the one hand, it is in a
certain sense pre-capitalistic, “direct,” a vague evocation of togetherness; on the other hand,
because it has shared in the progress of civilization, it has become reified, indirect, and
ultimately a “means” among many others. This ambivalence determines its function under
advanced capitalism. It is par excellence the medium in which irrationality can be practiced
rationally.15

It is not too difficult to imagine how the dialectic of the break, which in
Eisler and Adorno extends into and further divides the moment of the new
present (the “after”), could also extend into the past. For the past grasped as
a “before” is itself the effect of a historical break and should not be seen as
safe from further negation and splitting, which it cannot contain, and so
must sooner or later reveal to us its own regressive and progressive sides
that may then in the next steps lead us to their own inversions and
contradictions as well.

I ’ -
The historical dialectic of Composing for the Films attunes us to the
existence of a fundamental incommensurability between the sound and the
image, the impossibility of simply articulating one according to the logic of
the other (and the other according to the one). Rather than accompaniment
that follows a rule, at the core of any image-sound combination one finds a
nonrelation. Drawing on the work of Michel Chion, perhaps the best
historical as well as theoretical guide on questions of audio-vision, we can
assume that a certain type of perception characteristic of the experience of
cinema (and television) that may be called “audio-vision” depends on the
“concomitance” or simultaneous apprehension of sounds and images, the
effect of which is the phenomenon Chion calls “synchresis”: the attribution
in our perception of a “common cause to sound and image, even if their
nature and source are completely different and even if they have little or no
relation to each other in reality.”16 But although we may indeed experience
the commonality of audio and visual signals at the level of perception,
Chion crucially adds that “at the same time that they combine in ‘trans-
sensory’ dimensions, sound and image prove to be irreducible to each other
in their very confrontation; their encounter makes each point to what
distinguishes it from the other.”17 The discursive condition of sound
cinema, which has to be distinguished from something like a code, a
language, or a system of rules, includes next to the perceptual reality of
audio-vision (the “syncretic” impression of a common cause of sounds and
images in our perception) also its opposite: the fact that sounds and images
lack a shared or unitary cause, and that any linkages they come to form in
their encounters has as its condition the more fundamental dimension of
nonrelationality.
In order to mark this fact, Chion introduces the concept of audio-division.
While audio-vision describes the perceptual effects of the concomitance of
sounds and images in cinema, audio-division allows us to comprehend how
these effects are produced discursively. Or we may say, the concept of
audio-division is required if we are to grasp audio-vision not merely as a set
of perceptual but also as a set of discursive effects. As a concept, audio-
division, on one hand, refers to a set of specific signifying operations that,
according to Chion, happen below the audio-spectator’s perceptual
consciousness and yet structure and guide the process of audio-visual
perception. In this sense, audio-division does not point simply to the
nonrelation between sounds and images but encompasses above all the
ways image and sound become internally divided in the very moment they
are confronted with each other: the way, for instance, sound might organize
the image by “pointing out” some of its elements while “ignoring” others
and thereby changing our perception of the image completely; or the way
the image might divide sound and thereby endow it with a particular
significance (offscreen vs. onscreen, visualized vs. acousmatic sound, etc.).
On the other hand, the concept of audio-division seems to carry the
possibility of a more general theoretical application, for it refers to the
audio-visual linkage as such, which it considers “not as a neatly contained
complementarity or as the reconstitution of an imaginary natural totality but
rather as a generative concomitance that yields audio-visiogenic effects.”18
The concept of audio-division suggests that any audio-visual impression, if
it is not to remain in the register of the imaginary, must be considered from
the perspective of the nonrelation, which is the “generative” aspect in the
emergence of all audio-visual linkages. In Chion’s perspective, we can say,
the generative cause of audio-visual effects lies in the absence of any shared
or proper audio-visual cause.
With his attempt to wrest the effects of audio-visual discourse from the
imaginary, Chion effectively proposes for audio-vision a conception
homologous to the theory of discourse one finds in the psychoanalytic work
of Jacques Lacan. According to Alenka Zupančič, it was Lacan who
developed “a unique model of thinking a fundamental non-relationship as
dictating conditions of different kinds of ties (including social ties, or
‘discourses’).”19 There are things to be gained from exploring the logic of
this basic Lacanian notion of a constitutive nonrelation as the real that
effectively structures any kind of discursive activity. In Lacan’s case, the
nonrelation concerns the question of sexuality, or more precisely, the
absence in nature or in being of some instance that would regulate or
establish the proper terms of human sexual liaisons. This is what Lacan
means when he says in one of his more famous maxims that “there is no
sexual relation.” The absence of the sexual relation (or the insistence of the
sexual nonrelation), he claims in Seminar XIX, “clearly does not prevent
liaisons, far from it, but rather provides them with their conditions.”20 The
nonexistence of the relation (or the insistence of the nonrelation) does not
mean that sex doesn’t exist. It is clear, empirically, that all kinds of sexual
liaisons do in fact take place. The nonrelation does not simply block or
make liaisons impossible. On the contrary, as their impasse, it is the very
thing that makes all kinds of combinations possible, yet in such a way that
the particular linkages or liaisons in themselves become marked by an
impossibility to ever fully coincide with themselves. As Zupančič clarifies:
 The non-relation gives, dictates the conditions of, what ties us, which is to say it is not a
simple, indifferent absence, but an absence that curves and determines the structure with
which it appears. The non-relation is not the opposite of the relationship, it is the inherent
(il)logic (a fundamental ‘antagonism’) of the relationships that are possible and existing….
[T]he non-relation is a priori in the precise sense that it appears with every empirical relation
as inherent to its structure, and not as its other.”21

What is missing, as Zupančič clarifies further, is some kind of form, some

proper way of relating that would ground these liaisons. And it is this
absence of a form that as a kind of a priori makes possible and structures
the world of liaisons as their inherent limit. Any liaison has to deal with the
fact that the very thing that makes it possible is also the thing that prevents
it from assuming the form of a relation.
Transposing this logic to the case of “the audio-visual,” we can say that it
is precisely the absence of some proper audio-visual relation (the insistence
of a fundamental nonrelation between sounds and image) that opens up the
possibility and informs all kinds of audio-visual liaisons in cinema. It is
what dictates the conditions of the different sound-image combinations, the
linkages or liaisons that we encounter in cinema and other audio-visual
media. A “fundamental impasse,” the lack of a cause common to sounds
and images, is, in other words, what structures the reality of all audio-visual
phenomena. Or to put it slightly differently, what makes audio-visual
phenomena possible is the absence of some proper audio-visual form. The
form that would allow us to inscribe audio-visual difference as such is
missing. There are images and sounds, they can be combined, but there is
no audio-visual signifier that would allow us to write down their difference
in the form of a relation. Which basically means that not only are image and
sound different from each other, they also possess no shared way of
inscribing this difference. And furthermore, that each gets to inscribe the
absence of a shared form in their own way.22
The fundamental status ascribed to the nonrelation in a Lacanian
perspective means that any pure form of audio-vision, any sort of ideal—
including turning the nonrelation or “asynchrony” itself into a kind of ideal
form—is constitutively missing. It is precisely the “absence of this form …
which curves and defines”23 the discursive field of audio-vision. Thus,
although it may be illusory to think that one may ever fix a proper relation
between images and sounds, it is just as illusory to think that we may ever
encounter or isolate the nonrelation as some kind of truth of audio-vision
existing independently of the particular audio-visual liaisons. (To put it in
Lacaninan terms: the nonrelation might be the truth of the audio-visual
field, yet the truth is always only “half-said”; it is necessarily said
“impurely” through or as an internal curvature of the existing audio-visual
liaisons.) As much as one should avoid fetishizing certain relations as
proper to the form of the audio-visual relation (think, for instance, of how
certain specific types of synchronization of image and sound are described
in some filmmaking manuals as the only acceptable ones), one should also
avoid fetishizing the nonrelation as such (the existence of some pure audio-
visual “asynchrony” as the zero degree of audio-vision), since in this way
one misses precisely how the nonrelation (the impasse) may only be
engaged as something inherent to the very structure of all (possible) audio-
visual liaisons, as the structure’s internal torsion, the absence of a shared
cause at work in any part of the discursive fabric of audio-visual effects.
Any audio-visual linkage, any audio-visual effect we may encounter, will
be haunted from within by the absence of form. It will bear the mark of the
impasse, which is exactly what makes any audio-visual linkage at once
possible and radically unstable. We find traces of the audio-visual
nonrelation not only in the clear examples of a breakdown in audio-visual
articulation, the moments when audio-visual liaisons openly fail: when, for
instance, we suddenly no longer hear the words we continue to see the actor
saying in the image, or when the images and sounds are in some other way
clearly thrown out of (their intended) sync. We may also find the
fundamental nonrelation at work in the opposing case: in the successfully
constructed audio-visual liaisons. Most people who have ever attempted to
combine the same set of images with a series of different clusters of sounds
are likely familiar with the experience of things working out almost too
well, the sense of unearned ease with which many successful audio-visual
combinations may be made, the remarkable facility with which a certain
kind of audio-visual satisfaction may be achieved almost at will.24 But if
that is the case, they are just as likely familiar with how this unearned ease
of satisfaction achieved by an almost random generation of audiovisual
liaisons can itself turn into a sense of unease and dissatisfaction. That is, a
certain element of arbitrariness, which is the source of the satisfying
surprise, continues to stick as a kind of excess, a bit of surplus audio-visual
enjoyment, to the most successfully and satisfyingly accomplished audio-
visual liaisons, ultimately tainting the experience with a stain of
dissatisfaction: “The sound and image work remarkably well together! But
what am I to do with the fact that another sound would have worked equally
well? What, really, is the necessity of this particular sound-image
combination I have created?” Things work so well that we begin to doubt
they are working at all.

D A E
T C
The insistence of the audio-visual nonrelation, which may be thought of as
the absence of some properly audio-visual cause, means also that audio-
visual effects (audio-visual perception in cinema) are necessarily sustained
in relative autonomy from the order of causes. Chion himself has claimed
that sound appears in the history of cinema precisely as the operator of the
separation of aesthetic meaning from technological causes, or of the
expressive effect from the technical act.25 For example, it is possible to see
in the history of cinema how sometimes aesthetic effects appear with a
significant delay, or even show a certain indifference, with respect to the set
of technological causes and the reality of the recording medium that we
may commonsensically assume condition them. Chion describes the many
modernist innovations in the use of sound and music in cinema after 1945
precisely as such a series of aesthetic effects that cannot easily be traced to
some proximate technological change as their direct cause.
Another question is whether [the postwar cinematic] modernisms are linked to the advent of
technical possibilities that were previously unavailable. My answer is: not really. It’s true
that in an era when technology is touted as the answer to so many problems, we tend to
believe that technical innovation should also drive aesthetic innovation. Note, however, that
one of the richest periods in film history for aesthetic upheavals, from the late 1940s to the
mid-1960s, experienced only one real technological advance in sound—the switch from
optical to magnetic recording for shooting, editing, and mixing—and this change was
probably not even crucial to the aesthetic developments. In fact, the multiplication of new
aesthetic tendencies after the Second World War came from a relative stability in technical
means over the period from 1945 to 1975.26
Chion’s statement usefully points to the fact often obscured by the purely
image-centered discussions of the digital break in cinema, which is quite
simply that different levels of a particular phenomenon—technological,
aesthetic, social, cultural, and so on—often register a shift or a mutation
with different intensities and speeds, in ways that may sometimes be
radically noncontemporaneous, thus forcing us to understand the process of
historical change or the moment of a break as a temporal reality composed
of multiple and often conflicting rhythms. The particular importance of
thinking about sound in cinema, of cinema as an audio-visual discourse,
therefore also lies in the fact that it helps throw some skeptical light on the
implicit belief that is part of many current discussions of digital cinema—in
fact, it is a kind of constitutive assumption of these discussions—which is
the conviction that there exists a basic commensurability between the
technological layer, typically put in the position of the determining cause,
and the aesthetic as well as other dimensions (moral, epistemological, etc.),
which are given the task of registering in an almost immediate way the
effects of the supposedly deeper technological changes.
To return to Chion’s example of postwar modernist cinema, what,
according to him, this remarkable experimental period registered far more
forcefully than the historically more proximate or contemporaneous
technological changes (the use of magnetic tape recording) were the
delayed consequences of the earlier introduction of sound in the late 1920s,
which had as one of its key technical effects the standardization of film
speed required by sound-image synchronization. Through the
standardization of camera and projection rates cinema was, according to
Chion, transformed from a cinematograph—a machine that records and
projects movement at varying speeds, making the variable of time unstable
—to a “chrono-cinematograph”27—a machine that, because it now records
and projects movement at standardized speed, also fixes time. The first
films that fully developed the aesthetic or artistic consequences of this fact
—namely, that the cinema of synchronized image and sound makes “time
exist as such enough to contain all that makes up the scenes instead of
being itself the effect created by the montage, the music, and the rhythm of
actors”28—appeared in the 1950s and 1960s, which is to say, as “effects”
that were significantly deferred with respect to their technical “cause.” The
artistic development of this new modernist cinema, which Chion describes
as the cinema of “hardened time” or “ritualized cinema,” and which Gilles
Deleuze, stressing the political caesura of World War II, famously called the
cinema of the “time-image,” can therefore be understood as a delayed
aesthetic effect of technical changes introduced in a drastically different,
prewar moment. In fact, one could even speculate that the specifically
aesthetic uses of postwar technological means (the recording of sound on
magnetic tape) had to remain limited in scope throughout the 1950s and
early 1960s precisely because whatever they offered needed to first serve
the full development of the artistic consequences of the previous technical
transformation (the introduction of sound and the standardization of camera
and projection speeds which took place in the late 1920s and early 1930s).29

T “S R ” D S
L F I
The pursuit of the concept of audio-visual discourse in the pages above first
led us to the notion of audio-visual discourse and the conception of
nonsuccessive and nonchronological breaks between the various “historical
concretions” of audio-visual media (Zielinski). Subsequently, the same
pursuit suggested the necessity of thinking a fundamental nonrelation or
absence of audio-visual form as the structuring principle and the condition
of possibility of any articulation in the discursive field of audio-vision
(Chion and Lacan). And finally, we have proposed that articulations of
audio-visual discourse, structured as they are by the nonexistence of some
cause common to both images and sounds, also implies a certain
disarticulation (the introduction of holes, gaps, delays, anticipations,
indifference …) between audio-visual effects and some other order of
causes, such as may, for instance, be identified in the role media-
technological changes play in the production of audio-visual phenomena.
All this should help us question the rather simple and straightforward
narratives of the digital break in cinema, allowing us to qualify and perhaps
relativize both the determining role of technological change in these
accounts as well as the notion of the break itself.
 Looking at cinema as an audio-visual discourse undergoing a digital
mutation, it is possible to observe that what many have described as a
fundamental change at the level of the image coincides with rather limited
changes at the level of sound. As Chion himself convincingly describes it,
in the field of film sound, the effect of digital technology, at least from what
can be observed so far, appears weak, particularly when compared to the
“soft revolution” accomplished in the mid-1970s by the introduction of
Dolby Stereo sound.30 Due to the novel form of audio signal processing it
introduced, Dolby’s multichannel sound significantly widened the
frequency range and increased the dynamic range (the volume contrast) of
film sound. This new technical condition supported a transformation not
only of sound but of sound’s effect on the image, and thus of the very status
of the image as such.
The advent of more highs on the soundtrack, and of thin layers of ambient noise and details
above the voices, nuanced viewers’ experience of the micropresent. Breathing, scratching,
clicking, buzzing—a whole noisy underworld waited patiently for its turn, the working
masses of sound. In certain cases this noisy “third estate” won out, shifting the center of the
film closer to its domain, thus transforming the film frame from its customary status as a
privileged place into a frame of surveillance of the action, of detection—a monitor, pulling
the whole tablecloth closer without anyone noticing the dishes move. On the screen
everything looks right, but in the découpage, the construction of screen space, everything
has changed. The image no longer establishes the scenic space—sound does that—now the
image only presents points of view on it. The famous master shot that Hitchcock liked to
save for the end of a scene—always a winner—no longer has the same meaning. Sound
already defines a stable “long shot” in its own way, ringed by distant ambient sounds.31

With new Dolby Stereo technology, particularly with the ability to deploy
the “ ‘working masses’ of the upper frequency range,”32 film sound begins
to render in a finely grained manner the “rumor of the world,” and with this
produces a new kind of “sensation of life,” which has no precedent in the
history of cinema (Chion’s key example here is Philip Kaufman’s 1978
version of the Invasion of the Body Snatchers, particularly the precise and
obscene crackling sounds that produce much of the effect in the scene
during which the alien pods replicate the sleeping character played by
Donald Sutherland). Insofar as it is now sound much more than the image
that supplies the sense of the world’s presence and produces the sensation
of life for the audio-spectator, there occurs in cinema, following Dolby, also
a kind of radical redistribution of functions between sound and image.
Unlike in classical cinema of the early sound era, where the task of
establishing the spatial or scenic dimension of narrative action was given to
the image, and where sound, particularly music, played the supplementary
role of emotional and dramatic reinforcement, from mid-1970s onward,
sound increasingly takes over the function of establishing the parameters of
scenic space, while the image becomes the domain of partial views, of
fragmentary perspectives on this space, which the image surveys without
any longer being capable of encompassing it within its own establishing
shots.
This shifting of functions bears significant consequences for narrative
construction and dramatic representation of action, since in this process it is
filmic space itself that undergoes a profound mutation. For, as Chion
explains, it would be wrong to consider the classical space established by
the image and the new one, mostly defined by sound, as one and the same:
Even though it is so full of detail, and even though it is polyphonic, the contours and borders
of its acoustic space are still hazy. Sound, as I have said, does away with the notion of a
localizable point of view. Equally foreign to it is the notion of Euclidean perspective, despite
efforts that were made to impose such aural perspective in the early sound era. In the
multitrack sound spaces of Dolby, as well as in modern cinema, sounds are stacked and
arranged like objects in pre-Renaissance visual space; the emptiness that separates those
bodies is not structured.33

What emerges, particularly for the audio-spectator who has been trained to
recognize a world organized primarily around the eye, is a rather
paradoxical experience of space: at once articulated in fine acoustic detail
and yet without clear limits; a space lacking a localizable perspective which
at the same time (like medieval painting) teems with competing
“perspectives.” In relation to this new kind of space, according to Chion,
the image has lost its role as the “determining structure” and has become
ancillary and even a bit ornamental—“like an interesting idler, tempted to
become pretty and flirtatious.”34 But this seductive lightness might also at
times hide a certain exasperation of the image and what the image is
showing us, simply because the image now chases after the dimensions of a
spatial whole in an endeavor that at times certainly prove exhilarating, but
which must necessarily remain futile, precisely since the function of
constructing such a whole has jumped registers and as such fundamentally
eludes the capacities of the image itself.
The crucial point for our purposes here is that this remarkable
transformation, in which it is not only sound but also the image that mutates
in its encounter with sound, took place before the application of digital
technology in the process of film production and consumption. In fact,
when compared to the momentous changes that happened with the
introduction of Dolby in the mid-1970s, digital technology has so far
contributed rather little to the transformation in the fundamental nature of
film sound and its interaction with the image. Thus, for instance, Kerins
notes that the significance of digital surround sound in the history of cinema
lies not so much in the originality of the expressive and constructive
possibilities it offers as it does in the fact that digital sound technology,
starting from its expanded implementation in the 1990s, brought about the
standardization of the revolution already accomplished by the introduction
of Dolby sound technology in the preceding decades. In other words, the
significance of digital sound technology lies not in some fundamental
transformation of cinema’s signifying elements but rather in generalizing or
making commonplace the changes that have already taken place before
digital film sound technology appeared on the scene.35
To speak specifically of a digital revolution in cinema thus means to
occupy a rather one-sided position, which is guilty of ignoring the fact that
a large part of this “revolution” consists of simply a more general
distribution of mutations that have already taken place and have very little
to do with digital technology as their cause. In fact, insofar as one of the
key problems that the image-centric accounts focus on is precisely the
question of the image’s incapacity to continue guaranteeing a sense of the
world’s presence for the spectator, we may wonder to what extent this crisis
and its supposed ethical and epistemological consequences might have been
prepared by the earlier process, described so well by Chion, through which
sound “dethroned” the image and took over its role as the structuring agent
in the construction of filmic space. The “crisis” of the cinematic image one
often hears about today has less to do with the digital break and the
supposed loss of the image’s indexical (photographic) relationship with
reality and more with the image’s new place within the cinema’s audio-
visual discourse: that is, the sense of a “break” or the feeling of a “crisis”
stems from the image’s loss of its discursive function as the “establishing”
instance and the register used by films to set up the key parameters of a
world in which narrative events and dramatic action may take place.
It is worthwhile to speculate on the ways this reversal in the division of
labor between sound and image that took place in the 1970s, where the
image to some extent retains the primary focus of spectatorial attention and
continues to carry out the classical task of representing action but has to do
so in a fundamentally foreign space now structured by the enriched
capacities of sound, contributed to the prevalence of the conspiratorial trope
and the generalized feeling of paranoia that has since the 1970s come to
characterize so much of contemporary storytelling and culture more broadly
—a process first thematized by the great conspiracy thrillers, such as
Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation (1974) or Brian de Palma’s Blow
Out (1981). A striking analogy may, namely, be drawn between Chion’s
description of the post-Dolby construction of scenic space—the feeling of
intense presence combined with a fundamental vagueness of the world’s
contours, which produces a space inimical to the setting up of any
localizable perspective—and the analyses of the failure of “cognitive
mapping,” the collapse of our capacity to grasp the world visually and
narratively in the conditions of multinational or global capitalism.36
A comparison of this sort, to be developed more fully elsewhere,
suddenly places us on a new terrain, which is that of audio-vision as a
political metaphor, or rather as the metaphorical (and thus a displaced)
place cinema may provide for thinking politics. The existence of such a
place can be glimpsed from the language often used to describe the audio-
visual reality of cinema: the “domination” of image over sound, the
“exploitation” of music’s emotive power by the narrative function of the
image-track, the spectator’s (and film theory’s) “discrimination” against
sound and in favor of the visual. Chion, for whom “the greatest films are
always, at some level, metaphors for these questions of emergence and
power,”37 describes the advances of Dolby technology with reference to the
“ ‘working masses’ of the upper frequency range”—a political metaphor
that figures the moment of the 1970s as the uprising of a kind of sonic
proletariat in a manner that resembles the contemporaneous burst of the
postcolonial political subjects onto the stage of world history. The existence
of such political metaphors is perhaps not surprising. Homologous to the
articulations of audio-visual discourse, politics also begins with the absence
of form and has to contend with the insistence of the nonrelation or some
fundamental impasse as what structures the field of political struggles and
possibilities. One can say that there is politics because there is no natural
way of organizing human collective life, because the a priori form of social
relations is constitutively missing. Yet if this is the case, there is one final
bit of criticism that may be leveled against the image-centered narratives of
cinema’s history: namely, such accounts, which exclude the audio-visual
nonrelation and offer a rather flattened sense of what constitutes a historical
break or mutation, also lead us down the path toward an ultimately
depoliticized idea of cinema.

N
1. Rick Altman, “The Evolution of Sound Technology,” in Film Sound: Theory and Practice, ed.
Elisabeth Weis and John Belton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 44.
2. Mark Kerins, Beyond Dolby (Stereo): Cinema in the Digital Sound Age (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 2011), 3.
3. Ibid., 3.
4. But see, for instance, how introduces dialectical tension back into the discussion of the digital
image in the final chapter of his Change Mummified: Cinema, Historicity, Theory
(Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2001), 301– 50.
5. Siegfried Zielinski, Audio-Visions: Cinema and Television as Entr’actes in History
(Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1999), 21.
6. Ibid., 20.
7. Ibid., 18.
8. Ibid., 19.
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid.
11. Ibid., 240–41.
12. Antoine de Baecuqe, Camera Historica: The Century in Cinema (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2012), 21.
13. For more on this and related questions, see Dennis Broe, Birth of the Binge: Serial TV and the
End of Leisure (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2019).
14. Theodor Adorno and Hanns Eisler, Composing for the Films (London: Continuum, 2007), 13.
15. Ibid., 14.
16. Michel Chion, Film: A Sound Art, trans. Claudia Gorbman (New York: Columbia University
Press, 2009), 492.
17. Ibid., 232.
18. Ibid., 467.
19. Alenka Zupančič, What IS Sex? (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017), 22.
20. Jacques Lacan, … Or Worse: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan (Cambridge, MA: Wiley, 2018),
11.
21. Zupančič, What IS Sex?, 24–26.
22. The absence of a form that would allow us to inscribe audio-visual difference as such has, of
course, often led to the fantasy that such a form may nevertheless be found. Typically, the
place where such a form is fantasized to exist must almost by definition be posited as beyond
both image and sound: not merely a unifying third term but a term that transcends the
difference and can as such establish the common measure or the unity of the two terms. For
example, in his famous analysis of the sequence from Alexander Nevsky (1939), Sergei
Eisenstein posits that the form of audio-visual difference may be found in the graphic line, the
minimal kind of trace or inscription, which functions as a pure recording of movement (of
gesture and affect) and thus belongs to a more substantial layer in relation to which image and
sound are merely secondary expressions. See Sergei Eisenstein, “Vertical Montage,” in S.M.
Eisenstein: Selected Works, Vol. 2: Towards a Theory of Montage, ed. Michael Glenny and
Richard Taylor, trans. Michael Glenny (London: British Film Institute, 1994), 327–99. It is the
case that Eisenstein participates also in the opposing tendency, which places its wager on the
generative capacity of the nonrelation and the discontinuity of montage cuts. For the canonical
manifesto of this other tendency, see Sergei Eisenstein, Vsevolod Pudovkin, and Grigori
Alexandrov, “Statement on Sound,” in S. M. Eisenstein: Selected Works, Vol. 1: Writings
1922–1934, ed. and trans. Richard Taylor (London: I. B. Tauris, 2010), 113–14.
23. Zupančič, What IS Sex?, 22.
24. “The very simple experiment of creating a random pairing of any piece of music off a CD with
an audio-visual sequence from a DVD demonstrates how ‘synchronization-prone’ we are as
spectators, always on the lookout for the slightest sign of synch.” Chion, Film: A Sound Art,
487.
25. Ibid., 221–24.
26. Ibid., 99.
27. Ibid., 107.
28. Ibid., 108.
29. Compare with this example from Chion, in which “superstructural” or aesthetic effects appear
with significant delay in relation to their “infrastructural” or technological causes, the reverse
option, in which it is rather the effects that anticipate the cause. The most famous example of
this “idealist” and oft maligned anticipatory option is presented by André Bazin, “The Myth of
Total Cinema”: “It seems to me that in this instance we need to reverse historical causality,
which proceeds from the economic substructure to the ideological superstructure, and view
fundamental technological discoveries as fortunate and propitious accidents essentially
secondary to the initial conceptions of cinema’s inventors. Cinema is an idealist phenomenon;
men’s idea of it existed fully equipped in their brains, as in Plato’s higher world, and the
tenacious resistance of matter to the idea is more striking than technology’s prompting of the
inventor’s imagination.” What Is Cinema? trans. Timothy Barnard (Montreal: Caboose, 2009),
13. Yet one may at times find descriptions of how certain aesthetico-political desires
anticipated the technical medium of cinema well before its implementation in decidedly “anti-
idealist” historical narratives as well. According to Friedrich Kittler, for instance, during the
European Enlightenment, the period of the struggle of the bourgeoisie against the Church,
there emerged a desire for cinema, which, since at that point cinema could be anticipated but
not yet invented, found a compensatory satisfaction in literary Romanticism: “in the battle
between the Enlightenment and superstition, moving images were presented for the first time
 on a massive scale and thus became desiderata on a massive scale. Yet the more that magicians
strove to fulfill the demand for moving images, the greater the strategic counterwish to expose
these images as mere illusions became. As the cases of Cagliosto, Casanova, and Schröpfer all
sadly verify, this Enlightenment almost always succeeded, and in the cold early morning light
one more suicide victim lay in the parks of Leipzig. That is why … the unfulfilled wish for
moving images produced another medium, which could at least satisfy it in the realm of the
imaginary for a period of time before the invention of film: romantic literature,” Optical
Media: Berlin Lectures 1999, trans. Anthony Enns (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010), 102.
30. Chion, Film: A Sound Art, 151–53.
31. Ibid., 119.
32. Ibid., 118.
33. Ibid., 120.
34. Ibid., 121. One may also note how in these new circumstances the image, stripped of its
structuring agency, becomes a central vehicle for various forms of cultural and political
nostalgia. See Fredric Jameson, “Transformations of the Image in Postmodernity,” in The
Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern, 1983–1998 (London: Verso, 1998), 93–
135.
35. Kerins, Beyond Dolby (Stereo), 5–6.
36. Fredric Jameson, “Totality as Conspiracy,” in The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in
the World System (London: BFI, 1992), 9–84.
37. Chion, Film: A Sound Art, 217.
 CHAPTER 18

THE COMPOSER OF MUSIQUE

CONCRÈTE WIELDS A CAMERA

MICHEL CHION, TRANS. CLAUDIA GORBMAN

I have noticed a paradox in film criticism in France, particularly in scholarly

essays. Although in the 1960s and 1970s it was still difficult and expensive to
obtain prints of films for study purposes, let alone to make films, today’s widely
available and lightweight audiovisual equipment—from personal computers to
tablets, phones, and digital tape recorders—allows anybody to put images
together, to create and record and edit sounds. You can edit and mix films all by
yourself and you can observe the results instantly; you can try out different
kinds of sounds with a given set of images or edit different visual sequences
onto the same sounds. Here’s the paradox: very few current writers actually
observe sounds, images, and the results of their combination, plus the effects of
mixing sounds, images, and written or spoken words—a kind of observation
that lets us better understand what happens in the process of putting them
together.
Under the influence of Gilles Deleuze’s two film books, The Movement-
Image and The Time-Image, a lot of French film criticism has leaned in the
direction of philosophical and cultural generalizing. The best-known detailed
sequence analyses were penned in the 1960s to the early 1980s—such as
Raymond Bellour’s essay on a sequence in The Birds (1963); essays on
Marguerite Duras’s India Song (1975) by Marie-Claire Ropars-Wuilleumier;
Christian Metz’s analysis of Adieu Philippine (1962); the editors of Screen on
Young Mr. Lincoln (1939); and many analyses by Kristin Thompson and David
Bordwell.1 These are all quite compelling even if you do not share the
Derridean, structuralist, or Lacanian perspective taken in many of them, and
they remain relevant because of their reliance on patient observation and careful
description.
 Everything I have written in my books (which include Audio-Vision: Sound
on Screen and Film, A Sound Art) is the fruit of exhaustively observing what
happens when sounds and images combine. Attending to these phenomena was
perhaps easier for me than for others, because I learned to observe sounds
(using the technique Pierre Schaeffer called reduced listening) and moving
images separately and in isolation, and in addition, because I create and record
sounds and images.
I cannot stress enough the importance of observation. During my teaching
years, many French film students disdained the kind of observation I proposed
to them.2 Their impulse was to launch immediately into commentary—to
intellectualize or “interpret,” as they called it.
In order to observe a sequence in a sound film, you ideally need to possess:
Some knowledge of film and of editing, which can be easily acquired, and now easily put into prac
Some knowledge of linguistics, in order to understand, say, the difference between a sound a
phoneme and the mechanisms of how languages are understood;
Some knowledge of visual composition and the history of painting;
A method for observing sounds per se; I acquired this not only from Pierre Schaeffer’s Treatis
Musical Objects but also from the group exercise of reduced listening;
Some basic understanding of musical technique;
A healthy curiosity about human perception and, as I see it, a willingness to critique the notion of
five senses” (which goes back to Aristotle, and which should have been abandoned long ago), as
as focused deliberation of what hearing and sight do and do not have in common; and
If possible, knowledge of how to record sounds and images.

The ideal form of teaching film would invite each student to create imageless
audio works and then soundless visual works, and finally, audiovisual works.
One idea I find very important is transsensoriality, a notion that results from
observing sounds and images separately. To quote my own definition:
I call trans-sensory those perceptions that belong to no one particular sense, but which may travel
via one sensory channel or another without their content or their effect being limited to this one
sense. Everything involving rhythm may serve as an example. But other cases involve spatial
perceptions as well as the verbal dimension. A word that is read or spoken belongs to the same
sphere of language, even if the modes of its transmission (handwriting, vocal timbre) run in
parallel sensory channels. Rhythm is the essential trans-sensory dimension, since we experience
it before we are born. The fetus encounters rhythm in the form of variations in pressure on the
body wall, parsed with the combined beats of the mother’s heart and its own. Rhythm is
everywhere. For example, at night in the days before electric lights, it was present in the subtle
pulsations of candlelight, in one sensory variation that we have lost and have replaced with
others. Texture and grain are another category of trans-sensory perception.3
Let me emphasize that these ideas are based on personal experience. My own
personal experience is of course unique—we all have our own experiences
based on our personal and social differences, our times, and material conditions.
My father, who was an engineer and scientist, was a key person who oriented
me toward observation. He constantly practiced rigorous observation, and he
was passionately interested in photography and sound recording. Pierre
Schaeffer, the inventor of musique concrète, whom I met and with whom I
worked when I was just twenty and he was more than sixty, was also trained as
an engineer and scientist.4
Musique concrète is music made from sounds fixed onto a recording medium
(I prefer to use the term “fixed” instead of “recorded” even if they mean the
same thing)—sounds the composer has generally created from any and all
sources. This music is “concrete” because the work is produced concretely in a
precise material form and not in abstract notation to be subsequently executed
by others; in this respect, it is much like painting or film.
I became familiar very early on with tape recorders and amateur movie
cameras. In the 1960s, these were not everyday pieces of equipment. I was by
no means inundated with the sounds I created—I had only several minutes’
worth of audiotape. My image-making wasn’t too prolific either; the super-8
film cartridges I used to shoot with had a capacity of only four and a half
minutes. This is a far cry from what today’s devices are capable of. But there
were also my first experiences with projecting silent films, and with listening to
sounds alone with no images.
A few personal stories from childhood stand out as vivid memories. As I
recall, the first film I ever saw was around 1952, and it was silent. It was a little
home movie shot by my paternal grandfather on 8-millimeter film and projected
onto a wall in his apartment. It depicted family scenes, probably in black and
white. He had set up the projector close to the wall, so it created a small and
brilliant image. What I remember from it is light in movement, and small
people like those in a puppet show. The light resembled that of a candle or a
wood fire, but was concentrated into a small rectangle. As for the figures: forms
that moved, the shapes of members of my family—maybe my older brother and
me—but they were miniatures, not life-sized like in a movie theater. It was very
animated.
My foster parents, who raised my brother and me since we did not live with
my mother, listened to lots of popular radio, with game shows, dramatic serials,
and songs. My father and his wife, when we went to spend vacations with them,
listened to classical music. I loved listening to both operas and radio serials—a
few of the latter still existed then—and I would “see” the settings and characters
on the basis of sound alone.
The first time I saw images accompanied by synchronized recorded sound
was in a large Paris cinema. We went to see Cecil B. deMille’s Greatest Show
on Earth (1952). The movie was naturally dubbed in French, and it bore the title
Sous le plus grand chapiteau du monde (Under the Greatest Big Top in the
World). It was March or April 1953, and I was six. Unlike my grandfather’s
home movie, the image was huge and teemed with details, characters, circus
animals … The voices were bizarre, speaking French in a strange way, with odd
pronunciation—in the style of French dubbing actors of the period—and they
did not appear to match with the images, which showed American actors (even
as a child I could see that). TV sets were still rare in France then, and I had not
yet been in the house of anyone who had one.
So, very early on I had the strong experience of sound alone and moving
image alone, and of the strangeness that can result from their meeting. I can’t
say why I have such a good memory for sensory events, but in any case I do
remember these “firsts” vividly and precisely. As I mentioned, I think they
allowed me later on to understand more deeply what results when recorded
sounds and images are put together, especially the fact that each has its own
rhythm or absence of rhythm. This rhythm and this vibration arise not only from
the content but also from the radio or the projector, from the technical
apparatus.
When I became a university student at seventeen I saw classic silent films at
the Cinémathèque Française in Paris. Henri Langlois, the Cinémathèque’s
legendary director, refused to screen silent movies with music, either recorded
or played live, even though he knew that the films were accompanied by music
when they came out.5 Thus I saw Carl Dreyer’s Passion of Joan of Arc (1928)
and F. W. Murnau’s American masterpiece Sunrise (1927) with no sounds other
than the sounds in the screening room. I was fascinated by the luminous life of
these films, especially Murnau’s. Germans often referred to film as “Lichtspiel,”
which might be translated as “lightplay.”
Some projection systems create flicker in the image and flutter in the sound
—these also made their mark on me, as I will explain. At boarding school
starting at age ten, I saw the Wednesday night movie shows the older
schoolboys put on. They rented a projector and prints of older sound films on
16mm reels, always in black and white and dubbed into French. We saw plenty
of westerns, but we also saw the French versions of Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle
Thief (1948) and David Lean’s adaptation of Dickens’s Great Expectations
(1946), both of which greatly impressed me. When the characters spoke, we
didn’t notice much in particular, but when we heard an orchestra—for example,
in the opening credits of those two films, accompanied by the sentimental
scores of Alessandro Cicognini and Walter Goehr, respectively—the sound of
the string instruments oscillated and veered offkey in a pronounced way, not at
all like the sound of movies shown in 35mm in commercial theaters. The
school’s projector ran the film at a slightly irregular and unstable pace, and so
we heard wow and flutter in the music—the French term for this, pleurage,
derives from the word for weeping.
The audio flutter common to amateur screenings—and which is completely
absent in today’s film viewing technologies, which set and maintain a uniform
pace for images and sounds—was for me a supplementary emotional effect, like
a singer who exaggerates her vibrato. I recognized this effect because around
1957 my father had purchased a big German home reel-to-reel tape recorder
that my brother and I played with as children. My early acquaintance with this
recording device, which turned at a slow speed, helped several years later in
orienting me toward musique concrète. In creating musique concrète you make
the sounds yourself, edit and mix them, without the intermediary of a score.
Later I worked with professional tape recorders that recorded at a faster rate
(15 inches per second), with very little flutter. I discovered that I could record
the wow and flutter created with another, slower-rate tape recorder. This became
an expressive effect of sound. What was crucial for me toward 1970 was how
easy it was to learn to operate tape recorders, mixing consoles, filters, and
editing (which you did with a pair of scissors and special adhesive tape). In two
or three hours you could get fairly good at all the techniques. This allowed
composers to do everything themselves, and to learn simply by doing and
observing. I have stuck with this habit of being in control of as many of the
operations as possible when I produce a musical work or a film.
Revisiting these memories of childhood helps me understand the value of
having encountered recorded sound and filmed image separately. Today, people
can experience this separation just as easily, but they do not think of doing it on
their own because the audiovisual is so ubiquitous. Be that as it may, perceiving
the two apart from each other is useful, and this is why, in the final chapter of
the new edition of Audio-Vision, I advocate a method I call masking. In
masking, you observe sound and image separately by cutting out the image and
the sound in alternation. It helps us understand that when the two combine, we
engage a kind of perception that is not additive but complex, and which I call
audio-vision.
So I’d advise anyone who wishes to understand more deeply the combination
of sounds and images to create imageless sound works and soundless film
works, then, to carefully note what you perceive. You can apply the same
method to existing works. For example, on a long plane flight, watch a film
without headphones or subtitles: you’ll understand less of the story but you will
see more things, more details—you might notice when characters blink, when
the lighting shifts, and so forth. In other words, you will see more sharply. On
the other hand, an airplane is not the best place for observing just the sounds of
a film … better to be at home where it’s quiet.
I shot my first film in 1975, Le Grand Nettoyage (The Big Cleanup). For
shooting I borrowed one of the best super-8 silent cameras of the era, the
Beaulieu 7008-ZM4, from my sponsors at the National Audiovisual Institute.
This inexpensive little film, on which the director Jacques Kebadian and the
editor Jeannine Vernon advised me, is four and a half minutes long and has no
sound and no dialogue. The sole live character is a monkey—no humans appear
until the very end. Rodrigo Sacic, a former student and friend who is a film
sound professional, posted it on YouTube.6 You can watch it in either of two
ways: with sound (which I added afterward, as a sound montage) or silent. Both
versions are coherent in my view, but each creates a different atmosphere. The
silent version is more contemplative and mysterious; it allows you to see the
play of shadow and light better (I shot in summer, at different times of day)—
you more readily perceive the “Lichtspiel.” All the lighting is natural, but I used
sun, wind, and water. The sound version is more dramatic, and also more
emotional.
Three years after this first short, I bought my own silent Beaulieu camera and
used it not only to film in the streets of Paris and on trips to Iceland and New
York but also to make so-called experimental films (for me, films pure and
simple). For example, I projected an image shot in Coney Island’s Luna Park
onto a window or curtain in my apartment; I’d slow down the projector speed
(the projector allowed for changing the rate), and I would refilm the whole
thing. The image took on a different texture; by texture, I mean both the matter
in the surface of the image and vibrations, pulses, quakings, and irregularities in
the moving image in time—what I call temporal texture. In the digital era, we
can create textures in a variety of ways. One big advantage of digital is that it
inherently has much greater rate stability than nondigital systems. It allows the
practitioner to take irregularities in speed created by mechanical, nondigital
equipment and incorporate them into the new work. They become idiosyncratic
touches, like a pencil mark or handwriting.
By creating musique concrète on magnetic tape I understood the importance
of temporal texture and irregularities, small fine rhythms. My silent Japanese
projector allowed me to project at various speeds, speeding up or slowing down
to as few as two frames per second. I was making “cinéma concret” in which
the texture of the image, its irregularity, its details were no more or less
important than the represented content, somewhat as in painting.
I decided to make my first short film with a screenplay and dialogue,
Eponine, in 1983. I used a super-8 camera and enlarged the image to 35mm
before adding sound to the film, which could then be projected in theaters
equipped for 35mm. I was happy when the film won prizes in “normal” 16- and
35-mm short-film festivals.7 For the visual concept of the film’s style I took
inspiration from comics because of their stripped-down decor. I took charge of
camera and lighting, and I worked on the sound editing and image editing as
well as sound effects. The 35mm transfer print made the film grain much more
visible; the grain is in constant movement, like swarming microorganisms, and
lends texture to the image, as if it were a painting that moves. Again, it was
musique concrète that had sensitized me to the importance of texture, but I took
inspiration from painting, too. I spoke with my father’s friends who were
amateur drawers and painters, I spent time with a neighbor’s son who studied
art, and I observed their techniques.
In La Messe de terre (Mass of Earth), an audiovisual work of 2 hours 35
minutes begun in 1991 and completed in 1996, I combined images shot with a
video-8 camera with other super-8 images that were refilmed in video, and
sounds created in a studio.8 For shooting I intentionally used the camera’s
automatic settings—autofocus and the automatic diaphragm. Both features often
take some reaction time to focus on various filmed subjects and degrees of
brightness. For example, if something very luminous appears in the frame, the
aperture doesn’t adjust immediately; and if a subject moves very close to the
camera while you’re filming something at a distance, autofocus takes a moment
to focus on the new subject. This moment of latency or hesitation could be
considered a flaw, but it can also be a quality, an additional way to bring life to
the image, to give it rhythm.
 At the beginning of the Messe de terre, in the Introit movement, there are
images I happened to film in a raging summer storm near a seaside town. I was
shooting from a car on the passenger side, my wife at the wheel. Multiple
rhythms were created by the windshield wipers going back and forth, by the
trickling of water down the windshield, and by the fleeing vacationers running
from the beach. I superimposed these images with sounds literally created on
machines, for example, by brushing a mic against different parts of a tape
recorder. I did not keep the synch sound recorded by the video camera’s mic.
But I edited the sounds and images by playing with various speeds of each.
There were no synchronous moments or very few—rather, superimposed
cycles, as in compositions by Philip Glass. The dance of the rhythms in the
image with rhythms in the sounds ended up creating a strong relationship and
an overall audiovisual perception. I use the idea of mise en danse when the
visual rhythm combines with audio rhythms, even when there’s no
synchronism. This occurs not just in movie musicals but also in films using a
rapid and unstable image.
A more recent work, created in 2016 entirely with my home equipment and a
simple editing program, is my Third Symphony, subtitled The Audio-Divisual (1
hour 22 minutes). This work alternates visual sequences with no sound, audio
sequences with no image (the frame remains dark), and audiovisual sequences.
Such alternation restores intensity to the image and to music alike. Current
cinema, not necessarily experimental film, could also choose to alternate totally
silent sequences with imageless audio sequences and in so doing, refresh and
revitalize perception. Other movements of The Audio-Divisual Symphony are
devoted to illustrating some of the audiovisual effects I have identified in film
and video works, such as synchresis, temporal convergence lines, and rhythmic
transsensoriality.
Recently I began work on a Fourth Symphony which will be largely silent,
and will consist of four parts presenting different images in movement, images
that will be punctuated occasionally by sounds. They will differ from the films
of Murnau and Dreyer that I so admired at the Cinémathèque in that there will
be no narrative thread, only form.
To return to my initial grievance, and what this reflection has been intended
to highlight in a new way, is that what’s too often neglected in film analysis is
the sensory quality of films, which is clearly so important for many directors.
Take Sternberg’s The Scarlet Empress (1934), with its play on veils and fabrics,
or Kurosawa’s Dreams (1990), an experiment in painting in movement. Or
think of Fellini’s films—for example, the moving shadows and light in Roma
(1972) and Casanova (1976)—or films by Tarkovsky. And although it may
seem surprising, many action films highlight sensory qualities, particularly
those by Tony Scott, such as Domino (2005) and Déjà Vu (2006). This is even
more the case in the silent films by Murnau, Pudovkin (Storm Over Asia, 1928),
Sjöstrom (The Wind, 1928), and Jean Epstein (Coeur fidèle, 1923).
In Christopher Nolan’s sci-fi film Interstellar (2014), if you don’t notice the
use of shadows revolving around characters in scenes in spaceships and rotating
space stations—the way the shadows dance, a swirling that echoes other
swirlings heard in Hans Zimmer’s nondiegetic music—particularly in one of the
major themes that turns around the dominant, rotating around a center—it
seems to me that you miss something important in this film, which plays a role
that’s not just physical but also symbolic and emotional. Let me briefly explain
what I mean in Interstellar. The revolving light evokes the cycle of day and
night: the main characters who have gone into space have left earthly time and
now experience an “artificial” time which, using Einstein’s equations,
vertiginously “unaligns” them with relation to their kin who have remained on
Earth. When they return to our planet, they will have aged far less than their
own children. The hyper-rapid rotations of light in their rockets and their space
ships and stations suggest the passage of thousands and thousands of days that
they do not live through as such: for them it’s only a few days, but for their
children, and particularly the protagonist’s daughter, years have gone by.
In Zimmer’s music, the “swirling” around the dominant brings to mind the
importance of gravity in the traditional organization of tonal space, a principle
at the heart of the western musical system. Allow me to quote from a recent
book of mine:
In Interstellar, to suggest a prolonged state of suspension—of both gravity and human time—
Hans Zimmer created a musical motif that ceaselessly turns around the dominant and seems
capable of doing so forever, free of any obligation to reach a conclusion. In classical music this is
what is called a dominant pedal-point; you can find it toward the endings of Bach’s fugues and in
the developments of classical and romantic symphonies. In countless pieces it is a device that
traditional western music since the seventeenth century establishes as a kind of free zone where
music isn’t obliged to alight or conclude. The dominant pedal note is usually in the bass and
signifies: “We are going to play for a while at not having to finish.” In Interstellar, this very note
which the classical western system demands to resolve to the tonic seems to say, “I am breaking
out of my usual role which is to announce that this is going to end, and in prolonging myself I am
proclaiming that I can hover, I can vamp.” The dominant can be any note, of course; it is defined
by its position in a given scale in a given key. Thus it is always inscribed in a system that relies
on a symbolism of high and low—which is expressive only for beings whose body is subject to
the laws of gravity.
In the main theme of Interstellar, to create the effect obtained, it is not enough
simply to repeat one note. Other notes have to move in relation to it (say it’s E),
sometimes making us hear it as the dominant of a minor scale (A minor), and
sometimes the major third of the relative major (C major). Thus the same note
can be colored a different emotion depending on the key pivoting around it—
perhaps poignant and sad in A minor, or suggesting affirmation and positivity
with relation to C major.9
Emotion is born from the rhythmic dance between the rapid rotations of
shadow around the characters in the image, and the slower musical rotations
around the dominant note in the score. But it arises also from the awareness that
this double dance revolves around a center: the human being, and the affective
polarities that connect each of us to our loved ones, as well as all human beings’
dependence on gravity.
In speaking and writing about movies, people are not used to connecting up
the different filmic elements and their rhythmic components. This is probably
because we become too attached to the differences between sound and image,
and between screenplay and mise en scène—differences that exist only from the
point of view of technique and the division of labor in film production. When
sounds and images go together, they cease to be only sounds and images, but
they exert reciprocal influence; the rhythms of each begin to “dance” together.
If not so many people are attentive to this, it’s because they confuse cinema
with its technical means, and with the division of labor into the persons doing
sound and those doing images—historical, social, and economic factors. It is
possible to circumvent this division of labor, as people like Walter Murch have
demonstrated and as my work in film and video confirms.
I hope that these bits of my personal history might prove useful to readers,
and I beg you to excuse the empirical thrust of this chapter. Personal history,
however, has much to do with both creative and theoretical orientation. This
brief look back into my own suggests that the separation of sound and image in
my formative years has significantly influenced my ideas on audio-vision and,
indeed, the “audio-divisual,” the notion that sound and image never do truly
come together in seamless unity.

N
1. Raymond Bellour, “System of a Fragment (on The Birds),” in The Analysis of Film, ed. and trans.
Constance Penley (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), 28–68; Marie-Claire Ropars-
Wuilleumier, “The Disembodied Voice (India Song),” trans. Kimberly Smith, Yale French Studies
 60 (1980): 241–68; Christian Metz, Film Language: A Semiotics of the Cinema, trans. Michael
Taylor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), 149–84; “John Ford’s Young Mr. Lincoln: A
Collective Text by the Editors of Cahiers du Cinéma,” Screen 3, no. 3 (October 1972): 5–44; David
Bordwell, Filmguide to La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1973);
David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, “Space and Narrative in the Films of Ozu,” Screen 17, no. 2
(Summer 1976): 41–73.
2. I lay out a method for audiovisual analysis in Audio-Vision, a revised and expanded edition of which
Columbia University Press published in 2019.
3. Michel Chion, Film: A Sound Art, trans. Claudia Gorbman (New York: Columbia University Press,
2009), 496.
4. Chion worked for the research branch of the ORTF (French Radio and Television Office) as assistant
to Schaeffer starting in 1970. He was a member of the Groupe de Recherches Musicales (GRM,
formed by Schaeffer in the ORTF, then integrated in 1975 into the Institut National de
l’Audiovisuel) between 1971 and 1976. His compositions and writings have been strongly
influenced by Schaeffer.—Trans.
5. Rick Altman documents this history in his monumental book Silent Film Sound (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2004).
6. See https://youtu.be/iUUkA8wqlxQ.
7. Éponine ou le Fer à repasser (1984) won the Prix Jean-Vigo for short film in 1985 and also the
national Grand Prix at the Clermont-Ferrand International Short Film Festival in 1985.—Trans.
8. The Messe de Terre received prizes at the Locarno Festival and at the Académie Charles Cros
festival in 2015.—Trans.
9. Michel Chion, Des Sons dans l’espace (On Sounds in Outer Space) (Paris: Capprici, 2019), 71–72.
 CHAPTER 19

THE MANY BODIES OF THE

DANCER-ACTRESS
Toward a Kinesics of Film
Acting

USHA IYER

IN the final minutes of Kathputli (Puppet, Amiya Chakrabarty and Nitin

Bose), a 1957 Hindi film about an impoverished girl groomed into a
successful theater actress, Pushpa, the female protagonist, takes to the stage,
heartbroken because her insecure husband has taken away her infant
daughter and accused her of being in a relationship with her director-
mentor. Standing in front of the stage curtain, in a shaky voice, she narrates
how, many years ago, as a young, innocent girl, she watched a puppet show
and was fascinated by the dancing dolls, unbound by any burdens and
sorrows. The scene cuts to a close-up of her face framed in pitch darkness, a
key light from the left catching two streams of tears coursing down her
cheeks, as she laments, “One day that girl became a living puppet and
realized that she has to dance to the strings of a cruel fate. Today, I dance
again.” The scene fades to black. A percussive beat begins as the next scene
fades in, and the brass section plays from the orchestra pit.1 To the hard,
repetitive beat of the chenda drum, Pushpa performs a tortured dance,
employing the movement vocabulary of the classical South Indian dance
form Kathakali, traditionally performed by men.2 Her strong swivels and
grounded leaps testify to her impressive strength and virtuosity. The
movement vocabulary of Kathakali—with its heavy and muscular
footwork, large, expansive movements of the limbs that allow the dancer to
forcefully annex space, a fixed, strong torso, and dramatic, pulsating eye
movements—enables Pushpa to eloquently express her agony and rage at
the injustice meted to her.
Combined with an expressionist mise en scène, including a painted
backdrop of dancing women, and varied repetitions of her body, especially
in a remarkable sequence in which she watches over multiple Pushpa
puppets (fig. 19.1), this dance performance makes possible a complex,
multilayered staging of the melodrama of female suffering under a
patriarchal regime that limits women’s movement (whether in terms of what
is considered decorous dancerly comportment or moving out of the space of
domesticity). As Pushpa spins in anguish and resentment, the camera too
comes off its axis and sways in canted angles to the music as if it has all
become too much to bear, until she collapses onto the floor to rousing
applause from the audience. All that the film can do after this dizzyingly
virtuosic climax is tag on a few minutes of hasty and feeble narrative
closure that reconciles Pushpa with her husband.
Figure 19.1. Pushpa watches over multiple puppet figurations of her dancing body.

Describing Kathputli as “a Vyjayanthimala vehicle,” the Encyclopedia of

Indian Cinema disparages the film as consisting “of expensively staged
dance sequences loosely strung together.”3 Vyjayanthimala, who plays
Pushpa, was trained in the south-Indian classical dance form of
Bharatanatyam, and acted in dance-centric films through the early 1950s,
earning a reputation as mainly a dancer with meager acting abilities.4 In her
memoir, she reminisces, “Till Devdas [Bimal Roy, 1955] happened, the
critics kept harping that I was a dancer, not an actress. But after its release, I
received terrific reviews … I earned my reputation and got accepted in the
mainstream.”5 She ascribes this “metamorphosis from a dancer to an
emoting actress” to famed auteur Bimal Roy’s ability to discern the “bhavas
[moods] that flit across a dancer’s face during those myriad mudras
[gestures].”6 During this period, Vyjayanthimala was compared with other
leading stars such as Meena Kumari, Nutan, and Nargis, who were heralded
as more accomplished realist actresses, adept at conveying psychic depth,
and crucially, not presented as dancing stars.7 In this chapter, I explore the
critical consequences for theorizations of acting when we read dancing and
acting alongside rather than against each other, and examine how the
presence of dancer-actors produces multiple modes of cinematic narration
and affective responses. What happens when we analyze acting through
dance-related discourses of performance, and focus on gesture, movement,
the occupation of space, and mobilization of cinematic technologies by
dancer-actors? Might we claim other kinds of bodies, like the dance-trained
body of Vyjayanthimala in the example above, as good actors, not only as
producers of visual and kinetic spectacle, when we reconfigure standards
for acting that are predominantly founded on rubrics of psychological
realism, transparency, and face-centered emoting? These inquiries prompt
us to reevaluate standards of cinematic performance, genres, and modes and
consider how the combination of multiple performance regimes produces a
range of spectatorial affects and engagements.
“What do we talk about when we talk about acting?” asks Pamela
Robertson Wojcik.8 Indeed, what have we talked about when we have at all
talked about acting? Most anthologies and monographs on film acting
bemoan, quite rightly, the lack of substantial scholarship on the subject,
differentiating it from star studies, which has had a more robust trajectory
within film studies.9 Moreover, much of this scholarship on acting has
drawn from theater-related discourses focused on emoting, voice, and
presence, and engaged with acting theories and practices proposed by
Stanislavski, Strasberg, Grotowski, Artaud, among others, to the extent that
a comparison with theater has overdetermined scholarship on film acting.10
In her book, Dancefilm, Erin Brannigan remarks on the need for more
dialog between film studies and dance studies: “Dance theory offers
understandings of the moving body and its ability to produce and express
meanings that are particularly useful for addressing both popular film
genres and other categories of dancefilm.”11 Lesley Stern and George
Kouvaros call for a theorizing of cinematic performance in which “the
focus is on the way energy is deployed and transmitted by and through the
body rather than privileging psychological or mimetic principles.”12
Attuned to these critical impulses, my focus on dance reenvisions acting as
a choreographic phenomenon, reinvesting theories of performance with
corporeal presence, drawing our attention to the thick materiality of
laboring, moving bodies.13
My desire to read film performance through this framework is kindled by
my study of dancer-actresses in popular Indian cinema.14 In analyzing the
role of dance in the construction of the stardom of particular actresses in
Hindi cinema from the 1930s to the 1990s, I encounter the routine
binarization of the categories of acting and dancing, not unfamiliar to other
film industries as well. In the 1950s, during what is considered the “golden
age” of Hindi cinema, Indian film critics (especially those writing in
English-language publications), like their Hollywood counterparts, favored
naturalistic representation of psychic interiority and a Method acting-
influenced standard of seamlessness between actor and character. Mobile,
dancing performers were disparaged as mannered or theatrical, “shrugged
off casually as ‘dancing stars’.”15 Through references to the screen
performances of Vyjayanthimala, an acclaimed Hindi film dancer-actress
from the 1950s and 1960s, I examine here how dance training influences
acting repertoires, and how this interpretive shift toward movement,
gesture, and bodily comportment might alter our understanding of labor,
virtuosity, and technique, even in nondancing sequences. A focus on female
performers has the potential to demonstrate how kinesis and the pleasures it
offers are at the very heart of the political work that gender performs.
One of the questions Wojcik urges us to pose about acting is, “Can
musical performance or martial arts be considered acting?”16 While focused
on Indian dancer-actors in particular, this chapter aims to build a conceptual
framework around moving bodies that helps extend this question to other
cinemas and other kinds of bodies undergirded by movement, whether
acrobatic, vaudevillian, comic, or sporting. When we shift the dominant
focus from realist, speech-driven emoting, when we take seriously
performance that is not located only in the face—that most celebrated
expressive field for evaluating “good acting”—but across the body, in
dancing legs, gesturing fingers, gyrating torsos, emoting necks and heads,
we may locate the density and fluidity of performances in the physics of
movement and gesture, sensitizing our evaluative criteria to the performing
body’s ability to produce and express meaning through movement. Dance
scholar Sally Ness asserts, “When I think of dancers, I think of their
bodies,” elaborating that, “[i]n dance, the mind’s “I” can become variable,
and may inhabit the person in an infinite number of ways, investing the
authority of the first person in different body parts, or in the whole body
simultaneously in any number of spatio-temporal relationships.”17 When
we turn to dance to theorize film acting, we may similarly proclaim: “When
I think of actors, I think of their bodies.”

E I :R
“B ”A
A corporeally grounded theorization of film acting requires an engagement
with regimes of training, rehearsal, and production cultures. But first, a
consideration of how acting has been discussed within film studies helps lay
out the terms and concepts we employ to engage with acting, including
transparency and opacity, naturalism, and authenticity. Studies of the
intermedial relationships between theater and cinema illuminate how film
acting comes to be evaluated in Euro-American contexts. Cynthia Baron
and Sharon Marie Carnicke trace the influence of nineteenth-century
naturalism—which demanded “the gestural language of the everyday
(handshakes, grunts, and nods) … [to convey] the narrower modulations of
daily life”—on contemporary western paradigms for producing and
evaluating screen performance.18 Differentiating between transparent and
opaque performance elements, they note that contemporary forms of
realism and naturalism call for transparent acting that emphasizes the
illusion of characters and does not call attention to the skill of the actor, “the
opaque body and voice of the actor [becoming] the vehicle for the virtual
realm of the story.”19 With reference to acting styles in silent American
cinema, Roberta Pearson observes that like stage pantomime actors, film
actors of the time proudly displayed their skills and did not endeavor to
mask technique: “[a]udiences and critics condemned as inadequate those
who did not demonstrably act: the pleasure derived not from participating in
an illusion but from witnessing a virtuoso performance.”20 As
psychological causality becomes a dominant element in American film
narrative, with D. W. Griffith recognized as “the originator of ‘subtle,
restrained’ acting,” these older performative modes are supplanted by the
verisimilar code, which represses the gestural quality of earlier cinema.21
Kyle Stevens, in his study of Mike Nichols, famed for his work with actors,
delineates how, across performance styles in Italian neorealism, classical
Hollywood cinema and postclassical Method acting, psychological realism
comes to be enshrined in a discourse of restraint and in the erasure of
obvious markers of style in order to suggest a seamlessness between actor
and character.22 He argues that while realist performance is commonly seen
as transparent, an actor like Meryl Streep makes her performance visible,
her “metaperformance” a “reflexive invitation to watch both a deep
character and the labor of crafting it.”23 In simultaneously inhabiting a
character and commenting upon her, Streep moves from a transparent
register to a translucent one, foregrounding relations between fiction and
reality. Considering the case of Vyjayanthimala (albeit working in a
different film industry, and unlike Streep, not initially hailed for her acting)
prompts us to theorize how certain corporeal regimes and technologies of
the body, such as training in classical dance in this instance, also produce an
engagement with artifice and metaperformance, their nonnaturalistic
approach to performance requiring new interpretive lenses.
In keeping with the hybrid form of popular Indian cinema, which draws
on local theatrical, musical, and other performance traditions, and also on
Hollywood and other popular cinemas, the performance codes in this film
culture draw from multiple sources. Corey Creekmur notes that acting in
popular Indian film “might be described in Western terms as melodramatic
or emphatic rather than nuanced or subtle [featuring] a self-aware
exhibitionism or openly acknowledged display—rather than the complicit,
disavowed voyeurism characteristic of Hollywood cinema.”24 I refer to the
performance codes of popular Hindi cinema, especially in the 1950s and
1960s (the period of Vyjayanthimala’s stardom), as “melodramatic-realist”
since these genre-mixing films called for a wide range of performative
modes. With its exceptionally syncretic combination of melodrama, realism,
epic, music, and dance, popular Indian cinema requires actors to move
through a range of performance modalities within a film and sometimes, as
in the Kathputli ending, within the same scene: naturalistic and
nonnaturalistic, transparent and opaque, individuated and mythic. Indeed,
the omnibus “masala” (mixed spice) form of popular Indian films—which
include, in addition to comic subplots and action sequences, multiple song-
and-dance sequences—produces heterogenous modes of performance and
reception within the same film. It is because of this cinema’s deep
engagement with music and dance that we get a double regime of cinematic
performance that aims for psychological depth within the melodramatic-
realist narrative while activating other performance modes in the dance
numbers. In the Kathputli finale, for instance, Vyjayanthimala (whose body
carries gestural sedimentations of decades of rigorous classical dance
training) expertly shifts from a melodramatic-realist register of performance
to a differently codified, epic dimension wrought by classical dance idioms.
Vivian Sobchack’s plotting of the actor’s four bodies—Prepersonal,
Personal, Impersonated, and Personified—provides a helpful framework to
unpack this performatively nested scene in which the dancer-actress
Vyjayanthimala plays the character Pushpa who plays a dancer-actress on
stage.25 In Sobchack’s four-tiered framework, the actor’s preconscious
Prepersonal body is her particular physical and biological structure, “the
ground upon which other Impersonated bodies or characters will figure,”26
while the consciously sensing and sensed Personal body, the visibly
displayed social “self,” intentionally expresses through movement, gesture,
and voice.27 Professional actors, Sobchack notes, “select and mobilize the
capacities, qualities and affects of both their Prepersonal and Personal
bodies” to play characters or Impersonated bodies.28 The last category, the
Personified body, “stands in for an idea;” for instance, the Personified body
of a film star is the “metaphorized and reified body of their overall
cinematic accumulation.”29 In the case of Vyjayanthimala, her training,
since the age of eight, in the classical dance form of Bharatanatyam
produced a Personified body as a national cultural icon, and a proliferation
of Impersonated bodies as traditional dancers in genres such as costume
dramas and historicals. Brannigan, in her discussion of a performer’s
“idiogest” or gestural idiolect, defined by their corporeal specificity,
remarks that “The gestural parameters of a given performer become a kind
of performative domain that unifies a character, a film, and bodies of
work.”30 While I examine elsewhere how Vyjayanthimala’s dance-
determined star text unified her characters and filmography, a close parsing
of her dancing-acting body has significance for our analysis of the
mechanics of acting here.31
Sobchack’s framework is inflected in specific ways when we consider the
case of dancer-actors. The Prepersonal body of a dancer, for instance, is
grounded in a neuromusclature shaped by long-term, rigorous dance
training. Through years of physical discipline, dancers become deeply
attuned to their Prepersonal body’s capacities for movement, action, and
gesture in a way that many of us are unlikely to be. The protracted training
and discipline can turn a dance form’s movement vocabulary into an
intuitive, integral part of the actor’s being and comportment, to the extent
that the gestural system of that dance may escape the control of the Personal
body, which seeks to impersonate a particular character. In Kathputli, for
instance, Vyjayanthimala’s Bharatanatyam training makes itself evident not
only in the film’s dance numbers, where it would be considered appropriate,
but also in many of the narrative segments, where the same dancerly
gestures come to the surface, so that rather than the “natural” comportment
of daily movements, her eyes open a little too wide, her head nods a little
too much, she holds her back a little too straight, or her hands articulate an
everyday gesture a little too sharply. In these instances, Vyjayanthimala’s
performative repertoire from the Bharatanatyam dance form is clearly in
excess of the gestural codes of the melodramatic-realist performance mode
of popular Hindi cinema, which explains critics’ frequent evaluation of her
early performances as evincing a better dancer than actress, and more
generally their negative judgment of the acting skills of many dancer-actors.
James Naremore observes that the body of the film actor is doubled: “At
one extreme, the actor develops the body as an instrument, learning a
kinesics, or movement vocabulary; at the other, he or she is encouraged to
behave more or less normally, letting gesture or facial expression rise
‘naturally’ out of deeply felt emotion.”32 This dichotomy becomes
especially evident in the case of dancer-actors, who balance “invisible” or
“natural” acting in narrative segments with more obviously presentational
(rather than representational) performance in dance numbers. Like
Vyjayanthimala, many dancer-actors’ Prepersonal bodies erupt out of their
Impersonated bodies, their physical charge too strong to remain
constrained, especially within realist depictions of another’s embodied self.
The hyphenated identity of dancer-actors bespeaks the dual regimes of
performance written upon their bodies, and indeed, as I suggest, each of
these performative regimes is rewritten by its dancing-acting bodies.
Brannigan discusses how Rita Hayworth’s dance-trained body feels
restrained when performing “everyday” corporeality, and that her dance
numbers serve as “a literal explosion of this control into excessive
movements.”33 The dancing star’s body renders her ready to break into
dance, to move, as Brannigan remarks, across the “gestural anacrusis” that
bridges the shift between performance modalities of the narrative and the
musical number, to the extent that this potential exceeds the discrete
musical number, “creating a sense of suspension and anticipation that
effects the film form as a whole.”34 The dancer-actress exerts thus a strong
authorial presence over film form, shifting our criteria for evaluating screen
performance. We desire and await Vyjayanthimala’s danced enactment of
Kathputli’s dramatic moments, her participation in the film generating for
us the multiple pleasures of melodramatic-realist narrative and the classical
dance affects discussed below.

AN A A
When trained in certain modes of dance, opera, and theater, where
verisimilitude plays a secondary role, screen actors bring to the cinema an
embodied habitus of nonnaturalistic performance. Japanese theater and film
actor Yoshi Oida reminisces how when he began to tour with Peter Brook’s
international theater company, Brook remarked of his Noh-, Kabuki-, and
Bunraku-trained body, “Your acting is too concentrated and strong for this
style of work.” Oida remarks in his memoir, “I realized that I was still
performing in accordance with the principles of No theatre where the
actor’s concentration must be extremely intense. But popular theatre
requires another approach.”35 In the Kathputli finale, when Vyjayanthimala
plays Pushpa “realistically” in front of the curtains at the start of the scene,
the emphasis is on the spoken word and on her face as a privileged
expressive organ, especially on her eyes, from which issue forth tears, those
exalted realist indices of grief. The rest of her body is in darkness and cut
out of frame by the close-up. When Vyjayanthimala enacts Pushpa’s
emotions through dance, on the other hand, the physicality of the Kathakali
style distributes expressive power across her entire body. She employs
highly mannered codes of motion with gestures of the hands (hasta mudras)
as well as head, torso, and limb movements, producing what Indian
aesthetic treatises refer to as angikabhinaya (gesture-language), “exposition
by means of the gestures of the body and limbs.”36 Rather than a close-up
of individualized, realist tears, we are presented now with a startling
extreme-close-up of Pushpa’s eyeballs moving from side to side and her
eyebrows lifting up and down. These stylized Kathakali eye movements are
aimed at producing the rasas or affects of raudra (anger), veera (courage),
bhayanaka (terror), and karuna (pathos). In Indian aesthetic theories of
performance articulated in ancient and medieval treatises like the Natya
Sastra (Theory of Drama/Dance) and the Abhinaya Darpana (The Mirror of
Gesture), rasa (quite literally, taste or flavor) refers to the unified emotional
core of a play, produced through an interplay of the nine classic moods of
Indian performance: anger, courage, terror, pathos, desire, amusement,
revulsion, amazement, and peace.37 The pleasures of performance, I
suggest, might be reconfigured if we turn to Indian theories of abhinaya or
expression to think differently about acting, and in the process, trace longer
histories of acting, not just to the theater but to other performative modes
like dancing and singing.38
“Every time an actor performs, he or she implicitly enacts a “theory” of
acting,” observes Phillip Zarrilli, an actor-director trained in
Kalarippayattu, a South Indian martial art form, elaborating that this theory
is informed by “culture-specific assumptions about the body-mind
relationship, the nature of the ‘self,’ emotions/feelings, and performance
context … locatable within a set of historical, socio-cultural, and
aesthetic/dramaturgical circumstances.”39 Baron and Carnicke turn to one
such aesthetic tradition, Rudolf Laban’s structural approach, which analyzes
movement in relation to space, time, weight, and flow, to unpack the spatial
and temporal dimensions of acting in Hollywood. Using Laban’s taxonomy,
they examine energy flows, the direction and speed of movements, degrees
of resistance and control, and sudden and sustained gestures to conclude
that “characterizations are crafted through the specific spatial design of
movements and gestures, their place of origination in the body, and the
energy quality in actors’ movements, gestures, and expressions.”40 In her
detailed account of training practices in Indian classical dance, scholar-
practitioner Ananya Chatterjea notes, “the [Indian] dancer never learns to
think in terms of muscularity, weight shift, energy manipulation, or finding
her or his center,” identifying these as European, Western concepts.41
Instead, these principles are imbibed implicitly through an articulation of
the principles of angasuddhi (purity of limb) and saustabha (purity of body
line), among others, as delineated in the Natya Sastra (Theory of
Drama/Dance). While the adoption of this textual tradition has had a
complicated and problematic history through the colonial and post-colonial
period in the Indian subcontinent, I refer to these texts here for their
hermeneutic potential regarding certain lineages of performance, especially
in the case of film actors like Vyjayanthimala, Waheeda Rehman, Padmini
and others who were trained in recently-textualized classical Indian dance
forms, and who drew from these texts their own articulations of their
performance practice.42 Due to their training in this textualized tradition,
these dancer-actresses contributed to the development of particular styles of
dance and acting that were quite different from both traditional dancers
from an earlier period and earlier film and theater actresses.
An encyclopedic treatise on performative modes in ancient Sanskrit
theater, which included spoken parts, music, and dance, the Natya Sastra
examines in detail aspects related to acting, singing, and dancing, including
the ideal playhouse, metrics, diction, intonation, character types, costumes
and make-up, the representation of sentiments and emotions, the
movements of every limb, conventions of time and place, and even canons
of criticism and assessment.43 In the Natya Sastra and the Abhinaya
Darpana, the word natya refers to acting and dancing, since both
performative modes were combined in Sanskrit theater. The art historian A.
K. Coomaraswamy, who translated the Abhinaya Darpana into English in
1917, notes in his introduction that while this treatise’s principles may no
longer apply entirely to contemporary, hybrid Indian theater, “authentic
Indian acting … survives in the ‘Nautch’, a form of dance which sets forth a
given theme by means of song and gesture combined, [which] together with
the sister art of music, must be regarded as representing the most perfect
form of old Indian practical aesthetic culture now surviving.”44
Bharatanatyam and other dance forms canonized as classical by bourgeois
nationalist reformers were gentrified versions of this very nautch form,
which provides a vital genealogy for dance and performance in popular
Indian cinema. Without essentializing these older performative traditions as
fixed and unchanging, we may treat these principles of dance and theater
performance as providing clues and traces that help retrieve cultural and
social attitudes to performance and acting.
According to the Abhinaya Darpana, the actor’s means of expression
(abhinaya) include three kinds of gesture: angika (bodily), vacika (vocal),
and aharya (costume).45 The text’s elucidation of bodily gestures is
extraordinarily detailed, including movements of major, minor, and
subsidiary limbs, ranging from the head, torso, shoulders, back to armpits,
shoulder blades, calves, eyelids, nostrils, lower lip, chin, teeth, and so on.
Additionally, the text outlines the ten aspects of “the Inner Life of the
Danseuse”: swiftness, composure, symmetry, versatility, glances, ease,
intelligence, confidence, speech, and song.46 The Natya Sastra also
articulates a dizzying variety of movements and expressions constructed
through various body units. It details as many as eighty face movements,
thirty-six kinds of glances, twenty-eight single hand gestures, twenty-four
combined hand gestures, and so forth.47 This profusion of detailed bodily
gestures and comportments (a mere fraction of those included in the
treatises) emphasizes how these performance aesthetics are fundamentally
undergirded by a physiognomic, corporeal logic.48
Taking my cue from this elaborate lexicon of classical dance movements,
I have elsewhere deconstructed the dancing female body in Hindi cinema
into three broad expressive fields—the face, the torso, and the limbs.49 Each
of these “body zones” is capable of a variety of addresses depending on the
deployment of their constituent parts and the social connotations of those
gestural articulations. This body-centered aesthetic is crucial for analyzing
the ways in which the performing body is constructed in various traditions
and industries, and the relationship of film performance to other corporeal
practices. Vyjayanthimala marshals the language of this dance training in
describing her own experience with film acting: “It was my dance that lifted
me and propelled me to reach the top. There were no dramatics; I never had
any training in theater … Dance has been the most crucial component in my
evolving as an actress. Dancing is so much of bhava (mood) and abhinaya
(expression of the emotion).”50 Another accomplished Bharatanatyam-
trained dancer-actress of the 1950s and 1960s, Waheeda Rehman, was
renowned for her emotive abilities, which she ascribes to her training in
abhinaya. She recalls the director, Guru Dutt’s comment on her nuanced
performance in a song in his film, Pyaasa (Thirst, 1957): “She did the song
well because she is a dancer. She knows how to give silent expressions.”51
The Abhinaya Darpana charts the “course of the dance” (natya-krama)
thus:
The song should be sustained in the throat; its meaning must be shown by the hands; the
mood (bhava) must be shown by the glances; rhythm (tala) is marked by the feet. For
wherever the hand moves, there the glances follow; where the glances go, the mind follows;
where the mind goes, the mood follows; where the mood goes, there is the flavour (rasa).52

This delineation of the production of affect (also described as

sāttvikabhāvas (psychophysical responses) in the Natya Sastra) through a
series of physical actions is at the heart of the corporeally grounded
conventions of performance and reception that inform, however
tangentially, classical-dance-trained actors in Indian cinema. When dancer-
actors bring to film these conventions of representation from codified styles
of dance, they deeply alter the melodramatic-realist mode of acting in
popular film and indeed the very structuring of the film’s narrative content
and affective architecture. Thus, when Vyjayanthimala is chosen to play an
actress-in-the-making in Kathputli, without a doubt, she will express the
key emotions of the character through her abhinaya-centered dance. This
has implications for the portrayal of characters, for the impersonation of
other bodies by the actor, as a brief examination of the concept of rasa will
make clear.
The Natya Sastra describes rasa as the unified emotional core of a given
scene and of the play as a whole, which arises when the various formal
components of the drama are successfully conjoined in performance.53 The
treatise lists the eight rasas that can be communicated in performance—
desire, amusement, grief, anger, determination, fear, revulsion, and
amazement. Rasa theory here and in other treatises on Indian aesthetics
maps complex phenomenological processes for both the performer and the
spectator. Coomaraswamy notes in his introduction to the Abhinaya
Darpana, “the perfect actor has the same complete and calm command of
gesture that the puppet showman has over the movements of his puppets;
the exhibition of his art is altogether independent of his own emotional
condition, and if he is moved by what he represents, he is moved as a
spectator, and not as an actor.”54 The element of aesthetic distance between
the performer and the stylized performance of emotions is central to many
forms of Indian classical dance. In an essay on abhinaya and rasa, Sudha
Reghunathan notes of the dancer, “The moment she is swayed by the
emotion which she seeks to represent, stylistically, rasa slips away…. This
is where, it seems to me, dance stands apart from drama; whereas an actor’s
aim is to step into the role he seeks to play, the dancer does not. For, her
forte is the ability to relate emotions of the subtlest shades, impersonally.”55
This performance aesthetic, quite the opposite of Stanislavskian method
acting, for instance, is grounded in the metaphysical imperative to produce
a universal rather than individual portrayal of a particular emotion.
Like the puppet master mentioned in the Abhinaya Darpana,
Vyjayanthimala mobilizes in the Kathputli climax the multiple roles of
narrator and performer, generating the rasas of grief and anger at the
suffering of working women, of female artists, performers, and mothers,
with her dance vocabulary rendering this as an expression of collective
rather than individuated social subjection. Through the use of codified
dance gestures, dancer-actresses like Vyjayanthimala are able to expand the
affective force of their performance beyond the realm of the particular
cinematic character they are playing and become instead a nayika, an
archetypal heroine who depicts a mythic, universal rasa through a given set
of mudras (gestures). “The art in abhinaya,” explains dance scholar Uttara
Asha Coorlawala, “is the art of filling in details and shades of
characterization which imbue the archetypal images with living
multidimensional presence.”56 Their firm rootedness in the philosophical
and aesthetic traditions of dance helps explain why trained dancer-actresses
(including other Hindi film actors like Sadhona Bose, Waheeda Rehman,
Padmini, Madhuri Dixit, Sridevi, etc.) perforce have a different
performative repertoire than actors who do not dance or are not trained in
dance. This opens up the assessment of acting beyond the criteria of
naturalism and realism (employed by many Hindi film critics) to entirely
different approaches to acting and embodying characters and their
emotions. While initially dismissed as a not very skilled actor until she
learns the codes of Hindi cinema’s melodramatic realism, Vyjayanthimala,
through her dance-trained body, suffused with the knowledge of expressive
abhinaya, conveys quite literally a world of feeling drawn simultaneously
from contemporary and older lineages of representing experience.
Against the “naturalization of gesture” that the verisimilar code initiated,
Lesley Stern celebrates histrionic texts and performers, films and actors that
delight in the exhibition of virtuosity.57 Tracing histrionic performances to
earlier traditions that used “stylised conventional gestures with a limited
lexicon of pre-established meanings” and histrionic cinema to encounters
with theater and opera,58 she advocates the construction of genealogies that
can help us think of performance “outside the tyrannical and unimaginative
binary of identification vs. alienation.”59 Vyjayanthimala and other dancer-
actors bring to popular Indian cinema the codified gestures of classical
dance forms they trained in, which infuses their performance and entire
films with this histrionic energy, fissuring attempts at performance and
narrative cohesion in the films. While method actors draw upon their own
memories and experiences in an attempt to conflate actor and character,
dancer-actresses like Vyjayanthimala draw upon the folding of their dance-
trained Prepersonal bodies and actorly Personal bodies to combine multiple
performance modes that call attention not to some inner essence of the actor
but to corporeally grounded processes of training and rehearsal. A
combination of rasa-based and melodramatic-realist acting produces a deep
reflexivity in the performance, where Vyjayanthimala plays the character
but also comments on her situation through a codified performance register
that maps individual characters onto the gestural repertoires of archetypal
nayikas.

T M B V
The gestural systems of many Indian classical dance forms enable the
dancer to assume different roles, so that a “whole range of impersonal
human situations and experiences [is] expressed through gestures.”60 A
single dancer may essay, in the same performance, the role of the
mischievous baby god, Krishna and his mother Yashoda, as well as the
young, flirtatious Krishna and his lover, Radha. The same dancer may also
delineate through hand, eye, and other bodily gestures the entire locale in
which a scene unfolds, such as the lapping of waves in a lake, the swaying
of plants on its bank, blooming lotuses in the lake, and so on. Describing
the renowned Odissi dancer Kelucharan Mahapatra’s enactment of the role
of Krishna through gestures of flute-playing and then his impersonation of
Radha, through gestural descriptions of her breasts, Coorlawala notes, “the
same single performer represents empowerment and seduction, religion and
sensuality, theatrical artifice and human emotions, male and female,
dominant and subordinate positions.”61 Actors trained in dance
fundamentally alter the representational logics of popular Hindi cinema by
bringing to it this multiplication of personas through their ability to
gesturally embody manifold singularities. In each of her “dance films” in
the 1950s, Vyjayanthimala plays multiple dancing roles, often dressed in
drag to play both male and female parts.62 Chatterjea remarks that classical
dance training in abhinaya is complex: “one must learn, not just to depict
male and female roles, but to differentiate between typically male and
female embodiments of the same mood.”63 In addition to expressing
gendered emotional registers, the classical dancer also trains in nritta
(rhythmic dance movements not accompanied by sung lyrics or a narrative)
to gesturally capture gendered physical comportments including, tandava,
the male movement style, which is strong and warrior-like, and lasya, the
female movement style, gentle and soft.64 “Perhaps that is why acting came
naturally to me,” Vyjayanthimala recalls, “for in my solo Bharatanatyam
performances I portrayed different characters in quick succession. So, I did
not have any problem emoting.”65
In a figuration that would become typical of her production numbers
throughout her career, in “Mere watan se accha koi watan nahi hai”
(“There is no country better than mine in the world”) from Ladki (Girl, M.
V. Raman, 1953), the seventeen-year-old Vyjayanthimala’s dancing body
proliferates in multiple roles on stage. She plays a male drummer and a
female dancer from North-East India performing alongside each other (fig.
19.2), dancing women from different parts of the country, not to mention
the song includes multiple superimpositions of her dancing figure and facial
gestures.66
The recurrent multiplication suffuses the screen with the gestural excess
of the dancer-actress’s body. Baron and Carnicke note that
“characterizations that require actors to play more than one role especially
highlight the skill behind the selection and combination of performance
choices within a single production.”67 When we move away from standard
(i.e., realist) criteria for acting, we come to appreciate the intensive labor
involved in dancer-actors rehearsing dance moves over days (often
requiring significantly more time than rehearsals for narrative segments),
and collaborating with choreographers, musicians, directors,
cinematographers, costume designers, and so on, to construct the affective
architecture of dance numbers and film narratives. Considering that
“performances that lay bare an actor’s physical control can illuminate the
discipline that is the foundation of acting,”68 dancer-actors who train to
produce fully expressive bodies reveal the corporeal foundations of film
acting. They routinely “play more than one role” on account of the dual
registers of performance their dancing bodies engender, balancing more
realist narrative segments that call for “transparent” acting, where
movements are subsumed under character behavior and dazzling production
numbers in which their opacity as dancing stars becomes evident because of
the extraordinary skill on display, produced through rigorous physical
training.69 Vyjayanthimala’s description of her daily routine reveals the
labor involved in working in the film industry while continuing her classical
dance training:
Figure 19.2. Vyjayanthimala as male and female performers Ladki (Girl, M. V. Raman, 1953).

I would leave home around nine in the morning and be at the studios till six-seven in the
evening. When I returned home, I’d barely have time for a hot drink, before I began my
dance practice … the practice went on past midnight and Yagamma [Vyjayanthimala’s
grandmother] would put rosewater into my hands to splash on my face, so that I wouldn’t
fall asleep. I would even practice in my make-up room in-between shots.70

In another dance number from the same film, Ladki, “Na maro najariya
ke baan,” (“Don’t pierce me with your loving eyes”), Vyjayanthimala
performs the “dancing double role” of the celestial lovers, Radha and
Krishna. As she plays both the coy Radha and the amorous Krishna, her
remarkable gestural repertoire is amplified once again across the screen.
These instances of masquerade, all too common in her production numbers,
not only put on display her versatility but also evacuate her dance numbers
of male presence, producing radically altered figurations, in turn, of female
protagonists in her films—as women who do not necessarily sing and dance
to convey internal emotions centered around heterosexual romance but as
trained, professional dancers flaunting their magnificent artistry.71
Significantly, in later “serious” films that highlight her “acting” abilities
over her trademark, flamboyant dance numbers, Vyjayanthimala’s authorial
control over the narrative is diminished, as her performative repertoire is
subsumed and domesticated into the conventional trajectory of male-
centered narratives.72 She is never quite as luminously in charge once she
transitions from the “histrionics” of the dance film to the verisimilar register
of the social melodrama, where the ecstatic excess of her dancing body is
circumscribed by narratives driven by the hero’s goals.
Rather than take away from screen performance, dance supplements,
augments, and enriches film acting, foregrounding the mechanics of
embodiment and impersonation. Theorizing acting through dancing bodies
illuminates how certain movement vocabularies engender specific types of
cinematic narratives, genres, and industries. As indicated earlier, this may
be expanded to a broader corporeal theory of screen performance that
attends to movement vocabularies, physical training, performers’ idiogests,
the shifting registers in bodily comportment when actors move through
different narrative segments, and the relationship of cinema to other
performance traditions. When Vyjayanthimala employs abhinaya to enact a
range of human and nonhuman subjectivities—rain, rivers, peacocks,
snakes, thunder, lightning, flowers, gods and goddesses, and persecuted
performing women like Pushpa in the opening example—her actor’s body
is imbued with the capacity to embody multiscalar modalities ranging from
personal experiences to cosmic inhabitations. Even as narrative exigencies
frame Pushpa as a puppet dancing to other people’s tunes, allegorizing
female subjection in a realist-melodramatic idiom, when this is articulated
through dance, what erupts out of the narrative frame is Vyjayanthimala’s
dexterous choreography of multiple performance modes. In the body of a
dancer-actress, the puppet turns into the adroit, commanding puppet master.
This is why—recalling our earlier dictum, “When I think of actors, I think
of their bodies”—when one thinks of Vyjayanthimala’s acting, there is no
way to not think of her gloriously dancing body.

A
I thank Scott Bukatman and Karla Oeler for their insights and feedback on
this chapter and for their shared love of studying acting. Some sections of
this chapter have appeared in Usha Iyer, Dancing Women: Choreographing
Corporeal Histories of Popular Hindi Cinema (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2020).

N
1. The dance number from Kathputli may be viewed here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=D7YItiFOdWI.
2. Kathakali is one of the eight canonized Indian classical dance forms. It is predominantly
performed by men whose face paint and costume indicate the mythic or epic characters they
represent.
3. Ashish Rajadhyaksha and Paul Willemen, Encyclopedia of Indian Cinema (London: British
Film Institute, 1999), 350.
4. Bharatanatyam was among the first dance forms to be canonized as “classical” by the Sangeet
Natak Akademi (the National Academy for Music, Dance and Drama) in the early 1950s, in
newly independent India. Through her film career and continuing to the present day,
Vyjayanthimala continued a parallel professional career in Bharatanatyam performance on
stage, winning prestigious awards and performing at high-profile concerts for dignitaries,
including Indian presidents and prime ministers, Queen Elizabeth II, and American president
Dwight Eisenhower.
5. Vyjayanthimala Bali and Jyoti Sabharwal, Bonding … A Memoir (New Delhi: Stellar, 2007),
77.
6. Ibid., 72.
7. Usha Iyer, “Dance Musicalization: Proposing a Choreomusicological Approach to Hindi Film
Song-and-Dance Sequences,” South Asian Popular Culture 15, no. 2–3 (2017): 134.
8. Pamela Robertson Wojcik, ed., Movie Acting, the Film Reader (London: Routledge, 2004), 9.
9. See Cynthia Baron and Sharon Marie Carnicke, Reframing Screen Performance (Detroit:
University of Michigan Press, 2008), 1; James Naremore, Acting in the Cinema (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1988), 62; Lesley Stern and George Kouvaros, eds., Falling for
You: Essays on Cinema and Performance (Champaign Urbana: University of Illinois Press,
1999), 4; Kyle Stevens and Murray Pomerance, eds., Close-Up: Great Cinematic
Performances Volume 1: America (Edinburgh, Scotland: Edinburgh University Press, 2018),
1–5; Aaron Taylor, ed., Theorizing Film Acting. Vol. 14 (London: Routledge, 2012), 1;
Virginia Wright Wexman, “Kinesics and Film Acting: Humphrey Bogart in The Maltese
Falcon and The Big Sleep,” Journal of Popular Film and Television 7, no. 1 (1978): 42;
Pamela Robertson Wojcik, ed., Movie Acting, the Film Reader (London: Routledge, 2004), 1–
2.
10. Kyle Stevens and Murray Pomerance suggest that this might partly explain why film scholars
have stayed away from analyzing acting. Stevens and Pomerance, Close-Up, 3.
11. Erin Brannigan, Dancefilm: Choreography and the Moving Image (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2011), 7.
12. Stern and Kouvaros, Falling for You, 26.
13. A movement-based analysis of acting is also immensely valuable in theorizing the particular
sensations of kinesthetic spectatorship we become alert to when we examine how the kinesics
of performance registers on our spectatorial bodies. A focus on the mobility of the onscreen
body and the “moved” spectator can illuminate the cinematic production of what dance scholar
Susan Foster refers to as kinesthetic empathy, where perception is grounded not just in the eye
but in the entire body. See Susan Foster, Choreographing Empathy: Kinesthesia in
Performance (London: Routledge, 2010).
14. Usha Iyer, Dancing Women: Choreographing Corporeal Histories of Popular Hindi Cinema
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2020).
15. “Vyjayanthimala,” Star and Style (June 15, 1966): 5.
16. Wojcik, Movie Acting, 10.
17. Sally Ann Ness, Body, Movement, and Culture: Kinesthetic and Visual Symbolism in a
Philippine Community (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992), 6.
18. Baron and Carnicke, Reframing Screen Performance, 184.
19. Ibid., 182–83.
20. Roberta Pearson, Eloquent Gestures: The Transformation of Performance Style in the Griffith
Biograph Films (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 21.
21. Ibid., 39.
22. Kyle Stevens, Mike Nichols: Sex, Language, and the Reinvention of Psychological Realism
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 149–53.
23. Ibid., 169.
24. Corey Creekmur, “Madhubala in Mughal-e-Azam,” in Close-Up: Great Cinematic
Performances Volume 2: International, ed. Kyle Stevens and Murray Pomerance (Edinburgh,
Scotland: Edinburgh University Press, 2018), 163.
25. Vivian Sobchack, “Being on the Screen: A Phenomenology of Cinematic Flesh, or the Actor’s
Four Bodies,” in Acting and Performance in Moving Image Culture. Bodies, Screens,
Renderings, ed. Jörg Sternagel, Deborah Levitt, and Dieter Mersch (Bielefeld, Germany:
Transcript Verlag, 2012), 429–45.
26. Ibid., 432. One might also refer here to similar phenomenological frameworks, such as
Merleau-Ponty’s “bodily motor-intentionality,” Annette Michelson’s “carnal knowledge,” and
Noël Carroll’s “bodily intelligence,” that posit the pre-reflective intelligence and purposiveness
behind bodily actions.
27. Sobchack, “Being on the Screen,” 433.
28. Ibid., 436.
29. Ibid., 438–39.
30. Brannigan, Dancefilm, 142.
31. Usha Iyer, “Bringing Bharatanatyam to Bombay Cinema—Vyjayanthimala and Tamil-Hindi
Film Industry Interactions in the 1950s,” in Industrial Networks and Cinemas of India:
Shooting Stars, Shifting Geographies, and Multiplying Media, ed. Madhuja Mukherjee and
Monika Mehta (London: Routledge, 2020).
32. Naremore, Acting in the Cinema, 51.
33. Brannigan, Dancefilm, 154.
34. Ibid., 158.
35. Yoshi Oida and Lorna Marshall, An Actor Adrift (London: Methuen, 1992), 72.
36. Nandikesvara, The Mirror of Gesture: Being the Abhinaya Darpana of Nandikesvara
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1917), 17. Nandikesvara’s late Sanskrit text is
dated between the tenth and thirteenth centuries CE.
37. The Natya Sastra is dated between 200 BCE and 200 CE. Authorship is attributed to the sage
Bharata, but scholars consider it to be a synthesis of collective knowledge of production
practices current at the time.
38. Wojcik calls for “situating the actor in larger acting traditions.” Movie Acting, 7.
39. Phillip B. Zarrilli, ed., Acting (Re)considered: A Theoretical and Practical Guide (London:
Routledge, 2005), 3.
40. Baron and Carnicke, Reframing Screen Performance, 207.
41. Ananya Chatterjea, “Training in Indian Classical Dance: A Case Study,” Asian Theatre Journal
13 (1996): 75.
42. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, social reformers belonging to the Hindu
bourgeoisie turned to ancient and medieval Sanskrit texts like the Natya Sastra to project an
unbroken tradition of “respectable” national cultural forms, a process referred to as
“Sanskritization” by later scholars. For more on the anti-nautch movement, the marginalization
of traditional performers like tawaifs and devadasis, and the resuscitation of texts like the
Natya Sastra and Abhinaya Darpana, see Davesh Soneji, Unfinished Gestures: Devadasis,
Memory, and Modernity in South India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), and
Avanti Meduri, “Woman, Nation, Representation: The Sutured History of the Devadasi and
Her Dance” (PhD diss., New York University, 1996). By the 1940s and 1950s, these treatises
were explicitly cited in the dance training of middle- and upper-class women, including
dancer-actresses like Vyjayanthimala, Waheeda Rehman, and so on, and hence their relevance
here.
43. Reginald Massey, “From Bharata to the Cinema: A Study in Unity and Continuity,” ARIEL: A
Review of International English Literature 23, no. 1 (1992): 63.
44. Ananda Coomaraswamy, “Introduction,” in The Mirror of Gesture: Being the Abhinaya
Darpana of Nandikesvara (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1917), 7.
45. Nandikesvara, Abhinaya Darpana, 13.
46. Ibid., 16–17.
47. Mohan Khokar, Traditions of Indian Classical Dance (Delhi: Clarion Books, 1984), 61.
48. Zarrilli remarks of his training in South Asian Kalaripayattu and East Asian martial arts,
“unlike early Western theories of acting such as Aristotle’s Poetics which is primarily
concerned with theories of mimesis and representation, and therefore pays no attention to
issues of embodiment, training, or technique, many non-western theories of acting place
embodiment and awareness at the center of their description or examination of acting
techniques and process.” Acting (Re)considered, 86.
49. Iyer, Dancing Women.
50. Bali and Sabharwal, Bonding, 45.
51. Nasreen Munni Kabir, Conversations with Waheeda Rehman (New Delhi: Penguin Books
India, 2014), 38.
52. Nandikesvara, Abhinaya Darpana, 17.
53. Sheldon Pollock, A Rasa Reader: Classical Indian Aesthetics (New York: Columbia University
Press, 2016), 8.
54. Coomaraswamy, “Introduction,” 4.
55. Sudha Reghunathan, “Abhinaya, the Path to Rasa,” Journal of the Sangeet Natak Akademi 24
(1972): 47.
56. Uttara Asha Coorlawala, “Darshan and Abhinaya: An Alternative to the Male Gaze,” Dance
Research Journal 28, no. 1 (1996): 25.
57. Lesley Stern, “Acting Out of Character: The King of Comedy as a Histrionic Text,” in Stern and
Kouvaros, Falling for You, 282.
58. Ibid., 282–83.
59. Ibid., 292.
60. Kapila Vatsyayan, Indian Classical Dance (New Delhi: Publications Division, Ministry of
Information and Broadcasting, Government of India, 1974), 18.
61. Coorlawala, “Darshan and Abhinaya,” 24.
62. These include Bahar (M. V. Raman, 1951), Ladki (M. V. Raman, 1953), Pehli Jhalak (M. V.
Raman, 1955), New Delhi (Mohan Segal, 1956), Kathputli, and Aasha (M. V. Raman, 1957).
63. Chatterjea, “Training in Indian Classical Dance,” 75.
64. Ibid., 74.
65. Bali and Sabharwal, Bonding, 45.
66. See Iyer, “Bringing Bharatanatyam to Bombay Cinema,” where I argue that her acting body is
also doubled across two different film industries, located in Madras (South India) and Bombay
(Western India), each of which had developed its own performance codes.
67. Baron and Carnicke, Reframing Screen Performance, 185.
68. Ibid., 185.
69. See Usha Iyer, “Stardom Ke Peeche Kya Hai?/What Is behind the Stardom? Madhuri Dixit, the
Production Number, and the Construction of the Female Star Text in 1990s Hindi Cinema,”
Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies 30, no. 3 (2015): 132–36 for a
discussion of narrative numbers and production numbers, and the performance codes involved
in each.
70. Bali and Sabharwal, Bondin—A Memoir, 67.
71. This doubling of dance performance is in evidence in the case of other contemporary dancer-
actresses like Sandhya and Padmini as well. In the production number “Arre ja re hat natkhat”
(“Go away, you mischief-maker”) celebrating the colorful festival of Holi in Navrang (Nine
Colors, V. Shantaram, 1959), Sandhya performs a “dancing double role” presenting a female
dancer frontally with a male dancer’s costume on her back, literally turning back and forth
between the two personas. The Bharatanatyam-trained Padmini plays the male and female
lovers in “Piya milan ko chali radhika” (“Radhika goes to meet her lover”) from Payal (Joseph
Thaliath Jr., 1957), both sequences demonstrating the dancer-actresses’ facility with
incarnating different roles.
72. Some of these films include Sadhna (B. R. Chopra, 1958), Gunga Jumna (Nitin Bose, 1962),
and Sangam (Union, Raj Kapoor, 1965) for which she won major acting awards.
 CHAPTER 20

DOCUMENTARY LISTENING
HABITS
From Voice to Audibility

POOJA RANGAN

THIS chapter stages a conversation between documentary studies and

auditory cultural studies, narrowing in on a term that has been a central if
elusive force in shaping the field of documentary: “voice.” I argue that
documentary emerges from a powerful metaphysical tradition from which
we have inherited our assumptions about voice, including its associations
with agency, presence, and rationality—and the conviction that the
embodied, material aspects of voice are disruptive to the agency of the
speaking subject. The chapter poses the following questions: if “voice”
signals or indexes the human, then how do the documentary conventions of
“having a voice” distribute and calibrate what counts as human in the sonic
domain? How do documentary practices of representing the spoken word
respond to and shape conditions of audibility that not only premediate acts
of voicing, but also shape forms of attention that evaluate and hierarchize
these acts? How, then, do these practices and conventions manufacture,
codify, and regulate differences of race, gender, bodily ability, and other
socially constructed sonic identities through the ear?
I answer these questions not through readings of specific films but by
reading the history of documentary studies as a series of explicit and
implicit attempts to theorize voice.1 Recent research in the field of auditory
cultural studies shifts our attention from questions of how documentary
films speak—or to what they “give voice”—to how they shape the
conditions of possibility of audibility. I draw on a number of terms to
rethink documentary parlance, including the “listening ear” (Jennifer Lynn
Stoever), “audit” (John Mowitt), and “listening habitus” (Lisbeth Lipari).2
Separately, and in conjunction, these terms raise methodological
provocations regarding documentary as a site of auditory interpellation—an
apparatus of audibility—that teaches us not only how to speak but how to
listen and what to listen for.
My main intervention is redefining the pervasive idea of the “voice of
documentary” as an audibility, a term I develop by adapting Gilles
Deleuze’s concept of “visibilities.”3 The concept of “documentary
audibilities” foregrounds how documentary’s vocal conventions are
implicated in the work of shaping forms of attention that have the capacity
both to reinforce and to undermine a logocentric view of the world. I wish
to grasp how documentary is involved in the training and humanization of
the ear, producing a “documentary listening habitus” that inhabits us as
audiences, and that we, in turn, embody, perform, and inflect when we
recognize the audible evidence of difference. I frame the documentary
listening habitus in terms of two divergent or polar habits of listening:
objective listening and embodied listening. These listening habits are
entangled with discriminatory auditory practices that extend beyond
documentary, including accent neutralization in the call center industry,
audism or the pathologization of hearing impairments, and forensic
listening in asylum cases. The concept of a documentary listening habitus
enables us to reckon with the far-reaching implications of documentary
audibilities with an eye—or ear—to our auditory futures.

T V D
Voice is an elusive but pervasive signifier in documentary studies. Thanks
to an early and influential essay by Bill Nichols, “voice,” rather than
“gaze,” has become the prevailing metaphor for a documentary film’s
unique worldview or social perspective. Nichols defines the “voice of
documentary” as “something narrower than style: that which conveys to us
a sense of a text’s social point of view, of how it is speaking to us and how
it is organizing the materials it is presenting to us.”4 But even as he
associates voice with speech, Nichols hastens to add: “ ‘voice’ is not
restricted to any one code or feature such as dialogue or spoken
commentary. Voice is perhaps akin to that intangible, moiré-like pattern
formed by the unique interaction of all a film’s codes, and it applies to all
modes of documentary.”5
Over the last three decades, scholars writing about wide-ranging
documentary conventions (classical vocal narration, interviews) and
approaches (wordless essay films, direct cinema) have adopted the “voice”
metaphor, while practitioners have engaged it to theorize their own
authorial address.6 Several of these scholars have commented on the
complex formal, ethical, and political concerns condensed into this slippery
signifier, pointing out that voice functions as a metaphor for the stylistic
expressivity of a documentary film even as it invokes the documentary ethic
of representing actual speaking subjects.7 Indeed, Nichols conflates the two,
stating that voice is “like style, but with an added sense of ethical and
political accountability.”8 However, few have probed the implications of
this slippage, or troubled Nichols’s conviction that evolutions in
documentary style that emphasize the self-conscious inclusion of multiple
voices (especially those of the “voiceless”) resolve the ethical burden of
representation. I turn now to some of the foundational theorizations of voice
in documentary, including Nichols’s varied uses of this term. My survey of
this terrain differs somewhat from those of my predecessors in that I
foreground approaches that challenge the fundamental humanism of the
voice narrative. The evolution of the documentary genre toward ever-more
inclusive forms, I argue, does not resolve the fundamental dilemma of what
happens to the materiality of speaking voices in the process of being
transformed into a signifying voice.
Nichols uses voice as a metaphor for the evolving stylistic modes of
documentary: the expository, poetic, observational, participatory, reflexive,
and performative modes.9 Nichols differentiates these modes by stylistic
features (expository implies voice-over; observational implies no
commentary; participatory implies interviews) that vary in terms of the
number (single vs. multiple), address (direct vs. indirect), presence
(embodied vs. disembodied), tone (didactic vs. self-questioning, explicit vs.
implied), and social position (powerful vs. powerless) of actual speaking
voices.10 Importantly, he traces a roughly chronological evolution from the
un-self-consciously univocal (films featuring expository “voice of God”
narration) to the self-consciously polyvocal (self-reflexive films that mix
observation with interviews, and voice-over with intertitles, foregrounding
their own mediation), arguing that each stylistic mode contests the
ideological limitations of the prior mode.11
Carl Plantinga has elaborated on the literary genealogy of Nichols’s voice
metaphor and also contributed greatly to its extension. He likens Nichols’s
account of the modes of documentary to the narratological theories of film
and literary critics like David Bordwell and Seymour Chatman.12 Nichols’s
proximity to this lineage becomes especially pronounced in his later work,
Representing Reality, where he shifts from the vocabulary of “voice” to
“argument,” writing that every documentary film expresses an argument
that represents an ideology and a rhetorical proposition about how the world
is.13 “Voice,” as Plantinga notes, is more capacious and non-evaluative than
“argument.” It accommodates those poetic, world-making dimensions of
documentary that exceed rhetorical argumentation.14 In apprehending voice
as the discursive materialization of the film’s ideological comportment,
overt or covert, toward what is represented, Plantinga sees voice first and
foremost in terms of narrational authority.15 Unlike Nichols, Plantinga
therefore distinguishes between modes of documentary based not on formal
or stylistic features but rather on the degree of narrational authority
assumed by the film.16
Plantinga thus usefully decouples the relational ethics of documentary
from particular stylistic conventions, allowing us to apprehend that the self-
conscious inclusion of marginalized voices does not necessarily resolve the
burden of representation. Despite Trinh T. Minh-ha’s extensive writings to
the effect, this remains an unpopular opinion in documentary studies,
perhaps owing to the long shadow cast by Nichols. Sarah Kessler has
recently attempted to remedy this consensus by pointing out the unexpected
affinities among Trinh and Nichols in their writings on ethnographic and
interview-based films that feature social actors speaking in their own voices
as opposed to being spoken about or observed. Kessler excellently
synthesizes these concerns using the framework of ventriloquism.
Documentary film, she writes, can be understood as a ventriloquial
operation in which claims to objectivity mask the film’s distortion of voices
that it claims to allow to “speak for themselves.”17 Whereas Trinh argues
that the vocal alterity of indigenous people enlisted to speak about their
lives is subordinated to scientific-humanistic commentary, Nichols argues
that filmmakers subordinate their own voice and perspective to those of
interview subjects whose discursive immediacy they exploit.18 Historically
disenfranchised or “voiceless” subjects thus frequently become puppets or
mouthpieces for the filmmaker, even as they appear to speak for
themselves. To be given voice, Kessler concludes, is therefore to be
objectified or evacuated of the very voice that transforms an object into a
speaking subject.19
The framework of ventriloquism is edifying because it upends the
humanist narrative of inclusion that dominates discussions of voice in
documentary studies (voicing turns objects into speaking subjects). Nichols
remains committed to this narrative in his recent book Speaking Truths with
Film, where he has revisited the voice metaphor. Here, he frames voice as a
humanizing process of becoming a speaking subject in conversation with
listening subjects who confirm and ratify the significance of those speech
acts. He argues that documentary’s interpellative address—its voice—
distinguishes it from the overseen and overheard world of fiction, and plays
a key role in constituting a shared world between speakers and listeners:
“Unexpectedly, someone calls out: ‘Hey, you!’ […] to be addressed by a
film—to sense that a film seeks to engage and speak to us about the world
we share—functions as a hallmark of documentary film.”20
This is another version of what Nichols has argued in his earlier writings:
despite differences in who speaks and how, and whether the film’s message
is conveyed through explicit or implicit means, all documentary films share
the common denominator of a distinctive voice. As Nichols now puts it,
what arrests our attention in documentary, what makes us turn around and
listen in response to its “Hey, you!,” is the implied presence of verbal
address, the sense of a voice speaking to us, even when we don’t hear
words. Following the antihumanist line of thinking that I have traced, we
can restate this as follows: the interpellative force of embodied utterances
makes a textual documentary voice palpable and sensible even as these
utterances sacrifice their materiality for audibility. Or, documentary voicing
involves transforming embodied utterances into a form that can be
perceived, recognized, or sensed as a voice. The metaphorical use of voice
to refer to that intangible but palpable something—that sense of a shared
world—obscures the fundamental question: who or what disappears when
we hear the voice of documentary?

D M
When it is posed in this way, the elusive place of voice in documentary
resonates with what scholars of auditory culture have argued is the fate of
voice in the Western metaphysical tradition, which is to disappear, or to lose
its materiality. Voice, Mladen Dolar writes, is often regarded as “the
material support of bringing about meaning, yet it does not contribute to it
itself … It [this material support] makes the utterance possible, but it
disappears in it, it goes up in smoke in the meaning being produced.”21 But
not all voices disappear equally. The Western metaphysical and linguistic
traditions have bequeathed us the ideas of voice as a guarantor of truth and
self-presence (hence the association of voicing with selfhood, subjectivity,
and agency), as well as the idea that the sonic, material aspects of voice are
secondary and disruptive to the sovereignty of the subject.22 Voice, in
metaphysical thinking, is conflated with a signifying, authorial voice, and in
linguistics with spoken words and their rhetorical arrangement. In contrast,
the embodied, paralinguistic dimensions of voice (accents, intonation,
timbre, affectations, vocal fry) and prelinguistic, postlinguistic, or aphonic
utterances (like sighs, muttering, echolalia, babbling, humming, laughter, or
stammers) are potential obstacles to “proper” voicing—unless they are
coded as nonmatter, that is, as a neutral, seemingly immaterial norm.23 To
hear a voice or respond to its hail (“Hey, you!”) is to participate in this
metaphysics by distinguishing between mere sound and a “significant
sound” produced by a human soul—which is Aristotle’s definition of
voice.24
The binary between a signifying voice and a vocality outside of
referential meaning has been elaborated in terms of various dividing lines:
that between human and animal, language and music, male and female,
able-bodied and disabled, white and Black, or neutral and “accented”
voices. Notably, in each of these instances, the second term in the binary is
framed as an “excessive but powerless” form of sonority that has to be
made sense of—made audible—by the authorial voice represented by the
first term in the binary, which represents the standard in relation to which
the second term is measured and judged.25 This normalizing dynamic can
be traced across a range of geopolitical sites. For instance, female
politicians and public figures (Margaret Thatcher is a famous example) are
routinely trained to lower their vocal pitch in order to sound more
authoritative and emotionally “neutral,” whereas men who talk in a higher
pitch risk being mocked as “effeminate, camp, or gay.”26 A “neutral accent”
is also the goal of accent neutralization programs in offshore call centers
that train migrants from smaller Indian towns to sound worldlier to
minimize aural and cultural dissonance for native-English-speaking
customers in the United States, UK, Canada, or Australia.27
The vocal distinctions that inform these practices are gendered, classed,
and ethnicized variants of what Jennifer Lynn Stoever calls the “sonic color
line”: “a socially constructed boundary that racially codes sonic phenomena
such as vocal timbre, accents, and musical tone.”28 The sonic color line
“produces, codes, and polices racial difference through the ear” and
“enables listeners to construct and discern racial identities based on voices,
sounds, and particular soundscapes.”29 Stoever introduces the term “the
listening ear” for the ideological filter shaped in relation to the sonic color
line. The listening ear is shaped by an aggregate of normative listening
practices that channel the polymodal diversity of embodied listening
practices into a narrow corridor of “correct” or “reasonable” responses. An
example might be the way that popular Black musical genres like hip-hop
become essentialized and racialized bearers of connotations such as crime
or noise pollution, or, to cite a different historical aspect of Stoever’s
research, the way the singing styles of white female American opera singers
in the nineteenth century were believed to embody an idealized “feminine
range,” while those of their Black female counterparts were associated with
masculinity and hypersexuality.30 Stoever additionally notes that the kinds
of embodied listening practices filtered out by the listening ear include a
wide spectrum of D/deaf listening practices.31
 Effectively, the listening ear shapes an “order of sounds” and regimes of
listening, training audiences to discern socially constructed hierarchies—of
species, race, gender, class, bodily ability, and so on—through the ear, and
normalizing auditory standards associated with able-bodied, white,
Anglophone, elite, cisgender, heterosexual masculinity.32 John Mowitt has,
building on a psychoanalytic theoretical lineage, developed a similar
concept: audit. “Audit” is an analogue of “gaze” in the sonic domain that
roughly designates “that which exceeds and conditions hearing and
organizes the field of the audible.”33 Mowitt describes audit as a “hearing,”
or a mode of perception that has a primordial tie with aesthetics, or “the
distribution of the sensible.”34 Essentially, what Mowitt means by this is
that (a) aesthetic forms introduce thoroughly ideological, if unconscious,
perceptual distinctions, hierarchies, or distributions into the conceptual
domain of sound; and (b) these aesthetic forms, and the perceptual
attunements that they cultivate in their audience, are both produced by and
productive of the discursive conditions of audibility in any given
conjuncture.
Documentary is an aesthetic form that is both produced by and actively
productive of the audit. Scholars like Stoever and Mowitt demonstrate how
metaphysical and metaphorical ideas about voice emerge from the aesthetic
practices—including documentary practices and conventions—through
which sonorous material is made audible as voice.35 Their contributions to
auditory cultural studies emphasize the co-constitution of bodies and
culture, listening practices, and auditory regimes.36 If we take these insights
seriously, we cannot continue to describe “the voice of documentary” as a
passive description of a film’s textual point of view, or as a representation
of a person or referent out there in the world. The voice of documentary is
an audibility.37

F V A
By positioning the voice of documentary as an audibility, I am drawing not
only on Stoever’s “listening ear” and Mowitt’s “audit” but also Gilles
Deleuze’s concept of “visibility.” Deleuze uses the term “visibility” to
highlight a conceptual maneuver in Michel Foucault’s readings of the
modernization of institutions of confinement like the asylum and the prison
in the eighteenth century.38 Deleuze notes that, per Foucault’s analysis,
these modern institutions functioned as discursive as well as architectural
forms that introduced new ways of seeing, displaying, and speaking about
madness and crime: namely, as visible enclosures that framed those inside
as confined (and thus, “deviant”) and those outside as free (and thus,
“normal”).
Instead of treating the “facts” of confinement and freedom (or deviation
and norm) made visible by these institutions as self-evidences, Foucault
focuses on them as products of discursive illumination, that is, as the
product rather than the referent of a visual apparatus. For Deleuze, Foucault
demonstrates a novel way of thinking about visibility that refuses naïve
empiricism. Foucault shows that the very form of visibility made possible
by these institutions keeps us from understanding how it is the purported
“outside”—those that are ostensibly free—who are actually confined,
through a process of epistemological refinement that excludes criminality
and illness from the domain of humanity, locates these qualities in
particular “deviant” bodies, and sets those bodies apart in an environment
of apparent enclosure. Accordingly, Deleuze proposes that visible facts, or
what he calls “visibilities,” are not preexisting forms, qualities, or
characteristics of an object that would show up under light. Instead,
visibilities are “forms of luminosity which are created by the light itself and
allow a thing or object to exist only as a flash, sparkle or shimmer.”39 In
other words, Deleuze is saying that facts become visible in their particular
and recognizable form only as a result of the discursive a priori that
structure our modes of visual attention and recognition; in this instance,
those discursive a priori represent an entangled and enmeshed social field as
an illusory architecture of norms and deviations.
Transposing the notion of visibilities to the auditory plane offers a useful
way of approaching “voice” as the product of refinements of sound and
listening that precede and include documentary. Voice is not a preexisting
form, quality, or characteristic of a subject that is out there waiting to be
heard. Voice is the product of sonic forms, linguistic traditions, and auditory
practices that render sounds and gestures socially meaningful or disposable
and call into being practices of listening that resonate with those meanings.
Both within and beyond the field of documentary, “having a voice” tends to
be understood as a sign of inclusion, a marker of humanity, and thus of
membership in a “shared world,” to borrow Nichols’s phrase. But if we
follow the Foucauldian logic, via Deleuze, these processes of shaping sound
as voice—of making audible—can be understood as a process not of
inclusion but of discursive exclusion, confinement, and discrimination.
These processes of shaping sound as voice precede documentary, but as an
audiovisual genre whose modes of interpellation lean toward the audial as
much as if not more so than the visual, documentary also participates in
these processes of auditory discrimination and discernment.
This line of thinking demands a new definition of the “voice of
documentary.” To recap, this phrase has been defined by Nichols as “that
which conveys to us a sense of a text’s social point of view, of how it is
speaking to us, and how it is organizing the materials it is presenting to
us.”40 Nichols has also written that “to be addressed by a film—to sense
that a film seeks to engage and speak to us about the world we share—
functions as a hallmark of documentary film.”41 I propose a new definition:
the voice of documentary is a specific form of audibility whose rhetorical
and aesthetic modes of sonic focus (a) fashion its contents in forms that can
be understood and apprehended as a voice, (b) shape a listening ear that
accommodates its call, and (c) materialize a mode of relation or resonance
—a “shared world”—between these felt but often unspoken forms of
speaking and listening. To understand what is at stake in this mode of
relation between the film’s speech and the form of listening that it
cultivates, we must attend not only to the metaphysical inheritance of
“having a voice” and “lending a (listening) ear” but also to the discursive
and architectural enclosures that have historically framed embodied modes
of voicing and listening, and in which documentary films participate and
intervene when they “seek to engage and speak to us about the world we
share.”

T D L H
Approaching voice as an audibility offers new insights into documentary’s
emphasis on vocal conventions such as voice-over, interview, conversation,
and testimony. It also shifts and adds specificity to the ground from which
we pose questions about these cinematic conventions and their ethical
implications. In place of (or in addition to) the question “who is speaking
for whom, how, and why?,” we can now ask: How do documentary’s vocal
conventions make embodied utterances audible, and with what effects?
How do these documentary audibilities reproduce—or conversely,
deconstruct—the entrenched socially constructed binaries of signifying
voices and vocalities outside referential meaning? What forms of listening
do these audibilities model, sanction, elevate, and endow with value, and
what forms of listening do they diminish, mark as deviant, or render
inadmissible?
The audibilities frame brings into focus what I see as a central tension
within as well as the potential of documentary: that between the ontological
diversity of sound opened up by the documentary encounter, and the
lingering imperative of objectivity that filters, adjusts, hierarchizes, and
humanizes this diversity as voice. As Michel Chion reminds us, sound in
cinema, unlike the image, has no frame or “auditory container” to stop it
from penetrating and enveloping the listening subject.42 Sound and listening
do not by themselves constitute an alternative metaphysics—indeed, sound
can be just as effective as a medium of segregation as vision—but they
nonetheless provide an opening onto a mode of relating to the world
founded on the possibility of leakage and permeability, in which the listener
and the perceived are “intersubjectively constituted in perception.”43
Documentary’s world-building capacities benefit from being thought
through in these terms. What auditory relations do documentary forms
cultivate when they expose audiences to unsettling sonic worlds, and
alternately, when they organize, hierarchize, and domesticate these worlds
as voice?
I would like to propose that these two tendencies correspond to listening
habits that represent divergent poles of the documentary listening habitus.
Lisbeth Lipari develops the term “listening habitus” as an extension of
Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of habitus, which describes “the constellation of
deeply embedded and experientially shaped patterns of thoughts, attitudes,
practices, tastes, preferences and so forth that each person acquires as a
result of socialization.”44 Building on this concept, Lipari proposes that “we
each develop ways of listening (or not) that are partly shaped by culture and
our social location within it, and partly by our personalities and particular
life experiences. This is what we might call our listening habitus, which is
based on a combination of cultural, social, and personal experiences.”45
Documentary audibilities similarly cultivate distinct listening habits in
audiences (habits we inhabit and which inhabit us) at the same time as
documentary forms begin to embody and emulate these listening habits. I
want to concentrate on two habits of listening: objective listening and
embodied listening. Contrary to popular beliefs regarding listening as a
deliberate channeling of attention, these practices of documentary listening
may largely be unconscious and automatic precisely because they are
habitual.46 Objective and embodied listening are not mutually exclusive or
exclusive of other modes of listening. Rather, we can regard them as
opposing tendencies whose combinations and mutations comprise a
significant spectrum of the documentary listening habitus.
Objective listening regards the listening subject as a disembodied
scientific instrument that can register the sounds of the world “objectively”
rather than as a situated, embodied presence that is shaped by and shaping
of those sonic events. Its persistence as a documentary attitude
demonstrates the continuing influence of objectivity, a nineteenth-century
scientific attitude that aspires to “neutral” knowledge that “bears no trace of
the knower.”47 Objective listening extracts sounds (including vocal
soundings) from the world in which they participate and regards them as
something dissectable, physical, and object-like. In its emphasis on
accuracy, efficiency, and denotation, objective listening shares some
common features with the “transmission” and “semiotic” models of
communication.48 Forensic listening is an example of objective listening in
action. Currently employed in the information technology security industry
as well as in border control, this radicalized form of legal listening
frequently results in wrongful deportations based on vocal discrimination.
Forensic phoneticians who employ accent analysis to determine asylum
entitlement (a practice employed across Western Europe and Australia)
regard the accents of asylum seekers like a birth certificate or passport
indicating geographic origin, disregarding the fact that the instability of an
accent bears witness to the migratory lifestyle common to those seeking
asylum and that every act of voicing is calibrated (or accentuated) to
resonate with its intended listener.49
Objective listening thus disavows an apprehension of communication as
both constituted by and constitutive of the material and discursive world. In
other words, it disavows how individuals’ listening practices are embodied,
shaped by “the totality of their experiences, historical context, and
physicality, as well as intersecting subject positions and particular
interactions with power.”50 Similar to the “constitutive” view of
communication, embodied listening is attentive to how the material and
ideological positioning of the listener is shaped in conjunction with the act
of listening.51 It is reflective of an attitude that recognizes that the reduction
of sound to a listening subject is as illusory as the objective pursuit of sound
without a listener.52 Haptic listening is an example of embodied listening.
Film scholar Irina Leimbacher uses this term to refer to a radically ethical
mode of listening that receives sonorous alterity without seeking to
understand or master it.53 Leimbacher differentiates haptic listening from
verbal- or referent-oriented listening. Whereas the latter privileges
“gleaning signification and knowledge from words,” the former prioritizes
an embodied attention to “a voice’s textural and emotional qualities.”54
Haptic listening thus “shifts our ethical relation with the recorded subject,
experienced not merely as a dispenser of information or opinion but also as
a sonorous being whose voice resounds in us.”55
Evidence, information, and facts were the historical purview of
documentary film—or so we are told. Documentary in the classical
Griersonian tradition aimed to “persuade viewers to invest belief, to
produce ‘visible evidence,’ and even induce social action.”56 The vocal
convention most commonly associated with this tradition—didactic
expository commentary, delivered in the third person from offscreen,
mockingly called the “Voice of God”—reflected a keenly historical
understanding of how the metaphysical attunement to an idealized speaking
voice as a bearer of reason could be combined with the detached
metaposition of seeing from above to produce the impression of objectivity
and unproblematic truth.57 The implied objectivity of classical vocal
commentary has since been exposed as a “mask” or “hysterical barrier”
designed to contain the multiple, uncertain, and debatable meanings of
recorded sounds and images.58 Much of the scholarship on trends in
documentary film narrates the history of the genre as an ongoing attempt to
breach this barrier and liberate these meanings, reflecting the continued
influence of Nichols’s account of the documentary genre’s progressive
evolution from univocal to polyvocal styles.59
Voice of God commentary keeps at bay the impermanence, instability,
and unboundedness implied by the phenomenality of sound and asserts a
visualist, object-centered philosophy bent on measurement, certainty, and
control—in short, a philosophy that aligns with and invites objective
listening.60 However, the propensity for objective listening persists in the
observational and participatory modes of documentary, despite their
reputation for exposing audiences to a comparatively greater tonal and
timbral range of vocal soundings. Documentary historians heralded the
emergence of direct cinema and cinema vérité in the 1960s (made possible
by the availability and accessibility of new sync-sound technologies) as a
beacon of documentary’s pleasure and promise: sonic fidelity. Indeed,
documentary sounds shot on location often lack vocal clarity, and ambient
sounds tend to compete with dialogue, resulting in a blurring of human,
mechanical, nonhuman, and unidentifiable sounds. Additionally, as Jeffrey
Ruoff asserts, “[c]haracters in documentary films typically demonstrate a
wider variety of accents, dialects, and speech patterns than those found in
fiction films … Part of the delight comes from hearing the material texture
and richness of unrehearsed speech, the grain of the voice.”61
Ruoff’s comments bring to mind a film such as Deaf (Frederick
Wiseman, 1986), which was shot at the School for the Deaf at the Alabama
Institute, and which features numerous lengthy sequences of students,
parents, and teachers communicating using sign language, lip reading, and
nonverbal gestures, as well as speech. The film is notable for Wiseman’s
decision not to caption or subtitle these sequences but to dwell in their
duration—a choice that requires audiences to inhabit the disorienting
experience of learning D/deaf communication. But this film is an outlier.
Documentaries conventionally seek to orient rather than to disorient their
audiences.62 Vocal inflections, colloquialisms, timbre, and accent—which
can chart desire and (un)belonging across differences of class, ethnicity,
geography, gender, ability, and sexuality, and trigger affective relationships
across these lines—also present challenges for the audience’s
understanding. While the chaos of sound recorded on location testifies to
the immediacy and authenticity of documentary, it is also at risk of
becoming dislocated from visual points of reference, moving instead into
the “non-referential realm of music.”63
Measures such as subtitling, dubbing, miking interviews using directional
microphones, synchronizing voices to bodies, and editing out silences and
phatic cues neutralize and contain sonic events that threaten to escape the
referential act. These conventions are the seam between expository and
vérité-style realism: both hold up a fantasmatic image of voice–body unity
that reassures the listener of their place in the ontological order of things.64
These conventional mechanisms accomplish a variety of compensatory
effects: they habituate documentary audiences to vococentrism, or an
attunement to (an idealized) voice as the apex of a soundscape; rehome
errant voices in bodies; lasso the ear to the gaze; and subordinate sonic
disturbance to verbal information, which functions thereafter as evidence of
a speaking and thinking being.65 As a case in point, we might consider the
use of subtitles to help viewers to comprehend the regional accents of Black
subjects from the Mississippi Delta in a film such as LaLee’s Kin (Albert
Maysles, Deborah Dickson, and Susan Froemke, 2001). In one sense these
subtitles are perfectly ordinary and unremarkable conventions, but their
conventionality also has the effect of standardizing the accented basis of
some voices and accentuating or marking the “otherness” of others, thus
enabling an unspoken yet palpable norm to emerge: a “neutral” textual
voice, and its counterpart, a “neutral” listening ear.66 “Language as voice
and music—grain, tone, inflections, pauses, silences, repetitions—goes
underground,” as Trinh puts it.67
We can thus grasp the form of audibility or voice “given” by these
vococentric documentary conventions as a container or trap that limits the
expressive range of vocalization and the world that such voicing can
summon into being. When the embodied materiality or sound of voices
disappears in documentary’s audiovisual hierarchy, the embodied range of
the documentary listening habitus is also confined and set apart, relegated
to a type of sonic penumbra. Without being overly conclusive or
prescriptive, I will end by gesturing toward recent attempts to evolve an
audiovisual and critical vocabulary around films that invite their listeners to
reckon with this sonic penumbra.68 Leimbacher has written on films that
magnify the tonal, timbral, and rhythmic qualities of the “sonorous voice”
as a testimonial presence. For instance, Bocas de Ceniza (“Mouths of Ash,”
Juan Manuel Echavaría, 2003–2004) employs “singing head” testimonies
by victims and witnesses of political violence in Colombia whose searing
and trembling vocal textures entreat listeners to attend to the “flow and
process of the ‘saying’ rather than focusing solely on the ‘said of
speech.’ ”69 Leimbacher, Kessler, Patrik Sjöberg and I have all written, in
different contexts, about films that encourage us to listen “ventriloquially”
to the mismatch between voices, the bodies from which they emerge, and
the vocalic bodies that they summon into being. Some of these films, like
Kurz Davor Ist Es Passiert (“It Happened Just Before,” Anja
Salomonowitz, 2007), Covers (Adie Russell, 2006–present) and Paris
Without a Sea (Mounira Al Solh, 2007–2008) employ the Brechtian strategy
of attaching voices to bodies to which they don’t “belong.”70
Mockumentaries like Waiting for Guffman (Christopher Guest, 1997)
feature a voice—in this case a “gay” voice—whose audible materiality
“tells on” its linguistic content, calling attention to the ventriloquial basis of
voices as well as the gendered and sexualized expectations that shape
assumptions regarding the unity of testimonial voices and bodies.71
I have argued in this chapter that documentary films emerge from and
shape forms of audibility that teach us how to listen and what to listen for. I
have also argued that far from being a neutral activity, listening is both
thoroughly political and habitual. In listening to documentary, we
participate in social processes that produce the very meaning and domain of
“voice”—processes that have historically excluded and marked embodied
speaking and listening practices as deviant. Documentary forms have
participated in and extended these dynamics, but they also have the capacity
to function as a training ground for embodied modes of listening. But
because of the long shadow cast by metaphysical and metaphorical ideas
about voice and listening, the embodied voice and ear often abide in
penumbral conditions that detract from their materiality and embodiment
and invite an objective, disembodied attention to their “message.”
Contending with these penumbral audibilities requires new audiovisual and
critical vocabularies. It is with this goal in mind that I propose moving
away from the vocabulary of the “voice of documentary” to that of
documentary audibilities and listening habits.

N
1. For readers interested in the textual applications of the concepts I introduce, I include
references to other essays and articles in which I focus on readings of specific films.
2. Jennifer Lynn Stoever, The Sonic Color Line: Race and the Cultural Politics of Listening (New
York: New York University Press, 2016), 13; John Mowitt, Sounds: The Ambient Humanities
(Oakland: University of California Press, 2015), 5–6; Lisbeth Lipari, Listening, Thinking,
Being: Toward an Ethics of Attunement (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press,
2014), 52.
3. Gilles Deleuze, Foucault (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 52.
4. Bill Nichols, “The Voice of Documentary,” Film Quarterly 36, no. 6 (1983): 18.
5. Ibid., 18.
6. See, for instance, Charles Wolfe, “Historicizing the ‘Voice of God’: The Place of Vocal
Narration in Classical Documentary,” Film History 9, no. 2 (1997): 150; Leger Grindon, “Q &
A: Poetics of the Documentary Film Interview,” The Velvet Light Trap 60 (2007): 8 (see the
section “Analytic Categories”); David Oscar Harvey, “The Limits of Vococentrism: Chris
Marker, Hans Richter, and the Essay Film,” SubStance 41, no. 2 (2012): 8–9; Marit Corneil,
“Seizing Novels from Life: Oral/Aural Self-Mythologizing in Pour la Suite du Monde,” in
Beyond the Visual: Sound and Image in Ethnographic and Documentary Film, ed. Gunnar
Iversen and Jan Ketil Simonsen (Højbjerg, Denmark: Intervention Press, 2010), 108–12; Trish
FitzSimons, “Braided Channels: A Genealogy of the Voice of Documentary,” Studies in
Documentary Film 3, no. 2 (2009): 132.
7. Voice in Nichols’s sense is “nonvococentric,” as Harvey notes, representing a generalized
rather than a narrowly vocal expressive subjectivity. Harvey, “The Limits of Vococentrism,” 8.
On one hand, Wolfe notes, “voice provides a master trope for theorizing the founding
principles of documentary narration and rhetoric, governing the formal construction of a work
of non-fiction across different stylistic registers. Wolfe, “Historicizing the ‘Voice of God,” 150.
Simultaneously, voice invokes the varied narrative possibilities and political stakes of
representing actual speaking subjects—an invocation that is suggestive, to quote Corneil, of a
“certain ‘agency.’ ” Corneil, “Seizing Novels from Life,” 109, also see 112.
8. See Bill Nichols, Introduction to Documentary, 2nd ed. (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 2010), 71. Nichols elaborates: “voice serves to give concrete embodiment to a
filmmaker’s engagement with the world. The voice of documentary testifies to the character of
the filmmaker … to how he acquits himself in the face of social reality, as much as to his
creative vision. Style takes on an ethical dimension” (71).
9. See Nichols, “The Voice of Documentary,” 17–18; Nichols, Introduction to Documentary, 67–
93. The poetic and performative modes are new additions included in the textbook but not the
1983 article.
10. See Nichols, Introduction to Documentary, 142–211.
11. Nichols, “The Voice of Documentary,” 18; Nichols, Introduction to Documentary, 67–93.
Although Nichols notes that each mode contests the ideological limitations of the prior mode,
 he also treats each mode as an expansive container for films that are un-self-conscious about
the reality-effects of their formal devices, as well as those that self-consciously experiment
with, or draw attention to, the ideological and ethical implications of the same. As a case in
point, Nichols includes within the participatory mode (interview-based films) realist films such
as The Woman’s Film (San Francisco Newsreel, 1971) as well as those that are essayistic, such
as Tarnation (Jonathan Caouette, 2003) and vérité-based, such as Chronicle of a Summer (Jean
Rouch and Edgar Morin, 1961). See Nichols, Introduction to Documentary, 151, 181–82.
12. Carl R. Plantinga, Rhetoric and Representation in Nonfiction Film (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1997), 99; also see Seymour Chatman, Story and Discourse: Narrative
Structure in Fiction and Film (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1978), 153. Chatman
describes point of view as an ideological orientation and voice as the overt means through
which that orientation is communicated.
13. With this shift, Nichols emphasizes those rhetorical dimensions of the documentary genre that
rely on an informing logic borne forth by words, whether explicitly, through verbal
commentary, or implicitly, through the evidentiary arrangement of images and sounds. If the
film proposes “This is so, isn’t it?” then “[t]he work of rhetoric is to move us to answer ‘Yes,
it’s so,’ tacitly—whereby a set of assumptions and an image of the world implant themselves,
available for our use as orientation and guide in the future—or overtly—whereby our own
conscious beliefs and purposes align themselves with those proposed for us.” See Bill Nichols,
Representing Reality (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 140.
14. As Michael Renov has pointed out, the poetic functions of documentary go beyond persuasion
and promotion, and analysis and interrogation (the argumentative tendencies Nichols stresses)
and include recording, revealing, preserving (elemental functions that can be traced back to the
earliest actualités), and expressing (which can be imagistic and sensorial, not merely verbal, as
in the case of experimental documentary films from 1920s city symphonies to contemporary
sensory ethnographies). See Michael Renov, “Toward a Poetics of Documentary,” in
Theorizing Documentary, ed. Michael Renov (New York: Routledge, 1993), 21; also see 25–
28 and 32–35.
15. Corneil argues that for Nichols, voice is “style plus,” whereas Plantinga understands voice in
documentary as “point of view plus.” Plantinga defines voice as nonfiction film’s way of taking
a point of view by selecting, ordering, and emphasizing audiovisual material: voice for him
encompasses the point of view of the camera, filmmaker, or characters, as well as other
rhetorical gestures and genre norms. See Corneil, “Seizing Novels from Life,” 112; also see
Plantinga, Rhetoric and Representation in Nonfiction Film, 86.
16. Plantinga’s “formal voice” includes films that tend to close down interpretive possibilities
whether through expository narration, such as The Times of Harvey Milk (Rob Epstein, 1984),
or through the argumentative editing of interviews, such as Roger and Me (Michael Moore,
1989). In contrast, the “open voice,” under which Plantinga files direct cinema, as well as
autobiographical films like those of Ross McElwee, affords audiences more interpretive space.
See Plantinga, Rhetoric and Representation in Nonfiction Film, 108–15.
17. Sarah Kessler, “Puppet Love: Documenting Ventriloquism in Nina Conti’s Her Master’s
Voice,” Camera Obscura 31, no. 2 (2016): 65.
18. See Trinh T. Minh-ha, When the Moon Waxes Red (New York: Routledge, 1991), 91; Nichols,
“The Voice of Documentary,” 24.
19. Kessler, “Puppet Love,” 69. For Kessler this is also evidence of the proximity of documentary
to fiction film, whose practices of synchronization and dubbing have been described by
feminist film critics like Mary Ann Doane and Kaja Silverman as gendered special effects
rather than a record of reality—effects by which voices are artificially tethered to bodies on-
 screen and off. See Kessler, “Puppet Love,” 66; also see Mary Ann Doane, “The Voice in
Cinema: The Articulation of Body and Space,” Yale French Studies (Cinema/Sound) (1980),
Article 60; Kaja Silverman, The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and
Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988).
20. Bill Nichols, Speaking Truths with Film: Evidence, Ethics, Politics in Documentary (Oakland:
University of California Press, 2016), 74.
21. See Mladen Dolar, A Voice and Nothing More (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 15.
22. See Amanda Weidman, “Voice,” in Keywords in Sound, ed. David Novak and Matt Sakakeeny
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 234.
23. See Dolar, Voice and Nothing More, 20; Weidman, “Voice,” 233.
24. See Frances Dyson, Sounding New Media: Immersion and Embodiment in the Arts and Culture
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 8. Dyson writes that voice is a metaphysical
filter for transforming sound into speech and utterance into language.
25. Weidman, “Voice,” 234.
26. See Anne Karpf, The Human Voice: The Story of a Remarkable Talent (London: Bloomsbury,
2006), 226–29; 180.
27. In his 2015 ethnography of call centers in Gurgaon, India, A. Aneesh explains how middle- and
lower-middle class migrants from smaller Indian towns are trained to perform a globalized
class identity by adopting Anglicized pseudonyms, “switching off” local and regional
linguistic habits, and imitating common features of English speech that persist, to degrees, in
the dominant accents associated with the four aforementioned locations. See A. Aneesh,
Neutral Accent: How Language, Labor, and Life Became Global (Durham: Duke University
Press, 2015), 6–8; 62.
28. Jennifer Lynn Stoever, The Sonic Color Line: Race and the Cultural Politics of Listening (New
York: New York University Press, 2016), 10; 11.
29. Ibid., 11.
30. Ibid., 13, 86.
31. Ibid., 15. These include sign language and “look-listening” (Cardinale: an interpretive mode
that correlates visual sensations to speech and noises), “multimodal listening” (Ceraso: a
synesthetic, full-bodied approach to interpreting vibratory sensations through the convergence
of sight, sound, and touch), and “electrical hearing” (Mills, Chorost: the experience of hearing
sounds imperfectly rendered through speech processors and cochlear implants). See Cara
Lynne Cardinale, “‘Through the Eyes’: Reading Deafened Gestures of Look-Listening in
Twentieth Century Narratives” (PhD diss., University of California, Riverside, 2010); Steph
Ceraso, “(Re)Educating the Senses: Multimodal Listening, Bodily Learning, and the
Composition of Sonic Experiences,” College English 77, no. 2 (2014): 102–23, esp. 103–4;
Mara Mills, “Deafness,” in Keywords in Sound, ed. David Novak and Matt Sakakeeny
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 53; also see Michael Chorost, Rebuilt: How
Becoming Part Computer Made Me More Human (New York: Houghton Mifflin), 2005.
32. François Bonnet, The Order of Sounds: A Sonorous Archipelago (Falmouth, MA: Urbanomic
Media, 2016).
33. John Mowitt, Sounds: The Ambient Humanities (Oakland: University of California Press,
2015), 5–6.
34. Ibid., 5; also see Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics (London: Bloomsbury Academic,
2006), 12.
35. I owe this formulation to Weidman. See Weidman, “Voice,” 236.
36. As Brian Kane puts it, the study of auditory culture shows that “the capacities of the body are
cultivated at the same time that cultures become embodied.” See Brian Kane, “Sound Studies
 without Auditory Culture: A Critique of the Ontological Turn,” Sound Studies 1, no. 1 (2015):
8.
37. The discussion below expands on my introduction to a special issue of Discourse on
documentary audibilities. See Pooja Rangan, “Audibilities: Voice and Listening in the
Penumbra of Documentary: An Introduction,” in “Documentary Audibilities,” ed. Pooja
Rangan and Genevieve Yue, special issue, Discourse 39, no. 3 (2017): 279–91.
38. See Deleuze, Foucault, 47–79.
39. Ibid., 52.
40. Nichols, “The Voice of Documentary,” 18.
41. Nichols, Speaking Truths with Film, 74.
42. Michel Chion, Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen, trans. Claudia Gorbman (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1994), 68.
43. Salomé Voegelin, Listening to Noise and Silence: Towards a Philosophy of Sound Art (New
York: Continuum, 2010), xii.
44. Lipari, Listening, Thinking, Being, 52.
45. Ibid., 52.
46. See Hillel Schwartz, “The Indefensible Ear: A History,” in The Auditory Culture Reader, ed.
Michael Bull and Les Back (New York: Berg, 2004), 488. I am building on Schwartz’s
research on the weakening distinction between hearing and listening, which have traditionally
been framed as opposites.
47. See Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, Objectivity (Brooklyn, NY: Zone Books, 2007), 17.
48. See Lipari, Listening, Thinking, Being, 10; 11. Summarizing a range of work in communication
studies, Lipari writes that in the transmission paradigm, the “accuracy of the message, the
efficiency of delivery, and the precision of reception are in the foreground while other much
more interesting and important aspects of communication are missed” (10), whereas in the
semiotic paradigm, signs are believed to have a one-to-one or denotative relationship with the
world, rather than a relationship of slippage and connotative play (11).
49. See Lawrence Abu Hamdan, “Aural Contract: Forensic Listening and the Reorganization of the
Listening Subject,” Cesura-Acceso 1 (2014): http://cesura-acceso.org/issues/aural-contract-
forensic-listening-and-the-reorganization-of-the-speaking-subject-lawrence-abu-hamdan/;
Lawrence Abu Hamdan, “The Politics of Listening,” Keynote Presentation:
http://lawrenceabuhamdan.com/#/talks/ (Accessed July 16, 2018). According to Hamdan, who
has traced its emergence to legislative shifts in criminal law in the UK and many other
European countries in the mid-1980s, forensic listening formalizes and amplifies an
evidentiary regime of listening that was always present in the law: it regards the testimonial
status of the voice as the objective truth of the witnessing body beyond the control of the
speaking subject, rather than as something messy, subjective, interpersonal, mutable,
relational, and context-specific.
50. Stoever, Sonic Color Line, 15. After writing this chapter, I discovered that D. Andy Rice uses
the term “embodied listening” in an essay on the films of Irene Lusztig, referring to Lusztig’s
technique of filming the performed reading of archived letters. D. Andy Rice, “The Sense of
Feminism Then and Now: Yours in Sisterhood (2018) and Embodied Listening in the Cinema
Praxis of Irene Lusztig,” Senses of Cinema 89 (December 2018):
http://sensesofcinema.com/2018/feature-articles/the-sense-of-feminism-then-and-now-yours-
in-sisterhood-2018-and-embodied-listening-in-the-cinema-praxis-of-irene-lusztig/. I hope to
discuss the resonances of these ideas at greater length in another venue.
51. In the constitutive view of communication, “communication not only signifies or represents,
but also constitutes ‘world’ between persons, creating correspondences not between language
 and a nonlinguistic world, but between speakers and listeners mutually co-constituted in a
linguistic world.” See Lipari, Listening, Thinking, Being, 11. Embodied listening, as I am
defining it (building on Stoever), overlaps with but exceeds this view in that I am not confining
communication to language.
52. By conceiving of listening in this way I do not mean to suggest that sounds are constructs that
can be reduced to a listening subject. Rather, to borrow a phrase from James Steintrager and
Rey Chow, I am acknowledging the “ineluctable noncoincidence of emission and reception
and the entanglement of subjectivity and objectivity” involved in the perception of sound.” See
James A. Steintrager, with Rey Chow, “Sound Objects: An Introduction,” in Sound Objects,
ed. James A. Steintrager and Rey Chow (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018), 12.
53. Irina Leimbacher, “Hearing Voice(s): Experiments with Documentary Listening,” Discourse
39, no. 3 (2017): 297.
54. Ibid., 298. Leimbacher evolves haptic listening as a close relative of “listening otherwise,”
Lipari’s term for an expansive mode of listening that asks us to “simply stay with something,”
and to “just be with it, experience it, appreciate it, without having to fit it into some tidy box of
‘understanding’ ” (297); also see Lipari, Listening, Thinking, Being, 136.
55. Leimbacher, “Hearing Voice(s),” 299.
56. Michael Renov, The Subject of Documentary (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
2004), xvii.
57. See Wolfe, “Historicizing the ‘Voice of God,’ ” 149; Bruzzi, New Documentary, 48–49. The
booming, stentorian “voice of God” commentary associated with The March of Time is often
used as a derogatory stereotype for documentary narration writ large, even though, as Wolfe
and Bruzzi have both noted, this variant was an outlier rather than a norm. As Bruzzi puts it,
“the domination of the narration covertly serves to emphasize the incontrovertibility of the
images by refusing to dispute and doubt what they depict.” Bruzzi, New Documentary, 52.
58. Ibid., 59.
59. This includes analyses of the observational preference in the 1960s for a “minimum of
commentary” in an effort to “let the event speak” (Bonitzer); the “polyvalence” of interview-
based films that feature a range of dissenting opinions (Grindon); and the proliferation of
videos in the 1990s featuring subjective vocal commentaries by women and other minoritized
subjects that employ strategies such as irony, unreliability, contradiction, or digression
(Armatage, Russell, Renov, Lebow). See Pascal Bonitzer, “The Silences of the Voice,”
Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Theory Reader, ed. Philip Rosen (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1986), 320–22; Leger Grindon, “Q&A: The Poetics of the
Documentary Film Interview,” The Velvet Light Trap 60 (2007): 8; Kay Armatage, “About to
Speak: The Woman’s Voice in Patricia Gruben’s Sifted Evidence,” in Take Two: A Tribute to
Film in Canada, ed. Seth Feldman (Toronto: Book Society of Canada, 1984), 298–303;
Catherine Russell, Experimental Ethnography: The Work of Film in the Age of Video (Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 1999), 275–314; Renov, Subject of Documentary; Alisa Lebow,
“Introduction,” in The Cinema of Me: The Self and Subjectivity in First Person Documentary,
ed. Alisa Lebow, 1–11 (New York: Wallflower, 2012).
60. See Frances Dyson, “The Genealogy of the Radio Voice,” in Radio/Rethink: Art, Sound, and
Transmission, ed. Daina Augaitis and Dan Lander (Alberta, Canada: Banff Center, 1994), 168–
69.
61. See Jeffrey K. Ruoff, “Conventions of Sound in Documentary,” in Sound Theory, Sound
Practice, ed. Rick Altman (New York: Routledge, 1992), 222–3. Ruoff contrasts the pleasures
of sonic fidelity in documentary with the narrative pleasures of heightened vocal intelligibility,
clarity, and comprehensibility in Hollywood-style fiction.
62. As Leimbacher notes, “[c]onventional nonfiction works tend to solicit an inquisitive and
acquisitive listening that privileges the intake of coherent, concise verbal information.” See
Leimbacher, “Hearing Voice(s),” 293.
63. Holly Rogers, “Introduction: Music, Sound and the Nonfiction Aesthetic,” in Music and Sound
in Documentary Film, ed. Holly Rogers (New York: Routledge, 2015), 9.
64. See Ilona Hongisto, Soul of the Documentary (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press,
2015), 86–88.
65. See Chion, Voice in Cinema, 5.
66. I have written elsewhere about the abbreviation of facilitated communication and the
neutralization of accented speech in documentary representations of autistic protagonists and
call center workers. See Pooja Rangan, “‘Having a Voice’: Toward an Autistic
Counterdiscourse of Documentary,” in Immediations: The Humanitarian Impulse in
Documentary (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), 103–49; Pooja Rangan, “Auditing
the Call Centre Voice: Accented Speech and Listening in Sonali Gulati’s Nalini by Day, Nancy
by Night,” in Vocal Projections: Voices in Documentary, ed. Annabelle Honess Roe and Maria
Pramaggiore (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018), 29–44.
67. Trinh, When the Moon Waxes Red, 60.
68. Readers may wish to consult two recent edited collections devoted to developing such a
vocabulary: “Documentary Audibilities,” ed. Pooja Rangan and Genevieve Yue, special issue,
Discourse 39, no. 3, and Vocal Projections: Voices in Documentary, ed. Annabelle Honess Roe
and Maria Pramaggiore (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018). Several essays mentioned
in this chapter are compiled in these volumes.
69. Leimbacher, “Hearing Voice(s),” 307; also see ibid., 308–10.
70. See ibid., 310–12; Patrik Sjöberg, “The Fundamental Lie: Lip Sync, Dubbing, Ventriloquism
and the Othering of Voice in Documentary Media,” in Vocal Projections: Voices in
Documentary, ed. Annabelle Honess Roe and Maria Pramaggiore (New York: Bloomsbury
Academic, 2018), 45–61; Pooja Rangan, “The Skin of the Voice: Acousmatic Illusions,
Ventriloquial Listening,” in Sound Objects, ed. James A. Steintrager and Rey Chow (Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 2018), 130–48.
71. See Sarah Kessler, “The Voice of Mockumentary,” in Vocal Projections: Voices in
Documentary, ed. Annabelle Honess Roe and Maria Pramaggiore (New York: Bloomsbury
Academic, 2018), 137–52.
 CHAPTER 21

AUDIOVISUAL RHYTHM AND

ITS SPECTATOR MOONLIGHT
AS EXAMPLE

RICK WARNER

In order to understand my film, rhythm is much more important than the story. Some people who
hate my films say, “What rhythm? This film has no rhythm,” because they think of metric rhythm,
like in music. There are different types of rhythm, and this film has a rhythm that’s difficult to
define.

—Lucrecia Martel on her film Zama (2017)

[I]f there’s one thing of primary importance in a film, as I understand the art, it must be rhythm.
Everything is communicated through rhythm. Without rhythm, you have nothing.

—Robert Bresson
DERIVED from the Latin rhythmus and the Greek rhuthmós (measured flow
or movement), rhythm refers to a patterned distribution of elements in time.
Recurrent yet variable, a rhythmic arrangement awakens sensory
engagement, drawing us into its movements and intensities once we
perceive them. Rhythm, in this way, binds the formal to the experiential:
there is no rhythm to speak of apart from the listener or viewer who
becomes attuned to it. The word is often used synonymously with musical
vocabulary such as tempo, cadence, and meter, but rhythm in the context of
film involves much more. It potentially suffuses and energizes each
aesthetic feature in play, working to coordinate not just images and sounds
but, more precisely, narrative pacing and disclosure, choreographies of
figures within the frame, cutting patterns, camera movements, shot
durations, color schemes, and sounds ranging from music and speech to
ambient noise and silence. Whether fluid or turbulent, cinematic rhythm
emerges as a dynamic temporal process by which assorted elements
groove.1
For the spectator, rhythm imparts coherence amid fragmentary
impressions. More than just a matter of form, it can function as a grip that
holds us in thrall, as virtuosic directors from Alfred Hitchcock to Wong
Kar-wai know very well. Much recent film theory, with its interest in
embodied spectatorship, has revolved around matters of film experience
that are fundamentally rhythmic. Jennifer M. Barker maintains that cinema
activates “visceral” affinities between its formal rhythms and those of the
viewer’s body, including respiration, heartbeat, eye blinking, and muscle
contraction and relaxation. For Barker, “cinema gives us a feel for our own
deep rhythms, reminding us what we’re made of,” and therein resides much
of film’s magnetism.2 Of course, there are also larger rhythmic systems that
dictate our everyday schedules and affect our spectatorship.3 The
biorhythms we bring to our encounters with films and other audiovisual
media are subject to all manner of external manipulations of time that
organize twenty-first-century life in capitalist societies worldwide. Our very
economies of thought and attention are determined by rhythms of
productivity, efficiency, and haste, as well as by rapid, endless data flows
across an array of screens large and small. Affective bonds between films
and audiences are no doubt shaped by the techno-rhythmic circumstances
that Jonathan Crary identifies under his grim notion of “24/7”—the
accelerated imposition of the rhythms of the marketplace and consumption
onto every dimension of personal and social being.4 If cinema continues to
have a special rhythmic power for its spectators, perhaps this is not only
because it coalesces with our biorhythms at a visceral level, but also
because its rhythmic configurations occasionally provide a restorative, if
fleeting, antidote to the world Crary describes. This potential would depend
on the resources of a certain style or genre. Advocates of slow cinema, for
instance, tout its ability to counter the speeds of globalized late capitalism.
Critics have claimed that Tsai Ming-liang, Lav Diaz, Kelly Reichardt,
Carlos Reygadas, and other such filmmakers cultivate rhythms that
invaluably restore time for patient contemplation.5
The topic of rhythm in cinema spreads so far and wide that a
comprehensive discussion falls outside my purview.6 While a number of
film theorists (and filmmakers writing about their own methods) have
preoccupied themselves with how cinema works as a rhythmic art, my
focus will fall on those who have pushed beyond superficial analogies with
music to define rhythm as an all-embracing aesthetic principle. I will
explain the arguments of some of these figures while working toward a
theory of film rhythm that concerns multisensory combinations—audial and
visual rhythms that stimulate and develop our “transsensorial” attention.7
Eventually, I will turn to a case study of Barry Jenkins’s Moonlight (2016),
in particular its rhythmic orchestration of mood and atmosphere around its
main character’s traumatic passage from youth into adulthood. A close
study of Moonlight will illustrate how perception of a film’s rhythm may
powerfully tie aesthetic sensitivity to political consciousness, enabling the
viewer-listener to track and associate resonances of style, character, and
identity.

T O R
In the late 1910s and 1920s, film theorists—several of whom were also
directors—played up the power of rhythm in ways that stressed, yet also
complicated, the specificity of film as a medium. Two avant-garde
traditions of this period, French Impressionism and Soviet Montage, stand
out in large measure for their creative experiments with rhythm and its
psychological effects. Rhythm underpins the elusive Impressionist notions
of photogénie and cinégraphie across most of their varied articulations,
which followed from a generally shared need among these figures to
identify cinema’s essence, differentiating it from other arts while securing
its aesthetic legitimacy. A vitalistic sense of rhythm emerges in Jean
Epstein’s theory and practice of photogénie, which relishes the quasi-
scientific capacity of film to reveal and conduct vital forces at work in the
material world.8 For Epstein, the rhythm of a photogenic moment is not
merely captured by and contained within an image. Rhythm, rather,
operates within a tripartite relationship between the profilmic event (mobile
textures like wind, fog, and rippling water are preferred), mediational film
techniques (such as slow motion, focus pulls, camera movements,
superimpositions, and intimations of sound even before the addition of an
audio track in film history), and the spectator (specifically one who attends
to fluid movements and subtle, radiant details onscreen). For Epstein,
cinema registers—more than contrives—a universal dance of life that
connects things and people. It rapturously taps into rhythmic currents that
circulate between the object world and inner being, between material and
mental processes.9 Through the rhythms it captures, enhances, and creates,
cinema, for Epstein, intertwines the world’s mobility and flux with the
workings of human consciousness. If photogénie speaks to film’s rhythmic
rapport with life and thought, its theoretical elaborations in this era tend to
dwell on the nature of the film image itself and the viewer’s engagement
with individual shots. However, cinégraphie (“film writing”) refers to
overall cine-rhythmic design, encompassing continuity schemes that differ
from the plot-centered linkages of Hollywood films.10 Most passionately
endorsed by Marcel L’Herbier, Emile Vuillermoz, and Germaine Dulac (and
perhaps best realized onscreen by Abel Gance), cinégraphie is the rhythmic
assemblage of photogenic elements into a whole. At issue here is not just
the utility of montage but the intimation of a unified rhythmic feel
throughout, superseding plot with a poetic symphony in light. As Léon
Moussinac put it at the time, “it is from rhythm that the cinegraphic work of
art derives its order—without which it could never hope to be a work of
art.”11
For all their lyricism, French Impressionist theories of film rhythm lack
concreteness, in part because their views tend to be more optative than
closely descriptive of how a given film actually works. One often senses
their wish for a certain kind of cinema, rather than confirmation of its
existence. Even as they seek filmic specificity, their theories of rhythm
entertain analogies to music that, as David Bordwell argues, break down
under scrutiny. Bordwell claims that their analogical reference to music
serves as a pretext for theories of purely rhythmic, nonnarrative cinema—
hypothetical theories that are not always borne out by the fiction films they
invoke in their writings, or that they themselves direct. According to
Bordwell, the rhythmic exuberance in films such as Gance’s La Roue
(1922) and L’Herbier’s L’Inhumaine (1923) “usually follows from narrative
demands.”12 Moreover, he maintains that “Impressionist film style enriches
the narrative by increasing the filmmaker’s commentative role or, more
often, our awareness of the character’s inner states.”13 Bordwell’s
misgivings raise a certain tension that resides at the basis of many theories
of film rhythm: does rhythmic expression facilitate, vie with, or somehow
rise above narrative? One’s answer depends on the film in question and the
modes of aesthetic comprehension it fosters. For the sake of my account of
Moonlight below, I want to consider rhythm in a more phenomenological
light, as a durative force and logic of sensation that connects multiple
events through variable atmospheric repetitions. Such rhythm, I will show,
bolsters our experience of narrative without being subordinate. And it
preserves something of the vitalist perspective that marks photogénie and
cinégraphie.
Moving from the Impressionists to the theory and craft of the Russian
montagist Sergei Eisenstein, we find more rigorous notions of rhythmic
articulation across a film’s entire fabric—notions that extend into
multisensory potentialities of the sound era. In his early, widely quoted
writings of the 1920s, rhythm is one among several parameters of montage
that might overlap in a given scene or sequence. In Eisenstein’s famous
typology, “rhythmic montage” is closely tied to “metric montage,” or
juxtapositions on the basis of different shot lengths. Rhythmic montage
compounds this intershot procedure through formal contrasts emerging
from rhythms embedded within individual compositions: variant
movements, paths, and speeds of action that direct the viewer’s eye.
Eisenstein invokes as an example the Odessa steps massacre in his film
Battleship Potemkin (1925), pointing out how the “drumbeat” of the
imperial soldiers’ descent of the stairs conflicts with and “destroys” the
mere metric pattern. In the montage, this repeated, conflictual tempo and
motion of the soldiers formally transfers onto and becomes “another, new
form of movement,” also aimed downward: the rolling of the baby carriage
down the steps, which then takes the sequence to its apex of tension.14
Rhythm, in this period of Eiseinstein’s work, crucially amplifies the impact
of montage, yet within his schema it ranks beneath “tonal,” “overtonal,”
and “intellectual” montage, each of which is more complex (though he
admits that tone is itself “a stage of rhythm”).15 For Eisenstein in the 1920s,
rhythm is “primitive emotional” in its effects,16 but more sophisticated
types of montage rely on its power to link, modify, and contrast elements
within and across shots.
In his later essays, written around the time of his return to feature
filmmaking with the sound film Alexander Nevsky (1938), Eisenstein
assigns more comprehensive tasks to rhythm, seeing it as a means of
producing—and of assuring that his audience will perceive—organic unity.
If his earlier views configure rhythm within contrapuntal clashes of
montage that jolt the viewer into emotionally absorbing the film’s political
themes, his later senses are more delicate in force and more extensive in
structural reach, as suits his altered conception of montage in the sound era.
By the 1930s, his theory of montage predicates itself on syntheses through
which collisions give way to correspondences—including new possibilities
of sonic and pictorial synchronicity. Salient here is his opposition between
mere “depiction” (representation that copies appearances) and what he now
calls the obraz or “generalised image,” which probes the invisible essences
of phenomena, unfolds through artistic consciousness, and conveys specific
emotions necessary for the viewer to experience the image-formation
process itself.17 Far from being isolated, these combinatory images are
everywhere keyed to a logic of pars pro toto whereby each montage
element collectively drives home generalized themes that are woven
throughout the film and comprehensible at each point.18 With this holistic
definition of montage comes a shift in Eisenstein’s lexicon as concerns
audience response: reflexological shocks are replaced by subtler gradations
of “pathos” and “ecstasy” that move spectators to feel both aesthetic and
sociocultural co-belonging. That is, the cohesion of the montage fosters
social collectivity, in line with the Soviet ethos.19
Eisenstein now writes of the “rhythmically generalized image,” thus
elevating the role of rhythm in audiovisual montage by insisting that “the
narrative must not ‘take over’ so far as to lose the rhythmic link between
the segments as they are threaded together.”20 Rhythm conflicts with mere
depiction in order to evoke the generalized image, accentuate its
progression, and render it palpable to the viewer.21 Through rhythmic
finesse, depiction is transformed into image/obraz, their basic opposition
resolved. Eisenstein contends that “without rhythm montage would be the
‘shapeless’ sum of a succession of facts.”22 We can infer from his late
theories that rhythm affirms common denominators across both syntagmatic
and paradigmatic structures of a film, while operating as the bridge between
the architectonics of montage and emotional impact. Rhythm also harnesses
multitrack resources to engineer organic relations between image and
sound, especially music. Referencing Alexander Nevsky, on which he
collaborated with composer Sergei Prokofiev, Eisenstein lays out his
conception of “vertical montage,” which hinges on synesthetic matches and
transitions between musical and visual dimensions of a film. As Theodor
Adorno and Hanns Eisler point out, Eisenstein makes fanciful claims of
total image-music correspondence on the grounds of mere graphic parallels
between visual contours and Prokofiev’s written musical notation, to which
viewers in a theater would have no perceptual access.23 Nevertheless,
Eisenstein’s view of “inner synchronicity” raises concretely achievable
correlations of sound and sight that allow the audience, as he suggests, to
envision with its ears and to hear with its eyes—possibilities to which I will
return when I delve into the audiovisual rhythms of Moonlight.24
A theory of cinematic rhythm that equals Eisenstein’s in complexity can
be found in Jean Mitry’s The Aesthetics and Psychology of the Cinema
(1963). Mitry treats the question of rhythm as a lens through which to
survey and critique earlier film theories, as well as both avant-garde and
narrative filmmaking. He expands on Impressionist theories of rhythm but
takes issue with their analogies to music, pointing out that music, unlike
film, has no extrinsic physical referent. He also objects to their ideals of a
purely rhythmic system unbeholden to narrative content.25 Although he
concedes that visual rhythm in cinema loosely resembles musical rhythm,
he argues that visual rhythm “creates nothing” in its own right and is an
adjunct “modality” exerted on the dramatic features and profilmic
phenomena of a given film.26 Further, Mitry cites psychological studies
conducted by Ernst Meumann and David Katz to note that visual and
musical rhythms are not perceived in the same way: human vision may
sufficiently discern spatial proportions, but our hearing far outperforms our
sight in its ability to grasp subtle, short-range differences of force within
time.27 Casting rhythm not as preprogrammed metrical structure but as
spontaneously “perceived periodicity,” Mitry insists that rhythm is only
rhythm when its dynamics are observed and felt by spectators.28 As Dudley
Andrew summarizes, rhythm, for Mitry, “must always function ad hoc in
response to the conveyed images.” The film “develops in a rhythm, not
from a rhythm.”29
Mitry’s definition of rhythm as the event of its perception follows from a
Gestalt-based sense of constructive spectatorship. Cine-rhythmic structures
are greater than the sum of their parts and are never fully manifest as
representation. Spectators mentally construct these part–whole relations in
memory, as perceived events accrue and become entwined in and through
their consciousness (Mitry describes this as a mental counterpart to retinal
persistence).30 Rhythm, he writes, “cannot be accepted as anything but an
intellectual process” that traces “the overall curve of a modulation” to arrive
at “an approximate general ‘idea.’ ”31 Mitry is not far from Eisenstein here.
He engages Eisenstein’s early theory of montage but—not without
admiration—dismisses much of it as aestheticism divorced from the
physical world caught in film images. As for Eiseinstein’s account of
rhythm, Mitry finds it rooted too firmly in “metric time, i.e., clock time,”
instead of psychological time, and remarks that Eisenstein’s films mainly
use rhythm for stress, “as one would the loud pedal on a piano to increase
the dramatic tension or violence of the movement.”32 But there are
compelling overlaps between Mitry’s arguments and Eisenstein’s later
essays, which hadn’t yet been translated into French at the time of Mitry’s
writing. Both figures view rhythm as an accretive process into which the
spectator is drawn, and both discuss spectatorial effort in terms compatible
with Gestalt psychology and its emphasis on holism. The difference is that
Mitry safeguards the spontaneity of rhythm’s reception, departing from
Eisenstein’s deterministic tendencies. For Mitry, the film prompts the
viewer to confer a regulatory “measure” onto its unfolding rhythm, giving it
a readable framework, but rhythm itself isn’t entirely reducible to that
framework—it is still freer, more fluid, and more open.33 For Mitry, as for
Eisenstein, film rhythm “turns each of us into diviners of meaning” by
provoking our intuition,34 but Eisenstein takes it for granted that the
viewer’s affective and intellectual responses will be exactly those
anticipated by his formal designs. While Mitry accepts that rhythm follows
from directorial intent, he sketches out a more flexible interchange between
film, world, and a spectator who contingently “measures” an uncontainable
rhythmic system.35
The concept of rhythm moving the audience to intuitively “divine” (from
the Old French diviner and Vulgar Latin divinare, meaning “to conjure,” “to
speculate,” or “to predict”) overall patterns of significance from mere parts
also lies at the core of Robert Bresson’s ideas regarding rhythm.36 In Notes
on the Cinematograph, his collection of maxims meant to provisionally
guide rather than predetermine his craft, he writes: “Accustom the public to
divining the whole of which they are given only a part. Make people
diviners. Make them desire it.”37 Divination, he suggests, is an exercise of
intuition in the face of opaque or thinly portrayed events. Through stages of
impulsive guesswork, we approach part-whole relationships that remain
unsettled, mysterious.38 For Bresson, it is primarily rhythm that fuels our
divinatory response. As he tells Jean-Luc Godard in their 1967 dialogue in
Cahiers du cinéma:
[F]orm generates rhythm. And that rhythm is all-powerful. It’s the primary thing. […] But
the meaning arrives last. Now, I believe the question of accessibility to the public is above
all one of rhythm. I’m convinced of it. So, in the composition of a shot, of a sequence,
rhythm comes first. But this composition can’t be premeditated, it has to be purely intuited.
[…] When confronted by the unknown, we have to improvise.39

Closer to Mitry than Eisenstein, Bresson’s rhythm-first perspective casts

“divination” in a light similar to Mitry’s sense of “measure,” with both
thinkers treating rhythm in terms of the viewer’s immersive, uncertain
engagement with expressive forms that do not quite contain or distill the
whole of the film at any point. Like Mitry, Bresson emphasizes the viewer’s
memory, arguing that a screen event “that would have been forgotten right
away becomes unforgettable when it’s encountered inside of a rhythm,” by
which he means a formally acute rhythm amid expressive opacity and
reduction, as he is thinking of his own films.40 He values rhythmic
sensation at the very thresholds of attention. Slight details—the opening and
closing of doors, footsteps, drones of passing automobiles, hand gestures—
become invested with hypnotic rhythms that heighten attention. What
Bresson calls divination bears on films beyond his body of work, even if
they enlist different styles and rhythms. The example I will take up below,
Jenkins’s Moonlight, is more emotionally intense than Bresson’s expressive
system allows, but the spectator’s divinatory role remains of utmost
importance.

M R I
Eisenstein’s and Bresson’s respective views on cinematic rhythm amply
take sound into account—the former through his concept of organic “inner
synchroncity”; the latter through his insistence on discordant relations
between sonic and visual tracks (Bresson: “Image and sound must not
support each other but must work each in turn through a sort of relay”).41
Both thinkers speak to the role of audiovisual rhythm in synesthetic film
experience, if we generally regard synesthesia in the aesthetic (not strictly
neurological) realm as the coupling and conflation of two separate
modalities of sense perception, such that, for instance, a visual stimulus
triggers an associative aural response and vice versa (if we adhere to a
clinical definition, this response happens automatically).42 Filmic
expression, of course, overflows sight and hearing to evoke smell, touch,
taste, proprioception, and vestibular balance, mixing sensory registers in
rhythmic patterns that create categorical ambiguities for the spectator.
Jennifer M. Barker suggests that particular films (her example is Stanley
Kubrick’s The Shining, 1980) have the power to resuscitate the synesthetic
practices that allegedly all humans possess in neonatal and infantile stages,
before these associative tendencies “begin to wither around the age of three
or four,” soon going dormant in step with the acquisition of language and
literacy.43 Arguably, then, films can temporarily revive ways of perceiving
we once had but lost.
Michel Chion attends to the synesthetic powers and limits of cinema with
his principle of “rendering.” A film, he argues, doesn’t simply reproduce
sensations as we habitually know them in our real-world experience but
inventively renders “wetness and coolness, the moments when droplets
reach the skin […], the rush of cool air that can be felt near moving
water.”44 Cinematic expression renders myriad sense impressions through
rhythmic links and transferences between mere aural and optical stimuli.
For this process, Chion prefers the term “transsensoriality” over
synesthesia.45 As he puts it, “Those perceptions are transsensorial that
belong to no one sense in particular but can borrow the channel of one
sense or another without their contents and effect becoming enclosed within
the limits of the borrowed sense. For example: everything having to do with
rhythm […].”46 For Chion, transsensory perception can be activated within
the auditory features of a film alone, as when speech, music, and ambient
clatter adhere to a shared rhythm; but it can also play out through sensory
exchanges and mutations between image and sound. (A striking example
that comes to mind is the warehouse scene in Paul Thomas Anderson’s
Punch-Drunk Love, 2002, in which gradually building chaos occurs through
an unnerving, cacophonic blend of impressions traversing speech, physical
gesture, noise (recurrent telephone calls), and a percussive musical score
keyed partially to the protagonist’s inner angst while blurring the line
between the diegetic world and nondiegetic accompaniment.) Chion defines
such cross-modal articulations as “dimensional pivots,” junctures in the
viewing of a film where perception turns from one sense to another on the
basis of rhythm. Chion: “Rhythm is the essential transsensory dimension,
since we experience it before we are born. The fetus encounters rhythm in
the form of variations in pressure on the body wall, parsed with the
combined beats of the mother’s heart and its own.”47 Ultimately, for Chion,
what most matters about rhythm is its agile between-ness as a carrier and
binder of sensations: belonging to no single domain, rhythm is perhaps
nothing in and of itself, but it is the relational pulse in and through which all
sensory registers of a film can become meaningfully entwined. It therefore
appeals to “how the senses are […] highways more than domains,” in
complex ways that refute simple characterizations of film as a medium
consisting of just two “tracks”:
Materially speaking, the cinema uses auditory and visual channels, but this is not why it
must thereby be described as a simple sum of “soundtrack” plus “image track.” Rhythm, for
example, is an element of film vocabulary that is neither one nor the other […]. [W]hen a
rhythmic phenomenon reaches us via a given sensory path—this path, eye or ear, is perhaps
nothing more than the channel through which rhythm reaches us.48

Cross-modal rhythmic pivots and associations abound in Moonlight, but

before moving to its analysis I want to discuss one additional, overarching
function of rhythm from the vantage of film experience. My gloss of film-
theoretical notions of rhythm has increasingly moved toward
phenomenological views, from Mitry to Chion. In his recent book Film
Worlds, which draws on phenomenology (most significantly, the thought of
Mikel Dufrenne), Daniel Yacavone embraces the capacity of rhythm to
flesh out not simply a narrative but a film world—a cosmic, saturated-with-
mood atmosphere into which the viewer is absorbed. Echoing some of
Mitry’s points, Yacavone underscores the “lived time” of rhythm when the
audience is in the throes of discerning it. Film rhythm “compels attention,”
“opens up […] cognitive, imaginative, and emotional spaces,” and leads the
viewer to “los[e] track” of the “clock time” that mechanically rules
everyday experience. Further, rhythm not only discloses a world and
distributes sensation but also thrusts out the “global” (i.e., all-
encompassing) character or verve of that world at the level of tone.49 For
Yacavone, rhythm mobilizes a certain “global cineaesthetic world-feeling”
and pulls us into an “experiential fold” proper to it.50 Correcting earlier
phenomenological film theories that take the author out of the equation in
an attempt to move past the extremes of auteurism, Yacavone, here again
adding to Mitry, views the implied author as yet another force or presence
to be sensed in our encounter with a film.51 That is, we feel creative,
affective, and intellectual guidance through rhythms that are marked by
directorial design. This entails “surrender” on our part, but our participation
is “responsive” instead of merely passive.52

O W M
Aesthetic theory holds merit to the extent that it illuminates particular
examples. To that end, let me offer a working conception of film rhythm
summarized from what I have gleaned so far. Rhythm, in addition to being a
matter of form arranged in time, names a relational dynamic between screen
and immersed viewer—a dynamic charged with affect and driven by
intuition. Rhythm combines (and travels between) visual and acoustic
tracks, rousing sensations beyond the optical and auditory. Rhythm entails
the spectator’s detection of emergent patterns, whether through parallels or
contrasts. To intuit rhythm is to become attentive to fluctuating part–whole
relationships both in the moment (synchronic) and through duration
(diachronic). This, in short, is how we “measure” a film’s rhythm in Mitry’s
sense, how we groove with its progression both spontaneously and through
memory.
Barry Jenkins’s Moonlight lends itself to my discussion in a number of
elaborate ways. It marshals the vitalistic force of rhythm within and across
atmospheres saturated with affect, and it carries out multisensory rhythmic
patterns that rely on the viewer’s power of “divination.” What remains of
this chapter is not an application of those theoretical ideas to Moonlight so
much as an effort to derive them, where appropriate, from the film’s formal
logic and from the magnificently sensuous viewing experience the film
offers.
With his debut feature Medicine for Melancholy (2008), Jenkins, despite
operating with a meager $15,000 budget, established himself as a director
skilled at layering his art rhythmically, from graceful camerawork (in
collaboration with James Laxton, his regular cinematographer) to elliptical
editing (sometimes fluid in spite of the cut, sometimes jagged and offbeat),
through to his eclectic use of music not just as narrative support but as
atmospheric, emotional texture that opens up flights of lyricism in the
absence of dialogue. With a desaturated palette (creamy black-and-white
imagery with rose accents), Medicine for Melancholy unfolds to rhythms
that impart sensitivity to time and place. The film covers the span of a day,
studying the interactions of two twenty-something African American
characters as they explore San Francisco following their one-night stand.
The film’s aesthetics—which, by Jenkins’s admission, are informed by the
respective methods of Claire Denis, Hou Hsiao-hsien, Lucrecia Martel, and
Wong Kar-Wai, all of whom put rhythm first and revel in sensuous detail
above plot53—infuse their journey with spontaneity arising from a rhythmic
play of focus pulls, jump cuts, and handheld camera. The lens often
captures the characters at close quarters, tracing their gestures and skin in a
Denis-like manner. This style goes hand in hand with reflections on race
and class that range from the Black diaspora to gentrification in San
Francisco. Through rhythm, Jenkins connects the sensory feel of his film to
entrenched problems of social injustice, while also mapping global histories
onto a particular locale.
 Moonlight finds Jenkins working with greater means, his stylistic
vocabulary more fully evolved, his rhythmic command of atmosphere now
made to reverberate around and through the distressed consciousness of his
main character. Adapted from Tarell Alvin McCraney’s stage play In
Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue, the film takes place in Miami—the
poverty-stricken neighborhood of Liberty Square, where Jenkins himself
grew up—and follows the ordeals of a Black gay youth, Chiron, as he
matures and morphs into adulthood. Drawing inspiration from Hou’s Three
Times (2005),54 it splits the story into three parts according to stages in
Chiron’s life. Each section is declared by intertitles that refer to the same
character, but as he exists in a different moment: the eight-year-old “Little”
(Alex R. Hibbert), the teenage “Chiron” (Ashton Sanders), and the adult
“Black” (Trevante Rhodes). The triptych structure invites us to follow
Chiron’s quest for self-realization along personal, social, and environmental
lines. At the same time, the film probes the foundations of identity itself in
order to revise the stereotypes of Black masculinity that weigh on Chiron’s
metamorphosis. Instead of essentializing race, class, and sexuality, Jenkins
figures identity as a process of becoming that finds expression not just in
the drama but in a stylized cinematic play of light and shadow, sound and
color, gesture and milieu, montage and mise en scène.55
Jenkins’s rhythmic sensibility governs the film’s design in collaboration
with co-editors Joi McMillon and Nat Sanders, two of his former
classmates at Florida State University’s film school. McMillon and Sanders
received an Academy Award nomination for their contribution—a
breakthrough in McMillon’s case as the first African American woman to
be recognized in the category for editing. Moonlight won the Oscar for Best
Picture, in addition to earning multiple other top prizes from critics
associations and audiences at festivals. The film’s visceral impact owes
largely to impeccable pacing and the careful accumulation of motifs—a feat
of rhythm that warrants praise for all three artists.56
Moonlight builds and transmits its rhythms by coordinating multisensory
elements across its three main sections. The film is bookended by the
sounds of ocean waves—an atmospheric motif keyed to Chiron’s odyssey.
At the outset, as the screen remains black except for company credits, we
hear the opening of Boris Gardiner’s “Every N****r is a Star,” the theme
song from a now-lost 1974 documentary of the same name produced in
Jamaica by the Bahamian American blaxploitation actor Calvin Lockhart
and shot by the experimental Black documentarian William Greaves.57
What we hear, aurally mixed with ocean waves, is a slowed-down and
contorted sample of the song: it seems submerged in water but then changes
pitch to indicate the gradual rise of the voice and lyrics to the surface.
Jenkins replays the sampling gesture that kicks off Kendrick Lamar’s 2015
album To Pimp a Butterfly, which uses the same Gardiner tune, but here, the
modulation is more severe, more dreamlike, and one has the feeling that
this song and the ocean sounds it coincides with give birth to the film’s
images. This sonic inscription of the sea is the first cue by which we can
“measure” the film’s rhythmic development.
These germinal sounds also float indefinitely at the boundary between
diegetic and nondiegetic domains. We cut from the black screen not to the
ocean but to Juan (Mahershala Ali), a local drug dealer, as he approaches
the camera in his turquoise Impala and comes to a halt. When he shuts off
the engine, the Gardiner song—which has changed again to sound as if
sourced from his car stereo—stops. Jenkins’s modulatory sound technique
grows out of a Southern form of hip-hop called “chopped and screwed,”
where a preexisting song is subjected to dysmorphic alterations of speed,
pitch, tone, and rhythm, often with repetitions of phrases—all this to evoke
delirium or anguish more sharply than the original. As Jenkins states, “It
makes hip-hop almost hypermasculine, but it opens up all this yearning in
the lyrics. Hip-hop is usually moving at such a high bpm that you don’t
catch that not only is this poetry, but it’s really pained. If you chop and
screw it, you allow all of that pain to come through.”58 The Gardiner song
that opens the film is chopped and screwed—as are other hip-hop songs we
hear, including the rendition of Jidenna’s “Classic Man” that Black plays in
his car in the film’s third section. Jenkins adapts this musical concept in
multileveled ways that extend to theme, character, and the intensity of the
viewer’s immersion. As though to respond to Jean Epstein’s speculations on
the possibilities of “slowed-down” sound in cinema,59 chopped and screwed
music makes for a rhythmic reattunement of perception, while also retiming
and reframing masculinity to reveal layers of vulnerability. This idea
imbues the film’s portrayals not only of all three Chirons but also of Juan,
whose “drug dealer” persona integrates notes of compassion, warmth, and
self-reproach. Jenkins wrote the screenplay for Moonlight while listening
repeatedly to Slim K’s Channel Purple, a chopped and screwed version of
Frank Ocean’s 2012 album Channel Orange.60 The finished film retains
something of that music’s intoxicating feel, its brooding spirit.61 Though
Chiron’s narrative arc was, of course, central to Jenkins’s conception of the
film, he was partly “writing to a rhythm and not to a plot,” to quote Virginia
Woolf’s description of her experimental novel The Waves.62
The wave motif that rhythmically shapes Moonlight finds its most
memorable iteration in the scene where Juan teaches Little/Chiron to swim.
By this juncture, Juan has become a stand-in parent for Little, on account of
the negligence of the boy’s mother (who, in a stinging irony, is one of
Juan’s hooked customers). This signature scene starts on the beach in
sunlight. Juan calls Little into the ocean. Little pauses for a beat on the
shore, gazing wordlessly into the offscreen as the sound drops into a more
internal register. The sonic ambience of wind and ocean shifts into a tonal
murmur, which gradually gives way to an ecstatic flurry of strings in
Nicholas Britell’s musical score. An elliptical cut flings us into the midst of
an already-underway event at once ordinary and spiritual: Juan holds Little
horizontally in his arms, their bodies gleaming in the sun, the handheld
camera bobbing in and out of the greenish-blue water, which gathers on the
lens and half-conceals additional jump cuts that heighten the scene’s
lyricism. Juan, smiling, assures Little that he is safe and steadies him until
he floats. “That right there,” he says, “you in the middle of the world.”
To some degree, Juan’s resonant line pertains not just to Little but to the
audience. The scene’s rhythmic conjunction of sounds and images renders a
cosmic atmosphere that tangibly foregrounds the environment and
submerges us, along with the characters, into “the middle of the world.”
The music, waves, mobile camera, elliptical cuts, and gesturing figures
onscreen form a multisensorial weave, held together by a common rhythmic
pulse, or by what we might call “inner synchronicity,” after Eisenstein. But
this rhythm is rougher, more spontaneous than Eisenstein allowed.
Although it is formalized, the scene responds to and enhances, rather than
aggressively reshapes, the natural rhythm of the undulant waves, thus
receptively inscribing the phenomenal world (in this regard Jenkins is
closer rhythmically speaking to Andrei Tarkovsky’s concept of “time-
pressure”63). The movement of the ocean injects each frame with liveliness
and conspires with elliptical edits, some of which strikingly occur in sync
with the camera’s dipping and rising at the water’s surface.
This scene’s rhythm intensifies embodied experience, both in the action
staged and in the implied inclusion of the spectator. This is where
audiovisual rhythm needs to be understood in phenomenological terms. The
atmosphere that reaches between the tender event onscreen and the
spectator’s interaction takes on fleshy, carnal overtones—“flesh” not just in
the literal sense but in the conceptual sense that Maurice Merleau-Ponty
gives it: flesh as a common tactile substrate in and through which subject
and object, self and other, human beings and material world are elementally
interwoven.64 Jennifer M. Barker has written at length about the fleshy
dimensions of film experience.65 This beach scene in Moonlight
corroborates her argument, as well as Yacavone’s principle of the
spectator’s immersive “world-feeling.” The scene so movingly situates us
as a participant in the onscreen intimacy and its sensuous rhythm that we,
too, find ourselves “in the middle of the world.” The lilting expressivity
compensates for Chiron’s silence and pulls us into an atmosphere in which
his subjectivity intermeshes with the luminous milieu (fig. 21.1). The
scene’s rhythmic flourish also anchors the event in memory, both his and
ours, priming us to notice repetition. As we will see, the baptism he
undergoes—which is already tinged with eroticism—resurfaces through
multiple echoes that sustain and punctuate the film’s diachronic rhythm.
Figure 21.1. Juan initiates Little/Chiron into a quest for self-actualization in Moonlight, 2016.

This isn’t to say that Moonlight neatly allows all viewers to identify or
align with Chiron, or other characters, on the basis of aesthetic immersion
and human connection. Right after Juan teaches Little to swim, they return
to the shore and, as Little stays quiet, Juan talks gently about identity
formation, specifically in the context of a diasporic Black community
reaching back to “the first [people] on this planet.” As the waves sonically
endure offscreen and as wind rustles the out-of-focus palm trees behind
them, Juan recounts his Cuban heritage and tells Little that Little will have
to determine for himself who he will become. Here the tangible bond
between these two characters carves out a sphere of communal Blackness
that is more exclusive, more intimate, than the universal humanism that the
film elsewhere stirs. The striking close-ups of Juan and Little reinforce this
sentiment in that they lovingly highlight the characters’ vibrant skin.
Jenkins states in interviews that he sought to avoid the convention of
powdering down actors’ faces; he applied lotions and sprays between takes
so that their faces would reflect the light around them, and authentically
square with the humid Miami climate.66 Thus, there is an aesthetic
resonance between this tactic and Juan’s memory of a Cuban woman
observing how Black children “catch up all the light. In moonlight, black
boys look blue.”
 In short, the film’s rhythmic system opens up two different yet partly
intersecting vectors of audience involvement. These vectors correspond to
general and specific modes of community. As Eisenstein well understood,
the power of rhythm can be cosmic and communal, not merely aesthetic.
The rhythmic nuances of Moonlight ask us to distinguish between a more
general mode of empathetic investment and a more exclusive mode of co-
belonging within the global Black community that Juan sketches. The film’s
rhythms move the audience while negotiating between these communal
dynamics.
The swimming lesson finds a rhythmic reconfiguration in the later scene
in which Chiron, now in high school, has his first sexual experience with a
man, Kevin (played in this part of the triptych by Jharrel Jerome). This
replay associates the two scenes in memory as regards Chiron’s quest for
self-affirmation. We should note that Juan has died in the meantime, a
tragedy that the film leaves out through a poignant narrative ellipsis. Juan’s
absence (due in part to the indelible brilliance of Ali’s performance) haunts
the rest of the film, worsening Chiron’s pained isolation. The scene takes
place at night, back at the liminal site of the beach as Kevin happens upon
Chiron sitting alone on the shore. The visual style has changed in this
section: the images now have a starker compression of cool and warm color
temperatures, a balanced mix of orange and aquamarine (blue-green has
been tied to Juan, from his car to his house décor). This look lends the scene
an oneiric quality (indeed, it reappears from an earlier dream sequence,
initiated by the sound of waves, in which Chiron encountered Kevin having
sex with a young woman). Kevin’s arrival on the beach is itself dreamlike.
He appears out of nowhere; or rather, he speaks out of nowhere, initially
from offscreen, as if summoned by Chiron’s meditation. With calm
swagger, Kevin explains that the beach is his “smoke habitat” and produces
a blunt. “You like the water? Well I can introduce you to some fire.”67
Their sharing of marijuana activates multisensory associations. The
glowing cinder of the blunt rhymes visually with blurred orange streetlights
in the background, and counterpoises the blue tint of the images—a blue
that renders moonlight on their faces and evokes Juan’s memory of his time
spent in Cuba. The breeze then becomes more prominent. Chiron and Kevin
close their eyes, feeling its cool, pleasant force. As Kevin remarks and
Chiron affirms, this breeze has the capacity to gust through Liberty Square
and bring everyone in its path to a standstill, such that “all you can hear is
your own heartbeat,” as Chiron says. This wind motif slows things to lento
pace and gradually alters the tenor of conversation: their talk of the wind
leads to talk of tears—Chiron’s—pouring into the ocean, or evaporating
into air. This dialogue in turn gives rise to Kevin’s exploratory, amorous
caress.
We gather that Kevin pleasures Chiron with his hand, an event the film
shows obliquely, keeping the act below frame and then portraying their
figures from behind. Some commentators have objected to this indirectness,
but there is a case to be made—on grounds of rhythm—that Jenkins’s
formal choices do not suppress their sexual intimacy so much as amplify it
in cosmic terms.68 The sex scene transpires through a rhythmic
commingling of elements—fire, water, air, earth, moonlight. These
elements circulate affectively between image, sound, and performance.
From the tears cited in the dialogue to the semen that ends up on Kevin’s
hand, their intertwined bodies fluidly combine with the scene’s atmospheric
accents and textures. We see a close-up of Kevin’s hand as he wipes it off
on the beach, an echo of Chiron’s earlier gesture of ecstasy—also filmed in
close-up—when he clutches the sand. There is yet another touch-based
repetition of the swimming lesson in that Kevin, like Juan, cradles Chiron’s
head.
Although the film partially masks their encounter, we are still involved in
their intimacy through the scene’s treatment of touch and tactile perception.
This is how our bodies become enmeshed with the body of the film. Only a
disengaged viewer could not imaginatively feel the characters’ grainy
fistfuls of sand (fig. 21.2), or the sensation of wind on one’s skin. In the
scene’s early moments especially, the characters’ upturned faces at some
level invoke our own sensitive, embodied look at the screen.
Figure 21.2. Chiron grips the sand during his sexual encounter with Kevin in Moonlight, 2016.

Together, these two beach scenes, which explore Chiron’s need for self-
discovery and self-affirmation in a world hostile to him, condense important
motifs that rhythmically return in new forms and different sensory modes as
the film goes on. Wind and water—specifically the cooling effects of wind
and water on Chiron’s warm body—undergo many variations. In the film’s
third section, Black/Chiron dips his face in ice water at his sink (a slow-
motion, turquoise-tinted image that repeats a similar shot from the middle
segment). Later, Black stands in front of the open freezer in his apartment
and lets the “wind” soothe his face in medium close-up. The plaintive score
accents these gestures with replays of Chiron’s theme, which comes back in
chopped and screwed versions that map his emotional and physical
changes. This accentuation of skin and dermal sensitivity is at once political
and aesthetic in that it performs an affectionate affirmation of the specificity
of Chiron’s Blackness—without reducing racial identity to what Franz
Fanon calls the “epidermal schema” of debilitating objectivization imposed
onto Black subjects.69 Chiron’s skin figures as a radiant, if partial, index of
inner vitality. It figures within his process of becoming, even as his face and
infrequent speech hold thoughts in reserve.70 To put this effect in
Impressionist terms, his “photogenic” face becomes more communicative,
more readable, through the “cinegraphic” rhythms that release and lend
beauty to his interiority. Jenkins describes his approach as causing his
guarded characters to “thaw,” once sufficient time is given to their
silences.71 Here we must recognize the rhythmic value of Jenkins’s
stunning close-ups, which are also on display in his subsequent film If
Beale Street Could Talk (2018), and which seem to have been influenced by
Jonathan Demme’s work.72 With slowed speeds and blurred, near-abstract
backgrounds—the actors sometimes looking directly into the camera—
facial close-ups in Jenkins’s films seem to emanate warmth as they hold for
an extra beat or two.
Jenkins explains that he has sought to do for Black bodies onscreen what
Kerry James Marshall’s large paintings do for them on canvas: rescue them
aesthetically from prevailing tones of negativity and hopelessness in artistic
representation, while still addressing the realities of Black life in America.73
To return to my earlier point, his style both demarcates a social space
reserved for Black experience and opens the door to more universal
alignment. The film’s tactile motifs make for a bond with the spectator
according to the virtual sharedness of sensation. The beach scenes and their
sensorial mix lodge in our memory, too, which is how we catch their later
rhythmic recurrences. Moonlight flirts with a parallel (not to say an
equivalence) between Chiron’s body as enveloped by the Miami
atmosphere and the viewer’s body as enveloped and affected by the film’s
atmosphere—a relation best achieved in the theatrical viewing situation.
This parallel is, of course, complicated by the fact that not all audience
members can claim to “share” Chiron’s torment, but the film’s tactile
impressions serve as a humanistic medium that grants stronger purchase on
his experience, with our perceptual faculties more fully involved, if also
pressed to their limits.
The film’s rhythmic reverbs and reconstitutions of the beach scenes build
toward the late scene in which Black/Chiron, after a drive from Atlanta to
Miami, reunites with Kevin (André Holland) at the restaurant where the
latter works as a server and cook. In the ellipsis between the second and
third sections, Black (a nickname Kevin gave him in high school) has
undergone a stark transformation, with a new masculine pose: he is thickly
muscled and wears gold grills on his teeth. Black’s appearance harkens
back to Juan, whose style he has clearly emulated, along with his
livelihood, as Black now sells drugs in Atlanta.
 Another component of tragic history looms over this late scene. Shortly
after their beach interlude earlier, Kevin, under the pressure of bullies,
attacks Chiron at school, which prompts a chain of events resulting in
Chiron’s expulsion and departure from Miami. In the film’s third section,
Black receives a phone call from Kevin after many years of silence. Cool
and warm contrasts mark the alternating shots of Kevin and Black on the
phone—turquoise on Kevin’s side, soft orange on Black’s. A traveling shot
of Black in his car en route to Atlanta sets the mood for their reunion,
accompanied as it is by Caetano Veloso’s ethereal Spanish-language song
about lovesickness, “Cucurrucucú paloma,” a song that, via Jenkins’s
cinephilia, returns from Wong Kar-wai’s Happy Together (1997) and
applies to Chiron’s situation. The traveling shot cross-dissolves with a blue,
moonlit scene of children playing on the surf, which aligns the memories of
character and spectator in motivic terms.
Cut to one of the film’s most elegant shots. A long take—at first
punctuated by the music Black listens to in his car, Jidenna’s “Classic
Man,” chopped and screwed—shows Black climb out of his Impala (the
same make as Juan’s vehicle) in the restaurant parking lot and fix his
clothes and hair, delimited by splashes of blue-green and orange-pink light,
with cars swishing past in the background. As the shot goes on, he
approaches the restaurant’s entrance and the camera glides closely behind
him. This follow-shot is a rhythmic repetition, as each section of the
triptych in Moonlight is marked off by such a shot on the back of a different
version of Chiron. This structural device similarly occurs in Derek
Cianfrance’s The Place beyond the Pines (2013), where the follow-shot
figures in a study of masculinity and its cultural pressures. What Jennifer
M. Barker and Adam Cottrel write about the technique in that film also
applies to its function in Moonlight, namely, that it expresses not just a
character’s comportment and gait but the overbearing construct of
masculinity that the character’s body has been made to support. While
suppressing the face, as if to mimic the male character’s inclination to stifle
emotion, the technique riffs on the precariousness of masculine ideals. It
hints at more fragile modes of being underneath a pose of strength, rigidity,
and collectedness.74 The follow-shot of Black highlights his physical grace,
yet at the same time evokes a weight and encumbrance that comes with his
“Classic Man” persona. Put another way, the shot distills an image of
masculinity that will soon be partially dismantled.
The mobile camera continues inside the restaurant, where it lends the
scene an unhurried tempo. It floats loosely around Black, perpendicular to
the action but partially keyed to his point of view as it delineates, in concert
with subtle racks of focus, a kind of invisible cord that binds him to Kevin,
who hasn’t yet recognized his visitor. When their eyes meet, the film shifts
into slow motion for a brief moment and offers a shot and countershot that
don’t match up with the coinciding dialogue we hear: the characters’
mouths are motionless, while their faces express a magnified sense of being
taken aback. As pictorial equivalents of chopped and screwed music, these
close-ups reveal grief and endearment, and speak to the weight of history
these two men share. Once image-sound synchrony returns, the scene
unfurls to a leisurely rhythm made up of multisensory accents—the soulful
music on the jukebox, the ambient sounds of patrons, the passing cars
outside that busy the background, the more gradated chromatic interplay of
warm and cool, the bell above the entrance that rings periodically and at
least on one occasion triggers an elliptical skip in the scene. These features
comprise an intoxicating audiovisual “music” that augments the jukebox
songs. Added to this blend is a culinary motif. Kevin tenderly prepares for
Black a Cuban “Chef’s Special,” and they share a bottle of wine. The
pleasures of alcohol and food recall and substitute for the marijuana of their
earlier beach scene—a scene never far from our minds, or from theirs, as
we take in their interaction.
By way of atmospheric evocations that happen in rough alignment with
Black’s implied subjectivity, the restaurant scene’s rhythmic attributes
hover between the past and the present, while bringing back the refrain of
ocean waves through a dimensional pivot, to borrow Michel Chion’s term.
The more Kevin inquires about—and warmly yet forcefully criticizes—
Black’s transmutation into a drug dealer (“That ain’t you, Chiron”), the
more we see Black’s defenses and masks fade, and the more the scene
underlines the crucial point that Kevin is perhaps the only other person who
knows who Chiron is. After a tense exchange that moves Black to take
stock of himself, Kevin leaves to tend to a customer. In this brief interval,
the whooshing noise of cars from the street grows louder and morphs to
elicit the sound of the ocean’s ebb and flow. In a rare point-of-view shot,
the camera tracks gradually toward the door from Black’s vantage, in sync
with the volume change. Cut to a close-up of his face, which conveys
subdued notes of angst, fatigue, and reluctant concession. He keeps silent,
his thoughts appearing to turn inward, back to his past, as the camera closes
in (fig. 21.3). In this manner, the scene carries out a charged dimensional
pivot through a sonic modulation, one that attunes us to character
subjectivity and folds the past into the present according to the film’s
rhythmic ocean refrain. Black’s activity of “embedded listening,” to use
another Chion term, coincides with and inflects our own mnemonic aural
response.75

Figure 21.3. Wave-like automobile sounds conjure up the past for Black/Chiron in Moonlight, 2016.

The wave motif has one last resurgence in the parting seconds of the film.
Moments after Black reveals to Kevin inside the latter’s apartment, “You’re
the only man that ever touched me. The only one. I haven’t really touched
anyone since,” we are shown a two-shot of Kevin holding Black, as the
ocean aurally resurfaces. This sound forms a bridge into the film’s final
shot: Little, in blue light on the beach, looks over his shoulder into the
offscreen space in back of the camera. From a narrative and
characterological standpoint, there is nothing conclusive about this ending.
We are left to guess about where Chiron is headed and what the future holds
for his relationship with Kevin. Despite the parting allusion back to Little,
the film does nothing to fuse the multiple versions of our protagonist into a
coherent identity without gaps and omissions. There remains so much that
we don’t know and cannot know.
But we have seen how the film coheres through rhythmic relays of
sensation having to do with Chiron’s mostly thwarted coming-of-age arc. I
say thwarted in that Chiron’s search for self-realization is constantly foiled
or undermined—except for moments of gentle acceptance and fulfillment
that haunt him because of their rarity, transience, and incompleteness.
Indeed, this is what the liminal space of the beach comes to embody
through its echoes: a dreamlike site of potential, of vital energy that seems
painfully beyond Chiron’s reach in his daily life. The film’s overall binding
rhythm, which puts us on the wavelength of his emotions, is neither purely
image-based nor purely sound-based. Rather, it emerges through our cross-
sensory perception of relays between visual and acoustic tracks.
If rhythm makes us into “diviners” of patterned significance, we should
be careful to note that this may not occur in stride with the film’s unfolding
when we first confront it. The flux of the film’s rhythm outstrips our initial
attempt to grasp it, even as we feel its affective intensities and resonances; it
is only in retrospect (and perhaps upon a second viewing) that we are able
to comprehensively “measure” its cumulative logic. To recall Bresson’s
point, meaning arrives last, by way of memory.
Finally, my analysis has made clear that the rhythmic sophistication of
Moonlight brings aesthetics and social consciousness into tight
convergence. Jenkins’s enterprise challenges the common belief that
aestheticization has no place in a work that deals with underprivileged and
suffering social groups. From Jenkins’s remarks in interviews we can
deduce that for him, it is unfairly limiting to suppose that a filmmaker has
to put aside aesthetic beauty and opt for gritty realism to engage such
milieux responsibly. He recalls that he and Laxton, his cinematographer,
kept reminding one another on set that they were not aiming for
neorealism.76 Far from being exploitative or irresponsible, their lush
aesthetic approach pays tributes to the humanity of the characters and the
world they inhabit. Lifting a phrase from the McCraney source play,
Jenkins refers to Liberty Square as a “beautiful nightmare,” a place of
extreme deprivation and cruelty in the midst of arresting tropical splendor.77
The film attempts to communicate the feeling of life in this environment.
Moonlight manifests its politically minded humanism not primarily through
verbal content but through a rhythmic conduction of atmosphere. What
takes shape is a pensive, radiant, quietly militant affirmation of Black queer
masculinity—a film that asks us not simply to agree that Chiron’s life
matters, but to feel how it matters as we rhythmically interface with the
evolving moods of his consciousness.

N
1. On rhythm understood as an overarching and extensive element of cinematic design, see Yvette
Bíro, Turbulence and Flow in Film: The Rhythmic Design, trans. Paul Salamon (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 2008), 15, 36, 67, 231–32. For a more concentrated account of how
rhythm in cinema explores the paradoxical and unintelligible qualities of time itself, see Graig
Uhlin, “Film Rhythm and the Aporetics of Temporality,” Quarterly Review of Film and Video
36, no. 2 (2019): 104–24.
2. Jennifer M. Barker, The Tactile Eye: Touch and the Cinematic Experience (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2009), 128–29.
3. Henri Lefebvre writes: “Everywhere where there is interaction between a place, a time and an
expenditure of energy, there is rhythm.” Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis, trans. Stuart Elden and
Gerald Moore (London: Continuum, 2004), 15. For Lefebvre, who borrows his book’s title
from a coinage by the poetic phenomenologist Gaston Bachelard, there can be no
comprehension of time in everyday life without recourse to the concept of rhythm, which he
configures as a tool of analysis in its own right, grounded in practical experience.
4. Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep (London: Verso, 2013).
5. See, for example, Song Hwee Lim, Tsai Ming-liang and a Cinema of Slowness (Honolulu:
University of Hawaii Press, 2014).
6. Lea Jacobs has recently made a contribution to the moment-by-moment analysis of film
rhythm across correlated features of music, dialogue, acting, and visual style. Jacobs, Film
Rhythm after Sound: Technology, Music, and Performance (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2015). Her microscopic approach leads to many insights, but she defines rhythm in a
more rigidly metrical sense than I will in this chapter. For a concise overview of film-
theoretical conceptions of rhythm as they relate to early cinema, see Pasi Väliaho, Mapping the
Moving Image: Gesture, Thought and Cinema circa 1900 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University
Press, 2010), 12–16. Given that I am working toward an analysis of Moonlight, I single out
theories of rhythm that pertain to feature-length narrative cinema. The rhythmic complexities
of avant-garde filmmakers—the likes of Hans Richter, Joseph Cornell, Maya Deren, Stan
Brakhage, Ken Jacobs, Martin Arnold, and Abigail Child, to name far too few—lie beyond my
scope.
7. Michel Chion, Sound: An Acoulogical Treatise, trans. James A. Steintrager (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 2016), 206–9, 268.
8. On rhythm as it relates to vitalism, see Inga Pollmann, Cinematic Vitalism: Film Theory and
the Question of Life (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2017), 47–86.
 9. Tom Gunning writes along such lines of Epstein’s rhythmic capture and expression of “[t]he
constant vibration of the material world.” Gunning, “Preface,” in Jean Epstein: Critical Essays
and New Translations, ed. Sarah Keller and Jason N. Paul (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University
Press, 2012), 19.
10. Richard Abel, “Cinégraphie and the Search for Specificity,” in French Film Theory and
Criticism: A History/Anthology 1907–1939, Volume 1: 1907–1929 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1988), 206–8.
11. Léon Moussinac, quoted in Jean Mitry, The Aesthetics and Psychology of the Cinema, trans.
Christopher King (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), 111–12.
12. David Bordwell, “The Musical Analogy,” Yale French Studies 60 (1980): 145.
13. David Bordwell, French Impressionist Cinema: Film Culture, Film Theory, and Film Style
(New York: Arno, 1980), 215.
14. Sergei Eisenstein, “The Fourth Dimension in Cinema” (1929), in The Eisenstein Reader, ed.
Richard Taylor, trans. Richard Taylor and William Powell (London: British Film Institute,
1998), 117.
15. Ibid., 121.
16. Ibid.
17. Sergei Eisenstein, “Montage 1938,” in Eisenstein: Selected Works, vol. 2, Towards a Theory of
Montage, ed. Michael Glenny and Richard Taylor, trans. Michael Glenny (London: British
Film Institute, 1991), 296–326, esp. 300–10.
18. Oksana Bulgakowa, “The Evolving Eisenstein: Three Theoretical Constructs of Sergei
Eisenstein,” in Eisenstein at 100: A Theoretical Reconsideration, ed. Al LaValley and Barry P.
Scherr (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2001), 43–46.
19. On Eisenstein’s senses of pathos and ecstasy, see David Bordwell, The Cinema of Eisenstein
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 190–95.
20. Sergei Eisenstein, “[Rhythm],” in Eisenstein: Selected Works, vol. 2, 227–29.
21. Eisenstein: “The rhythm of the juxtaposition of elements is the fundamental means whereby the
generalisation will express itself […].” Sergei Eisenstein, “Laocoön,” in Eisenstein: Selected
Works, vol. 2, 131.
22. Eisenstein, “[Rhythm],” 236.
23. Theodor Adorno and Hanns Eisler, Composing for the Films (1947) (London: Continuum,
2007), 104–5.
24. Eisenstein, “Vertical Montage,” 334–36. On Eisenstein’s notion of inner synchronicity, see Kia
Afra, “‘Vertical Montage’ and Synaesthesia: Movement, Inner Synchronicity, and Music-
Image Correlation in Alexander Nevsky (1938),” Music, Sound, and the Moving Image 9, no. 1
(Spring 2015): 33–61. See also Robert Robertson, Eisenstein on the Audiovisual: The Montage
of Music, Image, and Sound in Cinema (London: I.B. Tauris, 2009), 142–69.
25. Mitry, Aesthetics and Psychology, 109–20.
26. Ibid., 117.
27. Ibid., 116.
28. Ibid., 104.
29. Dudley Andrew, “The Film Theory of Jean Mitry,” Cinema Journal 14, no. 3 (Spring 1975): 9.
30. Mitry, Aesthetics and Psychology, 104–8.
31. Ibid., 104–5.
32. Ibid., 146.
33. Ibid., 106–8, 119.
34. Ibid., 121.
35. Mitry’s notion of “measure” is not to be confused with meter. Where metrical rhythm imposes
a structure set out in advance, “measure,” in Mitry’s sense, describes the spectator’s more or
less improvised intuition of a film’s rhythmic logic and shape. And for Mitry, while this
measuring of rhythm supplies a framework, rhythm itself will not reduce entirely to that
framework.
36. For a history of how Bresson’s conception of cinematic rhythm responds to postwar French
intellectual debates about “vernacular” rhythm defined in Bergsonian terms, see Colin Burnett,
The Invention of Robert Bresson: The Auteur and His Market (Bloomington: University of
Indiana Press, 2017), 194–237.
37. Robert Bresson, Notes on the Cinematograph, trans. Jonathan Griffin (New York: New York
Review Books, 2016), 67. First published 1975.
38. Ibid., 6, 67, 88.
39. Jean-Luc Godard, interview with Robert Bresson, “The Freest Film I’ve Made, the One to
which I’ve Given the Most of Myself,” in Bresson on Bresson: Interviews 1943–1983, ed.
Mylène Bresson, trans. Anna Moschovakis (New York: New York Review Books, 2016), 148.
40. François-Régis Bastide, interview with Robert Bresson, “A Donkey in All Its Purity, Its
Tranquility, Its Serenity, Its Tranquility,” in Bresson on Bresson: Interviews, 136.
41. Bresson, Notes on the Cinematograph, 37.
42. Vivian Sobchack, Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving-Image Culture (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2004), 67–68.
43. Jennifer M. Barker, “Haunted Phenomenology and Synesthetic Cinema,” Studia
Phaenomenologica: Romanian Journal for Phenomenology 16 (2016): 380.
44. Michel Chion, “Sensory Aspects of Contemporary Cinema,” in The Oxford Handbook of New
Audiovisual Aesthetics, ed. John Richardson, Claudia Gorbman, and Carol Vernallis (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2013), 330. Here Chion also relates such “transsensory” perception to
Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology.
45. Chion equates “synesthesia” with Rimbaudian or Baudelarian poetic correspondences, where
the blend, Chion argues, fully eliminates heterogeneity. Chion, Sound: An Acoulogical
Treatise, trans. James A. Steintrager (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), 209; Chion,
Audio-Vision: Sound On Screen, trans. Claudia Gorbman (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1994), 137.
46. Chion, Sound, 268 (emphasis added).
47. Chion, “Sensory Aspects of Contemporary Cinema,” 330.
48. Chion, Audio-Vision, 136–37.
49. Daniel Yacavone, Film Worlds: A Philosophical Aesthetics of Cinema (New York: Columbia
University Press), 207.
50. Ibid., 223.
51. Ibid., 210, 219.
52. Ibid., 226.
53. For a discussion with Jenkins where he discusses his formative influences, see Peter Becker,
“Adventures in Moviegoing with Barry Jenkins,” The Criterion Channel, online streaming
service: https://www.criterionchannel.com/barry-jenkins-s-adventures-in-moviegoing.
54. Michael Boyce Gillespie, “One Step Ahead: A Conversation with Barry Jenkins,” Film
Quarterly 70, no. 3 (Spring 2007): 57.
55. As Richard Brody puts it, Jenkins “restores complexity to the very idea of identity, of the
multiplicity as well as the singularity of being oneself—and he conveys his own sense of
wonder that art itself can conjure it.” Brody, “The Unbearable Intimacy of ‘Moonlight,’” The
 New Yorker, October 28, 2016, https://www.newyorker.com/culture/richard-brody/the-
unbearable-intimacy-of-moonlight.
56. For an interview with McMillon about her collaboration with Jenkins, which extends to If
Beale Street Could Talk (2018), see Carol Vernallis, “The Shot and the Cut: Joi McMillon’s
and Barry Jenkins’s Artistry,” in Transmedia Directors: Artistry, Industry and New
Audiovisual Aesthetics, ed. Carol Vernallis, Holly Rogers, and Lisa Perrott (New York:
Bloomsbury, 2019), 321–28.
57. This song carries associations for Moonlight. The Lockhart–Greaves collaboration was not a
run-of-the-mill blaxploitation film but an attempt to depart from its clichés through a creative
rethinking of Blackness in a diasporic context. See Erica Moiah James, “Every N****r Is a
Star: Reimagining Blackness from Post-Civil Rights America to the Postindependence
Caribbean,” Black Camera 8, no. 1 (Fall 2016): 55–83.
58. Nicholas Rapold, “Interview with Barry Jenkins,” Film Comment (September-October 2016):
44.
59. Jean Epstein, “The Close-up of Sound” (first published 1955), trans. Frank Le Gac, in Jean
Epstein: Critical Essays and New Translations, ed. Sarah Keller and Jason N. Paul
(Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2012), 365–72.
60. My thanks to Clint Bergeson for confirming this via personal communication with Jenkins.
61. Following the film’s release, Jenkins collaborated on a chopped version of the Moonlight
soundtrack. Will Bundy, “Listen to a Chopped and Screwed Mix of the Moonlight
Soundtrack,” The Fader, February 24, 2017, http://www.thefader.com/2017/02/24/moonlight-
chopped-screwed-purple-og-ron-c-chopstars-soundtrack.
62. That Jenkins is a filmmaker for whom rhythm is primary is further evidenced by his comments
regarding his 2018 adaptation of James Baldwin’s novel If Beale Street Could Talk: “[T]he
pace and rhythm of the film is a direct reflection of the rhythm of Baldwin’s words.” Barry
Jenkins, “Inspired: The Spoken Word,” Film Comment (November–December 2018): 6.
63. Andrei Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time: Reflections on the Cinema, trans. Kitty Hunter-Blair
(Austin: University of Texas Press, 1987), 113–24.
64. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, ed. Claude Lefort, trans. Alphonso
Lingis (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 130–55.
65. Barker, Tactile Eye, 20, 26–27, 149, 153–56.
66. As Jenkins explains: “When you’re on a Hollywood set, or any movie set, the makeup person
has powder and they powder you down so you don’t reflect light. You can’t be shiny. You can’t
be moist. Fuck that … because my memory of this place I grew up in is of shiny, moist,
basically revitalizing and replenishing and alive skin.” Gillespie, “One Step Ahead,” 57.
67. The combination of cool and warm color tones has become ubiquitous in contemporary film
and TV since the industry-wide embrace of high-definition digital video, so much so that “teal
and orange” is a now a color correction filter in Final Cut Pro. Such color grading tends to be
quite specific to HD video—its intensities of radiance, its more plasticine textures. Jenkins and
Laxton shot Moonlight on digital video with an Arri Alexa camera, but they achieved a lyrical,
delicate feel that adheres closely to 35mm film; the look is also thematically appropriate to the
film’s world and its use of the Miami landscape. Moonlight sets itself apart from the chromatic
cliché I am identifying.
68. The sex scene in Moonlight deserves more attention than I can give it here. In an article that
primarily criticizes Luca Guadagnino’s Call Me by Your Name (2017), D. A. Miller references
Moonlight as an example of the “mainstream gay-themed movie” that regrettably uses
aesthetic beauty as a substitution for the spectacle of sex between two men. Miller, “Elio’s
Education,” Los Angeles Review of Books, February 19, 2018,
 https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/elios-education/. Miller’s criticisms apply more fittingly to
Call Me by Your Name, where Eros more profoundly textures the film and primes the viewer
for a graphic scene that never occurs. But Moonlight is arguably less at fault on this score.
Guadagnino’s camera anachronistically pans away from the about-to-happen sex scene to a
window, but Jenkins’s formal choices stay with Chiron and Kevin for the duration of their
encounter. With an indirectness appropriate to the film’s rhythmic style and construction, the
scene carefully articulates bodily sensations that reemerge later, in alternate rhythmic forms,
demonstrating the power of cinema to distribute sexual energy beyond the graphic depiction of
sex itself. The scene innovates where the shopworn vocabulary of sex scenes is concerned.
Their intimacy isn’t prudishly censored as much as expanded through a sensual atmosphere in
concert with Chiron’s affective mix of ecstasy and “solace,” as Jenkins describes the
underlying mood of the scene. Jenkins, audio commentary on Blu-Ray disc of Moonlight, A24
and Lion’s Gate, 2016. Whether the film could achieve this atmospheric effect just as capably
while offering more explicit images is a question for another essay.
69. Franz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove, 2008), 91–
92. First published 1952.
70. The close-ups of Little/Chiron/Black demonstrate the equivocal character of the human face
(now a window, now a mask) as described by Noa Steimatsky—its “constitutive illegibility”
that withstands discursive schemes of meaning and identification. Steimatsky, The Face on
Film (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 113–14.
71. Jenkins, audio commentary on Blu-Ray disc of Moonlight. Rapold, “Interview with Barry
Jenkins,” 45.
72. One thinks of the decelerated, semiabstract close-ups of Denzel Washington’s character in
Demme’s Philadelphia (1993), in particular during the hospital scene near the film’s end.
73. Jenkins asserts that Marshall’s aesthetic approach to portraying race harmonizes with his own
in Moonlight. Gillespie, “One Step Ahead,” 57.
74. Jennifer M. Barker and Adam Cottrel, “Eyes at the Back of His Head: Precarious Masculinity
and the Modern Tracking Shot,” Paragraph 38, no. 1 (2015): 92–100.
75. Michel Chion, Film, A Sound Art, trans. Claudia Gorbman (New York: Columbia University
Press, 2009), 476.
76. Barry Jenkins, audio commentary on Blu-Ray disc of Moonlight.
77. Ibid.
 SECTION V

HOW CLOSE IS CLOSE READING?

 CHAPTER 22

CONTESTING THE WHITE

GAZE
Black Film and Postcinematic
Spectatorship

CAETLIN BENSON-ALLOTT

ON July 21, 2014, director Spike Lee used social media to distribute a new
video project: a mashup of his film Do the Right Thing (1989) and recent
bystander footage of Eric Garner being strangled by New York City Police
Officer Daniel Pantaleo.1 Captured by Ramsey Orta on his cell phone, the
recording of Garner’s murder on July 17, 2014, was “the first in a wave of
recordings of African-Americans in violent confrontations with white
police officers to command national attention.”2 Titled “Radio Raheem and
the Gentle Giant,” Lee’s mashup uses approximate matches on action to
blend real-world and fictional murders into a single event. For Do the Right
Thing also depicts a young Black man choked to death by a New York City
police officer. Through careful editing, Lee imbues Orta’s footage with the
emotional intensity of feature filmmaking. He interjects into Orta’s
continuous long shot intimate close-ups of his martyred character, Radio
Raheem (Bill Nunn), struggling for breath, the camera seemingly inches
from his face. In so doing, Lee reminds his spectator of the historical
precedents for Pantaleo’s violence. He also refreshes Do the Right Thing
with a horrible timeliness, as the mashup graphically depicts how little has
changed since the movie premiered. Intermixed, the two source texts create
a searing critique of Garner’s murder by grounding it in generations of
terrorism and pain.
Wide-released twenty-five years to the day before “Radio Raheem and
the Gentle Giant,” Do the Right Thing was inspired by a series of highly
publicized (but unfilmed) murders of Black men and women by New York
police, including the fatal chokehold that New York police administered to
Manhattan graffiti artist Michael Stewart in September 1983.3 Its insertion
into Orta’s footage is so devastating as to be almost unwatchable, for the
mashup quickly and brutally conveys the frustration of a filmmaker who
tried to change the world but could not. Do the Right Thing was nominated
for Academy Awards, Golden Globes, and the prestigious Palme d’Or; it
also received high praise from scholars and critics for inspiring thoughtful
conversations about racism and anti-Black violence. “Radio Raheem and
the Gentle Giant” reminds its spectator how futile such conversations
turned out to be, as twenty-five years on, the NYPD is still killing Black
men with illegal chokeholds. Lee’s anger and resentment are palpable in
every shocking cut, which draw on conventions of Hollywood continuity
editing to suture the spectator into his antiracist depiction of anti-Black
violence. The video acknowledges that such depictions have not stopped the
hate, implicitly asking what might.
In addition, “Radio Raheem and the Gentle Giant” asks its viewer to
consider how documentary videos of Black death circulate through
contemporary media culture. Orta’s footage went viral after appearing in a
New York Daily News story the same day Garner died; “Radio Raheem and
the Gentle Giant” was released four days later and reframes the video in
part to comment on its early circulation.4 While the Daily News story
emphasizes the shocking brutality of Garner’s murder, it does not place his
homicide in a longer history of anti-Black violence. Lee’s video creates that
context using the grammar of narrative cinema, and, in so doing, it
encourages its spectator to question how different framing devices generate
different hermeneutics for videos of anti-Black violence. As mentioned,
Garner’s was the first of many incidents of anti-Black police violence to be
captured on cell phone cameras and distributed via social media and
internet news sources between 2014 and 2021 (the year this anthology went
to press). As Lee shows—and this chapter explains—different distribution
platforms encourage different spectatorial reactions to such videos, a
problem of framing and reception that film theory is uniquely equipped to
elucidate. These videos are in no sense films; neither Orta’s original video
nor “Radio Raheem and the Gentle Giant” was recorded or edited on film,
nor was either exhibited in cinemas.5 They belong not to genres we
associate with feature film but rather to genres of digital video. Yet by
reframing these videos in narrative and experimental films, Lee and other
Black filmmakers implicitly argue that there’s something wrong with the
way the videos previously circulated. Their work poses questions about
media and video spectatorship that film theory can and must address.
Indeed, they invite film theorists to extend their field and consider how
racism, visual culture, and postcinematic media intersect currently.
This chapter thus offers a postcinematic theory of spectatorship; it draws
on contemporary film theory to address the expanded field of film and
video culture, which includes not only narrative, documentary, and
experimental films but also television, digital video, and the many
platforms on which digital videos circulate, including social media. Even
classical film theorists known for their work on cinema have advanced
scholarship on other media; André Bazin’s inquiries into film’s ontology
fed his subsequent interest in television and later informed important
debates about the role of “liveness” in televisual ontology in the 1980s.6
Today Bazin’s work on liveness can also edify our understanding of “live”
videos on social media, including police assaults of African Americans that
were recorded in real time. These legacies should remind us that both film
and film theory have been postcinematic for quite some time, if by
“postcinematic” we mean the era of media diversification in which film is
one media genre in conversation with others.7 This chapter develops its
theory of postcinematic spectatorship around the issue of White
spectatorship, the unarticulated norm of film and video culture that
privileges a universalized Euro-American subject in much the same way
that the male gaze privileges a cisgendered, heteronormative masculine
viewing position.8 It examines how African American filmmakers have
incorporated recent documentary videos of Black death into their creative
practice to critique the prior circulation of those videos on social media and
internet news sites. In so doing, it argues for the continued relevance of film
theory for postcinematic media analysis, including the video cultures of
social media, and for the relevance of social media to keep film theory at
the forefront of media analysis.
Between Summer 2014 and Summer 2018, nearly thirty videos of US
police officers shooting, beating, and otherwise brutalizing African
Americans—often fatally—appeared on social media platforms, including
and especially Facebook.9 Sometimes they were posted as part of news
stories; sometimes the footage appeared with only the poster’s commentary.
In accordance with the interfaces of these platforms, users expressed a wide
range of negative affects in response to the videos, including and especially
horror, but these emotional protestations often failed to generate social
action.10 Historically, far more people viewed, shared, and commented on
these videos than took to the streets, donated to activist organizations, wrote
their government representatives, or engaged in other forms of offline
protest. Is there something about the norms of spectatorship embedded in
certain social media platforms that conditions horror and helplessness as
opposed to rage and political engagement? Indeed there is. Although there
are important structural differences between social media platforms, their
interfaces hamper responses—activist or otherwise—that might take the
user away from the platform. They may serve and support activist activity,
but social media also and more persistently perpetuate an older anti-Black
visual culture to their own financial benefit. As I will show, Facebook’s
interface encourages users to express their opinions about the content
posted to its site but neither questions nor encourages its users to question
the regimes of visibility that structure their reactions to that content.11 Not
all social media users are racist, of course, but the regimes of visibility that
govern social media platforms are. Social media platforms frame images of
the Black death for a White gaze that they inherit from White visual culture,
including and especially film and television.
By propagating spectacles of anti-Black violence, social media continue
racialized spectatorial traditions that reward viewers for feeling bad, as
though bad feelings were enough to change the world. They frame empathy
as a proper response to atrocity and violence but circumscribe its expression
and by extension its capacity to generate change. This dynamic becomes
especially apparent when the videos in question are re-presented in
contemporary US antiracist films, both narrative and avant-garde. Like
Spike Lee, Ryan Coogler and Ja’Tovia Gary incorporate documentary
videos of the Black death into their film practices in ways that resist the
debilitating terror that the videos arouse in other contexts. Their approaches
to film Blackness, to borrow Michael Boyce Gillespie’s generative term,
explore the vitality of antiracist resistance and Black cultural life.12 In
claiming (often posthumous) dignity and sovereignty for the unwilling
subjects of these videos, these artists herald the birth of an explicitly
antiracist media culture “as an always disruptive surprise that might pose
new paradigms for genre, narrative, aesthetics, historiography, and
intertextuality.”13 Lee, Coogler, and Gary work with viral videos of Black
death to contest the violence of White spectatorship and its continued
underwriting of such videos’ appearance on social media. Contrasting the
presentation of these videos on social media and in film thus advances the
cause of film theory in the age of its cultural marginalization by
demonstrating its continued relevance for new moving image cultures.
Through their reframings of such videos, Lee, Coogler, and Gary point
out the limits of spectatorial empathy and offer alternative models of
antiracist spectatorship. To that end, “Radio Raheem and the Gentle Giant”
pointedly inflicts pain on its spectator and makes them experience
helplessness and the futility of such feelings. During a wrenching match on
the action between a close-up of Raheem’s face as he falls and Garner’s
body on the sidewalk, viewers are likely to recoil and look away; I did. The
graphic intersection of these murders asks the spectator to question how
they ever sat by and watched a Black man die. How could they have
allowed themselves to believe that Do the Right Thing was only a fiction?
In this regard, “Radio Raheem and the Gentle Giant” makes very different
demands of its spectator than either of its source texts, forcing a more
personal form of introspection. It partakes of what Courtney R. Baker calls
“the pedagogical imperative of death”—that is, recognizing another’s
humanity through their passing.14 Redeploying Orta’s footage to teach his
spectator a lesson, Lee points out how little was asked of the spectator by
other media platforms on which this video circulated, where one could
simply leave an emoticon or a comment and thereby avoid confronting the
profound and lethal force of institutional racism in the United States.
 H W S
As Martin Berger has shown, cinema did not invent the White gaze; rather,
it is endemic to Western visual culture.15 For centuries, Euro-American
paintings, etchings, and photographs relied on the erasure of minority
subjectivity and distorted spectacles of raced bodies, often in pain, to justify
and codify White domination. Berger explains that White supremacy is a
“malleable social product” manufactured and sold through cultural goods,
from nineteenth-century genre paintings to narrative cinema.16 Early US
film culture thrived on racist depictions of African Americans and other
minorities, building upon what Stuart Hall calls “the base-images of the
‘grammar of race’.”17 This grammar includes everything from racist
caricatures and stereotypes to onscreen depictions of White mobs lynching
Black men, as seen in the 1904 melodramas Avenging a Crime, or Burned
at the Stake (director unknown) and Tracked by Bloodhounds, or a
Lynching at Cripple Creek (Harry Buckwalter). Silent cinema played a
crucial role in the expansion of anti-Black oppression during the Jim Crow
era. Nickelodeons and movie theaters offered collective spaces for
audiences of all races to experience the White gaze. As Daniel Bernardi
notes, this unmarked yet ubiquitous perspective “positions ‘whites’ as
normal and superior and ‘non-whites’ as deviant and inferior.”18 The
apotheosis of early cinema’s White gaze was of course D. W. Griffith’s The
Birth of a Nation (1915), which marshalled all the narrative innovations of
early Hollywood to vilify and degrade African Americans. But it is
important to remember that Griffith’s anti-Black artistry was not unique. He
advanced an industrial veneration of whiteness integral to US film culture
from its invention.
Cinema’s White gaze continued apace throughout the twentieth century,
as Richard Dyer demonstrates so masterfully in White. Dyer observes that
films need not degrade or even depict characters of color to construct a
White gaze. He finds, for instance, that “photographic media and, a fortiori,
movie lighting assume, privilege, and construct whiteness. The apparatus
was developed with white people in mind and habitual use and instruction
continue in the same vein, so much so that photographing non-white people
is typically construed as a problem.”19 When a twenty-first-century
cinematographer does a particularly good job photographing people of color
—as James Laxon does in Moonlight (Barry Jenkins, 2016) and Ava
Berkofsky does in Insecure (HBO, 2016–2021)—their accomplishments
become news, as celebrations of dark skin tones remain rare, surprising
even, in US commercial media.20
Many films by and about people of color also invoke the White spectator
as a norm in order to remind viewers that it is a norm. Take, for instance,
the opening scene of Jordan Peele’s Get Out (2016), wherein a Black man
walks nervously through an affluent suburban neighborhood after dark. As
it turns out, he is right to be afraid. Peele is not the first filmmaker to find
evil in the suburbs. However, he uses his setting not to titillate and excite an
implicitly White spectator—as Wes Craven does in Nightmare on Elm
Street (1984)—but to connect with Black viewers and remind White
viewers that Black people are not safe in presumptively White
neighborhoods. Peele makes this point in order to disrupt and decenter
White spectatorship, because it continues apace in much US cinema.
One would not go amiss in interpreting the White gaze I am describing
here as a racialized correlative to the male gaze Laura Mulvey identified as
structuring classical Hollywood cinema in 1975. Indeed, this chapter is at
base an antiracist apparatus theory of postcinematic media rooted in the
discourses and theories of prior media cultures. During the 1970s, Mulvey
and fellow apparatus theorists Stephen Heathe, Jean-Louis Baudry, and
Christian Metz looked beyond filmic content to show how the physical and
psychic structures of cinematic exhibition produce a spectatorial subject
position that imposes ideological values on individual viewers.21 Not all
cinemas or films interpellate the spectator in the same way, and not all
viewers adopt the spectator position foisted upon them, but certain trends
do prevail—such as the male gaze. In “Visual Pleasure and Narrative
Cinema,” Mulvey shows how classical Hollywood narration was created by
men for men to affirm patriarchal social values and how elements of
cinematic exhibition—including “the extreme contrast between the
darkness in the auditorium (which also isolates the spectators from one
another) and the brilliance of the shifting patterns of light and shade on the
screen”—reinforce androcentric ideology.22 But patriarchy is not the only
ideology the cinematic apparatus supports, as Manthia Diawara, Ed
Guerrero, Mark Reid, and others have argued. The exhibition and narrative
norms of mainstream US cinema also reinforce White privilege.23 To be
sure, not all moviegoers are White, as not all moviegoers are men, but such
viewing positions continue to pass as the unmarked norms of US cinema’s
address to its spectator, not to mention those of television and digital video.
Therefore, this chapter traces the precepts of White spectatorship through
US cinema and television to contextualize their manifestation in digital
video and social media. To name the gaze of Facebook’s distanced,
disinterested spectator as White allows one to historicize the platform’s
emphasis on empathy and understand it as not anomalous but immanent in
US-based social media. Like film, television, and other mass media before
them, social media facilitate structures of viewing that encourage users to
be horrified by images of Black suffering but not by the consumption or
distribution of these images.
As regards broadcast television, racial difference was endemic to its
ontology-cum-ideology of liveness, which is also its major gift to social
media and attendant video cultures. Liveness emerged early in television
studies as a key to the medium’s unique ontology, its difference from film’s
record of physical reality—“change mummified,” as André Bazin so
memorably put it.24 Indeed, Bazin himself found television’s defining
characteristic to be “the sense of intimacy that … is an effect of the liveness
of the image, its small scale, and its site in the home.”25 Bazin meant
liveness in the ontological sense—that is, simultaneous image capture,
transmission, and reception—but as television scholar Mimi White
explains, television’s culture of liveness includes far more than just real-
time transmission. Liveness is an ideology intrinsic to the television
spectator’s experience of the apparatus. Claims to liveness imbue all
television with “presence, immediacy, actuality,” even when none of those
qualities actually pertains to a given program.26 Jane Feuer has famously
pointed to morning talk shows as an example of this disingenuous ideology
of liveness, as they foster the impression that they are taking place “now”
when in fact they depend on prerecorded segments filmed all over the
world.27 Hence liveness is not—or not just—an ontology but a rhetoric, a
way of framing content. Think of that old disclaimer, “this show was filmed
in front of a live studio audience,” in which the word live conveys
immediacy and presence even though the announcement is actually
declaring the show to have been prerecorded. Nick Couldry points out that
media use liveness to give viewers a sense of belonging to a collective
audience.28 Whether actual or rhetorical, liveness conveys urgency,
significance, and a shared system of values. Individually, “we” have all
witnessed something together, thereby affirming its importance and our
common identity.
Of course, every “we” also creates a “them,” a supplement that defines
“our” collectivity, and television audiences are no exception. As in film,
television’s spectator emerges in contrast to those who are watched,
whoever they may be in a given instance. This distinction may be
innocuous in some cases, but in others, it provides the spectator with a
troubling insularity, a presumption of safety from the catastrophes that are
often the subject of live media coverage. Such insularity is, among other
things, a historic hallmark of whiteness. The us/them dialectic of televisual
liveness does not arise exclusively along racial lines—class, gender,
sexuality, ethnicity, nationality, and region are also involved—but racialized
social hierarchies do typically inhere in its distinction. Especially when the
“them” shown suffering is people of color, television interpellates its
spectator as White, as one who must be informed of suffering because they
are not suffering themselves. Here Courtney Baker’s work on media
coverage of Hurricane Katrina offers an insightful exemplum. Baker notes
that “stark spectacles of abandoned black folks signaling for help on
rooftops and pathetically shrouded with discarded bedsheets in death” did
inspire important conversations about structural inequality in the wake of
the tragedy. However, the visual and discursive framing of these images
more prominently impute blame to the victims. They invite viewers to sit in
judgment on “them” rather than ask what “we” did to enable such pain and
destruction.29 Liveness is not always racialized, but like movie lighting, it
too often affirms engrained systems of privilege and confirms the
prerogative of White viewers to watch Black suffering from safe distances.

L ,S M S ,
L E
Ideologically if not ontologically, liveness is a crucial aspect of the viral
videos of anti-Black police violence that Lee, Coogler, and Gary
incorporate into their film practice. Although the videos were rarely, if ever,
viewed during real-time transmission, their “presence, immediacy,
actuality” is key to their circulation through social media and various
journalism platforms. Liveness is a crucial aspect of the social media
apparatus, especially its interpellation and retention of its user-spectator.
Studies show that the perception of liveness helps lure viewers to social
media and holds their attention longer, which is why many social media
platforms rely on continuously refreshing newsfeeds.30 Constant status
updates imbue Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram with an ethos of liveness,
a feeling that one cannot look away without missing something. They also
provide media users with the tools to participate in the flow of liveness by
recording their own real-time transmissions.31 At any given moment, one
can check in on the Facebook Live map and find streams of people DJ-ing,
leading baking demonstrations, practicing makeup techniques, and partying.
Most of these videos garner no more than a few dozen views, but
collectively they create a genre. That genre occasionally gets violated when
Facebook users deploy its video capture function to document injustice or
human suffering. The latter category is perhaps best exemplified by
Diamond Reynolds’s livestream of her boyfriend, Philando Castile, dying
after being shot by Minnesota police officer Jeronimo Yanez in July 2016.
Castile and Reynolds were pulled over for a routine traffic stop, but when
Castile reached for his ID, Yanez thought he was going for a gun and shot
him seven times at point blank range. It was then that Reynolds opened the
Facebook app on her phone and began live-streaming Castile’s death and
her detention. Toward the end of her feed, as her cell phone battery
dwindles, Reynolds issues a series of direct addresses to the camera,
specifically to friends and family living in the area. She calls on a social
circle who might be on Facebook, but not to Facebook as a social circle:
“Phil, Sister, call me … I’m on Larpenteur and Fry. Whoever can come to
Larpenteur and Fry, that’s where I’m at. I’m gonna need a ride home.”
Reynolds’s public witnessing temporarily radicalized Facebook Live,
offering it a sense of urgency that the apparatus was not equipped to deal
with.
 Reynolds’s video thus fundamentally disrupted the ideology of live
streaming by reminding viewers that liveness can be as serious as life and
death, that liveness may require something of the spectator other than their
feelings. Alexandra Juhasz notes that “every look at video is circumscribed
by frameworks and frames,” which include “larger systems like racism and
sexism that condition us all in ways of looking and knowing.”32 These
frames inform the apparatus of social media, as they inform the apparatuses
of film and television. Notably, social media formally present videos of
Black suffering as horrible disruptions in a field of quotidian sociality that
includes advertisement, baby pictures, friend requests, and the like. Social
media do offer their spectator tools to react to those disruptions, but they
also discourage them from leaving the platform—which means that they
also discourage the spectator from intervening in larger systems of injustice
outside the video window. To be sure, a given user group may have a
negotiated or even oppositional relationship with the ideologies embedded
in these frames, but opposition does not mitigate the existence of those
frames.33 Either way, the apparatus of social media tends to isolate the
spectator from the violence they see in videos of Black death and limits
their horror to the incident in question rather than the systems that make it
possible.
Facebook’s apparatus begins structuring its spectator’s subject position at
login, because unlike some media platforms (social and otherwise)
Facebook requires its user to be logged in.34 Hence the Facebook spectator
is always individuated, always watching under their own name. Wherever I
go on Facebook, there I am, in the navigation bar, my name and profile
picture supervening upon all other content. Of course, viewers always
encounter media as individuals, but Facebook’s structural emphasis on the
user’s profile obstructs any notion of the anonymous, collective audience
intrinsic to cinema and broadcast television. To paraphrase Laura Mulvey,
what shows up on my Facebook feed is manifestly shown to me.35
Facebook’s data mining and newsfeed algorithms predetermine what will be
meaningful to me based on my friendships, my groups, my comments, my
shares, and other taste information. Such algorithmic personalization
insulates the user’s sense of the world by narrowing it to fit their
preconceived ideas about the world. Algorithmic personalization also
impacts users’ experiences of liveness on Facebook, as it fundamentally
alters the relationship of Facebook’s “us” to the “them” created by live
video.36
The ideology of liveness also invokes sociality on Facebook, but who we
think of as comprising that society is radically different, because society
appears constituted before us on the platform in the form of our friends’
comments and shares. As Karen van Es argues, “live media … establish that
something needs to be attended to now, rather than later, because it is
important to us as members of society.”37 This distinction comes into sharp
relief in the Reynolds video, which was seen over 5.7 million times (on
Facebook alone) in the month after it was recorded.38 The speed with which
her video spread attests to Reynolds’s skillful videography and the social
significance of Castile’s murder, as well as the deceptive sociality of social
media, which keeps users on the site by framing emotional reactions as
socially meaningful actions.
Specifically, Facebook’s platform facilitates empathic but facile reactions
to suffering that preserve the historic privilege of whiteness. As Tero Karppi
explains, Facebook hails “an individual who is emotionally drawn into the
feedback loops of the system.”39 These feedback loops are not just
entertaining and ego-affirming; they are also part of the apparatus of
insularity that defines the Facebook spectator and locates them in a history
of White spectatorship. Facebook’s encouragement of empathy is a key
component of this spectatorial dynamic, for as counterintuitive as it may
seem, empathic spectatorship actually reifies the same us-versus-them
sociality as televisual liveness. In her theory of moral spectatorship, Lisa
Cartwright proposes empathic identification as an ethical alternative to
traditional, ego-driven cinematic spectatorship. Most theories of film
spectatorship begin from some principle of viewerly identification with a
character, the camera’s look, or the viewer’s own look, but Cartwright
accords more agency to “the force of the object” onscreen and its power to
solicit feeling and fellowship in a viewer.40 Cartwright views empathy as “a
radically intersubjective process” in which “I do not necessarily feel the
other’s feelings or imagine myself in his or her place, but rather recognize
and even facilitate the otherness of the other.”41 Empathy requires a
cognitive and affective awareness of an other and their distinct situation.
For that reason, Cartwright explains, it necessarily involves a certain
psychological and cognitive distance from its object: “In my empathy with
you, in thinking I know how you feel, I do not need to know about you or
identify with you (or any given object of my attention such as an image of
you). I do not see from your position (and it is necessary for me not to, in
order to achieve the distance required for pity).”42 The empathizer feels
something in response to the other, but not sympathy; the empathizer feels
in reaction to an other but does not share the same feelings as that other.
Indeed, Cartwright notes that these feelings may arise from partial
knowledge or misapprehension, since empathy inevitably reflects more
about its subject than its object.
Cartwright is right to acknowledge the possibility of misapprehension in
empathy, but it poses more of a problem than she admits. Empathy can
motivate people to fight for social justice, but it can also reify established
prejudices and social injustices. As Saidiya V. Hartman has argued of
nineteenth-century abolitionist literature, “if the scene of beating readily
lends itself to an identification with the enslaved, it does so at the risk of
fixing and naturalizing this condition of pained embodiment.”43 Modern
spectatorial empathy carries a similar risk of racialized fixture, even if one
acknowledges limits to the empathizer’s understanding of the other’s
experience. Empathic pity can lead to a tacit acceptance of the status quo, of
the oppressed’s suffering as unjust but also inexorable. Nowhere is this
danger more pointed than on social media. When the Castile video showed
up in my Facebook feed, I watched in horror and felt devastated for Castile,
Reynolds, her daughter, and the rest of their family. Like so many others, I
was enraged at the long-term institutional racism that structured Castile’s
encounter with Officer Yanez. Facebook facilitated the distance required for
such empathy and pity by offering me a limited set of outlets for my
feelings, namely commenting, sharing, or selecting one of six emoji to
illustrate my reaction.44 One can do quite a bit more outside Facebook, of
course, but the apparatus discourages its users from moving off-platform by
encouraging us to stick around and express our feelings.
The Facebook Reaction emoji alert users to their fellow users’ feelings
and disingenuously promote feeling itself as a social action. Selecting a
Reaction is no more futile a response to atrocity than sharing, however.
Important as it may feel, the viral reproduction of extant information on
social media does not change the structures behind it. One is not in fact
“doing something” by “spreading the news” on Facebook. When I share a
video to a news feed—my own or someone else’s—I am asked “What’s on
your mind, Caetlin?” In answering, I document my experience or my
reaction, making a record of it for other users. Such introductory remarks
may include a call to action, but they do not themselves intervene in the
events they present. In fact, sharing preserves the insularity of the user-
spectator. If at first a video disrupts my status quo, makes me despair or feel
frightened, when I share it, I can pass that emotional burden on to others by
sharing. Sharing creates the impression, for the user most of all, that they
have responded to the images and their social significance. But reacting is
not the same as responding. Sharing videos of horrible things does nothing
to the system of power hovering just outside the frame or the regimes of
visibility that govern their appearance on Facebook.
Commenting on others’ posts similarly keeps the commenter embedded
in the social media apparatus, likewise circumscribing the impact of their
gesture. My comment may or may not influence other users’ experiences,
may or may not solicit comments from them as well. While the Frankfurt
scholars attributed liberatory power to critical commentary, social media
commentary is more indebted to the etymological roots of the term. The
Oxford English Dictionary traces the etymology of “comment” back to the
Latin commentāre, meaning “to devise, to excogitate (usually in a bad
sense, of fraud or mischief).”45 Commenting, then, has roots in scheming,
and that connotation continues to inflect its current association with
annotation and explanation. Like empathy, commenting is more about the
subject than the object, more about expression than exposition. It is part of
the political futility that is built into the social media apparatus. By keeping
the so-called user in the role of observer, Facebook preserves the insularity
of media spectatorship, including empathic spectatorship.
In sum, Facebook celebrates the spectator’s feelings as though they were
political interventions. Understanding this dynamic is key to understanding
how the platform continues the scopic regime of White spectatorship and
why Black filmmakers have felt the need to contest it with their art. For
celebrations of spectatorial empathy become especially problematic around
negative affects, such as anger, frustration, or horror. Horror is a particularly
felicitous affect for unpacking the danger of Facebook’s focus on feelings
as action. Many viewers, journalists, and public intellectuals described
Reynolds’s video as horrifying. Horror movies, television shows, video
games, comics, and novels have rendered the term nearly synonymous with
startle, shock, and disgust, but horror is in fact much more destabilizing.
Horrible things typically rupture one’s most fundamental assumptions about
the world. As philosopher Robert C. Solomon explains, horror comprises a
profound “recognition that things are not as they ought to be.”46 Solomon
also describes horror as a spectator emotion, observing, “it is the standard
case in horror that there is nothing to do, no action to be taken.”47 Put
another way, horror is rooted in a paralyzing revelation about one’s world, a
revelation like: Philando Castile died because a policeman shot him
without cause. The police shoot people, Black people, for no reason at all.
Such revelations leave people feeling helpless or dumbfounded, and social
media provide them outlets to express such feelings without challenging the
supposition that they are in fact helpless.
Hence the apparatus through which a spectator experiences horror may
dispose them to either preserve their distance or embrace the hard work of
making things the way that they ought to be. Naturally, these effects are not
wholly determinative; the success of social media activist networks and
indeed the online distribution of Lee’s “Radio Raheem and the Gentle
Giant” both attest to individuals’ capacity to resist the apparatus of any
given social media platform. That being said, Facebook does dispose its
spectator against involvement in the world beyond its platform, in large part
because a for-profit social network needs to keep its users on its site.
Specifically, it transposes activist videos of anti-Black violence into a
spectacular history of Black suffering and ambivalent White
spectatorship.48 Too often, the frames through which we encounter violent
videos on social media discourage social action. These include the technical
frames that constitute Facebook’s apparatus and the regimes of visibility
that predate them. As Jennifer Malkowski observes, spectacles of anti-
Black violence have been “a consistent feature of US media and public life
—from the beating of Uncle Tom in nineteenth-century literature to the
beating of Rodney King on twentieth-century TV news.”49 When we see
anti-Black violence on our social media feeds, we may be horrified but not
shocked, because these images are not without precedent. The sad truth is
that US visual culture has prepared viewers for an insular psychic position
from which to observe Black suffering without intervening in what they see.
Media corporations have been making money from the spectacle of Black
pain for centuries. This is the history of White spectatorship. Facebook’s
apparatus does not disrupt this lineage; in fact, it profits from it.

C S M ’ W G
F
As social media have become increasingly pervasive as platforms for video
distribution, filmmakers have begun to reflect on and contest their regimes
of visibility. The first films about social media were comparatively
apolitical and White, a trend exemplified by The Social Network (David
Fincher, 2010) and Catfish (Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman, 2010). Of
late, Searching (Ameesh Chaganty, 2018) and other “screencast” horror
movies have begun interrogating the effects of online sociality on
characters’ offline lives.50 In addition, many Black filmmakers and video
artists have started working with viral videos of anti-Black violence and
grappling with their place in film Blackness. Working in both narrative and
avant-garde traditions, these artists reclaim videos of Black death by
placing them in the context of Black life. Their films do not humanize the
videos’ subjects but rather remind viewers that they were always human,
that only certain deplorable spectatorial positions frame them as less than
human. It does not minimize the tragedy of these murders or the terror
visited upon the victims and their families to suggest that these filmmakers
do not bestow humanity upon their subjects. For these Black filmmakers
emphasize the already given humanity of their subjects by reframing and
historicizing the documentary footage of their deaths.51
By providing broader and more trenchant frames for watching viral
videos of anti-Black violence, these filmmakers also address the particular
anguish of watching such videos for Black viewers. As Courtney Baker
observes, facing “the trauma and indignity of the visual and video
reminders of our own precarious lives” can be deeply injurious for African
American viewers: “we are enraged, we are disgusted, we are mourning,
and we are terrorized by the uncritically circulated spectacles of our own
destruction.”52 Yet refusing to look at or listen to these videos does not
absolve one of the responsibility to respond to them. Alexandra Juhasz
contends that whether an individual chooses to watch any given video or
not, they remain bound to account for why they looked (or not), what action
they took as a result—including none at all.53 Contra Cartwright, Juhasz
suggests that feelings are not enough, that even when one does not watch,
awareness of the video and its truth still require a reaction, and not just a
Facebook Reaction. Certain documentary images demand a counteraction
from the spectator, either through direct address (e.g., Reynolds’s call to
Phil and Sister) or through the injustice they convey (e.g., Yanez murdering
Castile). In such cases, empathy is ethically insufficient. However, Baker
also suggests that spectacles of suffering can generate “humane insight” in
and for their viewers, provided that the viewer sees beyond the spectacle to
the social institutions and ideologies behind it.54 This is precisely what Lee,
Coogler, and Gary seek to achieve through their filmmaking.
Ryan Coogler’s Fruitvale Station (2013) teaches its spectator to see viral
videos of Black death in the context of Black life by reminding them to
grieve the person, not the incident. It includes and was inspired by
documentary cell phone footage of Oscar Grant III being shot by policeman
Johannes Mehserle in a Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) station in Oakland,
California on New Year’s Day 2009. Like Grant, Coogler grew up in
Oakland. He was a graduate student at the University of Southern
California at the time of Grant’s murder and quickly developed a proposal
to tell the story of Grant’s final day as a feature film. This story is not
presented linearly, not quite; instead Coogler begins with the death video to
frame it as the impetus for making Grant’s life his actual subject. Over the
film’s opening credits, the spectator hears a young man (Oscar, played by
Michael B. Jordan) discussing New Year’s resolutions with his girlfriend
(Sophina Mesa, played by Melonie Diaz), including his decision to stop
selling contraband cannabis. Coogler then cuts to the actual recording of
Grant’s murder before returning to Oscar and Sophina’s conversation,
which lower-third captions identify as occurring at 12:10 AM the night
before his murder. The rest of the film—the rest of Oscar’s day—finds him
shuttling between various errands and the memories they trigger, trying to
balance his personal goals and his responsibilities as a partner, father, son,
brother, and grandson. Through these interactions, Oscar emerges as a
complex, well-rounded character: joyful and angry, magnanimous and self-
interested, conflicted and compelling. Notably, nothing in Oscar’s day
predicts or contributes to the violence that befalls him in the Fruitvale
BART station that night. Indeed, viewers may at times forget what’s going
to happen to Oscar and of course already happened to Grant, both in the real
world and in the film’s prologue. Through painfully poignant shots of Oscar
alive—as when he races his young daughter home from preschool in slow
motion (fig. 22.1) or swallows his anger after his former boss refuses to
rehire him—Coogler invites the spectator to hope for a better outcome. His
depiction of Oscar’s quotidian existence reminds the spectator that Grant’s
was a life interrupted, a life without an end in sight even when it was just
around the corner.

Figure 22.1. Oscar, 2013 (Michael B. Jordan) encapsulates the joys of life as well as the sorrows of
death in Fruitvale Station.
 At the same time, death also haunts Fruitvale Station, as it haunts many
African Americans living “in the wake,” as Christina Sharpe so elegantly
figures it, of US slavery and social and political systems organized against
Black survival.55 While pumping gas on his way to sell his last bag of
weed, Oscar encounters a beautiful young pit bull wandering in the street.
Oscar and the dog greet each other affectionately, then Oscar turns away to
text Sophina. Soon after, he hears the dog being hit by car and the car
speeding off. Running into the street, Oscar finds the dog badly injured and
bleeding from the snout. He cradles the dog in his arms, speaks to it, and
comforts it as it dies. Then he must move on. Michael B. Jordan drains all
emotion from his face as Oscar pulls on his black knit cap, gets back in his
car, and drives away. Through these gestures, Jordan shows the spectator
how Oscar must disavow the pain of a senseless death he could not prevent.
Many critics disparaged this scene as melodramatic and emotionally
manipulative, especially after Coogler revealed that it was based on
something that happened to his brother, not Grant.56 Some questioned why
Grant’s death needed to be so pointedly foreshadowed by a dog’s, to which
Coogler replied that “in many ways, pit bulls are like young African-
American males.” Both are stigmatized as violent and treated as disposable
by US culture. For Coogler, letting Oscar react to the dog’s death was a way
to allow the character to respond to “all of the Black males who die in the
street and life goes on.”57 Oscar must harden himself against this injustice,
but that is not a shortcoming of his character, as he is visibly affected by the
dog’s suffering. Rather Oscar must find a way to live on “in the wake” of
death—the dog’s death and centuries of death imposed on Black men—as
the viewer must live on after Grant’s death and after Fruitvale Station.
Through its structure and its diegetic meditations on death, Coogler’s
film interpellates a spectatorial gaze that can recognize Oscar’s human
predicaments. It also pointedly demands that viewers feel for Grant as they
do for the dog—and challenges them to question their values if that affinity
does not happen spontaneously. This is one of the many ways in which
Coogler’s film challenges the tradition of White spectatorship, the regime
of visibility which enframes videos of Grant’s murder on YouTube and
other video-sharing platforms. Although those videos were recorded and
(originally) posted by citizen journalists objecting to anti-Black police
violence, they always and only reach the viewer as evidence of a crime.
They are not about Grant, whose face one can barely make out, but the
atrocity that befell him. Whatever one may feel or do in response to the
video, it is always and only another video, as the algorithmically generated
video queue on the right side of the YouTube website visually reminds its
viewer. Coogler uses the techniques of narrative filmmaking to tell Grant’s
story, the story his death video obscures, and to demand more self-reflection
from the spectator.
While narrative offers Coogler one strategy for retrieving a celebration of
Black life from a viral video of Black death, other filmmakers turn to
formal experimentation to radically recontextualize these videos and help
viewers question their circulation. This is precisely the strategy pursued by
Ja’Tovia Gary in her short film “Giverny I (Négresse Impériale).” Made in
Summer 2016, while Gary held an artist’s residency at Claude Monet’s
famous garden in Giverny, France, the film reflects Gary’s experience of
double consciousness as she tried to reconcile that “elaborately bucolic and
luxurious dreamscape” with the “brutal imagery” emerging on Facebook
that season, namely, videos of police murdering Alton Sterling (in Baton
Rouge, Louisiana on July 5) and Philando Castile (in St. Anthony,
Minnesota on July 6).58 “Giverny I” incorporates footage from Reynolds’s
video of the latter event as part of Gary’s contemplation of “the
vulnerability of Black women, bodily integrity, ethnicity’s ethics as
resistance work and how violence penetrates hierarchical class
structures.”59 The short film provokes in its spectator a terrifying,
destabilizing experience of cognitive dissonance by asking them to
syncretize contemporary images of Monet’s idyllic garden, archival footage
of Monet and of Black Panther organizer Fred Hampton, video clips of
Reynolds and her daughter, and Gary’s own unapologetic and finally
disruptive presence in Monet’s garden. In a montage set to a looped and
loopy remix of Louis Armstrong’s “La vie en rose,” Gary walks and poses
alone inside Monet’s secluded oasis. As Michael Gillespie notes, Giverny
has been preserved as a “space of whiteness, beauty, and earthly delights,”
here offered as a verdant synecdoche for the dominion of White artists and
the White gaze over Black women. Gary’s confident presence in this setting
“engenders a ‘reinscription’ of her body, a disarticulation of her black
aberrance in” Western art’s racialized system of value.60 Whether running
down a path or reclining on the grass, Gary makes the garden a frame for
her figure and also digitally processes the images to denaturalize them. All
of her poses thus critique the privileged space of artistic production that
Gary has been invited into, and, by extension, its invitation to retreat from
the world. The impetus for Gary’s ire becomes more pointed when she
starts to intercut garden shots with clips from Reynolds’s video, black
screens, Hampton expounding his theory of “negro imperialism,” and
translucent celluloid collages of plants from Monet’s garden. These
interjections violently disrupt and undermine Monet’s manicured idyll,
exposing how anti-Black violence underwrites white insularity. Notably,
Gary does not include shots of Castile dying, only shots of Reynolds, her
daughter, and the Minnesota sky. Her selections foreground her experience
as a physically distant but psychically imbricated viewer of anti-Black
violence. Intercutting Reynolds’s video with Giverny and Hampton, Gary
imposes on the spectator the confusion, fear, and outrage that she
experienced that summer, forcing them to do the hard work of resolving
Reynolds’s vulnerability, her anger, and the safety and privilege of Giverny.
Such reconciliation is necessarily impossible, and “Giverny I” is rife with
stutter cuts and glitches to remind the spectator of this problem. These
visual eruptions disrupt the White gaze that structured viewers’ initial
encounters with both Monet’s gardens and Reynolds’s video. Toward the
end of the film, Gary goes even further to register the violence of that gaze
and the pain it has caused. In one of her last appearances in the film, Gary
poses nude before her own camera, staring back at the spectator,
challenging their visual consumption of her body. Gary’s nudity at once
acknowledges entrenched art-historical expectations of how African and
African American women are treated in Western art and shocks the
spectator, who has previously seen her clad in a romantic, ruffled blue
dress. Her visual challenge to the spectator recalls Edouard Manet’s
“Olympia” (1856), wherein a White prostitute returns the viewer’s gaze in a
similarly defiant manner (and while wearing a similar black choker).
However, Manet’s painting also includes a Black female servant, the only
one in the image not returning the viewer’s gaze.61 By evoking both
Olympia and her unnamed attendant, Gary upsets the gendered and
racialized systems of oppression in French Impressionist symbolism.
Tellingly, however, this is not the final shot of Gary in the film. We see her
again, screaming from one of the Giverny bridges. While her posture is
unmistakable, Gary disrupts the sound of her own scream so that instead of
hearing a primal shriek of resistance, the spectator encounters a cacophony:
Armstrong’s song, Reynolds’s voice describing Castile’s death, and the
howl of acoustic feedback. As the spectator struggles to reconcile all of
these sounds, a similarly divergent set of images and visual effects alternate
rapidly onscreen: Gary, leaves, police lights, glitches, “NEGRO
IMPERIALISM.” This disjunction haptically imposes Gary’s distress on the
viewer’s body. Thus overwhelmed, the spectator now fully appreciates
Giverny as both a prison and a paradise, a site of artistic production
inadequate to the political climate in which Black artists live and work
today. Gillespie has described “Giverny I” as a “musing on why not all will
have a place in this garden.”62 That such a musing ends in a frustrated
scream speaks to the outrageous task the artist faces in trying to syncretize
antiracist filmmaking with the racist circulation of Black death on viral
video.
Figure 22.2. Gary shrieks with pain, frustration, and horror in “Giverny I (Négresse Impériale,
2017).”

“Radio Raheem and the Gentle Giant,” Fruitvale Station, and “Giverny I
(Négresse Impériale)” all struggle to recontextualize documentary footage
of anti-Black violence; all reframe those images to allow the viewer to see
them from a perspective other than ineffective empathy. These films do not,
cannot, ignore the legacy of the White gaze, but they do offer viewers an
option other than simply looking or not looking at viral videos of anti-Black
violence. This third option encourages viewers to look, as Judith Butler puts
it, “not only for the ‘event’ of violence, but for the racist schema that
orchestrates and interprets the event.”63 Such visual epistemologies
acknowledge and attack the logics of White supremacy undergirding US
corporate media, including social media. Butler observes that “the visual
field is not neutral in the question of race; it is itself a racial formation, an
episteme, hegemonic and forceful.”64 In the twenty-first century, the racial
formation of US media is carried forward not just by film and television but
also by social media. Its platforms perpetuate the terrible tradition of White
spectatorship against which antiracist filmmakers must pursue their art.
Therefore, film theorists committed to politically and culturally salient
criticism of contemporary artistic production and reception cannot read the
medium independent of Facebook, Instagram, and their ilk. Over the past
hundred-plus years, film theory has evolved a number of hermeneutics that
are helpful for interrogating a wide range of visual objects, the many media
with which filmmakers find themselves in dialogue. Just as filmmakers do
not limit themselves to film, as a medium or a culture, film theorists cannot
limit their studies to film or cinema; such reactionary gestures foreclose the
bright future of the field and its potential for meaningful social criticism.
Furthermore, film theory does not stop being film theory when applied to
new media objects. If anything, it becomes film theory 2.0: a new iteration
of the field as capable of and committed to analyzing postcinema’s media
cultures as it once was to cinema alone.

N
1. Lee has since removed “Radio Raheem and the Gentle Giant” from his Twitter, Instagram,
YouTube, and Vimeo accounts or made it private. Spike Lee, “Radio Raheem and the Gentle
Giant,” YouTube, July 21, 2014, accessed October 22, 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=Bnq4rrcIO1g.
2. Josh Sanburn, “The Witness,” Time, accessed September 28, 2021, http://time.com/ramsey-
orta-eric-garner-video/. For a full and terrifying dossier of citizen reporters’ recordings of anti-
Black police violence, see “Black Lives Upended by Policing: The Raw Videos Sparking
Outrage,” New York Times, updated April 19, 2018,
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/08/19/us/police-videos-race.html.
3. Elahe Izadi, “What Inspired Do the Right Thing Character Radio Raheem and Why He’s Still
Relevant Today,” Washington Post, September 26, 2016,
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/arts-and-entertainment/wp/2016/09/26/what-inspired-
do-the-right-thing-character-radio-raheem-and-why-hes-still-relevant-today/?
utm_term=.fedeeb478319.
4. Ken Murray, Kerry Burke, Chelsia Rose Marcius, and Rocco Parascandola, “Staten Island Man
Dies after NYPD Cop Puts Him in Choke Hold—SEE THE VIDEO,” New York Daily News,
updated December 3, 2014, http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/staten-island-man-dies-
puts-choke-hold-article-1.1871486.
5. While Do the Right Thing was shot on 35mm, the footage from Do the Right Thing in “Radio
Raheem and the Gentle Giant” was recorded from some kind of monitor, the edges of which
occasionally become visible as the handheld camera moves in relation to it. This technique
creates a powerful resonance between Lee’s cinematography and Orta’s.
6. See Michael Cramer, “Television and the Auteur in the Late ’50s,” in Opening Bazin: Postwar
Film Theory & Its Afterlife, ed. Dudley Andrew (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011),
268–74.
 7. See Shane Denson and Julia Leyda, “Perspectives on Post-Cinema: An Introduction,” in Post-
Cinema: Theorizing 21st-Century Film, ed. Shane Denson and Julia Leyda (Sussex, UK:
Reframe Books, 2016), 2.
8. While Laura Mulvey does not cite the male gaze as reliant on a cisgendered, heterosexual, and
White masculine subject, such values are nonetheless implicit in her description of its
patriarchal function. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” in Narrative, Apparatus,
Ideology: A Film Theory Reader, ed. Philip Rosen (New York: Columbia University Press,
1986), 198–209.
9. For a full and terrifying dossier, see “Black Lives Upended by Policing: The Raw Videos
Sparking Outrage,” New York Times, accessed September 28, 2021,
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/08/19/us/police-videos-race.html.
10. Importantly, the Black Lives Matter movement did not begin with videos of Black death on
social media but with the acquittal of George Zimmerman for the murder of Trayvon Martin.
Black Lives Matter has staged many important protests in response to these videos, but there
seems to be little correlation between expressing negative affect on social media and joining
the Black Lives Matter movement for most users. “Herstory,” Black Lives Matter, accessed
September 28, 2021, https://blacklivesmatter.com/about/herstory/.
11. For brevity’s sake, this chapter focuses on Facebook as its social media case study. This is not
because Facebook is exemplary of all social media platforms—although it is the most popular
and has been for years—but because its focus on sharing and feelings most clearly elucidates
social media’s debt to the multimedia history of White spectatorship.
12. Michael Boyce Gillespie, Film Blackness: American Cinema and the Idea of Black Film
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016).
13. Ibid., 12.
14. Courtney R. Baker, Humane Insight: Looking at Images of African American Suffering and
Death (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2015), 80.
15. Martin Berger, Sight Unseen: Whiteness and American Visual Culture (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2005), 1–2.
16. Ibid., 4.
17. Stuart Hall, “The Whites of Their Eyes: Racist Ideologies and the Media,” in Gender, Race,
and Class in Media: A Text Reader, ed. Gail Dines and Jean M. Humez (Thousand Oaks, CA:
SAGE, 1995), 21.
18. Daniel Bernardi, “The Voice of Whiteness: D. W. Griffith’s Biograph Films,” in The Birth of
Whiteness: Race and the Emergence of US Cinema, ed. Daniel Bernardi (New Brunswick, NJ:
Rutgers University Press), 104.
19. Richard Dyer, White (New York: Routledge, 1997), 89.
20. See Racquel Gates, “The Last Shall Be First: Aesthetics and Politics in Black Film and Media,”
Film Quarterly 71, no. 2 (Winter 2017): 38–45.
21. For a comprehensive introduction to apparatus theory, see Philip Rosen, ed., Narrative,
Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Theory Reader (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986).
22. Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” 201.
23. Manthia Diawara, “Black Spectatorship: Problems of Identification and Resistance,” Screen
29, no. 4 (1988): 66–79; Ed Guerrero, Framing Blackness: The African American Image in
Film (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993); Mark Reid, Redefining Black Film
(Oakland: University of California Press, 1993).
24. André Bazin, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” trans. Hugh Gray, Film Quarterly
13, no. 4 (Summer 1960): 8.
25. Michael Cramer, “Television and the Auteur in the Late ‘50s’,” in Opening Bazin: Postwar
Film Theory and its Afterlives, ed. Dudley Andrew (New York: Oxford University Press,
2011), 269.
26. Mimi White, “The Attractions of Television: Reconsidering Television,” in MediaSpace:
Place, Scale, and Culture in a Media Age, ed. Nick Couldry and Anna McCarthy (New York:
Routledge, 2004), 79.
27. Jane Feuer, “The Concept of Live Television: Ontology and Ideology,” in Regarding
Television: Critical Approaches—An Anthology, ed. E. Ann Kaplan (Lanham, MD: University
Publications of America, 1983), 16–21.
28. Nick Couldry, “Liveness, ‘Reality’, and the Mediated Habitus from Television to the Mobile
Phone,” Communication Review 7, no. 4 (2004): 355.
29. Baker, Humane Insight, 110.
30. See Inge Ejbye Sørensen, “The Revival of Live TV: Liveness in a Multiplatform Context,”
Media, Culture, and Society 38, no. 3 (2016): 381–99.
31. Social networks adopted user-generated live-stream video en masse during the 2010s. Twitch
and YouTube started hosting live-streams in 2011, while Twitter introduced its live streaming
app, Periscope, in March 2015. Facebook began offering live video streaming to certain
celebrities and corporate partners in August 2015; six months later, Facebook Live became
available to all of the site’s 1.8 billion users. (A relative holdout, Instagram did not add live
video until November 2016.)
32. Alexandra Juhasz, “How Do I (Not) Look? Live Feed Video and Viral Black Death,” JSTOR
Daily, July 20, 2016, https://daily.jstor.org/how-do-i-not-look/.
33. I think here of African American and LGBTQ communities on social media, particularly of the
vibrant and resistant online cultures known as Black Twitter and Gay Twitter. These
communities use social media to extend and strengthen marginalized voices, but that does not
mean that the platforms they chose were intended for the work of resistance.
34. As of July 2018, it is technically possible to see some—but not all—of a public user profile or
a business page without logging in to Facebook, but a lower third inviting the viewer blocks a
large portion of the screen. Scroll too much and a full-screen invitation to log in will block the
screen entirely.
35. Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” 201.
36. Indeed, the algorithms by which social media platforms regulate which posts a given user sees
can have a highly determinative effect on their experience of “us” and “them.” See Cass R.
Sunstein, #Republic: Divided Democracy in the Age of Social Media (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 2018).
37. Karin Van Es, “Liveness Redux: On Media and Their Claim to Be Live,” Media, Culture, and
Society 39, no. 8 (2017): 1250.
38. Claire Wardle, “How Did News Organizations Handle the Philando Castile Facebook Live
Video?” First Draft News, August 6, 2016, https://medium.com/1st-draft/how-did-news-
organisations-handle-the-philando-castile-facebook-live-video-549ff9a1da36.
39. Tero Karppi, Disconnect: Facebook’s Affective Bonds (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2018), 8.
40. Lisa Cartwright, Moral Spectatorship: Technologies of Voice and Affect in Postwar
Representations of the Child (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 24.
41. Ibid., 2.
42. Ibid., 24.
43. Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth
Century America (New York: Oxford University Press), 20 (emphasis added).
44. The original six Facebook Reactions—which translate to Like, Love, Haha, Wow, Sad, and
Angry—were introduced in February 2016 to sacrifice specificity for visual legibility with a
“quick, easy, and gesture-based way” to respond to posts, one that was admittedly more
nuanced than the old option to simply “like” a post. Elizabeth Stinson, “Facebook Reactions,
the Totally Redesigned Like Button, Is Here,” Wired, February 24, 2016,
https://www.wired.com/2016/02/facebook-reactions-totally-redesigned-like-button/. In April
2020, Facebook added a seventh reaction, care, in response to the global trauma of the
COVID-19 pandemic. Jessica Guynn, “Need a Hug during the Coronavirus Pandemic?
Facebook Is Giving You One to Share,” USA Today, updated May 1, 2020,
https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2020/04/17/facebook-messenger-coronavirus-new-hug-
emoji-reaction-support-family-friends/5147510002/.
45. “comment, v.”. OED Online, June 2018, accessed September 28, 2021,
http://www.oed.com.proxy.library.georgetown.edu/view/Entry/37055?
rskey=M5GebX&result=2.
46. Robert C. Solomon, “Real Horror,” in Dark Thoughts: Philosophical Reflections on Cinematic
Horror, ed. Steven Jay Schneider and Daniel Shaw (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2003),
243.
47. Robert C. Solomon, True to Our Feelings: What Our Emotions Are Really Telling Us (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 46.
48. I must here amend a position I took on social media in 2016 when I claimed that it was the
viewer’s responsibility to extend their reaction beyond social media. This chapter both expands
on and corrects that piece. See Caetlin Benson-Allott, “Learning From Horror,” Film
Quarterly 70, no. 2 (Winter 2016): 58–62.
49. Jennifer Malkowski, Dying in Full Detail: Mortality and Digital Documentary (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press), 195.
50. Two of the more successful films from this cycle are Unfriended (Levan Gabriadze, 2014) and
Searching. See Guy Lodge, “Out of Ctrl,” Guardian, August 20, 2018,
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2018/aug/20/laptop-film-john-cho-searching-unfriended-
timur-bekmambetov-profile.
51. Many other filmmakers have worked with documentary footage from the protests that emerged
in response to anti-Black police violence. This is an important and exciting artistic tradition
that reflects on and responds to different exigencies than the death videos, and it deserves its
own analysis by film theorists.
52. Courtney Baker, “The E-Snuff of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile,” Los Angeles Review of
Books, July 8, 2016, http://avidly.lareviewofbooks.org/2016/07/08/the-e-snuff-of-alton-
sterling-and-philando-castile/.
53. Juhasz, “How Do I (Not) Look?”
54. Baker, Humane Insight, 5.
55. Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2016).
56. Ryan Coogler, interview with Mike Ryan, “Ryan Coogler, Fruitvale Station Director, Defends
His Controversial Scene,” Huffington Post, July 12, 2013,
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/12/ryan-coogler-fruitvale-station_n_3580960.html.
57. Ibid.
58. Ja’Tovia Gary, quoted in Michael Gillespie, “Complicity,” in Unwatchable, ed. Nicholas Baer,
Maggie Hennefeld, Laura Horak, and Gunnar Iversen (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers
University Press, 2019), 127.
59. “Giverny I (Négresse Impériale),” CinemAfrica, accessed June 26, 2018,
http://cinemafrica.se/films/giverny-i-negresse-imperiale/.
60. Gillespie, “Complicity,” 127–28.
61. Even Olympia’s cat stares hostilely at the viewer from the right edge of the painting.
62. Gillespie, “Complicity,” 130.
63. Judith Butler, “Endangered/Endangering: Schematic Racism and White Paranoia,” in Reading
Rodney King/Reading Urban Uprising, ed. Robert Gooding-Williams (New York: Routledge,
1993), 17.
64. Butler is here writing about George Holliday’s recording of Los Angeles police offers
assaulting Rodney King, noting how its reception was contingent on longstanding racist tropes
in White visual culture. Butler, “Endangered/Endangering,” 20.
 CHAPTER 23

IN OTHER WORDS
Film and the Spider Web of
Description

TIMOTHY CORRIGAN

“Properly written texts are like spiders’ webs: tight, concentric, transparent, well-spun and firm. They
draw into themselves all the creatures of the air. Metaphors flitting hastily through them become their
nourishing prey. Subject matter comes winging towards them. The soundness of a conception can be
judged by whether it causes one quotation to summon another. Where thought has opened up one cell of
reality, it should, without violence by the subject, penetrate the next. It proves its relation to the object
as soon as other objects crystallize around it. In the light that it casts on its chosen substance, others
begin to glow.”

—T. W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, 87

Early in Cornell Woolrich’s 1942 short story, originally titled “It Had to Be
Murder,” the narrator Jeffries, with “his movements … strictly limited,”
watches, out the bay window of his bedroom, the daily routines of his neighbors
in the windows across a courtyard separating him from them.1 One particular
neighbor attracts his attention:
 I couldn’t make out what he was doing at first. He seemed to be busy in a perpendicular, up-and-
down way rather than lengthwise. He remained in one place, but he kept dipping down out of
sight and then straightening up into view again, at irregular intervals. It was almost like some sort
of callisthenic exercise, except that the dips and rises weren’t evenly timed enough for that.
Sometimes he’d stay down a long time, sometimes he’d bob right up again, sometimes he’d go
down two or three times in rapid succession. There was some sort of a widespread black V railing
him off from the window. Whatever it was, there was just a sliver of it showing above the upward
inclination to which the window still deflected my line of vision. All it did was strike off the
bottom of his undershirt, to the extent of a sixteenth of an inch maybe. But I haven’t seen it there
at other times, and I couldn’t tell what it was.
… Suddenly he left it for the first time since the shades had gone up, came out around it to the
outside, stooped down into another part of the room, and straightened again with an armful of
what looked like varicolored pennants at the distance at which I was. He went back behind the V
and allowed them to fall across the top of it for a moment, and stay that way. He made one of his
dips down out of sight and stayed that way a good while.2

The passage is particularly rich with verbal precision and metaphoric nuance,
made all the more lively (and potentially all the more meaningful) by the fact
that Jeffries is not at all certain what he is seeing in the cryptic movements
across this distance. The source text for Alfred Hitchcock’s 1954 metacinematic
Rear Window, Woolrich’s story continues to describe the mysterious visual
movements of his neighbor with comparable linguistic dynamics, as the active
field of what Jeffries calls the “delayed action” of moving between seeing,
describing, and interpreting. Gradually, this “delayed action” uncovers
Thorwald’s murder of his wife, but, more important for my purposes, it also
dramatizes the intricate relationship binding a concentrated viewing of images
with their linguistic descriptions. In the pursuit of moving images, here the
“delayed action” of description recognizes itself in a belated position of always
being “too late,” a position full of, on the one hand, interpretive potential and,
on the other, challenges which, when the frame of the rear window becomes the
moving images of Vertigo, threaten to transform that potential into swirling
silences.

T P D
For many years, I have been intrigued by the ways we respond and react to the
movies: how we are mesmerized by them, how we are repulsed by them, how
they make us think, how they allow us not to think, how they confuse us, how
they challenge us to see different worlds, and how they ask us to see the world
in different ways. Indeed, how many times do we finish watching a film and
begin, as part of our response, what is often the difficult task of recounting a
scene you loved or a sequence that confused you?
Leaving aside for now the contemporary advantage of reviewing or
rewatching parts of film through a DVD or other technological replays, imagine
this: immediately after watching a film, describe a favorite moment, a key
scene, some important dialogue, or a particularly memorable sequence in that
film. Better yet, make it a more measured and rhetorical challenge that involves
a circle of viewers asked to write down individual descriptions of a specific part
of a film. Doubtless, for different individuals, certain details will recur or
overlap in their various descriptions, and other details will, more or less, differ.
And of course some may simply vanish from memory. The language of those
descriptions could also vary considerably, and in some cases acts of concrete,
denotative description may shift into slightly interpretive, connotative
commentaries. Indeed, some of these descriptions may even stray into more
conceptual reflections on what individuals see and what it may mean in a larger
aesthetic framework.
What this exercise—or “play” in a Derridean sense—underlines, I believe, is
the extent to which “describing cinema” is a fundamental way that viewers
respond to movies. We are all film describers in one way or another: when we
leave a movie theater, even though we have seen the same film as our
companions, there is usually an inclination to talk about it in ways that extend
well beyond thumbs up or thumbs down. This inclination can often extend to
emailing our views to friends or even a more formalized blogging about what
we’ve seen and how we evaluate a certain film. For me, these efforts to describe
or “cite” the images or sequences that we have seen and have affected us when
watching a film demonstrate the central activities, varieties, and challenges of
watching movies: whether it’s a casual or concentrated response, describing a
film or key parts of one becomes a central movement in spectatorship when
language can reflect and often generate specific and often different
interpretation of that film.
In my role as a professor, description has been a serious exercise, serving as
one of the core assignments and strategies in virtually every film course I teach.
Aiming to have students move beyond simply “what happens” in a movie, I
begin by asking them temporarily to set the story of the film aside or at least to
make it a secondary layer. Primarily my goal in this context is to promote
attention and accuracy in how students look at the texture of an image or series
of images, a goal that most students quickly realize encounters significant
resistance in the excesses of the moving image with its numerous layers and
directions. Discussing his own experience with teaching film analysis, Serge
Daney characterizes that goal as a countercurrent to cinephilia, a way that
distances a viewer from the mesmerizing powers of the film image:
To hold onto an audience of students in order to delay the moment when they would risk passing
too quickly from one image to another, from one sound to another, seeing too quickly, declaring
themselves prematurely, thinking they are done with images and sounds when they don’t suspect
to what extent the arrangement of those images and sounds is something very complex and
serious, and not at all innocent. School permits us to turn cinephilia against itself, to turn it inside
out, like a glove, and to take our time about it. It confronts enigmas by not losing by sight of
them, holding onto them with one’s eyes, keeping them.3

Inside and outside the classroom, this “holding onto” the visual and aural
enigmas of the cinema is, for me, the salient power of description as an always
contingent, provisional, and sometimes creative response to the movies. Or, as
Mark Doty puts it, in a much broader discussion in his book The Art of
Description: all descriptions “are partial; thus all perception might be said to be
tentative, an opportunity for interpretation, a guessing game.” Suspended
between attention and resistance, he continues, “What we want when we
describe is surely complex: To solve the problem of speechlessness, which is a
state without agency, so that we feel impressed upon by things but unable to
push back at them.”4

E D
The historical backdrop for the complexities of describing cinema begins with
the notion of “ekphrasis,” the term used to characterize the representational
movement of a shared subject between different media, most often between a
visual representation and a verbal representation. One of the earliest, and still
best known, examples associated with ekphrasis is the poetic description of
“The Shield of Achilles” in Homer’s Iliad, but the history and tradition of
ekphrasis regularly appears as a dramatic and creative rhetorical action in
literature from John Keats’s “Grecian Urn,” the novels of Henry James, and
Wallace Stevens’s poetic efforts to “make the visible a little hard to see”5
through to more recent encounters, such as the novels of W. G. Sebald, where
resonant photographs punctuate the narrative prose. Specifically cinematic
versions of ekphrasis have also proliferated through the twentieth century,
notably in literature that assimilates or adapts filmic grammars and
perspectives: Luigi Pirandello’s Shoot! (1915), Vladimir Nabokov’s Laughter in
the Dark (1932), or the contemporary poetry of John Ashbery are only a few
notable examples of the range of works which, through an array of different
strategies and goals, attempt to translate the cinematic into the literary. As
varied as these practices and critical perspectives are, they sketch the historical
and representational foundation that underpins the interaction of images and
words, a foundation that remains a primary part of the heritage of describing
cinema and its strategies to still, to release, and to spin verbal webs around, into,
or after moving images.6 In all these cases and certainly in ways that haunt the
description of film images, as W. J. T Mitchell notes, “The ekphrastic image
acts … like a sort of unapproachable and unpresentable ‘black hole’ in the
verbal structure, entirely absent from it, but shaping and affecting it in
fundamental ways.”7
Recent studies have both assimilated and expanded the dynamics of the
ekphrastic, specifically in terms of the broader field of description and the
multiple dimensions and places where description appears. In a 2016 issue of
Representation titled “Description across Disciplines,” for instance, Sharon
Marcus, Heather Love, and Stephen Best broaden significantly the field of
ekphrasis (while, curiously, never referring to its long history) in their
introduction, “Building a Better Description,” where they highlight several of
the key points made by the different essays in the volume, including:
The generative flexibility of description and its “essential generosity” to attend “not only to its o
but also to the collective, uncertain, and ongoing activity of trying to get a handle on the world.”
The interactivity of interpretation and description as “mutually interdependent.”
The productive relationship of description and subjectivity according to which description is a r
not only of “what we encounter but also of ourselves encountering.”8

Each of these points—an uncertain generosity, a mutual interdependence, and a

reflexive subjectivity embedded in the act of description—signal key
elaborations in the transition from ekphrasis as act of transposition to
description as an act of uncertain reinscription whereby description becomes a
dialogic reinscription of self. Here the question of an accurate denotation of a
source text in its ekphrastic recuperation gives way to its inevitable reinscription
within a continual chain of descriptive connotations. As Roland Barthes puts it
in a manner that undercuts the lure of denotation in ekphrasis, “Structurally, the
existence of two supposedly different systems—denotation and connotation—
enables the text to operate like a game, each system referring to the other
according to the requirements of a certain illusion…. [D]enotation is not the
final meaning, but pretends to be so; under this illusion, it is ultimately no more
than the last of the connotations (the one that seems both to establish and close
the reading).”9
Midway through Vertigo, Scottie’s friend and former romantic partner,
Midge, paints her face into her version of the portrait of Carlotta. It is an odd
version of ekphrasis in which Midge describes and re-inscribes herself within
the eroticized frame of Carlotta, hoping to attract Scottie’s attention and
perhaps re-ignite their relationship. Rather than transposing a visual image to a
literary text, Midge transposes the image of a real self into a pictorial image, a
painting. Whereas ekphrasis usually foregrounds the power of one
representational system to transform or re-interpret another, Midge’s prank is
an attempt to inhabit the image with her social self, ironically calling attention
to its ekphrastic action and underlining the dramatic difference between an
erotic imaginary and the social real. Scottie, however, increasingly refuses to
acknowledge the frames and borders of ekphrastic textualities, so that the
images of Madeleine/Carlotta/Judy can merge as a palimpsest through (his)
own eyes. Midge’s denotative re-inscription of herself, sadly for her,
materializes the ekphrastic illusion in a manner that directly confronts and
disturbs the connotative chain that drives Scottie’s vision.

D C
In describing cinema, I am not primarily interested in the ekphrastic as a
dynamic that maps and measures the exchanges, for instance, between visual
images and the usually literary texts that appropriate them. Nor am I interested
here in the more common questions about how films themselves describe the
world through their various realist aesthetics, their different narrative strategies,
their cultural and ideological, or even their editing and framing techniques. All
these are important questions within debates about description and film. My
focus, however, is the critical act of description that is the foundation for the
reception of films, film sequences, and film images, and the extent to which
those acts of description provide a spectrum of entry ways into films, at the
same time dramatizing the pleasures and complexities of an active and varied
spectatorship. With some irony, I may be less interested here in the films
themselves than in the linguistic and rhetorical reclamation of those films as
verbal and written texts.
 For my argument, describing cinema is thus invariably, if less obviously,
about rhetoric, much in the way Adorno characterizes essay writing, where
“Rhetoric was probably never anything but thought in its adaptation to
communicative language.”10 With this approach, I follow Lesley Stern’s
incisive discussion in which “description is, of course, never merely
description. It is always rhetorical… Films live in the world and almost
inevitably open out onto other films, worlds, histories, political landscapes.”11
For her, this kind of “criticism is always more interesting if it not only describes
but if it probes, evidences curiosity, is attuned to resonance.”12 V. F. Perkins’s
comments on the relation between critical description, rhetoric, and
interpretation suggests more explicitly how descriptive rhetoric acts as a kind of
interpretation based in the communication of affect (which I will return to):
No intra-textual interpretation ever is or could be a proof. Most often, it is a description of
aspects of the film with suggested understandings of some of the ways they are patterned.
Rhetoric is involved in developing the description so that it evokes a sense of how, seen this way,
the film may affect us, or so that it invites participation in the pleasure of discovering this way in
which various of the film’s features hang together. But the ultimate appeal for conviction is to the
reader’s memory and renewed experience of the film.13

Like any visual image, films have innumerable qualities and ways of being
rhetorically described. Yet unlike an encounter with the single still image of, for
example, a photograph, with film those descriptions must struggle with the very
significant addition of movement and sound, additions which exponentially
ramp up the challenges of description: if description is a self-conscious
“pouring of the self into the now,”14 with film that interpellation of self in
language now vacillates within the gap between descriptive stasis and the
resistance of imagistic and audio movement. Before the VHS, DVD, and digital
file revolutions in playback spectatorship in the 1980s and 1990s, Raymond
Bellour’s landmark “The Unattainable Text” provocatively pinpoints the
problem of quoting and citing a cinematic text because of its fundamental
movement. Although today there may be the easy ability to arrest the filmic text
through those technologies, the real-time experience of the text has not
fundamentally altered, and significant challenges remain in trying to
linguistically inhabit visually and audially mobile spaces. More recently, Laura
Mulvey coincidentally retrieves the words of Woolrich’s Jeffries when she
characterizes a critical viewer’s encounter with fragments of a film that too
quickly flicker by us: this becomes an effort in which film quotation “delays”
the film image, a delay which she defines as “the essential process behind
textual analysis.” For her, the analytical opportunity in “delaying the image,
extracting it from its narrative surroundings, also allows it to return to its
context and to contribute something extra and unexpected, a deferred meaning,
to the story’s narration.” This in turn helps to explicate the “range of looking
relations” elicited by film quotation.15
There are of course many situations and platforms through which film
description occurs, contexts that necessarily shape and alter the dynamics of
description. Besides the fundamental act of writing itself, some of the most
prominent and distinctive variations on description as writing include
conversations, lectures, and video essays, each with their own rebalancing of
the rhetoric of description. With conversations, describing cinema usually
becomes a more dialogic and interactive texture through which the description
often calls attention to the gaps of memory that can also blur precise
compositional details, often in the service of arguments. Here the frequent back
and forth of a conversation attests especially to the challenge to accurately cite
texts or even plot details, and also to the socially productive exchanges between
interlocutors that underpin all efforts to describe recently observed films.
Academic lectures often—too often in my opinion—tend to minimize the
dialogic shape of description and replace it with a more authoritative, almost
legalistic position where description becomes evidence and proof. Video essays
usually shift the place of linguistic rhetoric from the center of description to the
margins of the images being re-presented and can take the form of a
palimpsestic reappropriation of images and sounds within a different conceptual
framework. In the best of these cases, the rhetoric of description shifts between
oral or written language and the visual syntax of the video.
As these examples suggest, there are also numerous technical and exhibition
modalities that come into play in a descriptive engagement with cinema. There
is, for instance, a significant difference between the need to describe a film as
an immediate and singular experience and the ability to see and resee an image
or sequence (again, enabled by the viewing technologies of the last forty years).
Less obviously, perhaps, are the possibilities and the limits for the description of
films engaged through immersive screens, home screens, or portable screens,
each of these offering different spectatorial positions that generate less or more
of the distance that allows for less or more descriptive activity. Arguably, an
immersive viewing experience tends to resist description or at least to shift the
focus of that description from what happens on and through the screen to the
visceral and kinetic experience of the viewer, while the manipulatable screens
of computers and other personal digital devices allow relatively precise
attention to images, while sacrificing other important dimensions of the film
(such as, most notably, the scale and impact of large-screen images). Although
these distinctions are much too schematic, they call proper attention, I believe,
to how cinematic description responds invariably to the technological and social
contexts that inform any descriptive encounter.
Throughout the history of cinema itself, there are likewise precedents and
oblique variations on the challenges of describing film images as part of the
movie experience. Films in the first decades of the twentieth century offer some
of the most fundamental but often quite sophisticated precedents in their use of
linguistic intertitles providing dialogue, narrative transitions, humor, and
occasionally commentary or poetic reflections on the action. Most famously
perhaps is the intertitle from D. W. Griffith’s Intolerance (1916): without any
direct reference to the plots of the film, a repeated line from Walt Whitman’s
Leaves of Grass, “Out of the cradle endlessly rocking,” appears a metaphoric
and connotative description of the historical repetitions that connect the four
stories of the film.16 Another version of this tendency, outside the linguistic
model and comprising an extensive historical and cultural range of films, occurs
in what I call self-describing cinema: movies such as Man with the Movie
Camera (1929), Singin’ in the Rain (1952), and Holy Motors (2012) reflexively
describe their own filmmaking process or their own place in film history as part
of the film narrative. Within this category, one of the most demanding
descriptive practices appears as a modern crisis that represents the failure of
description as a struggle with the cinematic task of describing the unseen, the
unseeable, or realities beyond the powers of cinematic description: the voice-
over of Jean Caryl’s text in Night and Fog (1955) largely relinquishes both
words and images of the Holocaust camps since “There is no use even
describing what went on here.” Especially after 1945, this crisis of description
moves to the foreground in both self-describing cinema and critical descriptions
of cinema.
It is almost a commonplace to say that Vertigo describes itself: as an
elaborately self-conscious and reflexive engagement with the essential
cinematic compositions that are at the thematic center of its story: vision,
images, and frames. Yet, it also describes itself as a film about the difficulty, if
not impossibility, of adequately and clearly describing its tortured visual world
with a denotative visual and aural language. Gavin Elster’s bromidic
description of his wife’s peculiar behavior, the linguistic flatness of Scottie’s
trial, or the gabby Midge’s formulaic attempt to resuscitate Scottie, all appear
as if superfluous eruptions in a film whose most dramatic moments are almost
silent, focused frequently on dumbfounded and sometimes catatonic Scottie.
Descriptive language flounders throughout Vertigo, as silence overwhelms so
many of its central sequences, as an inarticulable emptiness made more vibrant
by Bernhard Hermann’s swaying under-score. When Scottie follows Madeleine
to a museum gallery, the immensely rich visual movements—zooms and pans
darting between his eyes and the coiffed hair and bouquets that link Madeleine
and the portrait of Carlotta—seem beyond or before words. Throughout the
film, adrift in the anxiety of a musical score, language appears too late to
account for the action and almost irrelevant to the vertiginous spaces. Does the
final silent image of Scottie peering down at another body simply refuse, resist,
or at least deflect linguistic description?
This difficulty of articulating and describing a world of elusive images
persists, provoking and generating, I would argue, a subtle anxiety, or at least
urgency, in the description of films today. Based in a somewhat open-ended or
even arbitrary process that moves beyond the mechanisms of those traditional
cornerstones of cinematic identification and cognition, describing cinema has
become a pervasive and fluctuating rhetorical and hermeneutical action at the
center of the film experience, spread across the spate of fluent reviews, lively
blogs, and stylish academic writing about film.
As a measure of the productive and often creative range of cinematic
descriptions, this open provocation to describe aligns, most notably, with the
wide range of cinematic affects. Just as a vague “disturbance” in his
“subconscious”17 provoke and elicit the literary Jeffries’s descriptive
investigation of the moving frames across from his apartment; acts of
describing cinema are, perhaps needless to say, always motivated. More varied
than Jeffries’s motivations, however, cinematic descriptions respond to the
shifting play of affects as they commonly follow sometimes singular,
sometimes overlapping, affective encounters.
The contemporary interest in affect theory and practice has produced an array
of definitions and investigations, exploring affect as a field of communicative
intensities, pre-subjective emotions, and physical responses. In their
introduction to The Affect Theory Reader, “An Inventory of Shimmers,”
Gregory J. Seigworth and Melissa Gregg delineate for me the affective
grounding of that grey zone of cinematic description, where an affective
“duration” recalls both Jefferies and Mulvey’s “delayed action”:
 Affect arises in-between-ness: in the capacities to act and be acted on. Affect is an impingement
or extrusion of a momentary or sometimes more sustained state of relation as well as the passage
(and the duration of passage) of forces and intensities …. [It] can serve to drive us toward
movement, toward thought and extension, that can likewise suspend us (as if in neutral) across a
barely registering accretion of force-relations or that can even leave us overwhelmed by the
world’s apparent intractability.

Like other critical investigations that explore the circulation of these “forces and
intensities” in various anthropological or public realms, the place of these
affects seems, following Deleuze’s prelinguistic placement of it, to inhabit a
blurred space which precedes or evades their specific articulation. In contrast,
Eugenie Brinkema’s study The Forms of Affect locates the force and movement
of affect precisely in its formal articulation. According to Brinkema, most
models of affect in the humanities focus on affect’s power to “disrupt, interrupt,
reinsert, demand, provoke, insist on, remind of, agitate for,” yet those models
tend to characterize affect as a mostly abstract force which, to some extent,
deflates the concept, leaving “only the mild rhetorical force of summary and
paraphrase, intoned synonyms, and thematic generalizations.”18 Instead, she
insists: “Affect is not the place where something immediate and automatic and
resistant takes place outside of language. The turning to affect in the humanities
does not obliterate the problem of form and representation.”19 Through the
vehicles of forms, representations, and language, “The one way out for affect is
via a way into its specificities” which are part of a shared formal
configuration.20 Accordingly, and most suggestive for my argument, the
“insistence on the formal dimension of affect allows not only for specificity but
for the wild and many fecundities of specificity: difference, change, the
particular, the contingent (and) the essential, the definite, the distinct, all dense
details, and—again, to return to the spirit of Deleuze—the minor,
inconsequential, secret, atomic.”21 Affects are, in short, produced and
reproduced by representations and language. While for Brinkema those
representational vehicles appear in the formal specificities of a film, I shift the
rearticulation or double articulation of those specificities by the viewer-writer-
speaker for a viewer-reader-listener, in the actions of describing cinema as a
subjective encounter attempting to communicate a potentially shared insight and
experience, the distinctions and specificities of affect become the distinctions
and specificities of a rhetoric of representations put in play by the critical act of
describing the affect of film images.
Among a potentially long list of specific descriptive affects is a multiplicity
of filmic provocations. Some more broadly resonant than others, they can
include disturbances, bewilderments, enticements, disgusts, confusions, shocks,
longings, and excitements. These are easily recognizable examples of affects
generated by a film, a film image, or a film sound, which can easily mingle and
overlap. They in turn can provoke and solicit a range of particular and precise
affective positions in a cinematic description, reactivating those images and
sounds according to different rhetorical strategies or configurations. As the
central circuit in a descriptive exchange, a film sequence might be subject to the
rhetoric of selection, amplification, eroticization, puzzlement, and, less
obviously and more complexly, reviewing and layering (to name a few). In a
critical sense, these acts of descriptions—as speech or writing—appropriate and
extend particular affects as a way to measure, to neutralize, or to reinvigorate
them as more or less precise or imprecise rhetorical engagements. My
description of the tensely rapid “Waterloo Station” sequence in The Bourne
Ultimatum (2007), for instance, positions me between the shifting perspectives
of different computer and surveillance screens layered in and across the film
images and the flight of Jason Bourne, captured by those images, in a way that
mimics the rhetoric of a video game, a rhetorical recreation of various
suspenseful affects and velocities which is in effect and in delay a textured
interpretation of that specific sequence. Other critical positions may motivate
different descriptions of this sequence, yet even the most denotative description
will invariably, if less prominently, signal an interpretive action and position.
To a certain extent, it would be possible to catalogue or prioritize these kinds
of affects across the history of film genres, specific textual practices, and
different viewer relationships with films. Here, though, I am more interested in
differentiating and detailing the rhetorical productions that emerge within these
affective descriptions than in (impossibly) listing a full spectrum of them. As
Brinkema suggests, the true force of affect lies in providing the concrete details
and formal differences that, for me, appear in the detailed description generated
by or released in writing.
One of the most common forms of describing cinema is, I should add, what I
call an after-affects description. These are descriptions based in efforts to
recount film narratives, and they typically follow or expand upon an initial
affective engagement: how we describe a story may spring from how certain
details or dimensions of the film affected us or not as part of the texture of
numerous primary or preliminary affects.22 Thus, an after-affect of my response
to the Waterloo Station sequence in The Bourne Ultimatum (as well as other
sequences in the film) describes the narrative of that film this way: as a tale of a
man entrapped in a universe of technologies in which to survive the anonymity
of the image (and retrieve a lost identity) requires mastery of those technologies
as relentless and remarkable feats of execution. To recount parts or the whole of
a film narrative usually becomes a descriptive encounter motivated by different
degrees of attention, awareness, or interest based in, for example, an initial
fascination, confusion, or boredom with specific parts of that narration, or even
specific images or sounds. That interest and awareness then meld dramatic
actions, salient events, visual details, and audial positions in a far less
predictable manner than conventional cognitive responses to narrative structures
and movements suggest.23 Depending on the level of attention or awareness, in
short, describing a film narrative involves a more or less intricately entwined
balance between compositional details and narrative actions, a selective process
through which viewers necessarily narrate their own positions within the
movement of the story. Attentive descriptions of a film narrative can vary
considerably, not simply according to which elements of plot and action anchor
the description. More significantly, these descriptions will vary according to the
extent to which those particular narrative movements galvanize different visual
or audial details embedded in those narrative actions. To tell the story of a film,
in the most engaged descriptions, will gather the descriptive details around the
action as an interpretive embedding of that story.

V D

The Belated Gaze

Seventy-five years after Woolrich’s story was published and sixty-three years
after Rear Window adapted it, one sequence in Hitchcock’s 1958 film Vertigo
still haunts me across a spectrum of singular affects swirling around each other.
With its circumference in the 1950s, moving through postwar gender
turbulence, the emergence of art cinema, and wide-screen (Vista Vision)
technology, Vertigo spins through frames of auteurism and melodrama to
reshape Jeffries as an older and dizzier Scottie within a mise en abyme of
combined tracks and zooms, now unwittingly inhabiting William Rothman’s
“murderous gaze.” Like other Hitchcock films, in Vertigo description always
begins with the drama of looking and listening, both of which require an
attention that can too easily slip into the danger of distraction, the danger of
details, of vibrant flowers, of hair styles, of city streets, of jeweled pendants.
Might distraction be the counterpart of the classical gaze? With too much
attention or too much distraction, loss engulfs protagonists and viewers alike.
This may be the fundamental challenge of describing cinema. As many have
pointed out, it is also the dynamic that makes Vertigo such a quintessential arena
for description and its essential relationship to the pleasure of desire and the
danger of belatedness. As Scottie discovers amidst his trauma of seeing and
reseeing, as a darker version of the immobile Jefferies’s “delayed action,”
describing cinema is always, like re-inscribing and remaking lost images, “too
late.”

The Following Shot

Early in the film, Scottie trails Madeleine, a ghostly image presumably haunted
by a past that leads her to a church graveyard and later a museum gallery,
respectively places of physical death and imagistic resurrection. Bridging and
suturing these scenes is a sequence in a flower shop. From the start of the
sequence, the face and expression of Jimmy Stewart is that of a star in trouble
with his role—as a traumatized detective, a wandering lover, a haunted exorcist,
a Hollywood embodiment of a wonderful life, a former photojournalist—whose
eyes search nervously, fearfully as he steers through the vertical highs and lows
of San Francisco streets, the swirling hard turns, vertiginous recollections,
protected but also blinded by a windshield frame that internally masks the
world he pursues and then becomes the lens of obsession. The eyes, the facial
expression, and the frame are the world, a frame that longs to stop or solve the
mysteries of the world (as Jeffries once could), to arrest its relentless and
fugitive movement, as an impossible moment of description, a hopeless effort
not to be “too late.” But, in my position, the car, the clothing, the fashions are
already “too late,” markers of another time, a 1950s America permeated by
other stressed traumas and other stressed sexualities. From 2018, this too is
time-travel, like the layered voices and views from Chris Marker’s 1982
Sunless.
Twenty minutes into the film, Scottie, whose desperately troubled eyes are
only intensified by that shielding frame of a windshield, follows Madeleine’s
exotically and morbidly green, luxurious Jaguar into a dark back alley. (Why is
she using the backdoor of the shop, I wonder? Is something wrong here?). A
virtually silent scene except for the almost sickly dreamy score of Bernard
Herrmann. Why this backway, this shadowy tunnel? An entry to some
dangerous back room, the back room of consciousness? The underbelly? I go
back to the opening sequence: the ellipsis of death and guilt. An antechamber of
garbage cans and brooms leading toward yet another darkened doorway,
overwhelming Scottie’s dull and proper hat, suit, and tie, not unlike Madeleine’s
gray suit and tightly coiffed hair that barely conceals the spiral that rumbles
and disturbs beneath. The shot/countershot and track of Scottie’s searching
look, a following shot through the alley as an always following vision, the
double entendre of this following shot, always behind, always too late to grasp
with words.
Then the slow wipe from left to right as Scottie opens the opaque door like a
slide that becomes the palimpsestic opening of his sight as mind. The
Technicolor excess of brilliant flowers—purples, pinks, and yellows, gladiolas
and roses amidst which Madeleine wanders nonchalantly, middle-grounded
against the prosaic blur of other customers in the background. A claustrophobia
and entombment within the image: the luxury of being dead. A saleswoman
approaches, briefly speaks with Madeleine, and then retreats to retrieve her
bouquet. Madeleine wanders, eyes right in a slightly nervous or self-conscious
or performative way—toward Scottie’s position peeping through the door. How
can she not notice him peering through the crack in the door? Then the shot, the
key shot, a keyhole into a descriptive mise en abyme?: An image split by
Madeleine’s reflection in the door’s mirror on the left and the dark sliver of
open doorway on the right through which one eye is visible, an eye buried in
darkness, an eye unable to see with the depth of stereoscopic sight. She looks
down to the left, before a cut to his one eye straight at her and at us. (Did
Scottie’s police partner look him in the eye before he fell?) Their eyes parallel
each other at the same level of the frame. The figure of Madeleine becomes
fantastically broken, shattered by the edges of smaller mirrors on that border of
the door mirror that captures and describes her. This is an image that ricochets
toward us and then back to her and then back to him, swirling like a forward
track and reverse zoom. She looks up to her right, deliberately exhibiting a face
in profile and, after a cut, turns her back, and looks down right, offering the
other flattened profile. The inquisitive, threatened, and longing look and the
exhibitionistic, taunting pose balanced within the frame for us as a tension
between a concentrated, enhanced look and spinning, paralyzing distractions.
Where am I across their eye-lines which match only as a confrontation and
disruption. I know you’re looking at me from the movement of your face. The
woman arrives with the bouquet for Carlotta.
Here to see is to be lost in the spinning frame of a resisting image that
ultimately begs for some kind of descriptive stoppage like the desperate framing
of desire. But this is a description that is never quite achievable with the moving
images of the cinema. That impossible stoppage requires the work of a
reinscription, a reinscription that later becomes, for Scottie in this film, a
twisted make-over and reinvention of a lost image, of Judy as Madeleine as
Carlotta—the endless activity that is cinematic description.

My Furtive Glance

A series of short rhetorical snapshots of celebrated paintings and photographs,

Jean-Luc Nancy and Federico Ferrari’s book, Being Nude is a model for the
energy of description as it confronts the visual;24 it also spins Vertigo back into
the challenges of describing cinema’s place within the history of art. For Nancy
and Ferrari, the history of Western art can be figured as “the repeated attempt of
a furtive glance—peering through a window (as in Renaissance art, for
example) or leaning over the lens of a camera obscura (as in seventeenth-
century Dutch art)—to grasp a subject who is more or less aware of being
observed.”25 “As a result it is not only a presentation of a presentation, a vision
of a vision, but also the originary fragmentation that all vision is in itself, in
always being outside itself, exposed to the gaze of the other… The image does
not close over; it fails to come to a standstill or to insist on a particular whole.
The eye is set in motion.”26

N
1. Note that the spelling of Jeffries’s name in the short story differs from the spelling in the film as
Jefferies.
2. Cornell Woolrich, Rear Window (New York: iBooks, 2001), 6.
3. Serge Daney, La rampe: Cahier critique 1970–1982 (Paris: Gallimard, 1996), 91–92.
4. Mark Doty, The Art of Description: The World into Word (Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2010), 5, 9.
It should be clear, I hope, that this perspective here has little to do with Clifford Geertz’s
championing of so-called thick description over thin description, except perhaps to collapse that
distinction. With films, surface description has the same capacity to open up knowledge as thick
description.
5. Wallace Stevens, “The Creation of Sounds,” in Collected Poetry and Prose, ed. Frank Kermode and
Joan Richardson (New York: Library of America), 275.
 6. Versions of and variations on ekphrasis have likewise been the focus of a long tradition of aesthetic
reflections and philosophy, from Lessing and Goethe. Some of the most notable scholarship on
ekphrasis includes the work of W. J. T. Mitchell and James A. W. Heffernan.
7. W. J. T Mitchell, “Ekphrasis and the Other,” in Picture Theory: Essays on Visual and Verbal
Representation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 158.
8. Sharon Marcus, Heather Love, and Stephen Best, “Building a Better Description,” Representations
135, no. 1 (Summer 2016): 4, 8.
9. Roland Barthes, S/Z (New York: Hill and Wang, 1974), 9.
10. T. W. Adorno, “The Essay as Form,” in Notes to Literature, Vol. 1 (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1991), 20.
11. Lesley Stern, “Writing/Images,” The Cine-Files: A Scholarly Journal of Cinema Studies 4 (Spring
2013), http://www.thecine-files.com/current-issue-2/guest-scholars/lesely-stern/.
12. Stern, “Writing/Images.”
13. V. F. Perkins, “Must We Say What They Mean?: Film Criticism and Interpretation,” Movie 34
(1990): 4.
14. Doty, Art of Description, 23.
15. Laura Mulvey, Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image (London: Reaktion, 2006), 114,
151.
16. A variation on those descriptive intertitles appears in the tradition of the Japanese benshii, in which a
live commentator accompanies the projection of the film, describing and sometimes interpreting the
film images.
17. Woolrich, Rear Window, 83.
18. Eugenie Brinkema, The Forms of Affect (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), xii, xiii.
19. Ibid. (emphasis added).
20. Ibid., xiv.
21. Ibid., xv.
22. From a different angle, Gyorgy Lukacs famously discusses this distinction in the 1930s in his
evaluation of the two different tactics for literary narration. “Narrate or Describe?,” in Writer and
Critic and Other Essays, trans. Arthur Kahn (London: Merlin Press, 1970). Contrasting Tolstoy and
Zola, Lukacs opposes an immersive “experience” of a narrative with the mere “observation” of
information revealed through description (116), since, for Lukacs, the complexity of narrative
immersion and interaction “establishes proportions,” while “description merely levels” the density
of historical experience as surface images (127). While Lukacs’s polemic makes sense in the
context of its ideological underpinnings (differentiating novelistic strategies), shifting his argument
to acts of cinematic reception fundamentally dissolves his dichotomy and relocates it as an affective
category.
23. In The World Viewed, Stanley Cavell anticipated my position here in his attention to the productive
unreliability of our memories of film, a stance I regrettably criticized in 1980.
24. Thanks to Eugenie Brinkema for recommending this book to me.
25. Jean-Luc Nancy and Federico Ferrari, Being Nude: The Skin of Images (New York: Fordham
University Press, 2014), 31.
26. Ibid., 33.
 CHAPTER 24

WOMEN’S HANDS AND THE

CINEMATIC CUT
The Work of Montage in Man
with a Movie Camera, Klute,
and The Piano

DAVID A. GERSTNER

IN his short essay, “The Hands of Jean-Luc Godard,” Ignatiy Vishnevetsky

points out that the opening image in Godard’s film The Image Book (2018)
is that of a detail from Leonardo da Vinci’s St. John the Baptist (1513–
1516). Godard concentrates his lens on the figure’s hand and its index
finger as it points upward. The reproduced image is stripped of Da Vinci’s
sfumato technique, thereby rendering a “contrasty back-and-white [image,
that appears] like a Xerox some generations removed from the original.”1 It
is a detail from art history that at once signifies the gravitas of “art” while
marking its withering value in the cinematic age. In exercising this surgical
cut from the work of art by his own hand, Godard simultaneously situates
himself as an artist within the History of Art and a violator of that history.
He is, in short, the artist-as-filmmaker.
As such, and in this capacity, Godard unrolls a set of historical images,
shredding and tearing them from any claim to an original or a unique place
in the canon of art. Juxtaposed with the cutaway of St. John the Baptist is
the comic-book image of the Norman maid, Bécassine (1905). The great,
now fragmented da Vinci masterpiece is thus situated side-by-side with a
popular comic-book drawing that emerged not soon after the first cinematic
images were projected (1895). Is Godard suggesting a deadened
equivalence between St. John and Bécassine in the cinematic age? Because
both figures point their index finger upward to the heavens, does Godard
suggest that in reaching for the inexplicable, art is constrained by repetition
and thus doomed to transhistorical failure? If art and artist invariably fail in
their quest to express the inexplicable, is “art” merely variation on
technique made available by technological advancements? Or, is it that
Godard suggests that the artist’s hand-finger relation is the tool to carve out
any hope to reach toward meaning? The Image Book answers the latter in
the positive insofar as Godard identifies the filmmaker’s hands as the
human mechanism that delivers on the work of art’s ever-deteriorating, yet
invigorating, final gasps.
Godard underlines the point of the hand’s significance in The Image Book
with what Vishnevetsky calls “one of those esoteric quotes for which [the
director] is famous: ‘Man’s true condition: to think with hands.’ ”2 Through
a vast catalogue of images and sounds, spliced and transformed from their
original contexts, Godard describes in an interview how the film’s concept
came to be: “When I thought of the five fingers. I said to myself: ‘We’ll
make a film where there are five fingers and then what the five fingers
make together, the hand.’ ” The fingers of the hand—the parts of the whole
—provide Godard the structural framework for the film: (a) remakes,
copies; (b) war; (c) Rilke verse (“those flowers between the rails, in the
confused wind of travels”); (d) Montesquieu’s The Spirt of the Laws (1748);
and (e) Michael Snow’s La region centrale (1971).3 In effect, the
materiality of the hand—in part and in whole—enables the ground on
which memory, history, aesthetics, technique, and concept are assembled.
And by linking hands and fingers across the arts, Godard’s provocatively
handled montage reveals the history of art as technique and, because of
technique, its withering.
Hence, from St. John the Baptist’s and Bécassine’s indexical assertion,
Godard cuts to an image of (presumably) his hands at work on the editing
table. Linked with—nay, nestled within—the History of Art, the film
editor’s handiwork broadens écriture (painting, drawing, and film editing).
For Godard, écriture combines the conceptual and practical mechanisms
that grapple with the limitations as well as transformations that aesthetic
properties and technique provide. The work of art, in other words, takes
shape precisely because of human hands that think. And it is only the
cinema, as Godard would have it, that has the capacity to fully demonstrate
this intellectual/phenomenological labor—this handiwork. Put another way,
through the filmmaker-as-artist only the cinema has the opportunity to
engage the spectator intimately with the movement, the process, of making
art. In this way, the cinema’s unique properties (especially, the close-up)
bring the spectator into contact with the artist’s handiwork while, at the
same time, experiencing the work of art as such.
Moreover, and although The Image Book stunningly filters the History of
Art through twenty-first-century aesthetic technology, the image-affect
remains beholden to montage. Defamiliarizing representation—the image—
is only as affective as the cut that is made into it. Hence, the juxtaposition
of images within the history of images releases art from the tyranny of the
original, and from its fixed and consecrated place in time. The Image Book
puts to end any bid for the Gesamkunstwerk, the complete work of art. The
work of art—the history of art—is process. It is always in the making and
remaking by the artist’s hand that totalizing representation becomes
unhinged. In other words, to open representation to the flux of meaning, or
to resist the final word that purports to claim the terms for the image,
cinematic montage (as Godard would have it) is the artist’s last chance to
make art.
With the image of hands now holding our attention, and before moving
on to what is the central concern of this chapter—the image of women’s
hands and cinematic montage—I want to emphasize one final critical point
associated with Godard’s filmmaking: montage is representation. It is
commonplace to recognize that Godard’s production of text/image/sound is
a violence of re-presentation. In The Image Book, Godard fragments a quote
from Edward Said: “There is almost no doubt that representation involves
violence toward the subject of the representation. There is a real contrast
between the violence of the act of representing and the calm within the
representation itself.”4 The “calm” beauty that lies before us in the work of
art is in truth the reenactment of a history of violence. If aesthetic
representation is the history of hands that seeks presentation as such,
cinematic montage à la Godard sets out to destroy its veneer. To represent is
to deceive. It is a ruse for “truth.” Claims for completeness through beauty
is a lie. To represent is to act violently, to tear a part from the whole.
Cinematic montage, therefore, is the act of representation par excellence.
The cut-image transforms historical time and place; it reinvests the image as
a text that is necessarily transformative, incomplete. “Nothing is as handy
as a text,” Godard tells us. Hence, rather than insist on montage securing a
fantasy to suture ideological meaning (narrative), Godard tasks himself—
tasks his thinking hands—with vexing the terms for truth-in-meaning once
and for all.
But what’s missing? Or, better, what is open to us and yet to be revealed
when the image is cut from whole? How might we redirect our attention to
cinematic handiwork in which women’s hands push through the patriarchal-
masculinist impulse that so vigorously seeks to bind them? What might the
feminist filmmaker-as-artist offer through montage? What might a feminist
film look like when “beauty” or “calm” is destroyed?5 The purpose of this
chapter is to rediscover these overlooked yet ever-busy hands. I concentrate,
therefore, on women’s hands that are in fact seen doing labor in cinema. But
I look to these images to consider women’s-hands-at-work, not to shore up
positive or negative notions too easily assigned to questions of
representation. Instead, I am drawn to the tensions women’s hands create as
they navigate the ins and outs of patriarchal discourse in the cinematic
fantasy.
Man With a Movie Camera (Dziga Vertov, 1929), Klute (Alan Pakula,
1971), and The Piano (Jane Campion, 1993) offer a variety of cinematic
platforms to serve my task. In directing our attention away from manly
synecdochical images—such as Godard’s belabored hands which invoke the
spirit of the working-man artist—I argue for a broader theoretical palette
from which complex terms for “woman” might be investigated. Godard’s
theories of montage are useful since his own history of filmmaking suggests
montage as a process not only reserved for meaning between images but
with making meaning among images.6 But Godard had a good teacher:
Sergei Eisenstein.7 Like Godard, we still have much to learn from the queer
Soviet filmmaker.
But what is left to learn from modernist theories of montage? What
ideological stakes are in play when we explore further the significance of
the cut not only to satisfy cause-and-effect relations? In what way do
modernist theories of montage make possible “queer-feminist” film
analyses? More broadly, how might theories of montage trouble
representation as complete, as unique, as whole? My study takes its
theoretical lead from what Marie-Claire Ropars-Wuilleumier refers to as “a
synedochic operation”.8 Not dissimilar to Godard’s filmmaking, Ropars-
Wuilleumier approaches the juxtaposition of images as a set of relations not
reserved between cuts but, more rewardingly, among cuts, across images.
We can then ask, what are the implications insofar as montage sets in play
interrelational forces that toggle between the abstract (ideology =
patriarchy) and the concrete (image = woman’s hands), between the part
and the whole? At stake is representation and its “pulverization.”

“P S ”
Sergei Eisenstein’s “pulverization of the sign,” according to Ropars-
Wuilleumier, occurs when the cinema “through specific means” refuses “an
imagistic origin to ideas of meaning.”9 In “scattering the sign” or
“unchaining the metaphor,” Eisenstein “[alters] the very path of the
concept” insofar as his method of montage “suspends the mode of
significance carried by the sign.”10 Through her rigorous analysis of
October: Ten Days That Shook the World (Grigori Aleksandrov and Sergei
Eisenstein, 1928), Ropars-Wuilleumier brings precise attention to the
“fusion” of metaphor and metonymy. Her linguistic-semiotic deconstruction
of the film unpacks “the discursive power of montage.”11 In doing so, she
asks us to consider how “representations generate a signification which is
the product and not the sum of them.”12
Because representation is often at stake, if not the rub, when wrestling
with cinematic images of women and their juxtapositioning within a film,
Ropars-Wuilleumier’s treatment of Eisenstein’s October suggests a way to
expand on the theory of suture that depends heavily on shot-reverse/shot
sequences (i.e., between images). Identifying the product of representation
(concept) and not the sum of it as such, she recognizes that montage cannot
be reserved simply for two shots buttressed together (the key structural
component for suture theory).13 Instead, Ropars-Wuilleumier stresses the
repetition of the image-signs (representation) that invariably “overflow into
other parts of the film, thus establishing among several fragments the
weaving of an identical metaphoric texture.”14 Here, fragment-images give
rise to concept across the whole of the film. The significance of cinematic
images rests not in representation tout court; their significance resides in
their relational echo, their discursive giving to one another across the time
of the film. The editing of—the juxtaposition of—cinematic images,
therefore, reveals a theoretical dynamic between the concrete (material-
object representation) and the abstract (concept).
Eisenstein, of course, tangled with this complex dimension of cinematic
editing. He worked tirelessly to conceptualize the terms for montage to
awaken a materialist and ideological response on the part of the spectator.
To reduce Eisensteinian montage—or any Soviet theory of montage from
the period, as we shall see—to mere “editing” is to neglect the crucial focus
on montage as “concept.” For Eisenstein, the sign left to its own devices
made way for interpretive deception. To his mind, representation as such,
particularly when manufactured through the linearized principle of
organization (i.e., Hollywood editing), is the “structure of bourgeois
society.”15
In choreographing Godard’s and Ropars-Wuilleumier theories of
montage with Eisenstein’s own expansive conceptualizations, a useful set of
terms become available with which we might home in on the images of
women’s hands as materially and ideologically rich, as perversely
productive. In shifting our focus away from the weight of the sign and
directing it to an orchestration of the cinematic cut, we more ably discover
the activity of women’s hands as they unsettle patriarchal discourse. I
suggest—echoing Ropars-Wuilleumier contention that Eisenstein’s October
does not “recount the Revolution; it analyses its meaning; this discourse
does not pretend to represent events, but rather constitute their driving
principle: ‘the Bolshevik strategy’”—the work of woman’s cinematic hands
delivers a crucial element to think through ‘the Feminist strategy.”16 Seen
this way, the image-fragments of women’s hands are productively
transformed “through cross-cutting montage” so that their “formal linking
will facilitate the sliding of one to the other.”17 “The movement of the
[cinematic] writing,” Ropars-Wuilleumier tells us, “then retraces in its
constitutive dynamics that of a dialectic which constitutes the story.”18
Nearly one hundred years later, the language of queer Eisenstein’s theories
of montage—a critical discourse dependent on “cross-cutting” and “sliding”
across images to disseminate meaning—are as vital as ever.
In concentrating on the cut in this more malleable way, women’s
handiwork and the tools they utilize can be seen to vex the firm grip that
masculinist discourse has on things. Man with a Movie Camera, Klute, and
The Piano explore the image of women’s representation as made complex
precisely through the cinematic cut insofar as the image of feminist labor
finds itself performed as a sensual dance of power relations within
masculinist discourses. What these films illustrate through their cinematic
writing—montage—is the “constitutive dynamics that of a dialectic which
constitutes the story.”19

AW ’ H
My preliminary thoughts on this project were prompted by Amelie Hastie’s
delightful musings on Bree Daniel’s (Jane Fonda) hands in the film Klute.20
Hastie is drawn to the marvelous long take and tracking shot in the early
moments of the film where a host of female models are seated against a
wall, callously interviewed by ad-agency types. As the women are noted for
their beauty and, most often, their flaws, the camera pauses on Bree who is
asked to display her hands. With the throwaway remark—“funny hands”—
offered by a female executive who describes Bree’s hands, Hastie takes the
opportunity to trace Bree’s hand gestures and movements throughout the
film.
Women’s hands associated with the “call girl” (bodies solicited by the
very sound of their voice) occupy a powerful cinematic force of image and
sound in Klute. During the sequences in which her psychoanalysis occurs,
for example, Bree’s hand gestures become more theatrical as she expresses
herself to her therapist. Tightly framed in close-up during these sequences,
Bree wears her iconic snug-fitting turtleneck and form-fitted shag haircut.
Her performative hands in these moments bring into relief Bree’s hopes of
becoming an actor on the stage. But in describing her career goals she finds
her wishes complicated by her desire for Klute (Donald Sutherland), the
private detective hired to find the murderer of one of her clients. In therapy,
Bree’s gesticulating hands thus serve to express the repressed. Enclosed
within the cinematic frame, Bree vigorously if frustratedly expresses hope
to her therapist. Her hyperbolic hands work feverishly to escape that which
is foist upon her by the career industries to which she aspires, the job she
invariably must keep to survive, and the very wardrobe she must
necessarily confine herself to in order to entice the men who gatekeep her
world. Indeed, Bree’s hands are critical to her performance of Self-as-
Woman in the film.
Ropars-Wuilleumier’s turn on Eisensteinian montage helps us take into
account Bree’s “funny hands” that recur across the film, involved in so
many different activities, and, in doing so, they effectively “pulverize” the
limited terms for meaning that the sign offers when representing women. If
the call girl’s hands offer pleasure (from the moment she picks up the phone
to the moment she takes in hand the client’s money), they also defend
against the violence inflicted on her by men. Bree’s hardworking “funny
hands,” therefore, overflow the film’s metaphoric texture, intervening in the
images where men’s hands control both the scene and the woman’s body.
For instance, in the sequence where Klute fights in her apartment with her
former pimp and lover, Frank (Roy Scheider), Bree grabs a pair of scissors
and unexpectedly stabs Klute. For Bree to grab scissors—notably not a
knife or other sharp object—in the scene of her apartment vitally links her
to the mise en scène of another place weighted for women’s representation:
a garment-district factory where women’s clothing is manufactured.
In the garment factory, where swathes of textural fabrics overflow, Bree
partakes regularly in a client ritual where sexual desire intermingles with
theatrical performance. The encounter is significant on many counts as the
interaction with her client resonates across the film. The client, Mr.
Goldfarb (Morris Strassberg), the factory owner, never touches her. His
sexual pleasure derives from Bree delivering a staged performance in the
form of narrativized stripteases. When Bree describes Goldfarb to Klute,
she portrays him as a seventy-year-old man who lost his wife. He merely
delights in her presence in his factory office. The transaction, she tells
Klute, harbors a safe if not sympathetic place. In effect, she handles herself
well in Goldfarb’s presence.21
 As the scene begins, we are introduced to the elderly Goldfarb standing
behind his wooden desk and setting the stage for Bree’s visit. As if to
demonstrate Laplanche and Pontalis’s axiom—“fantasy is the mise-en-
scène of desire”—Pakula plays his directorial hand with great precision as
he lays bare the fantasy’s devices. In the dimly lit and time-worn office, we
see on Goldfarb’s desk a record player, and a small silver tray in which the
older man pours two glasses of sherry. A candy jar, a telephone, an
inexpensive Tiffany lamp, as well as a peculiar brass statue of a seated
monkey punctuate the scene’s detailed elements. We hear traditional
Yiddish music from the record player. The desk lamp serves as the only
light source, casting a secretive and musky ambiance onto the scene. It is
quite the cinematic place.
When Bree enters the space, it is in long shot. From Goldfarb’s point of
view, she appears in the distance, at the far end of the corridor that leads to
his office. She is positioned among the factory machinery and dressed
mannequins. Like the mannequins that line the pathway to Goldfarb’s
office, Bree poses. She is dressed in an elegant blue, shimmery evening
gown. As she moves forward, we cut to her in profile, the camera tracks
alongside her as she makes her way to Goldfarb’s office. As if a model on
the runway, Bree walks seductively past the fluorescent-lit, silent
workstations. Reams of fabric, spools of thread, and sewing machines idly
stand by. With Goldfarb’s cheap desk lamp luring her into the scene, Bree
approaches the office. In close-up, she enters the doorway where Pakula
echoes Hitchcock’s entrance for Kim Novak in Vertigo (1958), where Judy
Barton represents herself as Madeline Elster. Thus, the cinematic fantasy
begins for Goldfarb, Bree, and Pakula. In fact, the narrativized striptease
she performs, as I will point out, calls upon one of the cinema’s historically
cherished industrial rituals: Cannes.
For now, the spectator is positioned as a voyeur since the camera is
placed outside the office. This is made clear as the camera tracks back from
the space where we see the wood-framed windows that divide the office
space in which Bree and Goldfarb are situated. The entry doorway is
framed vertically while the interior office windows are split horizontally.
We peer, therefore, onto the fantasy, framed thricely. Moreover, and as the
camera pulls back, we are drawn into the factory workplace in which men’s
fantasies of women are manufactured.
 Positioned this way, we watch as Bree recounts a recent trip to Cannes
and commences with her narrativized striptease. The desk lamp’s paltry
illumination places both characters in half shadow. As the story about her
encounter in France with a seductive Italian marquis unfolds, she slowly
crosses in view of what is now our perspective of the split office space.
Attentively and earnestly Goldfarb takes his seat to listen to Bree’s erotic
adventure in the land where cinema is glamorously celebrated each year.
Moving alluringly we see, from our perch just beyond the office, Bree
undress for Goldfarb’s eager eyes. In telling the tale as she removes her
elegant frock and fur, Bree caresses her body and evokes the touch that
Goldfarb vicariously experiences via the “wise” stranger in Cannes whose
hands “taught [her] so many things.”
As she traverses the split room, the cinematic event unspools a troubling
reminder. When situated screen left, Bree’s body is split. She is cut literally
in half by the framed windows. As she strolls to screen right, she is in full
frame. In effect, Bree is a body torn. She is on two stages at once. A stage
of her own choosing and the stage on which she must play to keep food on
the table. On the one hand, Bree’s performance for the proprietor of a
women’s garment factory reaffirms women’s subjection to patriarchal order.
On the other hand, Bree ably strategizes the tactics, duality, and choices
necessary to survive masculinist ideology (even when constrained by the
tight-fitting evening gown she wears).
Bree’s erotic tale draws to its close when she elaborates upon the foreign
“hands” in Cannes that touched her. She had “never felt so beautiful,” she
tells Goldfarb. With this remark we cut to yet another vantage point, a
building across the way from which Klute has been eyeing the entire affair
—again evoking Hitchcock, this time a nod to the voyeuristic Jimmy
Stewart in Rear Window (1954). With all eyes upon her, and where unseen
but ever-present and sensual hands are recalled, it becomes clear that it is
ultimately Bree’s hands and voice that touch herself; they make her feel so
beautiful. Her narrative fantasy, derived from the place where cinema is
made glamorous, stitches together a seductive tale that gives pleasure to all,
but, importantly, the scene is entirely in Bree’s hands.
To be sure, the irony in removing her clothing in a space dedicated to
dressing up women cannot go unnoticed. The irony takes a more violent
turn when, later, Bree is attacked in the same location by the film’s
antagonist, Peter Cable (Charles Cioffi). The scene’s violence brings to
climax Pakula’s interest in cinematic properties for telling a story as well as
proposing a larger concept about women’s desire. In the scene between
Bree and Cable, Cable uses sound to assault Bree by forcing her to listen to
an audio recording of him murdering her friend. Visually, we see Cable
attack Bree in Goldfarb’s office which is now backlit from the outer
windows. Rather than Goldfarb’s softly lit desk lamp providing the scene’s
ambiance, the peculiar-looking sunlight pitches the characters into
silhouette. The factory that purportedly wraps women in beauty, and the site
that Bree once represented as a “safe” place shielded by the gentle father
figure, now discloses the masculinist brutality it seeks to bury. The violence
behind representation is thus savagely unveiled.
The attack scene in the factory brings into sharp relief the film’s
emphasis on the artificial constructs that give shape to and define the image
of Woman. Bree’s signature maxi-skirts, which confine the movement of
her legs; her snuggly-fitting leather jacket; and the turtleneck sweater that
wraps her throat put on display the woven fabrics produced for
heteromasculinist objects of desire. As such, it is worth recalling that Bree’s
most emphatic and freeing gesticulation takes place at her therapist’s office
when, situated in a tight medium close-up, she removes her snug-fitting
leather jacket. Her turtleneck is seen, moreover, to be short-sleeved, thereby
allowing more fluid motion for her arms. In removing clothing by her own
hand Bree unlocks—if only to a limited degree given that she is in the
presence of yet another voice of the father (the analyst)—and loosens the
masculinist chains that bind her.
The wardrobe factory further recalls the critical image-sign of the
scissors that Bree earlier grabbed when she stabbed Klute. Scissors cut
fabric, cut film, cut audio tape, and cut the body. If the scissors are seen but
once in the film, they are firmly grasped in Bree’s hands (à la Dial M for
Murder (Hitchcock, 1954)?) and thrust into the very heart of the film
(Klute/Klute). The scissor’s image-sign thus “overflows” into the “weaving
of an identical metaphoric texture” since its singular placement permeates
the multiple scenes in which Bree’s hands drive the film’s dialectical twists
and turns. At each and every turn, from the moment the film begins, Klute’s
narrative concept depends upon the cut. From clothing to bodies to film and
audio tape, the scissors’ cut triggers the pulverization of the image-sign.
 The film’s climactic scene with Cable thus puts the spotlight on women’s
manual labor and the violence involved in defining the image of women.
Bree’s remarkable, contained, yet expressive hands intersect in the place
where they join in with other women’s hands that cut, stitch, operate, and
create the agency to act for the desire of the Other and for the desire for
Self. For both Bree and the laborers at Mr. Goldfarb’s manufacturing
company, blistered and bloodied hands—seen and unseen—mark women’s
lives. The metaphoric texture of the film bears the scarred evidence from
these very cinematic cuts.

C ,T ,C ,A
If Klute queries the ideological space women occupy in the cinematic order
of things, the film simultaneously retreats into the very ideological
trappings it critiques (Klute, after all, magically appears to rescue Bree from
Cable’s malfeasant clutches). Through a “culture-industry” critique, one
might argue that Klute’s variations in cinematic style do little to dismantle
the deeply inscribed formal dimensions associated with Hollywood
filmmaking, let alone the role and representation of women. Thus, if
Hollywood film historically erases the possibility for radical film form and
representation, the early Soviets—Eisenstein and Vertov especially—
enthusiastically sought alternative modes of filmmaking through theory and
practice. The jury remains out on whether “alternative” art practices
succeed in disrupting institutional ideologies.22
What remains striking in these works is that even when such politically
astute filmmakers represent women as active participants within their films,
their hands are tethered to traditional forms of patriarchal codes for
“feminine” labor (sewing, cooking, etc.). A prominent case for
reconsidering this is Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera. If women
are shown to be makers in the film’s material construction, the question
remains to what extent they drive its conceptual framework. In her book
Kino and the Woman Question: Feminism and Soviet Silent Film, Judith
Mayne argues that Vertov “went further, perhaps, than his [Soviet]
colleagues in examining the place of filmmaking in relationship to the
productive labor of socialist society.”23 Moreover, Man with a Movie
Camera “raises many more complex questions concerning cinema,
narrative, and gender than do other films of the period.”24 Yet, Mayne
argues that the film is never free from the masculinist gaze. If “control is
directed toward the technology of cinema,” in which “the technology and
the female body function as subject and object,” and “however distanced
and demystified, the structure presented still maintains the traditional
contours of the man who controls the image [cameraman, projectionist] and
the woman who is the image.”25 In short, Vertov’s film “retains the familiar
contours of gender polarity” and, hence, cannot escape “sexual
objectification, with the woman’s body fragmented by the distinctly and
eagerly male point of view of the camera.”26 Mayne’s concern with Man
with a Movie Camera thus echoes Laura Mulvey’s contention that the
representation of women in narrative film is mutatis mutandis the “bearer of
the bleeding wound.”27 The image of woman announces lack because her
representation is defined by the male gaze, the look of desire that straddles
at once pleasure and (castration) anxiety.28 For Mulvey, such “beauty”
images must be destroyed and only a new feminist alternative cinema can
relaunch women’s image. As many have shown since Mulvey’s essay was
first published (including herself), boxing oneself into a theoretical corner
around the parameters of narrative cinema ignores complex aesthetic
practices in relationship to gender and sexuality.29 And, as Mayne
demonstrates in her analysis of nonnarrative cinema, the formal dimensions
attending masculinist fantasies of women associated with narrative film are
not alone the problem. But like narrative cinema, feminist theoretical
revision invites a return to nonnarrative cinema that Mayne encountered
with Vertov’s films.
Thus, I wish to hold on to Vertov’s filmmaking for a moment to suggest
that the women’s image in Man with a Movie Camera gives way to a more
malleable analysis than heretofore considered. “I write not on paper but on
film,” Vertov informs us in 1936. “Like any writer,” he continues, “I must
have a creative stockpile. Recorded observations. Rough drafts. But not on
paper; on film. Like any writer, I do not work on one thing alone.”30
According to his writings, “themes concerning women” were of central
concern, and this period of increased Stalinization found Vertov developing
both short and long films on the subject. In his stockpile of image-
fragments and notes, Vertov points to his keen interest in making a film
dedicated to Maria Demchenko, a key figure in the Stakhanovite
Movement. The movement, begun under the Soviet second five-year plan
(1935), was driven by efficient peasant-workers who proved they could
produce more than required by the State. Demchenko pioneered this
superfunctional praxis in the area of agriculture. When successful, the
workers were rewarded with “sewing machines and dresses” from the
leaders of the Stakhanovites.31
Thus, in writing “about specific individuals” in which “themes
concerning women” are addressed, Vertov wished to concentrate his lens on
“the schoolgirl, the girl in nursery school, mother and child, about abortion,
the creative young women, the status of our young women and those
abroad, about leisure and labor, the baby’s first steps, first words, about the
young girl, about women in youth, maturity, old age … [in short] from
diapers to old age.”32 From whatever our perspective is now, it is valuable
to bear in mind that Vertov pushed to represent women in such a way that
underscored their role, which, at best, recognized their centrality to
communism and, more complicatedly, stripped away their identity as
Woman and thus equalize labor along gender lines. It is not my intention to
hash out the theoretical quagmire such a debate leads us into; rather, I am
interested in Vertov’s “gaze” in which the tools for woman’s manual labor
(the celebrated sewing machine and its masculinist twin, the tractor) were
funneled into, conflated as, cinematic signs. To this end, Vertov reimagines
women’s collective labor through the use of what is always already the
father’s tools.
“If I am developing,” Vertov writes, “the theme of industrialization in
general, I can take machines, machine tools from various factories and
combine them, as though in the palm of my hand.”33 It strikes me that
Vertov’s wish “to combine” tools from “various factories” in the “palm of
his hand” proffers an image of “the factory” that is at once the site to build
tractors as well as to produce sewing machines in order to support the
functional state apparatus of the family. If domestic and industrial spaces
are traditionally gendered (sewing machines vs. tractors), Vertov’s
filmmaking collapses the distinctions by combining their forces through
montage as a symbiotic live/workplace in which men and women are
equally recognized for their labor. Theoretically? Utopic. Ideologically?
Shortsighted, particularly if one abides Mayne’s reading of women in
Vertov’s film: “sexual objectification, with the woman’s body fragmented
by the distinctly and eagerly male point of view of the camera” reinforces
traditional models of gendered labor. Yet, Man with a Movie Camera
demonstrates Vertov’s wish to combine images “as though in the palm of
my hand,” by representing women’s manual labor as something more than
sewing and cooking as the domain of women.
The montage of women’s working hands—assembled onscreen by Esther
Shub (Vertov’s wife)—displays Vertov’s utopic vision for gender parity
insofar as these representations enfold images of traditional and
contemporary forms of labor. In their very “overflow,” Vertov’s images
“[weave] an identical metaphoric texture” in which labor unfolds equally
between women and men. Women’s hands are seen to be working office
phones or tossing globs of mud for some sort of construction work while,
elsewhere, images of women washing linen are linked with cosmeticians
applying makeup to their female clients. But no sooner do the juxtaposed
images of women’s hands begin their intensive relationship than a montage
of men’s hands appears and combines with theirs. Here, in concert with the
very images she cuts on the editing table, we see Shub assemble and cement
together images of men receiving a shave from a barber while, in the next
shot, we see a man’s hands grinding an ax. As the montage gathers steam,
the film intermixes manual labor conducted by men and women: hair
cutting, shoe shining, spooling, construction, manicures, writing, and—
significantly—film editing. It is precisely through their combining that
hands are degendered.
As the montage rhythm intensifies, several of the hand shots are
presented in extremely tight close-up. Although the close-ups of hands
grinding the ax and cutting hair strongly encourage gender identification
with that of a man, when compared individually the images suggest
something less identifiable. Is the woman’s haircutter a man or a woman? Is
the ax-grinder, in truth, a man? What I mean to suggest in posing these
questions is that the image-sign is “pulverized” to the extent that Vertovian
montage blurs its representative currency, offering thereby something of a
commingling of gender. To recall Ropars-Wuilleumier’s dynamic rethinking
of Eisentein’s opening of the sign, Vertov’s cinematic hands resist “an
imagistic origin to ideas of meaning.” By degrading the image-sign as such,
accorded the workers’ hands, Vertov effectively “[scatters] the sign” and
“[unchains] the metaphor.”
The image-sign thus gives rise to meaning only in its relation to montage-
as-concept. As it turns out, and as Mayne reminds us, for all their bickering
it may very well be that Eisenstein’s and Vertov’s theories of montage are
not that disparate.34 Vertov’s theory of montage, according to Mayne,
should be “understood both as putting things together and as taking them
apart. Elements may be brought together in one direction, only to be taken
apart in another.”35 The filmmaker himself states: “Every kino-eye
production is subject to montage from the moment the theme is chosen until
the film’s release in its completed form. In other words, it is edited during
the entire process of film production.”36 I would add that Vertov’s emphasis
on “combining” his stockpile of images is not reserved for a single film;
rather, Vertov’s body of work must be understood in relation to his view
that Kino-Eye production was itself a concept. Film production is not
limited to the first and last click of the camera. His cinematic concept views
the film as but part of the larger whole of cinema. If Ropars-Wuilleumier’s
claims hold true for Eisenstein, Vertov’s “overflowing,” “sliding,” and
“unchaining the metaphor” arguably prove different for Vertov, but only by
degree.
Finally, while Vertov’s images—but not always—reveal the gendered
body of the hands at work, the very cutting and cementing together of the
images in the hands of a woman delivers a cinematic world in which
laboring hands imagine the power of all working hands to facilitate the
communist-dream project. If sewing machines are purportedly the purview
of women and axes that of men, Man with a Movie Camera introduces a
world through the cinematic cut in which these tools combine relations
precisely through montage: that is, concept. Montage thus refuses to delimit
labor by gender since gender identity unnecessarily separates and, thereby,
fails to reach communal ideals.

T G H P
Throughout the 1930s, Vertov continued to combine images and develop
film projects with women as their centerpiece. The concepts for his “poetic
films” drew upon science-fiction, social realism, and music.37 With the
advent of sound, films such as Enthusiasm (Symphony of the Donbas)
(1931) explored the experimental range that cinematic montage could bring
to the relationship between sound and image.38 He proposed no fewer than
six films between 1933 and 1941 in which women held center stage with
music serving as the hinge on which their representation took shape.
Proposals for the following were submitted for funding and state approval:
She and Evening of Miniatures (1933); A Young Woman Composer (1936);
A Day Throughout the World (1936); The Girl at the Piano (1939); and
Letter from a Woman Tractor Driver (a film-song) (1941).
When laying out his plan for A Young Woman Composer, Vertov stressed
that his project is “as if we are participating in the creative process of the
young woman composer’s work. We follow her thoughts. The thoughts turn
into visible images. Into poetic images. Into musical ones. Into pictures,
now into sounds, now into notes, now words.”39 In the war-propaganda
project Letter from a Woman Tractor Driver, we see “our young woman” as
she “skillfully drives her machine … And along with her—her women
friends; We see them—in many different montage shots, within the rhythm
of the song—storming the thick grain.”40 The film’s enthusiastic war-
preparedness message premises itself on the “theme of women replacing
their husbands, of sisters replacing their brothers, of daughters replacing
their fathers, of young women taking of their sweethearts’ posts.”41 Here,
and throughout Vertov’s “poetic film” proposals, he “focuses once more on
the image of our young woman.”42 Taken together, Vertov envisaged a
cinematic symphony in which women actively generated the material and
ideological tools for the communist project insofar as they ably moved into
modes of labor traditionally assigned along gender lines.
But it is the proposal for The Girl at the Piano—a “science-fiction epic”
that draws our attention. The proposal begins this way:43 “So … The Girl at
the Piano. A girl is playing the piano; The starry night; stares at her;
through the open terrace windows. The moon shines bright upon her hands.
The moon shines bright upon the keyboard. And it seems to her that it is not
sounds but the rays of wondrous distant worlds, the rays of twinkling stars;
that ring out beneath her fingers.”44 Through a concept that elevates the
tension between “real” and fantastical space, The Girl at the Piano turns on
a woman’s love for music and astronomy: “It is science with such poetic
allure!”45 Nevertheless, “she must not get distracted. Closer to earth. Closer
to earth.”46
As with all the proposals noted above, The Girl at the Piano signals a
cinematic event where a woman’s hands (her fingers, specifically) reach for
“wondrous distant worlds,” yet never distanced from “earth.” The
materiality of the women’s body thus discovers its kinetic energy through
necessary idealism. The film draws to its close with the girl recognizing
“that music, science, poetry have woven into a single, joyous dancing
circle. And not sounds, but the rays of twinkling stars, the rays of wondrous
distant worlds ring out beneath her fingers … The universe; with its starry
eyes; watches over; the girl, dreaming at the piano.”47 The image of this girl
“dreaming at the piano” is particularly striking because Vertov directs the
spectator’s look at the woman on the screen while evoking the universe’s
gaze in which its “starry eyes” “watch over” the girl, conjuring up the
dream-like existence the young woman so desires. Vertov’s imagery
succinctly maintains the principle that montage molds together the abstract
(the “wondrous” rays) and the concrete (her fingers at the piano).
The Girl at the Piano attains an-other-worldliness on earth through
dreamlike experiences only met when her fingers connect with the piano
keys. If the auteur’s protective watching over the young woman’s dreams
resounds with a certain patriarchal benevolence and/or sexual
objectification (to recall Mayne’s concerns), it is important to bear in mind
that the director insisted that we, the collective, are involved “as if we are
participating in the creative process of the young woman composer’s work”
(the title is “the Piano,” not “her Piano”). Like Man with a Movie Camera
—if not Godard’s The Image Book—we are invited into a communal
experience where bodies together create a culture of ideas. Together, the
cinema’s collective encounter in which image-spectator-auteur join forces is
not benevolent paternalism, strictly determined objectification, or bourgeois
catharsis. It is work toward building the collective dream, a collective
concept. We cheer her dream precisely at the moment when her fingers
touch the piano keys and the collective’s ideals “ring out” because, through
Vertovian montage, her touch is at one with ours.
If the concept for The Girl at the Piano put emphasis on an image-
fragment in which woman’s hands—specifically her fingers—at the piano
announced a woman’s central role in Vertov’s vision for Soviet modernism,
it does so because the image-fragment in Vertovian montage stresses the
body as body. As argued above, Vertov’s montage invites precisely this sort
of reading. By insisting on active bodily participation between spectator and
screen, and (like Godard) by bringing us into intimate close-up with
working hands that expand meaningful possibilities, Vertov revises the
terms that define, precisely, the girl at the piano as conceived in democratic-
capitalist culture. Through montage—a formal concept that necessarily
involves all participants to perform at the piano—the spectators join, nay,
become one with the girl at their piano.

T L L W C
The traditional Western image of women at the piano, however, was not as
progressively minded as Vertov envisaged it for communist culture. On the
one hand, the piano was promoted as a tool for woman’s independence and
creativity, to unleash repressed desires and emotions. On the other hand, the
piano kept women happily resigned to their place. Indeed, by the late
nineteenth century, Anglo-American industrial culture enthusiastically
discovered ways for women to simultaneously express repressed desire
through music while assuring that domestic chores were completed. In Men,
Women, and Pianos, Arthur Loesser journeys through more than four
hundred years of the history of the piano in relation to women’s social
status and function. In the late 1860s, Loesser notes for example, Wheeler
and Wilson Co. of Bridgeport, Connecticut combined “sewing machine and
melodeon; it had the form of a parlor sideboard.” With great American
ingenuity, “it presented a set of keys; whereas the sewing machine was
revealed after the top was turned back. There were side doors below,
containing two pedals—one for the musical and one for the sewing
apparatus—and by changing her foot from one to the other, the fair operator
could play at tones or at stitches as she felt inclined.”48 Vertov and the
women in the Soviet Union who worked the fields, sewed, and played piano
envisioned women’s labor quite differently.
To be sure, middle-class women in Western democracies searched for
ways to manage their identity and desire. Playing music served critical
pathways to navigate the constraints of patriarchal capitalism. Nevertheless,
middle-class imaginings of “the girl at the piano” functioned to domesticize
women and, as Laura Vorachek points out, constructed the middle-class
woman “with a bodiless, class-based sexuality” through which “her desire
… [was] displaced onto the piano.”49 A displacement, it turns out, that
occurred on a global scale during the age of empire. The double-edged
possibilities for the woman at her piano indeed traversed ever-widening
land grabs made during the nineteenth century.
For instance, New Zealand’s White-settler culture mirrored British and
American fantasies of civilized women. Yet, if in New Zealand the piano
was represented in the epoch’s literature, according to Kristine Moffat, to
create “an oasis of refined elegance, reminiscent of the mother country,” it
also served as a “tool of colonisation” (Caroline Daley’s terms, quoted by
Moffat).50 Along with learning the piano, Maori girls were taught “skills in
sewing and teamaking.”51 The piano’s symbolic weight in New Zealand,
therefore, echoed the terms for feminine delicacies played out in the
Northern hemisphere. But, as always, things are more complicated than
they appear. Jane Campion’s film, The Piano, approaches these complex
relations precisely through the body—the hands and fingers in particular—
of the colonizer-woman at her piano.
Born a “pakeha” (White settler), Campion is well aware of the tricky
relationship that exists between colonizer and the indigenous population
(Maori). Although celebrated for its official “bicultural” legal status, New
Zealand filmmakers—both pakeha and Maori—have long wrestled with
their not always easy cohabitation.52 In this way, Campion’s own subject-
position raises the doubly vexed conditions for the White-settler woman
who, in light of her gender, assumes a marginalized relationship to the
White-male settlers with whom she traveled and with the indigenous
population with whom she necessarily engaged. Though the stakes were
different, both White-settler women and Maori found themselves thrust
against a punishing White patriarchy.53
 In The Piano, Ada (Holly Hunter), the film’s protagonist, embodies this
unsettled doubling through her relationship to her piano. Not only does it
serve to communicate feeling; it also enables Ada to act on what is viewed
by those around her as perverse desire. For Ada, the piano is a trans-
Atlantic device that transforms and opens channels of desire as it travels
from one culture to another. When Ada arrives to her new landscape, her
hands joins forces with the colonized Other who carry the large musical
instrument through the bush. In effect, the piano brings Ada and indigenous
Maori into unusual and uneven alignment. Ada cuts a queer figure in the
New Zealand bush.
In her review of The Piano at the time of its release, Lizzie Francke
found herself “shaking” given the film’s ability to “[precipitate] a flood of
feelings.”54 While the film foregrounds women’s repression during the
nineteenth century, its cinematic enterprise communicates a woman’s
vibrant sensuousness. According to Francke, Campion’s visual aesthetic
and critical investigation into cinematic sound imbricates the spectator
where “the gentle caress, the smoothing of nimble fingers over sheets and
scales” evoke the “sensuous play of touch, smell, and sound.” To be sure,
“bodies become the instruments of expression, while the piano smelling of
scent and [sea] salt become corporeal.” If Campion trains her lens on bodies
as “instruments of expression,” it is the hands of women—specifically, her
fingers—that prove central to the film’s exploration of women’s desire and
the bane of the White patriarchy.
As the film opens, we peer onto the world through Ada’s spread fingers
placed over the camera’s lens. The world is at once held together as it is
split apart, not unlike the individual fingers that operate distinctly on the
keys of a piano while anchored to the hand. This synecdochic image
introducing Ada’s perspective is realized both visually and corporeally; it is
a complex and sentient view of things. We begin, therefore, as one with the
film’s protagonist’s perspective that is equal parts flesh and sight. On the
reverse cut, our point of view turns us around so that we look into Ada’s
eyes that remain partially covered by the placement of her fingers. It is a
crucial reverse-shot because it is here when we hear Ada’s “mind voice.”
(As mute, we will not hear her “speak” again until the end of the film.) With
her “mind voice” mixed into the spectacle, the spectator’s look is
commingled with Ada’s senses of sight, touch, and sound. “I don’t think
myself silent,” Ada tells us as she moves toward her piano and prepares to
separate herself from the instrument as it is packed off to New Zealand
where her yet-unseen husband awaits her. Like Bree in Klute, Ada will have
much “to tell” but in a different way.
With Ada’s arrival into this volatile and erotic “new world,” we are
invited into “Aotearoa” (“the land of the long white cloud”) and less that of
White-settler “New Zealand.” The place, “Aotearoa,” puts into relief a
crucial dimension that doubles the geographical terrain of The Piano as at
once grounded and ephemeral. In other words, Campion—herself a progeny
of White-settler culture—reveals a place not merely doubled (a conflict
between Anglo-Saxons and the indigenous population). Instead, Campion’s
cinematic world fuses materiality and desire through unanticipated
moments, bodies tossed to and fro within fragmented images punctuated by
touch. Ada’s body is thus no different than Aotearoa/New Zealand in that,
by force, her body commingles “biculturally”; Ada mirrors the violently
penetrated Aotearoa/New Zealand landscape that gives way to perverse,
desettling desire.55
Once on the shores of the new colony, we see Ada await her husband’s
arrival to escort her and her daughter Flora (Anna Paquin) to their new
homestead. As they wait, Campion zeroes in on Ada’s hands in tightly
framed close-ups. First, we see Ada caressing the soft skin of her daughter’s
face as the young girl sleeps. In the same shot, the camera tracks with Ada’s
hand as it moves from Flora’s face to the damaged wooden crate in which
her piano is stored. The shot, remaining in close-up, follows Ada’s fingers
as they pull away the cracked wood. Her action reveals a small section of
the keyboard. On the cut, an extreme close-up focuses more intently on
Ada’s fingers. She hesitantly begins to play a melody. While we hear the
stilted tune we simultaneously hear the clacking of the wooden keys as
Ada’s fingers tap them.
The series of Ada’s touches in the film—a range that includes the keys of
her piano, the skin of her daughter, the skin of her lover Baines (Harvery
Keitel), and the skin of her White-settler husband, Stewart (Sam Neill)—
elevate the film’s feminist implications because touch is less a mode of
communicating repressed desire than it serves to open possibilities to desire
across bodies. Ada’s presence in the now-chastened land of “New Zealand”
disrupts old-world values. Ada instead finds herself more attuned to sensual
flow of Aotearoa.
Through the body of the Other (women and Maori) Campion positions
White-masculinist colonizers in a paradoxically troubling confrontation
with their own desire. If, for men, women’s sensuality onscreen satisfies
both the experience of pleasure and pain (à la Mulvey), then Baines and
Stewart limit Ada’s full capacity “to speak” her desire. Whether through
missionary zeal or romantic ideals from Western culture, Campion’s men
are dumbfounded by Ada’s refusal to desire on anyone’s terms other than
her own. In The Piano, Ada’s insistence to desire takes shape in a landscape
in which women-as-Other navigate the travails of the terrain while, at the
same time, discovering an erotic sensuality for herself that a
heteromasculinist culture so often ignores. Ada-as Other is portrayed
through a dance with New Zealand’s indigenous culture where the material
world lends itself to the abstract delights of desire. As the film portrays it in
its modernist pretenses, Maori culture in “Aotearoa”—an existence not yet
fully trammeled by puritanical contrivances—figures as the antidote to
what’s to become Anglo-Saxon hypermasculinized “New Zealand.”
Campion, not unproblematically, explores these discomfiting relations in
several ways. When, for example, we see the Maori easily engaging
evocative language to discuss sexual desire (homosexual and heterosexual),
we see them lounging in the bush. Baines, the subject of their erotic
delights, is present and smiles modestly at their banter. Donning Maori
tattoos, Baines’s body suggests a White-settler that has subscribed to—
perhaps willingly inscribed by?—the indigenous culture to which he has
relocated. Baines’s romanticism and exoticism, though less violent than
Stewart’s passive aggressive personal interactions, prove just as troubling.
He is a landowner and will use that position to his advantage to gain access
to Ada.
In another scene of vexed cultural landscape where the bush serves as the
background, we see Flora fondle trees with other Maori children to mimic
sexual activity. The child’s play is looked upon by the Maori as natural and
perfectly acceptable. Stewart is deeply shocked by this activity and quickly
drags Flora away from the scene with a proper scolding. She is warned
never to behave in such a fashion. Flora, however, has two perspectives
challenging her worldview. She is at once the inheritor of her role as
colonizer and, like her mother, the embodiment of a torn existence as a
woman.
In this way, Ada learns from the Maori. She observes the way they
disorient their occupier. They do so slyly, humorously, and through strategic
resistance (Homi Bhaba refers to this as “catachrestic reversal”). Along
with the Maori house servants in her husband’s devout household, Ada
moves uneasily yet develops a sharp eye for ways to sideline the hypocrisy
that surrounds her. Her otherness in the colonizer home is not only
unwelcome; it is disconcerting to her fellow expatriates. And because the
piano—the object-other—profoundly announces Ada’s difference, it is
forced to take up residency elsewhere. The piano that purportedly and
traditionally registers women’s repressed desires is effectively removed—
by the very insistence of Ada’s husband and at the behest of Baines—
through a land deal; a deal secured not by a handshake between men but
with Stewart’s enthusiastic thrust of his ax into the ground.
Ada and her piano are exchanged to satisfy men’s longing for the woman
who seemingly embodies their dream-ideals of Empire. Once the piano is
carried and dragged by Maori through the bush, it arrives for Baines’s
possession. Ironically, the land deal that satisfies Stewart’s wishes for land
leads to Ada and Baines’s affair. The articulated arrangement between the
men includes piano lessons for Baines—by Ada. With her object of and for
desire moved into another man’s space, Stewart unconsciously unlocks a
Pandora’s Box of sensual delights between Ada and Baines. Thus, through
the image-fragment in which we see fingers touch (bodies, the keyboard),
the film’s metaphoric texture overflows. The Piano at once bears witness to
the representation of women at the piano as a metonymic trope for
repressed desire while the image provocatively opens itself to a feminist
metaphor that in no uncertain terms vexes men’s desire (i.e., delivers visual
pleasure while raising the specter of castration). Indeed, the masculinist
paradox is critical to The Piano’s “feminist strategy.” Whether her touch
makes her husband wince or her lover jealous, Campion’s men profit only
when the woman’s sensual world is ruptured. Ada’s touch bewilders both
men because their expectations for what the woman is meant to represent
fails. No element of the exchange satisfies the terms of the deal, the whole
or complete image of woman. Because of this, Ada finds that men’s desire
consistently requires her to give over pieces of herself.
For Baines, she removes a key from her piano on which “she carves a
message of love” to assure her lover that he “has her heart.”56 Ada’s gift—a
piece of herself meant to quell Baines’s jealousy—nevertheless triggers the
violence that Stewart will ultimately enact on her. As Ada wraps the key in
a cloth, she is surrounded by flowing, drying laundry. Bathed in warm
sunlight, she crosses the scene of domesticity where Flora handwashes
clothes. She hands her daughter the gift to deliver to her lover. No sooner
does Flora approach Baines’s home than she encounters Stewart who, upon
hearing from the girl Ada’s instructions, can no longer control his rage. He
realizes all control over Ada is lost. He rushes back to the homestead where
he grabs Ada and assaults her. She sits at a table where before her are half-
used spools of thread and yarn. Stewart lunges toward her with his ax while
she reads at the table. As Ada jumps away from the swinging ax, Stewart
slams the weapon into the piano that has since been returned to their home
when Baines’s affection for Ada become too much for Stewart (and Baines)
to bear. Visually, aurally, viscerally, the ax’s penetration into the piano
resounds in its close-up that recalls Stewart’s earlier ax-slamming into the
earth when he finalizes the exchange of Ada with Baines. The force of the
ax causes Ada’s book to flutter. The sewing materials on the table quake
when Stewart shoves her into the table. These items that are linked to her
fingertips, her handiwork, are shattered as her husband violently attacks
her/them. In thrashing these objects, he violates her. But the cutting into
Ada’s material world is insufficient for Stewart. Her body is ultimately the
site that must be cut, just like the timber he slices each day from the bush.
Stewart drags Ada outdoors.
The soft yellow sun that introduced the sequence when Ada approached
Flora with the gift has suddenly changed to a chillingly blue, rain-filled
scene. As if to respond to the horror of the moment, Aotearoa opened its
clouds, deluging Stewart as he drags Ada to his wood chopping block. Her
traumatic experience thus converges with and into the landscape as the
rains flood the scene. In their own perverse relationship, Aotearoa provides
Ada the tears she cannot deliver. If she is silent in her shock and Aotearoa
vociferous in its sorrow both are stunned by the recognition that the
colonizer’s wrath knows no bounds. He will chop away at any form of
Otherness that interferes with the terms of his occupation. Ada’s body
therefore echoes the trees that fill the land he butchers.
Fiercely struggling yet resigned to her fate as Woman, as Other, Ada falls
to the ground as Stewart guides her hand to the chopping block. Through
montage, as we hear Flora’s screams and Stewart’s cries to demand that
Ada answer whether she loves Baine, Campion replays the key image-
fragments from the film (hands, fingers, eyes, women’s faces, axes). In
doing so, the materiality of image-signs rush toward the moment when
Stewart cuts off Ada’s finger. The ax that sealed the deal between men—a
settler’s handshake—now aims to sever woman’s pleasure and desire. The
montage-sequence at the moment of the cut thus “unchains” the metaphors
that have traversed the film.
The sequence brings home the fraught dimensions of sensuality that
women and the land embody. Now, the touch that yielded erotic pleasure
and soothing music is cut, made to bleed. As the bearer of the bleeding
wound, Ada’s blood (an intense cinematic red) splatters across Flora’s face
as it shoots from her mother’s body. Ada’s own hands are now filled with
her blood that she holds at the site of castration. As the camera cuts to wide
shot, we watch a shocked Ada—bloodied, wounded, and traumatized—
walk toward the bush where she finally collapses and sinks into the
muddied earth.
The Piano’s climactic sequence fully incorporates Campion’s symphony
of cinematic technique where form and content at once stitch together yet
cut apart the film’s narrative pleasure. In the end, the familial bliss shared
with Baines is survivable for Ada only with the imagining of her piano
buried in the silent blue sea. The “feminist strategy” that Campion reveals
in The Piano is one in which the woman’s body is always already scarred
and mutilated. It is precisely this battle-worn and battle-ready body that
goes on to resist and exercise her desire on whatever homestead she finds
herself. In effect, Campion reveals the colonizers’ violence that
paradoxically serves the commodified representation of “calm” and beauty
that is the mark of New Zealand.

F T
In looking at the “funny hands” that appear on the screen we are made more
and more aware of a woman’s skin in the cinematic game. All those funny
hands reveal a masterful legerdemain on the part of women where the
masculinist power grab rears itself at every turn and in every cinematic cut.
They stitch, cook, entertain, and give pleasure. Yet in the give and take
between men and women on the screen, a power dynamic emerges. A set of
feminist strategies come into play between and among the cinematic images
insofar as a “woman’s liberation” is not the end result; instead, the feminist
strategies reviewed here reflect the messy reckoning with—to say it quickly
—White, heteromasculinist patriarchy.
This is why Marie-Claire Ropars-Wuilleumier’s work is so valuable to
recall, alongside Godard’s. Rather than view the cinematic cut between
images as an aesthetic to pronounce progress (cause and effect and/or literal
associative meaning), Ropars-Wuilleumier and Godard insist that image-
fragments gather meaning as they are cut and traverse one another. The
images of women’s labor considered in this chapter—whether in the works
of Pakula, Vertov, or Campion—take on their strategic force precisely
because they are juxtaposed among images. To eke out a close analysis
along these lines, therefore, requires a study of cinematic images as a
circulation of meaning in part-whole relations in which the “imagistic
origin to ideas of meaning” are “pulverized.” In this way, it is valuable to
recall Edward Said’s reminder that “representation involves violence
toward the subject of representation. There is a real contrast between the
violence of the act of representing and the calm within the representation
itself.”57 By honing in on montage, the cut, as it gives rise to concept we do
not destroy “the calm” that the image purportedly claims; rather, analyzing
montage-as-concept foregrounds the act of violence always already in play
in representation.
To the extent that Eisenstein’s October loosely threads the narrative
history of the storming of the Winter Palace through a pulverizing of image-
fragments that metonymically signify the Bolshevik Revolution, I have
sought to follow a cinematic threading of images in which the signifiers of
women’s labor are cross-stitched throughout a film and/or set of films in
order to yield potential and troubling feminist strategies. More important, I
have sought to theorize “[woman’s] true condition: to think with hands.”
N
1. Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, “The Hands of Jean-Luc Godard,” Mubi: Notebook Feature, December
25, 2018, https://mubi.com/notebook/posts/the-hands-of-jean-luc-godard.
2. Ibid.
3. Quoted in James Quandt, “Facing the Void: Jean-Luc Godard’s Book of Images,” in DVD essay
(Kino Lorber, 2019) for The Image Book. The five-point summary by author.
4. “Representation, or more particularly the act of representing (and hence reducing) others,
almost always involves violence of some sort to the subject of representation, as well as a
contrast between the violence of the act of representing something and the calm exterior of the
representation itself, the image—verbal, visual, or otherwise—of the subject. Whether you call
it a spectacular image, or an exotic image, or a scholarly representation, there is always this
paradoxical contrast between the surface, which seems to be in control, and the process which
produces it, which inevitably involves some degree of violence, decontextualization,
miniaturization, and so on. The action or process of representing implies, control, it implies
accumulation, it implies confinement, it implies a certain kind of estrangement or
disorientation on the part of the one representing.” (Edward Said, “In the Shadow of the West,”
in Power, Politics, and Culture: Interviews with Edward Said, ed. Gauri Viswanathan (New
York: Vintage Books, 2001), 39–52; 40–41).
5. This is, of course, Mulvey’s concern in her classic essay, Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and
Narrative Cinema,” Film Theory and Criticism, 7th ed., ed. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 711–22).
6. It is precisely Godard’s cinematic form and, hence, cinematic “contradictions” that arise in his
images of women that concern Mulvey and MacCabe. See Laura Mulvey and Colin MacCabe,
“Images of Woman, Images of Sexuality,” in Godard: Images, Sounds, Politics (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1980), 79–101.
7. Indeed, it is noteworthy that several iconic Eisensteinian sequences appear in The Image Book.
It is noteworthy because this recent film distances Godard ever more firmly from his earlier
commitment to Vertov’s theories of montage.
8. Marie-Claire Ropars-Wuilleumier, “The Function of Metaphor in Eisenstein’s October,” trans.
Sister Mary Christopher Baseheart, Film Criticism 2, no. 2/3 (Winter/Spring 1978): 10–34, 13.
9. Ibid., 30.
10. Ibid., 30–31.
11. Ibid., 16.
12. Ibid., 30.
13. See, for instance, the seminal essay by Daniel Dayan, “The Tutor-Code of Classical Cinema,”
in Movies and Methods: Volume 1, ed. Bill Nichols (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1976), 438–51.
14. Ropars-Wuilleumier, “Function of Metaphor,” 12.
15. Sergei Eisenstein, “Dickens, Griffith, and the Film Today,” in Film Form: Essays in Film
Theory, ed. and trans. by Jay Leyda (New York: Harcourt Brace Janovich, 1949), 195–255,
234. First published 1977.
16. Ropars-Wuilleumier, “Function of Metaphor,” 16.
17. Ibid., 17 (emphasis added).
18. Ibid., 30 (emphasis added). “The ideology of October,” Ropars-Wuilleumier writes, “develops
first from a writing which carries the testing of this proposition to its limits; its revolutionary
character does not hold to the story of the Revolution—which it does not tell—but the
 injection into the revolutionary discourse of a productive force traced upon the theoretical
motive power of the event: if the film stops at the edge of an essentially realistic
representation, the fact is that the discourse of the film conveys first a reflection on the real and
the impossibility of grasping it without in the first place constructing the concrete signification
with the abstracted image. The exigency is two-fold: to take cinematographic material—and
its illusory reality—back to the state of the raw material; to recover these fragments freed in an
ensemble which recomposes the contradictory image of reality and its significative orientation.
The movement of the writing then retraces in its constitutive dynamics that of a dialectic which
constitutes the story” (30 (emphasis in original)).
19. Ibid.
20. Amelie Hastie, “The Vulnerable Spectator: Funny Hands and Feminist Fits,” Film Quarterly
72, no. 3 (2019): 62–65. As Edward Gallafent reminds us, “The strategic use of actors’ hands
in cinema is the subject of illuminating commentary in other places and contexts.” Gallafent,
“The Southerner: Touching Relationships,” in A Companion to Jean Renoir, ed. Alastair
Phillips and Ginette Vincendeau (West Sussex, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), 538).
21. On the “good-bad” girl ramifications of the striptease, see Mary Anne Doane’s reading of
Gilda in Doane, Femme Fatale: Feminism, Film Theory, Psychoanalysis (New York:
Routledge, 1991), 107–8.
22. See, for instance, Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1984).
23. Judith Mayne, Kino and the Woman Question: Feminism and Soviet Silent Film (Columbus:
Ohio State University Press, 1989), 158.
24. Ibid., 155.
25. Ibid., 169–70.
26. Ibid., 181–82.
27. Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure,” 712.
28. It is important to bear in mind that Lacan “sharply differentiates the gaze from the subject’s
look.” As Kaja Silverman goes on to explain, Lacan “[confers] visual authority not on the look
but on the gaze. He thereby suggests that what is determinative for each of us is not how we
see or would like to see ourselves, but how we are perceived by the cultural gaze” (Silverman,
Threshold of the Visible World (New York: Routledge, 1996), 19). Although Lacan would
resist aligning the “gaze” with Ideology, the permeative qualities of “the gaze” echo concerns
with, for example, Althusserian concepts, while “the look” carries a phenomenological aspect
aligned with Merleau-Ponty. Lacan had interactions with both Althusser and Merleau-Ponty.
Both, in very different ways, infiltrated Lacan’s thinking on questions of gaze and look.
29. See, for instance, Steve Neale, “Masculinity as Spectacle: Reflections on Men and Mainstream
Cinema,” Screen 24, no. 6 (1983): 2–17. See, additionally, Laura Mulvey, “From a faculty
seminar with Laura Mulvey: Reflections on Visual Pleasure,” New Review of Film and
Television Studies 15, no. 4 (2017): 385–87.
30. Dziga Vertov, Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov, ed. Annette Michelson, trans. Kevin
O’Brien (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 199.
31. Sheila Fitzpatrick, Stalin’s Peasants: Resistance and Survival in the Russian Village after
Collectivization (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 274.
32. Vertov, Kino-Eye, 199.
33. Ibid., 53 (emphasis added).
34. If, as Mayne argues, “Eisenstein’s approach focuses on the potentially revolutionary elements
in bourgeois culture; it is a dialectic of appropriation,” then Vertov “insists upon sharp breaks
between bourgeois and socialist culture; his is a dialectic of emancipation.” Nevertheless,
 Mayne continues, “the dividing lines between appropriation and emancipation are not always
clearly defined.” Mayne, Woman Question, 19. When reviewing Vertov’s later notes for
unrealized projects, the blurry line will become more transparent. See further Michelson,
“Introduction,” in Kino-Eye.
35. Woman Question, 174.
36. Quoted in Mayne, Woman Question, 174 (emphasis added).
37. Vertov, Kino-Eye, 328.
38. Although I lightly touch on elements of sound in this chapter, the question of image/sound
montage is a critical one. Hastily noted in my earlier discussion of Klute and what I take up
below in The Piano, “montage-as-concept” puts into play complex forms of representation,
whether in Soviet montage or Hollywood-style narrative. In my haste, I hope the reader
gleaned the sensual possibilities the soundtrack offers in its textual “overflow.” What is merely
indicated here deserves full airing but space precludes that discussion.
39. Ibid., 297.
40. Ibid., 301.
41. Ibid., 311.
42. Ibid., Kino-Eye, 311.
43. Because Vertov presented his proposals in a quasi-poetic format (and in following Michelson’s
editorial style in Kino-Eye) I utilize semicolons to mark the lines between sentences that are
structured to follow poetic form.
44. Ibid., 300 (emphasis added).
45. Ibid., 301.
46. Ibid.
47. Ibid., 308–9.
48. Arthur Loesser, Men, Women, and Pianos: A Social History (Mineola, NY: Dover, 1954
[1990]), 560–61. See further, Dorothy Schwieder, “Education and Change in the Lives of Iowa
Farm Women, 1900–1940,” Agricultural History 60, no. 2 (Spring 1996): 200–15.
49. Laura Voracheck, “‘The Instrument of the Century’: The Piano as an Icon of Female Sexuality
in the Nineteenth Century,” George Eliot-George Henry Lewes Studies 38/39 (September
2000): 27.
50. Kristine Moffat, “The Piano as Symbolic Capital in New Zealand Fiction, 1860–1940,”
Journal of New Zealand Literature 28 (2010): 40.
51. Ibid., 48.
52. The most astute legal and cultural scholar on New Zealand/Aotearoa to work through the
ongoing political and economic forces that bear on the nation’s official “bicultural” status
(created with the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840 between colonizers and Maori) is Jane Kelsey.
See, for instance, Kelsey, The New Zealand Experiment: A World Model for Structural
Adjustment (Auckland, NZ: Auckland University Press, 1995), 22–24. For a comprehensive
study of the relationship between “pakeha” and Maori culture as it folds into New Zealand film
history, see David A. Gerstner and Sarah Greenlees, “Cinema by Fits and Starts: New Zealand
Film Practices in the Twentieth Century,” CineAction 51 (February 2000): 36–47.
53. No better film presents the violent effects between pakeha and Maori than Geoff Murphy’s
satirical Utu (1983). The Maori’s destruction of the nineteenth-century pakeha homestead
(ruled by husband wife, Jonathan and Emily) forcefully comes to its conclusion when Emily’s
piano—the instrument she plays to defer anxiety about external dangers (i.e., Maori) and that
defines her (deluded) female-colonizer identity—is tossed to the ground from the balcony of
the settler’s home. Although her husband escapes the pillaging, Emily is killed—pushed from
the same balcony as her piano. Murphy’s Utu renders the absurdity of colonization and the
 bewildering attempt by white settlers to redecorate a landscape they have savagely occupied
under the gloss of civilized décor and music.
54. Lizzie Francke, “Jane Campion’s Realm of the Sense,” BFI Film Forever, June 20, 2018,
https://www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/sight-sound-magazine/reviews-recommendations/piano-
jane-campion-holly-hunter-sensual-cinema. Further reference to this work is cited in the text.
55. Reshela DuPuis wrestles with what is, on the one hand, “a cinematic masterpiece of potent
pleasure” while, on the other hand, acknowledging Campion’s film is an “exploitative use of
the Maori’s homeland” that “functions as a highly schematic and inherently conservative tool.”
DuPuis, “Romanticizing Colonialism: Power and Pleasure in Jane Campion’s The Piano,” The
Contemporary Pacific 8, no. 1 (Spring 1996): 60, 62. Rather than come down righteously on
one side or another on whether the film is “conservative” or not, my aim is to understand the
way Campion registers the affective Otherness Ada shares with the Maori through cinematic
means. On pakeha and Maori women in the crosshairs of New Zealand’s drive for free-market
economics and politics. See Kelsey, New Zealand Experiment, 285–87.
56. Sue Gillet, “Lips and Fingers: Jane Campion’s The Piano,” Screen 36, no. 3 (Autumn 1995):
278.
57. Said, “Shadow of the West,” 39.
 CHAPTER 25

STANDING UP TOO CLOSE OR

BACK TOO FAR?
A Slanted History of Close
Film Analysis

ADRIAN MARTIN

Oh Gigi, while you were trembling on the brink

Was I out yonder somewhere blinking at a star?
Oh Gigi, have I been standing up too close or back too far?
When did your sparkle turn to fire,
And your warmth become desire? Oh, what miracle has made
you the way you are?
—“Gigi” by Frederick Loewe & Alan Jay Lerner (1958)

I well know that nothing is more suspect in the cinematic domain than to talk of technique.

—Alexandre Astruc (1948)1

When addressing a lofty concept it is always good, I believe, to begin in the
confused fog of the present—with the prevalent uses and understandings of
that concept which are (as it were) in the air, no matter how superficial or
misguided they may eventually turn out to be. The concept addressed by
this chapter is the close analysis of film and other screen media—which
goes by various names and under various labels, such as formal analysis,
detailed analysis, close reading, textual analysis, stylistic analysis, scene
analysis, frame-by-frame analysis, atomic analysis, and no doubt, by now,
granular analysis. If close tends to stick as the most enduring tag for this
type of analysis, it is because it has, inevitably, generated its opposing
approach or methodology: distant analysis.
All this remains to be unpacked. But, at the outset, I wish to record my
impression of two prevalent forms of close analysis that have well and truly
become part of that complex hive-network known as popular culture. The
first form is what we can call drilling down into a film, or any kind of
audiovisual text. I will confess that I was disconcerted in 1989 when I
encountered David Bordwell’s use of this euphemistic term in his
controversial book Making Meaning.2 Drilling: what an ugly, mechanistic
metaphor! As far away as possible from the familiar, broadly humanistic
ethos of intuiting, feeling, and exploring in which some critics (myself
sometimes included) have long imagined themselves to be engaged.
Bordwell’s aim was to illustrate a general, universally applicable process.
As he has reiterated in a blog essay, all interpretation—whether good or
bad, subtle or vulgar, whether chasing meanings that are (variously, in his
suggested terms) referential, explicit, implicit, or symptomatic—works in
this fashion:
For all these types of meaning, the process I posit is the same. The viewer maps, from the
top down, concepts onto cues and patterns found in the film. Given the results of perception
and comprehension, the viewer selects certain items to bear the meanings we bring to the
task.3

Bordwell’s language has in fact turned out to be very prescient: drilling

down (and its close variants such as digging)—as master metaphor for a
way of understanding and interpreting audiovisual texts—is now a
commonly used phrase in pop culture, and as an activity is frequently
celebrated. A case in point: in October 2017, the gifted director Joseph
Kahn made a music video for Taylor Swift titled “Ready for It?.” On many
Swift-related sites, a multitude of her fans pored over every moment—we
can say, without undue exaggeration, every digital frame—in order to find
and then decode the fleeting details of this video. Maura Johnston summed
up these researches for Rolling Stone in an online piece that promised the
revelation of “13 things you missed” in “Ready for It?” These annotations
range from numerological references—both 91 and 89 are scrawled on the
set, which can be unscrambled and then combined to form 1989, the year of
the singer’s birth—and name-drops (“Joseph” written in Chinese on a wall),
through to more flagrantly symbolic or allegorical readings of the star’s
trajectory: Swift is shown as both herself and a doppelgänger in the video,
giving rise to speculations that she feels trapped by her media persona and
wants to break free.4
Kahn, for his part, welcomed this barrage of interpretive speculation, and
(on his popular Twitter feed) thanked and further encouraged the fans:
“Love that you’re digging deep. Have fun!”5 So he is among those
contemporary filmmakers who consciously bury the treasure, the clues for
which fans will then assiduously dig; they explicitly organize their work in
that way. Another writer-director, of a very different sort, has explained a
similar working method to me: Chilean-born Gonzalo Maza, who has
collaborated with Sebastián Lelio and made his own feature debut with This
Is Cristina (2019), boasted that he provides “Easter eggs,” little jokes or
references (such as the camera catching sight of a book autographed by
Slavoj Žižek, or a snatch of piano music sampled from Francis Ford
Coppola’s The Conversation, 1974), that he knows cinephiles will
recognize and enjoy, while not impeding the basic enjoyment of story and
character on the part of those viewers not conversant with such references.
The second, prevalent form of mass analysis in recent years has been a
particular kind of explication—as in deciphering and explaining what really
happened in the plot line of some particularly enigmatic movie or TV
series. It is less about minute detail than the understanding of narrative
events—although it can, again, take recourse to the scrutiny of individual
frames for the clues that may be hidden in a given shot. This mode goes
hand in glove with ubiquitous TV episode “recap” culture online. David
Lynch’s Twin Peaks: The Return (2017) quickly became the privileged
focus of this approach—there are literally hundreds of videos on YouTube,
across many languages, offering exegeses of it—but similar interpretive
webs have been spun around, for instance, Brit Marling and Zal
Batmanglij’s equally mysterious The OA (2016–2019), made even more
open-ended by its cancellation on Netflix at the close of its second season.
The explication made of these TV series, or of those movies in the mode
of Inception (2010) dubbed mind game or puzzle films,6 invariably involves
a sorting-out of the various levels of the fiction, thereby determining the
status of particular events: are they reality or fantasy-projection? If the
latter, exactly which character’s fantasy-projection? Are we being treated to
unannounced flashbacks or flash-forwards? Does there exist a parallel
universe to the diegetic world, or even a full-blown multiverse, one that we
are occasionally given to glimpse? What Jen Chaney of Vulture website
called the “extremely meta” ending of The OA—where the fictional illusion
is broken, the studio set is revealed, and the actors are referred to by their
real names, but the cosmic Good versus Evil storyline seems to continue
unabated in a different guise—even gave rise to feverish speculation that
the series is “part of a Netflix original series multiverse in which many of
the streaming platform’s shows will prove to be interconnected”!7 Wow.
I do not consider either deep drilling or explication in their pop culture
modes to be among the highest or most productive—or even, taking the
long view of history, the most representative—forms of (for want of a better
word) scholarly close analysis. But they definitely answer to the profile of
this practice that we all recognize, whether or not we personally dip into its
toolkit, perpetuate its use, or engage in position-taking debates for and
against it.
Close analysis is about style—and is, in itself, something that goes in out
of style. Like all concepts in film (and related audiovisual media) theory,
close analysis rides on winds and tides of cultural fashion. There is a heroic
phase of its appearance and initial development, followed by abreactions
against it, denunciations of it for the sake of something newer and better,
rediscoveries of it, efforts to problematize and historicize it, and periodic
attempts to integrate or synthesize it with something else. And there is also,
as we have just seen, the popularization—at times, vulgarization—of it.
However, in essence, we all recognize what close analysis is and what it
signals: very close attention to the details of an individual text, which in our
framework is primarily a film. Eugenie Brinkema defines it more acutely:
A close reading begins with a serious, rigorous, careful interpretation of textual specificity:
that can be an isolated minor detail but it can also be a large-form structure or a pattern, a
rhythm or even a relation to formlessness. It brackets entirely things like production history
and context; is indifferent to the long and many forms of reception theory; and it emphasizes
the particular, different, contingent, unique details of textual construction and how they
unfold. […] It eschews paraphrase of themes. […] In film, that means attending to framing,
montage, mise en scène, color and light, rhythm, texture, sound, and a thousand other
things.8
 W D C A D ?P
P
What we tend to think of as the process of close analysis is, in truth, a
bundle of diverse practices cherry-picked from various schools of criticism,
and from distinct moments in the history of film theory. It is extremely
dependent on changes in spectatorship (as a historical phenomenon) and
developments in technology. Insofar as close analysis concentrates on the
details such as significant repetitions, recurring patterns of content and
style, visual and sonic echoes, and developing motifs, it reflects the legacy
bequeathed by the New Criticism movement in literary studies. This
tradition fed (alongside influences from art history) into the collective work
of Movie magazine critics in the 1960s and beyond, which was also taking
some of its tools from Cahiers du cinéma magazine in the 1950s.9 But the
most crucial protocol of close analysis—and this became especially so
under the broad influence of structuralist semiotics in the 1970s and beyond
—is the breakdown or segmentation of a work into its parts, from the
largest down to the smallest scale: acts (as in theater), sections, levels (if
there is more than one story-world or time-period in play), sequences,
scenes, shots. This latter method was developed by many but is nowadays
associated primarily with Raymond Bellour, whose practice of
segmentation came with an enticing theory about resolution and closure on
the psychic and ideological levels, as well as the purely functional,
storytelling one.10 Above all, a certain structuralist drive led to an effort to
circumscribe and delineate the overall system (or, a far less widely used
term today, “code”) of a film, and the finer-grain logic of its specific
choices of image and sound.
As was often discussed in the 1970s—both admiringly and caustically—
close analysis depends on the ability to stop and rewind a film, and
particularly to freeze a frame, hopefully without burning the celluloid strip.
This why such analysis, in its history, is tied to developments in technology.
Some of the most detailed critical accounts we can read from the 1940s and
1950s—those by André Bazin or Éric Rohmer in Cahiers du cinéma, or
Edouard de Laurot in Film Culture magazine—would appear to be based
either on copious notes taken in the dark during multiple screenings or on
reference to some version of the screenplay, publicly or privately
accessed.11
Moments of analytical clarity, popping out from the sloppy,
impressionistic magma of much old-style film criticism, bear witness to
breakthroughs in the situation of being able to view films in different, close-
range ways, such as on a Moviola or Steenbeck editing machine. As early
as 1948, Alexandre Astruc evoked the “four or five films of today and of
yesterday we have learned by heart, running them back and forth through
the Moviola so as to grasp their secret.”12 Speaking cryptically of himself,
he adds this illustrative tale:
That’s why I find the following anecdote so revealing: this tale of a boy who didn’t at all
like Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne [Robert Bresson, 1945] when it was projected on a
Saturday afternoon in a theater on the Champs-Élysées—but who was astonished,
completely fascinated by its slow unfolding, once it was unveiled for him, and only him, on
a tiny screen, like something to be read, no longer just seen; only then could he discover this
extraordinary work in its true light.13

The early 1950s show early glimmers of what would later be called (in a
somewhat exaggerated fashion) frame-by-frame analysis: specific frames
are photographically reproduced (a painstaking technical process at the
time) and annotated in the first edition (1953) of Karel Reisz’s The
Technique of Film Editing, for instance in a fascinating discussion of a
scene from Orson Welles’s The Lady from Shanghai (1947).14 In the 1960s
and 1970s, an effusion of obsessive fandom created what quickly became
fetish items for connoisseurs in the form of photo-novels: witness the
publication of Richard J. Anobile’s large-format rendition of Alfred
Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) in 1974, pairing thousands of frame
enlargements with dialogue transcription, or Grove Press doing the same,
on smaller pages, for Godard’s Masculin féminin (1966) and other art film
titles in the late 1960s. Around the same time in Italy, Francesco Casetti
was hosting a TV program where he would analyze film segments while
hunched over a viewing machine.
In the 1970s, the invention of the analytic projector brought the ability to
freeze frames without fire hazard in classrooms. The dedication on the part
of scholars to making frame enlargements directly from the celluloid strip
led to pages of profuse illustrations (often reproduced at postage-stamp
size!) in journals such as Camera Obscura, Communications, and Screen.
This freezing and poring-over of frames brought on its own special style of
reverie. The theoretical wave of poststructuralism in the mid to late 1970s
—and later the figural film analysis of the 1990s—seized, in its eagerness
to free itself from classical models of organic aesthetics, on the single frame
(at the 24th of a second) as an event in itself, especially when it was
strange, surreal, or cross-fading with a subsequent or prior image.15
Going still further, these intrepid, poststructuralist explorers of the very
guts of the cinematic apparatus scrutinized units even smaller than the
individual frame: every shadow, every lens flare, every dot, every muscular
flicker or eye-turn of a performer became potentially meaningful (or at least
interesting, something to note and behold) in the veritably atomic work of
analysts such as Marie-Claire Ropars or Tom Conley.16 An echo of this
intense frame work was sounded, many years later and in a different
sociopolitical key, by Hannah Frank in her book on the hidden traces of
women’s labor in assembly-line cartoons—hidden literally within the
photographed brushstrokes, vacant spaces, and dirt particles on single,
hardly perceptible frames.17
More generally, the above quotation from Astruc offers a glimpse of the
joy found in that historic moment when a film became accessible as a text
to be read, not just a movie to be seen in passing and preserved only in
faulty recollection. We need to be careful, now as in the 1970s, about
overdoing the intellectual flourish that came with all these literate and
literary metaphors—but we can still appreciate the point being made.
Getting hold of a film analytically means stopping it, fragmenting it,
reproducing (in whatever way) some small bits of it—just as we can do,
with relative ease, with the words of a poem or the photographed details of
a painting. All analysis of the arts involves investigating the relation of a
work’s parts to the whole—whether that be a classical, well-proportioned
form, or a deliberately unstable, modernist configuration. The history of
close analysis has taken us down the royal road from an initial gestalt of the
whole (which is what film reviewers usually only work with) to the patient
sorting-out and labeling of the parts.
That said, it is still possible today to imagine other, alternative ways of
breaking down films. Close analysis is about concentrating our attention,
but, naturally, that attention can be directed and subdivided in all manner of
ways. In Bellour’s popular model, everything ultimately came to rest upon
the building block of the shot; that, for him, is the fundamental unit of
cinema. Analysis proceeds, therefore, via the numbering of shots, the
counting of cuts, the basic description of the contents of each discrete
composition (whether static or in motion), the registering of point-of-view
(POV) positions, and the notation of such repetitions (sometimes redundant,
sometimes dynamic) as the shot/reverse shot volley.18 A later variation and
extension of this “shot-consciousness” (as Bordwell calls it, relaying David
Gessner)19 came in the form of the Cinemetrics tool devised by Yuri Tsivian
and Gunars Civjans, which established the ASL or average shot length of a
film—something useful for both analyses of individual films and broader
sweeps of filmic data.20
Nonetheless, other aspects of the aesthetic ensemble of cinema are often
severely downplayed or outrightly neglected in some especially zealous
displays of shot-consciousness. Students, using such tools for the first time,
tend to unknowingly inherit this myopia. Gérard Legrand (in his
extraordinary 1979 book Cinémanie) displaces the emphasis from shot
montage or découpage to a particular way of apprehending the holistic
work of mise en scène—especially as that is worked out in our gradual,
apprehension as spectators of a décor or location. Alain Masson continues
this line of analysis in his treatment of film musicals.21 Like for mise en
scène, another aporia has really only begun to be systematically addressed:
a proper appreciation of acting performance, and how it interacts with all
the other levels of filmic style.22
Even staying at the shot level, many of us who count the shots or cuts
after the fact of a film’s making—as if the brute mathematics of these
numbers had wholly guided its makers—generally have too little
understanding of the actual process of coverage, multiple takes, and camera
setups that occur during shooting: the various positions from which a scene
(or select parts of a scene) is recorded, in order to be played with
(sometimes with almost infinite variations) in editing. The principal vectors
or lines of force in a scene are not always, or wholly, pinpointed in its
eventual edit-points. Analysts often need to develop a retrospective
imagination in an effort to reconstitute the kinds of aesthetic choices made
at every stage of the filmmaking process. Intriguingly, the limitations of
shot-consciousness show up most clearly in that experimental film genre of
the exact remake: Gus Van Sant’s more-or-less precise 1998 mimicry of the
découpage of Psycho clearly lacks the dynamic, trial-and-error process
whereby Hitchcock arrived at and manipulated his shots—a process that
was less storyboard-bound than movie lore would have us believe.23
Bellour himself, beginning in the 1990s, began investigating other ways
of scoring the modulations of a film, without ever entirely abandoning the
contributing parameters provided by the start, end, and middle of a shot.
Applying the poetic and psychoanalytic methods provided by Daniel Stern’s
account of human perception in childhood, Bellour came also to include,
and sometimes privilege, intricate matters of rhythm, vibration, coloring,
shading, and affective resonance. In this way, mise en scène—radically
reconceived in relation to its generally classical use in criticism during the
1950s and in Movie—made a welcome return into Bellour’s analyses.24 A
multifaceted understanding of cinematic rhythm has also been undertaken
in the important work of Lea Jacobs;25 this insight has found its echo in
ongoing essays and reviews in Positif magazine by Masson. The latter
noted in 1997: “Light and shadow, body movements, the actors’ phrasing,
the respective length of dialogue lines and of silences, the varying intensity
that the dramatic representation imparts to the implementation of the
narrative—all make up rhythm in cinema.”26
The wide field of digital humanities has more recently handed us, in its
diverse projects and strategies of data visualization, other, newer ways of
imagining (and manipulating) the model picture of a film. Another practice
named cinemetrics has emerged in architectural theory: the effort to draw or
map the spaces of films takes us beyond the flat rationality of floor-plan
designs and into realms of movement, use-values, and emotion.27
Cartographic research approaches films via the geographical data maps of
various kinds that be constituted from them: this covers everything from the
distribution of location sites sifted through Google to cultural surveys of the
historical or social associations accruing to any specific place.28 Volumetric
techniques transform films into flat color fields, stacks of images lined up
into boxes that we can pass through in review with a computer cursor, or
reconstituted and projected 3D worlds (complete with holes and glitches).29
Audiovisual essays and art gallery installations (by Chantal Akerman,
Harun Farocki, or Aitor Gametxo) can pull apart and respatialize the shots
comprising a flowing découpage into multiple, simultaneous, or interrelated
screens. Some of these adventures have a heightened hyperrealism as their
alibi (in order to immerse the spectator in a diegesis via virtual reality);
others aim to reveal and intensify the fuzzy, hallucinatory, ever-mutating,
fundamentally unrealistic and dreamlike plasticity that (certainly to my
mind) constitutes the language of cinema.30
What do all these diverse protocols of close analysis aim to do, especially
for those lucky souls who undertake them? They provide a kind of spiritual
exercise—if we can take that term out of its strictly religious, Loyolan
context31—whose goal is, quite simply, to get us inside the film, to become
extremely familiar with it. This spiritual exercise is also (to shift the
reference from the Middle Ages to Antiquity) an art of memory:32 whatever
intimate knowledge we arrive at in relation to the workings of a film allows
us to replay it, any time we wish, in our minds; to make the film live,
eternally, within us, every part of us, like a memorized piece of music we
can automatically play upon picking up an instrument.

W I C A A ?I
D
What do we seek from close analysis, beyond the often palpable pleasure
and stimulation of engaging so closely with the material details of a film?
What do we hope to produce (whether in written or some other form) from
the experience of this close encounter? The standard answer to this
question, reiterated for at least four or five decades now, is meaning—with
that phrase “making meaning” often wheeled out to sum up both what texts
do and what spectators do, as well as what both do together.
There are many general categories of meaning in a film: thematic (the felt
significance that arises from a fiction), sociological or ideological (films as
the sometimes obscured reflection of the world they come from), and so on.
Often—at least insofar as we are concerned to value films—meaning is one
key to the art of cinema. There are certainly (we have all experienced them)
rich films, complex films, profound films. Or meaning can be an indicator
of cinema’s function or role, its action in the social and political sphere. But
meaning is not the only thing we can pursue through the act of analysis.
Sometimes a critic wants to penetrate the secret of how something works—
how its pieces form together to create some sort of effect or affect—to
understand the magic of the screen, or (in the words of Gigi, 1958) “what
miracle has made you the way you are.” That might be thought of as
understanding the craft of the medium—a poetics of cinema (the practice of
its making) as both Raúl Ruiz and David Bordwell have called it.33 Yet I
find it hard to cleanly separate art from craft, or poetics from poetry—and
especially when it comes to the results or evidence that we can glean from a
close analysis.
Rather than meaning per se, or some simplistic notion of craft skill within
fairly rigid conventions, I prefer to think of the materiality of cinema (on
the level of form and style) as wielding an expressive force. Expression is
not exactly the same thing, in my framework, as meaning, at least as we
traditionally understand the idea of meaning as explicable, paraphrasable
content. An action film (for instance) can move us, overwhelm us, pummel
us, without leaving us with very much to talk about in the way of dramatic
themes or sociopolitical implications. “Real art has the capacity to make us
nervous,” suggests Susan Sontag in one of the passages of her famous 1964
essay “Against Interpretation.” “By reducing the work of art to its content
and then interpreting that, one tames the work of art. Interpretation makes
art manageable, conformable.”34
But around now we hit a wall. Sooner or later, all talk of detailed analysis
collides with a wild proliferation of spatial and physical metaphors. Some
have already made cameo appearances in this chapter. All of them are
contested or contestable, none are stable. Analysis that is close or distant.
Meanings that are deep or shallow. Drilling from the top down. Surfaces
that are merely superficial, or (as in the famous line from Max Ophüls’s
Madame de … (1953)) only “superficially superficial,” hence are, in their
own way, deep. Film as materiality. Being inside or outside the film—with
uncertain borders on all the sides. It is a murky business, trying to establish
the distances, the proportions, the depths, the divisions perpetually in play.
 Paradoxes abound in the suggestively programmatic (and sometimes
gnomic) formulations of critics and theorists concerning these matters.
Sontag called for an “erotics of art” in criticism, for “a really accurate,
sharp, loving description of the appearance” and texture of a work.35 V. F.
Perkins ventured that meanings in a film “are neither stated nor in any
special sense implied. They are filmed,” since “a meaning presented is a
meaning made overt within the chosen medium,” not “hidden in or behind
the movie.”36 Yet such stirring formulations, despite their constant citation
and recirculation in film culture, remain somewhat enigmatic—it is not
immediately clear where we can take them, what practical methods they
might generate.37
To seek meaning in film implies and involves an act of interpretation.
This often seems like the only game in town, for, at some level, we are all
drawn to it, and we make meaning, it seems, as naturally as we breathe, or
spin stories. But—pushing back for a moment against the eternal, humanist
homily on the universality of meaning and storytelling—there are other
games of equal fun and importance. One of them is charting what Cristina
Álvarez López and I, in our collaborative work, call “the moves”: the points
(there can be many in a single, short scene) in which a film engineers a way
to change its temperature, shift its focus, raise its stakes, modulate its mood,
thicken its atmosphere, or scramble its hitherto established premises.38
Another is in the literary form of description (the neat Greek term ekphrasis
is often cited), or redescription. Sontag found a praiseworthy example of
“really accurate, sharp, loving description” in the film criticism of Manny
Farber.39 Indeed, his entire output as a writer was set against the facile
inscription of (frequently cliché) meanings in movies.
In an extraordinary 1979 lecture delivered at the Museum of Modern Art
in New York, Farber evoked his goal: “an idea of criticism as environment,
territory,”40 where the experiential or phenomenal world of the film and its
form opens up to, and encounters, the many material sensibilities shaping
real times and places—thus getting past the rigid division between what he
called “outside and inside criticism” (i.e., close analysis and sociological
analysis). “What I’d like to be talking about is a kind of archaeological dig
on a movie […] a movie has all kinds of cues in it; it goes sideways.”41 For
Farber, as for many critics who aspire to his level of inventiveness and
imagination, “going sideways” is all about leaving, wherever possible, the
straight lines laid down by a plot, and by what he disparaged as a
filmmaker’s slick “cunning” or “masterfulness,” however “aesthetic” and
well-crafted it might be.42 I do not vibe with Farber and his partner-
collaborator Patricia Patterson all the way on this particular campaign; to
me, masterfulness is also well worth digging into and appreciating.

F M :S ,M ,A ?
Let us turn now to the particular kind of meaning known as theme—the
general definition of which (in all the narrative arts) is also highly contested
and varied. Themes can be investigated from the vantage point of the
spectator who draws them out and interprets them, or the filmmaker who
works them in as substantial (or superficial) material; I am emphasizing the
latter perspective here. A theme (I think we can all agree) is something
more than a simple keyword, statement, or proverb. It has to be embodied
within the givens of the story, worked through in a series of successive
stages. The central idea has to be modulated, transformed throughout, and
be brought to some conclusion, or at least a satisfying equilibrium of
diverse options. Writer-directors (from Ruiz to Jean-Pierre Gorin)
sometimes speak of a “secret centre” in their fictions: not a single hidden
key, but a theme that is not overtly announced, at the same time informing
everything we see.43 Screenwriter-theorist Yvette Bíró’s remarkable 2008
book Turbulence and Flow in Film investigates this sense of the
subterranean semantic current in a film, which is enriched by detours and
digressions, and can emerge to the surface of plot at surprising points.44
Above all, a theme is an abstraction, something transpersonal, able to be
generalized beyond the specifics of any one fictional setting and group of
characters. It is a question seeking a response, a meditation, an
extrapolation.
In his posthumously published The Eloquent Screen, Gilberto Perez
cautions against a mode of thematic interpretation that proceeds “too
psychologically”45—and his admonition could be directed at much of what
I earlier called the explicative commentary of our contemporary moment.
Referring to the unspoken but suggested “amorous attraction” of Ethan
(John Wayne) and Martha (Dorothy Jordan) in John Ford’s The Searchers
(1956), Perez suggests that “what the director chose not to spell out, we
shouldn’t feel free to embellish.”46 Ford’s storytelling method—which
Perez characterizes in terms of subtlety and “mastery”—“calls not for
speculation on what we don’t know but for reflection on what we do
know.”47
But if there are things that are fruitless to speculate upon, what is it, by
contrast, that we know, then, from or about a filmic fiction? What has been,
in Perkins’s sense, made overt here? Referring to the crucial moment when
a visual motif in The Searchers—the camera’s “view from inside looking
out,” framing the action shown with a doorway or cave mouth—evokes the
memory or spirit of the character of Martha, Perez asserts: “However, I
didn’t think of Martha. I thought of the family, the civilization, that Martha
represents.”48 In Perez’s approach, all interpretation tends to what he calls
an allegorical reading of what characters represent, rather than who they are
as imagined, flesh-and-blood individuals. Considering a handful of Ford’s
classics, Stagecoach (1939), My Darling Clementine (1946), and The Man
Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), he writes:
Clementine and Ranse as the East, Wyatt Earp and Hallie and Tom as the West, are figures
of allegory. The Western allegorizes history through the myth of the frontier; it deals with
social and political issues not realistically but allegorically. And in The Man Who Shot
Liberty Valance, the allegory, usually implicit, becomes fully conscious, even self-
conscious. It is above all an allegory of violence—the violence of the wilderness and the
violence of civilization, the violence that society must suppress and the violence that society
must use.49

Talk of allegory, however, brings up another bundle of issues—and

misunderstandings. And this will take us, indirectly, further into a possible
sketch for an aesthetic of the expressive power of the fiction film, again
taking our lead from Perez’s highly significant book. Here is an example. I
have long been fascinated by a simple, seemingly uneventful scene around
forty-three minutes into François Truffaut’s The Soft Skin (1964). The
central male character, Pierre (Jean Desailly), stops at a gas station to fill his
car with petrol. As so often in the film, Truffaut seizes the opportunity to
concentrate on certain visible, physical details of the action—details that,
while being deftly, economically organized into a swift scene (there is little
“real time” in his cinema), also allow, at certain moments, for a deliberate,
contemplative pause. This is what happens when the camera lingers on the
numbers flicking by on the gas pump. The découpage alternates between
Pierre, his companion Nicole (Françoise Dorléac), the car being filled by an
attendant, the road in front of the station, and the rolling numbers, back and
forth. The scene is captivating in its minute attention to this tiny, banal
microevent. Yet what does it mean, exactly? What does it express? It
embodies a certain tension that is building in Pierre (caught, as he
uncomfortably and awkwardly is, between the two women in his life), and
meanwhile also building in us as spectators. Daily life is passing, but with a
neurotic, disquieting undercurrent of anxiety.
Yet we would be hard pressed to assign any kind of clear symbolic or
metaphoric status to that gas pump (in frontal close-up) and its typical
motions. It is an almost excessively obvious device, just something literally
happening, marking the time. This is a telling aesthetic decision on
Truffaut’s part. He set himself apart from the school of mannerist directors
of the 1960s (such as Joseph Losey or Stanley Kubrick, and later Francis
Ford Coppola) who enjoyed imposing the type of bravura authorial
commentary that is expressed by evidently significant objects, counterpoint
music/song selections on the soundtrack, or cross-cutting between scenes.
For Truffaut, meaning had to be embedded within the world of the story—
the routine actions and daily rituals of its characters—and never
superimposed in an ostentatious way. A certain, coherently defined surface
of the movie—naturalistic or stylized as the case may be—had to remain
relatively unperturbed, unless an especially strong gesture on the part of the
director was called for (as is the case with the sudden, wild whip-pans that
conclude his Love on the Run in 1979). We are close, here, to the aesthetic
system proposed by V. F. Perkins in his landmark 1972 book Film as Film,
in which Losey’s The Criminal (a.k.a. The Concrete Jungle, 1960) is faulted
for its “deliberate creation of discrepancies” between the naturalistic action
of a scene and the obvious artifice of its lighting changes.50
Yet, on another level of our public, global film culture, the notion that a
decoding of some symbolic level is both a necessary and good thing in art
runs riot. Let us take an example from the burgeoning world of video
essays, particularly those with a populist, blockbuster-oriented sensibility.
In February 2020, Sight and Sound published online an eleven-and-three-
quarter-minute video essay titled Bong Joon-ho’s Rampaging Metaphors by
Luís Azevedo, part of a special issue devoted to the director of Parasite
(2019) and its phenomenal global success.51 The least that can be said of
this appreciative video is that it is a masterpiece of categorical confusion:
metaphor, allegory, symbolism, comparison, dynamism, representation,
analogy, depiction, structure, theme, dramatization, embodiment,
connotation, microcosm, and macrocosm—all are mixed up in the essayist’s
voice-over narration, appearing (for all intents and purposes)
interchangeable in their meaning-making functions. It’s a well-edited
collage of snippets from Bong’s seven features, but the flow of sampled
images and sounds is often clearer (and more eloquent) than the overt
argument guiding it on top.
Bong’s metaphors are grouped, for the sake of Azevedo’s demonstration,
into Creature, Architecture, Direction (this and the previous one could
easily have been combined into “spatial metaphors”), and “Symbols
Metaphors” [sic]. Problematic interpretations abound: the vertical image of
a tall building is declared to be an “allegory for social hierarchy”—but no,
there would have been a story unfolding in that building, from bottom to
top (or vice versa), for there to be allegory in play (as the video accurately
identifies in relation to the train of Snowpiercer, 2013). Bong’s fantastic
characters of Okja (in the 2017 film of that name) and the monstrous sea
creature in The Host (2006) are “super-big” and hence can “carry his largest
metaphors”—as if physical size provided the measure of their capacity to
represent something, to make meaning.
Metaphors exhibit some strange properties in Azevedo’s videographic
account. They can be “strong,” “controlled,” “wild,” “complex,”
“unpredictable,” “faceless,” “shapeless,” and even (as per the video’s title)
“rampaging”—although we receive little sense of how a good, well-
achieved metaphor in cinema can be distinguished from a bad one.
Discussing the central object of a stone passed around in Parasite, the video
claims that when a character drops it, its metaphoric meaning is thereby
“subverted”—another collapse of physical and semantic properties. When
the hero of Barking Dogs Never Bite (2000) hears canine noise in the
distance, this is “the representation of his knowledge that life is out of his
grasp”—but wouldn’t that be an element in the working out of a more
general theme in the story?
The most alarming thing about Bong Joon-ho’s Rampaging Metaphors—
apart from its obligatory nod to the saving realism of “true-to-life
characters,” whatever that may mean in the context of Bong’s cinema—is
its assumption, derived from popular wisdom, that a metaphor is always a
puzzle to be solved, or a riddle to be cracked. The films are “conceptual
puzzle boxes” according to Azevedo—mixing up this conceptual level with
the mystery-thriller aspect of several Bong plots—and the “pleasure” they
are said to give is in the mental effort we expend in decoding them. But
then there is the sticking point of Bong’s playfulness (his “rampaging”
through metaphors), as if the director is deliberately, cheekily getting in the
way of the normal decoding process. Arriving, finally, at the humorous
scene of a character in Parasite discussing the meaning of a painting, the
video ends, dispiritingly and disconcertingly, with this flourish: “Does he
have any idea? Do we? Or is director Bong fucking with us?” To which I
add another question, courtesy of Peggy Lee: is that all there is?
But let’s back up from this example and reframe the interpretive problem
at stake. For the confusion which Azevedo’s video essay demonstrates is, at
least in some cases, understandable, even inevitable. A man looks left and
right and then chooses a path (this is an example from Bong cited in the
video): how to describe that figure of rhetoric as it happens in cinema,
exactly? The more I turned over the labeling possibilities, the dizzier I
became. Symbol, metaphor, allegory?
The crux of this issue is simple: when we use terms such as “metaphor”
and “symbol”—or, getting deeper into it, even more specialized terms like
“metonymy” and “synecdoche”—we are essentially appealing to the
understanding of these rhetorical figures that has been developed, over a
long history, in relation to literary language in all its forms (from oratory to
poetry). And if, in writing or speaking, I (for instance) refer to my
companion in shorthand as “a flower,” I have activated a particular semiotic
system that is peculiar to language: the letters or the sound of the word as
signifier, the denotation of a general physical object of flower, and the
metaphoric logic that ties partner to flower as the total sign—all of which
we understand in a swift, synaptic flash. But this everyday architecture of
reference—word, thing, idea—depends on the stark separation and
differentiation, in the first instance, in the nature of these levels: a word is
not a flower, and neither automatically is a person. One thing stands in for
something else that, in the primary instance, it is not.
In The Eloquent Screen, Perez takes up, with renewed vigor, the
challenge of considering cinematic tropes (as he likes to call them) in terms
of rhetorical figures and the history of their theorization. But, as he
demonstrates, most of the examples we can look to as the touchstones of
that tradition, being literary in their origin and nature, break down at the
moment we approach the medium of cinema. I easily can say or write “man,
this beast of burden” with a perfectly clear semantic intent. But if, in a film,
I simply cut back and forth between a man and a loaded-down donkey—the
type of elementary, mechanical example experimented with in silent cinema
by, among others, Sergei Eisenstein—it is not at all clear whether the
animal is a metaphor for the human, or the human a metaphor for the
animal.
Cinema—certainly narrative cinema of any kind or degree—demands a
different kind of rhetorical model (the subtitle of Perez’s book is A Rhetoric
of Film). His argument fixes, at its outset, on the trope of synecdoche:
Particulars, which are all the camera knows, are synecdochic inasmuch as they have a
meaning, which is always something general. Film is a medium of particulars invested with
meaning as parts of a whole. Each image on the screen shows something in particular, but
something that has a place in the construction of the general.52

So, photographically based cinema proceeds by immersing us in a physical

world—however fantastic or artificial that world may be. Everything is
connected, every detail leads to another. Just as in the Truffaut example: on
his way out-of-town with his mistress, Pierre drives, he stops at the gas
station, he fills up his tank … But this is not—or not only—realism, the
manufactured illusion of a diegetic world. Natural, everyday gestures and
objects—walking, working, doors, streets—can become, beyond their brute
documentary (or what Siegfried Kracauer called “flow of life”53) value,
means that are eloquent, expressive, meaningful.
That is what the catalogue of tropes proposed by Perez is, ultimately: an
inventory of expressive techniques, each time refound, reinvented, re-turned
by a skilled craftsperson/artist. This is the rhetoric of film, where
synecdoche can naturally lead to allegory to generalization to expressive
significance. Here we are close to the aesthetic system of interpretation and
evaluation developed, each in their own manner, not only by Perkins, Bíró,
and Perez but also Masson (in Le Récit au cinéma) and Shigehiko Hasumi,
all of them writing and teaching about film over a period of at least fifty
years.54

W I C A T C ?
The digital humanities research that is concerned with the gathering and
analysis of broad-based data has been referred to several times already in
this chapter, and I have endeavored to give it a positive, inclusive spin. But
I do so in the face of many in that field (as earlier during the rise of the New
Film History in the later 1980s, and now with the emerging discipline of
media archaeology) who begin from a combative position, casting out, in a
dramatic, inaugural gesture, all those old, tired, predictable film analyses
(close or otherwise) for which we have apparently transcended the need. Is
close analysis now a closed book, merely assumed or given, as basic
undergraduate knowledge?
In its public profile, the digital humanities make a major appeal to the
concept of distant (as distinct from close) reading. A formative text in the
establishment of this mode of analysis, especially in relation to a global
expanse of literary history, is Franco Moretti’s “Conjectures on World
Literature” (2000). Defining what is, in his view, the crippling limit of
textual analysis—namely, the time and energy it takes to process individual
works in conventional terms, and the effect of myopia that inevitably
produces—Moretti demands that we withdraw from an up-close focus:
“The more ambitious the project, the greater the distance must be.”55 His
stated ideal—one that has largely come into practice in the subsequent two
decades under the rubric of the digital humanities—is that we attend to
“units that are much smaller or much larger than the text: devices, themes,
tropes—or genres and systems.”56 These are things that, at least in 2000,
Moretti found to be lacking in literary studies—especially in the United
States, which he describes as “the country of close reading.”57
Problems arise in mapping Moretti’s survey of the field of literary
criticism and analysis onto the world of cinema. Devices, themes, tropes,
genres, systems: hasn’t writing on film, at all levels of sophistication, been
full of these things? A critic such as Raymond Durgnat in the UK, with his
breathtaking range of filmic examples (no matter the topic at hand, from
popular cinema to underground erotica), or the types of general survey
articles regularly published by Positif magazine, is proof enough that such
an overall interest has long been in the mainstream, the very lifeblood, of
cinema culture.58 The idea—a central one in Moretti’s polemical reasoning
—that “the trouble with close reading (in all of its incarnations, from the
New Criticism to deconstruction) is that it necessarily depends on an
extremely small canon,” and that (in what he calls an “unconscious and
invisible” but nonetheless “iron” premise) “you invest so much in
individual texts only if you think that very few of them really matter,”59
simply does not hold water in the case of film studies and criticism.
Existing genre studies—whether the fannish surveys of Kim Newman or
the sociological work of Siegfried Kracauer and Barbara Deming (to take
only its extremes)60—can well serve, whatever else they might achieve as
film criticism, as a rich source of data mining.
As I have already mentioned, microscopic or atomic analysis invites
suspicion from many observers. It seems like a fanatical, all-consuming
activity of dissection—unstoppable, potentially infinite. In the arena of art
criticism, James Elkins has focused a powerful and sustained critique on
what he terms “excessively close reading”—which he takes to be an
orthodoxy in most fields of arts criticism. In his 1996 essay “On the
Impossibility of Close Reading,” Elkins underlines the prevalent impression
that a “feeling of mild pathology hangs over all close readings,” especially
when they “begin to look lunatic or wrongheaded”61—finally serving to say
more about the assumptions and impressions of the analyst than the work
under analysis. For Elkins, close reading is fundamentally incoherent: it
switches, without warning, between different frames of viewing, different
interpretive modes, even different definitions of what constitutes the
minimum identifiable unit for analysis.
There is an echo of Elkins’s argument in Tom Gunning’s (essentially
sympathetic) reconsideration in 2003 of Bellour’s The Analysis of Film,
which collects classic essays of the 1960s and 1970s. Once Bellour
tabulates his properly structural shot-charts, he then elaborates fine-grain,
overlapping codes of symmetry and asymmetry, repetition and variation,
governing the structuring of filmic texts at all levels from small-scale
gestural details to large-scale narrative structures. But there are also sudden,
mysterious displacements or excesses at work, where (as Gunning
demonstrates) the analyst must shift to a different level of explication in
order to account for any discrepancy in, or outright contradiction of, the
features of their own methodological/theoretical system.62 In Bellour’s
case, the appeal to a kind of shifting, unstable thermodynamics of drives
and energies, very familiar within the modern, psychoanalytically informed
textual analysis of film, involves an unannounced “reach into the
interpretive realm” over and above the exhibition of pure “harmonies of
formal symmetries.”63 Such “intricate obscurity,”64 in Gunning’s opinion,
leads to potentially unwarranted “interpretive moves”65 on the analyst’s
part.
Traditionally, such interpretive arguments have been resolved by appeal
to the reality test of a principle of pertinence. But this, too, is a disputed
principle in the atomic age of poststructuralist and figural analysis. Let us
briefly cite the examples of two fugitive looks in cinema, and what two
outstanding analysts have made of them. In the course of the closing
dialogue scene in Manhattan (1979), actor-director Woody Allen casts a
quick look offscreen, to the right of frame, without any answering reverse
image to explain this gesture; to Carlos Losilla, Woody’s look thereby
gestures to something “beyond” the limits of this comedy, a structuring
“absent space” that signifies “a certain modern European cinema” outside
the reach of “his own classical comedy.”66 And in Fritz Lang’s Beyond a
Reasonable Doubt (1956), a freeze-frame can show us that, for a split-
second or two, star Dana Andrews looks (in violation of the usual, classical
rule) directly into the camera; for Hoi Lun Law, this is a deliberate detail
pitched below the usual threshold of the “observable,” but richly linked
(once we train ourselves to notice and properly “absorb” it) to the deepest
themes (duplicity, blindness, etc.) of the entire work.67
Such analyses pose to us a question, even a quandary: what is to be
counted as pertinent, significant, a telling or meaningful detail in a film?
When are details too small, too seemingly trivial, incidental, or fleeting to
be taken as data for strenuous analysis? In each case, a rational explanation
can be advanced to discount these details as matters for any necessary
interpretation: Woody’s glance is a purely naturalistic acting detail (eyes
wander …); and Dana’s look is an on-set mistake (issuing from an often
notoriously inebriated actor!) simply not spotted or perhaps reluctantly left
in the final edit of this B budget film. Are these, then, instances of
excessively close, unwarranted interpretive moves?
One often encounters in workaday objections to so-called excessive
analysis an appeal to common sense, to the ordinary viewer and the
mundane experience of viewing. Usually (so the exasperated argument
goes), spectators do not go frame by frame, do not freeze on surreal-looking
dissolves, do not peer into the swirling dots of celluloid grain or pixel
particles. Their experience of a movie is not granular. In a related vein, Seth
Barry Watter, across an engaging series of historiographic analyses, ties the
rise of excessively close analysis to developments not only in technology
but also in the hyperclinical approaches to filmed documentary evidence
pursued by some truly fanatical social scientists in their frame-by-frame
study, tabulation, and breakdown (again, an interminable process) of
microgestures and their possible interpretation68—a procedure parodied
with deadly accuracy by Albert Brooks in a sequence of his prophetic film
Real Life (1979). Watter expresses some incredulousness at such
microanalysis, including its incursion into film studies. As he points out,
where once, in the 1960s, a critic such as V. F. Perkins would concentrate
on décor and environment in the cinema of Nicholas Ray, by the 1980s he
was fixating on hand movements in ever-smaller segments of films by
Ophüls. The discerning critical gaze, driven by increasingly magnifying
technology, has (Watter seems to suggest) misplaced itself in such
analytical fancies and fantasias.
Likewise, reviewing a close analysis of action scenes in several movies
of the Mad Max (1979–2016) cycle, Richard Smith commented:
The urge to stop the frame, to segment scenes and then to reconstitute them anew as a
critical unity is deeply problematic when encountering action films. […] Critics could learn
the lesson of the Bordwell-Thompson approach to film analysis, that students get bored for a
very good reason—the film disappears when the frame is stopped. […] The advantage of
treating cinema as duration is precisely that it does not seek to enumerate the elements’
movement.69
“The film disappears when the frame is stopped”—that is, continuous,
flowing movement is the essential precondition of the ordinary enjoyment
of a typical genre film, or perhaps any film, under normal
viewing/screening conditions. Cinema is duration, according to this
account, and does not respond well to enumeration. But in the age of
DVD/Blu-ray, the time of incessant laptop screenshotting and GIF looping
that powers social media, can we be so sure, anymore, of this commonsense
objection to close analysis? Have we hit another, newer democratic vista in
cinema culture? Laura Mulvey certainly figured so when she reasserted the
enduring relevance of textual analysis for the age of everyday digital
consumption in her 2006 Death 24x a Second and its 2019 follow-up,
Afterimages.70
But there is a simpler, more practical counterobjection to the argument
about excessively close reading. It takes the position of the material
filmmaker, rather than the average (Smith/Watter) or ideal (Mulvey)
spectator. To every objection on the order of “would anyone ordinarily see,
take in, and process such fine-grain detail in a movie?,” the answer can
always be: but it’s there, it exists, whether or not it was meant to be actively
noticed. Someone—more usually, a collaborative team working in concert
—made the objective, material decision to cut exactly on this frame, to
employ this specific sound effect, or to treat the plastic values of the image
in precisely this way. Filmmakers of every kind work with frames,
microseconds, the tiniest of details, and some have spoken openly about it,
from Jerry Lewis and Wes Craven in Hollywood through to Austrian avant-
gardists including Peter Kubelka and Peter Tscherkassky.
The experience of every film, for all of us, comes down to the
orchestration, the streaming, of these millions of atomic details. And—this
was the principal intuition followed by Thierry Kuntzel—we take in all
these details, they register and inscribe themselves within our unconscious,
possibly to be unbound and accessed in a different way by our synaptic
memories.71 The Gilles Deleuze/Henri Bergson ideal of duration cited
above by Smith—let’s rephrase that as the technical and aesthetic working-
out of rhythms, moods, and intensities—is not the opposite of enumeration.
Filmmakers in postproduction suites may not produce shot-charts that look
exactly like those Bellour invented, after the fact, for The Big Sleep (1946)
or The Birds—although sometimes, they in fact do!—but their working
notes and software editing schemas can be just as complicated.
From the viewpoint of the analyst, too, it can be argued that nothing in a
film should be deemed, at the outset, insignificant, or of so little
significance as to be not worth mentioning. The history of film criticism
shows us, many times over, that what would once have been considered
impertinent as a point of analytical or interpretive entry can—with a shift of
perspective, of time, of cultural context—become suddenly, even
extraordinarily pertinent. This is what Mulvey has achieved, for instance, in
her written and audiovisual work on the sometimes subtle and fleeting place
of racial blackness in the finest detail of Douglas Sirk’s Imitation of Life
(1959).72 The question of whether one is standing up too close or back too
far cannot be decided in advance; you just have to plunge in, from wherever
you are located.
To the standard objection that close, textual analysis freezes, dissects, and
hence kills the life of films in motion, Bellour concedes that this is so—but
immediately adds that the aim of writing (hopefully good, vivid, expressive
writing) is to resurrect or revivify the film.73 When we see the whole scene
or film in motion again, after the process of close analysis, we see it anew,
more richly, we appreciate its detail more than ever—and we may even
learn how to integrate that perception, at least a little, within our experience
of ordinary, real-time viewing. As Bellour suggests—and to employ yet
another spatial metaphor—we reach the point of granting “textual volume,”
a weight, to the materiality of cinema, to the “space that constitutes and is
constituted by” its many elements.74
Close analysis in 2021 may have well and truly given up the ghost of a
once quasi-scientific urge to nail down grand systems, codes, logics, and
syntagmatiques. It sometimes operates today in a more fleeting, piecemeal,
belles lettres mode, on precise fragments detached from their wholes (both
Mulvey and Bellour have worked in this way), on what are often called
singularities of cinema. Or it carves out precious spaces, inside the
academy or elsewhere (in online video essays, for instance), for the patient,
in-depth work on cinematic form that is always required, never a done deal
once and for all. The space that constitutes and is constituted by cinema
eternally awaits, solicits, and rewards our closest attention.
N
1. Alexandre Astruc, “The Future of Cinema,” trans. Adrian Martin, The Third Rail (2017),
Article No. 9.
2. David Bordwell, Making Meaning: Inference and Rhetoric in the Interpretation of Cinema
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989).
3. David Bordwell, “Hunting Deplorables, Gathering Themes,” Observations on Film Art, April
9, 2020, http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/2020/04/09/hunting-deplorables-gathering-
themes/.
4. Maura Johnston, “Taylor Swift’s Ready for It? Video Decoded,” Rolling Stone, October 27,
2017, https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/taylor-swifts-ready-for-it-video-
decoded-13-things-you-missed-199579/.
5. Joseph Kahn, Twitter, October 26, 2017.
6. See Warren Buckland, ed., Puzzle Films: Complex Storytelling in Contemporary Cinema
(London: Wiley Blackwell, 2008).
7. Jen Chaney, “Decoding The OA: Part II’s Extremely Meta Ending,” Vulture, March 26, 2019,
https://www.vulture.com/2019/03/the-oa-part-2s-ending-explained.html.
8. Eugenie Brinkema in conversation with Ruth Mayer, “Colors Without Bodies,” The Return of
the Aesthetic in American Studies (December 2018): 7, https://returnoftheaesthetic.de/wp-
content/uploads/2018/12/Eugenie-Brinkema-in-conversation-with-Ruth-Mayer.pdf.
9. See Ian Cameron, ed., Movie Reader (New York: Praeger, 1972), and John Gibbs and Douglas
Pye, eds., Style and Meaning: Studies in the Detailed Analysis of Film (Manchester, UK:
Manchester University Press, 2005). Of particular significance in the later development of this
tradition is the work of Deborah Thomas; see her books Thomas, Beyond Genre: Melodrama,
Comedy and Romance in Hollywood Films (London: Cameron & Hollis, 2000), and Thomas,
Reading Hollywood: Spaces and Meanings in American Film (London: Wallflower, 2001).
10. Raymond Bellour, The Analysis of Film (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000).
11. André Bazin, What Is Cinema? (Montreal, Ontario, Canada: Caboose, 2009); Éric Rohmer, “Le
Roi des Montagnes,” Cahiers du cinéma (October 1956), Article 63; Edouard de Laurot,
Collected Writings (Amsterdam University Press, forthcoming).
12. Astruc, “Future of Cinema,” 50.
13. Ibid., 50.
14. Karel Reisz, The Technique of Film Editing (London: Focal Press, 1953), 251–55.
15. For a 1990s example, see Admiranda, no. 11 & 12 (1996).
16. Marie-Claire Ropars, Le Temps d’une pensée (Saint-Denis, France: Presses Universitaires
Vincennes, 2009); Tom Conley, Film Hieroglyphs (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1991).
17. Hannah Frank, Frame by Frame: A Materialist Aesthetics of Animated Cartoons (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2019).
18. See especially Bellour, Analysis of Film, 69–76.
19. David Bordwell, “Shot-consciousness,” Observations on Film Art, January 16, 2007,
http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/2007/01/16/shot-consciousness/.
20. See Cinemetrics website: http://www.cinemetrics.lv/index.php.
21. Gérard Legrand, Cinémanie (Paris: Stock, 1979); Alain Masson, Comédie musicale (Paris:
Stock, 1981).
22. See James Naremore, Acting in the Cinema (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988).
23. See Adrian Martin, “Shot-by-Shot Follies,” The Hitchcock Annual 2001–2002 (Fairfield:
Gottlieb, 2002), 133–39; Bill Krohn, Hitchcock at Work (London: Phaidon, 2000).
24. Raymond Bellour, Le Corps du cinéma. Hypnoses, émotions, animalités (Paris: P.O.L, 2009).
See also Adrian Martin, Mise en scène and Film Style (London: Palgrave, 2014).
25. Lea Jacobs, Film Rhythm after Sound: Technology, Music, and Performance (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2014).
26. Alain Masson, “Notes on Rhythm,” Screening the Past (2015), Article 39,
http://www.screeningthepast.com/2015/07/notes-on-rhythm/.
27. See Brian McGrath and Jean Gardner, Cinemetrics: Architectural Drawing Today (London:
John Wiley & Sons, 2007).
28. See, for a good example, Chris Lukinbeal, “The Mapping of 500 Days of Summer: A
Processual Approach to Cinematic Cartography,” NECSUS, (Autumn 2018), Article 14,
https://necsus-ejms.org/the-mapping-of-500-days-of-summer-a-processual-approach-to-
cinematic-cartography/.
29. See Kevin L. Ferguson, “Volumetric Cinema,” in Debates in the Digital Humanities 2019, ed.
Matthew K. Gold and Lauren F. Klein (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019).
30. See, in particular, Roland-François Lack’s website The Cine-Tourist,
https://www.thecinetourist.net/.
31. Ignatius of Loyola, The Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius (Chicago: Loyola Press, 1992).
32. Frances Yates, The Art of Memory (New York: Random House, 1966).
33. Raúl Ruiz, Poetics of Cinema (Paris: Dis Voir, 1995); David Bordwell, Poetics of Cinema
(London: Routledge, 2008).
34. Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation and Other Essays (New York: Dell, 1966), 17 (note that
the word “conformable” is often misprinted and misquoted as “comfortable,” and even
“comformable”!).
35. Sontag, Against Interpretation, 23.
36. V. F. Perkins, V.F. Perkins on Movies: Collected Shorter Film Criticism (Detroit, MI: Wayne
State University Press, 2020), 248–49.
37. See Adrian Martin, “What to Look For in a Film? (And How to Know When You’ve Found
It?),” forthcoming, in a 2021 book of essays in tribute to Perkins and edited by Andrew Klevan
and James MacDowell.
38. Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin, “Small Moves,” Transit, November 5, 2015,
http://cinentransit.com/nuit-et-jour/#dos; and see Álvarez López’s blog, Laugh Motel: On,
With, Around Film, https://laughmotel.wordpress.com/.
39. Sontag, Against Interpretation, 22.
40. Manny Farber, “Des années 1930 aux années 1970,” Trafic, (Autumn 2019), Article no. 111. (I
thank Robert Walsh for allowing me access to the complete English-language transcript of this
lecture, from which I am quoting).
41. Ibid., 38.
42. Ibid., 39.
43. Jean-Pierre Gorin, “Trains of Thought,” Filmviews (Spring 1987), Article no. 133.
44. Yvette Bíró, Turbulence and Flow in Film: The Rhythmic Design (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 2008).
45. Gilberto Perez, The Eloquent Screen: A Rhetoric of Film (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2019), 38.
46. Ibid., 41.
47. Ibid., 41.
48. Ibid., 42.
49. Ibid., 30–31.
50. V. F. Perkins, Film as Film: Understanding and Judging Movies (London: Penguin, 1972), 83.
51. Luís Azevedo, Bong Joon-ho’s Rampaging Metaphors, Sight and Sound, February 12, 2020,
https://www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/sight-sound-magazine/video/bong-joon-ho-metaphors.
52. Perez, Eloquent Screen, 60.
53. Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1997).
54. Alain Masson, Le Récit au cinéma (Paris: Éditions de l’Etoile, 1994); for a dossier on Hasumi,
see LOLA (November 2016), Article 7, http://lolajournal.com/7/index.html.
55. Franco Moretti, “Conjectures on World Literature,” New Left Review 1 (January/February
2000): 57.
56. Ibid., 57.
57. Ibid.
58. See Raymond Durgnat, The Essential Raymond Durgnat (London: British Film Institute,
2014); Michel Ciment and Laurence Kardish, eds., Positif 50 Years: Selections from the
French Film Journal (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2002).
59. Moretti, “Conjectures,” 57.
60. Kim Newman, Nightmare Movies: Horror on Screen Since the 1960s (New York: Bloomsbury,
2011); Siegfried Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German
Film (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1947); Barbara Deming, Running Away from
Myself: A Dream Portrait of America Drawn from the Films of the 40’s (London: Penguin,
1969).
61. James Elkins, “On the Impossibility of Close Reading: The Case of Alexander Marshack,”
Current Anthropology 37, no. 2 (April 1996): 198.
62. Tom Gunning, “The Work of Film Analysis: Systems, Fragments, Alternation,” Semiotica 144,
no. 1 (2003): 343–57.
63. Ibid., 351.
64. Ibid., 350.
65. Ibid., 352.
66. Carlos Losilla, “Un simple cambio de plano” (“A Simple Change of Shot”), Caimán 66
(December 2017): 82 (my translation).
67. Hoi Lun Law, Absorbing the Unobserved—A Tribute to V.F. Perkins (2016),
https://vimeo.com/175633069.
68. Seth Barry Watter, “Scrutinizing: Film and the Microanalysis of Behavior,” Grey Room 66
(Winter 2017): 32–69; and “On the Concept of Setting: A Study of V.F. Perkins,” Journal of
Cinema and Media Studies 58, no. 3 (Spring 2019): 72–92.
69. Richard Smith, “Criticism without Myth?,” Australian Humanities Review 31/32 (April 2004),
http://australianhumanitiesreview.org/2004/04/01/criticism-without-myth/.
70. Laura Mulvey, Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image (London: Reaktion Books,
2006), and Laura Mulvey, Afterimages: On Cinema, Women and Changing Times (London:
Reaktion Books, 2019).
71. Thierry Kuntzel, Title TK (Nantes, France: Éditions Anarchive/Musée des Beaux-Arts de
Nantes, 2006).
72. Mulvey, Death 24x a Second, 144–60.
73. Raymond Bellour, Dans la compagnie des œuvres (Aix-en-Provence: Rouge profond, 2017),
99 (my translation).
74. Bellour, Analysis of Film, 197.
 CHAPTER 26

ON FIRE
When Fashion Meets Cinema

MARKETA UHLIROVA

THE phenomenon of the serpentine dance is now widely recognized as one

with great importance for cinema’s early development.1 Devised by the
American performer and choreographer Loïe Fuller who also popularized it
on the Parisian stage of the 1890s, the dance departed from established
traditions such as classical ballet and the skirt dance. Rather than
foregrounding the body with its graceful poses and controlled trajectories of
movement, it used undulating silk as a means through which to conjure a
much more effervescent vision of movement, manifesting itself as a
rhythmic flow periodically punctuated by bursts of energy. Indeed, it was
the costume—sometimes the only visible element of the dance performance
—that became the principal draw in this unique theater, its swirling drapery
interacting with electric light, colors, and sometimes magic lantern imagery
to create forms in perpetual appearance and dissolution.
Fuller directly informed some of the most popular genres of the first two
decades of cinema, from the serpentine dance films and parodies to trick
and féerie films to later avant-garde productions.2 But the impact of the
dancer’s quintessentially modern imagery goes beyond any rudimentary
notion of influence. As has been argued from multiple disciplinary
perspectives, her performances both prefigured the cinema and were in
themselves intrinsically cinematic.3 Through her fluid shapes, Fuller
compellingly demonstrated continuous motion and change while also
becoming a moving screen that received and animated projected colors and
images. Her spectral costume, an artistic medium in its own right, thus
embodied a singular intersection between theatrical spectacle, dance, and
technological image on the cusp of cinema’s emergence.
Yet, given costume’s almost symbolic place in cinema’s beginnings, the
significance of dress for the cinema has not been adequately articulated.
And not only that: dress has commonly been sidelined in theoretical debates
on film. Cinema histories have for the most part regarded fashion and
costume as essentially foreign and irrelevant—as too superfluous, frivolous,
and ephemeral to be worthy of serious investigation. Writing in 1996, Pam
Cook argued that this area of study has been systematically ignored, calling
such neglect “scandalous” and “symptomatic” of a complex set of cultural
ambivalences toward dress and femininity (echoing a then-familiar
lamentation among fashion studies scholars).4 David Bordwell noted that
critical discourse marginalized costume design among the various
filmmaking crafts, regarding it as an inheritance from the theater.
According to him, film commentators focused instead on other, more
“purely cinematic” aspects of filmic language, such as editing.5 Or, to
follow Ian Christie, film “vision” has been “routinely attributed to its
director, in a tradition that was intensified by the critical revolution of the
1960s that launched ‘auteurism’, ” leaving little room for considerations of
other forms of creative authorship involved in filmmaking (including art
direction and costume design).6 It hardly helps the cause that both film and
fashion archives generally hold few reliable surviving costumes, and
historical records documenting costume and production design are similarly
sparse.7 As Elizabeth Leese writes in the introduction to her 1976 book
Costume Design in the Movies, “it is uncommonly difficult to confirm
factual information about costume designers and their work.”8
But the troubled status of dress in film history goes deeper than its
gendered dismissal and its scarce material evidence. For the most part, it
has also been relegated to an inferior position within the industry itself,
despite frequently playing fundamental roles in filmic mise en scènes and
narratives. Furthermore, and perhaps even more surprisingly, fashion
scholarship has largely shared film history’s indifference (or ambiguity?)
toward costume—and indeed fashion—in film. Both modern-day and
period costume on the screen have been discounted as unreliable historical
evidence, seen as belonging to the realms of fantasy and fiction. Where
narrative fiction film has been discussed, it was mostly to acknowledge its
power to popularize and disseminate fashions through imitation and
exaggeration, to illustrate a handful of couturiers’ forays into cinema, and,
more recently, to highlight cinema as a rich source of reference for fashion
design and photography.9 Most puzzling is the fact that nonfiction film’s
immense value for the study of fashion and dress has rarely been
recognized, despite the hundreds of fashion films held in public and private
archives globally.10 This may have something to do with the historical
difficulties in accessing film archives and their databases. But, more likely,
it is because cinema—in contrast to photography, illustration, and printed
magazines—was never truly regarded as fashion’s “own” medium. Until the
digital era, film had never come to play an integral role in fashion’s day-to-
day operations, and its cross-promotions through fashion magazines (as
opposed to film periodicals) tended to be sporadic. Unlike photography,
film production and distribution had never been fully controlled from
within the fashion industry, perhaps with a few exceptions such as the
couturier Paul Poiret’s productions in 1910s France, or shoemaker Baťa-
owned film studios in 1930s Czechoslovakia.11
The neglect of fashion in cinema has been sharply reversed in the past
two decades. There is now a thriving interest in exploring various
intersections between the two, evident in numerous scholarly publications,
conferences, and a dedicated academic journal,12 as well as public museum
exhibitions and fashion film festivals, online magazines, and other digital
platforms for fashion moving image content. In the academy, this
development has coincided with wider shifts toward interdisciplinarity:
there, fashion in cinema has been explored from within a growing roster of
humanities disciplines, including fashion and cinema studies, visual culture,
costume design and performance studies, theater and dance history, and
literary theory. These studies have explored all kinds of parallels and
interactions between the cinema and fashion industries. They have analyzed
the relations between costume, stardom, and fashion consumption; the
fashioning of characters’ identities through costume and styling; and, in
recent years, the rise of digital fashion film as a “novel” fashion medium of
the twenty-first century, which, in turn, has drawn attention to the
twentieth-century fashion newsreel. Yet, if a new field of study has
emerged, there lacks a consensus as to what exactly constitutes it.
While elsewhere I have sketched out how such a field may be
conceptualized,13 in this chapter I want to propose that its biggest stumbling
block has been the inability to clearly define its object of study. The
unspoken question has been: what exactly is to be examined? Fashion or
costume? And, consequently, who makes claims to such examinations:
fashion or cinema scholars? These are not merely questions of semantics
but ones that go to the heart of the difficulty in theorizing a unified field by
a community of researchers and practitioners willing to engage in a
dialogue. Fashion and film costume are not the same, but nor are they
readily separable. They speak to one another and often overlap in
conspicuous ways: costume can also be fashion and vice versa. With that in
mind, I believe that a careful, nuanced differentiation between the two
concepts can help illuminate just how complex their relationship is. I will
then also add a third term to this discussion—“clothes”—in order to
emphasize another critical distinction which, though important, tends to be
swallowed by the cracks in the fashion–costume divide.
Ultimately, I argue that fashion and dress have been major forces in
cinema history whose significance is far greater than the commercial
interrelationships in which they are often implicated. My thesis is that
fashion and cinema—as two industries, art forms, institutions, and cultures
—have been profoundly intertwined (albeit with frictions and
contradictions) and, crucially, have at times been mutually transformative.
This is true not only in terms of their many converging practices but also in
terms of their materialities, technologies, visual effects, and affects. While
dress and fashion are of course more crucial to some cinematic genres and
modes than to others, I suggest that their study offers a prism through which
to reframe our understanding of cinema’s workings across its narrative and
nonnarrative forms.

M C ,M C ?
What, then, is it that is modeled on the cinema screen? Is it fashionable
clothing? Or is it, rather, characters as they emerge through the act of
getting into costume? Much of the debate about film costume pivots around
this very distinction.14 Costume design, it is generally argued, grows out of
a different tradition from fashion, based in a distinct industry with its own
needs. It also operates on a different ontological register from fashion.
Where fashion is thought to respond to, and express, the changing social,
cultural, and political contexts in the real world, film costume, it is argued,
is circumscribed by the cinematic world and its own realities. Because of
this, it would seem that costume is largely exempt from a fashion-for-
fashion’s sake mindset with its emphasis on newness, now-ness, and
constant transformation. But such an assumption needs unpacking.
The fashion–costume debate emerged during the silent era at a time when
it was considered acceptable—and advantageous—for fashion to regularly
stand in for costume. For modern-day stories, actors and actresses were
typically encouraged to source their own wardrobes, and the emergent star
system soon made it clear that glamor and sartorial chic can greatly enhance
one’s star persona. At the same time, a close alliance between fashions
created by the couture houses and “screen fashions” was perpetuated by
popular and trade magazines. But as the costume designer solidified their
position in both Hollywood and European film studios toward the end of
the 1920s, there came attempts to theorize their métier by distancing it from
fashion.15 The newly professionalized designer was understandably keen to
stress that the thriving medium of cinema warranted a different dressmaking
expertise and aesthetic intent. An emergent discourse around film costume
began to emphasize its specificity, citing cinema’s unique requirements,
especially actors’ physical attributes and personality, as well as the
idiosyncrasies of cinematography (namely, how people and objects
photographed, problems of framing and magnifying, and considerations of
overall composition of the mise en scène). As costume designer Jacques
Manuel wrote,
cinematic fashion has … to be stylized. [It is] a transposition of fashion. A successful style
from a brilliant collection suffers no more painful an ordeal than the ordeal it undergoes
under the lens; it is almost always a bitter disappointment for the dress designer to see one
of his creations even on the News … Its proportions and volumes have gone missing, as
have its values and materials.16
Cinema, it was argued, necessitated an altogether different style. As Coco
Chanel, herself a couturière engaged by Hollywood in 1931, stressed: “I
work hard to try to create a film style.”17 For Chanel and others, it was
important to assert that costume need not follow fashion, as was typically
assumed, and that the opposite can also occur. The conceptual divorce of
costume from fashion, however, was far from straightforward. Certainly, in
the case of Chanel, the point was expressly not to dissociate oneself from
fashion but rather to produce “special fashion for film, or at least interpret
current fashion … This way,” she wrote, “you avoid two snags: creating
‘costume,’ which would be too artificial, or seeing clothes go rapidly out of
fashion.”18 Indeed, the issue of looking dated became perhaps the most
commonly cited issue when it came to comparing costume with fashion.
Due to Hollywood’s long production cycle that lasted six months or more,
costume design wasn’t compatible with the fast pace of fashion’s changes.
Thus, to fix such misaligned temporalities, studios during the 1920s and
1930s sometimes proclaimed that their designers thought so far ahead as to
effectively predict the future of fashion—engaging in a kind of twisted
competition for cultural prestige that ultimately only stressed how closely
aligned the two were.
With the arrival of sound, costume designers began to regard the
“parading” of current fashions in film as ill-advised and incoherent with the
totality of the film work and its message. One of them, Claude Autant-Lara
(a major contributor to France’s avant-garde who then turned into a
mainstream filmmaker and—like Chanel—a troublesome political figure),
called for greater humility of the entire film team toward the film sujet. He
asserted that a costume must primarily express a character’s inner state:
“their personality, habits, tastes, ideas, momentary dispositions, their
immediate past and future.”19 In his conception, costume was above all a
“psychological indication” that should speak volumes where a character
may remain altogether silent. A key building block without which the entire
dramatic edifice could easily collapse, it must preserve the character’s
authenticity and truthfulness.
Such concerns led to the emergence of a convention according to which
costume in fictional narratives is ultimately cast as a subordinate element,
an instrument of storytelling and characterization. Unlike fashion, it is not
allowed to act independently, to occupy the position of the primary object
of spectacle, to become a pure statement. Nowhere is this more forcefully
expressed than in Roland Barthes’s essay “The Diseases of Costume,”
written in 1955 in the context of the theater. Turning his argument into one
of ethics (costumes are “good” or “bad”), Barthes argues that when the
relation between a theatrical play and costume fails to be that of master-
servant, costume becomes “sick”—a “parasite” that saps the lifeblood of an
otherwise solid intellectual argument of the play: “[it] must not,” he wrote,
“constitute a dense and brilliant visual locus to which the attention may
escape, fleeing the essential reality of the spectacle.”20 Similarly, as Jane
Gaines notes, classical realist cinema assigned costume a paradoxical role
of being simultaneously highly visible and invisible.21 The expectation was
that, despite its enticing presence, dress should recede into the cinematic
illusion, resisting the temptation to distract too much from the all-important
plot. This delicate order was, of course, frequently disrupted in practice,
something that has often been viewed in terms of transgression and
violation, just as Barthes did. It has always been understood that the
capacity of clothing and accessories to stimulate the senses is such that if
left unchecked, it can quickly begin to overshadow all else.22 In that
context, it is somewhat ironic that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and
Sciences has made a tradition of awarding primarily the visually elaborate,
often flamboyant, costumes created for historical and fantasy settings—all
the more so since the merger of the black and white and color film
categories in 1967.23
The argument for a conceptual separation of costume design from fashion
has recently found its most vocal advocate in Deborah Landis, a practicing
costume designer and author of several books and a major exhibition on the
subject. While costume in her view is not an autonomous field (because
dependent on film production), it is certainly autonomous from fashion.24
To be sure, to isolate specific aspects and processes of costume design from
those of fashion design has substantial methodological import. Perhaps
most significantly, it carves out room for this much-overlooked field to be
studied and appreciated on its own terms. It allows us to see how costume
design contributes to the shaping of a film’s aesthetic while situating
characters and underscoring their evolving mental states. It also sheds light
on the thinking, creative processes, motivations, and artistry of the costume
designer, for whom photographic aspects of clothed bodies and costume’s
interaction with other elements in a given production come before problems
such as production quality, durability or a wearer’s comfort and experience
of material texture against the body.
There are, however, issues with any rigorous segregation of costume and
fashion, not least because positing such a binary threatens to ignore their
entangled relations. At its most basic, what gets overlooked is that the
category of costume simply does not apply to all types of dress that cinema
presents. Film also shows fashion. This is most obviously the case with
nonfiction film forms such as the newsreel, cinemagazine, industry
(process) film, documentary film, and advertising, as well as the
contemporary fashion film where fashion houses, designers, and brands
have been directly involved as sponsors, co-producers, commissioners, or
suppliers. But, alongside these, fashion can also be on display in narrative
fiction film, as when current fashion looks, sometimes explicitly linked to
the houses and labels that produced them, are paraded. Karl Anton’s The
Kidnapping of Banker Fux (1923) and Norman Krasna’s The Ambassador’s
Daughter (1956) are two examples of narrative film, in which a couturier—
in this case, Paul Poiret and Christian Dior, respectively—presented his
current collection as a fashion show, ostensibly for the benefit of the film’s
characters.25 Not only did these films showcase fashion in discreet scenes,
neatly bracketed within the diegesis, but their marketing campaigns also in
each case cleverly deployed references to the rarified world of Parisian
couture.
Though such blatant self-promotions are rare in fiction film, there have
been numerous other ways in which the two industries have been closely
interwoven, often with consequences for what is seen onscreen. These
affiliations include silent-era actors and actresses frequenting couture
salons, dressmakers, or tailors in search of costumes; fashion designers
creating costumes or supplying off-the-rack clothing for film (sometimes
credited as “gowns” to distinguish them from “mere” costumes); costume
designers transitioning to fashion design, and vice versa; stars being
groomed by designers and stylists both on and offscreen; underground
filmmakers experimenting with makeup and secondhand fashions; fashion
houses and brands being featured in shopping sequences; and, most
commonly, the practices of product placement, star endorsement and all
kinds of other commercial tie-ins that go back to the 1910s.26 Last, but not
least, there is also the telling fact that the majority of Hollywood’s early
moguls (Adolph Zukor, Lewis Selznick, Samuel Goldwyn, Carl Laemmle,
Jesse Lasky, and Louis B. Mayer) came into the movies from the garment
and jewelry trades.27
With cinema’s transition to feature-length narrative film in the 1910s
came the convention, adopted from the theatrical “fashion play,” of
actresses displaying contemporary dresses as a form of a dramatized
fashion show.28 Throughout the entire history of cinema, fashion has also
been frequently fictionalized. The spotlight has primarily been on the inner
workings of the couture salon and the photographer’s studio—as in Howard
Hawks’s Fig Leaves (1926), Alfred E. Green’s Irene (1926), or Dorothy
Arzner’s Fashions for Women (1927) of the silent era, or in William A.
Seiter’s Roberta (1935), Stanley Donen’s Funny Face (1957), and
Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow Up (1966) of the ensuing decades. In the
1920s and 1930s, such films were sometimes accompanied by fashion
shows staged before or after screenings, various accompanying department
store window displays, and stories in the film press that emulated the style
of fashion editorials. It was not uncommon for film producers and the
affiliated media to make claims to being at the very cutting edge of fashion,
or even its harbingers. Just before the release of George Cukor’s The
Women in 1939, for example, Photoplay had Adrian comment on the
coming trends as displayed in the film.29 These practices are of course still
alive and well. In the phenomenally successful HBO TV series Sex and the
City, the wardrobe designer/stylist Patricia Field created an enticing looks
by skillfully mixing designer, high street, and vintage fashions, some of
which were explicitly referenced within the dialogues. And a similar logic
is followed in arthouse films such as Olivier Assayas’s Personal Shopper
and Nicolas Winding Refn’s The Neon Demon (both 2016),30 proving that a
costume’s status as fashion can work in tandem with its “normal” role to
construct a character, serve the plot, and enhance mise-en-scène.
Indeed, it is at the level of meaning that the fashion–costume divide
commonly collapses. Fashionable or not, any garment has its place in the
internal “fashion system” of a film story—one that it is rarely possible to
sever from fashion sensibilities of the real world. From the early days of
film magazines, discourses of “film fashions” inherently operated on the
basis that costume and fashion enjoyed an intertextual relation. As has been
demonstrated in the case of both prewar and postwar cinema, especially
Hollywood, great attention was paid to the fashionability of film costumes,
seen to be as central to a star’s image as wearing fashion was offscreen.31
Particularly in films targeted at women, female characters’ frequent
costume changes became a desirable attribute, less a marking of temporal or
narrative progression than pure display that would perpetuate the audience’s
desire for vicarious consumption. As Anne Hollander observes with
reference to early twentieth-century fashion-plays, “people went … to see
clothes, not costumes.”32 It was enough for costumes to give a convincing
impression of being en vogue or make a bold style statement; their lack of
authenticity or historical accuracy did little to stop them from being
admired and imitated by contemporary audiences. Tellingly, in a 1939
diatribe against pervasive inaccuracies in period drama costuming, dress
historian James Laver bemoaned how voguishness routinely creeps up on
history:
No actress will willingly wear an unbecoming dress, and by becoming dress she means one
which, in however subtle way, has some hint of contemporary fashion. Last-minute
adjustments are capable of transforming an accurate historical dress in the most astonishing
fashion with the result that in a few years’ time the flavor of the year in which it was worn is
just as obvious as the flavor of the year it was supposed to represent.33

Without saying so explicitly, Laver recognized that in staging historical

returns within a contemporary context, film—and especially period drama
—costuming is essentially not too different from fashion design. Among the
films now seen as iconic for their impact on fashion, many reworked, and
made current, references to past fashions, military uniforms, subcultural
styles, or art movements—think David Lean’s Doctor Zhivago (1965),
Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde (1967), Liliana Cavani’s The Night Porter
(1974), or Slava Tsukerman’s Liquid Sky (1982). Going beyond merely
imitating or disseminating fashion’s dernier cri, cinema has established
itself a parallel system that has at times professed to be fashion’s fully
fledged rival.34 Its repositories of styles and symbolic systems have always,
inevitably, been in dialogue with fashion and have provided a creative
resource that fashion could mine in return.

C P ,C A
Besides the categories of costume and fashion, there is another distinct
realm of dress in film, which I will call simply clothes. In fashion studies
and cultural anthropology, the term “clothes” (clothing, vêtements,
Kleidung, abito) is used differently than “fashion” (mode, Moda). “Fashion”
is generally understood to denote the phenomenon of periodically changing
dress styles and consumer desires that come to encapsulate a zeitgeist,
whereas “clothes” is a broader term that refers to any garment made to dress
the body that may be free of fashion’s temporal limitations.35 In the cultural
studies tradition, the distinction between clothes and fashion has served yet
another purpose—namely, to redress a traditional hierarchy between high-
brow and low-brow culture by shifting scholarly focus away from what is
produced by the fashion industry to that which is generated, reassembled, or
repurposed within popular culture (especially subcultures). While both of
these uses are relevant to the study of dress in film, my use of the term
“clothes” here is more specific: it is to establish a conceptual distinction
from fashionability and characterization as the hallmark qualities of fashion
and costume, in order to highlight instances where clothes are foregrounded
more simply as objects—either as props that variously seduce, testify,
identify, inform, or confuse, or as “actors” that spontaneously play and play
up, or somehow perform themselves as material things. It is not that
fashionability and characterization necessarily disappear here (they are
often very much present), but they become secondary aspects to other, more
defining roles clothes embody.
Especially in the crime, horror, and comedy genres, garments and
accessories frequently figure as strategic narrative signposts. Importantly,
this is where the male wardrobe is foregrounded as often as the female one.
In Albert Capellani’s A Pair of White Gloves (1908), for example, the titular
white gloves are lost and found, and then planted at a crime scene in order
to wrongly incriminate a demi-mondain thief of a murder he did not
commit. In a cruel twist of irony, a seemingly insignificant detail of a quick
repair job performed on the gloves by a shop assistant turns into a kind of
forensic evidence that points to the supposed perpetrator and establishes his
guilt. Similarly, in Max Linder’s The Gentleman’s Thief (1909), Henri
d’Ursel’s La Perle (1929), Elio Petri’s The Tenth Victim (1965), Gérard
Oury’s The Umbrella Coup (1980), and Cindy Sherman’s Office Killer
(1997), sartorial objects such as scarves, shoes, pearl necklaces, bras, coats,
umbrellas, and handbags act as important clues and red herrings, forms of
disguise, warning signs, and, of course, murder weapons.36 And it is also
through clothes—or, to be more precise, their meaningful details and
modalities, such as holes and tears, dirt smears, and blood or sweat stains—
that cinema frequently signals the repressed and the unspoken, be it erotic
interest or various troubling excesses, abnormalities, and dysfunctions, from
mental illness, to corruption, infidelity, and destruction.37 Then there are
film fairy tales, in which garments and accessories both mundane and
precious are imbued with supernatural powers. From J. Farrell
MacDonald’s The Magic Cloak (1914) to Lotte Reiniger’s The Three
Wishes (1954), Powell and Pressburger’s The Red Shoes (1948), and the
popular Czech children’s television serials Pan Tau ( 1969–1978) and
Arabela (1979–1981), hats, cloaks, shoes, umbrellas, and rings transport
and make invisible, grant wishes, cause things to appear or disappear, and
make their wearers happy or miserable. In all these stories, garments and
accessories either drive the plot or cause it to take unexpected turns and
detours.
Clothes have also found themselves at the center of early and
experimental cinemas, in poetic explorations of cinematic language. In the
final segment of Man Ray’s cinepoem Emak Bakia (1926), the surrealist
poet Jacques Rigaut arrives in a flat with a suitcase filled with men’s shirt
collars. He tears them apart and then tears off his own collar too,
whereupon the pieces rise, liberated, and perform a wondrous abstract ballet
gyrating in distortions and double exposures. In other films by avant-garde
artists, such as Hans Richter’s Ghosts before Breakfast (1928) and Kenneth
Anger’s Puce Moment (1949), but also early filmmakers, such as Georges
Méliès’s Going to Bed under Difficulties (1900) and Lewin Fitzhamon and
Cecil Hepworth’s Invisibility (1909), and animators, like Jiří Bárta’s The
Extinct World of Gloves (1982), garments exercise their own will,
sometimes to an unsettling effect. Separated from their wearers and thus
released of their dependence on them, these objects assume a life of their
own, animated as they are by means of cinematic wizardry (fittingly, the
words “animate” mean “breathe life into,” deriving from the Latin
animare): bowler hats escape from heads, a shirt collar circles around a
neck, a suit walks on its own, gloves indulge in Bacchic debauchery …
Arguably, such cinematic tensions between the living and the inanimate
have a particularly uncanny resonance in the case of clothing, which, as
Walter Benjamin noted in his Arcades Project, brings life and death into
close proximity as it perpetually coalesces with the living body.38 When
divorced from this body, clothes become its shadows, ghostly shells that
remain bound to the living form even in its absence.39 Rather than being
worn or carried, garments in these films are transformed into protagonists
that themselves carry the scene. As they are dissociated from functions and
meanings habitually assigned to them—and thus defamiliarized—clothes in
these films turn into objects of wonder that acquire an intense transgressive
power. Like magical fetishes (understood in anthropological terms as a form
of charm), they have the capacity to act on their owners, though more often
than not with a distinctly subversive twist.
Figure 26.1. Ghosts before Breakfast. Dir. Hans Richter. Germany, 1928. Ó Marion von Hofacker.

When it comes to clothes shown in advertising and fashion films, such a

notion of a material object as fetish begins to mesh with the Marxist notion
of the commodity fetish.40 In Robert A. Gibney’s Warner Corset
Advertisement (1917), the French fashion films Sacs modernes (1924) and
Chaussures Sirius: Une Etoile m’a dit (1950) or the British newsreel Tough
Stockings (1960), clothes and accessories (again, largely divorced from
their wearers) are openly put on display. They usurp all else, demanding to
be savored and revered—their physical presence is fully foregrounded
while the human body (the mannequin, actor, laborer) recedes into the
background. The things of fashion here possess an intense materiality,
presented as they are up close, in a range of angles that best showcase their
distinct surfaces, colors, textures, and details. As William Pietz noted about
the fetish, one of its key features is its “irreducible materiality”: it is
“ ‘matter,’ or the material object [that] is viewed as the locus of religious
activity or psychic investment.”41 Crucially though, the garments in these
films here are not only displayed in their ready-made (ideal) state but in
processes through which they are yet to acquire form, or ones though which
they are tested and temporarily deformed—the making, manufacturing, and
product handling (stroking, rubbing, bending, stretching, scratching,
folding, and unfolding)—all of which accentuate characteristics such as
durability, flexibility, and quality, alongside their other haptic and aesthetic
properties.

M C :S ,S
S ,F
As I have sketched out here, despite having a prominent presence in
cinema, fashion has been represented by it rather ambivalently. Within
filmic narratives, it has been frequently ironized, parodied, and otherwise
disparaged for being foolish and inherently immoral. And yet, in terms of a
visual and affective experience, it has been consistently upheld for its
powerful capacity to hold the gaze and enchant. This contradiction between
what a film is telling about fashion and what it is showing is exemplified by
Howard Hawks’s silent comedy Fig Leaves (1926), a quasi-cautionary tale
about the New Woman’s pursuit of unbridled consumerism. This modern-
day narrative is from the beginning playfully framed as the Biblical story of
Adam (George O’Brien) and Eve (Olive Borden), in which fashion is
marked as the Devil, soon to be personified by Eve’s unscrupulous friend
Alice (Phyllis Haver). Though parodic at heart, the film’s sumptuously
designed fashion salon, with its mannequins, dazzling dresses, and shows,
as well as the effervescent figure of the couturier-artiste, nevertheless
reassert fashion as a wonderland promising beauty, reverie, and fairy-tale-
like transformation. Similarly, William Klein’s biting satire Who Are You,
Polly Maggoo? (1966), made forty years later, displays great ambivalence
toward fashion. On the face of it, Polly Maggoo is an unmasking of the
excesses and absurdities that accompany the fashion industry, a gibe
directed primarily at the media hype that surrounds the emerging cult of the
supermodel.42 And although fashion is ostensibly caricatured, it is
simultaneously flaunted as a liberating realm of creative expression—
because it is spontaneous, daring, and potentially unhinged. It is shown to
readily break new aesthetic grounds and effect radical change, be it by
championing new ideals of femininity, or by absorbing into its language the
seemingly incongruous influences of avant-garde sculpture.
Clearly, fashion captivates cinema not only through its flagrant insistence
on sharpness, style, and formal innovation but also (and perhaps more
importantly) because it evinces an ungraspable sense of allure and vitality.
Fashion is sensuous; it creates a sensory experience that cinema is, in turn,
very adept at showcasing and magnifying. Discussing 1930s cinema,
Hollander suggests that fashion and film produced something of a joint
effect when certain fabrics, jewelry, and hairstyles became the norm in the
portrayal of the “new cool, self-sufficient female image.”43 According to
Hollander, the formula for white gold and platinum, lamé, satin, sequins,
black lace, and marabou in dress was “built on the newly powerful
sensuality of colorless texture in motion in which American dreams were …
being acted out.”44 Such a conception of fashion-as-cinematic effect was
hardly specific to the first decade of sound film though, and even less so to
black and white film. The “photogenic” quality of surfaces that glow,
glimmer, morph, and metamorphose was already heavily exploited during
the silent era, often with the addition of vibrant applied colors that could
intensify the experience. It was also at this time, especially during the
1920s, that films often established a strong visual continuity between
costumes and sets in carefully composed shots. In certain instances the two
seem to blend into one another, enveloping the body in the raiment of the
totality of décor. It is this capacity of costume and textiles to alternately
sculpt the body and depart from it in order to fashion flattened decorative
tableaux that has continued to captivate avant-garde, experimental, and
underground filmmakers, as well as, lately, the makers of digital fashion
films.45
Giuliana Bruno and Esther Leslie have made important contributions to
articulating some of the convergences between dress fabric and film.46 They
have shown that not only can film heighten fashion’s materiality, but,
conversely, fashion, textiles, and jewelry can enhance a sense of film’s
objecthood.47 Certainly, twentieth-century fashion newsreels and industry-
sponsored process films about fabrics and garment production, such as
Werner Dressler’s Parures/Vom Spinnen und Weben (1939), Frederick
Wilson’s The Dancing Fleece (1951), or E. Milton Stoney’s It All Began
with Velvet (1955), and, to a degree, early twenty-first-century documentary
exposés of labor and environmental abuses in textile manufacture like
Rahul Jain’s Machines (2016), emphasize that the material of cloth
coincides with the “material” of the film. In these genres, fabrics and
magnified details of garments are directly mapped onto the screen, which
then turns into ornament. This is a reversal of sorts of an earlier practice
common within the cinema of attractions, in which an enlarged costume
silhouette or accessory (such as an open cape or fan) would double up as a
blank “living screen,” à la Fuller, for the display of changing decorative
designs or moving pictures.48
Figure 26.2 (a) (b) Parures / Vom Spinnen und Weben (Of Spinning and Weaving). Dir. Werner
Dressler. Switzerland, 1939. Collection Cinémathèque suisse. All rights reserved.

As Eirik Hanssen has shown, film color can also be seen as a kind of
textile when it is applied to black and white film using silent-era techniques
such as hand-coloring, stenciling, tinting, and toning.49 The mechanized
process of stencil coloring produces an especially curious effect: the
translucent color stains superimposed over faces, bodies, garments, and
other objects do not always accurately fit within their contours. This
misalignment imbues the layer of color with a distinct shimmering effect,
giving it, as Tom Gunning puts it, a sense of “subtle independence” from
the object.50 This gains particular significance in the context of the many
colored fashion newsreels and cinemagazines produced in the 1910s and
1920s by companies such as Pathé Frères and Gaumont—if clothing is the
body’s second skin, then these compelling color coatings, incidentally
animated as they were, become its third. It seems highly pertinent that the
coloring technologies used in silent cinema’s processes of tinting and toning
were derived from those of dyeing textiles.51 Similarly, the technique of
stenciling—coloring au pochoir—was derived from a method prominently
used in art nouveau prints and illustrations, textile design, and luxury
fashion magazines (themselves taking an inspiration from a traditional
Japanese craft).
Indeed, the production technologies of fashion and film have intersected
in fascinating ways. Recently, Wanda Strauven has performed a media-
archaeological excavation of the various technologies involved in garment
production (sewing, knitting, weaving) that predate or coincide with
technologies crucial to the cinema, including those of digital computing and
coding. One of the compelling examples Strauven cites is a close relation
between the sewing machine and the cinema (as a system of both producing
and projecting moving images), which also extends further into the realm of
industrial labor, where the human interacts with the machine.52 Such a
connection was brilliantly enacted in the British artist Annabel Nicolson’s
1973 performance Reel Time, which joined a loop of film strip to a film
projector and a sewing machine, creating a single interconnected unit. As
Nicolson projected light through the strip, she simultaneously stitched
through it in “reel time,” at once wrecking and repairing it until the point of
complete destruction.53
These material and labor links between textiles, color, and cinema
ultimately highlight the degree to which film itself is analogous to fabric, a
fact persistently erased by cinema’s illusionistic regime. For the most part,
the “fabric” of film only really becomes apparent when a film exhibits
precisely that which is generally thought undesirable: the grain, dust
particles, physical and chemical damage, or, in the case of electronic image,
rasterization or pixelation. Such “blemishes” have been celebrated by found
footage artists. Seeking lyrical beauty in the effects of deteriorating archival
film, Peter Delpeut’s and Bill Morrison’s films show faces, bodies, and
objects hauntingly distorted and overlaid with disorderly aggregates of
crusts and stains, or dramatically consumed, as if by licking flames. But the
film strip has also been deliberately manipulated in all manner of artistic
interventions throughout the history of avant-garde and experimental
cinema: consider the scratchings, paintings, punched holes, and collages
onto film made by artists as diverse as Len Lye, Norman McLaren, Stan
Brakhage, Bruce Conner, or Carolee Schneemann. And, in a similar vein,
artists working with the electronic image have developed their own
medium-specific forms of kinetic abstraction, from video raster
manipulations to the digital glitch and datamoshing, as in the work of Steina
and Woody Vasulka, Gary Hill, or Takeshi Murata.54 In all these instances,
the (invisible, immaterial) substance of film/video/digital image reasserts
itself as an arresting, highly tactile surface, an event in itself.
If celluloid or acetate film has a fabric-like materiality, it should not be
too surprising it has occasionally been made into clothing. The impressive
scaled costume of the male protagonist in Vladimir Chebotaryov’s 1961
fantasy film Amphibian Man, for example, was carefully crafted from film
stock, with each scale hand-cut and painted with mother-of-pearl.55 Or, in
the realm of couture, the French designer Jean-Paul Gaultier’s
Autumn/Winter 2009 collection included several corsets and accessories
stitched together from film strips. But celluloid fashion hasn’t always been
conceived as a tribute to the cinema. Even before the invention of the film
reel, celluloid was already widely used in the fabrication of clothing and
accessories.56 A cheap imitation of materials such as tortoiseshell, ivory,
and amber, this first commercial chemical plastic was used for various
personal accouterments such as rust-free corset clasps, buckles, cuffs,
hairpins, combs, spectacle frames, collars, and collar stiffeners. And once
the film industry had amassed volumes of old film stock, recycling methods
were developed through which to turn unwanted celluloid back into new
products—belts, bangles, ladies’ handbags, wallets, shoe shine, and other
objects of everyday use.57 A 1941 Czech newsreel Aktualita shows a
poignant vision of a couple of movie stars melt away with the film emulsion
on which they are registered, only to be efficiently transmogrified into nail
varnish and shoe polish. The uncanny sense that accompanies the idea of
old films turned into garb for the body is captured in an earlier British poem
suggestively titled “A Fallen Star”:
Figure 26.3 (a) (b) Aktualita. Dir. Unknown. Czechia, 1941. Collection Národní filmový archiv,
Prague.
 But now when I go glittering down the street
I’m filled with sorrow, having gained an inkling
That I possess a “star” upon my feet
To cause the wondrous “twinkling”58

and by the French writer and cinema historian Maurice Bessy:

Your nail varnish, Miss, which allows you to show off your pretty little hands with nails in
pink, red, mother of pearl or other colors. Perhaps Ramon Novarro is still lurking in there?
59

Celluloid, though extremely versatile and popular, was a notoriously

volatile material in its earlier developmental stages when cellulose nitrate
was the main ingredient. The fact that it is not only extremely flammable
but also spontaneously combustible is frequently bemoaned among film
historians (for good reasons) but is rarely mentioned by historians of
fashion. Yet, as Clyde Jeavons shows, personal adornments such as combs
and hairpins were very common causes of domestic fires—more so than
film. Jeavons even mentions an incident from the interwar era in which a
lighted match started a fire in an Edinburgh cinema not by coming into
contact with film but, which seems ironic, with a woman’s shoe.60 It is not
by accident that I conclude by invoking the notion of film worn, with all the
melancholy, transience, and even danger this entails. There is something
explosive about the union of dress and cinema. It goes beyond customary
frameworks of representation and signification, pointing toward more
radical concepts of mutual fashioning, of shaping and reshaping,
metamorphosis, and even rebirth. When the kinetic and affective powers of
the moving image (and sound) marry with those of fashion, this doubling
can create powerful sensory and emotional worlds. This explosiveness
suggests that the relation between fashion and cinema refuses to be easily
contained or tamed (let alone smothered) by any one approach or theory.
Instead, it keeps on giving.

A
I thank Kyle Stevens and Caroline Evans for their perceptive comments and
helpful suggestions.

N
1. Here I apply the term “serpentine dance” generically to a whole range of dances in which
moving costume, light, and projections were used to sculpt fleeting forms and natural
phenomena such as butterflies, serpents, orchids, lilies, fire, or clouds.
2. For a comprehensive filmography, see Giovanni Lista, Loïe Fuller, danseuse de la Belle
Époque (Paris: Hermann, 2007). First published 1994.
3. As well as cinema studies, these include dance and art history, and visual culture. See, for
example, Sally Sommer, “Loïe Fuller,” The Drama Review 19, no. 1 (March 1975); Lista, Loïe
Fuller; Tom Gunning, “Loïe Fuller and the Art of Motion,” in Camera Obscura, Camera
Lucida: Essays in Honor of Annette Michelson, ed. Richard Allen and Malcolm Turvey
(Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2002), 75–90; Tom Gunning, “Light, Motion,
Cinema!: The Heritage of Loïe Fuller and Germaine Dulac,” Framework: The Journal of
Cinema and Media 46, no. 1 (2005); Rhonda K. Garelick, Electric Salome: Loie Fuller’s
Performance of Modernism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), 210–11; Erin
Brannigan, Dancefilm: Choreography and the Moving Image (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2011), 35, Jody Sperling, “Cosmic Voyages in Advance of Cinema: La Loïe Skirts the
Universe,” in Birds of Paradise: Costume as Cinematic Spectacle, ed. Marketa Uhlirova
(London: Koenig Books, 2013), 79–88.
 4. Pam Cook, Fashioning the Nation: Costume & Identity in British Cinema (London: BFI,
1996), 8, 41–63.
5. David Bordwell, Figures Traced in Light: On Cinematic Staging (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2005), 8.
6. Ian Christie, “‘Out of the Shadows’: Milan Nejedlý and the Challenge of Understanding Czech
Production Design,” in Czech Cinema Revisited: Politics, Aesthetics, Genres and Techniques,
ed. Lucie Česálková (Prague: National Film Archive, 2017), 408.
7. Michelle Tolini Finamore, Hollywood before Glamour: Fashion in American Silent Film
(Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 110–11; Deborah Nadoolman Landis, Dressed:
A Century of Hollywood Costume Design (New York: Collins Design, 2007), xvi.
8. Elizabeth Leese, Costume Design in the Movies (New York: Benbridge, 1990), 6. First
published 1976.
9. For some examples, see Amy de la Haye, Chanel: The Couturiere at Work (London: V&A
Publications, 1994); James Laver, Modesty in Dress (London: William Heinemann, 1969);
Anne Hollander, Seeing through Clothes (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993) (first
published 1975); Elizabeth Wilson, Adorned in Dreams: Fashion and Modernity (New
Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2003) (first published 1985); Christopher Breward,
The Culture of Fashion: A New History of Fashionable Dress (Manchester, UK: Manchester
University Press, 1995). For analyses of cinema as a source of imagery mined by fashion, see
Rebecca Arnold, Fashion, Desire and Anxiety: Image and Morality in the Twentieth Century
(London: I. B. Tauris, 2001); and, more recently, also Alistair O’Neill, “The Shining and
Chic,” in Alexander McQueen, ed. Claire Wilcox (London: V&A Publishing, 2015), 261–80;
and Amber Jane Butchart, The Fashion of Film: How Cinema Has Inspired Fashion (London:
Octopus Books, 2016).
10. Nonfiction fashion films were first discussed by costume and film historians; see, for example,
Leese’s introduction to Costume Design in the Movies, which includes a brief discussion of
nonfiction fashion shorts; Jenny Hammerton, For Ladies Only? Eve’s Film Review: Pathé
Cinemagazine, 1921–33 (Hastings, UK: The Projection Box, 2001), a book focusing on
fashion as one of the major themes in the British Pathé cinemagazine Eve’s Film Review; and
Eirik Frisvold Hanssen’s “Symptoms of Desire: Colour, Costume, and Commodities in
Fashion Newsreels of the 1910s and 1920s,” Film History: An International Journal 21, no. 2
(2009): 107–21, a study of color in fashion newsreels during the silent era. Only in the last
decade have fashion scholars begun to turn their attention to newsreels, weaving them into
broader intermedial accounts of fashion and surrounding visual culture. See Tolini Finamore,
Hollywood before Glamour; Caroline Evans, “The Walkies: Early Fashion Shows and Silent
Cinema,” in Fashion in Film: Essays in Honor of E. Ann Kaplan, ed. Adrienne Munich
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011), 110–34; Caroline Evans, The Mechanical
Smile: Modernism and the First Fashion Shows in France and America, 1900–1929 (London:
Yale University Press, 2013); Marketa Uhlirova, “100 Years of the Fashion Film: Frameworks
and Histories,” Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body and Culture 17, no. 2 (2013):
137–57. See also “Screen Search Fashion,” an archival research project led by Rebecca
Arnold, available at http://screenarchive.brighton.ac.uk/portfolio/screen-search-fashion/about-
screen-search-fashion/.
11. For more on Poiret’s films, see Caroline Evans, “The Walkies.” For more on Baťa and film see
Petr Szczepanik, “Modernism, Industry, Film: A Network of Media in the Baťa Corporation
and the Town of Zlín in the 1930s,” in Films that Work. Industrial Film and the Productivity of
Media, ed. Vinzenz Hediger and Patrick Vonderau (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press,
2009), 349–76. See also a section on Baťa’s “fashion films” in Marketa Uhlirova, “Fashion
 and Czechoslovak Cinema of the Interwar Period,” in Berg Encyclopedia of World Dress and
Fashion: Volume 9: “East Europe, Russia, and the Caucasus,” ed. Djudja Bartlett and J. B.
Eicher (London: Berg, 2010), 137–40.
12. Film, Fashion & Consumption, edited by Pamela Church Gibson and published by Intellect.
13. Marketa Uhlirova, “Fashion in Cinema: Reframing the Field,” in Routledge Companion to
Fashion Studies, ed. Eugenia Paulicelli, Veronica Manlow, and Elizabeth Wissinger (London:
Routledge, 2021).
14. See, for example, Jane Gaines and Charlotte Herzog, “‘Puffed Sleeves before Tea-Time’: Joan
Crawford, Adrian and Women Audiences,” Wide Angle 6, no. 4 (1985): 24–33; Drake
Stutesman, “Costume Design, or, What Is Fashion in Film?,” in Munich, Fashion in Film, 17–
39; Jane Gaines, “Wanting to Wear Seeing: Gilbert Adrian at MGM,” in Munich, Fashion in
Film, 135–59; Landis, Dressed.
15. See, for example, Gilbert Adrian, “Clothes,” in Behind the Screen: How Films Are Made, ed.
Stephen Watts (New York: Dodge, 1938); or Jacques Manuel, “Esquisse d’une histoire du
costume de cinéma,” La Revue du cinéma 19–20 (Autumn 1949): 3–63.
16. Manuel, “Esquisse d’une histoire du costume de cinéma.”
17. Coco Chanel cited in Emma Cabire, “Le cinéma et la mode,” La Revue du cinéma 26
(September 1931), Article 26 (emphasis added).
18. Ibid.
19. Claude Autant-Lara, “Le costumier de cinéma doit habiller des caractères,” La Revue du
cinéma 19–20 (Autumn 1949): 65.
20. Roland Barthes, “The Diseases of Costume,” in Theatre and Performance Design: A Reader in
Scenography, ed. Jane Collins and Andrew Nisbet (London: Routledge, 2010), 204–10.
21. Jane Gaines, “Costume and Narrative: How Dress Tells the Woman’s Story,” in Fabrications:
Costume and the Female Body, ed. Jane Gaines and Charlotte Herzog (London: Routledge,
1990), 193. Also see Sybil DelGaudio, Dressing the Part: Sternberg, Dietrich, and Costume
(Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1993), 14; and Stella Bruzzi,
Undressing Cinema: Clothing and Identity in the Movies (London: Routledge, 1997), xv, for a
useful critique of the limited perceptions of costume’s role in film.
22. It is impossible not to evoke here Mulvey’s essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,”
which alludes to this in the discussion of the female spectacle, especially in Josef von
Sternberg’s films: a beautiful woman on the screen, fetishized through costume and close-ups,
threatens to become herself the content of a film, bypassing the order of the male gaze. In Film
Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, ed. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1999), 833–44.
23. Deborah Nadoolman Landis, Costume Design (Amsterdam: Focal, 2012), 72.
24. Landis, Dressed, xvi; and Landis, Costume Design, 8.
25. Marketa Uhlirova, “Scandal, Satire and Vampirism in The Kidnapping of Fux the Banker,” in If
Looks Could Kill: Cinema’s Images of Fashion, Crime and Violence, ed. Marketa Uhlirova
(London: Koenig Books, 2008), 108–17; Madeleine Delpierre, Marianne de Fleury, and
Dominique Lebrun, French Elegance in the Cinema (Paris: Musée de la mode et du costume,
1988), 119–21.
26. Many of these have been well documented: see, respectively, David Chierichetti, Hollywood
Costume Design (New York: Crown, 1976); Gaines, “Costume and Narrative”; Leese,
Costume Design; Sue Harper, “Gainsborough: What’s in a Costume,” Monthly Film Bulletin
52 (1985): 324–27; Bruzzi, Undressing Cinema; Alexandra Farah, Filme/Fashion—festival
catalogue (São Paulo, Brazil: Filme/Fashion, 2003); Tolini Finamore, Hollywood before
Glamour; Christopher Laverty, Fashion in Film (London: Laurence King, 2016); Ronald
 Gregg, “Fashion, Thrift Stores and the Space of Pleasure in the 1960s Queer Underground
Film,” in Uhlirova, Birds of Paradise, 293–304; Juan A. Suárez, “Kenneth Anger: Clothing,
Queerness, Magic,” in Uhlirova, Birds of Paradise, 277–92; Tamar Jeffers McDonald,
Hollywood Catwalk: Exploring Costume and Transformation in American Film (London: I. B.
Tauris, 2010); Pamela Church Gibson, Fashion and Celebrity Culture (London: Berg, 2012);
Charles Eckert, “Carole Lombard in Macy’s Window,” Quarterly Review of Film Studies 3, no.
1 (1978): 1–23; or Jean Thomas Allen, “The Film Viewer as Consumer,” Quarterly Review of
Film Studies 5, no. 4 (1980): 481–99.
27. Andrew F. Rolle, California: A History (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1969), 568. Also see
Peter Wollen, “Strike a Pose,” Sight and Sound 5, no. 3 (1995): 14; Berry, Screen Style; and
Tolini Finamore, Hollywood before Glamour.
28. See, for example, “The Exploits of Pathe,” The Bioscope (28 September 1916): 18. For links
between the world of couture and theater at the turn of the twentieth century, see Joel H.
Kaplan and Sheila Stowell, Theatre and Fashion: Oscar Wilde to the Suffragettes (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1994).
29. Gwen Walters, “Fashion Letter: What You Will Wear This Fall …,” Photoplay 52, no. 9
(1939): 70, 79.
30. See Nick Rees-Roberts, Fashion Film: Art and Advertising in the Digital Age (London:
Bloomsbury, 2018), for more on a direct involvement of certain narrative fiction films in
luxury fashion brands’ complex strategies of branding and metacommentary.
31. See, for example, Sumiko Higashi, Cecil B. DeMille and American Culture: The Silent Era
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); Berry, Screen Style; Tolini Finamore,
Hollywood before Glamour; or Rachel Moseley, Growing Up with Audrey Hepburn: Text,
Audience, Resonance (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2002).
32. Hollander, Seeing through Clothes, 345.
33. James Laver, “Dates and Dresses,” Sight and Sound 8, no. 30 (Summer 1939): 50.
34. Eckert, “Carole Lombard”; Gaines and Herzog, “Puffed Sleeves before Tea-Time”; Stutesman,
“Costume Design.”
35. On fashion as change, see Wilson, Adorned in Dreams, 3–5; for more on the distinction
between fashion and clothes, see Ingrid Loschek, “When Is Fashion?,” in When Clothes
Become Fashion: Design and Innovation Systems (Oxford: Berg, 2009), 133–34.
36. For an exploration of these themes, see various essays in Uhlirova, If Looks Could Kill.
37. Kitty Hauser, “Stained Clothing, Guilty Hearts,” in Uhlirova, If Looks Could Kill, 68–75;
Jonathan Faiers, Dressing Dangerously: Dysfunctional Fashion in Film (London: Yale
University Press, 2013). See also Bruzzi, Undressing Cinema.
38. Walter Benjamin, “Fashion,” in The Arcades Project (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1999), 69, 79.
39. Elizabeth Wilson, “Magic Fashion,” Fashion Theory 8, no. 4 (2004): 375–85.
40. For a historical discussion of the term “fetish,” including its use within ethnography and
Marxism, see William Pietz, “The Problem of the Fetish I,” Res 9 (Spring 1985): 5–17; see
also Lorraine Gamman and Merja Makinen, Female Fetishism (New York: New York
University Press, 1994) 14–50.
41. Pietz, “The Problem of the Fetish II,” Res 13 (Spring 1987): 23.
42. At the time, Klein was employed by American Vogue, edited by the larger-than-life Diana
Vreeland.
43. Hollander, Seeing through Clothes, 343–44.
44. Ibid.
45. For more on this, see Uhlirova, Birds of Paradise.
46. Giuliana Bruno, Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture, and Film (New York: Verso,
2002); Giuliana Bruno, “Surface, Fabric, Weave: The Fashioned World of Wong Kar Wai,” in
Munich, Fashion in Film, 83–105; Giuliana Bruno, Surface: Matters of Aesthetics, Materiality,
and Media (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014); and Esther Leslie, “Dreams for
Sale,” in Uhlirova, Birds of Paradise, 29–40.
47. Bruno, Atlas of Emotion, 324.
48. Marketa Uhlirova, “Costume in Early ‘Marvellous’ Cinema: The Aesthetic of Opulence and
the Teasing Image,” in Uhlirova, Birds of Paradise, 101–27. For more on the practice of
mobile costumes as “screens” in the context of vaudeville dance, see Jody Sperling, “Cosmic
Voyages in Advance of Cinema: La Loïe Skirts the Universe,” in Uhlirova, Birds of Paradise,
84. For complex links between the umbrella, the screen, and early cinema more generally, see
also Wanda Strauven, “Text, Texture, Textile: A Media-Archaeological Mapping of Fashion
and Film,” a paper given at Archaeology of Fashion Film Conference, organized by Caroline
Evans and Jussi Parikka, London, July 6, 2018. The paper was published in an amended form
as Caroline Evans and Jussi Parikka, “Sewing Machines and Weaving Looms: A Media
Archaeological Encounter between Fashion and Film,” in “Archaeologies of Fashion Film,”
ed. Caroline Evans and Jussi Parikka, special issue, Journal of Visual Culture 19, no. 3
(December 2020).
49. Hanssen, “Symptoms of Desire,” 108.
50. Tom Gunning, “Applying Color: Creating Fantasy of Cinema,” in Fantasia of Color in Early
Cinema, ed. Tom Gunning, Joshua Yumibe, Giovanna Fossati, and Jonathon Rosen
(Amsterdam: Eye Filmmuseum/Amsterdam University Press, 2015), 22.
51. Paul Read and Mark-Paul Meyer, Restoration of Motion Picture Film (Oxford: Butterworth-
Heinemann, 2000), 180; Joshua Yumibe, Moving Color: Early Film, Mass Culture, Modernism
(New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2012), 25–26; Hanssen, “Symptoms of
Desire,” 108.
52. Strauven notes that an analogy between the labors of sewing and editing was already made in
Dziga Vertov, Man with the Movie Camera (1929); see Strauven, “Text, Texture, Textile.”
Also, as Giuliana Bruno shows, the early film industry’s practice of employing women to
perform extremely laborious and repetitive tasks of film assemblage and coloring resembles
that of clothes sweatshops: Giuliana Bruno, Streetwalking on a Ruined Map: Cultural Theory
and the City Films of Elvira Notari (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 106,
108.
53. O’Neill, “The Shining and Chic.”
54. It is worth mentioning that the relations between digital distortions, moving images, and
textiles have also been explored by several conceptual fashion designers and image-makers in
the early 2000s. See especially Viktor and Rolf’s Autumn/Winter 2002 fashion show, which
rendered blue clothing as blue screens; Hamish Morrow’s Spring/Summer 2004 show, in
which imagery of walking fashion models were distorted through a digital code and projected
in real time onto a large screen; or Jens Laugesen and Nick Knight’s collaborative film Ground
Zero.03 (2003), which exploits the aesthetic of the digital glitch.
55. I am grateful to Alexandra Ovtchinnikova for bringing this to my attention. See E. A.
Rozovsky, “Nam bii vsiem na dno,” Podvodnoie obozrenie (Подводное обозрение) no. 2
(2002), 4–7.
56. P. K. Nair, “‘Not So Dangerous’: Some Recollections,” in This Film Is Dangerous: A
Celebration of Nitrate Film, ed. Roger Smither and Catherine A. Surowiec (Brussels, Belgium:
FIAF, 2002), 245. Also see Leslie, “Dreams for Sale.”
57. Stephen Bottomore cites trade press reports from as early as 1911 mentioning the manufacture
of shoe polish. “ ‘A Fallen Star’: Problems and Practices in Early Film Preservation,” in
Smither and Surowiec, This Film Is Dangerous, 188, 190.
58. “A Fallen Star,” London Opinion (September 23, 1914): 454. From a longer excerpt reprinted
in Bottomore, “A Fallen Star,” 188.
59. Maurice Bessy, “Mort du Film,” Cinémonde (May 25, 1933), Article 240. This is from a longer
excerpt reprinted in “Mort du Film” in Smither and Suroweic, This Film Is Dangerous, 364.
60. Jeavons, “Playing with Fire,” in Smither and Suroweic, This Film Is Dangerous, 237. On
nitrogen content in film versus household objects see Heather Heckman, “Burn after Viewing,
or, Fire in the Vaults: Nitrate Decomposition and Combustibility,” The American Archivist 73,
no. 2 (Fall/Winter 2010): 487.
 CHAPTER 27

WHEN AND WHERE DOES A

FILM BEGIN? PUTTING FILMS
IN CONTEXT

AMY VILLAREJO

OPENING scene: it’s Film History 101, taught on the “cruise ship” model of
international surveys. If it’s Tuesday, it must be Nazi Germany, Leni
Riefenstahl most likely. The professor walks to the podium, perhaps fires up
a PowerPoint presentation, and proceeds to offer some “context” for the
screening of the day. Who was Leni Riefenstahl, probably one of the few
women directors on the syllabus? What was she doing there in Nuremberg
(why that city in Germany?), filming the party rally, and how did she
choose to do it? And what was the Nazi party anyway? Its architecture? Its
positions, structures, and formations? Its leadership? And, thinking about
that early sequence of Hitler’s arrival from the heavens on a Lufthansa
plane, when does aerial cinematography in fact begin?
The contextual introduction might expand to include some of these
categories, too, familiar to students in film studies. First, national cinema:
what was Nazi cinema? How did Weimar culture become displaced by Nazi
institutions and with what shifts in content, personnel, policy, technological
development, and so on? Also perhaps transnational circulation, as the class
anticipates a screening of Frank Capra’s Why We Fight (1942–1945) series,
dependent as it is upon excerpts from A Triumph of the Will (1935) to let the
Germans make their own case for American intervention in the war: Capra
called the film “the ominous prelude of Hitler’s holocaust of hate,” a lethal
psychological weapon.1 Other observations may touch on genre
(documentary and propaganda), on aesthetic innovation (Riefenstahl’s
many moving cameras, Speer’s architecture, long focus), or on sound
(Riefenstahl’s use of music).
As the students begin to absorb the information deemed necessary to
comprehending Triumph, other questions either recede or intrude as the
“context” temporarily nudges the putative object out of view, questions
about the film’s aesthetics, say, or questions about modes of thought the
film itself practices (I’m thinking here about Akira Mizuta Lippitt’s
deconstructive observation that Triumph visually links National Socialism
to the fleeting appearance of a cat, a “catachresis” that is the signal of a
catastrophe as well as a theory of history2). Likewise, the very substance of
the film experience—the embodied encounter with sounds and images—is
deferred until the appropriate intellectual, maybe even hermeneutic, frame
is soundly in place.
If this scene is commonplace, even with well-meaning variations on or
objections to the idea of teaching global cinema or the specific object we
call “film,” I want in what follows to test, or to “theorize,” what context
itself means and enables. If Jacques Derrida’s often-quoted phrase, “Il n’y a
pas de hors texte” can help us here, it will be in understanding not, as it is
wrongly glossed, that there is nothing outside or beyond the text but that
both text and context are always present and always unstable. The trick will
be to see precisely how this works with regard to cinema and to what ends,
but with a bit of reframing.

H ,A ,E
Here in the context of developing a new theoretical account of the
boundaries of cinema, I want to shift the terrain and terminology from
“text” and “context” to the idea of cinema/media as always-already
emplaced, belonging to a habitat that both enables and enunciates what we
imagine the “text” itself to be. If one were to chart the critical genealogies
that inform such a perspective, they would draw, perhaps improbably, from
both cultural geography and new media theories. From the former, I take
the injunction to consider “place” as process, tying together social
interactions and built environments, bounded spaces and links to what
encloses them, unique histories, and internal conflicts. Philosopher Martin
Heidegger’s famous designation of a bridge across the stream as a function
that “gathers” encapsulates this multifold process:
The bridge swings over the stream “with ease and power.” It does not just connect the banks
that are already there. The banks emerge as banks only as the bridge crosses the stream. The
bridge expressly causes them to lie across from one another. One side is set off against the
other by the bridge. Nor do the banks stretch along the stream as indifferent border strips of
the dry land. With the banks, the bridge brings to the stream the one and the other expanse
of the landscape lying behind them. It brings stream and branch and land into each other’s
neighborhood.3

Heidegger’s thought flows in its own stream. It concatenates; it gathers just

as the bridge does. Each element of the neighborhood assembles by virtue
of the bridge, such that by the end of this example, the bridge brings earth
and sky together with divinities and mortals. For Heidegger, the bridge is
not a symbol but a locale: it makes possible a site from which something
begins to unfold. This is not the way that we usually think of a site or
habitat, but it is the way that I want to start to think of a film. Of course,
studies of place in cinema encompass vast territories and topics, far beyond
the scope of the present essay, including the role of the body in the affective
properties of media, the production of place in urban and rural contexts, the
development of post-Fordist and post-humanist geographies (often in
concert or dialogue with environmental or eco-criticism), the visual and
aural making of “nature” and landscape, and the histories of place in visual
culture. As will be clear in my reading to follow, I see cinema “taking
place” in a way that is consonant with, indeed inspired by, the volume of
that name edited by John David Rhodes and Elena Gorfinkel, in which a
given film minimally offers a virtual archive of places but also, more
profoundly, implicates human subjectivity deeply in the acts of inhabiting
that themselves ground cinema and media.4 It is in this regard that I stress
those terms that derive from the Latin habitare, dwelling, in my reading
practice.
In the second critical genealogy, to do with new media theory, I am
convinced that some of the insights into assemblages, systems, and
networks must inform, even retroactively, our insights into the relation
between text and context. These require more explanation before I
synthesize the two critical arenas through the work of David Harvey at the
end of this section. Manuel DeLanda’s reading of Deleuze and Guattari that
becomes Assemblage Theory is a useful place to start. From Deleuze and
Guattari’s magisterial book A Thousand Plateaus, DeLanda imports the
idea of an assemblage as “a multiplicity which is made up of many
heterogeneous terms and which establishes liaisons, relations between
them, across ages, sexes and reigns – different natures.”5 Assemblages
change along two axes or aspects of the concept: first, the parts that are
fitted together are not uniform in nature or origin, and, second, the
assemblage “actively links these parts together by establishing relations
between them.”6 To use Deleuzian language, they are coded and decoded,
territorialized and deterritorialized, measuring the degree to which the
components of the assemblage “have been subjected to a process of
homogenization, and the extent to which its defining boundaries have been
delineated and made impermeable.”7
From his 2006 book, A New Philosophy of Society, to the later one,
DeLanda’s assemblage theory attempts to address two aspects of a single
problem we might call the micro-macro, or the individual/society problem.
The first aspect entails a stress on the individual, such that, while
acknowledging the existence of “society” (taken as a whole), the approach
nonetheless sees the totality as an aggregate of individuals, “as a whole
without properties that are more than the sum of its parts.”8 DeLanda labels
this the “microreductionist” stance. The second aspect entails a concomitant
emphasis on social structure, in which individuals are mere products of
society (however elegantly articulated and theorized, from Durkheim to
Marx and onward). DeLanda calls this stance “macroreductionist,” insofar
as the microlevel appears as epiphenomenon. While other approaches to the
micro–macro posit intermediary levels, assemblages will become helpful
ways to model (and to determine the ontological status of) these entities: to
cite DeLanda,
interpersonal networks and institutional organizations are assemblages of people; social
justice movements are assemblages of several network communities; central governments
are assemblages of several organizations; cities are assemblages of people, networks,
organizations, as well as of a variety of infrastructural components, from buildings and
streets to conduits for matter and energy flows; nation-states are like assemblages of cities,
the geographical regions organized by cities, and the provinces that several such regions
form.9
The structure of DeLanda’s book in fact moves from the subpersonal to the
supranational, climbing scales toward what he calls “irreducible social
complexity,”10 but his is quite explicitly not a theory of mediation.
The way Deleuze and DeLanda imagine the relations between parts and
wholes is thus key to differentiating assemblage theory from dialectics or
other sociological models and will help me to frame the very issue or stakes
of context. Most of these models, DeLanda makes clear, consider parts to be
if not explicitly analogized to the human organism then at least to constitute
a whole that displays an organic unity or seamless totality. These he dubs
relations of interiority, in which “component parts are constituted by the
very relations they have to other parts in the whole.”11 The problem with
the idea of relations of interiority is the very idea of a seamless whole, a
bounded unity. For while a whole may have properties or parts that can be
enumerated, it also has (and this is part of the Spinozist legacy of the
project) capacities to interact with other entities, to affect and to be affected
by innumerable entities in an open potentiality.
Wholes characterized by relations of exteriority are assemblages. Parts of
assemblages are self-subsistent: “a part may be detached and made a
component of another assemblage.”12 Three dimensions of assemblages are
of theoretical interest to DeLanda: first, the variable role parts play from the
purely material to the purely expressive (as well as mixtures of the two).
Second, component parts are involved in processes which stabilize or
destabilize the assemblage; Deleuze’s well-known terms for these are
processes of territorialization and deterritorialization (and, incidentally,
DeLanda is particularly good in taking “territory” literally as a spatial term,
first of all as a “taking place somewhere,” and then also as a nonspatial term
meant to designate the process of increasing the internal homogeneity of an
assemblage, whereas deterritorialization denotes at once spatial dispersal
and the process of increasing the heterogeneity of an assemblage). The third
dimension involves a particular and specialized expressive media, genetic
and linguistic, coding and decoding, as I mentioned above.
Assemblages avoid essentialism and the dangers of reified
generalizations and instead emerge from concrete historical processes. In a
key passage, DeLanda insists: “The identity of any assemblage at any level
of scale is always the product of a process (territorialization and, in some
cases, coding) and it is always precarious, since other processes
(deterritorialization and decoding) can destabilize it.”13 He asks his readers
to think not in terms of logical differentiation but historical differentiation,
the distribution of singularities rather than the taxonomy of categories; the
emphasis, in still other words, is on the ongoing processes of production
rather than a list of properties characterizing the whole or final product.
Deleuze suggests that the “mapping” (my word) of the combination of
differently scaled individual singularities, their spaces of possibility
structured by universal singularities, and their historical differentiation be
called a “diagram.” (A “universal singularity” would be, for humans,
something like a body-plan, which has a topological structure and
contingent limits.) Deleuze also uses the term “multiplicity” to refer to the
structure of spaces of possibility; a “diagram” is sometimes also a
distribution of capacities to affect and to be affected, a field of relation of
force. In these terms one can glimpse the emergence of a spatial sensibility
that would open a given “text” to differently scaled individual singularities
and its context to a processual, productive, and mutating assemblage.
The Spanish sociologist Manuel Castells’s observations regarding the
essential features of networks for (neoliberal) capitalism seem similarly
important in understanding the nature of place in contemporary life, if with
a bleaker political perspective. For him,
networks are open structures, able to expand without limits, integrating new nodes as long
as they are able to communicate within the network, namely as long as they share the same
communication codes…. Networks are appropriate instruments for a capitalist economy
based on innovation, globalization, and decentralized concentration; for work, workers, and
firms based upon flexibility and adaptability; for a culture of endless deconstruction and
reconstruction; for a polity geared towards the instant processing of new values and public
moods; and for a social organization aimed at the suppression of space and the annihilation
of time.14

This idea of networks is indispensable for understanding pressures on the

coherence of spatial organizations in contemporary society. Where
DeLanda identifies assemblages in almost value-neutral terminology,
seemingly appropriate to the conceptual terrain of speculative realism on
which he works, Castells sounds an alarm here about what Deleuze and
DeLanda were calling “deterritorialization” above. As geographer David
Harvey also noted in his writings on postmodernism, the impact of
technologies of communication and the financialization of capital may be
seen as “time-space compression,” or what Karl Marx described as the
annihilation of time and space, in a regime of flexible accumulation: “the
time horizons of both private and public decision-making have shrunk,
while satellite communication and declining transport costs have made it
increasingly possible to spread those decisions immediately over an ever
wider and variegated space.”15 Instantaneity, speed, velocity: these are so
many effects of flexible accumulation that reroute our fundamental sense
and experience of time and space, or, better, of times and spaces as they are
determined by social relations. For Harvey, as for the French philosopher
Henri Lefebvre, “command over space is a fundamental and all-pervasive
source of social power in and over everyday life.”16
To attempt a brief synthesis: we may regard films and media texts as
assemblages on various scales, processes of setting parts of various natures
and origins in dynamic relation to one another. In so doing, assemblages
change: they territorialize and deterritorialize. They make possible ways of
conceiving of time and space, as much as they themselves “take place”
within social relations and historical horizons that are often marked by
struggle, instability, and insecurity. Let this stand as my working
understanding of “context,” as we turn to our shared “object,” a film.

O O
For this undertaking, I’ve chosen an object that is (a) accessible to all of us
via YouTube, (b) extremely short, (c) virtuosic, and (d) crammed with
significance. It is a single-shot film by the African American artist Kahlil
Joseph entitled Belhaven Meridian (2010), with a running time of three
minutes and twenty-six seconds. Joseph is extremely well known within
artist and music circles: he directed the first cut of the concept album film
for Beyoncé’s Lemonade, shot an influential video for Kendrick Lamar
(m.A.A.d), and won the Sundance Grand Jury Prize for short films in 2012
for his film for Flying Lotus, Until the Quiet Comes. He collaborates with
influential artists (such as director Terrence Malick) and dazzles with his
visual style, but his work has not been studied much, or written about in
long-form pieces in mainstream publications, with the exception of a New
Yorker article in 2017.17 Compared to an artist like Apitchatpong
Weerasethakul, his contemporary in terms of museum habitats for art film,
Joseph is unknown. If truth be told, I chose this film because I admire
Joseph immensely and wanted an opportunity to learn more about his work,
but I also wish that anthologies (thank goodness not this one!) didn’t
routinely relegate Black film to a subsection. Here is some counterpressure
to that gesture and to the weirdly nagging worries of some White or let’s
say non-Black film professionals who worry that they can’t teach Black
film.18
One might describe Belhaven Meridian as a “music video” for the artists
Shabazz Palaces’ “song,” which is not called “Belhaven Meridian” but
instead “Find Out.” All the scare quotes seem necessary since the film (shot
on 35mm black and white stock) insistently makes reference to other films
and media, vigorously resisting generic classification: Charles Burnett’s
1978 acclaimed film Killer of Sheep and HBO’s The Wire most notably, as
Belhaven features the actor Ernest Wadell who played Omar’s boyfriend
Dante on the television series (2003–2004). Indeed, Belhaven raises the
question of genre in a manner that is familiar from other instances of
contemporary image culture: it is difficult to adjudicate whether it belongs
to the category of art or popular culture, whether and how it is tied to the
music. If I were to call it an experimental film, insisting upon its aesthetic
innovation and ties to radical acts of vision, I inevitably shortchange its
grounding in hip-hop music and culture, the specific language and poetry of
the streets that it traverses. In short, it’s a Whole Bunch of Things at Once.
But we name its artists before confronting its generic roots: Shabazz
Palaces are the name of a hip-hop group of two from Seattle, the well-
known Ishmael Butler (a.k.a., in this incarnation, Palaceer Lazaro), formally
“Butterfly” (later “Ish”) of Digable Planets, and the instrumentalist/artist
Tendai “Baba” Maraire, who is the son of the Zimbabwean mbira master
Dumisani Maraire.
If we pause a moment, we can glimpse among this constellation of Black
artists, whose work we will appreciate further, a specter of death that will
linger over Belhaven Meridian. Tendai Maraire’s younger sister Chiwoniso
Maraire, also an accomplished mbira musician, died very young, at the age
of 37 in 2013, perhaps from pneumonia. Her ex-husband, the well-known
Zimbabwean guitarist Andy Brown, died a year earlier at age 50 of
unreported causes; their daughter, Chengeto Brown, also a musician,
committed suicide in 2015. Joseph’s brother Noah Davis, a visionary artist
and curator, died of cancer that same year, 2015. Two years after that, in
November of 2017, Ishmael Butler’s son, the rapper known as Lil Tracy,
lost his collaborator Lil Peep to an overdose. If you look at coverage of
these deaths, you’ll find lists and lists of those who have died, litanies for
an industry robbed of young talent by addiction, violence, poor health care,
homelessness, and HIV/AIDS.19
This talent comes from somewhere. Belhaven is the name of a street in
the neighborhood of Watts in Los Angeles. The street begins north of the
Century Freeway, the 105, and continues south to 119th Street, right
through the heart of the neighborhood. As if to remind us further of the
ravages of HIV/AIDS, Magic Johnson Park is a block away from its
termination, on East 120th Street. The name “Watts,” of course,
immediately conjures images of violence and resistance, creativity and
power. Its postwar African American community exploded after decades of
racial injustice and ill treatment by the police and state, resulting in the
Watts “riot” of August 11, 1965. (Many prefer to call it the Watts rebellion.
Naming is political.) Mass arrests, curfews, and heavy policing failed to
prevent deaths, injuries, and property damage. A governor-appointed
commission charged with examining the riot’s causes and proposing
remedies described the lifeworld of African Americans in Watts as a “dull
devastating spiral of failure,” as poverty and segregation eat away at
possibility; their infrastructural recommendations—better schooling, job
training, community policing, and so on—largely went unheeded.20
Almost thirty years after the Watts rebellion, another powder keg burst in
Watts: its name was Rodney King. A cab driver, King was arrested in
March 1991 and beaten brutally during his arrest, which was filmed by a
civilian and widely circulated on news media. When the officers who beat
him were acquitted in April 1992 after being tried for the use of excessive
force, outrage fueled another round of widespread rioting. The film director
John Singleton (who made the 1991 film Boyz in the Hood), who was at the
courthouse when the verdict was announced, knew what was coming: “By
having this verdict, what these people done, they lit the fuse to a bomb.”21
Six days of violence and looting resulted in massive devastation to the
South Central community, resulting in new alliances and activism in that
changing landscape (e.g., an enormous Asian American rally by mostly
Korean residents against police violence).
Watts had long been famous for its art: the Watts Towers, one of the
better known examples of “outsider art” (an English translation of the
French term “art brut,” or raw art) in the American West. Built by Italian
immigrant construction worker Simon Rodia over a period from 1921 to
1954, the towers’ structural integrity and resilience have become figurative
exemplars of the Watts community: it is a neighborhood that has survived
and weathered, tall and proud. Just south of the towers, across South
Central Avenue from Belhaven Street, is Nickerson Gardens, the largest
public housing development west of the Mississippi River and an iconic
example of midcentury postwar domestic architecture, meant to provide
alternatives to the slums of the American South in the Arcadia of Los
Angeles. Instead, they became places of terror and desperation for the
almost entirely African American communities who tried to survive in
them. In the hands of the extraordinary painter Kerry James Marshall,
projects such as Nickerson Gardens harbor many affects at once: hope,
resistance, despair, and abstract beauty. Here is his painting of Nickerson,
entitled Watts, 1963, painted in 1995 (fig. 27.1):
Joseph set Until the Quiet Comes in Nickerson Gardens, where the
complex serves as the mise en scène for a story of violent death and
expressive rebirth: the film might be an allegory for the power of music,
and it might be a love song to the possibility of black community under the
most dire of conditions (fig. 27.2).
Figure 27.1. Kerry James Marshall, Watts, 1963 (1995). Kerry James Marshall: Mastry retrospective
at the Met Breuer, 2017. Photograph by the author.

Like Until the Quiet Comes, Belhaven Meridian is, in other words,
located: it is a film of and about Watts, of and about histories of African
American expression and invention, of and about beauty and everyday life
and alienation. Let’s say that this is our object, a record of movement
through a place. Here is Tendai “Baba” Maraire:
Figure 27.2. Nickerson Gardens in Until the Quiet Comes, 2012.

I love creating on the bus, for example. I love writing on the bus. When you start off
somewhere in France and end up driving all the way to like, Sicily, you see so much. There’s
so much history and so many wars—so much land—you pass through. You pass through so
much geography, and that motivates me to write. The road has always influenced me, and
the people you meet from all over the world. You go places and our music makes these
people feel liberated and free and happy. It makes them feel like someone feels whatever
they’re going through. I’ve seen everything from proposals to first dates at our shows. The
travel is a big influence on me, heavy.22

O S
Belhaven is a single-shot film, unlike Joseph’s other films which tend to
feature virtuosic editing: associative and visually complex chains of shots
that are resonant and moody. If he lingers on a shot, as he does with the
dancer in Until the Quiet Comes, he invites an emotional, perhaps even
metaphysical response; Joseph admires the films of Andrei Tarkovsky and it
shows! In choosing to make a single-shot film, Joseph inherits Tarkovsky’s
interest in the long take but also the formal challenges of the unedited take.
In this sense, Belhaven owes debts to Orson Welles, whose opening shot for
Touch of Evil (1958) remains the referent for analog single-shot
choreography with its crane and tracking operation, as well as to Russian
filmmaker Alexander Sokurov, whose Russian Ark (2002) appeared as the
first digital single-shot feature. Libbie D. Cohn and J.P. Sniadecki’s film
People’s Park (2012) likewise relies on a single shot for a feature-length
film, a documentary walk through People’s Park in Chengdu, China. As an
inquiry into the changing nature of place, People’s Park raises formal and
substantive questions closest to those dear to Joseph in Belhaven.
Belhaven opens with a black frame, and an engine comes to life on the
soundtrack with the click of the ignition and a roar. Seven seconds in, the
image appears: Palaceer Lazaro (Ishmael Butler) in a 1968 Chevy Camaro,
a number 2 painted on the door, in the lower half of the frame, with a lovely
lady riding on the roof of the car, in a cotton dress and sunglasses right for
the LA sunshine. The beats begin, the rap a kind of prequel to “Find Out”:
“See I’m just like you, I know I’m a mess.” Joseph brings the sound of the
engine down to a purr, Lazaro puts down his cell phone, and a title appears:
“HIM: IT’S TIME.” She jumps down and takes the passenger seat. “HER:
WHERE ARE WE GOING?” The camera pans left to follow the car as it
starts down the street, and a phrase appears in Arabic (fig. 27.3).
Figure 27.3. Belhaven Meridian, 2010.

The few Arabic readers among US audiences would know that it means
“He saves us.” We can see that the words prompt a shift in vision, as the
camera completes a 180-degree pan to a view of the street in the other
direction, as Palaceer raps about and maps his own origin, “See, I’m from
up the block.” A title identifies the place onscreen—Watts, Los Angeles—
and as the camera moves to the center of the street, the film’s title appears.
Sun spots loll above a heavily shaded street as the camera tracks behind a
different woman, in a dress made of an abstract, almost modernist fabric,
with mid-calf boots. Shaded street below, sky above, houses and cars lining
this Watts everyday street: this is a film already about orientation, vision,
and light. Like Heidegger’s bridge, it sets its parts into dynamic relation, an
assemblage. A young man approaches the walking woman, yanking his
baggy pants with hitched fingers, white tank top gathering around his
skinny hips. “Hello, how you doin? No play, huh? You can’t say hi? No
response?” They talk together for a moment as Shabazz Palaces reenters the
soundtrack with the thickly layered sounds of the actual opening of “Find
Out”: “A lesson to the weak. Something a fly nigga speaks. It’s a depraved
devil’s heart system that got us all laid down. Make us content to play
around, and let god seers get clowned.”
As the two continue to walk down the street, the camera catches sight of
an African American man in a track jacket, leaning against a big American
sedan parked on the right curb. As if to follow his gaze, we pan right, still
tracking slightly, to a brief, straight-on view of a house on the street. It’s a
film shoot, a crew with a camera and a big boom mike recording Stan and
the protestations of Stan’s wife from Burnett’s Killer of Sheep, the house
captioned with the title “Sheep Killer, Est. 1977” on its porch gable. As
quickly as the short homage to Burnett comes, however, the camera leaves
it, and at the 1:50 mark, just almost exactly halfway in, it performs its
simple stunt, flipping a different 180 degrees to render the world upside
down.
Magic happens.
The simplest gesture remakes that vision, movement, light, and shadow
into something new.
The camera finds another protagonist, Ernest Waddell now, in the center
of the frame, walking along the same street but transformed in our vision:
we reverse the pavement and the sky, we adjust to the unfamiliar movement
of Waddell’s dangling arms, and we delight in these swerves of perception.
An African mask seems to dangle on his head, seemingly superimposed or
composited, until he grabs it and runs forward. “Find out who you are and
see it, find out what you are and free it, find out who you love and need it,
find out what you can and be it. That’s what’s up, that’s what’s up, that’s
what’s up, that’s what’s up.”
Of course, what’s up is now down: as the protagonist moves along the
street, other figures witness him from the sidewalks, and a group of young
people form a kind of obstacle swarm that sets him off course. Their
movements, too, are hard to decipher: are they adversaries or playful? Are
they pushing or dancing? In any case, Waddell moves through them and
through a stop sign (no stopping necessary), at which point he, too, is
replaced, this time by a trio of motorcyclists who cast captivating shadows
on the asphalt above them. As the camera tracks their progress, the music
fades to a single mbira melody, as the sky becomes bigger. More text
appears onscreen: HIM: WHEREVER WE WANT … One last beat from
“Find Out,” and fade to black.
 It’s tempting to read the film through the political cosmology of Shabazz
Palaces themselves. In their most recent releases, the duo elaborates a story
of Quazarz (in two simultaneously released album installments, Quazarz:
Born on a Gangster Star and Quazarz vs. The Jealous Machines), a musical
emissary from somewhere else sent to this place. Here is their story,
circulated through their label and through a graphic accompaniment to their
recordings:
Quazarz came to the Earth from somewhere else, a musical ambassador from his place to
ours. Somehow, through fire or through fury, the Palaceer of Shabazz Palaces caught wind
of the tale, and it is through his prism that we hear the story.
The beach was there, and Atlaantiis, and chemical alterations and cell memories and Andre
Norton, Richard K. Morgan, and always Octavia Butler. There were killings and there were
votes, and brutality in both. There was sound and there were other worlds, and there was a
vastness so participation sometimes came only at the edges. And the Palaceer coasted down
with the alien notion, like Quazarz, and so became.
On Quazarz when they look at this place here they see the inhabitants, the humans, but they
don’t assess as we do. And so when Quazarz was sent he was sent to meet a cat with
vibration, a creative and courageous, caring, compassionate dude that stood out. The dude
was a drug dealer, but that was neither here nor there, until his dealings squashed the
rendezvous, leaving our alien alone to figure out what this place is really all about.
Coming from, as we all used to, a simpler less complicated more essential innocent place,
the hero could not make heads nor tails of most advancements. From an aerial view, he saw
that a good percentage of earthly vibrations were on very small squares and it became his
belief that this world was very disposable and the spans short. His opinion was not of
anything good nor bad but simply the truth. The machines—he noted—though at the behest
of their master’s voice, are scorned, and jealous as all hell.
And so the tale is told while surfing on the board of Shabazz Palaces, with its sturdy sort of
base angled for takeoff on a new trajectory. There is new blood and space and room to be
different and have different assets and different art and different ways to talk and also open
up some space inside to do something new. There are pages and there are drawings, and
color and faces and inked dialogues written in ancient futuristic hieroglyph. There are scales
and there is melody and there are Sunny days and there is Darkness, but that—it should be
noted—to the Palaceer is not a lack of illumination or brightness. Maybe it is dark, but in it
is always optimism and joy, a bright darkness and a full, hopeful one as well.
It comes in gold, and it comes for the night. And so Quazarz sang the Jealous Machines.
And so too did the Jealous Machines sing the Gangster Star.23

It goes on a bit further, but you get the idea. The debts to science
fiction/fantasy are acknowledged through the esoteric trilogy of Andre
Norton (a pen name for Alice Norton), Richard K. Morgan, and Octavia
Butler. In the fiction of Quazarz, our own surnamed Butler (Ishmael)
improvises or riffs on his experience as an alien on a hostile planet,
observing its dark powers (corporate, digital, drugs) and its possibilities
alike. To my mind, Quazarz is Afrofuturism for gangsta nerds, a kind of
pragmatic philosophy of the beat.
Quazarz allows us to read Belhaven Meridian as a quest, a journey
through Black arts and inspiration (Killer of Sheep, the African mask, the
sounds of “Find Out” as well as the heritage of the mbira) that produces the
“new trajectory” above: “there is new blood and space and room to be
different and have different assets and different art and different ways to
talk and also open up some space inside to do something new.” The
radicality of vision turned upside-down, along with the openness of the
film’s ending, “wherever you want to go,” confirms the transformative
aspirations of Shabazz Palaces. Such a reading is indeed tempting, and yet
the improvisatory nature of Shabazz Palaces’ own music and process, a
free-flowing inventive flow, caution us against imposing the codified story
of Quazarz as the only grid that would make the film intelligible. I want to
return to the perspective not of the musicians but of Joseph the filmmaker,
whose own aesthetic and political visions shape Belhaven Meridian. If it
has taken me some time to get here, it’s because I saved the best for last.

F ,P ,M
Belhaven declares itself to be a meridian, which can definitionally be one of
two things: either (a) a circle of constant longitude that passes through a
given place on the earth’s surface and the terrestrial poles, or (b) a set of
pathways in the body along which vital energy flows. The former often
refers to a measurement, a way of imagining or recording distance (as in
meridian arc), position (as in a principal meridian), or origin (as in prime
meridian). The second definition is fundamental to Chinese medicine and
practices such as acupuncture, which has discovered twelve such pathways
in the human body associated with particular organs. Meridian derives from
the Latin meridies, which means both time and space/orientation, both
“midday” and “south.” To put it colloquially, Belhaven’s meridian feels to
me something like a conceptual pathway through a place with a very
inventive, focused guide at the helm, taking the measure of a particular
distance. Who is he?
 Kahlil Joseph belongs to a family, a neighborhood and a city, a museum,
a journal, an arts practice (primarily film and photography), and more. Let
me unfold this assemblage piece by piece. Although many filmmakers owe
much to their families of choice or origin, allowing us to read their styles or
rhetoric as inflected by experience and affiliation, Joseph’s connection to
family remains deep and sustained. Earlier, I mentioned his brother Noah,
the artist who died in 2015. With Noah, Joseph shared a large-scale
exhibition at the Frye Art Museum in Seattle (where the brothers grew up)
entitled Young Blood, a 2016 homage to Noah’s life and legacy as both
artist and curator. With Noah and his wife Karon Davis, Joseph helped to
found the Underground Museum (about which much more in a moment).
With Noah, Joseph launched a short-lived blog called FEB that featured
found photographs of African-American life, which became a magazine/art
journal published by the Underground Museum. Joseph’s mother, Faith
Childs-Davis (an educator who works with arts nonprofits), shot the image
featured on the first issue of FEB, a photograph of a community swimming
pool on the south side of Chicago in 1976 (fig. 27.4):
Joseph’s father, Keven Davis, appears posthumously in Joseph’s most
recent film, Fly Paper (2017), a study of and homage to Harlem inspired by
the documentary photographer Roy De Carava. In addition, Keven Davis,
who died of brain cancer in 2011, left an inheritance that helped to make the
Underground Museum a reality: a spirit, like those other hauntings and
premature losses, reaching in and helping out from beyond. If we zoom out
even slightly, we could note that Karon Davis’s father is the
actor/dancer/singer Ben Vereen, known to TV viewers as Chicken George
Moore from the landmark miniseries Roots from 1977 and to Broadway
fans as a Tony Award-winning actor who appeared in Jesus Christ
Superstar (1972) and Pippin (1973). As with Keven Davis’s celebrity
connections from his legal work with clients such as Venus and Serena
Williams, the extended worlds of this family bridge the exceptional and the
everyday, seeding the familial ground with resources and potentiality.
Figure 27.4. FEB, published 2017. Collection of the author.

For Joseph, family is habitat. Both projects he founded with his brother
and Karon Davis—the Underground Museum and FEB—serve as sites for
exploration, nurture, affiliation, support, intellectual and aesthetic
community, outreach, and more. Located in the community of Arlington
Heights, a highly diverse, low-income central neighborhood west of
downtown Los Angeles, the family-run Underground Museum continues
Noah Davis’s curatorial vision: after his death, he left blueprints for a dozen
and a half shows that he had conceived for the space (these along with
screenings and events in both the museum and the backyard “purple
garden” space, and a bookstore that collates books, music and art).24 (You
can shop online in the bookstore curated by Noah and Kahlil’s mom!
www.undergroundmuseum.org/bookstore.) Two things require elaboration.
To be sure, Arlington Heights is not Kahlil Joseph’s “own” neighborhood:
he grew up in Seattle and lives elsewhere in Los Angeles. But Noah and
Karon Davis remade Washington Boulevard storefronts and a church into a
space that has become a fulcrum for creative community, and such a
remaking is itself emplaced: they “created an incredible space for
conversation and exchange where big things happen in unpretentious
ways.”25 Second, the Underground Museum (UM) might be precisely the
kind of place to screen a film like Belhaven Meridian. In its purple garden
film series, the museum disseminates the work of artists such as Arthur Jafa
(a member of the UM extended family and the maker of Love is the
Message, The Message Is Death from 2016) and Barry Jenkins, who
enthused about Moonlight’s screening there:
“I was struck by what a diverse crowd it was—tons of black folks, people from the
neighborhood, white, Latino, Asian. And I thought, This is America,” says the director,
whose film went on to win the Oscar for best picture. “Nothing could replicate the feeling
that we had that night. It was almost like group therapy, all of us just out there under the
stars, witnessing this thing we’d made and using it to bring us together.”26

In its main galleries, since its founding in 2012, the museum has mounted
eight shows, four of which have been curated by Noah Davis, in a spectral
process in which the museum acquires the titles designated in his notes but
leaves the substance of the exhibition up to the viewers. As the curatorial
notes suggest about our agency to make meaning, through “this process,
Noah has made us better observers, better listeners, and better thinkers.”27
The gallery show I saw at the Underground Museum, “Artists of Color,”
enacted that process brilliantly. A collection of paintings, sculpture, and
installations of color-driven work (not limited to color field painting), the
show popped off the white walls of the gallery space and garden (where an
installation by Diana Thater filtered the Los Angeles sunshine through
scrims of primary colors in tunnels surrounding the courtyard). While color
is a primary artistic tool, and while the show featured works of abstraction
alongside more political uses of color (such as Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s
painting Forbidden Colors, 1988), a combination of four squares of white,
green, red and black that are forbidden by the Israeli army in Palestinian
territories), what went unspoken but nonetheless framed the show was, of
course, the color line, the segregation of the United States into black and
white and one of the powerful connotations of the idea of artists of color
(i.e., Black art). In discrete places, including the entrance to the museum’s
bathroom, Jim Crow signs (were these part of the show or the museum’s
infrastructure?) instructed patrons in the use of white and “colored”
facilities, color thereby acquiring a force both disavowed by the usual
protocols of the art institution/museum space and also foregrounded as
constitutive for the formation of public spaces; it was simultaneously, to use
Deleuzian terms, territorializing, deterritorializing, and reterritorializing.
If the Underground Museum assembles art and activism under the
umbrella of family, FEB poses a more direct challenge to the orthodoxy of
the intellectual world of high art in the United States. Tongues firmly in
cheek, the brothers named their photography blog FEB after a hybrid of the
highbrow art journal October (itself named after the Soviet revolutionary
film by Sergei Eisenstein) and the occurrence of Black History Month in
US schools in February. October, founded by former Artforum critic-
scholars Rosalind Krauss and Annette Michelson in 1976, promoted high-
octane, nominally left-wing, poststructuralist thinking, launching scathing
attacks on their detractors for a small, highly-selective and largely academic
readership, indicatively white. Black History Month, for its part, founded
by historian Carter Woodson in 1926 as Black History Week, set aside time
in February to be contrite about the racism of the other eleven months of
school instruction, trotting out photos of Dr. King and fragments of “I Have
a Dream” to indifferent and cynical students.28 Referencing the
paradoxically lofty out-of-touch aspirations of October and the similarly
clueless politics of Black History Month, FEB constellates colliding objects
and worlds with gleeful energy and curiosity (a word that crops up again
and again in reference to brothers Noah and Kahlil) to challenge the
common sense of art historians and institutions.
Incarnated first as blog, FEB initially simply showcased the brothers’
found photographs, scoured from collectors and other sources. Thinking
about collecting less as an aesthetic form and more as a modern practice,
literary scholar Jeremy Braddock observes that “[r]ather than constructing a
regressive ‘institutional counterspace,’ the modernist collection was figured
as what I will call a provisional institution, a mode of engagement modeling
future—and often more democratic—relationships between audience and
artwork.”29 FEB now (i.e., as a magazine/journal) enacts itself precisely as
such a provisional mode of engagement, archiving the projects of a
constellation of figures who constitute the Underground Museum world: the
family, Kerry James Marshall (whose painting of Nickerson Gardens you
have seen above), Arthur Jafa, and other allies, including scholar-poet Fred
Moten. Provisionality is underscored in the publication as a collection that
could be infinitely expanded: high-quality reproductions of the brothers’
collection of found photographs alternate with images of the museum,
notebook reflections, book and album covers (those of James Baldwin,
Outkast, John Coltrane, Gerhard Richter, etc.), images of artworks,
interviews with the artists, notes for the show “Non Fiction,” and so on.
Importantly, Kahlil Joseph’s films and photographic stills belong to this
collection, but they are no more prominently featured than works by the list
of artists included in the magazine’s first volume: Noah Davis, Durimel,
Kandis Williams, Deana Lawson, Martine Syms, Henry Taylor, Karon
Davis, Nico Young, Fred Moten, and Arthur Jafa. m.A.A.d, Lemonade (for
which Joseph received a co-director credit, since the film was radically
recut after he filmed it), and Process, a 2017 video project with the British
artist Sampha make appearances in FEB but only gesture to Joseph’s
expanding body of work and increasing renown.
 Tracking that body of work as it gains traction, for example at a European
opening of Fly Paper in Berlin as I type this, requires that I note some of
the stylistic preoccupations of Joseph’s work but suspend definitive
pronouncements about what it will have become. While such critical
openness might be the goal of all contextual thinking, it is especially
necessary for an artist whose signature genre is collaborative. To return to
the issue of genre I raised at the beginning, his are all films generated with
and in response to others’ musical compositions and recordings. In the case
of Beyoncé’s Lemonade, the name for the genre emerged as a “visual
album,” something that HBO could broadcast (and monetize) in advance of
the recorded album’s release. While Joseph’s films vary in length to include
much shorter work such as Belhaven, they share with Lemonade an
impressionistic and mood-driven response to the music; I resist the term
“music video,” therefore, for its conventional association with literal
interpretation, images of performance, choreographed dance, and focus on
the musician as star. As with Beyoncé’s journey from rage to redemption in
Lemonade, Joseph’s films likewise emphasize historical ties between
African America and Africa, musical inheritances and affiliations, and
improvisatory and rigorous movement (often by exquisitely trained
dancers) distinct from the choreography of backup dancers from Motown
onward.
We can find repeated and reoccurring visual motifs suggestive of these
associations and affiliations. Empty swimming pools and underwater
footage enable Joseph visually to link Los Angeles neighborhoods with the
African coast, invoking but never naming the Middle Passage. Sampha’s
lifeworld in Morden (South London) similarly links to his Sierra Leonian
background in Process through brilliantly submerged sound and images of
the sea as captivating and beautiful as those in Barry Jenkins’s Moonlight.
There are ties in Joseph’s oeuvre to African cosmology, too, to the role of
water as the source of birth/life. African arts and sounds recur, often as
extensions of the collaborative ethos, for example, with Ori body art in
Lemonade. And Joseph emphasizes links to the soulful, expressive
innovations of street art with Storyboard P, the Brooklyn dancer and body
artist featured in Until the Quiet Comes. If these elements do not explicitly
contribute to Belhaven Meridian, they are nevertheless aspects of its
assemblage, its emplaced articulation, its … context.
 Three minutes and twenty-six seconds of film, unfolding in a single shot:
this is a bridge like Heidegger’s. It connects one artist, Joseph, to the duo of
Shabazz Palaces. It unites a neighborhood with its visionaries,
deterritorializing spaces of violence as streets of possibility. It assembles
African America and Africanity into relations not of derivation or return but
of linkages, affordances, and empowerment. With the twist of the
filmmakers’ wrist, it unveils new modes of sight that remake the world.
Bodies, media, art, sound, light, and movement reveal their layered histories
in Belhaven Meridian, histories that take place now in all of its viewers.

C
In what can feel like a summons, I am drawn to Watts in part because the
first rebellion there took place on my second birthday, August 11, 1965.
Kerry James Marshall’s painting is dated with my birth year. I grew up in
Los Angeles, and my father took me as a kid to admire the Watts towers,
where I learned/was taught that Watts was a place of survival and resistance
and creativity. Perhaps what I recognize in Kahlil Joseph’s film is the
possibility of a shared lifeworld, a vision that can transform us all. That was
Noah Davis’s vision, too: “I strive for an artistic legacy that not only
transcends Blackness but confluences and impacts all cultures.”30

N
1. Frank Capra, The Name Above the Title: An Autobiography (New York: Macmillan, 1971),
325.
2. Akira Mizuta Lippitt, “Like Cats and Dogs: Cinema and Catastrophe,” Parasophia 1, no. 1
(2013): 30–38, http://www.parasophia.jp/en/publications/.
3. Martin Heidegger, “Building, Dwelling, Thinking,” in Basic Writings, rev. and exp. ed., ed.,
David Ferrell Krell (New York: Harper Collins, 1993), 354.
4. See John David Rhodes and Elena Gorfinkel, eds., Taking Place: Location and the Moving
Image (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011).
5. Manuel DeLanda, Assemblage Theory (Edinburgh, Scotland: Edinburgh University Press,
2016), 1.
6. Ibid., 2.
7. Ibid., Assemblage, 3.
8. Manuel DeLanda, A New Philosophy (New York: Continuum, 2006), 5.
9. Ibid., 5–6.
10. Ibid., 6.
11. Ibid., 9.
12. Ibid., 18.
13. Ibid., 28.
14. Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1996), 470–71.
15. David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1990), 147.
16. Ibid., 226.
17. Hilton Als, “The Black Excellence of Kahlil Joseph,” The New Yorker, November 6, 2017,
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/11/06/the-black-excellence-of-kahlil-joseph.
18. I can’t help but insert Michael Gillespie’s public rejoinder to one of these, in which he
reminded his interlocutor that she can’t possibly be Soviet, yet she teaches Eisenstein over and
over.
19. See, for example, coverage of Andy Brown’s death, “Remembering Andy Brown,” The Herald,
March 17, 2014, https://www.herald.co.zw/remembering-andy-brown/.
20. “Violence in the City—an end or the beginning? A Report by the Governor’s Commission on
the Los Angeles Riots,” December 2, 1965, 5, https://archive.org/details/ViolenceInCity.
21. Race + Rage: The Beating of Rodney King, CNN, broadcast, March 5, 2011.
22. Atoosa Moinzadeh, “Tendai Maraire on Shabazz Palaces, Musical Prophecies, and Bridging
American and African Cultures,” Paste Magazine, September 9, 2016,
https://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2016/09/tendai-maraire-on-shabazz-palaces-musical-
propheci.html.
23. From their label’s website: Sub Pop Records, July 14, 2017
https://www.subpop.com/releases/shabazz_palaces/quazarz_vs_the_jealous_machines.
24. I am grateful to my colleague Dehanza Rogers for steering me to the Underground Museum on
a recent trip to Los Angeles.
25. Myriam Ben Salah, “Editor’s letter,” FEB MAG, no. 1 (2017): II.
26. Diane Solway, “How the Family-Run Underground Museum Became One of L.A.’s Most Vital
Cultural Forces,” W Magazine, November 8, 2017,
https://www.wmagazine.com/story/underground-museum-los-angeles-kahlil-joseph-noah-
davis.
27. This phrase repeats in each show’s online description, as in this page for “Water and Power,”
the most recent show as of this writing: https://theunderground-museum.org/Water-Power.
Accessed July 7, 2018.
28. William Matt McCarter, “There Is a White Sale at Macy’s: Reflections on Black History
Month,” Radical Critique 1, no. 2 (2012),
http://www.radicalcritique.org/2012/12/Mccarter.html.
29. Jeremy Braddock, Collecting as Modernist Practice (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 2012), 14.
30. Noah Davis, inscription at the Underground Museum.
 SECTION VI

THE TURN TO EXPERIENCE

 CHAPTER 28

THE AFFECTIVE
TURNABOUT’S FAIR PLAY

SARAH KELLER

Whatever view we hold, it must be shown

Why every lover has a wish to make

Some kind of otherness his own:

Perhaps, in fact, we are never alone.1

THE affective turn in cinema studies has to do with theorizing from a

potentially vast variety of angles the slippery notion of affect, usually in
order better to understand how real or idealized (or disparaged, or resistant)
spectators experience films or how affects expressed through cinema
generate the look, structure, or meaning of films. Depending on whom you
ask, affect in this context may or may not be related to embodied or
disembodied feelings, sentiment, sensation, and/or forms. Like the feelings
it sometimes focuses on, the affective turn is fickle and may connote
different things to different people, a state of affairs that threatens to dilute
its descriptive power as a concept. Moreover, as the term has taken on
greater significance for cinema studies, several scholars have noted that
actually the affective turn is nothing new, just a name for what they have
been pursuing in their work for many years, work that has drawn on others
whose work down the years has done the same.2
Despite beginning here by remarking on how its unwieldy breadth
renders it a tricky barometer for thinking through cinematic experience and
textuality, I offer none of this to suggest that the concept of affect bears no
useful purpose. Nor would I propose narrowing the turn to affect down into
a more manageable size, staking a claim for new, clearer boundaries that
would limit it. Indeed, as I will show, some of its greatest power lies in the
affective turn’s slippery, kaleidoscopic, diverse, and expansive (and still
expanding) attributes. If nothing else, affect serves as a theoretical
repository for disenfranchised, individual, and multifarious experiences of
film, and as such has an intrinsic value for speaking to and for these
experiences when they are (and they often are) left out or diminished in
accounts offered of cinema. The metaphor of leveling the playing field
would be apt here because a key part of the affective turn hinges on the
notion that it promises in its recognition of individual feelings to validate a
wider range of experiences of the cinema. While there are at present so
many little bumps as well as boulders in that playing field that a major
landscaping job would be needed to rectify it, it has been a regular feature
of those filmmakers who work on the margins of the industry to figure out
other ways to play even without the smoothest surface underfoot. Here, I
focus on how the mutability of cinematic affect legitimizes these varied
experiences in relation to what is onscreen and underlines how they bolster
“the wish to make/Some kind of otherness [one’s] own.” To that end,
looking more closely at the dynamics of a few recent films made by a
handful of independent female filmmakers demonstrates both their films’
diverse inclusivity and (relatedly) their emphasis on empathy. Treating their
work in terms of how it addresses itself to a notion of empathy
demonstrates the efficacy of a turn to affect; it asserts how paying attention
to empathy offers a radical way of reading form, with the films’ affective
underpinnings guiding not just narrative meaning but the act of engaging
meaningfully with moving images more generally.
As if to illustrate this point, the opening scene of Céline Sciamma’s
Bande de Filles/Girlhood (2014) presents a football game (American
football) that introduces the issues at play here. While situated in the world
of the film, the sequence presents an emblematic prologue to the themes
and affective engagements of the whole film that rests somewhat outside of
it. Set to Light Asylum’s club anthem “Dark Allies,” the sequence begins
with a blurred shot of hulking young figures in full American football gear
running in slow motion toward the camera.3 Their bodies are armored with
all the equipment accoutrements that render them nearly identical—
helmets, padding, jerseys—with height and mass as the only discernible
differences. After a moment, but not too soon, rather than depicting a boys’
high school game as one might expect, Sciamma shows the players’ faces in
closer shots to reveal that these are energetic and serious girls, divided into
two teams for the same league (in red and white jerseys). They execute
plays, often demonstrating the same aggressive behavior associated with the
heightened masculinity of American football: one woman scowls, another
pulls on the helmet of her opponent, others assail members of the other
team, pulling them down hard in brisk tackles.4 At last one of the players
completes a long pass and runs in for the touchdown. She sets the ball down
on the turf and her teammates come celebrate that victory with her. Lest one
think the point here is combative division between teams, however, very
shortly thereafter, the whole field erupts in joyous celebration, red- and
white-jerseyed players equally jumping up and down and chanting in
celebration (fig. 28.1).
The opening sequence serves the narrative purpose of heralding one of
the film’s main themes: the necessity of a space apart—away from the
influence and repression of male prerogative—for a community of girls (or
any individual girl) to thrive. However, it mobilizes disorientation—our
expectations about watching a football game are thwarted by the
coordination with music, the blurred images, the gender surprise of the
players, the excitement and team spirit (Go Team Girl!) that is not limited to
one team as against another but floods over and flows between the teams
playing the game—in order to generate the film’s affective terrain. Emma
Wilson reads the sequence as one of the film’s many affective
disorientations: “[I]t is heightened, psychedelic, a part of the dream life of
its subjects.”5 She links this mode to Sciamma’s more general (within the
film) “commitment to a filmic synaesthesia, a sort of sensory overload that
surpasses aestheticism to carry intense feeling, to channel rapture,
sensation, hurt.”6
Figure 28.1. Celebrating players in Céline Sciamma’s Bande de Filles/Girlhood, 2014.

In the context of this affective intensity, several things happen. Most

obviously, the sequence rehearses a move from seeing others as others, to
seeing others as part of one’s own team. In a sense, this move suggests
identifying with and recuperating the other to the self (without losing sight
of either the self or the other). As Paul Ricoeur argues of the value of
narrative imagination, it takes a “transfer from Same to Other, in empathic
imagination, that the Other that is foreign is brought closer.”7 What we saw
as two teams are actually two parts of the same team; they maintain their
individuality while recognizing commonality. These girls playing and
wearing the uniforms of a (traditionally) man’s sport are joyously
masquerading to make something Other their own on multiple levels. At a
minimum, it is a move from other to self and from adversary to collective,
and it illustrates figuratively the act of empathy. Moreover, on the affective
level, by the end of the football game, two of the film’s primary modes of
expression for the girls that populate it—fighting and dancing, which are
seen throughout the film—are collapsed. The girls’ jubilation, coordinated
to the pulsing rhythm of the song, is the outcome of their coordinated
fighting aggression which marks the frustration of girls who we learn are
trapped in a system that holds them back and pushes them down. The game
represents one way the girls take matters into their own hands.
 As the film proceeds from this opening moment, which again, stands as
almost a prologue to the rest of the film rather than an integrated part of the
narrative arc (we never see the girls playing football again, nor is anything
about it mentioned again: it almost feels like a dream), it gradually channels
these energies into the restrictive circumstances of the girls’ lives. Their
team spirit lifts them up at this moment; however, immediately after, as they
walk home together, smaller groups among the large mass of loud girls peel
off gradually to their respective homes, becoming quieter and more guarded
as they walk through their neighborhood until only one girl remains, our
primary character Marieme (Karidja Touré), whom we now begin to follow
as an individual. Girlhood separates out this prologue in part to underline
the shifting registers of affective meaning traversed through the rest of the
film. Once the film launches into the main plot, the affect established at the
start continues, trailing the story’s happenings like a shadow. When the
affective energy flags or threatens to become illegible, similar affective
interventions take place. One might be tempted to attribute what David
Bordwell has called a parametric mode of narration—accentuating stylistic
elements over plot—to these incursions into affect, but only if one could
divorce that mode from its associations with a nonhuman, abstract form of
narration.8 The abstractions here, such as they are (including music,
blurring, color) are nonrepresentational but not at all nonhuman. Indeed,
one key benefit of reading empathy as a foundation of affective engagement
is that it validates the kinds of genuinely other-centered narratives as those
discussed here through human feeling expressed in a variety of ways.

T T A
The lively contention about what constitutes the affective turn and its
importance, how it should be delimited in meaning, to what ends it should
be applied, and so forth, has been well documented.9 Here, tracing some of
the angles by which it has been considered will provide an outline to which
I will lend some shading.
Among cognitivist approaches to cinema, affect has flourished in debates
about the greater or lesser role of the film in shaping emotional responses in
spectators. There is a relay between filmmakers and spectator, with the
former peddling emotion through narrative content (and, in fact, vice versa)
to the latter through filmic, narrative devices and cues. As Noël Carroll
makes plain for such an approach: “The filmmakers have selected out the
details of the scene or sequence that they think are emotively significant
and thrust them, so to speak, in our faces.”10 Greg M. Smith considers
scholarship that would take this sort of top-down approach, like Ed Tan’s
work, which claims that emotions are bound up with character motivations
or linked to feeling identificatory anxiety for characters onscreen. That is,
the film dictates emotional investments through identification with
character motivations. Smith concurs with crediting such motivations,
calling them the most “forward” inducements toward emotional investment
for spectators, but then he also creates a bit more room for more abstract
points of entry for feeling—for example, elements of film style—arguing
that in multiplying the possible “nodes” of emotion generated by the film,
there is a greater chance of connecting with the spectator’s existing history
and susceptibility to emotion.11 The dependence on narrative elements in
this approach, with a nod to the possibility of other kinds of elements at
play, banks on an efficient system that delivers affects in order to enhance
the experience of the film. It also counts on (to a significant degree) a
complacent spectator who will take the emotions offered her.
Other scholars focus on parsing the terminology around affect,
distinguishing how and where it goes to work or dividing it into categories,
with “affect” usually the largest category and sentiment, feeling, and
emotion as some of its components; specific emotions and/or affective
effects (e.g., tears) also play a role in some of the approaches to affect for
cinema experiences.12 All of this is useful, particularly if one insists on the
importance of the role of the spectator in studies of affect. Eugenie
Brinkema’s The Form of the Affects, however, does no such thing, instead
turning to a differently useful approach. One of the most attentive thinkers
about how affect has been framed within the recent affective turn, Brinkema
uses close reading as a way to retrain affect in service of the particulars of
form, offering her own readings to show the way. For example, she
expatiates on the subject of how the water’s surface is used in Open Water
(Chris Kentis, 2003) as a formal component that divides not just water and
air but an abundance of interest in form against the film’s narrative
content/character-driven emotions. For Brinkema, that divide articulates the
film’s anxiety as the “potentiality of form.”13 In her approach, Brinkema
pivots consideration of affect toward formal concerns particular to a
specific, complex act of reading. In so doing, she offers a space for form,
shape, and abstraction apart from strictly narrative concerns and detaches
affect from the smooth transfer of feelings from filmmaker to spectator.
Both the cognitivist and affect-as-form approaches offer powerful
accounts of how affect emerges within or helps shape cinematic meanings.
Although it is not the central concern of either of these approaches, they
both nevertheless afford room for contemplating two angles by which the
impact of affect may be viewed in order better to understand how
filmmakers and/or spectators engage with films which will be of concern
here. The first angle is their focus on abstraction, and the second is their
advocacy for disrupting the borders of narrative conventions like
maintaining the illusion of the fiction by not breaking the fourth wall. Both
shape the films of principal concern here, for example in Girlhood’s direct
addresses to the camera as the girls imitate their favorite performers, which
both serves a narrative purpose and somewhat undermines it. These
elements of affect theory correspond to oppositional reading and to the
radical potentialities of women’s films—both in the older sense, maternal
melodrama, and the like, and in a newer sense, in terms of a prevalent ethos
among certain women making films at the margins of cinematic
conventions that concerns itself with others. Both qualities of abstraction
and marginality point to the fecund wildness and individuality available to
affective emphases.
That this investment in affect happens not only in the films under
consideration here but in scholarship and criticism about them suggests the
powerful hold empathy exerts on the cinematic imagination. Empathy—
projecting oneself into the place of/feeling with another—provides a key
foundation for cinema experiences in the contexts of narrative and genre. It
is a necessary ingredient for everything from comedy to melodrama—as
well as in theories about cinema, even from very early on. As Charles
Musser contends, identification with characters and their situations
underlies the development of narrative elements that lead from the cinema
of attractions through the period of transition into narrative integration.14
Identification presupposes on some level that a spectator will care about a
character and invest in her plight, failures, joys, and narrative journey.
However, not limited to prompting character identification, the powers of
the camera help a filmmaker to convey, solicit, and/or represent ideas and
emotions as well as impressions of the world on the levels of style, form,
and abstraction.15 Carroll notes that Béla Balázs’s early writings on film in
the 1920s confer the designation of cinema as an art in its own right
primarily through its expressive capacities, through which film is ultimately
“progressive, putatively putting ‘people of the world’ in touch with their
human potential to apprehend the physiognomy of things, most notably that
of other people,” a potential having been diminished by daily exposure to
the modern world.16 Dwelling on the face (particularly in close-up, which
demands unstraying attention) definitely serves a narrative function—we
read faces to understand feelings that motivate actions, and so on—but it is
also a locus of meditation that transcends narrative functions.17 To inhabit
the time and space of another face marks a moment of empathic arrival. For
both Balázs and filmmaker-theorist Jean Epstein, writing in the same
period, the close-up—and importantly it does not significantly matter
whether it is of a face, typewriter, or an element of the landscape—as a
cinematic device allows ingress through the surface of things, a porosity of
people and things that renders them susceptible to another’s gaze.18 As Tom
Gunning notes, this sense of cinema posits that it offers “a way for human
perception to penetrate into the very life of matter.”19 Film theory has been
concerned in many cases with issues related to the experience of movies, of
feelings, and of the ways spectators imaginatively, perceptively, and
sensuously interact with and interject themselves into cinematic images. At
the heart of these issues is a notion of empathy—an effort to understand or
connect with films and the people, objects, and even moods they project—
which is underlined by as well as the ultimate expression of affect’s power
for studies of cinema.

E A
A path leads from identification by way of imitation to empathy, that is, to the comprehension of
the mechanism by means of which we are enabled to take up any attitude at all towards another
 mental life.20

If we had to imagine the notion of empathy in spatial or geographical

terms, it might effectively be graphed as charting (at least) two points
between which feelings may flow. At each endpoint, there would be a way
of allowing access—imagine perhaps a train yard roundabout through
which fellow feeling might freely traffic—allowing entry and recourse to
the original point. For cinema, these points would designate a filmmaker or
the film text traveling toward and then breaching the roundabout of the
film’s subject, but also, ideally, offering track for any spectator to join the
go-round and encourage connection to these points. Epstein tells us such
circumstances instantiate an “aesthetic of proximity,” through which “every
intimacy” is possible.21 Dwelling with faces in the cinema is just one way
of eliciting empathic responses and of encouraging commerce between the
self and the other. Rapturous engagement with images of any kind likewise
involves a projection or transfer of the self into moving images, an
imaginative displacement of the self–what Michael Fried calls “a perfect
trance of involvement” in an artwork that results in “negating the beholder’s
presence”22—which may be pleasurable or frightening depending on the
situation and the spectator. This trance and transfer bespeak an investment
in something outside the self, an ultimately empathic gesture.
Empathy is one of the core foundations of the affective turn and its
intensities, and it has been so all along. Indeed, the affective turn is not so
much a turn as an existing tendency within cinema studies that has come
into greater consciousness and which is defined by empathic engagement.
Many filmmakers demonstrate a fascination with or allegiance to notions of
empathy. Their work might overtly engage with empathy in their subject
matter, their way of addressing the spectator, or both. For Barbara Hammer,
for example, empathy drives her most important films, including Nitrate
Kisses (1992), which offers portraits of different couples while also
meditating on the history of representations (and censorship) of queer love,
sex, and intimacy.23 As KJ Reith and Mark Toscano describe it in their
screening notes, Nitrate Kisses poses the radical question of how we
“discover and define cinematic images of queerness.” Its answer takes form
in the film as “both a query as to the very nature of a queer cinema as well
as a complex and deeply empathic gesture towards the ongoing creation of
one. By employing gorgeous black and white cinematography intermixed
with historical found footage, Hammer aesthetically disintegrates temporal,
geographical, creative, and political boundaries in her effort to unify rather
than separate.”24
Connection and unity are the aim of works like Nitrate Kisses or, even
more plainly, Hammer’s final performance piece, Evidentiary Bodies (not to
be confused with her film of the same name), in which empathy was not an
oblique partner to the piece but her central theme.25 Indeed, she considered
titling it Empathy for a time before settling on Evidentiary Bodies instead.26
In her description of the motivation for the performance of Evidentiary
Bodies, she wrote of her interest in thinking of others in cinematic terms:
I have found no way to completely understand the ‘other’ or be understood by another. I
have resorted to film, moving images, and sound as the best path for me to make myself
open, vulnerable, giving, sharing, and, yes, unique to my friends and fellow filmmakers, my
artist colleagues, and those who love and appreciate creative and experimental making the
world over.
I still long for that most intimate of sharing and although I can’t crawl inside my lover’s skin
and experience her from the inside out, I can practice an empathetic listening, repeating back
what I have heard and learned, sympathetically embracing “otherness” and difference.
Through this “domestic” practice I extend these tools to the audience through performance
in film.
This could be empathy.27
Figure 28.2. Barbara Hammer’s performance of Evidentiary Bodies, 2016.

The performance piece happened just once, in November 2016 at the

Microscope Gallery in Brooklyn, New York (fig. 28.2). In it, Hammer
worked with a cadre of helpers, collaging older works (e.g., her film
Sanctus, 1990, which uses found footage of X-Ray films to examine the
fragility of filmic bodies) with newer presentations of the ideas that
comprised that work (e.g., projecting X-Rays of her own body around the
room). Further, she engaged the spectators assembled for the performance
both during the performance and in an extended Q&A session afterward
(the latter a hallmark of a Hammer performance or screening whenever she
was in attendance) in a way that underlined the importance of audiences
and others to her work more generally. For Evidentiary Bodies, she enlisted
many collaborators throughout the process, including her long-term life
partner, Florrie Burke, and a more recent musical collaborator, Scott
Norman Johnson. She also projected parts of the work onto the audience
and asked them to cast their attention in multiple directions (across the
space and across the time between past and present works). Her work aims
to honor others and enlist them in her process; it engages, as her program
notes outlined, “an empathetic listening” that reflects her active aim to
“sympathetically embrac[e] ‘otherness’ and difference.” Offering access to
her own person—imagining empathy as a two-way street, or again, a
roundabout—she invited her audience metaphorically to enter her body of
work and even her own body when she made them enter the room by
passing through sheets of her own X-Rays. Conceptually, her film practice
exhibits empathic connection: “One person extends to many and many
people extend to one, challenging the concept of the proscenium screen and
the stable audience.”28
As an experimental artist, the outlets for Hammer’s work might be more
flexibly adapted to this type of exploration of empathy. But empathy
underscores many modes of filmmaking in thematic and formal terms.
Kelly Reichardt’s narrative feature Certain Women (2016), for example,
adopts a structure not entirely dissimilar to Nitrate Kisses, dividing into
three loosely connected stories featuring women in the central roles. The
effect of segmenting the stories is first of all to fragment their narrative
movement forward (each one ends without closure; in the film’s ending, it
revisits each story very briefly, gesturing toward but not insisting on
closure). However, like Hammer’s film, the division into three sections
serves overall not to cut the women off from each other but to point out
connections and unity among them, this specific collection of “certain
women” presented by the film. Thus, the cement for the film is thematic
and/or stylistic rather than a traditional narrative arc. That is, for instance,
the emphasis on enclosed spaces—people framed in doorways and corridors
or small rooms—reads across the segments, as does the idea of women
looking to assert their voices amidst male concerns that try to thrust
themselves forward in the place of that voice. In both aspects, the film
emphasizes affective elements—the way the spaces generate feelings of
claustrophobia, the way these certain women yearn to be heard properly
through language and movement. Movement is a motif of the film: it begins
with a train entering the space of the frame; it continues most remarkably
with the rancher/would-be law student enamored of her teacher who arrives
for class on horseback and convinces that teacher to join her for a ride to the
local diner for a bit. In that motion, there is repressed emotion, and we are
invited to read the film’s trajectory geographically as a part of its journey
through the uncharted realms of female feelings finding expression in
cinematic terms.
Other films do not depend on innovations in narrative structure to provide
the design for conveying complex affective systems. In recent films that
focus on the experience of others, like Sciamma’s Girlhood, as well as
Chloé Zhao’s The Rider (2017) and Kirsten Johnson’s documentary feature
Cameraperson (2016), we find examples of work engaged with empathy.
Their affective energy is tied up with the narrative and extranarrative
meanings that hinge on empathic exchange both within the film and for the
spectator of it.
Zhao’s film centers on Brady Blackburn (Brady Jandreau), a young rodeo
rider who has recently sustained a head injury from a fall, and his milieu as
a member of a Lakota Sioux family and community in South Dakota.
Jandreau plays a version of himself, as do his sister and father and his
friends in the rodeo circuit and at home. In an interview about the film,
Zhao noted that it was built on the principle of understanding between two
people who on the surface are very different—Zhao immigrated from China
to the United States as a teenager; Jandreau worked on a Lakota Sioux
ranch when Zhao was making another film and, observing his penchant for
gentleness working with animals, wanted to film him despite (or because
of) his not being a professional actor. She remarked, “I think The Rider
became the type of film it is because of a man and a woman, because the
two of us wanted to work together and understand where we were coming
from.”29 Zhao portrays Jandreau’s real-life injury and struggles in a way
that allows him to narrate the story through actions, gesture, the face, and
the landscape. Her method was to stand by and allow his being to shape a
scene. For a sequence in which Brady tames a wild horse, for example,
Zhao filmed in two long takes and cut it together so that we witness his way
of doing things with minimal interference by her point of view. What
mattered for her was to bear witness to his way of being and let it speak for
itself. Reviews of the film primarily centered on a notion of generosity on
the part of Zhao’s working mode: her interest in, curiosity about, and
respect for Brady’s manner of interacting with people and animals (fig.
28.3). Godfrey Cheshire picks up on this idea in his review of the film when
he comments on “Zhao’s profoundly sensual and instinctive way of
immersing us in the character of Brady and his world.” As this would
suggest, her method strikes empathic and affective chords as well as
documentary ones.30

Figure 28.3. Brady Jandreau working with horses in The Rider Chloe Zhao, 2017.

In a different way, Girlhood elicits affective responses through

engagement with difficult realities, as we have seen for its opening
sequence but which extend beyond it. Some of the intertexts for Sciamma’s
film assist in the film’s avenues to affect. These include Jean-Luc Godard’s
Bande à part/Band of Outsiders (1964) and films focused, like Girlhood, on
the Banlieue such as La haine (Mathieu Kassovitz, 1995), as well as
popular songs like Rihanna’s “Diamonds” and the music video/YouTube
DIY stardom genres that play an important role across the film. Looking
outward toward the film’s intertexts both facilitates distraction from
narrative containment and expands the film’s compass to the lives of young
women living by the same strictures as those depicted in the film. As
Isabelle McNeill put it in relation to this film, and drawing on Anna
Everett’s notion of digitextuality, Girlhood “bursts the boundaries of the
film’s fictional world and makes its sounds and images resonate in a virtual,
shared, and contemporary cultural space.”31 Sciamma’s emphasis on color,
music, and blurred images are just some of the ways her film hews to
abstraction and activates that wide range of “nodes” of emotional
engagement described in Smith and addressed above.
Multiple sequences in Girlhood underline these simultaneous levels of
affective reach and engagement. As in the opening sequence discussed
above, affective modes shift based on different activities and levels of
togetherness: dancing all together, fighting one on one, walking around
together or alone. Dance is reserved for moments of connection and joy: the
girl gang of four rents a hotel room where they sing and dance together; on
the train, they teach Marieme their dance moves; a large group of girls
meets at the plaza at La Défense where they have a kind of dance-off. In
this last example, the girls are presented both as individuals and as part of a
collective in a long tracking movement across their line of bodies.32 The
camera movement spells out both their individuality and their connection.
Elsewhere, fighting serves as an explosion of the frustrations the girls’
experience: they yell at and brandish a knife at another girl gang across a
Métro platform; the ostensible leader of the group, Lady (Assa Sylla), fights
another girl in a highly visible public forum (and loses, bringing shame on
herself until Marieme challenges the girl and wins); Marieme threatens the
woman who would employ her in a dead-end job like the one her mother
has. Excess energy and frustration are channeled into these activities and
assert the individuality of each fighter; these are neither communal nor
empathic moments, but they establish self/other relations that are then
bridged in the moments when their commonality is asserted. Moreover, the
opening sequence suggests that unloosing and then controlling affective
intensity as expressed within and between the bodies of the girls will be the
subject of the film. In the aestheticization of these bodies, for instance in the
blue light, rhythm, and joyous dancing just for each other’s pleasure in the
“Diamonds” sequence, which they perform directly for the camera and each
other (fig. 28.4) (and in the girls’ occasional resistance to the gaze upon
those bodies, such as when Marieme dons baggy clothes and binds her
breasts after finishing her shift delivering drugs to fancy parties in a fancy
party dress), the film takes a shortcut to the feelings as yet inarticulable to
them.

Figure 28.4. Girlhood: Lady Sings to the Camera, 2014.

While a film like Girlhood expresses issues of empathy in a narrative

context, troubling the line between narrative and extranarrative concerns,
affect as a structuring principle is not limited to narrative contexts, or even
on some level to the intentions of the filmmaker, as the foregoing
discussion has on some level assumed. Take Kirsten Johnson’s
Cameraperson as a noteworthy example. Comprised of footage Johnson
took primarily as a documentary cinematographer for projects directed by
others (including Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004), Laura Poitras’s
Citizenfour (2014), and Kirby Dick’s Derrida (2002)), she frames it in the
opening title as something more personal—a map of her engagement with
others in the world—as well as something more organically expressive of
empathic connection, less developed by individual design:
 For the past 25 years I’ve worked as a documentary cinematographer. I originally shot the
following footage for other films, but here I ask you to see it as my memoir. These are the
images that have marked me and leave me wondering still.
With love, KJ

The clips Johnson includes vary in place, theme, and time. Because she was
the cameraperson rather than the director of most of the footage, the variety
is understandable. Nevertheless, she is deliberate in her framing of shots,
and her involvement with her film’s subjects becomes evident. She offers a
consistent yet richly textured document of her own interaction with (often
marginalized and terrorized) individuals, communities, institutions, and
attitudes, and as such merges the personal with the global. While she
maintains distance at all times, there are multiple occasions when it is clear
she is moved by or even pulled into the trauma or feelings of the scene she
is shooting, and that she is implicated in the moment in some way. A baby
is born in an underfunded clinic in Kano, Nigeria and we hear Johnson
conversing offscreen about where the midwife is taking it, whether it is
okay, and so forth. It is not okay: they do not have oxygen and the baby
needs it. A young woman waiting to see someone at a clinic tearfully
explains why she needs to have an abortion; the women behind the camera
commiserate with her, telling her it’s going to be okay and that they
understand.
When the footage swings toward the more directly personal—for
instance, in which Johnson’s mother, suffering from Alzheimer’s disease,
looks through photographs or walks around a property, trying to remember
details about her life and family—the emotional charge of the scenes filmed
makes perfect sense. But both types of footage are cut of the same cloth: in
her role as documentary cameraperson rather than journalist, Johnson has
been witness, but usually long after the fact, to horrific sites in history: in a
montage of silent, still shots, she shows sunflowers blowing in the wind at
Wounded Knee, a silent nighttime Tahrir Square, a statue of the Virgin
Mary at Nyamata Church, the World Trade Center site, Hotel Africa,
Guantanamo Bay Camp X-Ray, the Bibi Mahru Hill Swimming Pool, with
each site accompanied by an explanatory title such as “site of massacre of
10,000 Rwandan Tutsis,” “site of Taliban public executions,” or “site of
prisoner torture and abuse” (fig. 28.5). The aesthetics of the images are
undercut by her explanation, and they become charged with the affect their
empty surfaces hide. The second short sequence of the film shows her
filming along a highway when a sudden, totally unexpected crack of
lightning bursts on the horizon. She gasps and giggles, and the sequence, in
addition to underlining the sometimes-kismet that is part of the role she
plays, shows us that there is a dedicated but also responsive and deeply
feeling human behind the camera.

Figure 28.5. Bibi Mahru Hill Swimming Pool in Kirsten Johnson’s Cameraperson, 2016.

The footage consistently provides a fortuitous commentary on what this

role involves. One of the key sets of footage she returns to several times
was taken in Bosnia, as part of a documentary on the systematic
suppression, rape, and ethnic cleansing of communities (especially of
women) there. Sejid Koso, a war crimes site investigator and film
production driver, is in conversation with Velma Saric, a translator and field
producer, recalling a woman whose face goes completely dark as he drives
her to the site of her former house, where her whole family was killed. Saric
notes: “Our jobs are hard on us because we somehow process these stories
and we put them inside ourselves.” After taking in all of these stories, she
wonders, “What is your channel to let it go?” Johnson’s film seems to be
the answer: it is the channel for feeling, for empathy, about historic
atrocities as well as for incidents very close to home, personal tragedies like
the loss of her mother first to Alzheimer’s and then to death. As Michael
Koresky noted after the film’s release, “These tactics don’t convey some
banal observation on the interconnectedness of our world but a revelation of
the inner world of the film’s creator.”33 In fact it’s both a revelation about
interconnectedness and her inner world: its point is to connect the world
through her own processing of it in images and sounds, which models an
expression of empathy.
Several of these examples—Certain Women, Girlhood, and
Cameraperson—all are structured episodically, with distinct cuts and beats
between the parts. Certain Women has three stories strongly divided but
linked thematically; Girlhood is punctuated several times by a fade to black
(which sometimes lasts for up to around sixteen seconds) before beginning
a new scene; Cameraperson often lingers only for a few seconds before
cutting to another scene, often without a clear connection. The
fragmentation of the parts of each film serves to create multiple points of
possible identification, such that the overall effect is to nurture
identification in general rather than for one specific character arc that ends
in motivating a narrative action, even in the narrative films.
Further, the types of identification on offer fall into a range of categories.
That is, on one level, these three films, as well as Hammer’s and Zhao’s
films, demonstrate a filmmaker’s investment in a range of kinds of people:
queer, Black, Native American, immigrant, young, old, ethnic minorities
and majorities, disabled, rural, and so forth, often (but not exclusively)
identities removed from that of the filmmakers. The commitment to
expressing the experience of others in these films is not limited to focusing
on subjects who may be like the directors of those films. In different ways,
each of these films emphasizes the legitimacy of different ways of being.
They underline the power of the camera to convey a fundamental empathy
for the range of people on whom the films train their gaze. In addition to
different kinds of identities explored by the filmmakers, as we have seen,
they work in a range of styles, forms, using abstraction, narration,
documentation—a variety of rhetorical styles—to engage with their
subjects empathically and to encourage that level of engagement from their
viewers in order to have the films mean something: here, empathic
engagement is itself the point.

F T A
Turning to these independent features, one discovers a clear investment in
the lives of others and an attention to the variety of ways those lives might
be examined or expressed. If one casts a magnified eye to the untended
corners, the margins of the cinema industry’s landscape, one might likewise
observe that such expression takes on interesting forms. And, actually, it
turns out a telescope works less well than a kaleidoscope might: as we have
seen, these films foster a tendency toward multiplicity.
The history of women’s filmmaking neatly demonstrates the necessity of
better democratizing the tools available to a wider range of filmmakers who
might convey different frames for empathic understanding. Even women
working within the full studio supports of the Hollywood milieu have
enjoyed fewer of the spoils of that system, systematically. That story has
been unfolding for a long time. Despite recent improvements, in the first
eighty-nine years of the Academy Awards, only five women—Lina
Wertmüller, Jane Campion, Kathryn Bigelow, Sofia Coppola, and Greta
Gerwig—were nominated for an award in directing, and only one (Bigelow)
won in that category.34 While a number of smaller-budget films directed by
women have been released over those years, many remarkable works did
not garner the attention deserved. Many smaller films (and films directed by
women often fall into this category tout court) never make it to smaller
cities except when promoted by film societies, limiting the audience and the
films’ part in larger conversations about contemporary cinema. Streaming
platforms have partly alleviated but not eliminated this issue. It will be
interesting to observe whether these demographics will shift given the
radical change in viewing practices brought on by the 2020 pandemic and
whether women will fare better or worse based on different platforms for
release of their films. (For example, Reichardt’s release of First Cow was
interrupted by the closure of cinemas; subsequently, it was released in 2020
as a for-purchase title streaming on Amazon.)
 Indeed, certain signs suggest modest improvements are underway. In
2021, two women (at once!) were nominated for best director at the
Academy Awards, Chloe Zhao for Nomadland and Emerald Fennell for
Promising Young Woman, and Zhao won in that category. Moreover, while
in 2018, only 4 percent of the one hundred biggest box office film
productions were helmed by women, the needle has moved slowly in the
direction of inclusion (12 percent in 2019 and 16 percent in 2020).35 Also,
within the past few years, indications that the odds are stacked against
women asserting themselves in the industry have been assuaged somewhat
by the fact of the renewed vigor with which some high-profile film
festivals, like Sundance and the Toronto International Film Festival, have
aimed for greater inclusion of films directed by women. These festivals’
efforts have also helped some of these films gain wider circulation
postfestival.36 Further, other festivals are dedicated exclusively to work
directed by women, like the remarkable Seoul International Women’s Film
Festival (SIWFF), for which sold-out screenings of a robust selection of
films directed by women in the 2019 festival were common.37 There are
indications that the attention received by women’s films showing in such
festivals is on the rise, and one hopes the same could be said about
filmmakers from other marginalized groups, including Black, Latinx,
indigenous, immigrant, trans, and as many others as there exist.38
What is gained by greater exposure for films made by women and others
is a brighter, vaster array of approaches to the experiences and ways of
viewing the world, including (but as we have seen not at all limited to)
people like the filmmakers themselves. It is not that mainstream films over
the course of film history are not interested in empathy; I would argue
neither that women are more naturally inclined to empathy nor that they
possess a monopoly on the application of the concept to the way they make
films. Still, an expansion of perspectives is desirable, if only to lend some
correction to the tendency toward modes of narrative identification that
have created so many troubles for women spectators and feminist film
theorists. If women have been asked to occupy a difficult position relative
to power relations articulated by the representations, themes, or apparatus
for narrative feature films in the classical style, whether in abjection or
drawing on the subversive possibilities of masquerade, that may be in large
part because they remained on the margins of films’ production of
experiences. As Guiliana Bruno has observed, “dislocation has always
marked the terrain of the female traveler,” whether in actual travel or in the
imaginative terrain of cultural products like cinema.39 Projecting oneself
into the lives of others does not have to be an unpleasant dislocation,
however.
Like W. H. Auden’s observation about making otherness one’s own,
identification with others in cinematic terms may derive from the suspicion
that “in fact, we are never alone” to begin with. In the cinematic image,
there is a degree of otherness that a canny filmmaker might tap into in order
to tap into the desire to know the other, which is also a desire better to
understand the self in relation to them. In an interview with Lana
Wachowski, interviewer Cael M. Keegan remarks: “You’re asking
audiences to sense beneath the surface of things, teaching that cinema is not
only about what we see but how it impacts us affectively—in our bodies,
our feelings, our sensoria.”40 Soon thereafter, Wachowski concurs, relating
this to the invitation, terms, and demands of empathy: “Every work of art is
an invitation to another perspective, another way of seeing and abandoning
your own eyes, your perspectives, your prejudices, your assumptions.
Trying to experience the world through someone else’s eyes is an act of
love. […] Understanding requires empathy.”41
Underpinning the turn to affect is a perceived need to revive the
moribund body of the personal, the individual, the felt/lived experience
from the blow delivered to it by theoretical positions (for example, those
that depersonalize the spectator) endemic to early instantiations of cinema
studies in the academy. One benefit of the return to affect has been greater
acknowledgment of individual experiences of cinema, validating a wider
range of individual spectators—a democratic impulse aiming to bring
disenfranchised viewers into the fold of cinematic empowerment. In
addition to that validation, a key reason for the affective turn has been to
account for the impact of cinema on spectators—whether cinephiles or
cinephobes—who have discerned in the cinema a powerful tool for artistic
expression, articulation of present-day realities, escapism, and/or ideology.
Rounding the affective turn, we discover embodied experience as a not-
singular phenomenon. It is an expansive space offering room for the many,
the multiple, the in-process and unfixed experiences of cinema as expressed
by (again) the many, the multiple, the in-process, and unfixed people who
experience it.
Film experience should be validated and acknowledged both as unique
and as part of a complex tapestry of affects, which are expressed through
reading the form of the film but also through, drawing on Jean-Pierre
Meunier’s idea of film experience, a being-with the film.42 I mean both a
moment of shared being—which endures as long as the spectator is engaged
with the film and involves a variable set of qualities that define the
spectator’s and film’s merger—and an extensive experience, which includes
the aftereffects (in the continuation of the film experience by writing about
it, for instance, or in really any further engagements with the film). When
Roland Barthes describes leaving a movie theater as an emergence out of
hypnosis in which he feels the aftereffects of feeling “as if I had two bodies
at the same time,” he taps into the notion of a multiplication of the self
while occupying the realm of others.43 Lingering aftereffects grant a sense
of having been with and, even, having been a part of the others witnessed in
the immersive environment of the cinema.
The different ways the films discussed here attend to multiple
perspectives—an empathic effort to bridge the distance between disparate
bodies—demonstrates how the affective turn and its parallel turn to
experience might marshal productive tensions between actual individuals
and the masses. The provinces of theory (as well as the films they try to
describe) serve as a site for navigating and acknowledging both the one and
the many. This is to assert a place (even a very small, body-sized space) for
theory’s meaningful application to how actual bodies experience cinema
and how one might usefully think of other bodies doing the same. Certain
filmmakers and spectators are engaged with those questions through a
multiplicity of approaches to the form and themes of films.
Whether the affective turn will assist in allowing individual experience to
come to the fore in cinema studies and cinema more broadly may be a moot
point without a corresponding validation of filmmaking practices that put
affect at their center. While plenty of films in the mode discussed here
receive critical accolades and validation in scholarship, the relative dearth
of possibilities for project funding by a wider range of filmmakers remains.
As is the case in other realms of cultural, social, economic, and political
life, expanding opportunities for participation is crucial. For the television
and internet exhibition contexts, Aymar Jean Christian’s Open TV network
offers a promising starting point that could extend to cinema (or cinema
could extend to the same networks as the closure of cinemas begins to
prompt thinking differently about exhibition formats).44 For cinema (and,
again, television), the Sundance Institute and Collab workshops offer an
inroad for would-be filmmakers; initiatives to diversify media corporations
and award-granting bodies like the Academy aim to do the same from the
top down.45 For the marginalia of film experience, even an act of reading a
film for traces of connection among disparate folks may be a modest but
radical gesture toward understanding and coming to terms with others. The
affective turn makes fairer play for the democracy of experience on the
level of theory. As the girls jumping together at the start of Girlhood might
recognize: leveling the playing field, in this case by putting the girls in for
the team, can be a joyous outlet and occasion.

N
1. W. H. Auden, “Are You There?” (1941), https://allpoetry.com/Are-You-There-.
2. For example, at the “Affect and Feminist Media Histories Workshop,” hosted on May 15,
2020, on Zoom, by the University of Washington and Feminist Media Histories: an
International Journal, organizer Jennifer Bean and panelist Ann Cvetkovich both remarked
that their work had for a long time addressed issues of “affect” before that term was widely
applied to such work.
3. Isabelle McNeill identifies the song as a “queer club hit.” Isabelle McNeill, “‘Shine Bright
Like a Diamond’: Music, Performance and Digitextuality in Céline Sciamma’s Bande de filles
(2014),” Studies in French Cinema, 18, no. 4 (November 2018): 326–40.
4. Erik Levine’s short film More Man (2005) illustrates this ethos of American football for young
men.
5. Emma Wilson, “Scenes of Hurt and Rapture: Céline Sciamma’s Girlhood,” Film Quarterly
70.3 (Spring 2017): 13.
6. Ibid., 12.
7. Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 3 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 185–
86. As Richard Kearney has explained, Ricoeur refers to the historical imagination of things
that have actually happened, but that are put into narrative terms. The key for Kearney is that
Ricoeur’s move to recognize the similarity of the past must be accompanied by recognition of
its dissimilarity at the same time. It “refuses to allow reconstruction to become a reduction of
the other to the self; it resists absorbing difference into sameness.” See Richard Kearney, “The
Crisis of Narrative in Contemporary Culture,” Metaphilosophy 28, no. 3 (July 1997): 189–90.
 8. David Bordwell, Narration and the Fiction Film (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press,
1985), 274–310. Sarah Kozloff, in her review of Bordwell’s book, points out how adamantly
Bordwell “condemns the positing of a grand image-maker as an ‘anthropomorphic fiction’ and
goes on to transfer what I would label as human activities and qualities to an abstract process.”
While he grants certain presence to a “narrating entity” in the parametric mode, in general,
Kozloff notes, Bordwell wishes to divorce narrative texts not only from concrete, flesh-and-
blood creators but even from loose models of human behavior” (Sarah Kozloff, “Review:
Narration and the Fiction Film,” Film Quarterly 40, no. 1 (Autumn, 1986): 44).
9. Catherine Grant has compiled a useful collection of writings on the topic in her ever-generous
initiative, Film Studies for Free: https://filmstudiesforfree.blogspot.com/2011/11/on-affect-
and-emotion-in-film-and-media.html.
10. Noël Carroll, “Film, Emotion, and Genre,” in Passionate Views: Film, Cognition, and Emotion,
ed. Carl Plantinga and Greg M. Smith (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press,
1999), 29.
11. Greg M. Smith, “Local Emotions, Global Moods, and Film Structure,” in Passionate Views,
104–6.
12. For example, a 2011 dossier in Media Commons’ In Media Res project, “Steven Shaviro’s
Post-Cinematic Affect,” offers some of these perspectives:
http://mediacommons.org/imr/theme-week/2011/35/steven-shaviros-post-cinematic-affect-
august-29-sept-2-2011. Other places where the general outline of cinema’s turn to affect is
discussed include the introduction to Eugenie Brinkema, The Forms of the Affects (Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 2014), which outlines several more, as does Gregory Flaxman,
“Once More, with Feeling: Cinema and Cinesthesia,” SubStance 45, no. 3 (2016): 174–89.
Laura Marks, The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment and the Senses
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), also offers the distinction of situating affect
studies in terms of the physical senses of spectators.
13. Brinkema, Forms of the Affects, 210–40.
14. Charles Musser, “Rethinking Early Cinema: Cinema of Attractions and Narrativity,” in The
Cinema of Attractions Reloaded, ed. Wanda Strauven (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University
Press, 2006), 389–416.
15. See, for example, Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another (Gifford Lectures, University of Edinburgh
1986); Christian Metz, The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977); Elizabeth Cowie, Representing the Woman:
Cinema and Psychoanalysis (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996). That all of
these sources draw on psychoanalytic theories might well be cause for a follow-up essay to
address that issue.
16. Noël Carroll, “Béla Balázs: The Face of Cinema,” October 148 (Spring 2014): 58. Carroll
remarks on Balázs’s emphasis on expressiveness primarily to assert its status as art.
17. See Noa Steimatsky’s The Face on Film (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), as well as
Jacques Aumont, Du Visage au cinéma (Paris: Cahiers du Cinema, 1992).
18. Béla Balazs, “The Close-Up,” in Early Film Theory: Visible Man and The Spirit of Film, ed.
Erica Carter (New York: Berghahn Books, 2010), 38–45, and Jean Epstein, “Magnification,” in
French Film Theory and Criticism: 1907-1929, ed. Richard Abel (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1993), 235–41.
19. Tom Gunning, “Preface,” in Jean Epstein: Critical Essays and New Translations, ed. Sarah
Keller and Jason N. Paul (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2012), 14.
20. Sigmund Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921), cited in Cowie,
Representing the Woman, 72.
21. Jean Epstein, “An Aesthetic of Proximity,” in Keller and Paul, Jean Epstein, 272–73.
22. Michael Fried, Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 42.
23. Nitrate Kisses (1992) was Hammer’s first feature-length film made after over two decades of
mainly experimental filmmaking. It is usually described as an experimental documentary.
Broken into four sections with a couple at the center of each part, it aims to recuperate queer
history in the context of film and cultural history.
24. KJ Reith and Mark Toscano, screening notes for “Nitrate Kisses and Generations” program in
Barbara Hammer: Superdyke Retrospective at Museum of the Moving Image, July 27 and 28,
2019, http://www.movingimage.us/visit/calendar/2019/07/27/detail/nitrate-kisses-generations
25. Evidentiary Bodies became the title for four separate works that Hammer created or worked on:
an installation, a retrospective exhibition, a film, and a performance piece.
26. Hammer recalled her thinking about the title in an interview with Svetlana Kitto for the
Smithsonian in March 2018. “I really wanted to understand—my goal in life and even with my
last film, which I almost called Empathy rather than Evidentiary Bodies, is to be able to know
you from the inside out. Why can’t we have a way of, I don’t know, becoming the other
person, where, I don’t know, it could be seconds, it could be an hour—but to really see the
world through someone else’s eyes?” Oral History interview with Barbara Hammer, March
15–17, 2018, https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-barbara-
hammer-17555.
27. Barbara Hammer Archive, Box 8, Westbeth Studios, accessed February 2017.
28. Ibid.
29. Eric Kohn, “Chloe Zhao’s The Rider Is a Welcome Antidote to the Age of Donald Trump,”
IndieWire, Nov. 14, 2018, https://www.indiewire.com/2018/11/chloe-zhao-the-rider-the-
eternals-1202020696/.
30. Godfrey Cheshire, “Review of The Rider,” RogerEbert.com, April 13, 2018,
https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/the-rider-2018.
31. McNeill, “Shine Bright,” 326–40; McNeill draws on Anna Everett, “Digitextuality and Click
Theory: Theses on Convergence Media in the Digital Age,” in New Media: Theories and
Practices of Digitextuality, ed. John T. Caldwell and Anna Everett (New York: Routledge,
2003), 3–28.
32. The movement and its individual/collective energy remind the viewer of Agnès Varda’s
Women’s Answer (1975), which makes a similar move for a similar reason, and in its
documentary aim to argue for women’s rights, dovetails with Sciamma’s purpose. See Sarah
Keller, “Women’s Answer: Agnès Varda and Barbara Hammer” philoSOPHIA 10, no. 1
(2020): 107–12.
33. Michael Koresky, “I Am a Camera,” Film Comment, September/October 2016,
https://www.filmcomment.com/article/kirsten-johnson-cameraperson/.
34. Ashley Lee, “Oscar Nominations Shut Out Female Directors—Again,” Los Angeles Times,
January 22, 2019. The same is true for the below-the-line workers in most fields of film
production, although work is being done simply to make those workers (male or female) more
visible in current scholarship.
35. Cara Buckley, “Fewer Women Directed Top Films in 2018,” New York Times, January 3, 2019.
See also https://womenandhollywood.com/resources/statistics/, which tracks these statistics
over the past decade or so.
36. The balance is becoming more equal in several festivals, and the attention female directors
receive is finding outlets in mainstream media. See Anna Moeslein, “This Year’s Sundance
 Film Festival Was Big for Female Directors,” Glamour, February 4, 2019,
https://www.glamour.com/story/sundance-film-festival-2019-female-directors.
37. The SIWFF in 2019 featured approximately 120 films all made by women directors, and 33
screenings were sold out in advance of the start of the festival.
38. See Kate Erbland, “Film Festivals See ‘Historic Highs’ in Female Filmmaker Representation,
But the Gender Divide Remains Steep,” IndieWire, June 18, 2019,
https://www.indiewire.com/2019/06/film-festivals-female-filmmaker-representation-
1202150608/.
39. Guiliana Bruno, Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture, and Film (New York: Verso,
2002), 86.
40. Cael M. Keegan, “Interview with Lana Wachowski” (June 30, 2017), in Lana and Lilly
Wachowski (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2018), 139.
41. Ibid., 141.
42. Jean-Pierre Meunier, The Structures of the Film Experience: Historical Assessments and
Phenomenological Expansions, ed. Julian Hanich and Daniel Fairfax (Amsterdam: Amsterdam
University Press, 2019).
43. Roland Barthes, “Leaving the Movie Theater,” in The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard
Howard (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1986), 349.
44. Aymar Jean Christian, Open TV: Innovation Beyond Hollywood and the Rise of Web Television
(New York: New York University Press, 2018). Christian is both scholar and producer of
networked television.
45. The 2020 round of invitations to join Academy membership “surpassed [their] goal to double
[the] number of women and underrepresented ethnic/racial communities by 2020,” according
to their press release on June 30, 2020: https://www.oscars.org/news/academy-invites-819-
membership.
 CHAPTER 29

AN INVENTION WITH A
FUTURE
Collective Viewing, Joint Deep
Attention, and the Ongoing
Value of the Cinema

JULIAN HANICH

“[M]y consciousness of the attention of others

affects the orientation of my own attention.”

—Yves Citton1

D C C
F
IT’S surely one of the most beloved ironies of cinema history: when Louis
Lumière, at the very beginning of the history of cinema, famously predicted
that what he had helped to create was an “invention without a future,” he
did not foresee that the future of the cinema was to become the most
important art form of the twentieth century.2 As we all know, this art form
was, from the start, tightly tied to a specific dispositive: the movie theater.
Today, in our age of mobile screens—and long after the age of television,
the VHS recorder, and the DVD player—these ties are loosened to the point
where viewers watch only a small fraction of films in movie theaters:
Cinemagoing has ceased to be the default way of watching films long ago.
It is an almost equally great irony, though, that the cinema, once praised or
derided as a place of distraction by film theorists and cultural critics, is now
valued by many as a sanctuary of focused attention and concentration. As
Daniel Fairfax has recently put it, only slightly exaggerating, “It’s the place
where we have the possibility for the most concentrated experiences
possible in the modern world.”3 Precisely because the cinema is a
dispositive that enables, or at least facilitates, these concentrated and
focused experiences, we have to insist on its ongoing existence as a vital
cultural practice and social institution, securing its place in what Yves
Citton calls a healthy “ecology of attention.”4
At the same time we need to develop a greater sensitivity, in our students
and in ourselves, to when it is more appropriate to view a film in a cinema
rather than watch it elsewhere. Like a child in a toy store trembling with
consumer frenzy, how can we not feel overwhelmed by the enormous
choice of filmic artworks, movie entertainment, serial television fare,
multiscreen installations, and endless amounts of other moving-image
offerings surrounding us? At the risk of evoking a “Gothic nightmare of
fragmentation, sensory overload, an excess of meaninglessness, loss of
tradition,” as Adrian Martin puts it, I will urge us to reconsider not only to
what we devote our attention but also where, when, and how we do so.5 I
will suggest that more than ever it is necessary to become dispositive
conscious—even dispositive conscientious. Put bluntly, once we decide to
stay on our sofas and stream challenging films—like modernist art films,
slow cinema, avant-garde films—on our laptops, we knowingly or
unknowingly run the risk of robbing ourselves of experiences available first
and foremost in the cinema.6 In accordance with a number of other scholars,
Shane Denson and Julia Leyday have proposed the term “postcinema” for
today’s collection of newer media and dispositives which follow (but also
coexist with) the cinema. For Denson and Leyda, taking a postcinematic
perspective implies thinking about “the affordances (and limitations) of the
emerging media regime.”7 I agree: We have to investigate—and teach—
what particular media and their dispositives make possible for us and what
they prevent us from.8 Seen from this perspective, it is not at all far-fetched
to believe that we better engage some films privately and alone at home,
whereas we do better to watch other films in the public space of the cinema
and in the company of others. The latter, I claim, is the case for challenging
modernist art films, slow cinema, avant-garde films, and the like.
Among the phenomena that make me think so is the one in which I am
most interested here: joint deep attention. According to Katherine Hayles,
deep attention is a cognitive mode characterized by “concentrating on a
single object for long periods […], ignoring outside stimuli while so
engaged, preferring a single information stream, and having a high
tolerance for long focus times.”9 Hayles contrasts deep attention with
another cognitive mode she calls hyperattention, which is characterized by
“switching focus rapidly among different tasks, preferring multiple
information streams, seeking a high level of stimulation, and having a low
tolerance for boredom.”10 Due to its spatial and technological features the
cinema allows us to follow films of the more challenging kind with deep
attention, but it does so in part because of another central characteristic: the
co-presence of other viewers. Their deep attention can contagiously rub off
on ours and help us keep focused. Hence my term “joint deep attention.”
Let me illustrate this claim with an analogy: I can surely read a
bewilderingly complicated philosophical text by Hegel or Heidegger,
Adorno or Arendt while standing in a crowded subway or, even more
absurdly, dancing in a club. Does this change the content of the book?
Obviously not. But my experience of The Phenomenology of Spirit or Being
and Time, Negative Dialectics, or The Human Condition will be a different
one if I read the book in a quiet library peopled with quietly reading
scholars whose attention helps me keep my own attention focused.
Something similar can happen when we watch, in the company of quietly
focused co-viewers, films that pose challenges to our physical and mental
endurance and take us to the brink of our attention span.11 Think of
challenging works by Michael Snow or Béla Tarr, Maya Deren or Ingmar
Bergman, Apichatpong Weerasethakul or Chantal Akerman, Albert Serra or
Wang Bing, Tsai Ming-Liang or Marguerite Duras, James Benning or
Michelangelo Antonioni, Paul Sharits or Angela Schanelec.12 In the cinema
and in the co-presence of quietly attentive others, chances are high that we
have a different, more jointly deep attentive viewing experience than when
we watch these films on our computers alone at home. To be sure, there are
viewers with special attention capacities who can easily blend out sources
of distraction and concentrate equally well when watching films on a
laptop; some might even do so more effectively when without others.13 But
by and large and on average, viewers will be able to reach a state of deep
attention more easily in the cinema and in the co-presence of deeply
attentive viewers—or so I will claim.14
Next to deep attention there is another, more associative, even meditative
type of spectatorship of challenging films that can equally profit from co-
present viewers: heightened tranquility. In the first case—deep attention—
we contemplate the images and sounds, interrogate their properties, and
notice something unseen and unheard before, either because there is plenty
to discover (the images are full of visual “information,” as in the films of
Roy Andersson) or because they allow us to see something mundane to
which we have never really paid attention in everyday life (there is little
“information” to take in, as in Robert Bresson).15 In the second case—
heightened tranquility—the film puts us at ease and makes us reflect on
things only loosely connected or even entirely unrelated to it: we become
“pensive spectators” (Raymond Bellour), drifting off into reverie,
daydreaming.16 In the most extreme case we feel so deeply at ease that we
fall asleep, as Justin Remes has shown with reference to Abbas
Kiarostami.17 Importantly, we don’t have to attend to the same properties of
the filmic image simultaneously, nor do we need to follow the same
associations or indulge in the same reveries. In the cinema, we are helped
by the presence of others to reflect individually by paying attention or
daydreaming next to each other. While in what follows I will focus on deep
attention, it is important to keep in mind that both modes of spectatorship
can derive from an audience effect: It is because I am surrounded by other
viewers who keep on following the film in a deeply attentive or a
heightened tranquil mode that it doesn’t even occur to me to check my
emails, text my friends, or talk to my neighbors.

T S A C
There can be no doubt: the cinema is, for better or worse, a decidedly social
institution. We can always count on—and have to reckon with—the
physical co-presence of others. This has tremendous advantages and
disadvantages: The collective character of the auditorium plays
significantly into the cinema’s enabling but also constraining effects. In my
book The Audience Effect, where I deal at length with the advantages and
disadvantages of collective viewing, my goal was to describe the effects
that the cinema’s collectivity can have on our film experience but to avoid
utopian visions and overt value judgments about the superiority of the
movie theater.18 Here, I will let go of this neutrality; I will voice a
straightforward plea in support of the collective cinema experience when
watching films precisely of the challenging kind.19
Given that it is one of the crucial features of the movie theater, the
experiential effects of co-present viewers have mobilized surprisingly little
film theoretical energy. With the notable exceptions of Victor Freeburg,
Walter Benjamin, Erich Feldmann, Edgar Morin, and Roger Odin, the effect
an audience can have on one’s film experience has largely gone unnoticed
in the history of film theory.20 Some theorists—like Boris Eikhenbaum,
André Bazin, or Christian Metz—have even postulated an experiential
solitude and isolation in the cinema, a position echoed by Jacques Derrida
who claimed as recently as April 2001 that “there exists a fundamental
disconnection: in the movie theater, each viewer is alone. That’s the great
difference from live theater, whose mode of spectacle and interior
architecture thwart the solitude of the spectator.” What made Derrida
“happy at the movies” was precisely the cinema’s “power of being alone in
the face of the spectacle.”21
This seems to me both phenomenologically wrong and insensitive to the
benefits of watching a film with others: Some films offer social affordances
over and above individual ones, affordances they lose once we watch the
film alone. The term “affordance,” famously coined by psychologist James
J. Gibson, has gained enormous popularity in media studies and literary
studies lately. With literary theorist Rita Felski, I believe that it “offers a
helpful way of thinking about the properties of a substance in relation to
those who make use of them (thus a knee-high surface, for example, affords
the possibility of ‘sitting-on’). Especially salient […] is that affordance is
neither subjective nor objective but arises out of the interaction between
beings and things.”22 Thus, one and the same film can assume different
characteristics—offer different affordances—under changing
circumstances: Depending on where, when, and with whom we watch it, the
film grants us different possibilities to act on and with it.
Let’s take a drastic example, pornography, an example I do not use
gratuitously. Even though I reject the essentialist claim that pornography is
nothing more than material for masturbation, there is nothing outlandish
about the assumption that under specific circumstances, pornographic films
afford the possibility to masturbate. But, then, art films like Catherine
Breillat’s Romance (1999), 9 Songs (2004) by Michael Winterbottom,
Abdellatif Kechiche’s La vie d’Adèle (2013), or Love (2015) by Gaspar Noë
—films with very explicit sex scenes—may grant viewers the chance to
masturbate in private, too. As a female student of mine has recently
explained to me, one can even find the sex scenes from David Cronenberg’s
Crash (1996) compiled on porn sites ready. However, the individual
“masturbatory affordance” is seriously constrained in arthouse cinemas with
other physically co-present spectators. The very same properties of a film
thus offer an individual affordance in one case but not in the other.23
In contrast, take the social affordances of trash films and cult movies like
Tommy Wiseau’s The Room (2003), Jim Sharman’s The Rocky Horror
Picture Show (1975), or films by Ed Wood. In the company of other like-
minded trash- and cult-film fans these movies afford a strongly expressive-
diverted type of viewing with all the collective vocal and motor actions that
can come with it: speaking the dialogues, dancing in the aisles, throwing
spoons or confetti, using water pistols, doing the time-warp, and so on. But
who has ever thrown spoons at their own laptop while watching The Room
alone at home?
Joint deep attention, too, is a social affordance which we can draw on
only in the co-presence of others: It derives from the contagiousness of
other viewers’ highly focused attention. In 1969 Jean-Pierre Meunier, a
film-phenomenologist recently rediscovered, suggested that “between the
spectators of one and the same film, there exists a community of
comportment […] this behavioral community reinforces each individual’s
behavior through what they have in common.” According to Meunier, the
spectators in the cinema form “an anonymous intersubjective link, drawn
from a contagion of reactions, and through which each individual has a
vague feeling of solidarity with the crowd.”24 While Meunier omits
possible distancing and individualizing audience effects, his remark gives
us an interesting hint regarding the origins of the cinema’s joint deep
attention.

S F C A
But before looking more closely at this bottom-up contagion effect on
attention, I first want to zoom in on two top-down factors based on social
facilitation: heightened alertness and social conformity. Social facilitation is
one of the oldest topics in social psychology, reaching back to the late
nineteenth century. Following Bernard Guérin, it occurs when “one animal
increases or decreases its behavior in the presence of another animal which
does not otherwise interact with it.”25 Social facilitation research thus deals
with the minimal conditions for social behavior: “the difference between
doing something alone and doing the same thing with another person
present who is not influencing you in any direct way.”26 Oftentimes greater
control is taken over behavior when another person is present—either to
gain social approval or to avoid social disapproval.27
Here we could imagine cinematic situations of competition and rivalry—
like seminar viewings or press screenings but also regular projections one
attends with friends—that can increase alertness and lead to monitoring
how strongly you pay attention to a film. You apprehend the reactions to a
task waiting for you after the screening: an analysis of the film in the
seminar discussion evaluated by the professor, the writing of a review more
perceptive than those of other critics, or the discussion about the film with
your friends over dinner. Physiological arousal increases attention for
apprehension of being shamed in class or for not winning the competition
against the critic’s peers or your friends.28
Of course, such cases of heightened alertness do not constitute run-of-
the-mill experiences when confronted with challenging slow films or
experimental works. Instead, theories of social conformity may have more
explanatory power for the increased focused attention we pay in collective
viewing constellations: “without directing the behavior of the subject
explicitly, the presence of another person can lead to an increased
awareness of the social value of certain behaviors, of social standards, or of
the social consequences of behaviors,” Guérin informs us.29 The social
conformity theory would postulate: in a cinema we often pay sustained
quiet attention to a challenging film that we would not follow as closely
when alone because paying quiet attention to an artwork is the social norm
of behavior we implicitly honor in the presence of others. Just as we don’t
crack jokes at funerals or go to a job interview in underwear, paying quiet
attention to a challenging film is what one does in the presence of other
viewers in, at least, certain types of cinema—it is a display of what we
accept as the socially desirable standard. In contrast to the more competitive
and performance-oriented alertness factor, in the case of social conformity
the idea is not so much “standing out” than being “normal” and
“conforming.”30
In both cases, we have previously learned that our behavior can have
consequences when surrounded by others, although it might not have these
consequences when alone. In alertness cases, the costs can be both positive
and negative, whereas in instances of social conformity the emphasis lies
primarily on avoiding negative consequences—like being shushed,
reprimanded, or even expelled from the cinema.31
Now, strictly speaking, in both cases we are not dealing with joint deep
attention: social facilitation research is primarily interested in behavior and
not in collective phenomenal states (i.e., in experiential states of individuals
in a group shared collectively), where the collective experience is more than
an aggregation of individual states and comprises a comparatively strong
form of alignment.32 Unfortunately, it is not entirely clear yet how to define
collective phenomenal states and how they come about. As Elisabeth
Pacherie notes: “With the exception perhaps of collective emotions,
collective phenomenology remains to this day a largely uncharted territory.
We still lack detailed conceptual analyses of what exactly collective
experiences are, how they relate to individual experiences and what
phenomenal properties they have.”33 Especially, instances of collective
perceptual or collective cognitive phenomenology—the domains the
contagious effect of joint deep attention would belong to—demand further
research.34
This goes—a fortiori—for the joint deep attention effect in the cinema,
whose lack of research confirms the broader neglect of the cinema’s
collective experience I have criticized above.35 However, tentative evidence
for a contagious deep attention effect exists in empirical studies dealing
with analogous experiences: studying in a library and collectively
meditating in a meditation retreat.
Just like a cinema is more—and something else—than a mere place for
watching movies, a library is not simply a storage warehouse for printed
materials.36 As library scholar Jeffrey T. Gayton points out, the communal
aspect of the library involves seeing and being seen working quietly. Emily
Ranseen assists: “We live in a noisy society, where it is frequently expected
that exchange of energies necessitates sound. But communal study in a
library fosters a silent exchange of energy.”37 In an empirical study on a
public library in Porto, in which she used ethnographic and interview
techniques, Paula Sequeiros furnished evidence for these claims: the library,
she writes, “clearly allows for the construction of a feeling of togetherness,
seeing others absorbed in their tasks stimulates concentration in study.”38
Sequeiros underlines that tranquility, concentration, an integrative collective
intellectual labor, and an encouragement to concentrate and work were
among the most valued aspects by the visitors of the library.39 As a student
interviewed for her study phrased it: “I myself enjoy being able to look
around and say ‘look, all the other people are also doing the same as I do’
[…].”40
Similarly, in an ethnographic study on silent interaction in meditation
centers in the United States and Israel, sociologist Michal Pagis found that
participants reach the pleasurable and sought-after state of equanimity much
more easily in the presence of others: Through social attunement, the group
facilitated the experience of equanimity. The participants she interviewed
claimed that “when compared to individual meditation, they reach deeper
experiences of equanimity when meditating collectively.”41 Pagis sees a
form of collective contagion at work when the silent and relaxed bodies
influence each other.42 Even afterward, when the retreat has ended, many
practitioners find it easier to meditate in a group and therefore look for
group sittings to help reproduce the formerly achieved equanimity.43 As
Pagis puts it: “Paradoxically, meditation participants need others to forget
about others. They utilize the group in order to be able to put aside their
social concerns and reach a calm and relaxed state.”44 Importantly for our
analogy to the cinema, the interviewed participants hardly ever mentioned
other participants; only after Pagis asked them directly did they recall social
interactions. In other words, whether in meditation retreats or the cinema
one may well be contagiously influenced by others—and be only tacitly
aware of their presence—without focusing on them explicitly.45
Of course, what Pagis calls “contagious relaxation” is not the same as
contagious deep attention—the former is more closely connected to the
spectatorial mode of heightened tranquility mentioned above. But in
conjunction with Sequeiros’s library study, Pagis’s insights make it likely
that the quiet attention of an entire audience can contagiously affect my
own concentration, leading to a prereflective experience of deeply attending
the film jointly. Thus, we are dealing with a shared phenomenal state: It is
not only that you and I and everyone else socially conforms to the value of
quietly paying attention individually (as the social conformity argument
would have it), but there is a tacit sense that we, as viewers, deeply attend
to the film collectively. And this is the case even if we don’t reflect on our
joint attention and form an explicit thought along the lines of the participant
in the library study quoted above “Oh, wow, look, all the other people are
also doing the same as I do.”

C F M T ’
J D A
If we now return to the example of demanding art films, slow cinema, and
experimental films, films that pose challenges to our attention, endurance,
and patience, we can see how joint deep attention becomes a helpful and at
times necessary scaffold. Take director Paul Schrader’s minimal definition
of slow cinema: “making something take longer than we have been
conditioned to expect.”46 If something lasts much longer than expected, it
becomes difficult to know when exactly one has devoted enough attention
to it. Here the audience’s continuous attention can become indicative: other
viewers signal to you and you indicate to them that there might be more
unnoticed nuances and overlooked details to be discovered or that the
durational experience aimed at by the filmmaker asks for yet more patience
and endurance. In other words, the attention of the others can guide you,
indeed infect you, just as much as your attention can be contagious for
them. Looking and listening can turn into a mutually reinforcing attention
loop.
Compare how Lutz Koepnick imagines an audience’s irritated response to
the first long take in Béla Tarr’s The Turin Horse (2011):
“I get it, so now please cut!” it shouts inside our heads as the camera holds on without
giving us any hint at what could possibly end the shot’s durational excess. Our fingers start
tapping our knees; our eyes begin to veer across the screen, yet they fail to discover
anything new. We squirm in our seats, look around for support. Contemplativeness yields to
exasperation. […] We yearn for redemption by something as simple as a perspective
different from the present one. And finally (if we haven’t left the theater already), we may
give in and open up to our own exhaustion, to how Tarr’s shot has completely consumed our
initial sense of anticipation. We surrender to the slow passing of time.47

Although Koepnick’s account does not mention this, we can easily imagine
that those impatient viewers who look around in the auditorium do indeed
find support: The unyielding attention of others acts as a shepherd that
guides them out of the valley of boredom onto the plateau of an unusual
temporal experience.48 Affected and infected by the deep attention the other
viewers devote to the Tarr film, the annoyed viewers unfamiliar with this
type of spectatorial mode thus shed their encrusted viewing routine which
usually opposes such “underwhelming” or “boring” stuff.49
No doubt, watching challenging films with others privately at home can
also yield the benefits of joint deep attention (I regularly invite friends over
to my house precisely for that reason). However, the cinema’s public sphere
has an additional positive effect, because we are dealing with anonymous
others whose attention vectors we cannot as easily predict as those of our
parents or friends. It therefore means something else to collectively watch a
film in the public space of the cinema than in the privacy of the home, as
we are not surrounding ourselves with an “attentional filter bubble”—we
have to remain open to the unforeseeable responses of those unknown
others. While my hurried brother and my impatient self may easily agree on
stopping the Béla Tarr film and watching a different one once we discover
the tiniest durational demands, we may be surprised and positively
influenced by the attention spans of unknown viewers in a cinematheque or
film museum.
 Not least, our presence in the public space of the cinema can imply what
Yves Citton calls an “attentional activism.” By this he means the
“conspicuous demonstration of one’s joint attention so as to draw collective
attention to an unjustly ignored object.”50 Not literally contagious, our
presence in the public space of the cinema can spill over and have a
“magnetic” pulling-in effect outside the cinema: Watching a film alone on
platforms like MUBI or Alleskino merely sends data to the owners of the
platform but does not signal attentional activism—attending a challenging
experimental film, a demanding art film, or an extremely slow film in a
cinematheque issues a public statement to the local community in Brussels,
Paris, Munich, New York, or Bologna: hey, here are challenging films
worthy of attention! Due to the “circular self-reinforcing dynamic”
according to which “attention attracts attention,” the interest we show in
public may convince others to see it as well and pull them, as if
magnetically, into the cinema.51

T C D R :S ,
P ,S
Apart from the social aspect of the movie theater, I believe that several
other characteristics of the dispositive contribute implicitly to the joint deep
attention effect—characteristics hardly available when we watch a DVD or
stream a film at home. In recent years, film scholars have begun to
reevaluate some of the key features of the cinema dispositive. Take Dennis
Göttel’s book-length study on the movie theater screen in his German
monograph Die Leinwand or William Paul’s look at the influence of cinema
architecture in When Movies Were Theater (both from 2016). Paul seriously
rejects the idea of a filmic text unencumbered by the context in which it is
placed. He not only unearths a subterranean connection between the
architecture of the movie theater and the kinds of films shown in those
theaters but also thinks that the viewing surroundings influence the
experience of the film.52
In a similar fashion (if much more cursorily), I will now revisit—and
positively reevaluate—three characteristics of the cinema dispositive: its
nonmundane space, the impossibility of manipulating the film, and the
silence of the auditorium. This will help us to further clarify why we profit
from watching films that challenge our attention capacities and endurance
in the cinema and in the co-presence of quietly attentive others, despite the
fact that we can also encounter them in dispositives like private home
viewing, the museum, and the gallery.
(1) The Cinema as a Non-Mundane Space, or the Freedom from the
Everyday: Film scholars like Thomas Elsaesser have variously emphasized
the event character of going out to the movies and watching a film in a
classical projection hall.53 Extending a popular quip about the difference
between cinema and television we can say that while on television the film
comes to us, and with portable devices the film moves with us, we have to
make a move toward the film when we watch it in a cinema. More so, we
have to cross a liminal threshold into another “world” that keeps the
mundane world at bay. As one cinemagoer nicely put it: “As soon as I am in
the closed-off, dark space of the cinema, it begins: the magic of the new. I
am bereft of the wealth of mundane impressions that beleaguer me
elsewhere.”54
Let us assume that, like Paul Schrader in the following example, we are
watching a Robert Bresson film:
a man exits a room, closes the door. Normally in a regular film, you lay the splice as the
door closes. Bresson waits one, two, three seconds on the closed door. What’s happening
then? […] In real life you don’t watch a closed door when someone leaves. Your eye moves
somewhere else. But in a movie, he holds it on that door. Now what if he holds it ten
seconds on the door? What happens? What if he holds it 30 seconds?55

Again, we have a scene that puts our attention to the test because “our
sensory apparatus and our nervous system are always moving and looking
to move, the greatest challenge for them is to stay fixed on something that
does not move or change,” as Citton points out.56 When watching the
Bresson film on a computer at home, numerous means of diversion
surround us: the fridge, the bookshelf, the smartphone, Facebook, Snapchat,
Instagram, and the internet more generally with its endless offerings to look
things up and get carried away. We have to ward off the tendency to do
something else much more deliberately than in the cinema, where few
options remain other than looking and listening.57
 Yet going to the cinema not only helpfully protects us from the
affordances of the everyday—by voluntarily enclosing ourselves in a
different, heterogeneous space we also ascribe a special value to the
institution: our “effort” of going to the movie theater is, in the first instance,
a positive evaluation of the cinema as such, an evaluation that we signal
each other in the auditorium. Our presence demonstrates publicly that the
institution has a certain “value” for us, as an audience, before any kind of
evaluation of the individual film has taken place. Moreover, literally
spending 10 Euro for the ticket of the Bresson film and thus demonstrating
the willingness to figuratively “spend” two hours looking at it is another
signal of “worth”—especially at times when almost immediate free (if often
illegal) download access levels the value of individual films. Taken
together, this will make it much more likely that we stay committed to
looking at a closed door for thirty seconds. In the words of Schrader, a
filmmaker who has always been open to the idea that watching films can
have a transcendental side: “Going to a film is like going to a church. A
commitment is made. ‘I’ve come here of my own will and I accept the
rules.’ One doesn’t leave a church service after half an hour because it’s
boring.”58
(2) The Impossibility of Manipulating the Film, or the Freedom from
Having to Act: An important facet of our contemporary interaction with
moving images is the fact that we often encounter them individually and
that we are able to manipulate them according to our own liking.59
However, unlike on our computers or DVD players at home, in the cinema
we have no mastery over the film whose “succession of automatic world
projections” (Stanley Cavell) we are bound to follow.60 This means, first of
all, that the cinema qua its unstoppable projection leaves the integrity of the
filmic object intact for all of us: it stabilizes an object that has become ever
more destabilized and fragmentary by the various technological means we
have to change and manipulate it. The film comes to us as a (more or less)
contained work rather than an agglomeration of fragments into which we
transform it once we stop and resume, stop and resume, stop and resume.
What might look like a decided form of unfreedom—after all, the
“dictatorial” projection makes us follow the film linearly and without
intermissions—can become an enormous freedom: the freedom of not
having to choose between the various possibilities what to do. That’s, then,
what the cinema does for us: We cannot—or better: don’t have to—act on
the film; we have to—or better: are allowed to—follow it in its stabilized
form. Nor do we have to “share,” to “participate,” to “touch,” to “play,” to
“create,” to “turn into prosumers.” The movie theater imposes on us—but
again we should better say it allows for—a linear form of thinking and
perceiving together in deep attention.
Elsaesser even assumes, against the predominant mode of “distracted”
viewing, that watching a film without interruption is considered a special
privilege today. For Elsaesser, this trend is particularly evident in recent
slow or contemplative cinema.61 Their often ascetic form implies a cinema
of deferred gratification: Its much-vaunted durational aesthetics means that
the viewer needs to “spend” time and “pay” attention in order to see its
aesthetic potential gradually and ever-so-slowly unfold. What is at stake is
not presently visible, let alone can we experience it at once. It simply has to
be followed for a while.62 When a viewer interrupts Tarr’s long-take or the
door scene in the Bresson film and cuts its duration, she destroys the effect:
There is no duration left. It’s like turning off the sound before we expect a
jump scare in a horror film, using the black-and-white function on our
television set when we watch a film in glorious Technicolor, or turning to
our friend who has already seen the whodunit and ask her, after five
minutes, who the murderer is. For some experiences to become rewarding
means having to go through a period of waiting. A vocational hunter who
sees his prey upon arrival, shoots the deer and goes home with his “trophy”
has most likely a much less rewarding experience than the one who had to
wait for hours in his hideout before spotting the animal. And those who
dislike such martial analogies may think of other pastimes that imply
waiting and duration like chess-playing, bird-watching, or train-spotting. In
the case of challengingly slow films, destroying the aesthetic effect is
particularly problematic if we assume—for good reasons—an ethical or
political function of its duration.63
With an eye on other media, Jacques Aumont has claimed, “Playing
video games, strolling around a gallery, surfing the Internet, these are also
experiences, of course, but there is no constituted time. Everyone
constitutes their own time, in an aleatory manner.”64 In the cinema, by
contrast, time is constituted for us, together. Following Laura Mulvey,
today’s viewers who interrupt the filmic narrative and derive pleasure from
gaining control over the object can be considered “possessive spectators”:
“The possessive spectator commits an act of violence against the cohesion
of a story, the aesthetic integrity that holds it together, and the vision of its
creator.”65 For Mulvey, this act of violence has, of course, an empowering
effect. But let’s not overlook its downside: When we manipulate films
according to our own liking, the medium becomes a much more
individualized, even narcissistic one.66 Contra possessive spectatorship, the
cinema urges us to give up possession of the film and let it remain a
communal good for all to perceive rather than an individual property for me
to work on or otherwise interfere with.
(3) Silence in the Auditorium, or the Freedom from Noise: A quiet
cinema is a space that allows the aesthetic object of the film to stand out as
a Gestalt to perceive and to concentrate on. For Susan Sontag, silence
therefore counts as one of the “strategies for improving the audience’s
experience.”67 Just like a film watched in bright daylight “shades into” the
surroundings too easily, a film that we attend to in a hustling-and-bustling
train or gallery space is auditorily “flattened” and “disappears” into the
surrounding soundscape (“how to deal with the ‘bleeding’ of sound
between zones or booths in a gallery, from one work to another: is each one
cancelled, or will only the strongest survive?” Adrian Martin asks).68 We
should not forget that the cinema knows a gradual dawning of silence when
the lights go out and a gradual increase of noise when the lights are turned
on after the final credits: Just like the screen frame spatially separates the
moving images from their ensuing surroundings, this fore- and after-silence
is important for our perception of and attention to the film as it creates a
proper temporal embedment.69 That’s why it can be so disturbing if the
couple next to you talks throughout the credit sequence at the beginning and
your partner asks “Did you like it?” right after the film has ended.
Of course, some films are less harmed by competing light and sound;
others—like soundless Stan Brakhage films or very quiet Albert Serra slow
films—need the protection of darkness and silence to reach their full
aesthetic potential. It’s like listening to an aggressive Rammstein number
vs. a quiet song by Norah Jones: The former is less influenced by
surrounding noise than the latter. We should therefore reconsider the
demand for silence in the cinema: While it may come across as a form of
limitation of our freedom to talk, it should rather be seen as a form of
freedom from the individual noises of others and an enabling condition for
quiet things to be heard. We could characterize it as a form of protection of
something fragile, and this goes for the object of the film just as much as
the easily distracted viewer whose attention suffers from noise. As Sontag
has argued, “One important function of silence is “providing time for the
continuing or exploring of thought. Notably, speech closes off thought. […]
Silence keeps things ‘open’.”70
Somewhat paradoxically, silence in the cinema can have a
communicative effect: In the co-presence of others silence can express—
and thus unwittingly communicate—that an entire audience is awestruck,
overcome emotionally or following something in joint deep attention.71
This aspect is nicely captured in a 1907 Corriere della Sera article by
Adolfo Orvieto (writing under the pseudonym Gaio): “What silence! That
same audience that chats, coughs, and fidgets about in the theaters where
people go to hear and to see—often more to see than to hear—here, where
people go only to see, they don’t even breathe. Hardly a stifled exclamation
of wonder, hardly a weak whisper of commiseration underscore the
moments of pathos: the bloodshed, the disaster, the end of the world.”72
On the one hand, silence is easily achieved because we only have to sit
still and refrain from speaking; on the other hand, it is so easily destroyed
because one person alone can readily disrupt it. This is why some
commentators claim that silence is not a phase of passive receptivity—to
some degree it needs to be actively produced.73 Abiding by the codes of
quietude in the cinema should therefore be considered a collective
production of silence that has a deindividualizing effect because viewers
accept their individual voices to remain quiet. This greatly distinguishes the
silence alone at home from the silence of the cinema with three hundred
other viewers, because the latter is not the outcome of my own decision but
depends on the three hundred others as well. Especially against the
background of our “noisy” societies, where making oneself heard and being
heard are so important, three hundred people remaining quiet during a film
is a remarkable sign of respect and valuation—respect for the social norms
of the cinema and the film on display.74

T C ’ P E A
Since our 24/7 media culture relentlessly confronts us with an
overabundance of cultural products, many of us try to optimize the limited
amount of attention available by doing various things at once: while
walking through the Alte Nationalgalerie in Berlin we may listen to the new
album by Kendrick Lamar; while following a Mozart piano concerto played
by Alfred Brendel we may delve into the new collection of short stories by
Alice Munro; while watching the new Terrence Malick film we may check
football results.75 But this multitasking comes at a price: “What our
attention gains quantitatively by considering several objects simultaneously,
it loses qualitatively in intensity with each taken separately,” Citton
writes.76 If we want to keep alive intense concentrated aesthetic
experiences, we must not budge.
First, we have to protect institutions, like the cinema, that grant us
profound aesthetic experiences.77 Or, to put it slightly differently, we have
to create a cleaner and healthier ecology of attention. Who doesn’t
sometimes have the feeling that our environment is visually and
acoustically polluted with the waste of so many advertisements,
commercials, pop-up windows, hyperlinks, ever-present muzak, to name
but a few?78 From the standpoint of an ecology of attention it is important
to keep the cinema available as a choice, over and above other media and
their dispositives. As Citton underlines, not without biting polemic,
“Reading rooms, classrooms, cinemas, concert halls, dance theaters and
theaters are without doubt, along with churches, the last sacred spaces
where the attentional vampirism of communication still respects the
superior values of a certain mystical communion—which would be
sacrilegiously disturbed by a mobile phone ringing.”79
Second, we need to cultivate a sensitivity and sensibility about the right
choices—when it is valuable to watch a film in a cinema and when it is not
necessary or is even counterproductive. This implies becoming what I have
called dispositive conscious. However, as Lars Henrik Gass rightfully
points out, “One cannot expect that people go to the cinema or the opera if
they have never learned to enter a cinema or an opera.” Going to the cinema
therefore has to be taught—and it has to be learned.80
Third, we have to develop a sensibility for adequate attentional styles and
learn to understand when deep attention is appropriate and when
hyperattention is called for. Yet different attentional styles are not a mere
question of willfully choosing one over the other. Again, they are a matter
of habit and learning. As everyone who works in a university will agree,
this also implies a challenge for pedagogy and education: We have to
develop the skills for both deep attention and hyperattention. Due to its
social obligations and the other characteristics of the dispositive that I have
sketched above, the movie theater is one of the prime places to train one’s
deep attention with others.
Is the cinema an invention without a future then? Only if we are ignorant
or careless enough to deny ourselves the chance to make experiences of
deep attention together.

N
1. Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention (Cambridge: Polity, 2017), 83.
2. The quote is apocryphal, and it isn’t even clear who is its originator. Tom Gunning, Jean-Luc
Godard, and many others name Louis Lumière; some people, like Walter Murch, refer to
Auguste Lumière; and Thomas Elsaesser and Malte Hagener ascribe the quote to Antoine
Lumière, the father of Louis and Auguste.
3. Daniel Fairfax, “The Cinema Is a Bad Object: Interview with Francesco Casetti,” Senses of
Cinema 83 (June 2017), http://sensesofcinema.com/2017/film-studies/francesco-casetti-
interview/.
4. This chapter was written in Fall 2018, a long time before the lockdowns of the coronavirus
pandemic made film critics around the world put their longing for the collective movie theater
experience into affectionate words. I have refrained from updating my chapter with these—
often heartfelt—contributions, but, if anything, they lend evidence to the claims I make here.
5. Adrian Martin, Mise en Scène and Film Style. From Classical Hollywood to New Media Art
(Houndsmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 201.
6. I am very sympathetic with Raymond Bellour’s position to retain the term “cinema” for the
classical dispositive of the movie theater and to avoid applying it to all the other moving-image
viewing constellations. Of course, to a certain degree this is a mere question of semantics. But
semantic choices can, as we all know, have real effects. I therefore find it problematic to
“explode” the term and consider cinema to take place everywhere (pace Francesco Casetti).
See Raymond Bellour, La Querelle des dispositifs: cinéma-installtions-expositions (Paris:
P.O.L., 2012).
 7. Shane Denson and Julia Leyda, eds., Post-Cinema: Theorizing 21st-Century Film (Falmer, UK:
Reframe Books, 2016), 2.
8. As Adrian Martin puts it, “Every medium or art form (whether novel, theater, or art
gallery/museum) possesses its own dispositif, in the sense of the essential or usual conditions
under which it is experienced. What theorists once defined as the basic set-up of the cinematic
experience is neither eternally immutable nor all-determining, but it does offer what we can
call (after Kant and Eisenstein) a Grundproblem with which every film must work, whether it
chooses to or is even aware of it. Thus, each medium has its own broad dispositif.” Martin,
Mise en Scène, 189.
9. N. Katharine Hayles, “Hyper and Deep Attention: The Generational Divide in Cognitive
Modes,” Profession (2007): 187.
10. Ibid., 187.
11. Note, however, that the viewing mode I refer to as “deep attention” goes beyond these types of
films. As Charles Musser has demonstrated, we can already find it in early films of the 1890s
where the sustained presentation of a given motif suggested contemplative absorption and
exploration of the image: “one way that early audiences were meant to look at films was not
unrelated to the way they were meant to look at paintings.” Charles Musser, “A Cinema of
Contemplation, A Cinema of Discernment: Spectatorship, Intertextuality and Attractions in the
1890s,” in The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded, ed. Wanda Strauven (Amsterdam: Amsterdam
University Press, 2006), 162.
12. When I talk about challenging films I do not intend to lay the foundations for a new genre. I
merely want to point out that some films pose considerable challenges to the viewer’s
attention, endurance, and patience. With reference to recent debates about narrative
complexity, which is measured in cognitive comprehension, understanding, and interpretation,
we could argue that we are dealing with durational complexity here.
13. With regard to concentrated listening to challenging classical music, the composer Ernst
Křenek claimed, in the 1930s, precisely the latter: Rather than listening to it collectively in the
concert hall he advocated the solitude of the private room as most conducive to concentration
because it also allowed for reading the score, smoking, drinking, and walking around. Ernst
Křenek, “Bemerkungen zur Rundfunkmusik,” Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung 7 (1938): 160–
61.
14. Note that my plea for the cinema and a heightened dispositive consciousness does not at all
deny the innovations, functions, and pleasures of other media, for instance, small-screen or
digital-born fictions. For the latter, see Astrid Ensslin, Lisa Swanstrom, and Paweł Frelik,
“Introducing Small Screen Fictions,” Paradoxa 29 (2017): 7–17.
15. In these cases we could also speak of aesthetic instead of deep attention. For illuminating
revisions of the term “aesthetic attention,” see Bence Nanay, “Aesthetic Attention,” Journal of
Consciousness Studies 22 (2015): 96–118, and Peter Fazekas, “Attention and Aesthetic
Experience,” Journal of Consciousness Studies 23 (2016): 66–87.
16. Raymond Bellour, “The Pensive Spectator,” in The Cinematic, ed. David Campay (London:
Whitechapel Gallery, 2007), 119–23. On daydreaming, see Julian Hanich, “When Viewers
Drift Off: A Brief Phenomenology of Cinematic Daydreaming,” in The Structures of the Film
Experience by Jean-Pierre Meunier: Historical Assessments and Phenomenological
Expansions, ed. Julian Hanich and Daniel Fairfax (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press,
2019).
17. “Kiarostami has claimed,” Remes notes, “that he would be pleased to see a spectator of [his
film] Five enjoying ‘a pleasant nap’. He adds, ‘[…] The important thing for me is how you feel
once the film is finished, the relaxing feeling that you carry with you after the film ends.’ ”
 Remes concludes that “the spectator who falls asleep during Five has absorbed the spirit of the
film. She or he has given herself/himself over to the work’s soothing quiescence, its uneventful
tranquility.” Justin Remes, “The Sleeping Spectator: Non-Human Aesthetics in Abbas
Kiarostami’s Five: Dedicated to Ozu,” in Slow Cinema, ed. Tiago de Luca and Nuno Barradas
Jorge (Edinburgh, Scotland: Edinburgh University Press, 2016), 235. Director Lucrecia Martel
defends a similar position. See, for instance, film scholar Elena Gorfinkel’s tweet from May
18, 2018: “Lucrecia Martel talking abt her cinema & making space for the spectator: ‘falling
asleep in the cinema is not about boredom but a feeling of comfort, as when sun is shining on
you and you feel warm,’ ” https://twitter.com/cinemiasma/status/997492839167791104?
lang=en. See also Jean Ma, “Sleeping in the Cinema,” October 176 (2021): 31–52.
18. Julian Hanich, The Audience Effect: On the Collective Cinema Experience (Edinburgh,
Scotland: Edinburgh University Press, 2018). See also Julian Hanich, “Shared or Spread? On
Boredom and Other Collective Emotions in the Cinema,” in Atmospheres and Shared
Emotions, ed. Dylan Trigg (London: Routledge, 2022), 135–51.
19. To be sure, even the attempted neutrality of my book could not entirely chase off the specter of
normativity. As Hans Bernhard Schmid has pointed out with regard to recent debates in social
ontology, claims about “what there is” in the social world are tightly connected to views about
how social life “should be”: “Indeed, ontological claims are often a cover-up for normative
views.” Hans Bernhard Schmid, “Collective Emotions: Phenomenology, Ontology, and
Ideology: What Should We Learn from Max Scheler’s War Propaganda?” Thaumàzein 3
(2015): 104.
20. For an overview of these positions, see Hanich, Audience Effect, ch. 2.
21. Antoine de Baecque and Thierry Jousse, “Cinema and Its Ghosts: An Interview with Jacques
Derrida,” trans. Peggy Kamuf, Discourse 37 (2015): 29. Thanks to Christian Ferencz-Flatz for
bringing this interview—as well as the Křenek article mentioned above—to my attention.
22. Rita Felski, The Limits of Critique (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 164–65
(emphasis added).
23. Here we also find a reason why pornographic theaters have almost completely disappeared
from our urban environments. See Julian Hanich, “Clips, Clicks, and Climax: The Relocation
and Remediation of Pornography,” Jump Cut 53 (2011).
24. See The Structures of the Film Experience by Jean-Pierre Meunier: Historical Assessments
and Phenomenological Expansions, ed. Julian Hanich and Daniel Fairfax (Amsterdam:
Amsterdam University Press, 2019). For empirical evidence from social psychology,
communication studies and media psychology, see Hanich, Audience Effect, ch. 1. Another
interesting study I have only recently discovered is Suresh Ramanathan and Ann L. McGill,
“Consuming with Others. Social Influences on Moment-to-Moment and Retrospective
Evaluations of an Experience,” Journal of Consumer Research 34 (2007): 506–24.
25. Bernard Guérin, Social Facilitation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 1.
26. Ibid., 1.
27. Ibid., 165.
28. To be sure, this evaluation apprehension can also be based on an imagined audience. However,
the co-presence of other viewers more forcefully reminds the viewer of the future task (but, of
course, the more familiar and benevolent the others the smaller the evaluation apprehension).
29. Ibid., 67.
30. Ibid., 77.
31. The alertness theory can of course imply elements of social conformity, too, as doing well in
seminar debates, discussions over dinner, or writing better reviews than others may confirm
the social value of competition. However, here the evaluation apprehension will likely be more
 foregrounded (“I have to really pay close attention now, otherwise I will get a poor evaluation
from my professor”), while in social conformity cases the evaluation apprehension remains
mostly a background phenomenon not focused on during the screening.
32. Elisabeth Pacherie, “Collective Phenomenology,” in The Routledge Handbook of Collective
Intentionality, ed. Marija Jankovic and Kirk Ludwig (London: Routledge, 2018), 162 and 166.
33. Ibid., 170–71.
34. Ibid., 171.
35. For instance, in a recent quantitative study on the gratifications of watching a film in a movie
theater rather than at home, Alec Tefertiller did not offer a single item in his questionnaire that
would have allowed his participants to indicate that they may generally prefer watching films
in the co-presence of largely anonymous others, let alone making them choose from a range of
more specific benefits of collective viewing—such as being able to concentrate more deeply on
a film. Alec Tefertiller, “Moviegoing in the Netflix Age: Gratifications, Planned Behaviour,
and Theatrical Attendance,” Communication & Society 30 (2017): 27–44.
36. On libraries, see Jeffrey A. Gayton, “Academic Libraries: ‘Social’ or ‘Communal?’ The Nature
and Future of Academic Libraries,” The Journal of Academic Librarianship 24 (2008): 60–66.
37. Quoted from ibid, 61 (emphasis added).
38. Paula Sequeiros, “The Social Weaving of a Reading Atmosphere,” Journal of Librarianship
and Information Science 43 (2011): 268.
39. Ibid., 264.
40. Ibid., 265.
41. Michal Pagis, “Evoking Equanimity: Silent Interaction Rituals in Vipassana Meditation
Retreats,” Qualitative Sociology 38 (2015): 45.
42. Ibid., 51.
43. Ibid., 52.
44. Ibid., 54.
45. Ibid., 45.
46. Paul Schrader, “Rethinking Transcendental Style,” in Transcendental Style in Film. Ozu,
Bresson, Dreyer. With a New Introduction (Oakland: University of California Press, 2018), 11.
47. Lutz Koepnick, The Long Take. Art Cinema and the Wondrous (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2017), 11–12 (emphasis added).
48. For a compelling recent overview of research on boredom, see Andreas Elpidorou, “The Bored
Mind Is a Guiding Mind: Toward a Regulatory Theory of Boredom,” Phenomenology and the
Cognitive Sciences 17 (2018): 455–84.
49. Yves Citton speaks of improvisation practices: “showing yourself to be attentive to the
attention of the other requires to get out of pre-programmed routines.” Citton, Ecology of
Attention, 88.
50. Ibid., 154.
51. Ibid., 48.
52. William Paul, When Movies Were Theater. Architecture, Exhibition, and the Evolution of
American Film (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), 3, 12, and 293. See also Lutz
Koepnick’s claim: “the specific milieu of moving-image display might matter as much for how
the images interact with their viewers as to what is solely visible on screen.” Koepnick, Long
Take, 28.
53. See, for instance, Thomas Elsaesser, “Kino als Erfahrung und Ereignis,” in Kinoerfahrungen:
Theorien, Geschichte, Perspektiven, ed. Florian Mundhenke and Thomas Weber (Berlin:
Avinus, 2017), 23, 26.
54. Claudius Beutler and Johanna Niermann, eds., Die Schönheit des Betrachters. Eine
fotografische Annäherung im Dialog mit Filmschaffenden (Munich, Germany: Edition Text +
Kritik, 2018), 94 (translation mine).
55. Alex Ross Perry, “Paul Schrader: Deliberate Boredom in the Church of Cinema,” Cinema
Scope 73 (2018), http://cinema-scope.com/cinema-scope-magazine/paul-schrader-deliberate-
boredom-in-the-church-of-cinema/.
56. Citton, Ecology of Attention, 128.
57. Here John Belton’s observation is apposite: “On a big screen, a film fills our field of vision and
becomes a world for us to enter, a world that is bigger than life. On a small screen, as Nicholas
Rombes points out, the film is ‘just a piece, a fragment’ of the larger world that surrounds us.”
John Belton, “Psychology of the Photographic, Cinematic, Televisual, and Digital Image,”
New Review of Film and Television Studies 12, no. 3 (2014): 241. See also the strong
arguments put forth in Martine Beugnet, “The Bigger Picture: On Watching Films on a Cinema
Screen,” in What Film Is Good For: On the Ethics of Spectatorship, ed. Julian Hanich and
Martin Rossouw (Oakland: University of California Press, forthcoming).
58. Schrader, “Rethinking Transcendental Style,” 20.
59. Lars Henrik Gass, Film und Kunst nach dem Kino (Cologne, Germany: Strzelecki Books,
2017), 15.
60. Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed. Reflections on the Ontology of Film, enlarged ed.
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), 72–73.
61. Elsaesser, “Kino als Erfahrung und Ereignis,” 26.
62. See, for instance, Asbjørn Grønstad, “Slow Cinema and the Ethics of Duration,” in Slow
Cinema, ed. Tiago de Luca and Nuno Barradas Jorge (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press,
2016), 273–284.
63. For an argument along these lines, see, for instance, the aforementioned articles by Koepnick
and Grønstad, as well as Song Hwee Lim, “Temporal Aesthetics of Drifting. Tsai Ming-Liang
and a Cinema of Slowness,” in Slow Cinema, ed. Tiago de Luca and Nuno Barradas Jorge
(Edinburgh, Scotland: Edinburgh University Press, 2016), 87–98.
64. Daniel Fairfax, “The Experience of a Gaze Held in Time: Interview with Jacques Aumont,”
Senses of Cinema 83 (2017), http://sensesofcinema.com/2017/film-studies/jacques-aumont-
interview/.
65. Laura Mulvey, Death 24x a Second. Stillness and the Moving Image (London: Reaktion, 2006),
171.
66. Gass, Film und Kunst nach dem Kino, 28.
67. Susan Sontag, “The Aesthetics of Silence,” in Styles of Radical Will (London: Penguin, 2009),
12.
68. Martin, Mise en Scène, 184.
69. The term “fore- and after-silence” comes from Bernard P. Dauenhauer, Silence, The
Phenomenon and Its Ontological Significance (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980),
9–16.
70. Sontag, “Aesthetics of Silence,” 19–20. This is not to say that silence in general is always
benign. In fact, silence is an ambivalent phenomenon: It can link people in national moments
of silence, religious worship, or cinematic joint deep attention, but it can also separate them
and create power relations.
71. Of course, in the cinema, just as in the library, we cannot easily decide if the cause of a
viewer’s silence is voluntary and internal or institutional and external: “When a person enters a
library to read something, the source is ambiguous. The reader wants to be silent, to read the
text and not to be disturbed. In such a case, we may talk of intentional silence with an internal
 source. But being silent in a library is a social norm; such a norm may be said to exist in order
to take into account an individual’s wants, but to ensure that the individual’s personal wishes
are addressed, this silence may be considered an imposed silence, i.e. external source.” Dennis
Kurzon, “Towards a Typology of Silence,” Journal of Pragmatics 39 (2007): 1682.
72. Gaio, “Summertime Spectacles: The Cinema,” in Early Film Theories in Italy, 1896–1922, ed.
Francesco Casetti, Silvio Alovisio, and Luca Mazzei (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University
Press, 2017), 52.
73. Dauenhauer, Silence, 24. Compare also what Pagis observed in her empirical study on
meditation: “even though silent interaction is based on rules and structural conditions that are
set by the meditation center, it still needs to be actively produced by the participants.” Pagis,
“Evoking Equanimity,” 47 (emphasis added).
74. Cinemas are thus spaces that provide what Sam Demas and Jeffrey A. Scherer call an
“increasingly rare commodity—[a] quiet area within a public space.” Sam Demas and Jeffrey
A. Scherer, “Esprit de Place: Maintaining and Designing Library Buildings to Provide
Transcendent Spaces,” American Libraries 33 (2002): 67.
75. The term “24/7 media culture” comes from Koepnick, Long Take, 8.
76. Citton, Ecology of Attention, 32 (emphasis added).
77. Ibid., 159.
78. As Susan Sontag noted already in 1967: “in an overpopulated world being connected by global
electronic communication and jet travel at a pace too rapid and violent for an organically
sound person to assimilate without shock, people are also suffering from a revulsion at any
proliferation of speech and images.” Sontag, “Aesthetics of Silence,” 21.
79. Citton, Ecology of Attention, 159. For Raymond Bellour, the champion of the cinema
experience par excellence, the mobile phone equally threatens the integrity of the cinema
dispositive, “as if it is being eaten away from within by the private disaffection of a new kind
of spectator.” Quoted from Hilary Radner and Alistair Fox, Raymond Bellour: Cinema and the
Moving Image (Edinburgh, Scotland: Edinburgh University Press, 2018), 170. For literature on
the attention economy, see the classic Georg Franck, Ökonomie der Aufmerksamkeit: Ein
Entwurf (Munich, Germany: Hanser, 1998), and Jonathan Beller, The Cinematic Mode of
Production: Attention Economy and the Society of the Spectacle (Lebanon, NH: Dartmouth
College Press, 2006).
80. Gass, Film und Kunst nach dem Kino, 59. See also “Orte des Films: Kino, Festival,
Kunstmuseum. Barbara Pichler im Gespräch mit Chris Dercon und Lars Henrik Gass,” Nach
dem Film 15 (2017), http://www.nachdemfilm.de/issues/text/orte-des-films-kino-festival-
kunstmuseum.
 CHAPTER 30

THOSE WHO HAVE

The Impersonality of Film
Theory

JOHN DAVID RHODES

IN 1947, writing from her studio apartment in Morton Street in New York’s
Greenwich Village, the filmmaker and film theorist Maya Deren proposed a
new mode of filmmaking: “ritualistic form.” In this form, “the human
being” is treated “not as the source of the dramatic action, but as a
somewhat depersonalized element in a dramatic whole.”1 An impulse
toward depersonalization runs throughout the text from which this passage
is quoted. Depersonalization—which we might link to a broader conceptual
field of impersonality—is one of this brilliant and strange book’s insistent
themes. For Deren, depersonalization constitutes a means of weaponizing
the aesthetic: “The intent of … depersonalization is not the destruction of
the individual; on the contrary, it enlarges him beyond the personal
dimension and frees him from the specializations and confines of
personality.”2 Although she studiously avoided mentioning him by name in
An Anagram, Deren was self-consciously carrying on T. S. Eliot’s rhetorical
invocation of impersonality in his 1922 essay “Tradition and the Individual
Talent,” in which he claims that “the emotion of art is impersonal.”3 Deren
had written her master’s thesis on the influence of French Symbolist poetry
on Eliot and Ezra Pound; she wrote from a deeply informed perspective,
and with intention.4 Not actually naming Eliot might have been her own
way of demonstrating the truth of one of his essay’s most famous tenets:
that the writers who come before us “are what we know.” Quoting him or
naming him would be beside the point.
For various reasons having to do with the peculiarities of her biography,
and the way in which texts were translated and traveled around the world in
the 1930s and 1940s, Deren had not been much exposed to the theoretical
writings on cinema produced in Europe in the interwar period. She wrote,
therefore, in relative ignorance of how much her own theory was in
sympathy with some of these figures: Vertov, Eisenstein, and even, in
curious ways, with the essays of André Bazin, who was writing at the same
time Deren was and reaching some of the same conclusions about the
nature of cinematic representation—and its theorization—albeit in a manner
that valorized a very different sort of cinema that Deren advanced in An
Anagram. It seems compelling and worth further consideration that these
writers, some working unaware of one another, others engaged in explicit
discursive combat, all share investment in the divestment of the person, or
the personal. They were not alone. Across the history of film theory, many
theorists of cinema have agreed that it is better to think of cinema as a
category—of production and reception—that displaces the person, or
displaces, at least, any personal, individualizing sense of the person. In what
follows, I will make several stops at what are perhaps some of the most
touristed spots in the contested territory of classical film theory. My aim is
to trace the way in which some impersonal inorganic vitality has been
theorized as the greatest gift bestowed by cinema on the human beings
whose human being its mechanical being throws into question.

M
The theorization of the moving image inherited from the modernist culture
that developed before and alongside it an interest in—and at times an
insistence on—modern art’s movement away from the claims of the
“merely” personal. The abstraction of analytic cubism, for instance, might
be understood not only as a method of draining any sense of immediately
recognizable content from the picture plane but also as a means of barring
an interest in the picture as a point of access to the artist’s particular views
about or feelings about such content itself. And although many modernist
experiments in literary fiction plunged readers into the inchoate signifiers of
a character’s “stream of consciousness” point of view, this immersion in
character subjectivity operated—so it could be argued—as an immersion in
the abstraction of language itself. This dialectical tension between form and
content, abstraction and representation that we notice in the aesthetic
culture of high modernism has been epigrammatically captured by T. J.
Clark: “Modernism had two great wishes. It wanted its audience to be led
toward a recognition of the social reality of the sign (away from the
comforts of narrative and illusionism …); but equally it dreamed of turning
the sign back to a bedrock of World/Nature/Sensation/Subjectivity.”5 Even
this “bedrock,” however, in being a kind of universal substance of
representation, points us in the direction of an art that has more at stake than
the fortunes (or foibles or dreams or desires) of the individual—whether
that individual is the subject or the author of the representation in question.
Wilhelm Worringer’s polemical attack on “empathy” and the “naturalist”
art that offered itself as the medium of empathetic artistic experience
announced a major initiating phase of this favoring of the impersonally
abstract. In Abstraction and Empathy, first published in 1908, Worringer
stages an attack on the “need for empathy,” which he associates with “the
Greeks and other Occidental peoples,” whose art could be understood to
exemplify what he calls “naturalism”: “the reproduction of organically
beautiful vitality.”6 Worringer pits against such naturalism an “urge to
abstraction” exemplified by the art of “savage peoples,” “primitive epochs
of art,” and “certain culturally developed Oriental peoples.”7 According to
Worringer, “the civilised peoples of the East” had a vivid and profound
sense of respect for the “unfathomable entanglement of all the phenomena
of life” from which they sought, in art, some repose or relief:
The happiness they sought from art did not consist in the possibility of projecting
themselves into the things of the outer world, of enjoying themselves in them, but in the
possibility of taking the individual thing of the external world out of its arbitrariness and
seeming fortuitousness, of eternalising it by approximation to abstract forms and, in this
manner, of finding a point of tranquillity and a refuge from appearances. Their most
powerful urge was, so to speak, to wrest the object of the external world out of its natural
context, out of the unending flux of being, to purify it of all its dependence upon life, i.e., of
everything about it that was arbitrary, to render it necessary and irrefragable, to approximate
it to its absolute value.8
The imaginatively carefree pseudo-anthropology and geopolitics on display
here are less interesting than the fact that the struggle between empathy and
abstraction is clearly an allegory of the contest between realism and an
emergent modernism. Worringer seems to trace a genealogy for the forms
of the early twentieth century to the very origin of the work of art, but the
genealogical ruse smuggles in at least two practices (or items of dogma)
that would become central to modernist aesthetic theory: an intense
stylization of the appearance (or form) of the work; and an insistence on the
work as something that does not spring from or express the vicissitudes of
the individual, but rather that arises from necessity and produces, in turn,
something necessary. Hidden in this account and its privileging of the
necessary—a championing of abstraction as if it shared in nature’s necessity
—is also an implicit emphasis on the intentionality of the abstract work of
art: it is produced by the labor of human artificers. Abstraction is produced
by taking, externalizing, wresting, purifying, and rendering. This exercise
of artistic will, however, is definitionally opposed to a sense of artistic
individuality, if we identify individuality with a sense of personal
expression that is spoken by or through the work of art.
Worringer’s argument—both its sense and its key terms—made its way
into Anglo-American modernism by way of T. E. Hulme, who heard the
German aesthetician speak in Berlin in 1912 and offered “practically an
abstract of Worringer’s views” in his essay “Modern Art and its
Philosophy.”9 Hulme’s influence, in turn, was felt on Ezra Pound and Eliot,
and it is the latter’s aforementioned essay, one of the most influential
theoretical statements on the nature of modernist poetry, that has served as
the most frequently referenced articulations of the value of “impersonality.”
In an essay entitled “Romanticism and Classicism” Hulme uses those terms
as near cognates or substitutions for Worringer’s empathy and abstraction,
respectively. Hulme, rather bitchily, calls Romanticism “spilt religion,”
where “classical verse” is extolled as “dry, hard”—in other words,
impersonal.10 Eliot, clearly under the influence of Hulme, mobilizes the
notion of “impersonality” in his aforementioned “Tradition and the
Individual Talent” in order to advance the claims of modern poetry’s
seriousness: “the poet has, not a ‘personality’ to express, but a particular
medium, which is only a medium and not a personality, in which
impressions and experiences combine in peculiar and unexpected ways.”11
He is writing against the long shadow (as he might have felt it) cast by
Romantic poetry’s enshrinement of a sense in which the poets are people
who express themselves to other people (“a man speaking to men,” in
Wordsworth’s phrase).12 Modern poetry should shake off the dross—as he
saw it—of solipsism: “Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an
escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape
from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and
emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.”13
Many assumptions are ferociously condensed in this famous passage’s
recapitulation of Worringer’s disparagement of naturalism’s arbitrariness
and valorization of abstraction’s necessity. “Expression,” a term that we
might almost accept neutrally as one of literary representation’s prime
objects, becomes an object of almost paranoid aversion. To express is to
translate an interiorized and private feeling into something communicable
and shareable that can be, in turn, internalized, interiorized yet again (by the
reader or listener). This set of practices is, we are meant to understand, a
base pursuit best shunned by “those who have.” Those already in
possession of the human qualities of personality and emotion do not need
poetry to serve as proxy for these qualities. Being, apparently, already freed
from necessity, they can instead pursue a vision of poetry as something
necessary—a made thing, yes, but one that has the force and self-evidence
of Clark’s “bedrock.” The exemption from need on the part of those who
have allows those who have to entertain a sense of poetry as something
proceeding from its own, autonomous needs. In other words, this is a
description of what we ordinarily call aesthetic autonomy.
Eliot, of course, cannot simply be taken at his word, and many writers
have sought to demonstrate that his prescriptions for poetry are hardly
consistent with the presence of markers of his personality in his own
work.14 However much this condemnation of the personal would seem to be
easily dismissed as a pronouncement issued from the heights of material
and cultural privilege, the staying power of some notion of the impersonal
has been formidable across twentieth- and twenty-first-century aesthetic
theory, and it emerges again and again in film theory, in particular. Deren’s
repurposing of this tradition of thought is implicitly grounded in Eliot’s
essay. But Eliot’s epigrammatic insistence on the impersonal circulates in a
variety of later texts and contexts that have no such material links. The
problem, then, seems to be that Eliot’s pronouncement distils a modernist
sensibility whose recurrence and durability remains to be reckoned with,
even when we can see through it. It is this sensibility’s appearance and
reappearance in two major phases of classical film theory that will occupy
me across the rest of this chapter.

T S
Although Eliot would invoke the value of impersonality in terms of its
emotionlessness, emotion was a decisively central term for the Soviet film
theorists who attempted to claim for film a serious contribution to culture.
Culture, of course, meant Soviet culture, the culture pertaining to and
nourishing a socialist state. But where the “turning loose of emotion” meant
for Eliot a sort of artistic incontinence, the harnessing of emotion was
something of a crucible for Soviet film theory, especially for Sergei
Eisenstein in his attempt to make the case for his vision of montage practice
as the royal road of film aesthetics, both in the Soviet Union and more
broadly. In a flurry of theoretical statements written in the early to mid-
1920s (i.e., roughly contemporaneous with Eliot’s essay and with the apex
of literary high modernism in the Anglo-American context), Eisenstein
sought to demonstrate the political, cognitive, and aesthetic value of
montage, often by comparing it, somewhat sneeringly, to both the practice
and the writings of fellow traveler Dziga Vertov, whose “Kinok” (or Kino-
Eye) movement began its activity in the same span of years.15
In “WE: Variant of a Manifesto,” a 1922 text that announces the project
of the Kinok movement as a cyborgian synthesis of human and machine—a
coming together that ascetically sheds association with the human, Vertov
writes:
 WE invite you:
—to flee—
the sweet embraces of the romance,
the poison of the psychological novel
the clutches of the theatre of adultery;
to turn your back on music,
—to flee—
out into the open, into four dimensions (three+time), in search of our own material, our
meter and rhythm.
The “psychological” prevents man from being as precise as a stopwatch; it interferes with
his desire for kinship with the machine.
In an art of movement we have no reason to devote our particular attention to contemporary
man
The machine makes us ashamed of man’s inability to control himself …
For his inability to control his movements, WE temporarily exclude man as a subject for
film.16

The disdain for the human, as well as for the reliable methods of
representing human experience, is a disdain for the individual human, the
pathos of individual (bourgeois) experience. Cinema, if it is to understand
its potential role in a new order of modern life, must arrogate to itself a
better calling, a calling more synthetic, in two senses of that word: artificial,
made (not merely discovered); and uniting disparate fragments into a unity.
In “The Council of Three,” a text composed a year later, Vertov articulates
this program as a kind of Frankensteinian blason du corps:
I am kino-eye, I create a man more perfect than Adam, I create thousands of different people
in accordance with preliminary blue-prints and diagrams of different kinds.
I am kino-eye.
From one person I take the hands, the strongest and most dexterous; from another I take the
legs, the swiftest and most shapely; from a third, the most beautiful and expressive head—
and through montage I create a new, perfect man.17

This metaphor for the Kinok’s aesthetic practice has something in common
with the French Surrealists’ exquisite corpse, in which a new and often
grotesque human body is rendered through a bracketing of intentional
control over the whole, as multiple hands contribute their illustration of one
of the body’s horizontal sections, fold the page, and pass the drawing to the
person next to them. A new rendering of the human is produced by way of a
surrender of any control over the work as a whole. In Vertov’s perfect
synthetic body, the kino-eye fiercely organizes this body’s composition: all
is intentional control. Despite its delirious vision of a machinic, or almost
nonhuman human body, the tone is high Romantic, humanist. On the one
hand, the kino-eye’s chief vocation, at least initially, is “the sensory
exploration of the world through film.”18 But as it “gathers and records
impressions,” it does so with a perfected, mechanical eye, one that projects
a kind of ordered interpretation onto the profilmic, simultaneously with its
recording of it.19 And, even more importantly, through editing, these
recorded fragments are shaped, arranged. The kino-eye boasts: “I put
together any given points in the universe, no matter where I’ve recorded
them.”20 The principle of the “interval,” or “the transition from one
movement to another,” governs the process by which the potential
arbitrariness of filmic fragments are molded into a dynamic whole.21 This
aesthetic practice, or its theorization, could be broadly characterized as a
mode of first abstracting particulars—plucking them from the flux of the
world—and then forcing them to undergo a second abstraction by relating
them meaningfully to one another through the rhythm of editing. What is
finally conveyed, while it accords with the intelligence of the kinok, is
something larger than the individual kinok; what is produced is a synthesis
expressive of the epoch, a distillation of experience.
Vertov claims that the method he proposes “enables one to introduce into
a film study any given motif—political, economic, or other.”22 This claim
carries the implication that the “motif” sits outside the practice theorized;
the theorization prescribes a film praxis of radical plasticity—capable of
representing anything, but not necessarily obliged (or ontologically
wedded) to representing any one thing in particular. Moreover, after he
names “ ‘life caught unawares.’ etc., etc.” as one of the several predicates of
kino-eye, Vertov quickly qualifies that he means by this “not ‘filming
unawares’ for the sake of the ‘unaware,’ but in order to show people
without masks, without makeup, to catch them through the eye of the
camera in a moment when they are not acting, to read their thoughts, laid
bare by the camera.”23
Yet one wonders if Vertov’s emphasis on film’s unique and formidable
capacities to reveal the world is responsible, in part, for the grudge that
Eisenstein nurtured against him and his Kino-Eyes. Perhaps it was all a case
of the narcissism of small differences. Annette Michelson seems to suggest
as much when she writes that “the bitter triviality” of Eisenstein’s attack on
Vertov issues, at least in part, from “a shock of recognition.”24 This attack
was made most acerbically in Eisenstein’s essay “The Problem of the
Materialist Approach to Form,” written in 1925. The essay takes the shape
of a triumphalist declaration that Eisenstein’s The Strike (1925) is an
“ideological victory in the field of form.”25 Part of this revolutionary force
consists in the fact that, according to Eisenstein, the film figures not just a
technical advance in form but a configuration of new forms welded to new
contents. Eisenstein makes a fittingly modern-industrial analogy: “It is not
by ‘revolutionising’ the forms of the stage-coach that the locomotive is
created but through a proper technical calculation of the practical
emergence of a new and previously non-existent form of energy—steam.”26
For Eisenstein, Vertov’s experiments are chiefly experiments in form. His
concern to distinguish the achievements of Strike, which has moments of
similarity to Vertov’s Kino-Pravda, released not long before, extends from a
desire to assert his independence from the Kino-Eye movement, to which
he might otherwise be understood to owe a debt of influence. The
interesting thing here is not the rightness of Eisenstein’s critique, however
“trivial” it might be, but its terms. Eisenstein claims that his film is “a
tractor ploughing over the audience’s psyche in a particular class context,”
whereas Vertov’s cinema “weaves” “a set of montage fragments of real life”
and thus produces nothing more than “primitive Impressionism.”27 He
returns to the plough metaphor a second time: “Vertov takes from his
surroundings the things that impress him, rather than the things with which,
by impressing the audience, he will plough its psyche.”28 In other words,
Kino-Eye aesthetic practice fails to throw off the yoke of personality in
order to take up the fully realized achievement of a depersonalized formal
method that treats its spectators like an undifferentiated expanse over and
through which the film exerts its force. We could say, in a sense, that Vertov
is more interested in the film, and how it is made, and Eisenstein—despite
his endless prescriptions for how montage editing should be practiced—is
ultimately more interested in the beholder, the effect that the film has on
them. In this sense, Eisenstein is the more Kantian thinker: he is less
interested in the work of art itself, than the work of art as a medium in
which the spectator discovers a new experience—one that feels
immediately their own but that in fact is shared universally.29
When Eisenstein turns to theorize dialectical montage more elaborately,
he proposes it as a formal method with irresistible cognitive (and thus
ideological) results. As spectators register first one shot (or “montage cell”)
and then another and then—immediately—compare them, an idea is
released into the collective spectatorial brain. The spectator is almost a
medium through which the composition of the film passes, or a second
projector, without which the film would otherwise be inert. (One thinks of
Hitchcock’s comment, made in reference to Psycho, that he liked to play the
audience “like an organ.”30) Properly speaking, if Eisenstein is to be
believed, there would be, for example, no individual “reading” or
“interpretation” of the famous gods sequence in October (1929) that could
be produced by one spectator and not another. Everyone has equal access to
the montage sequence, and it effects all spectators equally, at once:
Step by step, by a process of comparing each new image with the common denotation,
power is accumulated behind a process that can be formally identified with that of logical
deduction. The decision to release these ideas, as well as the method used, is already
intellectually conceived.
The conventional descriptive form for film leads to the formal possibility of a kind of filmic
reasoning. While the conventional film directs the emotions, this suggests an opportunity to
encourage and direct the whole thought process, as well.31

The effects of montage are as ineluctable as they are universal. The

montage film enlarges the spectators’ faculties: they now have an idea that
they did not have before. Its effects are intimate—the very insides of their
minds are altered, whether they will this or not—but also impersonal
because so entirely collective or universal: everyone’s mind is altered in the
same way. (As John Mackay has written, Eisenstein saw spectators as
“bundles of psychosocial resistances.”32) Anything less than this
universally shared response would amount to nothing more than the bathos
of Vertov’s so-called Impressionism: an individual’s noodling with a
camera, offered up as a personal interpretation of what is, one that can be
taken or left, as opposed to a universal enforcement of what should be.
No one needs to take Eisenstein at his word, or Vertov’s at his, for that
matter. What interests me, however, is that the battle between these two, or,
more accurately, the battle Eisenstein wages against Vertov, is a contest
between two attempts at making film as radically impersonal a medium as
possible.

T R
So far I have been discussing film theorists (all film practitioners, as well,
of course) who wanted to make cinema into a medium that privileged forms
of abstraction. The intensity of these theorists’ prescriptions and
prohibitions is, I would argue, symptomatic of the fact that cinema is—or
certainly creates the impression that it is—a medium most suited to the
needs and claims of realism. Cinema’s vaunted indexicality is bound up in
its apparent affinity with realist representation. The camera’s impassive
ability (provided lighting conditions are right, the lens focused, etc.) to
produce a fairly detailed and accurate image of whatever is placed before it
over time seems to make of it a natural ally with the cause of realism.
“Realism,” of course, is a notoriously difficult thing to pin down. It is not
not a style, and yet in most cases, whatever style the realist text might
assume, that style will typically offer or affect (“perform” might be a better
word) an appearance of having no style whatsoever. Linda Nochlin’s
introduction to the complexity of the nature of realist representation in the
nineteenth century is a most useful guide to this vexed problem. She
explores realism according to a series of interlinked and sometimes
contradictory attributes and associations: its (supposedly) privileged
connection to the reality that it represents; its intervention into our sense of
time and history (especially its emphasis on the contemporaneity of the
realist artwork with its subject matter); its broadened range of subject
matter; its relationship to science, as well as its status as a kind of science
itself; its response to pressing social and political issues.33 Cinema inherits,
tout court, this prehistory, this complex of (sometimes contradictory)
concerns. So it is that theorists who have cinema as an intrinsically or
ontologically realist medium do not always sit comfortably under the same
taxonomic umbrella. The question of impersonality, however, can be seen to
cut through the differences among those theorists who might be called
“realist,” by which I mean those who theorize by way of drawing attention
to cinema’s realist capacities. While a great many theorists could be
included in this discussion, I will restrict myself to the following: André
Bazin, Maya Deren, and Siegfried Kracauer.

Bazin

André Bazin is probably the most likely-to-be-encountered figure in any

introduction to film theory course. His ubiquity has to do with the fact that
Bazin’s essay “The Ontology of the Photographic Image” makes what are
perhaps the boldest (and yet the most eloquently articulated) claims for the
indexical nature of photography. His argument is often taught or referred to
as naïve, foolish, mystical, or some combination of those three things; he is
often set up as the straw man of realist film theory. Teaching him, in fact,
can be something of a challenge precisely because his argument seems so
refutable on so many grounds. His fascination with the material bond that
joins the photographic signifier to its signified leads him to make a number
of startling claims, the most outlandish of which might be this: “The
photographic image is the object itself, the object freed from the conditions
of time and space that govern it.”34 It should not require an analytic
philosopher to tell us that this statement is “nothing short of logically
incoherent.”35 Disproving Bazin is a fairly easy task, but doing so does little
to explain the rhetorical force of Bazin’s theory, nor does it make sense of
the rhetoric of impersonality which, I would argue, makes indexicality (or
Bazin’s rhetorical instrumentalization of it) a means to an end. Indexicality
is the means; impersonality the end.
Earlier in the same essay Bazin explains what photography is, and what is
new about it, by comparing it to older representational media (especially
those that have been pressed into the service of realism): “No matter how
skilful the painter, his work was always in fee to an inescapable
subjectivity. The fact that a human hand intervened cast a shadow of doubt
over the image.”36 Photography’s interest, for Bazin, and the interest in it
that he imputes to the beholder of the photographic document, is not
aesthetic but psychological. He claims that photography satisfies “our
appetite for illusion by a mechanical reproduction in the making of which
man plays no part.”37 The absenting of the human creator, the artist, from
the scene of creation allows for a confidence in the image and what it
represents. If the essay stopped here, however—on the question of
photography’s impersonal automatism—it would be beautifully expressed
but not terribly interesting. To come into being “without the creative
intervention of man,” however, is not, for Bazin, merely the bracketing of
interpretation, subjectivity, bias, and partiality. If it offered only these
qualities, photography’s only use to us would be found in the courtroom.
Photography’s impersonal automatism, its ascesis—in the act of creation—
of the human subject is a way of escaping ourselves, of discovering more
than what we already know that we know. Hovering in the background of
this essay is something like Eliot’s bad poet, keen to offer us an outpouring
of his own personality, keen to give expression to what he has already
known he has felt, to what he already knows. Bazin sees in photography a
means of banishing this poet, or of making him redundant, of avoiding what
Kant would call “the concept.”38 Photography’s absenting of the human-
creator-subject allows for the creation of something not-yet-known: “The
photograph as such and the object in itself share a common being, after the
fashion of a fingerprint. Wherefore, photography actually contributes
something to the order of natural creation instead of providing substitute for
it.”39 Obviously, automatism is not the only way to see that something new
is created, but Bazin’s generativity consists in a slightly perverse rereading
of a medium seemingly dedicated or doomed to the mere repetitive
reproduction of what already is as, instead, a medium uniquely capable of
inventing what never was before. Photography’s impersonal automatism for
Bazin is not just the guarantor of truth; it is the progenitor of the new.

Maya Deren

Maya Deren makes, in some ways, for unlikely company with Bazin,
insofar as those familiar with her work (both as a maker and a theorist)
might think of her primarily as a proponent of editing. So many of the most
memorable moments in her own films depend not on the organic wholeness
of the cinematographic image but on the abstracting possibilities of joining
one bit of footage to another. Her theory tends to follow a similar logic:
“All invention and creation consist primarily of a new relationship between
known parts,” she argues in an essay from 1960.40 New relationships
between images can only be made via editing. The tension, however,
between the photographic, indexical fact of cinema and the abstracting,
deforming possibilities of editing is what animates Deren’s theory, and this
animating tension is also the source of her vision of a cinematic praxis that
is radically impersonal.
As I mentioned already, Deren’s interest in cinema was preceded by an
immersion in high Anglo-American literary modernism. After she had
made the first five of her films, the five for which she is most celebrated,
Deren wrote a book that remains one of the most startling and generative
works in the canon of film theory, a text that Annette Michelson calls “an
early, ambitious, and nearly definitive statement of her poetics.”41 Deren’s
debts to Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent” and to modernist
theory more widely have been remarked upon by Michelson and more
systematically and genealogically traced by Renata Jackson.42
(Unfortunately, Deren’s theory often tends to be read in relationship to her
own film practice and not as a contribution to the development of film
theory more broadly.)
As I mentioned in the opening passages of this chapter, Deren nowhere
mentions by name Eliot’s theory of impersonality which so clearly
influences her own thinking.43 This is no bad thing: Eliot seems to have
been subsumed into her thinking in a manner that accords with the logic and
sensibility of Eliot’s own. She comes closest to alluding to Eliot’s writing in
the book’s third chapter.44 In the same chapter, she echoes Worringer’s
thinking but credits its argument exclusively to Hulme, through whom she
seems to have encountered him, perhaps without realizing the latter’s debts
to the former.45 She mobilizes an understanding of the “primitive” artist,
who would have been “the best informed” member of his society in order to
repudiate the “modern primitive,” who merely mimics the real primitive’s
abstract forms while being “less informed of his own culture” and thus
creates “forms irrelevant to its informations.”46 The phony primitive (here
we might imagine Deren is thinking of examples drawn from Abstract
Expressionism or Surrealist painting) attempts to achieve a mode of
abstraction by withdrawing from his conscious engagement with his
culture. For Deren this is an ontological sin against the nature of art, which
must, she argues, always “at least comprehend the large facts of its culture,
and, at best, extend them imaginatively.”47 Deren’s thinking here seems to
echo Eliot’s contention that the “dead writers” who constitute a tradition are
not “remote” but should be alive in a serious creative act because “they are
that which we know.”48 Deren presses forward the argument that a radical
embrace of what can be known, combined with the artist’s “own
imagination and intellect” and “the art instrument,” is the only way of
insuring that the resulting artwork will not merely be “redundant,
exploratory activity.”49 Deren’s is a theory of radical self-consciousness in
which the full embrace of one’s knowledge, one’s capacities, one’s culture,
and one’s medium all unite to create the conditions for an escape from self
and analysis of the wider culture, rather than a collapse into the solipsism of
individual expression. Deren epigrammatically condenses her thinking into
the claim that “the distinction of art is that it is neither simply an expression
of pain … nor an impression of pain, but is itself a force which creates
pain.”50 She goes on to link this vision of art’s distinction (or its specificity)
to “a classicism” and to “ ‘ritualistic’ form,” echoing both Hulme and
Worringer, again, even though the cadence of the passage—“neither … nor
… but”—echoes precisely that of Eliot’s “not … not … but … ” Eliot is that
which Deren knows (and I think it would be fair to say that she expects her
readers to know this, too).
The refusal of both expression and impression are compelling insofar as
Deren seems to suggest that the cinema ought to do more than represent a
feeling (like other narrative media) and do more than offer the reality of its
own documentation (like other indexical media). As an iconic-indexical
medium that is, moreover, a time-based and durational medium, film has
the possibility of combining the obdurate reality of the photographic
sections of time recorded by the camera with the plasticity of language, in
which combinations of elements create new meanings out of familiar
signifiers. In Deren’s first film, Meshes of the Afternoon (1943), which she
made with her then husband Alexander Hammid, there are a number of
sequences in which the film’s unnamed protagonist (played by Deren
herself) is shown looking into space. The film cuts on close-ups of Deren’s
face to shots in which Deren (re)appears—as if she existed in her own
point-of-view shot, as if she were both subject and object of her own
perception. The force of editing creates a palpable sense of something
impossible or unreal becoming real and all too possible. The indisputable
thereness of the photographic fact (the shot, in its indexicality and in its
duration), and the cognitive force of editing suggest that somehow Deren
really does see herself. So great is the force of this evidence, so upsetting
the frisson of this effect, that we find ourselves only later explaining to
ourselves how the effect was achieved. (“I get it! She edited a shot of
herself looking to a shot of herself being looked at!”) But the
demystification does not dislodge the real unreality of what we have seen,
or, as Deren would put it: “the reality which emerges is a new one—one
which only film can achieve and which could not be accomplished by the
exercise of any other instrument.”51
The point in my discussion here is not to offer up evidence of Deren’s
conviction in cinema’s specificity (its “distinction”), but to consider how
that specificity operates theoretically for her, as a guarantor of the medium’s
impersonality. Deren chooses to call the sort of artistic practice she is
theorizing “ritualistic.”52 The term summons a nexus of qualities. First, it is
the case that art itself, as autonomous practice, arises from its heteronomous
function in ritual, religious practice. More important for Deren, “ritualistic
form is not the expression of individual nature of the artist.” Instead, and in
the fuller passage with which I began this chapter, Deren writes:
ritualistic form treats the human being not as the source of dramatic action, but as a
somewhat depersonalized element in a dramatic whole. The intent of such depersonalization
is not the destruction of the individual; on the contrary, it enlarges him beyond the personal
dimension and frees him from the specializations and confines of personality.53

What I think Deren is driving at is the opposite of W. H. Auden’s reminder

that “poetry makes nothing happen.”54 The cinema capable of embodying
the ritualistic form that Deren theorizes actually would make something
happen. When Deren sees herself (across a cut) in Meshes of the Afternoon,
the effect is closer to the consecration of the host in the Catholic eucharist,
or the summoning of the spirits in voudoun (a subject that greatly interested
Deren and about which she wrote a brilliant book and shot footage for a
never-to-be-completed film). Ritual extends from a constitutive
impersonality and produces a reality that did not exist before. Deren’s use
of the term secures the logic of her dismissal of expressions and
impressions: these are things that make nothing happen. Ritual form,
however—what Deren calls “a conscious manipulation designed to create
effect”—produces “the new man-made reality, in contrast to the revelation
or recapitulation of one which exists.”55 Here the urgency of Deren’s theory
becomes clearer: it extends not merely from a squeamishness about the
mawkish sharing of feelings but from a desire to make sure that something
unprecedented comes into the world, in a way—so she believes—that can
only be true when the individual is displaced as the origin of the work. Read
in this light, we can see that Deren and Bazin, writing contemporaneously,
but without having read each other, discover a practice of cinematic
impersonality that indicates the preferred path for advanced film practice in
the postwar period. Bazin, I imagine, would have been exasperated with
Deren’s delight in montage, and Deren would have not put up with Bazin’s
puritanical opposition to it, but on a more fundamental level, they speak the
same language, one of impersonality.

Kracauer

Siegfried Kracauer is the theorist who most fully and systematically

elaborated what could be considered a “realist” theory of film. His Theory
of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality was written in the 1950s in
New York City and first published in 1960. Like Bazin and Deren, Kracauer
responds—implicitly and explicitly—to the experience of World War II and
its demonstration of the human capacity to unleash violence. The subtitle of
Kracauer’s book directs readers immediately to an understanding of the
medium as a reparative force. For Kracauer much depends on cinema’s
photographic base: the book’s first chapter is titled “Photography.” The
emphasis Kracauer places on “reality,” and on film’s photographic nature,
has frequently led critics to dismiss his work as naively invested in
cinema’s proximity to or faithful reproduction of the world.56 Miriam
Hansen bracingly disputed this manner of reading Kracauer: “If Kracauer
seeks to ground his film aesthetics in the medium of photography, it is
because photographic representation has the perplexing ability not only to
resemble the world it depicts but also to render it strange, to destroy
habitual fictions of self-identity and familiarity.”57 In this sense, Kracauer’s
thinking aligns with Bazin and Deren, and, moreover, coincides with both,
as we shall see, in its making a case for film’s estranging realism by way of
emphasizing its tendency toward depersonalization.
Part of cinema’s capacity for impersonality is the way in which it—
always because of its photographic base—is a porous medium. It lets things
into film, onto the surface of the cinematic representation, outside the full
control of the intentions of the maker. Cinema’s contingency is the
guarantor of its cultural and ethical importance, and this same contingency
—precisely because it is the substance of that part of cinema ungoverned by
the consciousness of the filmmaker—is the source of its impersonality.
Kracauer tells us, early on in the book, that “the most creative film maker is
much less independent of nature in the raw than the painter or poet; that his
creativity manifests itself in letting nature in and penetrating it.”58 This
passage makes an interesting counterpoint or companion to Deren’s
thinking. For Deren, the artist’s supreme control is always paramount, but
what the artist manipulates are small sections of reality laid down on the
filmstrip. For Kracauer, however, film’s provision of a new way of grasping
the contingency of our world is offered by the same indexicality so
important to Deren and Bazin, but it is indexicality’s interruption of artistic
coherence (“authorship” we might say) that is the source of its power.59
For Kracauer, film’s interest lies in the fact that it captures whatever is
placed before the camera. It possesses and exhibits a mode of inattentive
attention, even when authorial control is at stake. For instance, Kracauer
suggests that “any film narrative should be edited in such a manner that it
does not simply confine itself to implementing the intrigue but also turns
away from it toward the objects represented so that they may appear in their
suggestive indeterminacy.”60 The lack of fixity is a kind of unlegislated,
unquantifiable force or evidence belonging to and generated by the
cinematic image, something that evades or eludes the psychologization of
both maker and spectator. In his chapter addressed to the question of
spectatorship, Kracauer links the sensuous, evidentiary charge of cinema to
its capacity for depersonalization. He argues that “film images affect
primarily the spectator’s senses, engaging him physiologically before he is
in a position to respond intellectually.”61 The spectator’s physis here
summons a universalizing solvent, one that usurps the intellect’s passion for
interpretation and possession for the meaning of a film. Kracauer reports
that a “French woman” told him that “ ‘In the theater I am always I … but
in the cinema I dissolve into all things and beings.’ ”62 It is one of the most
beautiful passages in the book, and Kracauer’s recourse, at exactly this
moment, to the speech of another, cleverly emphasizes the blurring of
boundaries that he is attempting to identify. Authorized by this wonderful
formulation, Kracauer goes on to speculate that filmgoing arises from a
“physiological urge”: spectators do not go to the cinema “to look at a
specific film or to be pleasantly entertained; what they really crave is for
once to be released from the grip of consciousness, lose their identity in the
dark, and let sink in, with their senses ready to absorb them, the images as
they happen to follow each other on the screen.”63
Here depersonalization might look merely like a kind of stupefaction, but
Kracauer is keen to find a way of describing the response to film as a way
to being-in-common, a manner of attuning ourselves to what we share,
rather than what we (individually) possess. The value of the
depersonalization produced or afforded by cinema’s privileged affinity with
the contingent extends from the fact that it “assists us in discovering the
material world in its psychophysical correspondences. We literally redeem
this world in its dormant state, its state of virtual nonexistence, by
endeavoring to experience it through the camera.”64 We might worry that
Kracauer here, in the book’s epilogue, verges on the homiletic. The
redeeming, so to speak, phrase here, is “through the camera.” The camera’s
abstracting and alienating agency does not merely fulfill the function
assigned to art by Shklovsky, to make us, through the “device” of art feel,
again, the strangeness of that which has been rendered invisible by
familiarity.65 In a sense, the institution of art, or the autonomy of art, is not
what is at stake for Kracauer, given his assertion that “art in film is
reactionary,” an “intrusion.”66 Rather, the camera, in its ontologically
impassive registration of what is before it, gives us the world, rather than a
world, or a world according to this or that filmmaker.

A I
The impersonal tendency that I have attempted to trace in two major phases
of classical film theory is felt across a great many strands and tributaries of
film theory, produced in different times and places, in response to different
demands and imperatives. Stanley Cavell’s The World Viewed returns
repeatedly to the question of cinema’s impersonality, a quality granted it by
photography’s automatism by which we win an experience “of the camera’s
outsideness to its world and my absence from it.”67 Do we not hear the
claim of the impersonal when Laura Mulvey, in the last paragraph of her
landmark essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” issues the
exhortation that “the first blow against the monolithic accumulation of
traditional film conventions (already undertaken by radical film-makers) is
to free the look of the camera into its materiality in time and space and the
look of the audience into dialectics, passionate detachment?”68 Do we not
hear, again, an echo of the impersonal refrain, in Gilles Deleuze’s insistence
on the “purely optical and sound situations” that offered are by the cinema
of the time-image?69 And even more recently, in film theory’s confrontation
with affect theory, the task it seems is, as it ever has been, to find our way
toward the chastening frisson offered by impersonality.70
In tracing this line of affiliation, I do not mean to dissolve the historical,
ideological, and cultural differences that importantly separate these
theoretical works. Nor do I intend to read film theory’s history of reckless
disagreement, divergence, and heterogeneity in a key of deadened or dull
sameness. One could simply reduce the recurrences I have traced to the
simple fact that cinema, as a modern artistic medium, is still in thrall to the
modernist sensibility that is conatal with the cinema itself. But there is
another sense in which the theoretical investment in cinema’s impersonality
—a gift bestowed on it by its indexicality and its automatism—tells us an
interesting story about the status of the human when cast in relationship to
the cinema.

N
1. Maya Deren, An Anagram of Ideas on Art, Form and Film, in Essential Deren, ed. Bruce
McPherson (Kingston, NY: Documentext, 2005), 58. This text was originally published as a
chapbook by the Alicat Book Shop Press in Yonkers, New York.
2. Ibid., 58.
 3. T. S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” in The Sacred Wood (London: Routledge,
1989), 59. First published 1920.
4. Cf. my account of Deren’s interest in Anglo-American modernism in John David Rhodes,
Meshes of the Afternoon, new ed. (London: BFI Film Classics/Bloomsbury, 2020), 27–34. First
published 2011.
5. T. J. Clark, Farewell to an Idea (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), 9.
6. Wilhelm Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style,
trans. Michael Bullock (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1963), 14–15.
7. Ibid., 15.
8. Ibid., 16–17.
9. T. E. Hulme, “Modern Art and its Philosophy,” in T.E. Hulme: Selected Writings, ed. Patrick
McGuinness (Manchester, UK: Carcanet Press, 2003), 98. Cf. Alun R. Jones, “T.E. Hulme,
Wilhelm Worringer and the Urge to Abstraction,” The British Journal of Aesthetics 1, no. 1
(1960): 1–7.
10. Hulme. “Romanticism and Classicism,” 71, 79.
11. Eliot, “Tradition,” 56.
12. Eliot does not name Wordsworth, but alludes to him: “These experiences are not ‘recollected,’
and they finally unite in an atmosphere that is not ‘tranquil’.” Ibid., 58. Here Eliot has in mind
Wordsworth’s characterization of poetry as something that “takes its origin from emotion
recollected in tranquility.” Cf. William Wordsworth, “Preface,” in Lyrical Ballads, ed. Michael
Mason (Longman: London, 1992), 82.
13. Eliot, “Tradition,” 58.
14. Cf. Maude Ellman, The Poetics of Impersonality: T S Eliot and Ezra Pound (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1987).
15. For a gloss on the meaning of “kinok” see the glosses provided by Annette Michelson in her
edited edition of Vertov’s writings: Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov, ed. Annette
Michelson, trans. Kevin O’Brien (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 6.
16. Ibid., 7.
17. Ibid., 17.
18. Ibid., 14.
19. Ibid., 15.
20. Ibid., 18.
21. Ibid., 8.
22. Ibid., 21.
23. Ibid., 41.
24. Michelson, “Introduction,” in Michelson, Kino-Eye, xxiii.
25. Sergei Eisenstein, Selected Works, Volume I, trans. and ed. Richard Taylor (London:
BFI/Indiana University Press, 1988), 59 (italics in original).
26. Ibid., 60–61.
27. Ibid., 62.
28. Ibid.
29. I admit this may be a hasty and inaccurate (even heretical) conceptualization or
characterization of both thinkers. For a finer glossing of the distinctions and overlaps here, cf.
John Mackay, Dziga Vertov: Life and Work. Volume 1 1896–1921 (Boston: Academic Studies
Press, 2018), 270–75.
30. François Truffaut, Hitchcock/Truffaut, revised ed. (New York: Touchstone/Simon and Schuster,
1983), 269.
31. Eisenstein, “A Dialectical Approach to Film Form,” in Film Form: Essays in Film Theory, ed.
and trans. Jay Leyda (San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1977), 63. Written in 1929.
32. Mackay, Dziga Vertov, 273. Mackay immediately goes on to say that Eisenstein also saw
spectators as “endowed with the capacity, if properly stimulated, to dialectically or
‘ecstatically’ transcend those resistances.” Ibid. But even this capacity, I would argue, is a
general quality shared by all spectators universally, and so not a personal attribute of any
single spectator.
33. Linda Nochlin, Realism (Middlesex, UK: Penguin, 1971), 13–56.
34. André Bazin, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” in What Is Cinema? Volume I, ed.
and trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 14.
35. Noël Carroll, Mystifying Movies: Fads & Fallacies in Contemporary Film Theory (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1986), 112.
36. Bazin, “Ontology of the Photographic Image,” 12.
37. Ibid.
38. Cf. Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgement, ed. Paul Guyer, trans. Paul Guyer and
Eric Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 99–104.
39. Bazin, “Ontology of the Photographic Image,” 15.
40. Deren, Essential Deren, 123.
41. Annette Michelson, “Poetics and Savage Thought: About Anagram,” in Maya Deren and the
American Avant-Garde, ed. Bill Nichols (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 27.
42. See ibid., and Renata Jackson, “The Modernist Poetics of Maya Deren,” in Nichols (ed.), Maya
Deren, 47–76. Michelson also places Deren directly in a tradition of abstraction that descends
from Eisenstein. Michelson, “Poetics and Savage Thought,” 34.
43. Like Hulme in his suspicion regarding Romanticism, Deren had a hostile attitude towards
Surrealism of being a kind of incontinence. See Essential Deren, 38–43.
44. This is chapter 3A. Deren proposes that the book is organized as an “anagramatic complex,”
meaning that section is related to the whole, and the whole is present in each part. Deren,
Anagram, 36.
45. Ibid., 51.
46. Ibid., 53.
47. Ibid., 53.
48. Eliot, “Tradition,” 52.
49. Deren, Anagram, 53.
50. Ibid., 54.
51. Ibid., 89.
52. Deren explains her use of the term, as well as her misgivings about it, in ibid., 57–58.
53. Ibid., 58.
54. W. H. Auden, “In Memory of W.B. Yeats,” in The English Auden: Poems, Essays and
Dramatic Writings, 1927–1939, ed. Edward Mendelson (London: Faber and Faber, 1977), 242.
55. Deren, Anagram, 59.
56. See Miriam Hansen’s summary of these charges (leveled by Pauline Kael, Andrew Tudor, and
Dudley Andrew) in Miriam Hansen, “Introduction,” in Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film:
The Redemption of Physical Reality (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), ix.
57. Hansen, “Introduction,” xxv.
58. Kracauer, Theory of Film, 40.
59. Hansen has written—much more powerfully, I should say—about what I am trying to describe
here. Cf. again Hansen, “Introduction,” esp. xxv and xxxi.
60. Kracauer, Theory of Film, 71.
61. Ibid., 158.
62. Ibid., 159.
63. Ibid., 159–60.
64. Ibid., 300.
65. Viktor Shklovsky, “Art as Device,” in Theory of Prose, trans. Benjamin Sher (Champaign, IL:
Dalkely Archive Press, 1991), 1–14. First published 1929.
66. Kracauer, Theory of Film, 301.
67. Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film, enlarged ed.
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), 133.
68. Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen 16, no. 3 (Autumn 1975): 18.
69. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta
(London: Continuum, 2005), 4. N.B.: the preponderance of some form of this phrase through
the book’s first chapter.
70. E.g. Eugenie Brinkema, The Forms of the Affects (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014).
 CHAPTER 31

ON THE IMPERSONALITY OF
EXPERIENCE
Psychoanalysis, Interiority,
and the Turn to Affect

SCOTT C. RICHMOND

D. N. Rodowick opens the preface to the second edition of The Crisis of

Political Modernism, published in 1994, with these sentences:
Today I find that the 1970s, or what I call the era of political modernism, is often treated
with an equal mixture of pride and embarrassment. Pride in a decade in which theoretical
work in film studies defined the cutting edge of research in the humanities and in which the
field itself became increasingly accepted as an academic discipline. A certain
embarrassment in that the era of political modernism now seems a bit passé, especially with
respect to its formalism and extravagant political claims. Text-centered semiology,
psychoanalytic accounts of the subject, and Althusserian Marxism appear in 1994 as relics
of a near past that are now surpassed by a variety of approaches: for example, the renewed
emphasis on historical research, the theoretical questions raised by the debates on
postmodernism, and the increasing dominance of television and video studies.1

Rodowick here is telling one version of one of the best known just-so
stories of film theory. Once upon a time, in the 1970s, film theory had a
dominant approach. We might, with Rodowick, call that approach political
modernism—or 1970s theory, or Screen theory, or “Grand Theory,” or
apparatus theory. Whatever we want to call it, such theory put
psychoanalysis—alongside semiotics and ideology critique, and saturating
both—at the center of the project of theorizing the spectator, or the
cinematic subject. Such a project was exciting, or at least productive, but it
was also, in retrospect, excessive. Already passé in 1994—perhaps now
outré in the 2020s—this project needed to be corrected: made more modest
in its claims and means, and displaced from its dominant position in film
theory. And indeed, it was. Sometime in the years around 1990, that
dominance, and with it the taken-for-granted importance of psychoanalysis
as a critical tool in film theory, gave way.
When apparatus theory gave way, it gave way first and foremost to
methodological pluralism—not only to the tendencies Rodowick lists
above, but also to cognitivism, film-philosophy, Deleuzian theory, reception
studies, cultural studies, and phenomenology. No particular disciplinary
formation came to occupy the dominant position apparatus theory enjoyed
in its heyday from about 1970 to about 1990. That said, when theorists have
told versions of this story during the last decade or so, they have tended to
put special emphasis on how apparatus theory gave way to affect theory.
Twenty years after Rodowick, Eugenie Brinkema begins The Forms of
the Affects with a rhetorical question: “Is there any remaining doubt that we
are now fully within the Episteme of the Affect?”2 And, when she turns to
film theory specifically, she writes, “When the history of film and media
theory in the 1990s and 2000s is written, it will turn out to have been the
long decade of the affect.”3 For his part, and more recently still, Nico
Baumbach writes that “an emphasis on signification has been replaced by
an emphasis on asignifying intensities, on the haptic and tactile, on bodies
and pleasures.”4 For Baumbach, this affect theory, like the cognitivist and
analytical-philosophical “posttheory” that arose around the same time, is
marked by “a refusal to see media in terms of either the subject or
representation and an unqualified dismissal of the utility of concepts such as
identification, ideology, or any terminology derived from psychoanalysis or
Saussurean linguistics.”5
Thus we have a picture of the history of film theory since 1970—what is
sometimes called “contemporary” film theory. First, an era in which film
theory is dominated by the language of psychoanalysis and the project of
theorizing the subject of cinema. Then, a second era in which even the most
theoretically ambitious approaches dispense with the jargon and methods of
psychoanalysis as well as its major intellectual project of theorizing the
subject (whose name in film theory is sometimes the spectator). In this
second era, theory is a lot less important, and what theory continues to be
written is written with different coordinates—most centrally, affect.
Academic essays that begin with a recitation of a just-so story quite often
aspire to a brilliantly counterintuitive reversal of that story. This chapter
offers no such reversal. Indeed, I believe the picture of film theory in
Rodowick, Brinkema, Baumbach, and others really is both useful and
largely correct.6 In place of a reversal, my goal in this chapter is to offer a
richer version of this picture, or at least one part of it. I want to discern,
across this rupture between specifically psychoanalytic film theory and the
turn to affect in film and media theory, a shared intellectual problem that
animates both: that of the impersonality of experience. The rupture of the
early 1990s in film theory will then not appear as the replacement of one set
of intellectual problems for another—say, from the extravagant
impersonality of the spectator to the personal and even diaristic impulse of
affect theory. Rather, it will appear as a modulation of theoretical problems
and the elaboration of new ways of working through them. In other words,
this chapter narrates the shift (cribbing from Brinkema) from the episteme
of the spectator to the episteme of affect by focusing on how impersonality
structures both.
Let us ask a question that is nearly always taken for granted in our just-so
stories: why did psychoanalysis need to be overcome? And why, for many,
did the turn to affect take its place? In Rodowick’s and Baumbach’s
accounts—as well as in more polemical versions with designs on killing off
psychoanalysis, such as those collected in Bordwell and Carroll’s Post-
Theory—the issue is the excessiveness of apparatus theory.7 Apparatus
theory’s political claims were extravagant—too speculative, too impersonal,
too universalizing, too focused on a now-outdated account of gender, and
too indifferent to the intersecting structural differences of race, queerness,
and ability. Moreover, especially under the tutelage of Jacques Lacan, it’s
also too obscure, too full of jargon, too recursive and referential and self-
referential, too unhinged. Brinkema, meanwhile, declines to offer even that
much of an explanation for the turn away from psychoanalysis and to affect:
“the contemporary critical investment in affectivity across the humanities
has to do with a poststructuralist response to the perceived omissions in
structuralism—or, indeed, may be part of a post-poststructuralist or anti-
poststructuralist response to perceived omissions in poststructuralism. The
turn to affect, thus, is part of a larger reawakening of interest in
problematics of embodiment and materiality in the wake of twentieth-
century Western theory that, for many, was all semiotics and no sense, all
structure and no stuff.”8 The breadth of Brinkema’s diagnosis—
encompassing as it does Western theory writ large—hints at something less
parochial than Rodowick’s and Baumbach’s narratives of a dispute between
film theorists about methods.
Why, then, did psychoanalysis seem to become extravagant? And, by the
same token, why did it cease to adequately describe our experiences—at the
movies, to be sure, but also elsewhere? And how did the turn to affect, by
contrast, seem to offer a new, important, and salient language that more
fully describes our forms of life and what it is like to live them?
The critical intuition at the heart of this essay is that film theory is
(among other things) a shared project of reckoning with what is difficult to
articulate in our aesthetic encounters with technical media. In the picture I
am trying to draw here, film theory comprises theoretical and critical
resources for sorting out what is personal and impersonal in such
encounters, in ways that reflect the meaning, force, texture, and context of
those encounters. In its concern with the impersonal—which is to say, the
broadly shared aspects of aesthetic encounters with film but also other
technical media—film theory is thus a form of realism about the technical
articulations and intimate structures of our horizons of experience in a
particular historical moment. The history of film theory—the history of how
we speak to one another about what is meaningful in movies and our
experiences of them—is, then, one expression of the history of experience.
To put it simply, and borrowing Brinkema’s broader horizons: the shift in
film theory away from psychoanalysis and toward affect should be read as a
reflection of, and response to, broad and deep transformations that not only
occurred in humanistic theory but also in the structures of experience that
humanistic theory aims to express—or, if you want a single word, in
subjectivity.9 And, so, let me restate these questions with a few shifts in
emphasis: what changes might have driven a shift in subjectivity, between
1970 and 1990, that obviated psychoanalysis as the critical idiom most
adequate to that subjectivity—and replaced it with affect?
 Posed this way, I hardly need to answer the question with its single, well-
known name: neoliberalism. We might hesitate at the ease of that answer; I
for one worry about how neoliberalism has come to be the culprit
responsible for everything bad under the sun since 1980 or so. But stating it
this way might also help us see that, however dead cinema may or may not
be in the 2020s, film theory in its psychoanalytical phase and its turn
toward affect (or indeed in its other iterations) remains a crucial intellectual
inheritance and scholarly practice for reckoning with our present. The
history of film theory since 1970 can be usefully understood as a series of
schemes for articulating the intimate impersonality of our relations to
technology. It is thus also a history of ways of articulating the political
import of what’s personal and impersonal about experience in the cinema,
and our experience with technical media more broadly. The political and
technical economy of the present—whatever your names and periodizations
of it may be (my preferred abstraction cluster is “intensively computational
neoliberal racial capitalism”)—is marked by the increasing personalization
of our media, and thus by profound shifts in, and equally profound
uncertainties about, what is personal and impersonal in experience.10
The path I take here is to offer provisional generalizations about the
impersonality of experience at a few different historical moments in the
intellectual trajectory of film theory from psychoanalysis to affect, in
roughly chronological order. These generalizations are grounded in close
engagements with what I take to be exemplary theoretical texts. To be sure,
my examples are calibrated to give a particular picture; my history here is
avowedly tendentious and speculative. After an initial sketch of
impersonality in the psychoanalysis of Freud and Lacan, I play out the
problem of impersonality in the apparatus theory of Christian Metz’s The
Imaginary Signifier. I then read Damon Young’s Making Sex Public,
reworking his story of the shift from the liberal to the neoliberal sexual
subject as a story about larger shifts in the nature of desire and the
relationship between desire, intimate impersonality, and media technology:
from the liberal subject to the neoliberal subject. Next, I draw on Steven
Shaviro’s The Cinematic Body as the paradigmatic text of the pivot from
psychoanalysis to affect, standing as my central example of how affect
theory articulates the impersonality at the heart of the cinematic encounter.
Finally, I turn to Brinkema’s polemic against affect theory to try to sketch
an alternative account of what film theory lost when it lost psychoanalysis,
and what it embraced in its turn to affect, and in its current methodological
pluralism—and what that loss might mean for the project of theorizing our
media today.

T I E
Psychoanalysis is, at its heart, a discourse of the impersonal.11 I mean this
in two senses. On the one hand, I mean the more pedestrian sense in which
any generalizing from case studies—say, in Freud’s postulation of the
Oedipus complex—aims at the impersonal. In this, psychoanalysis is like
any theory or method that produces general accounts arising from
regularities or patterns across cases, although in developing its cases, it
perhaps dwells more in the personal than other such discourses. But
psychoanalysis is not only impersonal in this way: it is also a theory of the
impersonal, of the nature of impersonality and its centrality to psychic life.
In many of its guises, and certainly in the versions most familiar and useful
to film theory, psychoanalysis attempts to articulate the impersonality at the
very heart of the personal.
Freud’s most famous concept, the unconscious, is already a name for the
impersonal dimension of psychic life. Freud offered more than a few
incompatible theories of the unconscious across his career, but they do
share at least one common feature. The unconscious names the part of
myself that I cannot appropriate as me or part of me—I cannot introspect it,
I cannot simply speak it aloud, I cannot experience it or understand it or
avow it or reckon with it (without, that is, undergoing treatment—and even
then, such understanding or reckoning is highly mediated). Freud’s theory
of impersonality in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) is one of his most
important, and certainly the best-known to film theory. Beyond the Pleasure
Principle is a study of the “compulsion to repeat”—over and above
intention, pleasure, even adaptation—in shell-shocked soldiers who came
home traumatized from the Great War, as well as in his grandson’s fort-da
game.12 Of course, these speculations lead Freud to the death drive, a
tropism inherent in organic life directing it toward “an earlier state of
things,” which, radically, tends toward a mineral, inorganic stasis: death.13
At the heart of the psyche, and even of life in general, Freud discerns the
famous death drive, or the incessant pull of the radically impersonal.
In the sequel to Beyond the Pleasure Principle, The Ego and the Id
(1923), Freud returns to this theme in more sober tones. There, Freud
introduces the concept of the id. Freud’s English translators (and James
Strachey in particular) have a frustrating tendency to varnish
psychoanalysis with pretensions to scientific rigor, translating perfectly
good ordinary German words with Latin or latinate neologisms. The
German title of The Ego and the Id is Das Ich und das Es; a direct
translation would render it The I and the It. (Ego and id are the Latin
equivalents.) The id—das Es, the It—is the radically impersonal dimension
of the psyche: “What we call our ego behaves essentially passively in life
and … we are ‘lived’ by unknown and uncontrollable forces.”14 Freud
proposes to call this “other part of the mind” das Es, following a tradition
he traces back to Friedrich Nietzsche, “who habitually used this
grammatical term for whatever in our nature is impersonal and, so to speak,
subject to natural law.”15 Freud took this idea of the id as being subject to
natural law quite seriously: he would speculate later in the book that the id
is not only heritable but also belonged to the species, not the individual.16
The id, then, is that impersonal part of ourselves governed by natural law,
rather than being self-governed.
For Freud, the ego was not, for all that, different in kind from the id; the
ego was a particular part or region of the id. However, if the id and ego are
not different in kind, Freud needed a story about how the ego comes into
being, how, that is, the ego is differentiated from the id. The ego is a
cutaneous formation, a kind of callous, where the recesses of the psyche
meet the world. “The ego is that part of the id which has been modified by
the direct influence of the external world through the medium of the Pcpt.-
Cs. [perception-consciousness system].”17 And the psyche meets the world
in virtue of the fact that it is embodied: “the ego is first and foremost a
bodily ego.”18 “The ego is ultimately derived from bodily sensations,
chiefly from those springing from the surface of the body. It may thus be
regarded as a mental projection of the surface of the body.”19 In this
“second topography” of the psyche, the ego is a part of the id transformed
by its contact with the world. More specifically, it arises from the need for a
sense of a body separate from but in relation to the world. (In a different
idiom that I have elaborated elsewhere, the ego is first and foremost a name
for proprioception, the perception—and consciousness—of self.)20 The id
is governed by natural law, the ego, by self-awareness and self-
maintenance.
Jacques Lacan, famously, would rework this scheme in one of his earlier
essays, “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function as Revealed in
Psychoanalytic Experience [Le stade du miroir comme formateur de la
fonction du Je telle qu’elle est nous revelée dans l’expérience
psychanalytique]” (1949).21 The “mirror stage” essay is, of course, a story
about the formation of the ego—das Es, le Je, the I. I will not rehearse this
story here, as it is so well known to film theory. For my purposes, it suffices
to note Lacan’s particular contribution. He specifies the particular influence
of the external world which sets off the differentiation of the ego from the
id, as a body ego marked by self-awareness: the encounter, that is, with the
mirror, and the identification with one’s own image in the mirror. For the
Lacan of the “mirror stage” essay, the self-consciousness of the ego, the
reflexive folding of the id into a consciousness of self that is the self,
precipitates through an encounter with optical technology. Which is also to
say, in the mirror stage as elsewhere, the ego for Lacan is, in a precise way,
a technical phenomenon.22 The id is governed by natural law; the ego, by
technical law. In each case, the psychoanalytic subject is shot through with
impersonality. What is personal in a psyche or a life arises only as the result
of, and against the backdrop of, impersonal forces. In contrast to clinical
practice, psychoanalytic theory’s picture of the subject is that of, in Mikkel
Borch-Jakobsen’s terms, an “intimate otherness” that is fundamentally not
appropriable as a self, as part of a psyche, that simply cannot be identified
with.23
Lacan’s mirror stage would, of course, become the central psychic and
technical figure for film theory’s psychoanalytic project. Christian Metz, in
The Imaginary Signifier (1975), writes, in some very well-known sentences,
“Film is like the mirror. But it differs from the primordial mirror [of Lacan’s
mirror stage] in one essential point: although, as in the latter, everything
may come to be projected, there is one thing and one thing only that is
never reflected in it: the spectator’s own body.”24 In Metz’s hands, like
Laura Mulvey’s after his, the cinema is a technology that intervenes in the
same place as the mirror: it is a technics of identification, which is to say, a
technology that installs itself as this intimate other. The cinema, like the
mirror, produces a subject.25 In Lacan, this subject has as its ground the
technics of the mirror, and identifies with its own image in the mirror. In
Metz, the subject both is grounded by and identifies with the operation of a
cinematic technics.
Joan Copjec complains, rightly so, that psychoanalytic film theory’s
treatment of the mirror—and Lacanian psychoanalysis in general—is too
enthralled with the operation of the cinema’s technics. The apparatus in
apparatus theory is so efficient and so implacable as to produce “the
harmonious relation between self and social order (since the subject is made
to snuggle happily into the space carved out for it).”26 Film theory attends
almost exclusively to the determinations of a subject by a technical
apparatus (or dispositif, if you like) that simply and always works. For
Copjec, this emphasis mistakes Lacan and his project, since on her reading
Lacan demonstrates how the psychoanalytic subject continually disrupts the
social order. For a great many film theorists, many of whom worked in a
psychoanalytic idiom, the problem lay not in a bad reading of Lacan but
elsewhere. For in presuming the seamless operation of the cinematic
apparatus, apparatus theory left no apparent room for differences of
structural kinds—or, if it did, accounting for such difference became a
vexed endeavor. “Sexual difference” was the most visible problem in
feminist theory of the 1970s, but racial difference also mattered a great deal
in the peregrinations of apparatus theory in the 1980s.27 Either way, the
problem lies in a picture of the cinema as a too-efficient technology, mass-
producing subjects in its own image, without resistance.
Regardless of whether it’s correct, apparatus theory’s reception of
psychoanalysis was certainly productive. The rhyme between the screen and
the mirror allowed apparatus theory to place the cinema’s operation at the
fundamental level of the subject’s self-relation. It described the cinema as a
technics for the modification, modulation, and indeed the production, of a
spectator–subject that was never empirical, never biographical or personal,
but impersonal through and through. The cinema of apparatus theory
unraveled the spectator’s ordinary self-possession and self-awareness. By
replacing the mirror with the screen, it engendered a process of
identification first with the cinema’s technics, and then with various
characters.28 It dwelt in (or snuggled happily into) the impersonal operation
of a technical system, of a subject that is almost purely a technical effect.

T I F T
This is the story of the ego: the dynamics of identification, the technicity of
the psychoanalytic subject and cinematic spectator. It is an important story
to tell to limn the impersonality of the spectator. But the cinematic spectator
did not only have an ego; it also had an id. Psychoanalytic film theory’s
concern with identification was matched only by its investigation of desire.
The screen was like the mirror, perhaps, but it was also, as we shall see, like
the window: film viewing, for much psychoanalytic film theory, was an act
of voyeurism. Damon Young has shown that this voyeurism—and in the
Freudian idiom, we should say, this perversion—is as central to the
functioning of the cinematic apparatus as the screen’s recapitulation of the
mirror. For Young, cinematic voyeurism is a nonteleological looking at
other human bodies. Thus he discerns “a perverse technical substructure, a
queer foundation at the level of the apparatus…. Although the rhetorical
and ideological operations of films as texts make it possible for us … not to
see it, the ‘ontological’ voyeurism of the cinematic apparatus, though it may
not always be specifically sexual, is fundamentally queer.”29 In other
words, the spectator not only has its sense of self modulated technically, it
also has its desire reworked technically—remade in the image of the cinema
—in ways that are easy to miss and difficult to identify with. Indeed, the
impersonal, perverse queerness of the cinematic apparatus is a queerness
untethered from identity, not appropriable as one’s own, and, crucially,
articulated by technics.30
The film is indeed like the window. In the last chapter of his book
Making Sex Public, “Through the Window from Psycho to Shortbus,”
Young looks through two cinematic windows, in Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock,
1960) and Shortbus (John Cameron Mitchell, 2006). In so doing, he shows
how something fundamental shifts in the way the cinema structures desire
between 1960 and 2006. Hitchcock’s midcentury sexual subject is marked
—as decades of criticism on Hitchcock have shown—by an inscrutable
interiority enfolded in layers of indirection and repression. Hitchcock’s
camera penetrates windows to reveal a hidden and perverse interior; both
his camera and his sexual subject are fundamentally structured by
perversion, the diversion of sexuality from its “proper” objects and aims—
and is thus, as Young points out above, latently queer.31 Young writes,
“This complicated viewing position constructs as its implicit addressee (and
mimics the standpoint of) the modern individual as subject of desire, in the
sense Foucault diagnosed that term as key to the modern (post-Christian,
medical and psychoanalytic) system of sexuality: desire as what ‘has
psychological depth’; ‘can be latent or manifest, apparent or hidden; …
repressed or sublimated’; as some nontransparent drive that thus calls for
‘calls for decipherment, for interpretation.’ ”32 In other words, the subject
position constructed by Psycho, and the perverse cinematic regime for
which it is the objective correlative, is a subject position ordered both by
and for psychoanalysis. Not only does Psycho explicitly offer its own pop-
psychoanalytic explication of its action in the voice of a criminal
psychologist explaining Norman Bates’s mommy issues, the viewer finds
themselves caught up in the perverse technological machinery of the
cinematic apparatus—and, by extension, caught up in the perverse
ideological machinery of the mid-twentieth-century apparatus (or dispositif,
in Foucault) of sexuality.33 Ordered by this apparatus of sexuality, this
subject is opaque to itself, with a psyche and a set of experiences that must
be explicated, and subjected to interpretation and elaboration, by
psychoanalytic method. For Psycho, as for psychoanalysis in general, sex
was “cloistered away as the festering truth of the subject’s ultimately
inaccessible interiority.”34
Shortbus, by contrast, dispenses with the opaque interior and its
perversion—and thus with the necessity and utility of psychoanalytic
interpretation. It does so because “it does away with the notion of
repression. Though the characters face challenges that center on their
sexuality, the key issue is not that of a repressed sexual drive.”35 In place of
repression, and thus of the split between the ego and the id and the
mediations and indirections of perversion, Young finds two problems:
permeability and connectivity. And indeed, these problems are not problems
that require psychoanalytic procedures to solve: “The working out of
problems in Shortbus is not the working out of the subject’s relation to itself
—the hermeneutics of the subject—but rather its participation in what
Shortbus club hostess [Justin Vivian] Bond, advancing a metaphor that will
be literalized when Sofia’s orgasm lights up the city, calls a ‘magical
circuitboard, a motherboard filled with desire that travels all over the world,
that touches you, that touches me, that connects everybody’.”36 The
problem of what Young calls the neoliberal sexual subject, embodied by
Shortbus and its anodyne obscenity, is not about mitigating the perversions
of an ultimately inaccessible interior, nor is it tarrying with that
inaccessibility in the process of analytic therapy, nor is it even managing the
mediations between the ego and the id, the self and its intimate other.
Instead, the problem for the neoliberal sexual subject lies in calibrating
one’s position and participation in the magical motherboard, assuring one’s
proper place in the global network—not a network of sex or desire but of
bodies and pleasures. For Young, Shortbus imagines a pleasure that is
ultimately evacuated of interiority, of truth content, and indeed, of desire.37
This replacement of sex and desire by bodies and pleasures is, of course,
a riff on Foucault’s famous gnomic slogan at the end of the first volume of
the History of Sexuality: “The rallying point for the counterattack against
the apparatus of sexuality ought not to be sex-desire, but bodies and
pleasures.”38 In Young’s words, “if desire belongs to sexuality as at once
self-relation and a means of normative discipline, pleasure, in Foucault’s
description, is not self-knowledge; it arises ‘at the limit of the subject, or
between two subjects,’ at the point of meeting, that is, at the superfices.”39
Pleasure, ultimately, is a superficial thing: “Meaningless and self-evident, it
requires no interpretation.”40 The model of the subject in Shortbus, both in
its characters and in its viewing position, is one unburdened by an
interiority that calls out for interpretation. Its impersonality is of a different
order than that of the psychoanalytic subject.
Because of this, Shortbus’s neoliberal sexual subject simply has no need
for psychoanalysis: its difficulty, its jargon, its elaboration of the opacity
and impossibility and necessity of self-relation in the mode of
interpretation. All this comes to feel misplaced, exorbitant.41 And this lets
me specify a bit more precisely the question I posed in the introduction:
Why did psychoanalysis lose its privileged position in film theory? And
why might affect have superseded it, at least in one strand of theorizing? I
proposed that between 1970 and 1990—or between 1960 and 2006—
cinematic subjectivity changed. In Young’s rendering, cinematic
subjectivity no longer seemed ordered by an interiority that required
psychoanalysis to interpret. This superseded interiority belonged to a form
of life ordered by desire, perversion, opacity, and interiority. With the
advent of neoliberalism and its sexual subject, the form of life and forms of
cinema to which psychoanalysis was suited had dissipated or unraveled. In
its place, neoliberalism and its technical, aesthetic, and political economies
had elaborated instead a form of life ordered by connection, circulation, and
superficiality. Psychoanalysis no longer seemed appropriate to the cinema
of the time; it no longer made adequate sense of the films of the time; it no
longer gave much insight to the structures of subjectivity such cinema
elaborated; it no longer felt necessary or appropriate to reach whatever
interiority we felt we had; and it no longer belonged to the forms of life
most of us seem to live, now.

T S S
In The Cinematic Body (1993), Steven Shaviro uses psychoanalysis to
demolish psychoanalysis. In a sustained attack on psychoanalytic film
theory of the 1970s and 1980s, he argues that the cinematic experience does
not intervene in our inner lives; nor does it order our desire. The cinematic
subject is not the repository of an inaccessible, perverse desire implanted by
the cinematic apparatus. Its ego is not remade in the image of the cinema;
its id is not the repository of repressed desires. He writes,
 I am taking issue with the conservative, conformist assumption—shared by most film
theorists—that our desires are primarily ones for possession, plenitude, stability, and
reassurance. I am thereby also rejecting this assumption’s complementary underside: the
notion of the Oedipal structuration of a “split subject,” which must assume the burdens of
“lack” (alienation from the real), and of the exclusive, binary disjunction of gender, as the
price for entering society. I am suggesting, rather, that what film offers its viewers is
something far more compelling and disturbing: a Bataillean ecstasy of expenditure, of
automutilation and self-abandonment—neither Imaginary plenitude nor Symbolic
articulation, but the blinding intoxication of contact with the Real.42

For Shaviro, this desire for expenditure, automutilation, and self-

abandonment are iterations of a cinematic subject that is fundamentally
masochistic. Overwhelmed by “raw sensation,” this cinematic subject “is
repetitively shattered by an ecstatic excess of affect.”43 Shaviro here is
riffing on the queer psychoanalytical project of Leo Bersani, who theorizes
sexuality as a desire for repetitive self-shattering, reworking Freud’s death
drive as a tropism toward “that which is intolerable to the structured self.”44
This jouissance marks a temporary dissolution of the ego. For much of
psychoanalytic film theory, the cinema is a machine for the production of
subjectivity, and an elaboration of certain genres of interiority. For Shaviro,
following Bersani, the cinema is a machine for extinction of self and the
demolition (or, at least, the demotion) of interiority.
The means by which this self disappears is, of course, affect. There are
many different attempts to define the term (including my own).45 I won’t
belabor definitional questions here, which often serve to distinguish affect
from its neighbors with which it might be confused, feeling and emotion.
But I do want to stress that in this body of thinking—in film theory as in
humanistic theory more broadly—affect is usually a term that insists on the
impersonal dimension (or even, nature) of the intensities it names. As Gilles
Deleuze and Félix Guattari put it, “affects are no longer feelings or
affections; they go beyond the strength of those who undergo them …
affects are beings whose validity lies in themselves and exceeds any
lived.”46 Elaborating the impersonality of affect, Shaviro writes: “affect is
primary, non-conscious, asubjective or presubjective, asignifying,
unqualified, and intensive; while emotion is derivative, conscious,
qualified, and meaningful, a ‘content’ that can be attributed to an already-
constituted subject. Emotion is affect captured by a subject, or tamed and
reduced to the extent that it becomes commensurate with that subject.
Subjects are overwhelmed and traversed by affect, but they have or possess
their own emotions.”47 Affect, for Shaviro as for most thinkers in the turn to
affect, is ultimately something that circulates between bodies and resides in
or traverses the body. It is intensity before it is captured by subjectivity and
made intelligible or interpretable by a subject—before it is turned into
emotion.
Regardless of what affect is, or the particular modes of impersonality that
supposedly organize it, claims about affect are nearly always organized by a
certain generalization of feeling. According to this account, affect does not
belong to me, the film theorist writing about films; it is not supposed to be
autobiographical. After all, as a cinematic subject, I come undone—
ravished, unraveled, or shattered—by the intensity of affect. As a film
theorist, when I speak a language of affect, I make a claim that my mere
feelings—with which affects are so easily confused—are not actually what I
am talking about. Instead, the intensities I am describing are not mine but
entities unto themselves. Or, if I am oriented more by Lauren Berlant, Eve
Kosofsky Sedgwick, or Kathleen Stewart than Deleuze, these intensities are
provisional elaborations of the generality or impersonality of my
experience.48 In effect, when theorizing in a language of affect, the subject
that I am, the subject writing film theory, also tends to disappear—even as I
am nevertheless speaking about my feelings—or, at least, intensities that
take place in my body.
As a rhetorical and conceptual move, appealing to affect is a way of
generalizing experience. Affect theory offers a surprisingly variegated set of
tools to do the work of generalization. (It is not for nothing that
phenomenology, another set of tools for generalizing first-person
experience, is so frequently associated with affect theory in much
contemporary humanities work; this association is more fraught than is
usually acknowledged.) In effect, affect theory offers warrants for a certain
generalization of the experience of the theorist, a project not very foreign at
all to any practice of aesthetic criticism, which, as Stanley Cavell points
out, require the critic to make her taste, in some way, general.49
Following Sedgwick’s well-known distinction between “strong” and
“weak” theory, I have argued elsewhere that there are “strong” and “weak”
versions of affect theory.50 In its “strong,” Deleuzian variant (which in
media theory I associate most closely with Brian Massumi and Mark
Hansen), affect theory is manifestly disinterested in subjects.51 According
to this thought, affects are actually not first person; they do not belong to
the subject who undergoes them. As such, they are not on the same
ontological level as experience or the subject, and thus, if we are theorizing
with them, they neither proceed from nor lead to experience. Of course, my
claim here is that even this version of affect theory, despite itself, is a
language to speak the impersonality of experience, one with its rigors and
agreed-on procedures for generalizing from experience. By contrast,
“weak” affect theory of the kind Sedgwick herself wrote (at least
sometimes) more thoroughly acknowledges that it is grounded in
autobiographical, personal experience. It offers its accounts while
embracing the risk that perhaps its appeals to affect are not feelings, or
experiences, that are very widely shared. This risk is important to take,
however. When the experiences it elucidates are shared, we can discover
ways of thinking, feeling, living, and doing politics together.
Either way, it seems to me that the film theorists who turned away from
psychoanalysis and turned toward affect did not move away from the
problem of experience, of its impersonality and difficulty and technicity.

O R
The picture I am drawing of film theory’s turn to affect is pointedly
different from the influential one Brinkema offers in The Forms of the
Affects. For Brinkema, when psychoanalytic film theory of the 1970s gave
way to a film theory largely organized by affect, theory forgot how to read:
“the work on affect and emotion from the past two decades that constitutes
the ‘turn to affect’ in film studies is novel in its shared sense that 1970s film
theory, with its grounding in psychoanalysis, Marxism, and structuralism,
lost its way, engaged diligently in the forgetting of affect by remembering
too well how to read.”52 Brinkema’s picture: affect theory, which is content
not to read, insists only on “the felt visceral, immediate, sense, embodied,
excessive,” “{excess, affect, sensation, embodiment, intensity, resistance,
whatever},” “some magical mysterious intensity X,” and “vague shuddering
intensity.”53 “One suspects, from these furiously recorded diaries, that the
theoretical qualification of such work is to be a better consumer of feelings;
if affect does not need to be interpreted, just recorded, then the most
affected theorist wins.”54
By contrast, for Brinkema, psychoanalytical film theory was “committed
to reading for form and ideology, meaning and sign”; it “remember[s] too
well how to read.”55 Brinkema is not arguing for a return to psychoanalytic
theory; nor is she trying to demonstrate that such theory is organized by a
(good) practice of close reading. Indeed, her signature method, radical
formalism, wants to get as far away as possible from psychoanalytic film
theory’s central conceptual term, the cinematic subject or the spectator:
“Thus, not only is this book not offering a contribution to theories of
spectatorship; it should be regarded as a de-contribution to spectatorship
studies, an attempt to dethrone the subject and the spectator.”56
Nevertheless, she does want to draw a picture of an affect-oriented film
theory that does not know how to read: “Although [Jennifer] Barker’s The
Tactile Eye is replete with references to specific films and specific shots or
scenes in specific films, in its emphasis on ‘muscular empathy’ and the
visceral exchange between film body and spectatorial body puts those
formal traits to work for this sensuous relation, for that ‘we’ who feels.”57
Whatever Barker is doing in her phenomenological work, for Brinkema, it
is not reading.
One of Brinkema’s slogans: “Affect is not where reading is no longer
needed.”58 But Brinkema goes much further than that: for her, where there
is affect, there is apparently not reading. In its place, there is only “brute
and final description of one man’s movements or one woman’s felt
pressures.”59 She continues by quoting the following passage from Shaviro:
 The pleasures, the unpleasant constraints, the consuming obsessions of writing theory …
cannot be separated from the bodily agitations, the movements of fascination, the reactions
of attraction and repulsion, of which they are the extension and elaboration. On the other
hand, however, theory derives its particular form from its endeavor to separate itself from
these founding impulses. It tries to assume as great a distance as possible from its object….
The subjectivity of the theorist is unavoidably engaged in this process, in ways that he or she
is driven repeatedly to reflect upon, but that remain forever beyond his or her grasp. What is
most important is what we are unable to acknowledge. I am too deeply implicated in the
pleasures of film viewing, and too embarrassed by my complicity with or subordination to
them, to be able to give a full and balanced account.60

For Brinkema, the consequence of acknowledging the theorist’s

unavoidable subjectivity is a loss of the generalizability that is proper to
theory: “With the loss of theoretical generalizability comes a loss of new
readings and new questions or problems…. [F]or those who care deeply
about speculation (of which I am one), these accounts are ends, not
beginnings, of theoretical inquiry.”61 The turn to affect, for Brinkema, does
not know how to read (or read well); nor does it know how to theorize (or
theorize well). The Cinematic Body, along with the rest of affect theory,
forgot how to read films. And so, The Cinematic Body, with its theoretical
claims grounded in a close reading of Kathryn Bigelow’s Blue Steel (1990)
and with its chapters each dedicated to close readings of films (by George
Romero, Jerry Lewis, Andy Warhol, etc.), does not know how to read.
Meanwhile, books of apparatus theory, like Metz’s The Imaginary Signifier,
apparently “remembering too well how to read,” do not mention individual
films at all.
Brinkema’s complaint, ultimately, lies in her rejection of affect theory’s
acknowledgment that theory is always compromised. No matter theory’s
aspirations to trace the impersonality of experience, cinematic or otherwise,
such experience both grounds and animates much of film theory’s project.
Brinkema, refusing such compromise, insists that her radical formalism, in
its elaboration of interpretive labor, dethrones the subject, negates
autobiography, deals in “subjectless affect, bound up in an exteriority,
uncoupled from emotion, interiority, expressivity, mimesis, humanism,
spectatorship, and bodies” (45). The theoria that animates her speculation
is, supposedly, unencumbered by the particularities of Brinkema’s
experience and subjectivity. But what is brilliantly, irreducibly,
resplendently present on each page of The Forms of the Affects is Eugenie
Brinkema: her mind, her interpretation, her charisma, her affects.
Like the psychoanalytic theory he critiques, Shaviro affirms the
analytical and interpretive difficulty of articulating the impersonality of
experience. It is not easy, in film criticism or theory, to sort out what in my
experience is mine and what belongs to the film, or to cinema. Shaviro, like
Metz and many others, puts this difficulty at the core of his film-theoretical
project. Brinkema effectively denies that difficulty, castigating any
acknowledgment of the subjectivity of the theorist as “always a
solipsism.”62 (This is one reason she does not allow for history in her
narrative of the turn to affect; to acknowledge why a theoretical language
might matter to a particular group of theorists at a particular time would be
to acknowledge the situatedness, the compromising, the subjectivity of
theory.) She thus aspires to the generalizability of a theoretical practice
whose impersonality is not ever compromised by the mess of subjectivity—
neither by the theoretical interest in subjectivity nor as the ground of the
theory’s interest and work. In place of such subjectivity, Brinkema places
her faith in method, and rigor.
Like almost every affect theorist (in film theory or in other fields),
Brinkema insists on the impersonality of the affect she reads for. Hers is an
affect resolutely without subjects (or bodies, or selves, or even persons).
She achieves that impersonality not with the fatuous assertion that her
feeling is important, or general, or somehow universal (as she accuses affect
theorists of doing). Instead, she achieves her generality and impersonality
through the rigor of method: the application of radically formalist close
reading. Her reading and her procedures are admirably rigorous. But the
application of such rigor will not, in fact, save us from the problems that
animate the repeated insistence that affect is impersonal: to paraphrase
Stanley Cavell, the problems of an individuality become isolation, and of
our means of escaping from such isolation.63
The impersonality of affect, the acknowledgment of the subject, and
rigor’s promise of an escape from solipsistic isolation: these are, to my
mind, the absolute core of what is vital in film theory, its epistemic and
aesthetic effects, the work of its work. Despite their differences, apparatus
theory’s psychoanalytical rigor and Brinkema’s formalist rigor both promise
to discern what is impersonal about an encounter. In their quest for the
impersonal, both psychoanalysis and formalism aspire to a certain
incorrigibility. They do not create, describe, or curate an experience. They
make a demonstration. They also hold out the promise of getting the
theorist away from the embarrassing, excessive mess of the personal. Rigor,
in the sense of overcoming what is personal, specific, or desultory about a
theorist’s encounter with a film, names a tendency toward the disappearance
of the subject from the experience which is nevertheless both the ground
and the target of that theory.

A ,I ,T
Lauren Berlant writes that “affect theory is another phase in the history of
ideology theory.”64 They continue: “To think about sensual matter that is
elsewhere to sovereign consciousness but that has historical significance in
domains of subjectivity requires following the course from what’s singular
—the subject’s irreducible specificity—to the means by which the matter of
the senses becomes general within a collectively lived situation.”65 This is
one way of restating, without the Lacanian baggage, Louis Althusser’s
famous (and dispositive for apparatus theory) definition of ideology:
“ideology represents the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real
conditions of existence.”66 Both trace a line from what is singular, specific,
personal in a scene to the structural determination—that is, to the
impersonal. If for Althusser ideology’s mediation between the personal and
the impersonal is specifically imaginary (again, in the Lacanian sense), for
Berlant, these mediations are much messier, much more difficult to track,
and not at all as intelligible or straightforward as older theories of ideology
might suggest. Our forms of life have shifted to reconfigure the relation
between personality and impersonality, and we have not yet caught up.
Affect theory begins with an acknowledgment that sorting out what is
personal and impersonal in an encounter—with cinema, with other
technical media—is difficult. And not simply because, as psychoanalytic
theory makes clear, it is impossible to identify with the intimate other of the
impersonal subject. To be sure, affect theory (in all its guises) has nowhere
near the stable picture of the subject that film theory did in its
psychoanalytic phase. Instead, affect theory—emphatically and explicitly in
Berlant’s case, but in many other thinkers besides—takes itself to be
engaged in the project of articulating the impersonality of experience, at the
moment when subjectivity has transformed, profoundly so. The historical
conditions of existence, which we might easily group under the heading of
neoliberalism, have transformed subjectivity and obviated psychoanalytical
models of the subject—and the models for the subject’s relations to those
very historical conditions which have not ceased to transform it. Not
knowing how to sort out what’s personal and what’s not, affect theory
follows the course from the personal, and hopes to arrive at something
impersonal, without very much confidence that our ways of following that
course—which Berlant glosses as intuitionist—can themselves assure our
success.
Recall Young’s diagnosis of this historical shift: the replacement of a
liberal sexual subject, organized by repression and perversion, by a
neoliberal sexual subject organized by circulation, permeability, connection.
In the first, interiority is recessed, inaccessible, requiring the rigors of
psychoanalysis to unpack. The second, it would seem, is a subject turned
inside out, bereft of interiority, traversed by affect and intensity, but
unencumbered by the contingent mess of an inexpressible inner life. This
subject is also permeable, open to connection, marked by successes or
failures of inserting itself into networks. One note that bears particular
emphasis in conclusion is that the technological articulation of the subject
has shifted: from a cinematic apparatus working over a desiring subject, to
an always-on network into which bodies and pleasures circulate. Affect
theory, at least the sort Brinkema targets, would then not only be diaristic
but the uncritical transcription of the dictates of a neoliberal regime of
power that Deleuze famously called control, concerned more with the
valorization and circulation of intensities than the discipline of bodies. I
sometimes find myself in the grip of that picture: here we are, all just
blathering on about our feelings, while the world keeps shattering around
us.
Our forms of discourse—whether they speak of repression or intensity,
psychoanalysis or affect—are tied to our historical horizon, to our forms of
life, and to the technological organization of our experience. Film theory
across its long history, but especially in the 1970s and 1980s, understood
the pressing need not only to understand the impersonal dimension of
experience but also the decisive importance of cinema’s technology to that
dimension. If our political economy has shifted toward neoliberalism, and
our technology is now presumptively computational and networked and
ubiquitous, two consequences follow: what feels personal or impersonal in
an encounter itself has shifted, and so, too, must the ways we talk about the
impersonal and personal stuff of our lives. If anything, social media, with
its circulation of the personal and its “personalized” but nevertheless
impersonal address to us, have at once heightened the stakes of sorting out
personality and impersonality, at the same time obviating our ready-to-hand
and shared ways of telling them apart.67
Film theory as a historical project—but especially in its intersections with
psychoanalysis and affect theory—has always taken seriously the
impersonally intimate ways in which the technical dimension of the cinema
addresses us not as individuals but as spectators. The crucial inheritance of
this theory is that it can help us understand the ways our contemporary
technology orchestrates new modes of impersonality. That may or may not
mean attending to films; it may or may not mean reading them—for their
form, or for anything else. Meanwhile, the promise of affect theory—in film
theory, or in the study of other technical media—lies in its continual
working of the problem of the personality, and impersonality, of our media.
Sometimes, it avoids this problem, as when it simply postulates the
generality or importance of one’s own encounters with films. Sometimes, it
avoids this problem, as when it refuses to acknowledge the risk or difficulty
of attending to what is irreducibly personal about our encounters with
media, as when it simply postulates the radical impersonality of affect.
Sometimes, even, it manages to do both at once. When it is successful,
however, affect theory sounds out one or several new languages for
discovering what is personal and what is impersonal, what is particular and
individuating and what is or might be shared among us. It is, in Cavell’s
words, “news about a world we share, or could”—when we no longer know
our place in a world, nor what sharing that world might mean.

N
 1. D. N. Rodowick, The Crisis of Political Modernism: Criticism and Ideology in Contemporary
Film Theory, 2nd ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), vii.
2. Eugenie Brinkema, The Forms of the Affects (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), xi.
3. Ibid., 26.
4. Nico Baumbach, Cinema/Politics/Philosophy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018), 6.
5. Ibid., 6.
6. For a different version of this story which stresses the shifting technologies of the moving
image, see Caetlin Benson-Allott, “Introduction: Opening Up to Home Video,” in Killer Tapes
and Shattered Screens: Video Spectatorship from VHS to File Sharing (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2013), 1–24.
7. David Bordwell and Noël Carrol, eds., Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies (Madison:
University of Wisconsin Press, 1996).
8. Brinkema, Forms of the Affects, xi.
9. You may note a certain slipperiness in my terms here: horizon of experience, form of life,
structure of experience, subjectivity, and so on. I do not think these are all equivalent, but I
also think that getting precise about which term I really mean is counterproductive. I do think
such terms are related. We find different vocabularies to express the same set of core problems
that reflect different commitments in various theoretical articulations, and also different
historical circumstances organizing those commitments. It is, of course, this core set of
problems that concern me here—and precisely not the differences between (say) Wittgenstein’s
form of life versus Gadamer’s horizon of experience versus Althusser’s subject.
10. On personalization, see especially Kris Cohen, Never Alone, Except for Now: Art, Networks,
Populations (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017); John Cheney-Lippold, We Are Data:
Algorithms and the Making of Our Digital Selves (New York: New York University Press,
2017); and Scott C. Richmond, Find Each Other: Networks, Affects, and Other Queer
Encounters (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, forthcoming).
11. Broad statements of this kind are risky. First of all, I use “psychoanalysis” here as a shorthand
for “psychoanalytic theory” (as opposed to, say, the clinical practice of psychoanalysis, or even
the genre of the psychoanalytic case study). More to the point, while I do mean this in a very
general sense, I do want to insist that this is also the sort of psychoanalytic theorizing that is
reasonably well known in the humanities academy: Freud and Lacan’s greatest hits, to be sure,
but also British object relations theory (Melanie Klein, D. W. Winnicott, Wilfred Bion, Adam
Phillips), psychoanalytic theory post-Lacan in France (Jean Laplanche, Mikkel Borch-
Jacobsen), as well as psychoanalytic theorizing in the humanities more broadly (Leo Bersani,
Joan Copjec, Ruth Leys).
12. Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, trans. James Strachey (New York: Norton,
1961), passim., but see esp. 17.
13. Ibid., 30.
14. Sigmund Freud, The Ego and the Id, trans. Joan Riviere, ed. James Strachey (New York: W. W.
Norton, 1960), 17.
15. Ibid., 17 n. 12.
16. Ibid., 35.
17. Ibid., 18–19.
18. Ibid., 20.
19. Ibid., 20 n. 16.
20. Scott C. Richmond, Cinema’s Bodily Illusions: Flying, Floating, and Hallucinating
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016).
21. Jacques Lacan, “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function as Revealed in
Psychoanalytic Experience,” Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English, trans. Bruce Fink
(New York: W. W. Norton, 2006).
22. The technics at issue in Lacan are not always the same. See especially Jacques Lacan, The
Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book 2: The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of
Psychoanalysis 1954–1955, trans. Sylvana Tomaselli (New York: W. W. Norton, 1988). In this
work, Lacan theorizes the ego in specifically cybernetic terms, as the operation of an
impersonal, technical system. I learned how to read the mirror stage as a story about technics
from Mark B. N. Hansen, Bodies in Code: Interfaces with Digital Media (New York:
Routledge, 2006). Lacan’s cybernetic inheritance (especially in the second seminar) is detailed
in Lydia Liu, The Freudian Robot: Digital Media and the Future of the Unconscious (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2010). For more on technicity in Lacan, see Friedrich Kittler,
“The World of the Symbolic—A World of the Machine,” in Literature, Media, Information
Systems, ed. John Johnston, trans. Stefanie Harris (New York: Routledge, 1997).
23. Mikkel Borch-Jakobsen, The Freudian Subject, trans. Catherine Porter (Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 1988), 6, 8.
24. Christian Metz, The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema, trans. Celia Britton
et al. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), 45.
25. Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen 16, no. 3 (Autumn 1975): 6–
18.
26. Joan Copjec, “The Orthopsychic Subject,” October 49 (Summer 1989): 60.
27. The literature here is vast. For a retrospective account of some of these differences and how
they mattered, see especially Elizabeth Reich and Scott C. Richmond, “Introduction:
Cinematic Identifications,” Film Criticism 39, no. 2 (Winter 2014–2015): 3–24.
28. This is, of course, Metz’s famous division between primary and secondary cinematic
identification. For more on this, see Metz, Imaginary Signifier, 54–56; Scott C. Richmond,
“The Exorbitant Lightness of Bodies, or How to Look at Superheroes: Ilinx, Identification, and
Spider-Man,” Discourse 34, no. 1 (Winter 2012): 113–44; and James J. Hodge, “Gifts of
Ubiquity,” Film Criticism 39, no. 2 (Winter 2014–2015): 53–78.
29. Damon R. Young, “The Vicarious Look, or Andy Warhol’s Apparatus Theory,” Film Criticism
39, no. 2 (Winter 2014–2015): 44.
30. Elsewhere I have argued that sexuality is itself best understood as a fundamentally technical
phenomenon. See Scott C. Richmond, “Sex and Technics: Ma vraie vie à Rouen,” in Find
Each Other. See also Gayle Salamon, Assuming a Body: Transgender and Rhetorics of
Materiality (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010).
31. Young is of course relying on the canonical definition of perversion in Sigmund Freud, Three
Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, trans. and ed. James Strachey (New York: Basic Books,
2000).
32. Damon R. Young, Making Sex Public, and Other Cinematic Fantasies (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2018), 199.
33. The difficulties of translating the French word dispositif into English are well-known, and I
will not harp on them here. It suffices to say that, at least sometimes, the “apparatus” of
“apparatus theory” in 1970s film theory translates dispositif (although sometimes it translates
appareil—including Louis Althusser’s appareils idéologiques and Jean-Louis Baudry’s
appareil de base). In Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality, meanwhile, Robert Hurley has
rendered le dispositif de la sexualité (the title of book’s fourth part) as “the deployment of
sexuality.” Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert
Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1980). For more on the translation of dispositif, see Frank Kessler,
 “Notes on Dispositif,” accessed June 18, 2021, http://frankkessler.nl/wp-
content/uploads/2010/05/Dispositif-Notes.pdf. For more on the significance of the term
dispositif in relation to Foucault’s thoughts on sexuality, see Richmond, Find Each Other, ch.
4.
34. Young, Making Sex Public, 200.
35. Ibid., 205.
36. Ibid.
37. This is substantially similar to the story told in Nick Davis, The Desiring-Image: Gilles
Deleuze and Contemporary Queer Cinema (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). Davis
tells a different causal story, about HIV/AIDS, rather than the shift from liberalism to
neoliberalism. But for both Young and Davis, the 1980s is marked by a decisive shift in
cinematic sexuality—and sexuality more broadly.
38. Foucault, History of Sexuality, 157, translation amended.
39. Young, Making Sex Public, 207.
40. Ibid.
41. To be sure, Shortbus isn’t Young’s preferred example for the neoliberal sexual subject; it still
has too great an attachment to the liberal forms of personhood that organize its fantasies of
sexual democracy. His example of the neoliberal sexual subject is, by contrast, Paul Schrader,
The Canyons (2013), which has no quaint attachments to anything democratic. See Young,
Making Sex Public, 215–37.
42. Steven Shaviro, The Cinematic Body (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 54.
43. Ibid., 54, 56.
44. Leo Bersani, “Is the Rectum a Grave?,” October 43 (1987): 197–222.
45. Two of the more productive efforts at this, which don’t agree very much with each other, are
Eric Shouse, “Feeling, Emotion, Affect,” M/C Journal 8, no. 6 (December 2005),
http://www.journal.media-culture.org.au/0512/03-shouse.php, and Jonathan Flatley, “Glossary:
Affect, Emotion, Mood (Stimmung), Structure of Feeling,” in Affective Mapping: Melancholia
and the Politics of Modernism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 11–27. I
have also recently taken a stab in this direction in Scott C. Richmond, “Feelings,” in A Concise
Companion to Visual Culture, ed. A. Joan Saab, Aubrey Anable, and Catherine Zuromskis
(Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2021), 439–55.
46. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, “Percept, Affect, and Concept,” in What Is Philosophy?,
trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994),
164.
47. Steven Shaviro, Post-Cinematic Affect (Winchester, UK: Zero Books, 2010), 3.
48. Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011); Eve Kosofsky
Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2003) and “Melanie Klein and the Difference Affect Makes,” South Atlantic Quarterly
106, no. 3 (Summer 2007): 625–42; Kathleen Stewart, Ordinary Affects (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2007).
49. Stanley Cavell, “Aesthetic Problems of Modern Philosophy,” in Must We Mean What We Say?:
A Book of Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 73–96.
50. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or, You’re So Paranoid,
You Probably Think This Essay Is About You,” in Touching Feeling, 123–52; Richmond,
“Feelings.”
51. Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2002); Mark B. N. Hansen, New Philosophy for New Media (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 2004).
52. Brinkema, Forms of the Affects, 28.
53. Ibid., xiii, xiii, xiv, xv.
54. Ibid., 32.
55. Ibid., 27, 28.
56. Ibid., 36.
57. Ibid., 35.
58. Ibid., xiv (emphasis in the original).
59. Ibid., 33.
60. Shaviro, Cinematic Body, 10.
61. Brinkema, Forms of the Affects, 33.
62. Ibid., 32.
63. Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed: Enlarged Edition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1979), 23.
64. Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 53.
65. Ibid., 53.
66. Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses: Notes towards an
Investigation,” in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York:
Monthly Review Press, 2001), 109.
67. This, I take it, is Kris Cohen’s central point in his crucial Never Alone, Except for Now: Art,
Networks, Populations. For Cohen, contemporary media are marked by a confusion of “group
form”: when we participate in life online, are we participating in a public, or a population? Are
we liberal subjects or statistical members of a population? Individuals or dividuals? Many will
insist that we are now the latter, for example, John Cheney-Lippold, We Are Data: The Making
of Our Digital Selves. But for Cohen, we are always potentially both, and online life is marked
by an unpredictable toggling or oscillation or bleed between these two poles. This is the scene
into which I have written my next book, Find Each Other.
 CHAPTER 32

CINEMATIC EXPERIENCE
From Moving Images to Virtual
Reality

ROBERT SINNERBRINK

ALTHOUGH it has figured frequently in theoretical discourse on cinema, the

idea of “experience” has rarely received specific critical reflection or
analysis. From early attempts to theorize the aesthetic experience of film,
the shift to theorizing the ideological effects of spectatorship to the more
recent turn toward embodied engagement, the idea of “cinematic
experience” has proven both productive and elusive. This tendency has
become more acute with the rise of new media technologies (from digital
cinema, interactive media, to VR) that challenge assumed views about the
nature of cinematic experience, emphasizing in particular the idea of
“immersion” as a key element of contemporary audiovisual culture. In what
follows, I outline some of the features, history, and implications of this
concept. I offer both an historical account of the different aspects of this
notion (concerning aesthetics, spectatorship, ideology, and embodiment)
and a theoretical reflection on its implications and possibilities in relation to
both contemporary discussions in film-philosophy/film theory and
contemporary cinematic practices. I examine the transformation of
cinematic experience from a more traditional notion of aesthetic experience,
as applied to early film theory, the development of theoretical inquiry into
cinematic spectatorship with its skeptical critique of the notion of
experience, and the recent turn toward theorizing experiential dimensions of
cinematic engagement (affect, embodiment, and a renewed focus on
perceptual, aesthetic, and ethical experience). In conclusion, I consider
briefly the impact of new audiovisual technologies, suggesting that the
original enthusiastic embrace of cinema as an “experience machine”
capable of arousing, emulating, and enhancing “ordinary” experience has
returned in response to the rise of digital media culture, notably the advent
of VR narrative formats.

C E :A ,P ,
T
To be schematic, early film theory moved between opposing poles of
inquiry: (a) attempts to argue for the legitimacy of cinema as a new art by
arguing for the aesthetic experience it elicited and (b) more radical attempts
to articulate the novel and transformative forms of experience that cinema
could generate (perceptually, aesthetically, and imaginatively), which called
for new ways of understanding both art and aesthetic experience.1 This
contrast between more traditional versus experimental forms of experiential
engagement gave way to a more focused exploration of the idea of cinema
spectatorship, which was taken to have its own distinctive features—both
novel affordances and perceived moral pitfalls—compared with other forms
of artistic engagement. The midcentury (largely European rather than
Anglophone) attempts to explore aesthetic, phenomenological, and
imaginative forms of engagement with cinema (e.g., in the Filmologie
movement and in the work of theorists like Jean-Pierre Meunier) did not,
however, result in an ongoing research program or sustained establishment
of disciplinary foundations, despite its practitioners’ hopes.2 In what
follows, and to set the scene for my later discussion, I turn to the reflections
of early film theorists on cinematic experience, which demonstrate the
tensions between attempts to accommodate cinematic engagement within
traditional aesthetic theories and attempts to articulate the novel forms of
experience that the new art form could afford.

Cinematic Experience in Early Film Theory

From an historical perspective, early film theorization tended to focus on
the question of cinema and its role in cultural or aesthetic experience
(cinema as a modern art form or as an art capturing the experiences of
modernity).3 The earliest attempts to claim cinema as the “seventh art,” for
example, sought to establish its credentials in relation to theater, painting,
and poetry, and thereby aimed to incorporate film into traditional aesthetic
theories.4 Cinema’s resistance to this incorporation, however, due to both its
popular origins and its hybrid status, paved the way for theorists to argue
for an independent theory or philosophy of film, one concerned with
understanding the nature of the new medium, but also one more adequate to
cinema’s challenge to traditional aesthetic theories, notably its capacity to
capture the ephemeral, distracted experiences of modernity.5
The appearance of both avant-garde cinema and cinematic artist-auteurs
during the 1920s saw the emergence of what we could call speculative film-
philosophy. This experimental approach to theorizing the new medium was
more attuned to transformative kinds of experience (aesthetically and
psychologically). Indeed, certain authors and filmmakers in the 1920s (like
Delluc and Epstein) explored the idea of a “cinematic thinking”: cinema as
expressive of a distinctive mode of thinking, expressed through moving
images, which was not only analogous to consciousness but could also have
aesthetically transformative effects.6 This represented a way of approaching
cinema that challenged traditional philosophical discourse and called for a
new style of writing more in keeping with this transformative potential of
cinematic experience. With the later work of Jean Epstein this radical form
of film-philosophy mutated into an “antiphilosophy”: one that gestured
toward the overcoming of traditional aesthetic approaches thanks to the
revelatory powers of cinema to extend or expand “natural” consciousness,
to capture the dynamism of modern experience, and to reveal what remains
“invisible” in everyday life.7 The link between the transformative
experience of cinema and the distinctive experiences identified with
modernity (thanks to the acceleration of everyday life, impact of modern
technology, powerful role of images in cultural and social experience, etc.),
was again central to the way in which radical film theorists—from Epstein
and Balázs to Benjamin and Kracauer—approached the potentials of the
cinematic medium. As representative of such approaches, and particularly
the tension between traditional (accommodationalist) and modern
(transformationalist) conceptions of cinematic experience, I shall focus
briefly on Giovanni Papini and Riciotto Canudo, two early writers who
paved the way for theorists such as Balázs and Kracauer, before turning to
Hugo Münsterberg’s famous text, The Photoplay, the first sustained effort
to theorize both the psychological and aesthetic dimensions of our
experiential engagement with cinema.

Papini and Canudo on Cinema, Aesthetics, and Modern

Experience

A short piece published at the beginning of the last century by young Italian
writer and critic Giovanni Papini, “La filosofia del cinematografo” (The
Philosophy of Cinematograph) is arguably the first philosophical text on the
new art form of the cinema.8 Uncovered by Francesco Casetti, this
remarkable text, published in the Turin journal La Stampa in May 1907,
articulates many of the themes that would come to define film theory over
the coming century. It also offers one of the first meditations on the idea of
cinematic experience, understood here in the dual sense of the kind of
experience that cinema can afford us and that which is depicted or
expressed through moving images.
Papini commences with the observation that motion picture theaters
constitute a cultural and technological innovation that represents both a sign
of modernity and a threat to the unity of tradition.9 He goes on to list a
variety of reasons why film should matter to philosophers, emphasizing the
aesthetic experience and exploration of everyday life that cinema makes
possible but also hinting at the philosophical insights into modern
experience that cinema might yield. Papini stresses cinema’s capacity to
present complex historical and fictional scenarios in a manner that is both
realistic and spectacular, providing the spectator with a mirror or window
on an array of events unfolding in time and across disparate locations that
would be impossible to reproduce in the theater.10 The impression of reality
afforded by cinema leads to another advantage: the capacity to represent
events shortly after they occur. For Papini, this satisfies the modern appetite
for conveying news and “current affairs,” combining the features of the
“daily newspaper and the illustrated magazine.”11 It is this conjunction of
art and news, drama and spectacle, entertainment and information that
shapes the philosopher’s speculations on the importance of cinema for both
capturing and comprehending modern experience.
On the other hand, Papini also underlines the role of the imagination:
thanks to its novel use of visual special effects, cinema can show
imaginative and arresting images that defy ordinary experience or even the
laws of nature. It can create an imaginary world that is realistic and
fantastic at once, satisfying an imaginative engagement and hallucinatory
fascination with images that cannot be matched by the other visual arts:
“Thanks to photographic subterfuge, we are able to enter a world with two
dimensions that is far more imaginary than our own.”12
Indeed, by developing a philosophical interest in cinema, Papini claims,
we could make philosophy itself more “relevant” to our image-captivated
world.13 Cinema thereby not only serves as an object of philosophical
rumination; it can stimulate philosophy in ways that attune it better to the
ambiguous experiences of modernity. Papini’s prescient account of the
philosophical novelty represented by cinema, and the transformative
experiences that it makes possible, stands in sharp contrast with the very
traditional forms of theorization that were brought to bear in understanding
the new medium. If cinema is a medium apt to capture the accelerated
dynamism of modern experience, and even a way of attuning philosophy to
the modern world, how are we to theorize or philosophize about film?
This tension is strikingly evident in the work of Ricciotto Canudo, hailed
as one of the first film philosophers of the early twentieth century.14 An
important influence on Jean Epstein and Abel Gance, Canudo was praised
by Epstein for his prescient insight into the art of cinema. Canudo’s famous
essay, “The Birth of a Sixth Art” (1911), reprinted as “L’Esthetique d’un
sixieme art” in his book, L’Usine aux images, made paradigmatic claims for
the aesthetic experience afforded by cinema, which again is particularly
attuned to the accelerated pace and dynamic character of modern life.15
Canudo argued that the distinctiveness of cinema lay in its promise to
combine the rhythmic arts of music and poetry with the plastic arts of
architecture, sculpture, and painting—a version of Nietzsche’s famous
distinction between the dynamic “Dionysian” arts of music and the plastic
“Apollonian” arts of the image. As is typical of early film theory, Canudo
applies the schema of the five fine or beaux arts, to which cinema (along
with dance) would be added. More interesting is Canudo’s situating of
cinema as an art emerging in a period of historical transition between the
old world and the new. It is into this cultural “twilight zone” of nascent
urban modernity that cinema appears as a “superb conciliation of the
Rhythms of Space (the Plastic Arts) and the Rhythms of Time (Music and
Poetry).”16 Despite the obligatory comparison with the theater, Canudo
goes on to define cinema—well before Tarkovsky—as a hybrid art form
that is akin to “a Painting and a Sculpture developing in Time.”17
Like other early theorists, Canudo offers a hybrid account of the defining
features of movies, combining historical and technological aspects with
aesthetic and psychological elements, and highlighting cinema’s two
paradigmatically significant dimensions: the symbolic and the real, which
are, as he tells us, “both absolutely modern.”18 Cinema’s symbolic aspect is
that of “velocity”: the speed with which elements can combine and
interconnect in order to create a complex ensemble of images that has an
organic unity, “similar to a living organism.”19 Cinema is the symbolic art
most attuned to the speed and fragmentation of modern life, the acceleration
of human perception and dispersal of action in modern social and cultural
experience. The nineteenth-century bourgeois “love of restfulness” has been
replaced by the mobile attentiveness afforded by technology; the desire for
speed, noise, mobility, distraction, and conquering spaces is now satisfied
by the cinema rather than the theater. The modern collapse of distances,
exposure to anonymous crowds, bringing together disparate cultures, and
technological transformation of experience are all well captured and
amplified by the “extreme rapidity of the representation”20 afforded by
moving images.
The aesthetic potentials of film point us again toward realism. Cinema’s
real aspect, for Canudo, appeals to the modern audience’s fascination with
seeking “its own show, the most meaningful representation of its self,”
coupled with our recognition of the increasing “mechanization” of gestures,
actions, and experience in modernity.21 Responsive to the effects of
technology on modern experience, the cinematograph sums up, Canudo
claims, “all the values of a still eminently scientific age, entrusted to
Calculus rather than to the operations of Fantasy (Fantasia).”22 Cinema is
thus akin to a “scientific theater” with a “mechanical mode of expression”
that brings pleasure to a distracted and restless crowd who share a common,
if fragmented, mode of experience. Canudo’s prescient insights on the
relationship between cinema and modern experience continue today in
reflections on the relationship between new digital media and contemporary
forms of distracted attention.
As Bazin too would argue, this realist desire to capture our experience of
movement and life in images is not peculiar to modernity. Rather, it reflects
a deep anthropological need that one can trace back to the prehistory of art.
Anticipations of this realist desire for capturing movement and life can be
found, as both Canudo and Bazin remark, in the “ancient painters and
engravers of prehistoric caves,” who sought to suggest the movement of
animals’ limbs in their pictures (beautifully captured and reproduced in
Werner Herzog’s remarkable documentary, Cave of Forgotten Dreams,
2010). In a manner anticipating Bazin’s famous “myth of total cinema,”23
cinema now makes possible the idealist dream of capturing the totality of
experience in images; for it is an art form that can present the whole of life
in action, capturing events and expressing movement “with as much speed
as possible.”24 At once an expression of light or energy and of human
feeling or reflection, thus bridging the gap between materiality and ideality,
moving images promise to reconcile and reproduce the experience of
subjectivity in modernity through technological mediation.25
Nonetheless, there is a profound ambivalence at the heart of the new
medium. On the one hand, cinema harks back to the prehistory of art; on the
other, it resists integration into traditional aesthetic conceptions of art.
Canudo thus vacillates between presenting cinema as a synthesis of the
traditional arts and cinema as a new technological-industrial art expressing
the dynamic experience of modernity. Based as it is on the mechanical
automatisms of photography, cinema, in its current form, lacks the element
of “plastic interpretation” (expression of artistic intention) characteristic of
painting (an account that would be developed by Arnheim in his
pathbreaking 1932 book, Film as Art). Yet it heralds an art form that
transcends these aesthetic categories, combining the automatism of the
camera with the intentionality of the film-author (or ecraniste).26 It
promises to transcend the dualism of “nature and spirit,” offering a
reintegration of modern experience that has been the holy grail of aesthetics
since the late eighteenth century.

Münsterberg on Cinematic Experience

Hugo Münsterberg’s The Photoplay, widely regarded as the first work of

film theory proper, focuses squarely on the nature of cinematic
experience.27 It exemplifies the concern with aesthetic experience prevalent
in early film theory, while adding a new emphasis on the psychological
experience of emotional and cognitive engagement with cinema that has
returned in contemporary film theory and philosophy of film. Setting a
much-followed pattern, The Photoplay offers both an argument for the
artistic validity of film in comparison with the theater and an original
exploration of the analogy between film compositional devices (close-up,
flashback, flash-forward) and our conscious cognitive experience
(psychological acts of attention, recollection, imagination, and emotional
states). As with earlier theorists, however, the novelty of Münsterberg’s
philosophical insights into the psychological aspects of cinema—the
suggestive film/mind analogy—remain at odds with his more classically
Kantian approach to cinema’s aesthetic possibilities. Once again, cinema
presented a challenge to theoreticians anxious to argue for cinema’s artistic
legitimacy but also eager to defend its capacity to not only capture modern
experience but emulate conscious experience itself.

Münsterberg’s Psychology of Film

Like many early film theorists, Münsterberg was quick to defend the artistic
specificities of the new medium. More originally, he also examined the
psychological dimensions of cinematic experience, presenting one of the
earliest instances of what Noël Carroll has called the “film/mind analogy”:
the suggestive parallel between cinematic techniques and perceptual
experience.28 We can understand film’s aesthetic power, Münsterberg
ventures, once we attend to the way it “influences the mind of the
spectator,” which means analyzing “the mental processes which this
specific form of artistic endeavour produces in us.”29 He makes the familiar
phenomenological point that while we know that we are watching “flat”
two-dimensional images in the cinema, we nonetheless experience the
strong impression of depth and movement on the screen.30 Depth and
movement on screen are the result of “objective” perception coupled with
the subjective shaping of this perception by psychological and neurological
processes that we do not consciously notice once immersed in the complex
visual experience of the film.
Depth and movement, however, are only the elementary features of the
film image. In protocognitivist fashion, it is the psychological act of
attention that Münsterberg emphasizes as the key to understanding the
film/mind analogy. “Attention” refers to the intentional directing of
consciousness that selects what is relevant or not in our field of conscious
awareness. Such directing can be further distinguished into voluntary and
involuntary acts of attention. Voluntary attention involves our conscious
focusing of consciousness through particular ideas or interests that we bring
to our impressions or observations, ignoring whatever does not serve our
interests or desires. Involuntary attention refers to the way events or objects
in our environment can provide the cue for the (unwilled) focusing of our
perceptual awareness. Involuntary attention also spans emotional and
affective responses to what is happening in ourselves or in our environment:
“Everything which appeals to our natural instincts, everything which stirs
up hope or fear, enthusiasm or indignation, or any strong emotional
excitement, will get control of our attention.”31 Clearly, ordinary experience
involves a complex interplay of voluntary and involuntary attention (like
when I attend to a friend’s injury prompted by my reaction to her cry of
pain), and this is what cinema excels in evoking, directing, and
manipulating for dramatic effect.
As with the theater, film (and Münsterberg means here silent film) relies
upon the expressiveness of the human face, the gestures of the actors’
bodies, and the movement and action of the characters to compose the
images commanding our involuntary attention. Not only movement but
mise en scène (the specific arrangement of objects and figures composing
the image) can also elicit our rapt attention; elements of the actor’s
physiognomy, costuming, setting, artifacts, and the visual composition of
space can all contribute to the capturing of involuntary attention: “An
unusual face, a queer dress, a gorgeous costume or a surprising lack of
costume, a quaint piece of decoration, may attract our mind and even hold it
spellbound for a while.”32 Finally, the power of landscape and setting opens
up immensely powerful visual means of capturing audience attention and of
expressing emotional coloring or mood and affect—ideas that one can find
developed further in theorists such as Béla Balázs and Gilles Deleuze.
The great power of moving images, for Münsterberg, lies in their
elicitation and directing of perceptual and cognitive experience. The close-
up, for example, provides a visual analogue for the intensification of
perception that attends attentive focus. Münsterberg is the first of many
theorists (e.g., Balázs) to highlight how the cinematic image can direct our
perceptual attention to particular objects, gestures, or expressions. His
originality lies in underlining the strong analogy between perceptual
attention and cinematic devices: “The close-up has objectified in our world
of perception our mental act of attention and by it has furnished art with a
means which far transcends the power of any theatre stage.”33 The close-up
provides a specifically visual means of prefocusing our attention; drawing
our attention to particular objects, actions, or events; amplifying their
affective power by extending or concentrating our visual scope; and using
changes in scale and focus in ways that cannot be reproduced in the theater.
To the close-up we must add the flashback and its striking suggestion of
the operations of memory. Here again a parallel can be found with the
flashback and the use of montage, which Münsterberg again draws out by
contrast with the case of the theater. Unlike theatrical performance, which
relies on our remembering the sequence of scenes that preceded the one
before us, in film the act of remembering can be screened, so to speak,
before our very eyes thanks to flashbacks. For Münsterberg, film can be
said to “screen” memory, whether it is the recollection of a character, which
might be suggestive of the viewer’s recollections, or the film’s “own”
recollection of an earlier scene or narrative sequence.34 The film/mind
analogy is thus most strongly drawn in the case of the flashback, which
provides “an objectivation of our memory function” that parallels the
“mental act of remembering.”35 Recollection-images parallel the function
of memory in our conscious experience, even though the recollection-
images do not have to belong to an individual character or remain tied to a
particular subjective point of view.

Münsterberg on the Aesthetic Experience of Film

In addition to the film/mind analogy, focusing on perceptual and cognitive

experience, Münsterberg also analyzes the aesthetic experience that cinema
affords. His work combines a Kantian “aesthetic attitude” approach to film
—that the aesthetic experience of film, like other arts, depends upon a
detached, contemplative perspective in which our desires or “interests” are
put out of play—with a Schopenhauerian account of art as enabling us,
through the aesthetic experience of objects, to transcend our immediate
spatiotemporal context.36 Art is about the artistic transfiguration of our
experience, transcending our immediate, “involved” cognition of the world,
which will always prove superior to mere imitation or decorative
attractiveness.
The second point is that to experience art aesthetically, Münsterberg
claims, requires that one adopt the appropriate aesthetic attitude: a
detached, “disinterested” pleasure in the appearance of the object for its
own sake. Echoing Kant and Schopenhauer, he points out that the same
object can be experienced differently depending upon the cognitive and
practical interests we bring to bear upon it.37 Like Schopenhauer,
Münsterberg claims that art neutralizes our practical experience, presenting
us with an image of reality “liberated from all connection” with the world.
Works of art provide a transfigured image of unity—“complete in itself”—
that transcends instrumental interests, while satisfying our desires in a way
that brings temporary aesthetic delight.38
How does this Kantian and Schopenhauerian aesthetic shed light on
cinematic experience? From both aesthetic and psychological perspectives,
narrative film presents a human story “by overcoming the forms of the outer
world, namely, space, time, and causality, and by adjusting the events to the
forms of the inner world, namely, attention, memory, imagination, and
emotion.”39 The inherent abstraction of the film image (especially in silent
film) brings the screen performance closer to the mental dimensions of
experience. Cinema emulates subjectivity, paralleling our cognitive
experience, without being reducible to it. Movement can be presented in
ways that extend or even defy the limits of our natural perception; time can
be manipulated as we revert to the past, jump back to the present, now
divided along different timelines, and imagine the future in different ways.
The sheer fluidity of cinematic representation makes possible the aesthetic
transcending of the ordinary constraints of time and space that order our
lived experience40—a profound insight that has shaped the subsequent
history of film theory, including the reaction against aestheticist
conceptions of experience that defined the rise of screen theory.

T “A -E ”W F T
Despite their emphasis on exploring both perceptual-cognitive and
aesthetic-cultural dimensions of cinematic experience, early film theories
did not really describe concretely or analyze explicitly the role of
spectatorship in our engagement with cinema. On the one hand, the
spectator was assumed to be a passive recipient of aesthetic experience
(e.g., Münsterberg’s detached viewer); on the other, the cinematic spectator
could also become a subject of transformative experience that promised
new ways of perceiving, feeling, or seeing the world (e.g., Epstein’s
“cinema as brain”). The specific nature of cinematic spectatorship,
however, remained unclear; the need for a way of conceptualizing
spectatorship appropriate to the cinematic experience became more
pressing.

The Critique of Experience in “Grand Theory”

The next waves of film theory across the latter half of the twentieth century
certainly focused on these neglected aspects of cinematic engagement. At
the same time, theorists remained suspicious of both the aesthetic and
psychological dimensions of cinematic experience, favoring theories that
posited these forms of experience as by-products of nonconscious processes
and supraindividual (institutional, ideological, and cultural–historical)
contexts. Film theorists therefore moved away from traditional forms of
aesthetic theory in favor of critical, independent accounts of both the
unconscious and ideological processes structuring the identity and function
of cinematic spectator. Such was the task of the psychoanalytic-semiotic-
Althusserian paradigm of film theory that Bordwell and Carroll
disparagingly dubbed “Grand Theory.”41 Instead of perceptual–cognitive
engagement or aesthetic experience of cinematic art, theorists elaborated
concepts of the gaze, suture, and the ideological interpellation of the
(gendered and class-defined) “subject.” Instead of inquiring into cinema as
art, critical attention was focused on the cinematic apparatus and its mass
products of ideological persuasion. A “hermeneutics of suspicion” (inspired
by Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche) was applied to cinematic experience, which
sought to reveal the unconscious, semiotic, and ideological processes at
play “behind the back” of the socially constructed, ideologically positioned,
subject of the cinematic apparatus. Cinematic experience became the object
of ideological critique rather than a basis for aesthetic or moral reflection.
As is well known, from the late 1960s through to the late 1990s, the
dominant model of film theory was defined by an eclectic synthesis of
Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, semiotic theory, Marxist
critical theory, and poststructuralist thought.42 Despite its eclectic quality, it
could be described as “antiexperiential” in orientation, encompassing
different traditions and styles of film theory. According to Carroll,
semiological film theory had a first wave (e.g., Christian Metz), taking its
inspiration from linguist Ferdinand de Saussure; and then a second wave
(1970s screen theory), in which this semiological approach was combined
with (Lacanian) psychoanalytic theory and (Althusserian) Marxist theories
of ideology. This second wave of film theory was given a further political
inflection during the later 1970s through the feminist analysis of gender and
a critique of the ideological function of Hollywood film. The common
denominator throughout was a critical focus on the ideological dimensions
of culture and the critique of “the subject.”43 Its target was the key role of
moving images and narrative film in the promulgation of ideological forces
with the power to shape or mold subjectivity according to the needs or
demands of dominant social, cultural, and political orders. With its focus on
the powerful effects of cinema on our subjective experience, film theory
seemed ideally placed to serve as a tool to unmask ideology and to
contribute to the political critique of the “bourgeois subject.”
 Film theory developed into cultural-ideology critique, for which it was
axiomatic that subjective forms of aesthetic experience, visual pleasure,
emotional engagement, and narrative involvement in cinema were no more
than ideological lures or psychological ruses designed to capture, position,
and manipulate the spectator. Subjective experience was the ideological
reflection of a thoroughly constructed series of socially coded and
ideologically structured subject positions that consolidated the status quo.
The latter functioned by reflecting mandated forms of identity organized via
the ideological matrices of class, gender, “race,” and sexuality.44 The task
of film theory, therefore, was not to debate whether film was art or
investigate the psychological and aesthetic dimensions of cinematic
experience; rather, it was to critique these very forms of experience and
demonstrate the role of cinema as a means of ideologically manipulated
subject formation. Experience was a code word for ideology rather than a
means of making sense of the medium.45
How did the demotion of experience function in regard to cinema? The
common feature across these quite diverse approaches (structuralist,
psychoanalytic, semiotic, and poststructuralist) was the philosophical
“critique of ‘the subject’ ”: challenging the centrality of the (Western,
identitarian, purportedly universalist) subject of experience.46 In film
theory, this meant the devaluation of the concept of “experience” (whether
psychological, aesthetic, or phenomenological) as itself a product of
processes of subjectification—that is, a tool in the process of the ideological
construction of subjectivity—and hence a phenomenon that was unable to
provide any basis for the critical theorization of cinema (or of cinema
spectatorship).
Many of these motifs of “antiexperientialist” theory were synthesized and
consolidated into the poststructuralist wave of film theory during the 1990s
(where the theoretical influences shifted toward philosophers such as
Nietzsche, Heidegger, the Frankfurt School (Adorno, Benjamin), Irigaray,
Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida, Lyotard, and Baudrillard).47 We could
summarize these approaches as developing a critique of the model of
subjective experience underpinning the earlier aesthetic, psychological, and
classical forms of film theory (the emphasis on psychology and aesthetics in
Münsterberg and Arnheim, or on realism in Bazin and Kracauer). Three
theoretical motifs shaped poststructuralist film theory: the critique of
“experientialist” models of the subject; the neglect of phenomenological
and embodied experience; and the instrumentalization of aesthetic qualities
into ideological traits. As I summarize below, these three motifs also
encountered various theoretical difficulties, which has led to a return of the
concept cinematic experience in recent decades.48

Critiques of “Experientialist” Models of “the Subject”

Drawing on both Lacanian psychoanalytic theory and poststructuralist
critiques of the “Cartesian subject” in modern European philosophy, Grand
Theory and poststructuralist film theory eschewed psychological and
aesthetic models of cinematic experience and developed instead a sharp
critique of the ideological, dualistic, but also pseudo-universalist
pretentions of classical film theory.49 The model of the “decentered subject”
at the heart of poststructuralist theory, however, only fits some aspects of
cinema spectatorship. The overly “formalist” conception of the
semiotic/psychoanalytic/ideological/textual “subject” posited by Grand
Theory was suitable for, and tended to encourage, critical analyses of the
manipulative “subjectifying” operations of the cinematic apparatus and its
pernicious ideological effects. It overlooked, however, the affective,
emotionally engaged, cognitively stimulated, morally reflective, and
aesthetically expressive dimensions of cinematic spectatorship, hence
suggesting the need for a return to theories of affect, embodiment, emotion,
and critical (cognitive) reflection evident in contemporary film theory.

Neglect of the Phenomenological and Embodied Experience of Film

Structuralist, psychoanalytic/semiotic, and poststructuralist film theories
rejected “author”/auteur centered approaches, as well as subjective
approaches to cinematic experience, in order to situate texts within cultural–
historical processes, structures of meaning, philosophical–ideological
lineages, and institutional as well as discursive contexts.50 Effects of
meaning and subjective experience of cinema were artifacts or discursive
effects produced by complex processes of subjectification, signification,
and mechanisms of power. Such approaches demoted experience to the
level of discursive effect or institutional artifact rather than the focus of
theoretical reflection or critical evaluation. In doing so, however, they
neglected phenomenological descriptions of film experience; the affective,
emotional, and embodied character of cinematic engagement; or close
detailed analysis of the temporal, affective, aesthetic quality of film
spectatorship. The turn to phenomenological theories of spectatorship,
affect theory, as well as aesthetic and expressive analyses of film style can
be understood as diverse but connected responses to these “antiexperiential”
tendencies in received models of Grand Theory and/or poststructuralist
theory.

The Instrumentalization of Cinema’s Aesthetic Qualities

The aesthetic qualities of cinema were construed either as philosophical–
ideological or textual–semiotic features to be revealed by theoretical
analysis, which also proved limiting for understanding and appreciating
cinema as well as stymieing theoretical reflection on the nature of cinematic
experience. Despite the late Roland Barthes’s attempts to engage with the
aesthetic dimension of (photographic) images—using the contrast between
socially conventional studium (codes of representation) and aesthetically
expressive, subjective “punctum”—poststructuralist theories of film tended
to avoid the aesthetic dimensions of cinematic style or else subsumed these
under ideologically “symptomatic” textualist readings of film.51
Consequently, the aesthetic experience of cinema remained an area of
serious theoretical neglect for many decades. Indeed, the dearth of detailed
aesthetic or medium-specific analyses of cinema by poststructuralist
thinkers (excepting Deleuze) suggested the need to move beyond the
poststructuralist tendency to favor one-sidedly “symptomatic” readings of
film as articulations of ideology or manifestations of underlying semiotic
codes, discourses of power, or the play of the signifier, and to explore more
aesthetically nuanced, phenomenologically complex, historically specific,
analyses of films and of film genres.

T R C E
Following the demise of the antiexperiential, psychoanalytic–semiotic and
poststructuralist paradigm of film theory, the need to theorize cinematic
experience in all its contextual and multimodal aspects became increasingly
pressing. The prevailing symptomatic theoretical approaches to cinematic
experience thus gave way to a renewed focus on the perceptual, embodied,
affective–emotional, phenomenological, and cognitive dimensions of our
engagement with audiovisual media. The two main currents we could
identify here concern the “affective-bodily” turn on the one hand,
emphasizing embodied, affective, and phenomenological aspects of
cinematic experience, and the “cognitivist-naturalist” turn on the other
hand, that focused explicitly on cognitivist and naturalistic (scientific)
approaches to theorizing these subjective phenomena.

The Affective Turn in Film Theory

As Eisenstein, Noël Carroll, and David Bordwell have all remarked, the
power of movies resides in their capacity to elicit emotional engagement.52
Until the recent “affective turn” (from the late 1990s), the dominant schools
of film theory largely ignored topics such as emotional engagement, affect,
and empathy. As discussed, film theory of the 1970s and 80s focused rather
on theorizing “desire” and questioning “pleasure,” critically analyzing the
manner in which movies manipulate spectator subjectivity. Continuing the
anti-experientialist stance of related approaches, psychoanalytic film theory
had little interest in “emotion” or “affect” because its focus lay in the
unconscious and ideological processes that contributed to the formation of
(gender and class) identity. Marxist critical film theory, on the other hand,
argued that the dominant forms of narrative (Hollywood) cinema, with their
emphasis on emotional engagement, moral individualism, and narrative
closure, provided ideologically manipulative forms of narrative pleasure
that contributed to the depoliticization of the masses and ideological
valorization of the American (capitalist) way of life. Emotion and affect
were relegated to the domain of the regressive, “irrational” responses of
ideologically manipulated spectators subjected to, and thereby subjects of,
the cinematic apparatus.
 The recent “affective turn” across the humanities, however, has put
emotion, “the body,” and subjectivity back on the agenda, opening up new
forms of theoretical and ethical reflection. Emotion and affect have returned
as central issues in film theory, which has been rejuvenated by contributions
from philosophy, phenomenology, empirical psychology, cognitive theory,
neuroscience, and evolutionary biology.53 Philosophy of film—in both
“Continental” and analytic–cognitivist guises—has both criticized the
psychoanalytic paradigm and developed new ways of thinking about affect,
emotion, and the aesthetic-ethical experience of cinema (an aesthetic
encounter that opens up varieties of ethically significant experience). In this
sense, the “affective turn” coupled with recent philosophical interest in
cinema has renewed the focus on experience and thereby reanimated some
of the key questions of “classical” film theory, for example, how to
understand cinema’s power of emotional engagement and hence its ethical
significance.

The Phenomenological-Affective Turn

In recent decades, subjective experience has made a dramatic return to film

theory and the philosophy of cinema. The broad sweep of
phenomenological approaches in film studies—from Vivian Sobchack’s
groundbreaking work to various forms of affect theory—offer concrete and
focused explorations of embodied subjective experience, even where these
methodologies bracket, modify, or transcend first-person “introspective”
perspectives.54 Phenomenologically “thick” description of structures of
experience; the theorization of affect from phenomenological, cognitive,
and Deleuzian perspectives; and recent interest in cognitivist approaches to
film all remain committed to detailed theoretical inquiry into the nature and
conditions of subjective experience, even if the particular traditions,
methodologies, and theoretical approaches vary from case to case. Indeed,
the turn to phenomenological theories focusing on affective experience—
both from the spectator perspective and in relation to cinematic expression
—has become so influential that we can talk of an “affective turn” in film-
philosophy.55 Phenomenological approaches, foregrounding the experiential
aspects of cinema, put the human subject back into the picture, but one that
is no longer defined by Cartesian models of consciousness but rather by its
“affects,” its corporeality, and its embodied experience.
In these approaches we find a recurring emphasis on “the body”—or on
the role of embodiment in cinematic engagement—rather than on
consciousness or critical reflection. Such theories are eclectic, deriving in
part from classical and postwar phenomenology (Husserl, Merleau-Ponty,
and Heidegger), as well as drawing on feminist, culturalist, and
“Continental” as well as cognitivist sources.56 All of them tend to analyze
cinematic experience focusing on “first person” experiential perspectives
that can be applied not only to the theorization of spectator response but to
the understanding and evaluation of cinema as such—sometimes even
attributing “subjective” traits or qualities like “embodiment” or
“intentionality” to the film itself.57 Elsaesser notes that this focus on
cinematic experience, whether from phenomenological or cognitivist
perspectives, returns to an earlier focus on corporeal responses to moving
images that we can find already in the work of prewar theorists (Walter
Benjamin’s distinction between individuated Erlebnis and collective
Erfahrung, for example).58 These hybrid approaches provide a rich
interdisciplinary matrix to explore affect and emotion in our aesthetic and
ethical experience of cinema.
These broadly phenomenological approaches to affect and emotion—
from Husserlian and Merleau-Pontian phenomenology, theories of
embodied spectatorship, to Deleuzian-inspired “affect” theories—
nonetheless also face significant challenges and criticisms.59 The
“standard” challenge facing phenomenological approaches is how to avoid
the charge of subjectivism: How to connect the first-person, qualitative
description of a phenomenon (say affect) to the empirically grounded,
explanatory theory of the causal mechanisms (physiological and
neurological) underlying subjective phenomena? Phenomenological
approaches offer rich, “thick” descriptive theories of various aspects of
cinematic experience. At the same time, they are not in a position—given
their character as descriptive—to offer causal explanatory accounts of the
phenomena in question. Indeed, phenomenological theorists sometimes run
the risk of relying on the authority of master thinkers (Merleau-Ponty,
Deleuze, etc.) in order to justify the claims made concerning affective,
embodied experience. This is the point at which phenomenology and
cognitivism can meet, the former providing a rich descriptive theory of
phenomena relevant to cinematic experience that the latter can analyze in
empirical, causally explanatory terms.

The Cognitivist Approach to Cinematic Experience

Commencing in the 1980s and 1990s, a number of film theorists (such as

Joseph Anderson, Edward Branigan, Noël Carroll, David Bordwell,
Gregory Currie, Torben Grodal, Carl Plantinga, and Murray Smith)60
challenged the psychoanalytic-semiotic paradigm of film theory and
adopted instead a variety of cognitivist approaches to the theorization of
film, analyzing a range of problems pertaining to cinematic experience,
including audiovisual perception, emotional engagement, narrative
understanding, and film interpretation.61 In contrast with the reigning
paradigm, cognitivism rejects “speculative” theory in favor of “piecemeal”
theorization.62 It inquires into various aspects of film experience using the
tools of cognitive psychology and theories of mind, which for their part
often draw on neuroscientific theories and philosophy of cognition
emphasizing (depending on the particular orientation) functional, modular,
or embodied processes of cognition. Although early forms of cognitive
theory modeled the brain as operating computationally (using the
algorithmic processes of the computer as an analogy for how our brains
process information), more recent forms of cognitive theory have moved
away from this computational model in favor of modular, network,
distributed, and, more recently, embodied, embedded, extended, and
enactive conceptions of mind (the “4E model of cognition”).63
Cognitivist theorists reject the long-standing Platonic prejudice that
reason and emotion are opposed, agreeing with Aristotle that they are
complementary modes of human cognition that enable us to understand our
experience and respond to the world through practical action. They assume
that spectators respond to cinema using the same cognitive modes of
perception, emotion, and understanding as occur in everyday experience. In
conjunction with philosophical aesthetics, cognitivist theories have been
developed to explain film spectatorship and the understanding of narrative
film, while stressing the importance of emotional engagement for cognitive
experience more generally.
According to critics of cognitivism, however, contentious issues still
remain that mark the limits of this paradigm’s explanatory power,
particularly with reference to the relationship between epistemology and
ethics.64 One problem is how to deal with ideology and the cultural–
historical dimensions of our engagement with cinema. As a “naturalistic”
theory—one that posits causal scientific explanations of phenomena
explicable in terms of the laws of nature—critics argue that cognitivism has
difficulty accounting for the role of ideology, along with cinema’s historical
and political dimensions, without risking the “naturalistic fallacy”
(assuming that because a phenomenon can be explained in terms of natural
laws it can also be justified by appeal to such laws, or put differently,
reducing an object’s normative properties to its natural properties). Other
critics acknowledge that cognitivism offers powerful explanatory theories
of the underlying causal processes involved in our experience of cinema,
but this does not mean that it provides a suitable hermeneutic framework
for film interpretation or aesthetic evaluation.65 The danger of
“reductionism” looms large for such critics, who accuse cognitivism of
distorting or downplaying important aesthetic, hermeneutic, and
ethicopolitical dimensions of cinema by reducing these to underlying
elements of a naturalistic theory of mind that underplays the role of social
or cultural–historical contexts.
These objections, however, are not conclusive: cognitivists can respond
that naturalistic theories explaining perception, emotion, cognition, and so
on, can provide a firmer, more empirically grounded basis for theorizing the
role of affective response, emotional engagement, and cognitive
understanding in the operations of ideology through film.66 Or they may
argue that the charge of “reductionism” is misguided because the
“conflation” of levels of explanation is as much a risk for hermeneutic
theories as naturalistic ones (e.g., the tendency to treat film interpretation as
providing hermeneutic “evidence” for the validity of a theoretical
approach). Moreover, recent forms of social cognition and 4E theories of
cognition incorporate the role of social interaction, sociocultural context,
language and culture, and external/technical prostheses in our cognitive and
practical engagement with the world.
Despite the skepticism of some theorists, it would be unwise to prejudge
how successful applying cognitivist, neurological, and evolutionary theories
to aesthetics will be, especially with regard to the theorization of cinematic
experience, for which cognitivism has much to offer. Indeed, as Murray
Smith has recently argued, a naturalistic approach to aesthetics—drawing
on naturalistic explanatory theories concerning perception, emotion,
cognition, and evaluation—can provide precisely the kind of
complementary and synthetic naturalistic framework required in order to do
justice to cinematic experience.67 Theorizing cinematic experience—which
combines perceptual, sensory, affective-emotional, and cognitive-reflective,
as well as contextual cultural, social, and historical factors—could benefit
from synthesizing both phenomenological and cognitivist perspectives.

T C E :I ,
I , VR
What about our experience of contemporary audiovisual media? Film
theory has, for obvious reasons, focused on the kind of spectatorial
experience afforded by the cinematic apparatus. With the rise of digital
media, emphasizing immersive and interactive forms of audiovisual
engagement, embodied experience has returned as a key concept and focus
in contemporary film theory and philosophy of film.68 With the shift toward
digital media, interactive media, and VR technology, new challenges and
questions can be raised about how we are to understand cinematic
experience in an expanded sense (including these profound transformations
and proliferations of the medium). One important issue is the shift from the
apparent passivity and transparency of cinematic engagement (the
conventions of invisible continuity editing, narrative shot conventions,
personalized causal plot structuration, and clear narrative closure, familiar
from what Bordwell calls “canonical” narrative) toward greater interactivity
and deeply immersive forms of engagement in interactive media and VR
narrative (fictional and nonfictional) works—a trajectory, as Oliver Grau
shows, with a long history.69 A number of theorists argue that, due to its
immersive and interactive character, encouraging a sense of “presence”
within the audiovisual world, VR diminishes our awareness of cinematic
narrative conventions, including the directing of attention via shot selection,
cutting, montage, or editing; sound and music effects; lighting; color, and
mise en scène.70 VR offers, moreover, a deeply “immersive” perpetual
experience: situating the viewer within the diegetic audiovisual world that
allows for both directed perceptual engagement and agential interactive
involvement.71 With the shift toward immersive interactivity, we are no
longer dealing with a spectatorial relationship but rather with a
participatory attitude and agential orientation toward the audiovisual
world.
At the same time, we should reflect further on the posited contrast
between the “transparency” of (canonical) narrative cinema and the
immersive sense of “presence” and interactive involvement solicited by VR
technology.72 There are significant contrasts between conventional narrative
cinema and VR forms of narrative that help articulate how VR audiovisual
works engage us in a multimodal manner. These include the contrasts
between (a) directed versus immersive engagement; (b) spectatorial versus
participant perspectives; and (c) audiovisual displacement (via framing,
cutting, perspective/point of view/spatiotemporal location) versus
audiovisual continuity (within a bounded immersive environment, with a
unitary time/space, centralized participant perspective, and strong alignment
between participant/protagonist action and point of view). Examining the
relationships between these key contrasts between VR and conventional
cinema can help us better understand the transformed version of cinematic
experience, as well as aesthetic and ethical potentials, evoked by interactive
VR works.
The first contrast, that between directed versus immersive engagement,
refers to the manner in which conventional cinematic narrative explicitly
directs our attention, whereas interactive VR narrative immerses us in a
fictional world in relation to which we have more attentional agency.
Although often described as “immersive,” spectatorial engagement with
conventional cinematic narrative is in fact highly orchestrated or directed
(prefocused or “cued” according to a variety of cinematic techniques,
generic conventions, and audiovisual prompts). Even within the tradition of
Bazinian realism or “slow,” contemplative cinema—with its unity of time
and space, emphasis on duration, and freedom to direct our attention to
various elements of the image—cinematic narrative depends essentially on
the directing of attention and perceptual focus as well as the modulation of
emotional responsiveness. By contrast, in VR narrative, the spectator
occupies a perspective included within the diegetic world, and has the
capacity to direct their attention to salient elements, aspects, or features of
this world according to their own will. Our attention is no longer primarily
directed or guided by the cinematic techniques or devices deployed by the
film—although this still remains a relevant feature—but can be directed by
the spectator depending on their own perceptual and/or emotional responses
to the situation in which they are interactively immersed. In some cases,
explicit intervention in the diegetic world is invited, even demanded, which
transforms the cinematic spectator into a virtual world participant. This
presents a challenge for VR cineastes, because it is clearly still necessary,
for the purposes of developing the narrative and ensuring emotional
engagement, to guide or direct the participant viewer’s attention to salient
objects, characters, or events.73 Nonetheless, the degree of agential activity
accorded to the viewer is far greater than in conventional narrative cinema,
thus transforming the nature of the spectatorial relationship.
The second, related feature is that the “spectator” thus assumes a
participatory, rather than spectatorial, attitude to the fictional world and the
characters that populate it. In conventional cinema, the spectator does not
feature within the diegetic world of the narrative; if attention is drawn to the
fictional status of the cinematic world, or the spectator addressed directly,
this becomes a moment of interruption or distanciation which momentarily
suspends and thereby calls attention to both the conventions of cinematic
spectatorship and the fictional status of the cinematic work. In the case of
interactive VR fiction, however, the viewer is enfolded within the virtual
environment, can be addressed or can interact with fictional characters, and
in some cases can intervene in or respond to events that they encounter
within the audiovisual world. One’s attitude toward this world is therefore
defined by the possibility of participatory rather than (purely) spectatorial
engagement, even though large parts of the narrative may involve no direct
participation and moments of participatory intervention may be quite rare.
Nonetheless, the potential for direct address and agential response is built
into the cinematic world in a manner that does not obtain in the fictional
worlds of conventional narrative cinema.
The third contrast is more ontological, namely, the inherent displacement
that defines conventional cinematic spectatorship versus the immanent
continuity that characterizes VR fictional experience. By this I am referring
to the idea that conventional cinema, as Carroll and others have argued, is
defined as a “detached display” that bears no relationship to the spectator’s
actual spatiotemporal location (there is no relationship between, say, the
fictional world of Citizen Kane and my lounge room as I watch this film on
my television screen).74 In the case of VR fiction, however, the
participatory spectator’s perspective is included or “built into” the fictional
world in an immersive, involved, potentially interactive manner. This
means that there is an internal relationship between my point of view and
the diegetic fictional world that does not exist in the case of conventional
cinema. I am able to move, within certain limits, within the fictional world,
interact with characters, direct my attention to different elements of it,
departing from the narrative focus of events if I choose, even intervene in
and, in some cases, affect the outcome of narrative situations or events. The
VR display, in short, is not “detached display” but rather an involved
display: the participatory spectator is immanently involved as a participant
within the fictional world rather than occupying the position of a detached
observer of such a world and the events transpiring within it. It is defined
not by “alienated vision” (Carroll) as much as by “immersive involvement.”
This again has profound consequences for the manner in which VR fictional
narratives are made and what kind of aesthetic affordances and modes of
ethical experience might be possible with this new medium (or
expansion/transformation of the conventional cinematic medium).75
What aesthetic as well as ethical implications arise from these differences
between conventional and VR fictional narrative in understanding
cinematic experience? Do VR and interactive fictional works, due to the
immersive interactivity they invite, present a more direct form of ethical
engagement than the more detached spectatorial modes defining
conventional narrative cinema? A related question concerns the rich
potential for hybrid or crossover forms of VR fictional and nonfictional
works. How might hybrid VR works prompt us to rethink our conceptions
of “cinema” or indeed of “narrative” in new ways? Are there ethical
differences (concerning the role of empathy, for example) in the way that
VR fictional and nonfictional works function compared with conventional
cinema? What kind of critical vocabulary or philosophical concepts might
we need in order to understand the new kinds of cinematic experience,
notably the kind of hybrid spectator/participant–immersive/interactive VR
world relationships being explored today? These are some the most
compelling questions facing us in attempting to understand how new digital
and interactive media are promising to transform the meaning and potential
of cinematic experience in profoundly immersive, enactive, and embodied
ways.

N
1. See Francesco Casetti, “The Throb of the Cinematograph,” in Early Film Theories in Italy,
1896–1922, ed. Francesco Casetti (Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam Press, 2017), 11–32;
Francesco Casetti, “Philosophical Issues in Early Film Theory,” keynote presentation for the
Film-Philosophy Conference, Kings College London, September 13, 2012, audio recording
available online at: http://backdoorbroadcasting.net/2012/09/francesco-casetti-philosophical-
issues-in-early-film-theory/; Francesco Casetti, Eye of the Century: Film, Experience,
Modernity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005); Robert Sinnerbrink, New
Philosophies of Film: Thinking Images (London: Continuum/Bloomsbury, 2011).
2. See Jean-Pierre Meunier, The Structures of Film Experience: On Filmic Identification, ed.
Julian Hanich and Daniel Fairfax (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2019); Robert
Sinnerbrink, “The Missing Link: Meunier on Imagination and Emotional Engagement,” in
Hanich and Fairfax, Structures of Film Experience, 197–210.
3. See Béla Balázs, Early Film Theory—Visible Man and the Spirit of Film, ed. Erica Carter,
trans. Rodney Livingstone (New York: Berghahn Books, 2010).
4. Casetti, Eye of the Century, 12 ff., points out that in 1919 Delluc talked of cinema as the fifth
art, with Canudo later describing it as “the seventh art,” which was taken up in popular usage.
As Casetti remarks, even those (like Canudo) who wanted to incorporate cinema into the
traditional historical hierarchy of the arts, “had to realize it was a new form of experience that
demanded new forms of canon.” Ibid., 12.
5. See Rudolf Arnheim, Film as Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957) (first
published 1932); Balázs, Early Film Theory; Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of
its Technical Reproducibility: Third Version,” in Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings Volume
4: 1938– 1940, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press,
2006), 251–283. Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1960).
6. See Daniel Frampton, Filmosophy (London: Wallflower Books, 2016), 49.
 7. See Jean Epstein, Jean Epstein: Critical Essays and New Translations, ed. Jason N. Paul and
Sarah Keller (Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam Press, 2012). See also Malcolm Turvey,
Doubting Vision: Film and the Revelationist Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2008), for a critique of what he calls the “revelationist tradition” in early film theory.
8. Giovanni Papini, “The Philosophy of Cinematograph,” in Early Film Theories in Italy, 1896–
1922, ed. Francesco Casetti, Silvio Aloviso, and Luca Mazzei (Amsterdam: Amsterdam
University Press, 2017), 47–50. First published 1907.
9. Ibid., 47.
10. Ibid., 48.
11. Ibid., 48–49.
12. Ibid., 49.
13. Ibid., 49–50.
14. See David Rodowick, “Ricciotto Canudo and the Birth of Film Aesthetics,” Cinematic 8
(Spring 2008): 33–35; Ara H. Merkian, “A Screen for Projection: Ricciotto Canudo’s
Exponential Aesthetics and the Parisian Avant-Gardes,” in European Film Theory, ed.
Temenuga Trifonova (London: Routledge, 2008), 225 ff.
15. Ricciotto Canudo, “The Birth of a Sixth Art,” in French Film Theory and Criticism, Volume 1,
ed. Richard Abel (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 58–66.
16. Ibid., 59.
17. Ibid.
18. Ibid.
19. Ibid.
20. Ibid., 60.
21. Ibid. This claim reappears in Giorgio Agamben’s recent remarks on cinema and modernity. See
Giorgio Agamben, “Notes on Gesture,” Means without End: Notes on Politics, trans. Vincenzo
Binetti and Cesare Casarino (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000).
22. Canudo, “Sixth Art,” 60.
23. André Bazin, “The Myth of Total Cinema,” in What Is Cinema? Volume 1, trans. Hugh Gray
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 17–22.
24. Canudo, “Sixth Art,” 61.
25. Ibid.
26. This idea has also been rediscovered in recent film theory—for example, in Jacques Rancière’s
remarks on cinema as combining the unconscious automatism of the camera with the
conscious intentionality of the artist-director. Jacques Rancière, Film Fables, trans. Emiliano
Battista (Oxford: Berg Books, 2006), 166.
27. Hugo Münsterberg, The Photoplay: A Psychological Study, in Hugo Münsterberg On Film. The
Photoplay: A Psychological Study and Other Writings, ed. Allan Langdale (New York:
Routledge, 2002). First published in 1916. As Langdale notes, Münsterberg’s The Photoplay
anticipates Rudolf Arnheim’s better known Film as Art (1932), which has had an immense
effect on film theory while The Photoplay has been largely ignored (Langdale, Photoplay, 27).
28. Noël Carroll, “Film/ Mind Analogies: The Case of Hugo Münsterberg,” Journal of Aesthetics
and Art Criticism 46, no. 4 (1988): 489–99. This “film/ mind” analogy has been sharply
criticized by Mark R. Wicclair, “Film Theory and Hugo Münsterberg’s The Film: A
Psychological Study,” Journal of Aesthetic Education 12, no. 3 (1978): 33–50.
29. Münsterberg, Photoplay, 65.
30. Ibid., 71. Arnheim’s Film as Art makes just the same point. After noting how easily depth
perception can be emulated by “the stereoscope” (the simultaneous projection of slightly
different images for each eye), and noting the difference between natural depth perception and
 the “shallow” depth of the film image, Arnheim remarks that the “effect of film is neither
absolutely two-dimensional nor absolutely three dimensional, but something between.”
Arnheim, Film as Art, 20. Münsterberg made the same observations on depth perception, the
stereoscope, and the “depth effect” of motion pictures, over a decade and a half earlier: “We
have reality with all its true dimensions; and yet it keeps the fleeting, passing surface
suggestion without true depth and fullness, as different from a mere picture as from a stage
performance.” Münsterberg, Photoplay, 71.
31. Ibid., 80.
32. Ibid., 84.
33. Ibid., 87.
34. Ibid., 90.
35. Ibid.
36. Ibid., 114.
37. Ibid., 116.
38. Ibid., 121.
39. Ibid., 129.
40. Wicclair argues that what is “overcome” is not the spatiotemporal and causal structure of the
outer world “but rather the physical constraints which govern an actual agent’s direct
observation of events in the ‘outer world.’ ” Wicclair, “Film Theory,” 44.
41. See David Bordwell and Noel Carroll, eds., Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies
(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996); David Bordwell, “Contemporary Film
Studies and the Vicissitudes of Grand Theory,” in Bordwell and Carroll, Post-Theory, 3–36;
Noel Carroll, “Prospects for Film Theory: A Personal Assessment,” in Bordwell and Carroll,
Post-Theory, 37–68; Noel Carroll, Mystifying Movies: Fads and Fallacies in Contemporary
Film Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988); Noel Carroll, Philosophical
Problems of Classical Film Theory (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988).
42. See Richard Allen and Murray Smith, eds., Film Theory and Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1997).
43. See Carroll, Mystifying Movies.
44. See Felicity Colman, ed., Film, Theory and Philosophy: The Key Thinkers (Durham, NC:
Acumen, 2009); Patrick Fuery, New Developments in Film Theory (New York: St Martin’s
Press, 2000); Robert Stam, Film Theory: An Introduction (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000);
Robert Stam, Robert Burgoyne, and Sandy Flitterman-Lewis, eds., New Vocabularies in Film
Semiotics: Structuralism, Post-Structuralism and Beyond (London: Routledge, 1992).
45. Walter Benjamin earlier theorized the “destruction of experience” in modernity, the
disintegration of collectively experience, culturally and historically mediated Erfahrung into
atomized, fragmented, ahistorical, and subjective forms of Erlebnis which substituted
sensation for meaning and dispersed individuality for shared social solidarity. Much of his
critical work on literature and culture is oriented by this conception of a “destruction of
experience,” a line of inquiry only rarely taken up in relation to film. See Thomas Elsaesser,
“Between Erlebnis and Erfahrung: Cinema Experience with Benjamin,” Paragraph 32, no. 3
(2009): 292–312; Miriam Bratu Hansen, Cinema and Experience: Siegfried Kracauer, Walter
Benjamin, Theodor W. Adorno (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011); Miriam Bratu
Hansen, “Benjamin, Cinema and Experience: ‘The Blue Flower in the Land of Technology,’”
New German Critique 40 (Winter 1987): 336–75.
46. See Ian Aitken. European Film Theory and Cinema: A Critical Introduction (Edinburgh,
Scotland: Edinburgh University Press, 2001) and Fuery, New Developments.
47. See Colman, Film, Theory and Philosophy, and Robert Sinnerbrink, “Poststructuralism and
Film,” in The Palgrave Handbook for the Philosophy of Film and Motion Pictures, ed. Noël
Carroll, Laura di Summa Knoop, and Shawn Loht (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019). Many
of these motifs have recently returned in the postheory turn to identity politics and
“intersectional” forms of film theory.
48. See Thomas Elsaesser and Malte Hagener, Film theory: An Introduction through the Senses
(New York: Routledge, 2010).
49. See Sinnerbrink, “Poststructuralism.”
50. See Stam et al., New Vocabularies.
51. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New
York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018). For discussion, see Sinnerbrink, “Poststructuralism.”
52. Sergei Eisenstein, Selected Works. Volume II. Towards a Theory of Montage, ed. Michael
Glenny and Richard Taylor, trans. Michael Glenny (London: BFI Books, 1991); Noel Carroll,
“The Power of Movies,” Daedalus 114, no. 4 (1985): 79–103; David Bordwell, “A Case for
Cognitivism,” Iris 9 (Spring 1989): 11–40.
53. See Noel Carroll, The Philosophy of Motion Pictures (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2008); Amy
Coplan, “Catching Characters’ Emotions: Emotional Contagion Responses to Narrative Fiction
Film,” Film Studies: An International Review 8 (2006): 26–38; Berys Gaut, A Philosophy of
Cinematic Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Torben Grodal, Embodied
Visions: Evolution, Emotion, Culture, and Film (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009);
Patricia Pisters, The Neuro-Image: A Deleuzian Film-Philosophy of Digital Screen Culture
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012); Carl Plantinga, Screen Stories: Emotion and
the Ethics of Engagement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018); Carl Plantinga, Moving
Viewers: American Film and the Spectator’s Experience (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2009); Jane Stadler, Pulling Focus: Intersubjective Experience, Narrative Film, and
Ethics (New York: Continuum, 2008); Murray Smith, Engaging Characters: Fiction, Emotion,
and the Cinema (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995); Tarja Laine, Feeling Cinema:
Emotional Dynamics in Film Studies (New York: Continuum, 2011); Allen and Smith, Film
Theory and Philosophy; Greg M. Smith, Film Structure and the Emotion System (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2003); Ed S. Tan, Emotion and the Structure of Narrative Film:
Cinema as an Emotion Machine (Marwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 1995).
54. See Vivian Sobchack, Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2004); Vivian Sobchack, The Address of the Eye: A
Phenomenology of Film Experience (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992);
Jennifer Barker, The Tactile Eye: Touch and the Cinematic Experience (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 2009); Laura Marks, Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002); Laura Marks, The Skin of the Film:
Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2000).
55. See Jane Stadler, “Cinema’s Compassionate Gaze: Empathy, Affect, and Aesthetics in The
Diving Bell and the Butterfly,” in Cine-Ethics: Ethical Dimension of Film Theory, Practice,
and Spectatorship, ed. Jinhee Choi and Mattias Frey (New York: Routledge 2014), 29.
56. See Barker, Tactile Eye; Allan Casebier, Film and Phenomenology: Towards a Realist Theory
of Cinematic Representation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Laine, Feeling
Cinema; Marks, Touch; Marks, Skin of Cinema; Sobchack, Carnal Thoughts; Sobchack,
Address of the Eye; Stadler, Pulling Focus.
57. See Barker, Tactile Eye; Frampton, Filmosophy; Laine, Feeling Cinema; Sobchack, Address of
the Eye.
58. Elsaesser, Erlebnis and Erfahrung.
59. See Christian Ferencz-Flatz and Julian Hanich, “What Is Film Phenomenology?,” in “Film and
Phenomenology,” ed. Christian Ferencz-Flatz and Julian Hanich, special issue, Studia
Phaenomenologica 16 (2016).
60. Joseph Anderson, The Reality of Illusion: An Ecological Approach to Cognitive Film Theory
(Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1996); Edward Branigan, Point of View in the
Cinema: A Theory of Narration and Subjectivity in Classical Film (Berlin: Mouton, 1984);
Carroll, “The Power of Movies”; Carroll, Mystifying Movies; Bordwell, “A Case for
Cognitivism”; David Bordwell, “A Case for Cognitivism: Further Reflections,” Iris 11
(Summer 1990): 107–22; Gregory Currie, Image and Mind. Film, Philosophy, and Cognitive
Science (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Grodal, Embodied Visions; Plantinga,
Moving Viewers; Smith, Engaging Characters.
61. See Bordwell and Carroll, Post-Theory; Allen and Smith, Film Theory and Philosophy;
Plantinga, Moving Viewers; Greg M. Smith, Film Structure and the Emotion System
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Ted Nannicelli and Paul Taberham, eds.,
Cognitive Media Theory (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2014).
62. See Bordwell and Carroll, Post-Theory.
63. See Richard Menary, ed., The Extended Mind (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2010), and Richard
Menary, Cognitive Integration: Mind and Cognition Unbounded (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2007).
64. See David Rodowick, “An Elegy for Theory,” October 122 (2007): 91–109.
65. See Frampton, Filmosophy, 106–7; Sinnerbrink New Philosophies, 51 ff.
66. See Plantinga, Moving Viewers, 190–97.
67. Murray Smith, Film, Art, and the Third Culture: A Naturalized Aesthetics of Film, Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2017).
68. See Mark Hansen, New Philosophy for New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006).
69. Oliver Grau, Virtual Art: From Illusion to Immersion (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003). See
also Ruth Aylett and Sandy Louchart, “Towards a Narrative Theory of Virtual Reality,” Virtual
Reality 7, no. 1 (2003): 1–9; Grant Bollmer, “Empathy Machines,” Media International
Australia 165, no. 1 (2017): 63–76; Adam Daniel, “Inhabiting the Image of Collisions: Virtual
Reality Cinema as a Medium of Ethical Experience,” Fusion Journal 18 (2018): 5–15; Kate
Nash, “Virtual Reality Witness: Exploring the Ethics of Mediated Presence,” Studies in
Documentary Film 12, no. 2 (2017): 119–31; Miriam Ross, “Virtual Reality’s New
Synaesthetic Possibilities,” Television and New Media October (2018): 1–18.
70. See Daniel, “Inhabiting the Image”; Nash, “Virtual Reality Witness”; and Jack M. Loomis,
“Presence in Virtual Reality and Everyday Life: Immersion within a World of Representation,”
Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments 25, no. 2 (2016): 169–74.
71. See Alison Griffiths Shivers down Your Spine: Cinema, Museums and the Immersive View
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), and Torben Grodal, “Stories for Eye, Ear, and
Muscles: Video Games, Media and Embodied Experiences,” in The Video Game Theory
Reader, ed. Mark J. P. Wolf and Bernard Perron (New York: Routledge, 2003), 129–56.
72. See Loomis, “Presence.”
73. See Daniel, “Inhabiting the Image.”
74. See Sinnerbrink, New Philosophies, 28–33.
75. See Daniel, “Inhabiting the Image,” for a discussion of the idea of VR as a medium of ethical
experience, focusing on immersive VR documentary dealing with indigenous experience in
Australia.
 I

For the benefit of digital users, indexed terms that span two pages (e.g., 52–53) may, on occasion,
appear on only one of those pages.

Figures are indicated by f following the page number

4K film technology, 98, 101, 106
5X2 (Ozon), 24–25
8K film technology, 106
9 Songs (Winterbottom), 593
2001: A Space Odyssey (Kubrick), 223–24

A
Abhinaya Darpana (The Mirror of Gesture), 391–94
Acconci, Vito, 136–37
The Act of Killing (Oppenheim), 279f, 279–80
Adebar (Kubelka), 28–29
Adkins, Terry, 279–80
Adorno, Theodor
on Eisenstein’s films, 425
on the essay, 79, 83, 87–88, 473
on free time, 22
on hearing and historical change, 363–65
on the legibility of reification in film, 59–60, 61
texts compared to spider webs by, 468
on thinking in fragments, 80
Adversarially Evolved Hallucinations (Pagalen), 332, 334
aesthetics
affect theory and, 36–37
Arendt and, 39–42
categorization and, 37–38, 62–64
cognitive model of, 34–35
Frankfurt School and, 35–36
interested judgment and, 34–35, 40, 41–42, 43, 45
Kant and, 38, 40, 41–43, 50–51
knowledge-effects and, 43
liberation and, 61–63
“return to beauty” movement and, 33–34
 sensory model of, 34–37
vicarious causation and, 36
An Affair to Remember (McCarey), 195–96
affect theory
affective turn and, 569, 574–82, 584–86, 658
Brinkema and, 36–37, 118, 258, 476, 627–28, 637–40
depersonalization and, 636, 639–41
empathy and, 574–82
feminist film theory and, 201–2, 583–86
ideology critique and, 635–37
in-between-ness and, 476
lesbian characters in film and, 259
neoliberalism and, 629
noncognitive nature of our interaction with world in, 36
Agamben, Giorgio, 46
Agee, James, 220
Ahmed, Sara, 190–91
Akerman, Chantal, 202, 511, 592
Aktualita (Czech newsreel from 1941), 540–41
Aldrich, Robert, 190
Aleksandrov, Grigori, 341–42, 485
Alexander Nevsky (Eisenstein), 374n.22, 424–25
Algerian War, 301
Ali, Mahershala, 431–32, 434
Allen, Woody, 27, 195–96, 519–20
Allison, Henry, 42–43
Alphaville (Godard), 276f, 276–77
Althusser, Louis, 1–2, 131, 161–62, 626, 639–40
Altman, Rick, 352n.3
Álvarez López, Cristina, 513
The Ambassador’s Daughter (Krasna), 531
Ameche, Don, 28, 220
Amphibian Man (Chebotaryov), 540–41
Anatahan (Sternberg), 216
Anderson, Adisa, 249
Anderson, Amanda, 60–61
Anderson, Paul Thomas, 428
Andersson, Roy, 592
Andrew, Dudley, 341–42, 425–26
Andrews, Dana, 519–20
Anger, Kenneth, 534–35
Annie Hall (Allen), 195–96
Anobile, Richard J., 509
Ant Farm, 278
Anton, Karl, 531
Antonioni, Michelangelo, 81–82, 532, 592
Anzieu, Didier, 185–86, 342
Aono Suekichi, 168–69
Apocalypse Now (Coppola), 340
apparatus theory
androcentrism in film and, 451–52
Facebook and, 454–56
feminist film theory and, 131, 186, 632
ideology critique and, 161–62
psychoanalytic film theory and, 137–38, 632–33
queer theory and, 131, 632–33
subject as “master of all it surveys” in, 131–32
White spectatorship and, 451–52
Apple, 286, 353n.12
Arabela (Czech television serial, 1979–81), 534
Aragon, Louis, 4
Arendt, Hannah, 39–42, 45–46, 215–16
Aristotle
appropriateness and, 302–3, 312
mimesis and natural law of association of, 299–300, 302–3, 313
ontology and, 174, 305
organons (imagined technical instruments) of, 306–7
on reason and emotion, 660
Arnheim, Rudolf, 651, 656
Arnulf Rainer (Kubelka), 28–29
Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat (Lumière), 321
Artaud, Antonin, 309–10, 387
artificial intelligence (AI)
automation of perception and, 329–31
computer-generated imagery and, 323
deepfakes and, 321, 323–24
generative adversarial networks and, 320–21, 332–34
images’ ability to intervene in everyday life and, 332
kino-eye concept and, 324–25
machine vision technologies and, 320–22
operational images and, 328–29
postphotographic realism and, 334
Arzner, Dorothy, 192, 532
Ashbery, John, 471
Assayas, Olivier, 532
assemblage theory, 550–53
Astaire, Fred, 347–48
Astruc, Alexandre, 505, 508–10
Aśvaghoṣa, 170
As You See (Farocki), 328–29,
Atwood, Margaret, 190
Auden, W.H., 569, 584, 620–21
audio-vision
advanced audio-vision and, 362–63
definition of, 359–60
“digital break” in filmmaking and, 360–62, 369–72
 disarticulation of aesthetic effects and technical causes in, 368–70
discourse and, 359–60
Dolby stereo and, 370–73
historical change in hearing processes and, 363–65
nonrelation and, 366–68, 370, 373
synchresis and, 365
Auerbach, Eric, 316n.32
Aumont, Jacques, 600–1
Austin, J. L., 37
Autant-Lara, Claude, 530
Avatar (Cameron), 103–4
Avenging a Crime, or Burned at the Stake (1904), 450–51
The Awful Truth (McCarey), 185, 195–96, 197
Azevedo, Luís, 515–17

B
Baby Driver (Wright), 347–48
Baby Face (Green), 198–99
Badham, John, 348
Badiou, Alain, 160–61, 175–76
Baecque, Antoine de, 362–63
Baker, Courtney, 450, 452–53, 458
Bakhtin, Mikhail, 186, 199–200, 206
Balázs, Béla
on the close-up film technique, 120–21, 574
on decline of film’s mass cultural influence, 2–3
on Gish, 205
on the need for expressiveness in every film frame, 287–88
on sound’s lack of shadow, 342–43
Baldwin, James, 123–24, 137–38
Balibar, Étienne, 79–80, 92n.20
Ballet mécanique (Murphy), 102
Balsom, Erika, 96–97, 100, 107, 110
Bambara, Toni Cade, 236–38, 243–44
Band of Outsiders (Godard), 579
The Bandwagon (Minnelli), 347–48
Bao Weihong, 167–68
Bardot, Brigitte, 85–86
Barker, Jennifer M., 422, 427–28, 432–33, 436–37, 637
Barking Dogs Never Bite (Bong Joon-ho), 516
Baron, Cynthia, 388–89, 392–93, 396–97
Barr, Roseanne, 200–1
Barrymore, John, 28
Bárta, Jiří, 534–35
Barthes, Roland
“the book of the self” and, 84–85
 on costumes’ role in drama, 530
on denotation and connotation, 472
on the logic of the tableau, 80
nonmethod and, 79, 84, 90–91
ontology of everyday objects and, 302
Batmanglij, Zal, 506–7
Battleship Potemkin (Eisenstein), 424
Baudelaire, Charles, 20
Baudry, Jean-Louis, 33, 131–32, 159, 161–62, 451–52
Baumbach, Nico, 627–28
Baumgarten, Alexander, 35–36
Bazin, André
close analysis and, 508
on experiential solitude in the movie theater, 593
on film and abstract painting, 290–91
on film and the preservation of time, 24
on film as “complete illusion,” 16–17
horizontal montage and, 82–83
indexicality of photography and, 617–18
on liveness, 448–49, 452
on mechanization of movement in Modern Times, 283
media essentialism and, 111–12
ontology and, 172, 174
realism and, 310–11, 650–51, 656, 662–63
on technological progress, 106
on theory versus criticism, 5
Beaches of Agnes (Varda), 88
Bécassine (French comic book drawing), 482–83
Begin Again (Carney), 346–47
Being John Malkovich (Jonze), 349
Belhaven Meridian (Joseph)
Arabic graphic in, 557f, 557–58
opening of, 557
Shabazz Palaces’ “Find Out” and, 553, 557–60
single-shot format of, 556–57
Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles and, 554–58
Bell, Alexander Melville, 17
Bell, Peter, 322
Bellamy, Ralph, 197
Belle de Jour (Buñel), 122
Beller, Jonathan, 117, 137
Bellour, Raymond
on the challenge of quoting cinematic text, 473
close analysis and, 510–11, 519, 521–22
on “pensive spectators,” 592
on video technology and extended corporeality, 88
Belton, John, 341–42, 344, 607n.57
Benglis, Lynda, 136–37
Benjamin, Walter
aesthetic theory and, 35–36
on camera’s ability to reveal world inaccessible to human eye, 326
on clothing and the body, 534–35
on film and clock-time, 15
on July Revolution and “attack on time,” 20
on myth of midnight, 27–28
on time and boredom, 20
on “time lived through” versus “time rich in memory,” 19, 21–22, 242, 659
Bennett, Dionne, 192–93
Bense, Max, 78–79, 81–82, 83, 87, 90–91
Benveniste, Émile, 84
Bergen, Candice, 205
Berger, John, 125–27
Berger, Martin, 450–51
Bergman, Ingmar, 349, 592
Bergman, Ingrid, 85, 159
Bergson, Henri
on cinema and the processing of time, 19, 21
on comedy and repetition, 283–84
critique of film’s Newtonian “closed system,” 277–78
on habitual recollection versus independent recollection, 282
vitalism and, 284
Berkofsky, Ava, 451
Berlant, Lauren, 36, 155–56, 201–2, 636, 639–40
Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Großstadt (Ruttmann), 215
Bernardi, Daniel, 450–51
Bernardini, Maria, 206
Bersani, Leo, 117–19, 274–75, 635
Bessy, Maurice, 541
Best, Stephen, 471
Beyoncé, 553, 564
Beyond a Reasonable Doubt (Lang), 519–20
Bhaba, Homi, 498
Bharatanatyam (Hindi dance form), 386–87, 390–91, 393–94, 396
Bicycle Thief (De Sica), 379
Bigelow, Kathryn, 583, 638
The Big Sleep (Hawks), 521
The Birds (Hitchcock), 376, 521
Bíró, Yvette, 514, 518
The Birth of a Nation (Griffith), 450–51
Blackmail (Hitchcock), 197
Blackson, Robert, 278
Blanchett, Cate, 263–64
Blossfeldt, Karl, 326
Blow Out (De Palma), 347, 372–73
Blow-Up (Antonioni), 81–82, 91n.16, 532
Blue Steel (Bigelow), 638
Bocas de Ceniza (Echavaría), 413–14
Bodhi, Bhikkhu, 172–73
Bogart, Humphrey, 219
Bogle, Donald, 1
Bong Joon-ho, 515–17
Bonnie and Clyde (Penn), 533
Borch-Jakobsen, Mikkel, 631
Borden, Lizzen, 202
Borden, Olive, 536–37
Bordwell, David
on ambiguity as style, 62
on costume design, 526–27
on “drilling down” in film analysis, 505–6
on Grand Theory, 654–55
on parametric narration, 571–72
poetics of cinema and, 512
posttheory and, 3
prominent mid-century American film critics profiled by, 220–21
on rhythm and film, 423–24
Born in Flames (Borden), 202
Bose, Nitin, 385
Bourdieu, Pierre, 41, 410–11
The Bourne Identity (Liman), 138–40, 139f
The Bourne Ultimatum (Greengrass), 476–78
Braddock, Jeremy, 563–64
Brakhage, Stan, 539–40, 601
Brannigan, Erin, 387, 390–91
Breathe (Laurent), 205
Brecht, Bertolt, 35–36, 214, 342
Breillat, Catherine, 593
Bresson, Robert, 421, 426–28, 439, 509, 592, 599–600
Brewer, Craig, 347
Bridesmaids (Feig), 195–96
Brief Encounter (Lean), 351–52
Bringing Up Baby (Hawks), 185, 195, 197
Brinkema, Eugenie
affect theory and, 36–37, 118, 258, 476, 627–28, 637–40
close reading and, 507–8, 573
psychoanalytic film theory and, 637
on theory’s decline, 2–3
on the “true task” of theory, 2
Britell, Nicholas, 432
Broeckmann, Andreas, 322
Brook, Peter, 391–92
Brooks, Albert, 520
Brooks, Peter, 119–20
Brown, Andy, 554
Brown, Chengeto, 554
Brownstein, Carrie, 266–67
Bruno, Giuliana, 537–39, 584
Buckwalter, Harry, 450–51
Buddhism
dependent originations and, 170–71
montage and, 178–79
ontology and, 172–75
six domains of the consciousness and, 171
Taoist concepts in, 173
Tathāgatagarba and, 166, 170–71, 175–76
Vajrayāna Buddhism and, 170
Yogācāra and, 166, 170–72, 175–76, 179n.1
Zen Buddhism and, 166, 170
Bull, Michael, 345–46
Buñuel, Luis, 122
Burgin, Victor, 274–75, 275f
Burke, Florrie, 576–77
Burnett, Charles, 553, 558
Butler, Ishmael, 553, 557, 559
Butler, Judith, 127, 462–63
Butler, Octavia, 559

C
Caillois, Roger, 23
Cameraperson (Johnson), 580–82, 581f
Cameron, James, 103–4
Campion, Jane, 349, 495–501, 583
Canudo, Riciotto, 648–51
Capellani, Albert, 534
Capra, Frank, 185, 216–17, 548
Carnal Knowledge (Nichols), 205
Carnicke, Sharon Marie, 388–89, 392–93, 396–97
Carol (Haynes)
ending of, 265
female desire and, 260, 263–65
opening of, 263–64
photo still from, 266f
power imbalances between female protagonists in, 264–65
Sunset Boulevard allusions in, 264
unresolved semiclimaxes in, 264–66
Carpenter, John, 156
Carroll, Noël
affect theory and, 572–73
essentialist definition of moving image used by, 95, 108–9
film/mind analogy and, 651–52
on Grand Theory, 654–55
 Heath’s debates with, 1–2, 4
medium specificity criticized by, 95, 96–97, 103–6, 111–12
on philosophy’s approach to film, 5
posttheory and, 3
on Welles’s The Trial, 48–49
Carruthers, Lee, 25
Carson, Lisa Nicole, 245
Cartwright, Lisa, 455–56
Caryl, Jean, 474–75
Casablanca (Curtiz), 219
Casanova (Fellini), 382
Casarino, Cesare, 206
Casetti, Francesco, 324, 509, 648
Castells, Manuel, 552
Castile, Philando, 453–56, 460–61
Catfish (Joost and Schulman), 457–58
Cavani, Liliana, 533
Cavell, Stanley
on aesthetic criticism and depersonalization, 636
on aesthetic judgment and modern philosophy, 38
on fantasy and knowledge of the world, 41–42
on “inherently pornographic” nature of film, 125
ontologically invisible spectators and, 137–38
on sound’s origins, 344–45
Cave of Forgotten Dreams (Herzog), 650–51
Certain Women (Reichardt), 577, 582
Chaganty, Ameesh, 457–58
Chakrabarty, Amiya, 385
Chandler, James, 298–99
Chanel, Coco, 529–30
Chaplin, Charlie, 214, 220, 282–83, 283f, 288–89
Chatonsky, Grégory, 334
Chatterjea, Ananya, 392–93, 396
Chaussures Sirius: Une Etoile m’a dit (French fashion film), 535–36
Che (Soderbergh), 98
Chebotaryov, Vladimir, 540–41
Chen Xihe, 167–68
Cheshire, Godfrey, 578
Childs-Davis, Faith, 560
Chion, Michel
audio-vision and, 365–66
on Dolby sound and filmmaking, 370–73
on film sound’s lack of frame, 342–43, 410
musique concrète and, 378–79, 381
on new film technologies available after 1945, 368–70
on rhythm and film, 428
synchresis and, 341–42, 365
transsensoriality and, 377, 382
Choi, Jinhee, 5
Cholodenko, Lisa. See High Art (Cholodenko)
Chomksy, Noam, 157
Christian, Aymar Jean, 585–86
Christie, Ian, 526–27
Chytilová, Vera, 199
Cianfrance, Derek, 436–37
Cicognini, Alessandro, 379
Cinderella fairytale, 27–28
cinégraphie, 423–24
CinemaScope, 99, 342
Cinémathèque Française, 379
Cioffi, Charles, 488–89
Citizenfour (Poitras), 580
Citizen Kane (Welles), 43–44, 51
Citti, Franco, 206
Citton, Yves, 590–91, 598, 599, 602–3
Civjans, Gunars, 510
Cixous, Hélène, 188
Clair, René, 111–12, 177, 341–42
Clark, Adam, 247
Clark, T.J., 610, 612
Clarkson, Patricia, 260–61
The Clock (Marclay), 25–27
close analysis
data visualization and, 511
“drilling down” and, 505–6
explication and, 506–7
frame-by-frame analysis and, 509
goals of, 512–13
limits of, 518–22
metaphor and, 515–17
mise en scène and, 510–11
New Criticism movement and, 508
shot analysis and, 510–11
technology’s facilitation of, 508, 521
themes and, 493–94
Clueless (Heckerling), 195–96
cognitivism, 660–61
Cohn, Libbie D., 556–57
Colbert, Claudette, 28
Comolli, Jean-Louis, 62–63, 151, 161–62
computer-generated imagery (CGI), 108, 112, 323
Comte-Sponville, André, 64–65
Confucianism, 170
Conley, Tom, 509
Connor, Steven, 342–43
Constantine, Eddie, 276–77
Contempt (Godard), 85–87
The Conversation (Coppola), 372–73, 506
Coogler, Ryan, 449–51, 453–54, 458–61
Cook, Pam, 192, 526–27
Coomaraswamy, A. K., 393–95
Coorlawala, Uttara Asha, 395–96
Copjec, Joan, 131–32, 632
Coppola, Francis Ford, 340, 372–73, 506, 515
Coppola, Sofia, 349, 583
Corey, Wendell, 204
costumes in film
awards for, 530
celluloid film as costume material and, 540–41
costume/fashion distinction and, 528–33
experimental film and, 534–35
fashion films and, 535–36
fashion in society influenced by, 533
film color and, 539
film production schedules and, 529–30
film theory’s neglect of, 526–28
as strategic narrative signposts, 534
Cottrel, Adam, 436–37
Couldry, Nick, 452
Counter Music (Farocki), 327–29
Covers (Russell), 413–14
Crary, Jonathan, 422
Crash (Cronenberg), 593
Craven, Wes, 451, 521
Crawford, Joan, 123, 137–38, 190
Crazy Rich Asians (Chu), 195–96
Creekmur, Corey, 389–90
The Criminal (Losey), 515
Cubitt, Sean, 343
Cukor, George, 532
cultural studies, 156–57, 159–60, 533–34, 627

D
Daisies (Chytilová), 199
Damon, Matt, 138–39
Dance, Girl, Dance (Arzner), 192
The Dancing Fleece (Wilson), 537–39
Daney, Serge, 33, 470
Daniels, Jeff, 27
Dargis, Manohla, 222–23, 268
Dash, Julie. See Daughters of the Dust (Dash)
Das indische Grabmal (May), 214
Daughters of the Dust (Dash)
35mm film format and, 237
African conception of time and storytelling in, 232, 237, 243
Black women’s collective belonging forged through history of violence in, 231–35, 238–40, 241,
249
difficulties obtaining financial support for, 236–37
formal and stylistic innovations in, 236–38
Great Migration and, 241
Gullah cultures and dialect in, 237, 240
technologies of visual representation in, 241
as touchstone for subsequent Black feminist thought, 235, 238
Unborn Child in, 234, 241, 243–44
Davies, David, 99–101
Da Vinci, Leonardo, 482–83
Davis, Bette, 123–24, 190
Davis, Karon, 560–64
Davis, Keven, 560–61
Davis, Natalie Zemon, 199–200
Davis, Noah, 554, 560–64, 565
Davis, Theo, 34
Dawkins, Roger, 317n.67
Day, Cora Lee, 231–32
A Day Throughout the World (Vertov), 493
Deaf (Wiseman), 412–13
Dean, Jodi, 155–56
Dean, Tacita, 96
Deep Dream Generator, 322
Deep Play (Farocki), 328–29
Déjà Vu (Scott), 382
DeLanda, Manuel, 550–52
de Lauretis, Teresa, 140–41, 187
Deleuze, Gilles
on AND, 80–81, 309–11, 313
on BETWEEN, 80–81, 310–11
affect theory and, 635–36
assemblage theory and, 550–52
on Bergson’s objection to cinema, 277–78
on cinema of the “time-image,” 369–70
empiricist film theory and, 309–12
on film as pure movement and fragmentation, 258
on filmmakers’ “thinking” with cinematic images, 232
free direct discourse and, 277
on Freud and fathers, 135–36
on Godard, 308–9, 311
on “multiple, creative solitude,” 78
repetition and, 279
visibility and, 408
on Wahl, 297, 311
Delpeut, Peter, 539–40
Demchenko, Maria, 491
DeMille, Cecil B., 29, 378–79
Deming, Barbara, 219–20, 518–19
Demme, Jonathan, 435
Denis, Claire, 430
Denson, Shane, 591
De Palma, Brian, 347, 372–73
depersonalization
affect theory and, 636, 639–41
modernism and, 610–12
montage and, 616
psychoanalytic film theory and, 629–32
Soviet film and, 612–16
weaponization of the aesthetic and, 609
Der Blaue Engel (Von Sternberg), 191, 221–22
Deren, Maya, 592, 609–10, 612, 618–21
Derrida (Dick), 580
Derrida, Jacques, 134, 549, 593, 656
Desailly, Jean, 515
Descartes, René, 79, 300–1
De Sica, Vittorio, 379
DeSimone, Tom, 190
Devdas (Roy), 386–87
The Devil Finds Work (Baldwin), 123–24
Dial M for Murder (Hitchcock), 489
Diamond Ring (Dean), 96
Diaz, Melonie, 458–59
Dichter, Mark, 344
Dick, Kirby, 580
Dienstfrey, Eric, 340
Dietrich, Marlene, 191, 221–22
Dimendberg, Ed, 218
Dior, Christian, 531
Disney, Walt, 190, 287–88
Disobedience (Leilo), 267–70, 269f
Divorce Italian Style (Germi), 190–91
Doane, Mary Ann
on cinema and experiencing time, 16, 21, 242
on filmmaking and indexicality, 95–96, 100, 107
on film theory in digital era, 3
on hysteria, 203
on pathos in Haynes’s films, 264–65
on sexist jokes in film, 187, 197–98
on sound in film, 341–42, 343
Doctor Zhivago (Lean), 533
documentary listening
audibilities and, 404, 409–11, 413–14
 audit and, 403, 408
“the listening ear” and, 403, 407–8
listening habitus and, 410–14
objective listening and, 411–12
objective versus embodied listening and, 411–12
voice and, 403–9
Voice of God commentary and, 412
Doisneau, Robert, 197–98
Dolar, Mladen, 406–7
Dolby systems
branding and, 342–43
soundtrack composition affected by development of, 344
technological innovations achieved by, 340, 370–73
Domino (Scott), 382
Donen, Stanley, 532
Dorléac, Françoise, 515
Dosse, François, 310
Do the Right Thing (Lee), 447–48, 450
Doty, Mark, 470
Double Indemnity (Wilder), 221
Douglas, Melvyn, 196
Dowdy, Andrew, 223–24
Dreams (Kurosawa), 382
Dressler, Werner, 537–39
Drew, Robert, 103–4
Dreyer, Carl, 379, 382
Dufrenne, Mikel, 429
Duhamel, Georges, 324
Dulac, Germaine, 102, 113, 423
Dunkirk (Nolan), 342
Dunne, Irene, 197
Dunst, Kirsten, 349
Duras, Marguerite, 376, 592
Dürer, Albrecht, 328–29
Durgnat, Raymond, 518–19
D’Ursel, Henri, 534
Dutt, Guru, 393–94
Dyer, Richard, 151, 451

E
Eagleton, Terry, 33–34
“Easter eggs,” 506
Eastman Kodak film technology, 97–99
Ebert, Roger, 223–24
Echavaría, Juan Manuel, 413–14
Ecstasy (Machatý), 221–22
Edelman, Lee, 123
Edison, Thomas, 16–17, 28–29, 288–90, 340–41
Eichmann trial (1961), 45
Eidsheim, Nina Sun, 339
Eikhenbaum, Boris, 593
Eisenstein, Sergei
Alexander Nevsky and, 374n.22, 424–25
Battleship Potemkin and, 424
on early Disney animation, 287–88
on “militant humor,” 196
montage and, 424–26, 433, 485–86, 612–13, 615–16
on movies and emotional engagement, 658
October and, 485–86, 501, 502n.18, 563, 615–16
The Strike and, 614–15
Vertov and, 614–16
Eisler, Hanns, 363–65, 425
Eisner, Lotte, 213–17
ekphrasis, 471–72, 513
Elgort, Ansel, 347
Eliot, T. S., 609, 611–13, 617–19
Elkins, James, 519
Elsaesser, Thomas, 293, 599, 600, 659
Emak Bakia (Man Ray), 534–35
empiricist film theory
appropriateness and, 303, 312
Deleuze and, 309–12
Godard and, 307–9, 311, 313–14
ontologies of technical objects and, 298–99, 301–2, 305–7, 312–14
pluralism and, 298–300, 311–12, 313–14
semiotics and, 310
Simondon and, 304–7
Enthusiasm (Symphony of the Donbas) [Vertov], 493
Ephron, Nora, 195–96
Eponine (Chion), 381
Epstein, Jean
on aesthetics of proximity, 575
camera posited as quasi-subject with own agency by, 325–26
Canudo and, 649–50
on cinematic thinking, 648, 654
on the close-up film technique, 574
photogénie and, 423
Eshun, Kodwo, 278
The Eternal Frame (Ant Farm), 278
Evening of Miniatures (Vertov), 493
Eve’s Bayou (Lemmons)
Black women’s collective belonging forged through history of violence in, 239, 245, 249
Creole language and culture in, 240, 246
father’s kiss of Cisely in, 240–41, 244–45
 spatiotemporal knowledge formation in, 240–41, 244
Evidentiary Bodies (Hammer), 575–77, 576f
The Extinct World of Gloves (Bárta), 534–35
Eye/Machine I, II, III (Farocki), 328–29

F
Facebook
algorithmic personalization on, 454
apparatus theory and, 454–56
commenting feature of, 456
diversion and, 599
empathic spectatorship and, 455–56
films of anti-Black violence circulated on, 449–50, 453–54, 457
liveness and, 453–55
machine vision systems and, 321
Reaction buttons on, 456
sharing feature of, 456
user profile login as required feature of, 454
White spectatorship and, 449, 451–52, 455
Fahrenheit 9/ 11 (Moore), 580
Fairfax, Daniel, 590–91
Fallen (Hoblit), 97–98
The Fall of the House of Usher (Epstein), 105
Fanon, Frantz, 232, 435
Farber, Manny, 212–13, 513
Farocki, Harun. See also specific works
camera’s ability to reveal world inaccessible to human eye in the films of, 327–29
operational images concept and, 328–29
repetitions in the films of, 294
slapstick humor of, 291–93
Farrow, Mia, 27
Fashions for Women (Arzner), 532
The Fatal Hour (Griffith), 26–27
Fata Morgana (Herzog), 216
Faust (Gorski), 216
Fay, Jennifer, 39
FEB (blog), 560–62, 561f, 563–64
Feinberg, Joel, 48
Feld, Hans, 214
Fellini, Federico, 382
Felski, Rita, 153–55, 593
feminist film theory
affect theory and, 201–2, 583–86
apparatus theory and, 131, 186, 632
Black women’s anger and laughter in, 192–93, 201
coquette’s laughter and, 189, 194–99
 hysteric’s laughter and, 190, 203–7
killjoy’s laughter and, 189–94
misogyny in comedies and, 185, 187
patriarchal codes for labor and, 490–91
prankster’s laughter and, 190, 199–202
silent films and, 188
unruly female laughter and, 187–88, 200
women’s hands in film and, 486–501
“the zany” and, 201–2
Fennell, Emerald, 583–84
Ferguson, Otis, 220–21
Ferrari, Federico, 480
Feuer, Jane, 452
Field, Patricia, 532
Fig Leaves (Hawks), 532, 536–37
film essays
as archives of the past, 87–91
borders and, 78–83
eccentric arrangements within, 83–87
rhythm and, 84–85
Fincher, David, 113, 457–58
First Cow (Reichardt), 583
Fitzhamon, Lewin, 534–35
Fitzpatrick, Veronica, 205
Fleming, Victor, 185, 190
Flusser, Vilém, 329–31
Fly Paper (Joseph), 560–61, 564
Fonda, Jane, 486
Ford, John, 514–15
Foucault, Michel, 61–63, 161–62, 360–61, 363, 408–9, 633–34, 656
Francke, Lizzie, 496
Frank, Hannah, 509
Frankel, David, 190
Frankfurt School, 35–36, 360–61, 363, 456, 656
Franklin, Seb, 138–40
Frantz Fanon (Even the Dead Are Not Safe) [Pagalen], 332
Fred Ott’s Sneeze (1894 kinetoscope), 289f, 289–90
French apparatus theory, 22–23, 131
French Impressionism, 423–24
Freud, Sigmund
“child is being beaten” fantasy and, 134–36
on desire and a singular past, 270
Dora case study of, 119–20
drives and, 118
the ego and, 118–19, 630–35
on the “four individuals” in every sexual encounter, 130–31
heteronormativity and, 135–36
the id and, 630–35
 on laughter and civilization, 194–95
Oedipus complex and, 117–19, 135–36, 629–30
repetition and, 275–76, 280–81, 284
self-contradictions of the signifying body, 119–20
“skin sack” of, 88–89
the unconscious and, 630
Frey, Mattias, 223
Fried, Michael, 575
From Apple to Kleptomaniac (Pagalen), 332
From Caligari to Hitler (Kracauer), 123, 213–14, 216, 217–18
Fruitvale Station (Coogler), 458–63, 459f
Fuller, Loïe, 526, 537–39
Funny Face (Donen), 532

G
Gabriel, Betty, 193
Gadsby, Hannah, 207–8
Gaines, Jane, 123–24, 188–89, 530
Gametxo, Aitor, 511
Gance, Abel, 111–12, 423–24, 649–50
Garbo, Greta, 29, 196
Gardiner, Boris, 431–32
Garner, Eric, 447–48, 450
Garofolo, Ettore, 207
Gary, Ja’Tovia, 449–50, 453–54, 458, 460–62
Gass, Lars Henrik, 603
Gaultier, Jean-Paul, 540–41
Gaut, Berys
on digital film’s “distinct artistic properties,” 96, 112–13
medium defined by, 99–101
on medium specificity and differential properties, 107–8
Gayton, Jeffrey T., 596
The General (Keaton), 288–89
generative adversarial networks (GAN), 320–21, 332–34
The Gentleman’s Thief (Linder), 534
Gere, Richard, 198
Gerima, Haile, 232–33
Germi, Pietro, 190
Gerow, Aaron, 167
Gerwig, Greta, 583
Gessner, David, 510
Get Out (Peele), 193–94, 451
Ghosts before Breakfast (Richter), 534–35
The Giant (Klier), 330
Gibney, Robert A., 535–36
Gibson, James J., 593
“Gigi” (Lerner and Loewe), 505
Gillespie, Michael Boyce, 449–50, 460–62
Ginzburg, Carlo, 304
The Girl at the Piano (Vertov), 493–95
Girlhood (Sciamma)
affect theory and, 571–72, 579
direct address to camera in, 573
opening of, 570–71
parametric narration and, 571–72
photo stills from, 571f, 580f
Girls Trip (Lee), 200
Gish, Lillian, 205
“Giverny I (Négresse Impériale)” (Gary), 460–63, 462f
The Gleaners and I (Varda), 88–90
Gledhill, Christine, 2
Godard, Jean-Luc
Alphaville and, 276f, 276–77
the “AND” in the filmmaking of, 89–90
Band of Outsiders and, 579
Contempt and, 85–87
empiricist film theory and, 307–9, 311, 313–14
on filmmaking as “receiving,” 93n.35
Here and Elsewhere and, 78, 80–83
The Image Book and, 482–84, 494
Masculin féminin and, 509
Montage My Fine Care and, 307–8
Scénario du film Passion and, 86–87
time and space in the filmmaking of, 81–82, 90
Vent d’est and, 313
The Goddess (Yonggang Wu), 205
Goehr, Walter, 379
Going to Bed under Difficulties (Méliès), 534–35
Gonzalez-Torres, Felix, 562–63
Good, Meagan, 239
Goodwin, Malcolm, 246
Google, 321
Goold, Rupert, 349
Gorfinkel, Elena, 549–50
Gorin, Jean-Pierre, 80, 82–83, 90–91, 313, 514
Gorris, Marleen, 186
Gorski, Peter, 216
Göttel, Dennis, 598
Gracyk, Theodore, 354n.35
Graff, Gerald, 224
Grainge, Paul, 342–43
Gramsci, Antonio, 235
Grand Theft Auto IV (video game), 293
Grand Theory, 153, 654–57
Grant, Cary, 4, 195, 197
Grant III, Oscar, 458–60
Graphics Interchange Format (gif), 288–90
Grau, Oliver, 661–62
Greatest Show on Earth (de Mille), 378–79
Great Expectations (Lean), 379
Greaves, William, 431
Green, Alfred E., 198, 532
Greenberg, Clement, 218–19
Gregg, Everley, 351
Gregg, Melissa, 36, 476
Griffith, D. W., 24, 26–27, 151, 205, 388–89, 450–51, 474–75
Groundhog Day (Ramis), 195–96
Groves, George, 340–41
Gründgens, Gustav, 216
Guattari, Félix, 135–36, 550, 635–36
Guérin, Bernard, 594–95
Guest, Christopher, 413–14
Gu Kenfu, 167–68
Gunning, Tom, 519, 539, 574

H
Habermas, Jürgen, 137
Hache, Émilie, 64–67
Haddish, Tiffany, 200
Hall, Stuart, 2, 160, 162, 450–51
Halliwell, Stephen, 303
Hammer, Barbara, 575–77, 582
Hammett, Jennifer, 33–34
Hammid, Alexander, 619–20
Hampton, Fred, 460–61
Hansen, Mark, 3, 636
Hansen, Miriam, 35–36, 188–89, 212–13, 225–26, 621
Hanssen, Eirik, 539
Happy Together (Wong Kar-wai), 436
Harman, Graham, 36
Harris, Theresa, 198
Harris-Perry, Melissa, 192–93
Hartman, Saidiya V., 455–56
Harvey, David, 550, 552
Haskell, Molly, 1, 185, 225
Hastie, Amelie, 486
Haver, Phyllis, 536–37
Hawks, Howard, 185, 198, 216–17, 521, 532, 536–37
Hayles, Katherine, 591
Haynes, Todd. See Carol (Haynes)
Hayworth, Rita, 391
headphones
conscious thought and, 344
home stereo systems and, 340
immersion and, 338–39, 342–44
intercranial aesthetics and, 348–52
iPods and, 340–41, 345–46, 347, 353n.12
potentially solipsistic nature of, 345–46, 348–49
power over environment associated with use of, 345–46, 348
sharing music via, 346–47
Sony Walkman and, 340–41, 345–46
Heath, Stephen, 1–2, 4, 7, 161, 451
Hegel, G.W.F., 35, 119
Heidegger, Martin, 19–22, 174, 549–50, 656, 659
The Help (Taylor), 201–2
Henderson, Marcus, 194
Hennefeld, Maggie, 258
Henry, Damien, 333
Hepburn, Katharine, 195
Hepworth, Cecil, 534–35
Her (Jonze), 349
Here and Elsewhere (Godard and Miéville), 78, 80–83
Herman, Ed, 157
Herrmann, Bernard, 479
Herzog, Werner, 216, 650–51
Herzogenrath, Bernd, 5
Hibbert, Alex R., 430
High Art (Cholodenko), 260–61, 263f, 264, 266–67
Hiroshima, Mon Amour (Resnais), 221–22
History Will Repeat Itself (2007 Berlin art exhibition), 278
Hitchcock, Alfred
The Birds and, 376, 521
Blackmail and, 197
Dial M for Murder and, 489
master shot and, 371
North by Northwest and, 4
Psycho and, 43–44, 350, 509, 510–11, 615
Rear Window and, 469, 488–89
Shadow of a Doubt and, 218
on suspense, 26–27
Vertigo and, 274, 472, 475, 478–80, 488
Hitler, Adolf, 217–18
Hoblit, Gregory, 97–98
Hoi Lun Law, 519–20
Holland, André, 436
Hollander, Anne, 532–33, 537
Holy Motors (Carax), 474–75
Homer, 206, 471
Homo Sacer (Agamben), 46
hooks, bell, 151, 187, 192–93, 201, 224
Horkheimer, Max, 35–36, 59–60, 62–63
Horowitz, Mark, 215–16
Hosokawa, Shuhei, 346
The Host (Bong Jong-Hoo), 516
Hot Fuzz (Wright), 191
Hou Hsiao-hsien, 167–68, 430
Hou Yao, 176
Howard, Bryce Dallas, 201
Howery, Lil Rel, 194
How to Live Together (Barthes), 79, 84, 90–91
How to Remove a Police Helmet (Farocki), 293
Huang Jiamo, 169–70, 176–77
Hui Yuk, 174
Hulme, T. E., 611–12, 618–19
Hume, David, 300, 302, 310–14
Hunger, Francis, 322
Hunter, Holly, 496
Hurricane Katrina (2005), 452–53
Husserl, Edmund, 659
Hustle and Flow (Brewer), 347
hyperattention, 591, 603

I
ideology critique. See also Marxism
affect theory and, 635–37
affirmation and, 160–61
apparatus theory and, 161–62
cognitive mapping and, 162–63
conspiracy theory and, 158–59
credibility of popular culture and, 159–60
epistemological objections to, 153
modernist versus populist versions of, 156–57
nature and, 154–55
online culture wars and, 152, 156
postcriticism and, 153–55, 157–58
reflexivity and, 159
skeptical default orientation toward media and, 157–58
If Beale Street Could Talk (Jenkins), 435
Ihde, Don, 343
The Image Book (Godard), 482–84, 494
ImageNet, 320, 332–34
Images of the World and the Inscription of War (Farocki), 328–29
IMAX, 342
Imitation of Life (Sirk), 521
Inception (Nolan), 507
India Song (Duras), 376
Insecure (Rae), 451
Interstellar (Nolan), 382–83
The Interview (Farocki), 293–94
Intolerance (Griffith), 474–75
Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Kaufman), 371
Invisibility (Fitzhamon and Hepworth), 534–35
Irene (Green), 532
Irr, Caren, 7–8
It All Began with Velvet (Stoney), 537–39
“It Had to Be Murder” (Woolrich), 468–69, 473, 475
It Happened One Night (Capra), 185
Iwasaki Akira, 168–69
I Was a Male War Bride (Hawks), 198

J
Jackson, Peter, 113
Jackson, Samuel L., 240
Jacobs, Lea, 511
Jafa, Arthur, 237, 243–44, 561–64
Jain, Rahul, 537–39
James, Henry, 471
James, William, 281–82, 297–98, 300–1, 307, 312, 313–14
Jameson, Frederic, 151, 158–59, 161–62
Jan Bot (EYE Filmmuseum), 323
Jandreau, Brady, 578f, 578
Jannings, Emil, 191
Jay, Martin, 33–34
Jeanne Dielman (Akerman), 202
Jeavons, Clyde, 541–42
Jeder für sich und Gott gegen alle (Herzog), 216
Jenkins, Barry. See Moonlight (Jenkins)
Jenkins, Henry, 159–60
Jerome, Jharrel, 434
Jidenna, 431–32, 436–37
Johnson, Celia, 351
Johnson, Kirsten, 580–82
Johnson, Scott Norman, 576–77
Johnston, Claire, 187, 192
Johnston, Maura, 506
joint deep attention
cinema dispositive and, 598–602
communal meditation centers and, 596
communal study in libraries and, 596
contagion effect and, 592–94
 cult films and, 594
demanding art films and, 597–98
freedom from having to act and, 600–1
freedom from noise and, 601–2
pornography and, 593
Jonze, Spike, 349
Joost, Henry, 457–58
Jordan, Dorothy, 514
Jordan, Michael B., 458–60, 459f
Joseph, Kahlil, 553, 560–65. See also Belhaven Meridian (Joseph)
Journey to Italy (Rossellini), 84–85
Joyrich, Lynne, 263–64
Judy (Goold), 349
Juhasz, Alexandra, 454, 458
Jurassic Park (Spielberg), 343
Jusqu’à la Victoire (Gorin), 80

K
Kael, Pauline, 222
Kafka, Franz, 45–49
Kahn, Joseph, 506
Kaluuya, Daniel, 193
Kant, Immanuel
aesthetic theory and, 38, 40, 41–43, 50–51, 653–54
Chinese translations of, 172
moral theory and, 59, 65–66
thing-in-itself concept and, 175–76
Wahl’s critiques of, 297–98
Kaplan, Sara Clarke, 239–40, 243
Karina, Anna, 276–77
Karlyn, Kathleen, 186–88, 199–200
Karppi, Tero, 455
Kasson, Jonathan, 23
Kassovitz, Mathieu, 579
Kathakali (South Indian dance form), 385, 391–92
Kathputli (Chakrabarty and Bose), 385–87, 386f, 389–92, 394–95
Katz, David, 425–26
Kaufman, Philip, 371
Keaton, Buster, 288–89
Keats, John, 471
Kebadian, Jacques, 380
Kechiche, Abdellatif, 593
Keegan, Cael M., 584
Kehr, Dave, 222–24
Keitel, Harvery, 497
Kelley, Malcolm David, 246
Kennedy, Flo, 202
Kentis, Chris, 573
Kerins, Mark, 342, 360, 372
Kern, Stephen, 18–20
Kessler, Sarah, 405–6, 413–14
Kiarostami, Abbas, 68–72, 592
The Kidnapping of Banker Fux (Anton), 531
Killer of Sheep (Burnett), 553, 558, 559–60
The Killers (Siegel), 25
Kinetoscope reels, 288–90
King, Rodney, 457, 554
Kittler, Friedrich, 137, 258, 330–31, 340
Klee, Paul, 330
Klein, William, 536–37
Klier, Michael, 330
Klute (Pakula), 486–90
Koepnick, Lutz, 597
Koresky, Michael, 582
Koso, Sejid, 582
Kouvaros, George, 387
Kracauer, Siegfried
biographical background of, 213–14
on camera’s ability to reveal world inaccessible to human eye, 327
on cultural fantasies and popular cinema, 123
film reviews in American popular press by, 216, 218–19
on form’s overriding nature in film, 60–61
medium specificity arguments regarding photography and, 103
on modern art and “playing with danger,” 225–26
on Nazi propaganda films, 217–18
realist theory of film and, 621–22, 648, 656
on terror films, 218
Krasinski, John, 346–47
Krasna, Norman, 531
Krauss, Rosalind, 121, 136–37, 563
Kristeva, Julia, 202
Kubelka, Peter, 21, 28–29, 521
Kubrick, Stanley, 223–24, 427–28, 515
Kuntzel, Thierry, 521
Kurosawa, Akira, 382
Kurz Davor Ist Es Passiert (Salomonowitz), 413–14

L
Laban, Rudolf von, 214–15, 392–93
La Boum 2 (Pinoteau), 346
Lacan, Jacques
énonciation/énoncé distinction and, 140
 the gaze and, 131–32
mirror stage and, 134, 631
nonrelation and, 366–67, 370
Ladki (Raman), 396, 398
The Lady Eve (Sturges), 195–96
The Lady from Shanghai (Welles), 44–45, 509
La haine (Kassovitz), 579
LaLee’s Kin (Maysles, Dickson, and Froemke), 413
Lamar, Kendrick, 431, 553
Lamarr, Hedy, 221–22
La Messe de terre (Chion), 381–82
Landis, Deborah, 530–31
Lang, Fritz, 15–16, 85–86, 349, 519–20
Langlois, Henri, 215–16, 379
La Nouvelle Héloïse (Rousseau), 137
La Perle (D’Ursel), 534
Laplanche, Jean, 122, 136, 487
La Roue (Gance), 111–12, 423–24
L’Atalante (Vigo), 347
Latour, Bruno, 64–67, 153, 158, 160
Laughing Anne (Wilcox), 203–4
Laughing Gas (silent film), 188
Laurent, Mélanie, 205
Laurot, Edouard de, 508
Laver, James, 532–33
La vie d’Adèle (Kechiche), 593
Law, Hoi Lun, 519–20
Lawson, Richard, 270
Laxton, James, 430, 439
Lean, David, 347, 351, 379, 533
Lee, Ang, 198
Lee, Malcolm D., 200
Lee, Spike, 447–50, 453–54, 457–58
Leese, Elizabeth, 526–27
Lefebvre, Henri, 439n.3, 552
Léger, Fernand, 102
Legrand, Gérard, 510
Le Grand Nettoyage (Chion), 380
Leilo, Sebastián. See Disobedience (Leilo)
Leimbacher, Irina, 411–12, 413–14
Leisen, Mitchell, 27–28
Lemmons, Kasi, 240, 244. See also Eve’s Bayou (Lemmons)
Lemonade (Beyoncé), 553, 563–64
Lenin, Vladimir, 168–69
Léontine Guards the House (French silent film), 199
Le Plaisir (Ophüls), 349
Lerner, Alan Jay, 505
Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne (Bresson), 509
Leslie, Esther, 537–39
Letter from a Woman Tractor Driver (Vertov), 493–94
Lewis, Jerry, 521
Leyda, Julia, 591
L’Herbier, Marcel, 423–24
Life of Gargantua and Pantagruel (Rabelais), 200
Liman, Doug, 138
Linder, Max, 534
L’Inhumaine (L’Herbier), 423–24
Linji School (Zen Buddhism), 170
Lipari, Lisbeth, 403, 410–11
Lippitt, Akira Mizuta, 548–49
Liquid Sky (Tsukerman), 533
The Little House (Burgin), 274–75, 275f
Liu Na’ou, 169–70, 176–78
liveness, 107, 448–49, 452–55
Lloyd, Harold, 288–89
Lockhart, Calvin, 431
Lockwood, Margaret, 204
Loesser, Arthur, 495
Loewe, Frederick, 505
The Look of Silence (Oppenheimer), 280
Lorde, Audre, 193
The Lord of the Rings (Jackson), 113
Lorre, Peter, 216
Losey, Joseph, 515
Losilla, Carlos, 519–20
Lost Weekend (Wilder), 218
Lotte Eisner in Germany (Horowitz), 215–16
Love (Noë), 593
Love, Heather, 471
Lubistch, Ernst, 194–95, 196, 220–21
Lucas, George, 340
Lukács, Georg, 78, 87–88
Lumiére, Louis, 590–91
Lumière Company, 9–10, 17–18, 321
Lu Xun (Zhou Shuren), 168–69
Lynch, David, 7, 506–7

M
M (Lang), 349
Mabry, Tina. See Mississippi Damned (Mabry)
Macbeth (Welles), 45
MacDonald, J. Farrell, 534
machine learning. See artificial intelligence (AI)
Machine-Readable Hito (Pagalen), 332
Machines (Jain), 537–39
Mackay, John, 616
MacKenzie, Adrian, 322
MacMurray, Fred, 221
Madame de … (Ophüls), 512–13
Mädchen in Uniform (Sagan), 221–22
Mad Max cycle (1979-2016), 520
The Magic Cloak (MacDonald), 534
Magnani, Anna, 206
Mahapatra, Kelucharan, 396
male gaze
Baldwin on, 123–24
castration anxiety and, 490–91
Par le trou de la serrure and, 125–31, 126f, 128f, 129f, 132, 138–39
White spectatorship compared to, 448–49, 451–52
women’s labor in film and, 491
Malkowski, Jennifer, 457
Mamma Roma (Pasolini), 206–7
Manet, Edouard, 461–62
Manhattan (Allen), 519–20
Manovich, Lev, 3
Man Ray, 534–35
Manuel, Jacques, 529
The Man Who Envied Women (Ranier), 338–39
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (Ford), 514
Man with a Movie Camera (Vertov), 81–82, 159, 325, 490–93, 494
Maori society, 495–98, 504n.53
Mara, Rooney, 263–64
Maraire, Chiwoniso, 554
Maraire, Tendai “Baba,” 553, 555–56
Marcel, Gabriel, 300–1
Marclay, Christian, 25–27
Marcus, Sharon, 471
Marey, Étienne- Jules, 17, 21
Marie Antoinette (Sofia Coppola), 349
Marker, Chris, 274, 478–79
Marling, Brit, 506–7
Marriott, David, 232
Marshall, Kerry James, 436, 554–55, 563–64, 565
Martel, Lucrecia, 421, 430
Martin, Adrian, 591, 601
Marvin, Lee, 25
Marx, Karl, 4, 154, 157–58, 160, 552, 654–55
Marxism
base-superstructure relationship and, 152–53
commodity fetishism and, 535–36
critical theory and, 655, 658
Eisner on, 215
 Hall on, 160
nature and, 154
right-wing conspiracy theories regarding, 152
Mary Jane’s Mishap (silent film), 188
Masculin féminin (Godard), 509
Maslin, Janet, 262
Masson, Alain, 510–11, 518
Massumi, Brian, 257–60, 270, 306, 636
Mastroianni, Marcello, 191
May, Joe, 214
Mayne, Judith, 192, 490–93, 494
Maza, Gonzalo, 506
McAdams, Rachel, 267, 270
McCarey, Leo, 185, 195–96
McCraney, Tarell Alvin, 430, 439
McDonagh, Martin, 346–47
McGrath, Jason, 205
McMillon, Joi, 430–31
McNeill, Isabelle, 579
McQueen, Steve, 7
Means, Sean, 223
Medicine for Melancholy (Jenkins), 430
medium specificity
Carroll’s criticisms of, 95, 96–97, 103–6, 111–12
classical film theory and, 95, 101–4, 107–8, 110–12
differential properties and, 107–8
digital/celluloid film distinctions and, 95–97, 98–100, 103–4, 112–13
functionalist definitions of, 98–99
indexicality and, 95–97, 100, 107
introduction of new technologies and, 100–1, 105–6
liveness and, 107
medium essentialism and, 96–97, 101–4, 111–12
postructuralism and, 95
vehicular medium/artistic medium distinction and, 99, 103–4
Mehserle, Johannes, 458–59
Meillasoux, Quentin, 162
Méliès, Georges, 27, 100–1, 266–67, 534–35
Memento (Nolan), 24–25
Mendelsohn, Daniel, 222
Menschen am Sonntag (Siodmak and Ulmer), 215
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 432–33, 659
Meshes of the Afternoon (Deren), 619–21
Metz, Christian
apparatus theory and, 161–62, 451–52
on experiential solitude in the movie theater, 593
film and the mirror compared by, 631
on the perspectival cinema image, 131–32
secondary identification and, 125
 semiotics and, 310, 655
on sound’s verification of images, 341–42
Meumann, Ernst, 425–26
Meunier, Jean-Pierre, 585, 594, 647
Michelson, Annette, 563, 614–15, 618
Midgley, Mary, 59
Midnight (Liesen), 27–28
Miéville, Anne-Marie, 78, 80–83
Minh-ha, Trinh T., 405–6
Minnelli, Vincente, 347–48
The Mirror (Tarkovsky), 349
Mission Impossible films, 112
Mississippi Damned (Mabry)
Black women’s collective belonging forged through history of violence in, 239, 245, 246–48, 249
mobile camera cinematography in, 247
setting of, 245, 246–47
sexual assault and temporal rhythms of television in, 248–49
“Mississippi Goddamn” (Simone), 245
Mitchell, John Cameron, 633
Mitchell, Radha, 260–61
Mitchell, W. J. T, 471
Mitry, Jean, 425–27, 429
Mizejewski, Linda, 204–5
Modern Times (Chaplin), 282–84, 283f
Modleski, Tania, 197
Moffat, Kristine, 495–96
Moholy-Nagy, László, 324, 326
Moll, Georgia, 85–86
Monet, Claude, 460–62
Montage My Fine Care (Godard), 307–8
Montaigne, Michel, 84–85
Montesquieu, Baron de, 483
Moonlight (Jenkins)
Black diaspora and, 433
cinematography of people of color and, 451
ending of, 438
film design of, 430–31
music in, 431–32, 437
reunion scene between Chiron and Kevin in, 436–38, 438f
setting of, 430, 439
sex scene between Chiron and Kevin in, 434–35, 435f, 443n.68
swimming lesson scene in, 432–33, 433f, 435
Underground Musem’s screening at, 561–62
wave motif in, 431–32, 437–38
Moore, Henry, 73
morality
art’s intelligent gratification of consciousness and, 73–74
film noir and, 57–58, 75
 ideology and, 60–62
moralism and, 58–59, 63–68, 74–75
nonhuman animals and, 64–66
style and, 57–59, 66–68, 75
Mordvintsev, Alexander, 322
Moretti, Franco, 518–19
Morgan, Daniel, 225–26
Morgan, Debbi, 240–41
Morgan, Marcyliena, 192–93
Morgan, Richard K., 559
Morrison, Bill, 539–40
Morton, Samantha, 349–50
Morvern Callar (Ramsay), 349–50
Moten, Fred, 563–64
Moussinac, Léon, 177, 423
moviola editing machine, 298–99, 307–8, 312–14
Mowitt, John, 403, 408
Mulvey, Laura
on androcentrism of film, 451–52
on detachment from traditional film conventions, 622–23
film compared to mirrors by, 631
on the male figure’s inability to bear sexual objectification, 127–30
psychoanalysis in the film criticism of, 2
on quotation of films, 473
on representation of women and “the bleeding wound,” 490–91
on resisting women’s systematic disempowerment in mainstream cinema, 187
on texual analysis in a digital age, 521
on the “three looks” of cinema, 125–27
Mumford, Lewis, 18, 20
Munster, Anna, 322
Münsterberg, Hugo, 4, 300–1, 651–54, 656
Murch, Walter, 340, 344, 383–84
Murnau, F. W., 215–16, 379, 382
Murphy, Dudley, 102
Murphy, Geoff, 504n.53
musique concrète, 378–79, 381
Musser, Charles, 574
Muybridge, Eadweard, 17, 21, 258, 289–90
My Darling Clementine (Ford), 514
Mythologies (Barthes), 122–23, 154, 302

N
Nabokov, Vladimir, 471
Ñaṇananda, Kañukurunde, 172–73
Nancy, Jean-Luc, 345, 480
Nanette (Gadsby), 207–8
Narboni, Jean, 62–63
Naremore, James, 391
Natya Sastra (Theory of Drama/ Dance), 391–95
Nehme, Farran Smith, 223
Neill, Sam, 497
neoliberalism, 629, 633–34, 640–41
The Neon Demon (Refn), 532
Ness, Sally, 388
New Criticism, 508, 518–19
Newman, Kim, 518–19
New Zealand, 495–98
Ngai, Sianne, 34, 37–38, 45, 201–2, 258
Nichols, Bill, 404–6, 409–10, 412
Nichols, Mike, 205, 388–89
Nichomachean Ethics (Aristotle), 302–3
Nicolson, Annabel, 539
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 41, 79, 154, 157–58, 630, 649–50, 654–56
Night and Fog (Caryl), 474–75
Nightmare on Elm Street (Craven), 451
The Night Porter (Cavani), 533
Ninotchka (Lubitsch), 29, 196–97
Nitrate Kisses (Hammer), 575
Nivola, Alessandro, 267
Nochlin, Linda, 616–17
Noë, Gaspar, 593
Nolan, Christopher, 24–25, 342, 382–83
Nomadland (Zhao), 583–84
North, Michael, 283
North by Northwest (Hitchcock), 4
Norton, Andre (Alice Norton), 559
Nunn, Bill, 447
Nussbaum, Martha, 66–67

O
The OA (Marling and Batmanglij), 506–7
O’Brien, George, 536–37
Ocean, Frank, 431–32
October: Ten Days That Shook the World (Aleksandrov and Eisenstein ), 485–86, 501, 563, 615–16
Oedipus complex, 117–19, 135–36, 629–30
Offert, Fabian, 322
Office Killer (Sherman), 534
O’Hara, Maureen, 192
Oida, Yoshi, 391–92
Okada, Eiji, 221–22
Okja (Bong Joon-ho), 516
Oklahoma! (Zinnemann), 99
“Olympia” (Manet), 461–62
O’Malley, Sheila, 267–68
Ong, Donna, 177
Open Water (Kentis), 573
Ophüls, Max, 349, 512–13, 520
Oppenheimer, Joshua, 279–80
Orta, Ramsey, 447–48, 450
Orvieto, Adolfo, 601–2
Osten, Franz, 214
Oury, Gérard, 534
Ouyang Jian (Ouyang Jingwu), 172

P
Pacherie, Elisabeth, 595
Padmini, 392–93, 395
Pagden, Anthony, 299–300
Pagis, Michal, 596
Paglen, Trevor, 331–32, 334
Pagnol, Marcel, 111
A Pair of White Gloves (Capellani), 534
Pakula, Alan, 487–89, 500–1
Palance, Jack, 85–86
Panagia, Davide, 33–34
Panh, Rithy, 280–82
Pantaleo, Daniel, 447
Pan Tau (Czech television show), 534
Papini, Giovanni, 648–49
Paquin, Anna, 497
Parallel I-IV (Farocki), 290–94, 291f, 292f, 294f
Parasite (Bong Joon-ho), 515–16
Paris Without a Sea (Mounira Al Solh), 413–14
Par le trou de la serrure (French silent film), 125–31, 126f, 128f, 129f, 132, 138–39
Parures/Vom Spinnen und Weben (Dressler), 537–39
Pasolini, Pier Paolo, 206–7, 276–77
Passion of Joan of Arc (Dreyer), 379
Patterson, Orlando, 194
Patterson, Patricia, 513
Paul, William, 598
Pearson, Roberta, 388–89
Peele, Jordan, 193, 451
Peeping Tom (Powell), 125, 132–34, 133f, 137–38, 145n.68
Peirce, Charles, 310
Penn, Arthur, 533
People’s Park (Sniadecki), 556–57
Perceptron, 320, 330
Perez, Gilberto, 514–15, 517–18
Perkins, Anthony, 46
Perkins, V. F., 473, 513–16, 518, 520
Persona (Bergman), 159
Personal Shopper (Assayas), 532
Pesce-Marinieri, Piero, 324
Petri, Elio, 534
Phoenix, Joaquin, 350
photogénie, 423–24
The Piano (Campion), 349, 495–500
Piccoli, Michel, 85–86
Pierson, Ryan, 50
Pietz, William, 535–36
Pinkerton, Nick, 112
Pinocchio (Disney), 287–88, 288f
Pippin, Robert, 57–58
Pirandello, Luigi, 471
The Place beyond the Pines (Cianfrance), 436–37
Plantinga, Carl, 405–6, 416n.15, 660
Plato, 22–23, 83–84, 303, 313, 660
Play Time (Tati), 98
Poetics (Aristotle), 303
Poiret, Paul, 527, 531
Poitras, Laura, 580
Pontalis, Jean-Bertrand, 122, 136, 487
Porter, James, 313, 315n.26
Portrait of a Lady on Fire (Sciamma), 349
poststructuralism, 95, 509, 628, 655–57
Pound, Ezra, 609, 611–12
Powell, Michael, 125, 132–34
Power Plants (Steyerl), 333
Pretty Woman (Marshall), 27, 195–96, 198
Price, Brian, 39–40
Primary (Drew), 103–4
Process (Joseph), 563–64
Prokofiev, Sergei, 425
Promising Young Woman (Fennell), 583–84
Proust, Marcel, 280–82
Psycho (Hitchcock), 43–44, 350, 509, 510–11, 615
Psycho (Van Sant), 510–11
psychoanalytic film theory. See also Freud, Sigmund
apparatus theory and, 137–38, 632–33
castration anxiety and, 117–18, 131, 132–34, 490–91
childhood trauma and, 132
close-up film technique and, 120–21
depersonalization, 629–32, 641
the ego and, 630–35
embodiment and, 119–20
fantasy and, 122–24
 heteronormativity and homosexuality in, 127–31, 138–40
the id and, 630–35
male gaze and, 123–31, 132–34, 140
neoliberalism and, 633–34, 640
Oedipus complex and, 117–19, 135–36
“subjective shot” and, 125, 126f
the unconscious and, 118–19, 121, 630
Puce Moment (Anger), 534–35
Pudovkin, Vsevolod, 102, 104–5, 113, 341–42, 382
Punch, Lucy, 191
Punch-Drunk Love (Anderson), 428
The Purple Rose of Cairo (Allen), 27
Pyaasa (Dutt), 393–94

Q
Qingyuan Xingsi, 173
Quazarz story, 558–60
queer theory
apparatus theory and, 131, 632–33
defensive attachments to stable sexual identities and, 118–19
the gaze and, 138–40
montage and, 484–85
rejection of narrative linearity and, 260
A Question of Silence (Gorris), 186
A Quiet Place (Krasinski), 346–47

R
Rabelais, François, 200
“Radio Raheem and the Gentle Giant” (Lee), 447–50, 457, 462–63
Rai, Himansu, 214
Rainer, Yvonne, 338–39
Raman, M. V., 396
Ramsay, Lynne, 349–50
Rancière, Jacques, 33–34, 50, 140, 156, 160
Ranseen, Emily, 596
Ray, Nicholas, 520
“Ready for It?” (Swift), 506
Reagan, Ronald, 246, 257–58
Real Life (Brooks), 520
Rear Window (Hitchcock), 469, 488–89
Reclining Woman (Moore), 73
Red Dead Redemption (video game), 291, 292f
The Red Shoes (Powell and Pressburger), 534
Reed, Carol, 49–50
Reel Time (Nicholson), 539
Refn, Nicolas Winding, 532
Reform School Girls (DeSimone), 190
Reghunathan, Sudha, 394–95
Rehman, Waheeda, 392–95
Reichardt, Kelly, 422, 577, 583
Reinhardt, Max, 214
Reiniger, Lotte, 534
Reisz, Karel, 509
Reith, KJ, 575
Rembrandt von Rijn, 88–89
Remes, Justin, 592
Renoir, Jean, 46, 213
repetition
automatism and comic forms of, 282–84
Burgin’s video works and, 274–75
cuckoo clocks and, 287–88
Deleuze and, 275–76
European New Wave cinema and, 276–77
free direct cinema and, 276–78
Freud and, 275–76, 280–81, 284
Graphics Interchange Format (gif) and, 288–90
habit and rote forms of, 281–82
Kinetoscope reels and, 288–90
Parallel I-IV video installation (Farocki) and, 290–94, 291f, 292f, 294f
reenactment and, 278–81
zoomorphs and, 284–86
Reynolds, Diamond, 453–56, 458, 460–62
Rhodes, John David, 39–40, 549–50
Rhodes, Trevante, 430
rhythm
divination and, 426–27, 439
etymology of, 421–22
film viewers’ bodies and, 422
French Impressionism and, 423–24
Moonlight and, 429–39
multisensory immersion and, 427–29
omnipotence of, 423–27
perception and, 425–26
Soviet montage films and, 424–26
Richmond, Scott, 36
Richter, Hans, 87–88, 534–35
Ricoeur, Paul, 25, 117–18, 157–58, 571
The Rider (Zhao), 577–78, 578f
Riefenstahl, Leni, 548
Rigaut, Jacques, 534–35
Rilke, Rainer von, 483
Riva, Emanuelle, 221–22
Rivette, Jacques, 84–85
Robcis, Camille, 123
Roberta (Seiter), 532
Roberts, Julia, 198
Robey, Tim, 263–64
Robinson, Edward G., 221
Rocca, Daniela, 191
The Rocky Horror Picture Show (Sharman), 594
Rodia, Simon, 554–55
Rodowick, David N., 3, 40, 114n.1, 626–28
Rogers, Alva, 231–32
Rohmer, Éric, 508
Roma (Fellini), 382
Romance (Breillat), 593
Romanticism, 611–12
The Room (Wiseau), 594
Rooney, David, 269
Ropars-Wuilleumier, Marie-Claire, 307, 376, 484–87, 492–93, 500–1, 502n.18, 509
Rosler, Martha, 202
Ross, Kristin, 301–2
Rossellini, Roberto, 84–85, 90
Rosten, Leo, 216–17
Rougement, Denis de, 309
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 137
Roy, Bimal, 386–87
Ruiz, Raúl, 512, 514
Ruoff, Jeffrey, 412–13
Russell, David O., 97–98
Russell, Kylee, 246
Russian Ark (Sokurov), 556–57
Russo, Mary, 199–200
Ruttmann, Walter, 215

S
S 21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine (Panh), 280–82, 281f
Sacic, Rodrigo, 380
Sacs modernes (French fashion film), 535–36
Safe (Haynes), 263–64
Safety Last! (Newmeyer), 288–89
Said, Edward, 483–84, 500–1, 501n.4
Saint, Eva Marie, 4
Sanctus (Hammer), 576–77
Sanders, Ashton, 430
Sanders, George, 85
Sanders, Nat, 430–31
Santner, Eric, 46
Saric, Velma, 582
Sarris, Andrew, 222
Sartre, Jean-Paul, 305
Satterfield, Jean, 222
Saturday Night Fever (Badham), 348
Saussure, Ferdinand de, 655
The Scarlet Empress (Sternberg), 382
Scarlet Street (Lang), 15–16
Scénario du film Passion (Godard), 86–87
Schaeffer, Pierre, 376–78
Scheffler, Samuel, 59, 63–64
Scheider, Roy, 487
Schickel, Richard, 220–21
Schicksalswürfel (Osten), 214
Scholes, Percy, 340
Schonig, Jordan, 38, 50–51
Schopenhauer, Arthur, 172, 175–76, 653–54
Schrader, Paul, 57–59, 71–72, 75, 597, 599
Schulberg, Budd, 217
Schulman, Ariel, 457–58
Schwechater (Kubelka), 28–29
Sciamma, Céline, 10–11, 349, 570–71, 577–79. See also Girlhood (Sciamma)
Scott, A. O., 225
Scott, Tony, 382
screen theory, 654–55
The Searchers (Ford), 514
Searching (Chaganty), 457–58
Sebald, W. G., 471
Second Earth (Chatonsky), 334
Sedgwick, Edward, 198
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 157–58, 636
Seigworth, Gregory J., 36, 476
Seiter, William A., 532
Semiotics of the Kitchen (Rosler), 202
Seoul International Women’s Film Festival (SIWFF), 583–84
Sequeiros, Paula, 596
Serious Games (Farocki), 293–94, 328–29
serpentine dance, 526
Serra, Albert, 601
Serrurier, Iwan, 298–99
The Seventh Seal (Bergman), 349
Sex and The City (television show), 532
Seyrig, Delphine, 202
Shabazz Palaces, 553, 557–58, 559–60, 564
Shadow of a Doubt (Hitchcock), 218
Shahid-Saless, Sohrab, 214
Shambu, Girish, 225
Shanghai (China), 168–69
Sharman, Jim, 594
Sharpe, Christina, 459–60
Shaviro, Steven
aesthetic theory and, 36
on cinema and masochism, 134
ideality of signification and, 120
on Kant’s aesthetic theory, 38
postcontinuity editing and, 138
psychoanalytic film theory and, 117, 637–39
She (Vertov), 493
Sheedy, Ally, 260–61
Sherman, Cindy, 534
The Shining (Kubrick), 427–28
Shiryaev, Denis, 321
Shklovsky, Victor, 213, 622
Shortbus (Mitchell), 633–34
Shub, Esther, 492
Sigel, Newton Thomas, 97–99
Sight Machine (Pagalen), 332
Silverman, Kaja, 34, 93n.35, 132–34, 185–86, 187, 342
Simmel, George, 18–19
Simondon, Gilbert
ontogenesis and, 304–6
ontologies of technical objects and, 298, 305–7, 313–14
on relations as independent variables, 305, 308–9
Simone, Nina, 245
Sims, David, 265
Since (Warhol), 278
Singin’ in the Rain (Donen and Kelly), 474–75
Singleton, John, 554
Siodmak, Robert, 215, 218
Sirk, Douglas, 217, 521
Sjöberg, Patrik, 413–14
Sleepless in Seattle (Ephron), 195–96
Slim K, 431–32
Small Axe (McQueen), 7
The Smiling Madame Beudet (Dulac), 102
Smith, Greg M., 572–73, 579
Smith, Jada Pinkett, 200
Smith, Murray, 661
Smith, Richard, 520–21
Smollett, Jurnee, 240–41
Sniadecki, J.P., 556–57
Snow, Michael, 483, 592
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (Disney), 190
Sobchack, Vivian, 174, 258, 343–44, 390–91, 658–59
The Social Network (Fincher), 457–58
Soderbergh, Steven, 98
The Soft Skin (Truffaut), 515, 517–18
Sokurov, Alexander, 556–57
Solomon, Robert C., 456–57
Some Like It Hot (Wilder), 195–96, 198
Sontag, Susan, 72–74, 122–23, 224–25, 512–13, 601
The Sound Barrier (Lean), 347
Spencer, Octavia, 201
Spielberg, Steven, 343
Spiral Staircase (Siodmak), 218
Stagecoach (Ford), 514
Stakhanovite Movement, 491
Stanwyck, Barbara, 198, 220
Stapel, Wilhelm, 324
Star Wars (Lucas), 340
Stcherbatsky, Fyodor, 172–73
Steinberg, Marc, 169
Sterling, Alton, 460–61
Stern, Daniel, 511
Stern, Lesley, 387, 395–96, 473
Sternberg, Josef von, 191, 216, 382
Stevens, Kyle, 205, 388–89
Stevens, Wallace, 471
Stewart, Jacqueline, 188–89, 241
Stewart, Jimmy, 478–79, 488–89
Stewart, Kathleen, 636
Stewart, Michael, 447–48
Steyerl, Hito, 90–91, 333
Stiegler, Bernard, 22–24
St. John the Baptist (Da Vinci), 482–83
Stoever, Jennifer Lynn, 403, 407–8
Stoney, E. Milton, 537–39
Strassberg, Morris, 487
Strauven, Wanda, 539
Streep, Meryl, 388–89
The Strike (Eisenstein), 614–15
structuralism, 508, 628, 637, 656–57
Sturtevant, Victoria, 204–5
Sunless (Marker), 478–79
Sunrise (Murnau), 379
Sunset Boulevard (Wilder), 264
Sutherland, Donald, 371, 486–87
Swanson, Gloria, 264
Swift, Taylor, 506
Sylla, Assa, 579

T
Tan, Ed, 572–73
Tanabe Hajime, 174
Tanxu, 170
Taoism, 170, 173
Tarkovsky, Andrei, 349, 382, 432, 556–57
Tarr, Béla, 592, 597–98, 600
Tathāgatagarba, 166, 170–71, 175–76, 179n.1
Tati, Jacques, 98
Taylor, Tate, 201
Taylorism, 18–19, 21, 24, 282–83
The Tenth Victim (Petri), 534
Theweleit, Klaus, 123
They Live (Carpenter), 156
The Third Man (Reed), 49–50
Third Symphony (Chion), 382
This Is Cristina (Maza), 506
This Is the Future (Steyerl), 333
Thompson, Kristin, 223, 376
Thompson, Tessa, 246
Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (McDonagh), 346–47
Three Kings (Russell), 97–99
The Three Wishes (Reiniger), 534
Threlfall, David, 191
time’s passing
chronophotography and, 17
the cinématographe, 17–18
clock-time and, 16, 18–20, 23–27, 29–30
“free time” and, 22
“killing time” and, 20–24, 30
the kinescope and, 16–17
mechanical nature of filmic time and, 28–29
modern industrial era and measuring of, 18–19, 21, 24
narrative time and, 24–27
nickelodeons and, 23–24
the phonograph and, 16–17
romantic comedy and, 27–28
Todd AO film format, 99
Tompkins, Kyla Wazana, 201
Toscano, Mark, 575
Touch of Evil (Welles), 47, 161, 349, 556–57
Tough Stockings (British fashion fillm), 535–36
Touré, Karidja, 571–72
Tracked by Bloodhounds, or a Lynching at Cripple Creek (Buckwalter), 450–51
Training Humans (Pagalen), 332
Trainwreck (Apatow), 195–96
transsensoriality, 377, 382, 428
Travers, Peter, 270
Travolta, John, 348
The Trial (Kafka), 45–46
The Trial (Welles), 45–51
Triumph of the Will (Riefenstahl), 548–49
Truffaut, François, 515, 517–18
Truitt, E. R., 20–21
Trump, Donald, 155–56, 158
Tscherkassky, Peter, 521
Tsivian, Yuri, 510
Tsukerman, Slava, 533
Tucker, Forrest, 204
Tuhus-Dubrow, Rebecca, 345–46
The Turin Horse (Tarr), 592, 597–98
Twentieth Century Women (Mills), 346
Twin Peaks: The Return (Lynch), 7, 506–7
Tyler, Parker, 220–22

U
Ulmer, Edgar G., 215, 223–24
The Umbrella Coup (Oury), 534
Underground Museum, 560–64
“Un Regard Oblique” (Doisneau), 197–98
Until the Quiet Comes (Joseph), 553, 555–57, 556f, 564
Utu (Murphy), 504n.53

V
Vajrayāna Buddhism, 170
Van Es, Karen, 454–55
Van Sant, Gus, 510–11
Varda, Agnès, 88–90, 588n.32
Veloso, Caetano, 436
Vent d’est (Godard), 313
Vereen, Ben, 560–61
Vernon, Jeannine, 380
Vertigo (Hitchcock), 274, 472, 475, 478–80, 488
Vertov, Dziga. See also specific works
Eisenstein and, 614–16
on film and working-class solidarity, 106
images of women in films of, 490–95
kino-eye concept of, 324–25, 613–15
on technological progress, 106
Verwoert, Jan, 293–94
Vigo, Jean, 347
Virilio, Paul, 330–31
virtual reality technology, 646, 661–64
Vishnevetsky, Ignatiy, 482–83
Vogel, Amos, 1
Vorachek, Laura, 495
Vuillermoz, Emile, 423
Vyjayanthimala
classical dance training of, 388–91, 393–96
on demands of combining a career in dance and film, 396–98
Kathputli’s finale and, 391–92, 395
as Kathputli’s leading actress, 386–87
Ladki and, 398
multiple personas portrayed in the dance of, 396–98, 397f

W
Wachowski, Lana, 584
Wadell, Ernest, 553, 558
Wahl, Jean
Anglo-American empiricism introduced to French philosophers by, 297, 300–1, 311, 313–14
on Being as process, 305
escape from Nazi-occupied Europe by, 301
Kant and, 297–98
ontologies of technical objects and, 301
Waiting for Guffman (Guest), 413–14
Wang Guowei, 172, 175–76
War at a Distance (Farocki), 328–29
Warhol, Andy, 278
Warner Corset Advertisement (Gibney), 535–36
Warshow, Robert, 151, 219–20
Watter, Seth Barry, 520–21
Watts, 1963 (Marshall), 554–55, 555f
Watts neighborhood (Los Angeles), 554–58, 565
Wayne, John, 514
Weber, Max, 364
The Wedding Banquet (Ang Lee), 198
Weisz, Rachel, 267, 270
Welles, Orson. See also specific works
aesthetics of interested judgments and, 34–35, 41–42, 43, 45
animals and the films of, 46
distortions introduced by editing patterns of, 49
The Holocaust and, 46
as “unfaithful adapter,” 45
Wenders, Wim, 216
Wertmüller, Lina, 583
West, Mae, 194–95
West Point (Sedgwick), 198
Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? (Aldrich), 190–91
What Makes Sammy Run? (Schulberg), 217
When Harry Met Sally (Reiner), 195–96
White, Mimi, 452
White, Rob, 263–64
Whitehead, Alfred North, 297–98, 300–1, 312–14
White spectatorship
African American women and, 461–62
anti-Black violence and, 448–50, 453–54, 457, 460, 462–63
apparatus theory and, 451–52
empathy and, 455–56
Facebook and, 449, 451–52, 455
Hurricane Katrina (2005) and, 452–53
liveness and, 452–54
male gaze compared to, 448–49, 451–52
normativity and, 450–51
television and, 452–53
Western visual culture and, 450–51
Whitman, Walt, 474–75
Who Are You, Polly Maggoo? (Klein), 536–37
Why We Fight (Capra), 548
Wilcox, Herbert, 203–4
Wilder, Billy, 27–28, 194–96, 214–15, 218, 221
Wilderson, Frank, 251n.17
Williams, Bernard, 66–67, 73
Williams, Linda, 2, 201
Williamson, Timothy, 5–6
Wilson, Emma, 570–71
Wilson, Frederick, 537–39
The Wind Will Carry Us (Kiarstami), 68–74, 69f, 70f, 71f, 72f
Winterbottom, Michael, 593
The Wire (Simon), 553
Wiseman, Frederick, 412–13
Witt, Michael, 307–9
The Wizard of Oz (Fleming), 185, 186f, 190
Wojcik, Pamela Robertson, 387–88
Wollen, Peter, 1, 151
Wollheim, Richard, 99
The Women (Cukor), 532
Wong Kar-Wai, 422, 430, 436
Wood, Ed, 594
Woodside, D. B., 246
Woolf, Virginia, 431–32
Woolrich, Cornell, 468–69, 473, 475
Worringer, Wilhelm, 610–12, 618–19
Wright, Edgar, 191, 347

Y
Yacavone, Daniel, 429, 432–33
Yanez, Jeronimo, 453–54, 455–56, 458
Yang Renhui (Yang Renguang), 170, 172
Yogācāra, 166, 170–72, 175–76
Yonggang Wu, 205
Young, Damon, 8, 632–34, 640
Young Mr. Lincoln (Ford), 161, 376
A Young Woman Composer (Vertov), 493–94
YouTube, 160
You Were Never Really Here (Ramsay), 350, 352

Z
Zahlten, Alex, 169
Zama (Martel), 421
Zarrilli, Phillip, 392–93
Zen Buddhism, 166, 170
Zerilli, Linda, 39
Zhang Zhen, 167
Zhao, Chloé, 577–78, 583–84
Zhong Dafeng, 167–68
Zielinski, Siegfried, 360–63, 370
Zimmer, Hans, 382–83
Zinnemann, Fred, 99
Zodiac (Fincher), 113
Zong Baihua, 173
Zong Bing, 173
Zupančič, Alenka, 366–67