In this discussion on cinema and on the experience of cinema, I would like to discuss more specifically the notions of consciousness, mimesis, desire and affect, themes that are present in all three of the essays.
First of all, Kracauer talks about the stupefying effect of cinema, just like an addiction to drugs, the idea of being “released from the grip of consciousness” (159). This hypnotic effect he discusses is quite interesting insofar as the implication of senses in cinema might be linked to the chemical fabrication of film and to the indexical characteristic of the picture. It seems the same idea that tries to convey the director of photography for Nam Naadu who explains that he feels like he is “painting with light”. Rutherford also talks about the “energy” of the image and I think this is also related to the chemical mystery of the moving camera oscura. When Kracauer says that the reaction of the spectator is one of a person who is dreaming, drifting out of consciousness, “in a state between waking and sleeping” (162), I agree with that to some extent. In fact, if we define dream as the realm of possibility where creation and action are intertwined, cinema also illustrates this, as the camera becomes the moving eye of the dreamer. Just like a dream, cinema acts as an escape from a reality bound by space and time, because cinematic techniques allow us to distort time (ellipses, flashbacks) and space (special effects).
Towards the end of his piece, Kracauer explains the two moments during the cinematic experience: the unconscious affect related to senses and the drifting back into consciousness. What happens between these two moments? The question of that journey, the drifting back and forth through consciousness and unconsciousness is essential to the cinematic experience. This particular aspect relates in a way to the idea of mimesis: when my senses fully react to the motion picture (the creation of affect, as defined on page 63 in Anand Pandian’s article), I am hypnotized and drawn into the film. However, there is something in the analysis of Rutherford that was rather hard to grasp. She makes the argument that Nowhere to Hide (and the Korean new wave in general) is a cinema of affect (rather than “emotion”, following the distinction we made in class on Thursday) and thus of mimesis. But I was under the impression that this affect was particularly possible when the mise en scène is non-diegetic, when everything is within the frame. The excerpt of Nowhere to Hide we saw is on the contrary diegetic in my opinion and therefore, as we are “shown” all the fabrication of the movie (unrealistic scenes, fast montage, special effects, artificial lights…), we are brought out of the frame of the motion picture. I might understand it for other movies, but the presence of affect for the spectator did not strike me for Nowhere to Hide. Maybe it is simply related to the fact that this affect is triggered by cultural codes as well, as it is described in Anand Pandian’s article.
The last thing I would like to discuss is desire in cinema, and the idea of longing described in Pandian’s ethnographic field work made me think about this sentence of the French philosopher Novalis: “Philosophy is the nostalgia for a place we have never known”. In a way, I feel that the desire related to the experience of cinema is somewhat the “nostalgia for a place we have never known”
- Ayan Meer
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The lead post refers to the experience of cinema as a nostalgia for a place we have never known. I believe that only occurs for a subset of people. Let us take the movie, Avatar for example. Not many of us have fallen in love with a creature from outer space( at least I hope not). We have never been there, but we might have experienced love or at least desire to have that experience. For those who have experienced love, the movie represents a nostalgia for something we have known, to go back to the moment when we knew that man or woman was ours. For those who have not experienced love, the movie becomes a nostalgia for something never known. As discussed in class we proceed to place our expectations of what love should feel like and what heroism feels like.
Considering the notion by Kraucer about drifting between this unconscious and the conscious, the movie provides a safe medium to experience our deep-seated emotions. Continuing with the Avatar example, as we watch the protagonist have to choose between his country’s needs to tear down the new land, and his love for the woman, we drift into the unconscious by placing ourselves in his shoes. What does it feel like to have to choose between two things you love so much? What would I do in this situation? Yet, in those in-between moments, our conscious reminds us that it is just a movie. Our family members are not at war. We might laugh, cry or experience the craziness of a horror movie, but as in Tom and Jerry, no matter the insult, we come out with our bodies intact. We return to our lives two hours later and continue as nothing ever happened. This is the beauty of cinema.
-Emmanuel Ohuabunwa
All of the readings seemed to provide a unique perspective about media. In the Kracauer reading, one main discussion point was the influence of sound in a movie. "For the most part they concur in suggesting that the arrival of
sound has not noticeably altered the picture: that actually the present-day moviegoer undergoes much the same experiences as the moviegoer in the days of the silent." This is a fascinating point, however I disagree. I believe that though even if words themselves do not add too much to the film (and even this I am skeptical about), the music probably adds a great deal to a film. Think about the movie Jaws, and how it would be different without the re-appearing theme song. This song, through classical conditioning made it so whenever the audience would hear it, they would start getting nervous, even if nothing was actually happening. Another concept, lowered consciousness, I found to be partially true. I wouldn't say I completely forget myself as I watch a film, as Wallon would have said, because I often reflect on how a movie relates to my own life, but I do become less aware of myself as an individual and more immersed with an alternate universe created by the film. In the Rutherford reading,the author talks about the necessity to engage the viewers' senses. This is prevalent in films such as "Nowhere to Hide" where synesthesia becomes one of the strongest aspects of the movie. The audience gets a real sense of the story setting through sounds, still shots of water droplets or other textured surfaces, and bright/bold colors. In the Pandian reading, I found the idea of media supporting someone's lifestyle very interesting, and thought about all the times I catch myself humming a song that reflects my mood or the activities I am currently engaging in.
I would like to elaborate on Iyan's point that "cinema is somewhat the 'nostalgia for a place we have never known.'" I think is particularly true as evidenced by our watching of "Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend" in lecture last week. I believe it was Winnie who expressed that the cinematic clip, although decidedly unrelatable to our everyday experiences, was somewhat nostalgic. However, one definition I found for nostalgia is "a wistful desire to return in thought or in fact to a former time in one's life." This suggests that to feel nostalgia requires one to have experienced said feeling at a previous time. The class, on the other hand, cannot know what life in 1949 was like, and yet the video still had a sense of nostalgia. This dichotomy between the actual definition of nostalgia and this idea of feeling nostalgia for a time or place one has never actually known is something that I find particularly fascinating about our study of cinema.
Iyan and Emmanuel have associated this nostalgia more with desire for a certain time, place, or feeling, rather than a longing to go back to something we have known before. I tend to agree with them, but does that explain for what happened when the class watched the Marilyn Monroe clip? Did we find ourselves longing to experience something like what we saw? I'd argue that we did not, or at least I did not, at least at face value. I did not watch the video and feel the desire to go to 1949, where I have obviously never been before, where apparently women only wanted diamonds and men only wanted women like Marilyn Monroe. I wouldn't fit into a place like this, and I'd be willing to bet that most if not all of the class wouldn't either.
Rather, I looked at the video as an artifact of a previous time. I'd define the "nostalgia" we spoke of in class as more of an appreciation for the past rather than a desire to return to it. I watched the video, marveled at the difference in music and acting and thematic content as compared to cinema in my lifetime, and moved on from it. In this way, I'd argue that cinema acts more as a documentation of various times, even if it is not necessarily documentary film. Cinema acts as a historical artifact to provide us an escape from our own times, only to return us back a couple hours later, perhaps more knowledgeable, but not more experienced. We cannot literally experience what we see in film; we can only learn from it. This is why I find the discussion of "nostalgia" to be so troubling.
Jessica DeBakey
The lead post discusses the “hypnotic” effect of cinema as discussed in Kracauer’s article. I was particularly interested in the distinction Kracauer makes between film and theater in this regard. I was unsatisfied with the explanation given in the Kracauer article, so I thought a bit about why it might be that there is such a distinction. Kracauer’s only explanation given for this is that when we go to the cinema we are extracted from our own lives and put in the world displayed on the screen. I see no reason, however, that I would not be as invested in the characters, circumstances, and worlds depicted in the theater. Good theater should entice the viewer so that she is as invested in what is happening on stage as the viewer of a movie is to what is happening on the screen. So, I do not think that Kracauer paints a cohesive picture as to why the theatergoer is not as ‘lulled’ or ‘hypnotized’ as the moviegoer. I do think reasons for this distinction exist though. The reason that I think is most evident, is in the way the theater allows the viewer to make decisions as to what she will attend to at any given moment. The movie screen is almost like a replacement set of eyes for the viewer. The director carefully selects what shot angles will be used when, and controls the way the viewer sees what is taking place. In the theater, we are left to our own devices when it comes to where our attention ought be focused and when. There are certainly ways in which the theatergoer’s attention is controlled, but, unlike the moviegoer, the theatergoer is constantly reminded that she is indeed in her own body, and making her own decisions. The moviegoer is put into a position where she is not making any of the decisions on her own. She does not change the direction of her gaze once during the film, and this is where cinema ultimately differs from theater when it comes to creating the hypnotic state that Kracauer explains.
The piece by Siegfried Kragauer serves as a link between the descriptions of film by Anne Rutherford in “Nowhere to Hide” and Professor Pandian in “Landscapes of Expression.” In “The Redemption of Physical Reality,” Kragauer discusses how changing lighting, filming angles, music, editing, or reproducibility may influence the effectiveness of a film. In “Nowhere to Hide,” Rutherford describes how director Lee Myung-se “works with the experience of viewers moment by moment—in the timbre of a sound, the shape of a shadow, the hue of a light, or the rhythm of a movement…” (Rutherford, 163). Clearly, Myung-se is manipulating all possible components of his film in order to heighten its effectiveness and impact upon the viewer. A similar emphasis of film’s effectiveness on the viewer is discussed in Pandian’s article, and a particularly interesting quote reads, “As marked spaces of fantasy, imagination, and desire, song sequences have especially come to express the more dispersed horizons of emergent middle-class aspirations,” (Pandian, 58).
From the selected quotes, one may gather that the directors and producers of the films discussed in both Rutherford’s and Pandian’s sources utilize various tools of cinematography to enhance the mimetic experience of the viewer. However, there are also stark contrasts between the film productions discussed in the two articles. The fundamental difference between the two types of film related to the fact that Lee Myung-se created Nowhere to Hide in order to demonstrate the capabilities and range of a film production, while the Tamil movies described in “Landscapes of Expression” seem to be created with a focus on the level of audience appeal and appreciation in mind. This being said, which approach has the greater ability to influence the “emotion” and “affect” experienced by the viewer? More broadly, is there a “right” way to go about producing a film intended for mass consumption?
I would agree with the Kracauer article that Cinema does have the ability to captivate audiences and send them into a state of suspended reality. It is as Meer has noted, seing a movie is a "release from the grip of consciousness". The primary goal for movie audiences to come and enjoy film is an escapism from the rigors and worries of daily life. Cinema allows the viewer to live vicaiously through the characters in the film without assuming the percieved risks in the film.
Film offers a detached but absorbing journey that transports us away from the overwhelming or boring parts of life into worlds strange to us. We do not percieve the movie as miply flashes of light splashed onto a movie screen, but rather a portal into the world of the film. This relationship to film has been heightened with the introduction and promotion of 3-d technology, blurring the line between film and reality even more.
As a Film and Media student, the enjoyment of film has become more difficult now that I have been taught to notice the cinematic details of films. When I was a child, the editing or cinematography of a film mattered little, but now my trained eye has kind of ruined the drug-like effect that is described by Kracauer.
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