This paper explores the role of existential feelings in films, and the impact of theconnections between cinema and existential feelings for emotional life in general. After explaining the notion of existential feelings and illustrating them in films with Black Swan and The Help , the paper concludes that movies offer provide insights about our own existential feelings because films promote emotional awareness by the way they function as emotional laboratories. This will lead to an examination the presence and role of (...) surprise for emotional a wareness in general, and more specifically by seeing how it works within suspense movies with the illustration of Rebecca . The analysis will show how the paradox of suspense is tied to the way we can be surprised by our own feelings, including our own existential feelings. The paper concludes that the cinema is capable of providing this privileged place for exploration because it maintains our ability to feel surprise and keep open to surprise. (shrink)

The widely accepted reading of Eija-Liisa Ahtila’s work is that her use of multiplescreens and fragmented, multilayered, narratives of unstable subject positions and multiple assemblages of enunciation produces an embodied experience of the palpitations of time as it flows backwards and forward in heterogenic durations. It is claimed that her use of the installation form to portray this resolves the longstanding and still pressing debates about the seeming irreconcilability between the demands of the critical viewer and the seductions of the (...) immersive environment. This paper reviews the way this question is framed by Marc Augé, Peter Osborne, Jane Philbrick, Catherine Elwes and Jessica Morgan, and argues that her film installations recompose the problem in the creation of works that “think” through dynamic and non-decomposable interplays between affective, perceptual and cognitive strategies.This movement away from the stagnant debate between formalism andillusionism is pushed still further by the deployment of the Deleuzian concept of the Event. For Deleuze, the Event is both an historical instance and an ongoinginstantiation of the features of European consciousness. Where is Where? is an exemplary rendition of the Event structure of life and the potential of the cinematic installation form to make the Event palpable. In this way, the Event is intensified and the installation is made into an Event itself.This paper uses the concepts rarely used in film theory, aion, chronos and theevent, as they were developed by Deleuze in one of his most philosophical books, The Logic of Sense, and takes other concepts from his wider conceptual armory, to identify a singularly productive encounter between philosophy, film and the installation form. (shrink)

This essay examines the motif of the upside-down image in cinema and focuses on the perceptual and cognitive activity of the spectator. In the first part, I refer to Maurice Merleau-Ponty discussion of psychological experiments on retinal inversion and describe the dynamic disembodiment/re-embodiment as a way of providing the spectator both the thrill of unbalance and the perceptual re-orientation functional to the cognitive comprehension of the film. In the second part, I analyse the formal and stylistic modes of representation of (...) the upside-down image of the character in selected film scenes. In particular, I argue that the rotation al camera movement is a filmic “gestures” that simulates the human bodily movement. (shrink)

Recent discoveries in neuroscience, among which that of mirror neurons ,have strongly influenced the debate on spatial cognition, action, emotion andempathy, all aspects that in recent years have been deeply reconsidered within film studies. This article focuses on the role embodied simulation theory—triggered by the discovery of MNs—plays in film experience. ES has beenproposed to constitute a basic functional mechanism of humans’ brain.Because of a shared bodily representational format, we map the actions of others onto our own motor representations, as (...) well as others’ emotions and sensations onto our own viscero-motor and sensory-motor representations. We wonder how relevant this mechanism is in our film experience reconsidering both classical and recent theories that to some extent have foreshadowed ES, and testing our hypotheses through the stylistic analysis of two sequences from Hitchcock’s Notorious and Antonioni’s Il grido. (shrink)

This paper addresses the issue of embodiment by looking at Rubefilms in which the maladjusted to new media, confusing reality and illusion, directly touch the screen to catch the object of desire. The shift from perception to action here signals that from transcendent to embodied spectatorship, revealing the screen as a material “interface ” that both provokes and frustrates the real contact. Defining this “ambivalent tactility” as a key aspect of interfaciality, the paper explores it in the frame of various (...) spectatorship theories broadly from Lacanian semiotic psychoanalysis to Merleau-Pontian phenomenology of embodiment, while revisiting and reinterpreting such concepts as the mirror stage, narcissism, and skin ego in relation to the screen function. This investigation suggests not only that the screen is a touchable interface for tactile experience, but also that the subject is “in touch with” surroundings before it “touches” something — i.e., one’s body is an inherently embodied interface generated through the primary écart from the mother’s body. Then, one can map three forms of interface from external to internal— screen, mirror, skin — and see that the artificial technological interface turns out to be derived from the ambivalently tactile skin as the embodied interface. (shrink)

Gilles Deleuze’s distinction between the “cinema of action” and “the cinema of the body” has been quite influential in contemporary studies of film performance. Deleuze analyzes the ways in which certain directors reduce their narratives to the bodies of the actors so as to disturb narrative coherence. The camera’s interaction with the body goes beyond narrative motivation and according to Deleuze, the primary concern of this type of cinema is not dramaturgical consistency, but the production of a performative excess bymeans (...) of the development of bodily attitudes and gestures which are not subordinated to narrative requirements. Using two films as case studies—Dogville and Dogtooth —, the art icle discusses the politics of this shift from representation to performance. I draw attention to the ways Lars von Trier and Yorgos Lanthimos place emphasis on the materiality of film performance and valorize the performative over the representational aspect of the medium, so as to answer a set of questions not posed so far: i) what are the political implications of this aesthetic? ii) Can this stress on performativity be understood under the rubric of minor cinemas? iii) In what ways and why does corporea l cinema defy dramatic realism? In accounting for these questions, the article investigates the filmmakers’ dialogue with the modernist debates of the past, so as to elucidate why form is the key to our understanding of the politics of corporeal cinema. (shrink)

In 2009, Marco Bellocchio made the film Vincere, which tells the tormented relationship between Benito Mussolini and Ida Dalser. The film not only retraces Mussolini’s personal life, but also his ascent to power. In the narration of this political aspect, Bellocchio, thanks to his collaboration with the actor Filippo Timi, reinterprets and sheds new light on one of the most interesting aspects of the biography of il Duce: the importance of the mediatic use of his body as a political statement. (...) By way of some important stylistic choices, the director shows that these media images are nothing but illusions hiding the true, dark and perverse side of Mussolini’s character. (shrink)

This article considers questions of embodied visuality, sexuality, and spectatorship in the pre-Production Code filmmaking of 1920s/30s Hollywood. With Laura Mulvey’s theorization of possessive spectatorship in new media and Jennifer M. Barker’s embodied approach to early cine-eroticism providing a conceptual framework, “Seduction Incarnate” suggests that the very elements of momentum and stillness, elusiveness and control examined by these scholars are incorporated into the sensual subjectivities of pre-Code films; and through techniques like close-ups, elliptical montages, and suggestive fade-outs, these filmic bodies (...) make material the dramas of revelation and concealment that drive the narratives themselves. In close readings of movies like The Divorcée, The Cheat , Red-Headed Woman , Three on a Match, and Baby Face — as well as a consideration of their remediation in home-viewing collections and on the internet — the article proposes that pre-Code productions invite the intimate visuality enabled by contemporary viewing practices, even as they assert the autonomy of their cine-subjectivities. No longer forbidden but still provocative, these films continue to engage their viewers in a flirtatious visual pleasure: promising possession while eluding its grasp. (shrink)

The screening of films made on mobile phones to spectators, either on a mobile phone or projected before an audience, significantly affects the materialinstrumentality of the phone film, with profound consequences for its reception and the ontological truth that results from such kinds of audience engagement.In the transformative process between the capture of real events and thereception of representational moving images by the spectator, the phone filmtransitions from a particularised kind of audio-visual artefact recording afilmmaker’s personal experience, to become the (...) material component of a potentially innovative discourse that foregrounds the body as central to an understanding of how we experience images on the screen of a mobile phone.Drawing on notions of a physical, quasi-biological interaction betweenfilmmaker and spectator that implies a particular kind of cellular connectivity, thisarticle reaches back through a Deleuzeian-Guattarian concept of the rhizome to the philosophy of Bergson, and back to the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty and Sobchack that underpin it. Reception of the phone film is thus located withinphenomenological experience, revealing the act of seeing screened representations of the body as contingent on objective thought about sensation and interconnected movement within the world. (shrink)