SEVEN

CINEAESTHETIC WORLD-FEELING AND IMMERSION

THE EXPERIENCE OF NARRATIVE FILMS OF MANY KINDS, TOGETHER with our discussion of basic types of film expression and immersion on the “local” scale of a cinematic work, opens the door for recognition of a more global aesthetic affect and immersion characteristic of film worlds. This is a property of the total durational experience of a film that, along with viewer attention, is also attributable to the artistic acts and intentions of filmmakers. As such, this global affective dimension is closely linked to artistic style and authorship as these pertain to the entirety of a cinematic work and its experience.

In seeking to identify and explain this phenomenon of an experiential constellation of film-work elements, we will find it necessary to shift from a predominantly analytic and cognitive approach, broadly speaking, to one that is more phenomenological and, in some senses, at least, “existential.” Here we may take our lead from Mikel Dufrenne’s detailed descriptions of the “expressed world” of the artwork as an aesthetic object of attention. A number of Dufrenne’s central distinctions, categories, and conclusions help us to chart the relation between global film-world expression and viewer immersion, as well as to build further, necessary bridges between the sensory, symbolic (cognitive-semantic), and affective dimensions of cinematic works and worlds. For reasons that will become clear, an adequate treatment of this topic also involves some consideration of cinematic temporality and rhythm in its various forms and heterodox presence.

CINEMA AND THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF AESTHETIC EXPRESSION

The Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience (La phénoménologie de l’expérience esthétique) was first published in France in 1953.1 The prominent philosopher and aesthetician Monroe C. Beardsley called this voluminous study “one of the two most outstanding works in phenomenological aesthetics” (alongside Roman Ingarden’s The Cognition of the Literary Work of Art).² Despite the fact that more than a half-century has now intervened, there has been nothing in this field since to challenge its status as such. Eugene Kaelin points out that Dufrenne’s study offers an alternative, in some respects Kantian-inspired, middle path between Merleau-Ponty’s primarily perception-centered account of artworks and their experience, on the one hand, and Sartre’s locating of the aesthetic in processes of cognitive imagination, on the other.³ As immediately given in our sense experience and requiring acts of imaginative engagement—as well as always entailing a constant negotiation between perception and imagination—the experience of art, for Dufrenne, is defined primarily by a work’s expressive and affective dimension. More specifically, it consists of the feelings generated by the nonmaterial worlds of aesthetic objects, which artworks render incarnate and shareable, presenting them to and for our conscious awareness.

Dufrenne draws a primary distinction between the work of art and the “aesthetic object.” Whereas the artwork is a physical entity, an “empirical reality in the cultural world,” the aesthetic object is the work as and when it is concretely experienced, wherein its full “sensuous” potential is actualized.⁴ Through a consciousness-enabled removal from its quotidian perceptual environment, and from physical and measurable time and space, the aesthetic object emerges (from the artwork) as something in the world “but not of the world.”⁵ The figurative stage is thus set for the viewer’s, reader’s, or listener’s immersive entrance into this profoundly “intentional reality” (in the phenomenological sense of an appearance existing within and for consciousness), and the different sorts of perceptual and affective experience that the aesthetic object constitutes and promises. With respect to cinematic experience, this initial perceptual immersion Dufrenne describes may no doubt be aided by the screen size, environmental conditions, and rituals of a movie theater—now and at the time of his writing the ideal viewing situation in most instances. Yet, and as other past and present forms of film exhibition and viewing experience are sufficient to demonstrate—and as also applying to the subsequent, deeper aesthetic immersion to be described—large-screen, theatrical viewing is certainly not necessary for it.

In similarly attempting to reorient the concept of a certain, sui generis “aesthetic attitude,” which is sometimes misleadingly portrayed as largely a matter of a detached, objective, and “disinterested” attention, Alan Goldman has written more recently that “when we are . . . fully engaged in appreciating a work, we often have the illusion of entering into another world. We lose ourselves in the aesthetic experience, in the world of the work. This is the truth behind the claim that the aesthetic attitude removes or detaches us from the world of our practical affairs. It is not that we are detached from the aesthetic object in appreciating it: very much the reverse is the case.”6 The common view that Goldman here rejects, with reference to the singular, “other” world of a work, is one that is also antithetical to Dufrenne’s understanding of an aesthetic apprehension that is (in senses to be explained) “internal” to the aesthetic object and its world, as well as what I wish to argue in relation to the artistic worlds of cinema.

Dufrenne’s first distinction between the artwork and aesthetic object, and his emphasis on the viewer’s, reader’s, or listener’s initial and largely perceptual immersion into the nonphysical reality of the latter, is complemented by a crucial second one. Aesthetic objects and their associated worlds compel a more affective and complete immersive engagement because they are fundamentally dualistic. As we saw in chapter 1, in relation to the represented or denoted level of the cognitive contents of a film, this further distinction is one between the “represented” and “expressed” worlds of aesthetic objects. In some ways parallel to our present dichotomy between the world-in and world-of a film, Dufrenne stresses that along with its symbolic representations of recognizable objects, persons, actions, and so forth, in a representational work there is a constructed space and time within which all of these are situated and may be related coherently. This framework is at once novel and sufficiently familiar enough to both function as a setting or context for the narrated story or drama and organize its basic perceptual contents (e.g., in any of the “ways of worldmaking” we have considered).

From an aesthetic, as well as a psychological and symbolic (or semiotic) perspective, a work’s total representation is a kind of adjunct or extension of ordinary experience and the “real world.” When, however, it is merged with the unique, created, and expressed dimension of the aesthetic object, in and through the work’s experience as felt, a more complete and rounded, experiential reality is formed. Closely related with the artistic “style” that gives “body” to representation and expression in the aesthetic object, this reality is conceived as its total experienced “world.”7 The beholder (or reader) becomes immersed in this created and presented world not only through identification (and other forms of psychological engagement) with fictional realities, and the rest of what the work contains, but through the actual temporal and affective conditions and structures that govern an artwork’s experience and may be seen as characteristic of aesthetic apprehension as such (allowing for certain variations among art forms and media).

Within his general account of aesthetic experience Dufrenne specifically extends the distinction between the represented and expressed dimensions, with all that it entails, to cinema. As was briefly discussed in chapter 1, he maintains that although “the vocation of the cinema that corresponds to its technical possibilities” is to “use all the resources of the image” to create the “illusion” that is its represented world, this is still, as in any art form, only a means to an expressive end.⁸ In addition to anticipating Mitry’s and Pasolini’s core arguments (as well as some of Deleuze’s) concerning artistic expression in cinema, Dufrenne’s position is also in keeping with the aforementioned “functionalist” distinction between (1) what may be powerfully achieved in and by the film medium (or any moving-image media) in accordance with its special properties and capacities (e.g., cinematographic or digitized image ones)—for instance, the perceptual illusion of a three-dimensional space, more lifelike representations, a detailed fictional world—and (2) that which best defines its specifically aesthetic and formal uses, as multiple and variable as these may be. It is also along these lines that Dufrenne maintains that cinema as art “can enlarge our vision without having to deceive us.”⁹

By way of only slight digression, and to bring this perspective up to date: just as in video-game creation, with which it is becoming increasing similar, in contemporary mainstream filmmaking computer-aided processes can now conjure up the images not only of whole cities, landscapes, and armies but of entire historical worlds, dream worlds, alien worlds, and so forth, far more easily than ever before. They may achieve the sort of concentrated representational scope, detail, and multiplicity that prior to cinema was perhaps only to be found in some remarkable paintings and frescoes, such as Albrecht Altdorfer’s The Battle of Alexander at Issus (1529) and Tiepolo’s Allegory of the Planets and Continents (1753), and, after cinema’s advent, only in the grandest of epics (e.g., Cabiria, Intolerance, The Ten Commandments). The fact that in highly popular films like The Lord of the Rings trilogy and Avatar, for instance, the screen is often full of more represented entities and events (given an added illusionism, in some cases, courtesy of the 3-D format) than can be consciously apprehended and appreciated makes the above distinction, and potential disjunction, between representations and sensory spectacle, on one hand, and expressive and aesthetic depth, on the other, only more salient. By the same token, a lack of any necessary correspondence between the extent and detail of a film’s “represented world” and its aesthetic expressiveness (and meaning related to it) only makes the acknowledged artistic achievements of filmmakers who have worked in an “epic” register and format (i.e., widescreen) all that more impressive and valuable. The same holds true for any more creative and artistically significant use of CGI, 3-D technology, and HD picture resolution, since, and as now often commented upon, basic features of these image technologies may work against or overwhelm certain more subtle formal and aesthetic meanings and affects. In general terms it must be remembered that although they of course significantly overlap, cinema’s technical developments, including the seemingly inevitable progress toward ever more fluid, convincing, and lifelike (in some ways, at least) simulations of direct visual and aural perceptions, is clearly distinct from any aesthetic evolution or development of narrative cinema.10

However it may manifest itself in specific works, as a primary goal (or, at least, consequence) of artistic creativity, Dufrenne associates aesthetic expression with an affective depth that, in turn, gives representation a sense of life and immanent necessity. Borrowing directly from Kant, he refers to this as the “inner finality” of the aesthetic object, which is like that which a “living being expresses.” As fused in its total expressive world, representation and aesthetic affect are insoluble. Artworks manifest “a certain quality which words cannot translate but which communicates itself in arousing a feeling. This quality proper to the work—to the works of a single creator or to a single style—is a world atmosphere.”11

Many of the central features of the marriage of expression and immersion that are described in The Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience with recourse to the idea of a singular, expressed “world-atmosphere” of a work (in any form) are, as I will attempt to make clear, particularly pronounced in the experience of a cinematic work and world. As I will explain further, in the case of film-worlds this global atmosphere of feeling of a special kind can be seen as an interrelation and integration of the three sorts of local affects described earlier. But it is also, and more generally, the affective sum total of a film’s audiovisual and fictional representation, any number of symbolic-artistic exemplifications, and the dynamic temporal structure of a cinematic work. As one of the most significant and defining world-markers of films, this affect (partly analogous to what Mitry describes as “poetic feeling” in cinema)¹² serves to distinguish one film work and world from another in a profoundly qualitative way.

Some contemporary film theorists and philosophers of film have recognized the need to better account for this sort of global, created affect. With reference to Lynch’s Mulholland Drive, among other films, Robert Sinnerbrink has argued recently that the overall “mood” that a film conveys, for which he uses the German term Stimmung, is generally missing from the affective map of films and their worlds offered by many current theorists who favor analytic and cognitive approaches (for some of the reasons I discussed in the previous chapter).¹³ As if in response, Plantinga, one of the theorists in question, has recently proposed a distinction between the “human moods” of characters represented or expressed in a film and the variable “art moods” associated with a film work as a whole or with a part of it.¹⁴ Plantinga’s concept of art mood falls short, however, of the total affective whole of a film as an artwork, which includes a pronounced synthesis between it and character mood (or feeling) as tied to diegetic fiction.

While surely a significant part of it, neither “mood” (in these senses) nor “tone”—as when a critic suggests that one or more sequences changes the “entire tone” of a film—are a sufficient description of the affective whole in question, which also exceeds even what “atmosphere” may generally denote. Although this total expression can go under many names and be theorized from a number of different perspectives, it is the existential-phenomenological framework of Dufrenne’s account of aesthetic expression, making use of Kant’s understanding of the “organic” unity of the artwork, and also dovetailing with some of the more convincing aspects of Mitry’s theory of cinematic expression, that would appear to provide the most fruitful and comprehensive starting point for a general model of this experiential aspect of cinematic works.

GLOBAL FILM-WORLD EXPRESSION

A film has many different affective elements, just as it has many different represented, formal, and artistically exemplified ones. But in the same way that it has one single represented world, comprising all of its specific denotations and implied references and associations, it may be seen to possess a complex and composite but unitary, and aesthetically unified, feeling (or feeling constellation). As Cassirer recognized with respect to every artwork’s holistic affect, this structure of feeling resists being identified with any single, readily articulated emotion, since quite often we “cannot subsume it under any traditional psychological class concept.”15 Such global affective presence is undoubtedly reliant and perhaps logically supervenient upon (in the contemporary philosophical sense) some of a film’s episodes of local expression, as joined with other aesthetic and symbolic elements.¹⁶ Yet it is not merely an aggregate but an emergent property, in that it does not consist of and cannot be identified with any collection of such individual, expressive features. Far from being confined to a particular feeling or emotion (or idea) conveyed by a given represented object or event, the appearance or action of a character, a musical cue, or a slow panning shot, the aesthetic expression in question belongs to any given film as a whole. For viewers sensitive to its growing presence, it may come to be associated with and to pervade virtually all of a film’s literal and fictional representations, yet it “does not belong to them in their own right, since it is not they that bring it about.”¹⁷

Global aesthetic expression is, in other words, strongly cumulative, often coming to awareness and increasing in intensity for the viewer as a film progresses—and more and more, in consequence, serving as an affective filter that colors and informs the representational contents of images and the human (or humanlike) dramas they convey. Yet it may also reveal itself at privileged moments, being microcosmically present in something approximating its “final” (i.e., total) work-constituted nature. Thus, for example, something of the particular constellation of feeling forming the global created affect of Tarkovsky’s Stalker may be seen as contained in nuce in the final, mysterious shot of the Stalker’s crippled daughter, with its noumenal intensity and sense of the spiritual in the everyday. Likewise, something of the particular and total tragic-romantic expression of Hitchcock’s Vertigo is conveyed to us in Scottie’s (Jimmy Stewart) surreal anxiety dream.

At the same time, such global aesthetic expression also works as a principle of synthesis, integrating distinct and disparate formal and referential elements and expressions: as Dufrenne makes the point, it “changes and yet remains the same, sustaining a kind of organic development which does not change in its essence” (187). Thus, in films that are highly fragmented on the level of representation and story or are marked by numerous and varied local affects and emotion-producing images and sounds (such as Lynch’s Inland Empire, Shane Carruth’s Upstream Color, and Paolo Sorrentino’s The Great Beauty, to cite a few notable, fairly recent examples), this expression may also provide a kind of expressive glue, in the form of a “common quality of feeling” that somehow reconciles contrasting or incongruous spaces, times, and events on an affective plane, as well as disparate tones, moods, and other feeling contents (some of which, if isolated from the whole, would be found to be discordant or in seeming contradiction [187]). As such an integration, the affective unity-in-difference in question is also likely reflected to some degree in the familiar viewer experience of the powerful, indeed sometimes overwhelming, copresence of many “mixed emotions” when a film ends, as forming an affective presence that admits of no single existing name, label, or description.

A brief consideration of Claire Denis’s Trouble Every Day (fig. 7.1) may help to more concretely illustrate these general, related points. Denis’s film has no shortage of visceral shocks and provoked “bodily” sensations and is rife with sensory-affective images and sounds: including what is seen to happen to human bodies and their remains within its story of a mysterious syndrome frequently turning sexual desire into fatal orgiastic violence. Trouble Every Day also furnishes plenty of opportunity for character- and story-based identifications and engagement, as tied to what I have called cognitive-diegetic expression (emotion). Yet, within a still recognizably horror-film framework, featuring the gruesome, graphic violence (or its aftermath) that is now seemingly de rigueur in the genre, these features are, overall, secondary in importance to what the film most powerfully foregrounds in affective and aesthetic terms: a world-feeling in the form of an overriding mesmeric and uncanny atmosphere that might be described as constituting a mix of dread, fascination, eroticism, revulsion, and aspects of the surreal for which there is (of course) no single adjective, and of an immersion that is concomitant with these. Generally attempting to describe this affective force field of the film, Martine Beugnet, for instance, refers variously to its “pregnant atmosphere of anxiety,” its “unusual mix of genres and atmospheres,” and its “equivocal, melancholy tone.”18 While the creation of an unsettling atmosphere is a staple of horror films and thrillers, and, as Beugnet suggests, some generic elements surely contribute to such global expression of Trouble Every Day, the film conspicuously transcends any generalizable affect associated with standard generic classifications and conventions.

FIGURE 7.1   Cinematic world-feeling as a global, irreducible affective atmosphere in Denis’s Trouble Every Day.

It may seem easier to describe any human experiential world in terms of observable, individuated, concrete, and physical-perceptual elements of it, as things that may be actually pointed to, as opposed to what are (in the first instance, at least) highly subjective and nebulous phenomena such as feeling, mood, or tone. So, too, it is natural to try to seek and equate any total affective expression in films with more localized, individually identifiable features of them. These include the objects or causes of discrete episodes of each form of local affective expression we have considered, particularly those of the formal-artistic sort, whose sources are (most often) readily observable individual formal and stylistic features of films. In a nonspecifically cinematic context, Dufrenne aptly calls such individuated, affect-producing features of an aesthetic object its many and varied “expressive traits,” which may pertain, in his examples, to “particular visual shapes, details of the mode of writing, or melodic themes.”19

Certainly, in looking for the more specific causes of Trouble Every Day’s total expressive atmosphere or world-feeling (beyond its story events and situations in themselves), we may with good reason point to Agnes Godard’s impressionistic, often defocused, cinematography; the film’s cryptic and laconic dialogue; its oblique and fragmentary framings; the rhythm of the cutting; the accomplished ambient jazz-rock soundtrack (by the band Tindersticks); or the trancelike performances of Vincent Gallo, Beatrice Dalle, and Alex Decas, playing characters seemingly controlled in their actions by impersonal forces (biological, chemical, geopolitical, metaphysical) over which they have (almost) no capacities for resistance.²⁰ However, as an indecomposable, experiential unity, this strongly holistic expression eludes, almost defies, any definitive list of such contributing factors. Not only is their identification and analysis insufficient to fully account for this affective atmosphere, but, in terms of actual viewer experience, any such attempted causal attributions likely come after one has already “discovered” this world-feeling in the private theater of consciousness. In other words, they may well belong to a posteriori critical discourse, as well as being most frequently somewhat pale abstractions from the irreducible, experiential whole.²¹

Explicitly picking up on Dufrenne’s general observations and looking at the matter from the filmmaker’s, as opposed to the viewer’s, position, Mitry argues that this area of cinematic art is squarely in the realm of creative intuition, where there are few if any prior rules and standards for anticipating and calibrating the conveyed temporal and rhythmic feeling of a shot or sequence—or, by extension, of the film in its entirety—given the “many constantly variable factors” involved. It is, rather, and as he continues, a matter of what “feels right” to filmmakers (particularly, in his view, at the editing stage of a film).²² Through some seemingly magical amalgam of intuition, imagination, artistic intelligence, technical skill, and experience on the part of the filmmaker and his or her collaborators, ultimately in interaction with the viewer’s capacities for feeling, which are to some extent anticipated, a global affective atmosphere is realized in many films. Although intangible and not given directly to perception (alone), it is as much an artistic feature possessed by a cinematic work (and “objective” in this sense) as any other intentional deposit, such as a general theme or the particular symbolic association made by an image. And yet, like the proverbial smoke through a key hole, or a God whose “center is everywhere and circumference is nowhere,”23 its complex artistic composition and its palpable yet ineffable character means that it eludes any more comprehensive, nonreductive analysis. It thus remains a rationally opaque and elusive je ne sais quoi of the most compelling of narrative cinematic works.

As responsible for a good deal of the experienced difference between one film world and every other, the singularity of this aesthetic world-feeling is beyond the uniqueness that every film possesses as a formal and symbolic (referential) construction and as a perceptually distinct and original object or event. For whereas these distinguishing attributes of a work are a matter of observable and cognizable facts and sensory apprehension—even if they often require substantial interpretation and understanding of the “given” data of moving images—global cinematic expression is, as I have already argued, a more directly felt than simply perceived or known presence. At the same time, however, just as all created worlds are, in Goodman’s sense, versions, the singular cinematic world-feeling of any film (including Trouble Every Day, for example) may still be felt as similar to the total aesthetic expression of any number of other films, plays, novels, paintings, and pieces of music—as well as certain other nonartistic life experiences. Highly variable in terms of strength, depth, interest, and felt originality, in some films (in fact, perhaps the majority) if such global expression exists, it may be largely buried under, or eclipsed by, more temporary and superficial stimulations and local affects and emotions (sometimes in the form of clichés) to the asymptotic point of virtual absence.

As our previous discussions are more than sufficient to indicate, while important to film art in all the ways I have mentioned, I am not at all suggesting, in the manner of some familiar “expression” theories of art, that this global, cine aesthetic world-feeling (as it might also be appropriately termed) is the only, or always the most significant, aesthetic aspect or feature of a cinematic work-world. As experienced, it is not only copresent but typically in complex interaction with many perceptual and symbolic elements that are capable of bearing aesthetic properties or qualities, including both those that are perceptually given and relational, or imputed (i.e., dependent for their recognition on the making of culturally informed associations). These all have an a priori equal claim to artistic significance and value. Moreover, such a global expression, as present and recognized, and frequently associated with a director’s style (in ways that I will shortly address) is not necessarily artistically profound and valuable in itself. Rather, as I have already mentioned, it is rightly judged, as it is experienced, in the context of other (nonaffective) aspects, meanings, and values of a cinematic work. Thus while the nature and conveyance of such affect is seemingly a highly significant (if less systematic) basis on which a cinematic work may be interpreted, valued, and judged as art (and in critical practice often is, if not, however, under the label of “world-feeling” per se), it is hardly ever the sole one.24 And although it may be more immediately felt and known than other artistic or aesthetic qualities of a film, like them, and as distinct from narrative and sensory aspects or properties taken in isolation, its depth and affective intensity may dramatically increase the more one sees, understands, and appreciates a film.

REVISITING CINEMATIC TEMPORALITY

Although the global, cineaesthetic world-feeling of many films may elude precise description and analysis, we may still wish to inquire about the general dynamics that characterize this special sort of affect and engagement in relation to significant medial, formal, and temporal properties of films. Its recognition, in other words, invites the question of how it is realized, at least in general terms, together with its connection to viewer immersion, in the strong, world-entering sense explained in the preceding chapter. In following the broad conceptual arc of Dufrenne’s phenomenology of aesthetic experience, and its philosophical influences (most notably Kant), these dynamics and relations are predicated on the multifaceted temporality of films, as integral to the achievement of such work-embracing expression. A brief revisiting of the oft-discussed topic of time in films is equally necessitated by the general distinction between the fictional world-in and the artistically informed world-of a cinematic work (as still relevant in this affective context), insofar as each of these has its own associated, temporal axis that is also a prominent part of a film’s aesthetic experience.

Narrative fictional films are both the repositories and products of three basic forms of time: (1) actual or physical, (2) represented, and (3) what may be termed, alternatively, lived, experiential, felt, or expressed time (with all of these latter designations deemed equivalent in our present context). Whereas the represented time of a narrative film corresponds to the time of the aesthetic object’s “represented world” as Dufrenne conceives it, and the world-in a film, as I have described it, the lived and felt time of a film is, in its aesthetic aspect, akin to what Dufrenne refers to as the “expressed time” of the aesthetic object’s “expressed world.”25 The interrelations among these distinct forms of time (which, to a more limited extent, have spatial corollaries) are crucial to film worlds as experienced, and the ability to manipulate them successfully is central to artistic filmmaking.²⁶

To briefly elaborate on this classification: the actual time of a film is the (externally) measurable clock time of its unfolding, as determined by the length of the reels containing the projected film or the information storage equivalent in the case of films created or projected digitally. By custom dating back to early theatrical exhibition practice, this time most often consists of around one and a half to two hours for the narrative feature film. As in a novel or play, represented time, in contrast, is that time directly or indirectly indicated by a film’s fictional narrative and action, and it includes, principally, the chronology of represented events. In our present terms it is the timeline of the fictional world-in, regardless of the many ways it may be creatively manipulated and thus shown to differ from the strict and irrevocable linearity of temporal consciousness in our real (or, at least, our waking) lives.

If actual running time is thoroughly objective (as belonging to the causal order of nature or, at least, our means of measuring it), represented story time is perhaps best regarded as a kind of copy or imitation of it. At a minimum it is faithful enough to undergird the actions of characters and allow for the progressive development of action and story. As is true of a play or a novel, story time is reliant on the viewer’s cognitive awareness and construction and is actualized only in and through a recognition of the temporal markers and durations that are portrayed: sometimes quite explicitly (in accordance with certain cinematic conventions and narrative designs) but sometimes only implicitly or with purposive vagueness. In some cases viewers may not fully grasp a film work’s represented time on a first, second, or even third viewing, owing to its complexity or ambiguity, whereas in other cases this dimension is foregrounded to the degree that story and actual running time clearly coincide. In all instances, however, and no matter how roughly specified, this basic form of cinematic time, as common to all fictional narratives, is still fixed, the same for all viewers who comprehend it, in the created, finished form of a work. (The total represented duration of the fictional events of La notte, High Noon, and Do the Right Thing, for instance, is always approximately twenty-four hours.)

Yet beyond the objective (running) time of every film, and the semi- (or quasi-)objective represented, fictional time that belongs in essence to all narrative forms, there is also a distinctive experientially grounded duration attached to cinematic works. Apart from its 119 minutes from opening image to closing credits, or the many decades of the late nineteenth century and early twentieth that its story spans, Citizen Kane possesses a felt time, which may vary from viewer to viewer, and from one experience of it to the next, but that in spite of this variability is identifiable with Welles’s film. This third basic form of cinematic temporality owes much to the distinctively human, psychological form or mode of time that is not measured or quantified in any way. It is, rather, a qualitative succession that is simply “lived,” as described famously by such thinkers as Henri Bergson, Edmund Husserl, Eugène Minkowski,27 and, more recently, in relation to cinema, by Deleuze (who draws on Bergson’s concept of durée in explicating it). In a narrative film, however, such unmeasured temporality is clearly never entirely independent of either of the other time dimensions described, both of which contribute substantially to its realization.

Although a part or dimension of a film world as consciously created, often with very deliberate, artistic aims in mind, like global cineaesthetic feeling, the lived—or, perhaps even better, “living”—duration of a cinematic work exists only insofar as it is actually felt by viewers. Descriptions of the phenomenon, including this one, merely succeed in gesturing in its direction. Just as all cinema involves (and requires) a concentration and distillation of ordinary, chronometric time on a representational level, like music it is also an experiential concentration of lived, affective time, introducing a level of palpable expression into a film world. Yet even if internal to the psyche—and subjective, by definition, in contrast to cinema’s “objective” pole of basic and iconic representation—there can be, and often is, substantial transsubjective agreement among viewers, critics, and theorists about its primary qualities in a given work—such as, for instance, the felt lassitude of L’avventura, the breathless rush of Touch of Evil, the heavy and circular stasis of Werckmeister Harmonies. Additionally, there may be recognition and relative consensus concerning how aspects of this work-created temporality are related to the whole range of a film’s literal and figurative representations, themes, and meanings.

The triad of forms of time in or of a cinematic work may be thought of as three concentric circles. Their arrangement, however, in terms of which is figuratively contained within which (as one way to attempt to describe the empirical reality of the situation), differs according to the two most basic perspectives from which a film (or any artwork) can be described. From an external perspective, apart from one’s actual perceptual and imaginative engagement and immersion, the running time of a film is the outermost circle. It contains represented (story) time and affective time, both of which begin and end with the film-viewing event (except, of course, to the extent they may be preserved in memory). In first-person experiential and affective terms, in contrast, this relation may be reversed. It is the expressed, lived time of a film world that often seems to contain both represented time and objective, clock time within its affective field, taking priority in our conscious awareness over each. Thus we may, for instance, glance at our watches during a film’s screening precisely in order to check the extent of the discrepancy between our impression of its felt time and the actual number of minutes that have elapsed. Or, we may find it difficult to believe that two films whose felt time has diverged so sharply are actually the same length; or, again, we may remark on how so many fictional actions and events could have been packed into approximately those two hours, which have seemed to our conscious attention so much shorter or longer. (These familiar phenomena are clearly distinct from imagination-assisted story time, which may be minutes, days, or millennia.) Such experiential realities inform the creative pacing of films, as a major concern of directors and editors, and much creative (as opposed to merely functional) film editing hinges on how differences measured in seconds may radically alter the perceptual and affective experience and meaning of a shot or sequence. All of these considerations point to the existence of felt cinematic duration, which like any other inherent feature of cinema may be employed in variously creative and artistic ways. They also speak to how the differences and tensions between the immutable and inexorable actual (clock) time of a cinematic work as a created and physically bounded object, and its duration as experienced, in the perpetual present tense of its unfolding, may be crucial to its aesthetic experience.

Given these basic forms of time, there are also three distinct sets of recurrent relations among them. Actual work time and represented story time may converge and diverge in a great many ways, as, for example, in the case of entire films, or sequences, presented in so-called real time. In some film worlds this relation takes the form of a significant artistic exemplification in itself. In the celebrated long-take, moving-camera sequence that opens Touch of Evil, a bravura foregrounding of the relation between diegetic, or world-in, time and actual cinematic (world-of) time is achieved in and through a dramatic action (and subsequent plot point). In a close-up image a timer affixed to a bomb (about to be attached to a car) is held before the camera and set before the viewer’s eyes to three and a half minutes (fig. 7.2). This image serves not only to anticipate the amount of time until the imminent explosion but (simultaneously) to highlight the duration of the remarkable crane shot that leads up to it, with the explosion appearing to “trigger” the film’s first edited transition.

FIGURE 7.2   Actual and represented time self-reflexively in sync in the opening of Welles’s Touch of Evil.

The relation between represented and felt time may be an equally complex and aesthetically significant temporal interaction within film worlds. It may involve, for instance, the relative divergence or continuity (but always potential difference) between one or more character’s temporal experience of represented events and the viewer’s perceptual apprehension of their duration. In Resnais’s Last Year at Marienbad and Muriel this conjunction is exemplified through complex point-of-view and flash-back constructions (auditory as well as visual), which create a pronounced interaction between a character’s and viewer’s “time consciousness” (in Husserl’s phrase). However it is articulated, cinematic art allows for the lived time of the viewer’s experience of a film world to be brought into analogical relation (more or less direct) with the experience of time on the part of characters, as it is represented and expressed. It is thus one (if only one) prominent route of aesthetic immersion by way of the represented and fictional world-in a work, which some films open up to their audiences via processes of perceptual and imaginative identifications with represented characters and situations.

With these relations between forms of cinematic time in mind, but to now return to the total expressed world-feeling of a cinematic work, as our primary concern, the latter is closely allied to a film’s “lived” or felt time as here described. Both constitute an experiential, qualitative “unity-in-multiplicity,” to borrow Dufrenne’s characterization of the affective “world atmosphere” of the aesthetic object,28 which intentionally recalls Bergson’s classic description of the nature of lived time, or durée. Dufrenne is correct to emphasize, however, that such a global affective property of an artwork (as an aesthetic object), as a presence that grows or builds in consciousness, is not simply like lived, temporal duration but is conveyed in and through it: “it is above all time, in its pre-objective form, which the aesthetic object manifests in its expression.”²⁹ In cinema, as in many arts, one of the major created and experiential links between lived time and this total affective expression is rhythm, always comprising, as Mitry observes, “relationships of intensity contained within relationships of duration.”³⁰

RHYTHM, LIVED TIME, AND AESTHETIC AFFECT

People tend to think that my preoccupation is with the simple plastic effects of the cinema. But to me they all come out of an interior rhythm, which is like the shape of music or the shape of poetry.

—Orson Welles

At its most fundamental level, rhythm is the perceived or felt order and pattern of a succession of discrete sense impressions, most often characterized by repetition and separated by intervals of varying lengths. But as Mitry, who writes at length and with acute perception on rhythm in cinema, maintains, it is also a matter of “time evolving in a succession of alternating and interrelated durations” amounting to an “effective distinction between contrasting times.”³¹ In this sense (at least) rhythm opposes itself to clock time, precisely because the latter either has no rhythm or, amounting to much the same thing, its pattern never varies, bespeaking of mechanism in contrast to that which is organic and living.

The phenomenon of losing oneself in music, in a beat, is often viewed, perhaps rightly, as the paradigm case of immersive, absorptive experience. But this is by no means the only sort of affective and psychological immersion associated with the rhythmic character of a great many activities. A hallmark of being absorbed in a thought, a book, a conversation, or a daydream is the familiar sense of losing track of objective time. We find ourselves transported away from the homogeneous progression of seconds, minutes, and hours, and the many worlds of practical action that our temporal measuring devices both structure and prompt, to some more natural or aboriginal temporal condition, with another sort of unifying principle. Here we join with the affective rhythms of human actions and naturally occurring events, our sensory awareness of which opens up other cognitive, imaginative, and emotional spaces than those we may regularly inhabit. Of course, not all such common experiences of rhythmic transport are aesthetic, occurring in relation to art. Yet as part and parcel of the experience of artworks and their worlds—and especially, perhaps, cinematic ones—such dynamics of rhythmic immersion work in an often more powerful, concentrated, and dramatic way. In the case of a cinematic work, lived time and affective rhythm help to provide for immersive engagement on the part of the film viewer, but, in a double movement, these are also its symptoms and consequences.

These and similar considerations lead Dufrenne to argue that rhythm is not only one formal or structural property of artworks (as aesthetic objects) among others; rather, as tied to lived time, expressive rhythm is concomitant with the aesthetic object as apprehended. Like the work’s total affective expression, rhythm, as the “movement that animates” representations, is conceived as permeating every other aspect or element of the work. Rhythm not only contributes to an artwork’s world in the affective dimension; it “espouses and expresses the very being of it” as an aesthetic object that compels our attention.32 These dynamics may be held to apply to our encounters in consciousness with physically static works like paintings and sculptures, as well as to drama, film, and, of course, music. Yet clearly, films, like musical works, not only seem but actually do (physically) extend and change in time; thus, they possess intrinsic rhythmic properties (visual, verbal, musical) that are powerfully copresent with felt and figuratively represented ones. In addition to its (potential) aesthetic nature and value in narrative cinema, it is also not difficult to see how the prevalence, density, and plurality of different interlocking forms of rhythm, and the resulting affective heterogeneity, all contribute to the lived time of films, as well as to a deep affinity between cinema and noncinematic or everyday perceptual and imaginative experience.

Rhythm is manifested in a bewildering variety of ways in films, and in relation to its incorporation cinema fully deserves the title of Gesamtkunstwerk, or total art form. Burch argues that given its all-embracing and multifaceted nature—marked by an “enormous complexity” far exceeding that found in music—together with the interpenetration of space and time in cinema, a film’s rhythm might just as well be termed its “cinematic structure” and vice versa.33 Moreover, if narrative and non-narrative films alike have a single, shared artistic “secret,” it is likely a rhythmic one. This, at least, is the view of numerous theorists, critics, and filmmakers. Merleau-Ponty, for instance, has associated the specifically artistic use of cinema with the articulation of “a particular overall cinematographic rhythm,” born of shot choice, order, and duration, and Mitry has pointed to an “organization of time, i.e., a rhythm that becomes apparent only at the moment the film begins to fulfill its aesthetic function.”³⁴ So, also, many filmmakers—including some of the most prominent and perceptive writers and theorists among them (e.g., Eisenstein, Vertov [in relation to his theory of “intervals”], Pudovkin, Bresson, Godard, Straub, Kluge, and Tarkovsky)—have written and spoken of the rhythmic essence of cinema as an art form. Moreover, in some cases they have stressed the profound relation between a film’s rhythm(s) and features of its affective dimension and the created worlds of films, specifically.

Memorably describing filmmaking as “sculpting in time,” Tarkovsky posits rhythm, and what he calls “time pressures” internal to shots or sequences, as the source of an expressive depth in films residing beneath their perceptual surface.³⁵ He largely ascribes the root source of the affective, cinematic rhythm of a film to that which is internal to the image and which results from the “natural” movement and duration of the objects and actions filmed (including human bodies and wider natural phenomena such as wind, rain, flowing water, and fire, with which his own films are replete). Here, such natural motion and duration is both supported and channeled but also transformed by the movement of the camera, for example, as distinct from movement imposed on the image-event from without by sequencing and editing. Nonetheless, since Tarkovsky sees editing as following the lead of this “internal” expressive movement as grasped and transmitted more or less intact by filmmakers, he argues that “you will always recognize the editing of Bergman, Bresson, Kurosawa or Antonioni; none of them could be ever confused with anyone else, because each one’s perception of time . . . is always the same.”36 Aside from this last point (to which we will return) Deleuze, citing Tarkovsky’s Sculpting in Time as a precedent, also places a great deal of stress on affective figurations born of the relation between the living body within the frame and the presentation of lived time around its actions and postures, as found (according to his well-known theory) in the postclassical, “time-image” films of Godard and Ackerman, Cassavetes and Philippe Garrel, among others.³⁷

It seems quite clear, however, that as a general rule in-frame movement (attached to filmed objects, whatever they may be) provides for only a restricted concept of filmmaker-constructed, and aesthetically actualized and powerful, rhythm in cinema and its relation to affect. Not least, since its presentation transcends the “classical” film theory opposition between montage editing and the long-take sequence shot (as Deleuze also acknowledges).³⁸ Many other factors contribute to the rhythms achieved by and through the multiple temporalities of a film world, including the durational and affective consequences of editing and of graphic rhythms generated by light, color, shadow, and visual depth (or its lack); in addition, of course, there are the rhythmic properties of the soundtrack, not only music but sound effects and the often distinctive speech patterns of actors. Encompassing all of these, Eisenstein describes the total formal rhythm of a film as a matter of a “synthesis of two counterpoints—the spatial counterpoint of graphic art, and the temporal counterpoint of music.”³⁹ In line with the broad distinction I suggested earlier between rhythmic “lived” (felt) time and a “rhythmless” clock time, he also contrasts the dynamic and irregular rhythm of both life processes and great art with that of lifeless and mechanical “metrics.”⁴⁰ Taking it almost for granted that every would-be artistic film must possess its own unique “rhythmic formula,” the Russian theorist-director claims that “it is quite obvious that the same sequence of movements, with the addition of different combinations of duration, will produce quite different expressive effects.”⁴¹

In the early 1980s Godard gave a number of provocative interviews coinciding with the release of his Sauve qui peut, the English title of which, and the director’s preferred one—Slow Motion—indicates the technique that he turns to in order to explore the relation between rhythm, represented story time, and a more purely affective time, by manipulating the standard twenty-four-frames-per-second speed of films as shot and projected. Without citing Eisenstein directly, he echoes the Soviet pioneer, critiquing what he regards as the overly regular metrical dynamics of most cinema as lifeless and lacking dialectical energy. Commensurate with Cassirer’s insight that affect in art is as much a matter of “motion” as “emotion,”42 for Godard “different speeds” captured in a film necessarily bring with them different artistic moods and tones, in a constant affective flux.⁴³ Like Dufrenne, Godard associates felt rhythms not only with the experiential depth of a film (“through rhythms movies represent so-called life”) but, correspondingly, with the gateway to distinctive artistic “worlds,” and the affective qualities of them, which both result from and effect a transformation and animation of the profilmic. Rhythm, he maintains, endows that which a film represents with a new significance, one that is a matter of what the filmmaker more thoroughly creates rather than finds or simply allows the camera to record. He notes that in much contemporary filmmaking “rhythms have stayed the same but I think that there are infinite worlds. Movies do not ‘land’ on them. This is what is difficult and what interests me . . . because when one stops the image in a movement, one perceives a change. . . . One perceives a whole lot of other worlds.”⁴⁴

Both Godard’s and Eisenstein’s observations dovetail with Tarkovsky’s claim that through a unified structure of “varying rhythmic pressures,” one that is felt as well as visually or aurally perceived, a film may achieve an expressive depth that is characteristic of great art in many forms and media. With specific reference to the singular worlds of films and their makers, Tarkovsky argues that “it is above all through a sense of time, through rhythm, that the director reveals his individuality.” Indeed, he conceives his own primary aesthetic task as trying to create his own unique “flow of time” and convey such temporal succession.⁴⁵ While both created and, in a sense, discovered in the course of a film’s making, for Tarkovsky as well as for Eisenstein (and Welles, as quoted above), such total affective rhythm in its artistic manifestation cannot be imposed on a film’s form via wholly external principles, preestablished conventions, or any technical means alone. Rather, it is a viewer-enabled, relational and “organic” property of a cinematic work as presented in its entirety and resulting from a filmmaker’s often highly intuitive creative actions and intentions.

INTERNAL TEMPORALITY AND SUBJECTIVITY IN THE FILM-WORLD EXPERIENCE

Dufrenne’s phenomenology of aesthetic experience helps provide some further theoretical underpinning to all of these overlapping insights on the part of critics, theorists, and some of the greatest filmmakers concerning the interrelations among time, rhythm, and a successful or genuine artistic expression that emanates from the “interiority” of a cinematic work and its singular “world.” The expression in question may, moreover, be credited with providing the recognized existence and experience of such a world (as a world) in the first place. In Dufrenne’s phenomenological model the rhythmic movement of all aesthetic objects, but particularly temporal ones, joins with the movement of the viewer’s combined perception and feeling of it, since “the duration of the aesthetic object can be perceived only if it is integrated into our own duration.”46 Given that the aesthetic object possesses an “expressed” (affective) time and space of its own, the linking up of these temporal streams has important consequences.

As we have just seen, in Tarkovsky’s account, in the experience of a film the filmmaker’s own expressed (sense of) time joins with, and becomes part of, the viewer’s lived and felt duration. The filmmaker’s subjectivity thus meets and engages with that of the viewer, as mediated (as it must be) by the work. Tarkovsky portrays this “global” interaction as an immersive “world dialogue,” as it were, of a special, affective and aesthetic kind: “the person watching either falls into your rhythm (your world), and becomes your ally, or else he does not, in which case no contact is made. And so some people become your ‘own,’ and others remain strangers.”⁴⁷ In Dufrenne’s version of this suggested dynamic the realization of the artwork’s expression, and “world,” in the viewer’s consciousness (as a durational phenomenon) is tied to the fact that time is “spatialized” and space “temporalized” in the aesthetic object.⁴⁸ In addition to serving as a fit description of the experience and systematization of rhythm in general—as a primarily temporal phenomenon that is perceived and measured spatially—this claim of Dufrenne’s has special relevance to cinema, an art in which space and time profoundly unite and interpenetrate, and no more so than in the conjunction of cinematography and editing. Indeed, the French philosopher’s formulation is almost identical with Panofsky’s earlier observation (one fully in keeping with the direct and pronounced influence of Cassirer’s Kantianism on Panofsky’s thought) that the greatest, and distinctly artistic, “possibilities” of films lie in their “dynamization of space, and, accordingly, spatialization of time.”49 French theorist Edgar Morin also argues along similar lines.⁵⁰

In Dufrenne’s phenomenology of art, such intimate interrelation of time and space (time spatialized, space temporalized) is seen to give the artwork, as experienced, the character of a “quasi-subject.” Adapting certain of Kant’s arguments in The Critique of Pure Reason in the pursuit of what might be best described as a philosophical metaphor for aesthetic experience, Dufrenne sees this dynamic as akin to the experiential field of consciousness itself. Whereas space is given a temporal dimension through a cognitive subject’s successive perceptions of it (as something that persists), time is endowed with a spatial (i.e., external and empirical) presence, as that which is common to all observable changes and may be measured through standard movements.

Succinctly, lived time is a form of Kantian “inner sense” that is located (if that is the right word) in the non spatial interiority of the conscious mind.⁵¹ It is only a sense of time that provides for a unified I, and that sense of self to which the I is thereby related, as a persistent register of experiences, at any given moment of conscious awareness. Space, in contrast, as the a priori form of “outer sense,” is divorced from the self and is the ground for the determination of an objective reality. However, given the suggested “phenomenological solidarity of time and space,”⁵² each implies the existence of the other: time gives us a self, and space gives us a world. And just as a self implies a world and a world a self (as Merleau-Ponty also stresses), lived time implies space and space lived time. Not only do time and space interpenetrate in conscious experience, but this interpenetration is conscious experience, in the sense of allowing for its possibility and content.⁵³ In this way space, as composed of and composing the external objects of consciousness, is animated by experiential time and is literally put into an internal, mental kind of movement.

Now, the aesthetic relevance of this fundamental dynamic lies in the way it is mirrored in an artwork as experienced: its objective, spatial, “represented world” is metaphorically akin to the external reality that our outer senses help the mind to construct. In contrast, the “expressed world”—that is, world-feeling or “atmosphere”—of the aesthetic object as conveyed through lived time is, for Dufrenne, like the “inner” time sense of consciousness serving to establish the self-identity of the subject. Just as in our actual, first-person experience, however—where the self possesses both a represented external reality and an internal, strongly affective, but largely inarticulate one—so, too, within the aesthetic object are the represented and expressed held in reciprocal, mutually determining relations.

Dufrenne, who has been followed here by some contemporary phenomenological theorists of film, regards this kinship as a justification for conceiving the artwork (as experienced) as a “quasi-subject” with a kind of animate “interiority,” provided by the interdependent relationships between representation and expression, time and space.54 In other words, a work is “related” to itself, as something like a conscious subject’s relation to the I that changes in time yet remains experientially unified. Like consciousness, the aesthetic object is simultaneously “a relation to the self and a relation to a world,” which, since the self coconstitutes a world, is also a self-relation.⁵⁵ Thus, and finally, the crux of this layered argument is that the relation between the spatiotemporal and experiential structure of consciousness, on the one hand, and of the aesthetic object, on the other, is not only a formal or structural analogy, since the aesthetic object itself is actualized in the beholder’s consciousness (in which it is contained). We, as a cinematic work’s viewers, may thus be seen to fulfill the work’s expression through feeling it in time, whereby our subjective temporal field (or inner “world”) joins with its “inner” expressed world.

Of more significance in this context than the ersatz characterization of an aesthetic object as a quasi subject—today the most frequently cited idea of Dufrenne’s Phenomenology—is, I wish to claim, the fundamental triadic relation it identifies—that is, the relation structure of a work’s felt duration, its qualitative affectivity as experienced, and the lived time of the beholder, which together form a dynamic but persisting unity. This unity may be seen as the bedrock of global cine aesthetic expression (cinematic world-feeling), as well as immersion.

Dufrenne’s argument has a clear ring of aesthetic idealism. Crucially, however, what chiefly prevents this dynamic of expression from collapsing into a solipsistic relation between the self and the self—in which the objective presence and experienced alterity of the work, as a created and intended object, is lost in the form of its mental apprehension—is that the affective expression actualized in aesthetic experience is the expression not of a quasi subject but of an actual subject: namely, the artist, who is not somehow left out of account but is felt (and known) to be present by “proxy” in his or her created world. Indeed, the unity of the aesthetic object’s affective dimension in this view springs from the unity of a Weltanschauung, a “way of being in the world which reveals itself in a personality,” that is, the personality of the artist.56 This holds insofar, it must be added, that the personality in question is in fact seen to be expressed by the work specifically, and withstanding any other public or private manifestation of it.

If, following Dufrenne, and as both Pasolini and Mitry also contend, the artistic filmmaker endows the communicative symbolic structure of a narrative film with a singular aesthetic expression as a result of his or her creative vision and stylistic choices—resulting in a “formal” interpretation of both a specific (represented) subject and of “reality” through this subject’s cinematic treatment—then at least part of this effort can be seen to eventuate in the global affective expression of a film. In other words, it is manifested as a unified and unifying feeling of a film in which the filmmaker as creator is in a genuine (if not actual) sense “present.” Such a cinematic version of authorial presence may be seen as one major experiential (or “phenomenological”) reality underlying the common practice of associating or identifying the affective expression of an artwork and its created “world” with the biographical artist: for example, in references to the expressed, and expressive, worlds of Goya and Hopper, Mozart and Coltrane, Renoir and Bergman,⁵⁷ and the characteristic “feeling” of each. As a corollary of the association of the aesthetic object’s “internal” expression with something of the inner life of an individual (the artist) as externalized and objectified in artistic form, Dufrenne suggestively regards the nonspatial, nonlocalized, rhythmic “interiority” of a work as akin to its individual “soul” (or animus in Latin, referring to both life and self-movement). Constituting its expressed “world-atmosphere” of feeling, this is implicitly contrasted with the representational dimension of the aesthetic object alone (as its “body”).⁵⁸

GLOBAL CINEAESTHETIC EXPRESSION (WORLD-FEELING), STYLE, AND FILM-WORLD CREATORS

A personal artistic style, in the view I have been explicating, is the intangible force that fuses artistically formed representation and expression in the full unity of a known and felt world—a world that, in this case, is an object-experience with a particular internal (affective) coherence that is intuited by the viewer as the film unfolds in lived, rhythmic time. As was the case with Goodman’s theory of style and artistic worlds rooted in symbolic-artistic reference (e.g., exemplification), it is beyond the scope of this chapter (and book) to defend this expression and creator-centered concept of style in toto. Yet Dufrenne is far from alone in making a connection between (1) a total, singular artistic expression or affect emanating from the experienced spatiotemporal “interior” of an artwork, including a film, and (2) the artist or, here, artistic filmmaker as its cause or source. Nor is he alone in using the particular terms that he does to describe this expression—namely, world, world view, soul, interiority, personality.

In fact, the linking of style with all that which is sometimes referred to as a singular personal vision or outlook (as manifested through artistic expression and stylization) has a clear affinity with some prominent articulations of auteurist film theory and criticism and other creator-focused conceptions of cinematic art. Mitry holds that “for the filmmaker, inasmuch as his work is the manifest expression of his thoughts, his subjectivity, his way of seeing or feeling, the film becomes a means of perpetuating (or at least of fixing for his own consciousness) a unique moment of his self.”59 Carroll argues more soberly that by way of “personality,” which he describes as an individual’s “ways of being” translating into a “view of the world,” there is a “deep connection” between the idea of an artistic style and of a work’s affective expression. He further maintains that recognition and exploration of this tripartite conjunction (of style, expression, and personality) is the particular “theoretical strength” of auteurist approaches to cinematic art.⁶⁰

Ideas such as these are also at the core of Andrew Sarris’s highly influential “Notes on Auteur Theory in 1962,” which defended and attempted to systematize the French politiques des auteurs developed earlier in the pages of Cahiers du cinéma. Sarris offers three basic and closely interrelated “premises” of a cogent auteurism, corresponding to three different “levels” of a film. The first premise pertains to “technique,” that is, that a genuine cinematic auteur is a “technically competent” director. The second premise pertains to “style”; that is, a director is a genuine auteur if his or her body of work exhibits shared, significant, and identifiable features. These serve as a creative “signature” that, in turn, allows for the “distinguishable personality of a director,” as reflected in his or her films, to be held up as a “criterion of value.”⁶¹

However, it is Sarris’s third and “ultimate premise” concerning artistic expression in cinema, as also closely connected to and underpinning an individual style and an expressed personality, that is still more directly related to the approach and views we have been examining. In a substantial addition on his part to Cahiers’ auteur criticism, such expression is seen as inseparably wedded to what he calls a film’s “interior meaning” as the “ultimate glory of cinema as art.” Sarris argues circumspectly (with some good cause) that this “meaning” is “not quite the vision of the world a director projects nor quite his attitude towards life,” however much these may play a part in it. Rather, concerning this “ambiguous” and unique significance, which in the creation of a film comes to be “imbedded in the stuffof cinema,” and directly along the lines of Dufrenne’s conception of the expressed world of aesthetic objects, he writes: “Dare I come out and say that what I think it to be is an élan of the soul? Lest I seem unduly mystical, let me hasten to add that all I mean by ‘soul’ is that intangible difference between one personality and another.”62 For Bordwell, critically appraising Sarris’s views, “interior meaning” is “best understood as an expressive quality that arises from differences we can recognize among directorial personalities. And while this expressive quality may pervade an entire work, as nostalgic melancholy suffuses Ophüls’s films, it is just as likely to show up in privileged moments.”⁶³

I take Sarris to be suggesting that what “shows up” in particular moments may be a recognition, more pronounced, of what does often “pervade” a film work as a whole (at least an artistically good or great one)—that is, global cineaesthetic expression or world-feeling. Yet, as I have mentioned, it may come to the fore with varying degrees of affective and cognitive intensity and viewer awareness during its experience. Moreover like Dufrenne, in terms of all aesthetic objects, and Tarkovsky, with reference to the expressed personality and “world” of the filmmaker (encompassing his or her “innate perception of life”)⁶⁴ as this is reflected in a singular rhythmic duration and its affect, Sarris also associates this irreducible, felt as much as perceived, difference between one film and filmmaker and another with rhythm. (Writing with reference to Renoir’s La règle du jeu, he suggests, for instance, that it is sometimes “expressed by no more than a beat’s hesitation in the rhythm of a film.”)⁶⁵

This experiential and expressive account of artistic style in cinema, forwarded in notably overlapping terms by Sarris and Tarkovsky (as if following Dufrenne’s broader thesis), should be seen to supplement rather than to contradict the more perception-based, affectively detached, and analytic account of artistic style featured in Goodman’s theory of world-making. The same may be said with respect to other equally “impersonal” and deromanticized (“expression free,” one might say) conceptions of cinematic authorship, including, for instance, Peter Wollen’s influential structuralist account of the “author-function” in cinema.66 Of course, to the extent that cinematic authorship (and style) is seen as problematized by the collaborative nature of filmmaking and by the significance of films clearly exceeding any implantation of actual intentions on the part of the director, as well as what might be taken as a “worldview” expressed in it, it is the latter, impersonal or “objective,” notion of style that may seem especially apt in relation to cinematic worlds. Nonetheless, such approaches are clearly deficient in phenomenological and affective terms, with respect to their inability to account for the inherently and defiantly “personal” dimension of so many great film works and their worlds, not only as intellectually recognized and critically discussed but also as profoundly felt.

Indeed, even in the face of all attempts to sever the individual consciousness and actions of its principal maker from the work created, an affective expression on the part of the film director clings to the specially constructed world of a film. And it is notoriously difficult to shake off while still doing justice to a cinematic work’s artistic accomplishments. Nor does the cinematic version of the so-called death of the author sit well with attempts, such as the present one, to theorize films as singular, unified, cognitive-affective, and artistic wholes. The fact that some or many film and other moving-image entertainments may be regarded, without loss, as collaborative productions in which there is little or no pronounced aesthetic expression and affect (or, for that matter, stylistic innovation and extranarrative significance) that is readily associable with a particular filmmaker is insufficient to support the thesis that cinema as an art form is characterized by a relative lack of personal authorship. Nor does it support the view that narrative films lack what such authorship may entail with respect to the feeling dimension of a cinematic work as analogous, in some respects, to that of a poem, symphony, or even architectural work (e.g. Gaudi’s highly expressive buildings).

The unique, irreducible expression of a cinematic work-world appears to be not only analogous to an individual personality, as likewise functioning as a complex but irreducible constellation of features, but is one formal-expressive instantiation of the artist’s at least creative personality or self (to be distinguished from the empirical or biographical one). A singular film world bears the marks, however indirectly (or by “proxy”), of an equally unique, individual perspective and intentionality. In other words, it is a more or less direct reflection of that actual human agent who makes hundreds, if not thousands, of interrelated decisions in the making of a film, all of which may somehow contribute to its artistic features, affective and otherwise, and its significance. If a film director is aptly defined as “one who is asked questions,” as Truffaut’s voice-over in Day for Night suggests, then perhaps not all, but surely much, of a finished film work and its world, as presented and experienced, is the result of the “answers” given. In more general terms, Bordwell asks the appropriate rhetorical question: “who is to deny that a director’s habitual ways of orchestrating the diverse materials of the medium do not reflect something of the director’s personality?”67 Similarly, in a robust defense of the view that artworks (and not just people) may be properly said to express feelings, attitudes, and moods, which also argues for a strong link between expression and intentionality, Guy Sircello points to what he terms the actual “artistic acts” of creators as these are concretely manifested by works. These artistic acts ensure that at least some of what a work expresses is properly attributable both to the work (as a perceptual object) and to the artist, via how, exactly, a particular painter paints, a certain poet treats a given subject, a novelist portrays a character, and so on, with the expression in question coming as the direct result of these activities. It is to be understood, however, that the acts in question are “not identifiable or describable independently of the works ‘in’ which they are done.”⁶⁸

Although the problems surrounding the relation of artistic style and expression to such a fairly robust conception of authorship are complex, the general position advocated here (as transferred in its application to filmmaking) is indicated by philosopher Peter Lamarque, who writes, “If style is thought of as a way of doing something, rather than merely as a set of formal features, then it seems to be closely related to the expression of personality.”⁶⁹ Such a (tentative) conclusion is no more surprising, or implausible, than our commonly held belief that a great many of our real-life decisions, actions, and projects are external and public manifestations, reflections, or symbols of aspects of the entire person whose decisions, actions, or projects they are. These, it should be added, almost always possess an affective character. In fact, from certain perspectives in psychological theory there is no clear distinction to be made: a personality consists in just those recurrent traits, attitudes, and dispositions of an individual that somehow find public expression and communication—of which art, including narrative film art, is one substantial form.

Defending single authorship in cinema against a number of philosophical objections to it, Paisley Livingston argues that film directors, like authors or creators of any artworks, have, first, expressive intentions and, second, control over the whole of a work. These are, in fact, his two proposed criteria for artistic authorship in any form or medium.70 Aptly fulfilling these criteria, global cineaesthetic expression (or world-feeling), as precisely encompassing the whole of a film work in all the ways discussed here, may also be seen as largely the product of filmmakers’ intentions (whether these are direct and conscious, or indirect or “second-order”), no less so than its multilayered representations and chosen world-making strategies, together with the specific formal structures chosen to exhibit and convey them. Mitry remarks that “when a film displays an aesthetic principle and reveals a personality, it is not difficult to observe that this personality always comes from the director.”⁷¹ While a great deal of emphasis must be put on the when in this observation, it seems a generally valid one. Of course, as the advocates of the thesis of multi- or nonauthorship in cinema wish to remind us, through his or her own creativity and style something of the personality of a cinematographer or composer or screenwriter or actor is also expressed, or otherwise present, in a film. Although more than plausible, this observation is largely irrelevant in our present context since these other reflections (or “indicia”) of authorship are further and quite rightly associated with the cinematography or the dialogue or the music or the acting, specifically, but not with the film work as a whole, to which cineaesthetic world-feeling as artistic expression belongs (together with much else of artistic interest and experience in relation to a film in symbolic, thematic, and formal terms).

In juxtaposing central aspects of some past and present, expression-centered formulations of cinematic authorship with a conception of a film’s total, durational world-feeling, as an affective and aesthetic expression ultimately emanating from a single personality through the objective mediation of a created world, an important qualification must be added. As Sarris implicitly acknowledges, any truly defensible auteurism must begin by recognizing that the “distinguishable personality” and “worldview” that a film is seen to embody and express is not to be equated, tout court, with the empirical personality or worldview of a certain historical individual (the film director), as apparent or discoverable independently—that is, outside of the work or works under consideration. For even if the filmmaker’s (or other artistic world-creator’s) subjectivity is clearly “behind” a film world’s total expression, in terms of at least partly conscious, well-formed intentions (or a transmission of “signature” features into a work via some other means), this does not mean that the viewer can ever “get behind” the work-world to access even this much of originating subjectivity in any other form (as Sircello rightly observes).72 Nor, for that matter would the subjectivity, if so accessed, necessarily correspond with that expressed by, and through, the work.

With these considerations in mind, insofar as aesthetic expression is a manifestation of the artist’s subjectivity, both Dufrenne and Merleau-Ponty maintain with good reason that the expression in question is ultimately better conceived in a more holistic and relational, as opposed to a predominantly psychological and biographical, sense—that is, as a reflection and product of the artist’s “being-in-the-world” as manifested in art. As in Heidegger’s conception of Dasein, this formulation captures the idea that although this “being” is an irreducible “unity of subjectivity,” like the “expressed world” (Dufrenne) of the aesthetic object of which it is both a result and an extension, it is still also tied to those larger formative or mediating cultural and historical realities from which neither the artistic self (as a self) nor the aesthetic object (as experienced) is entirely emancipated. The true relation here is a kind of symbiotic or mutually informing one, which is difficult to express in short compass but has been articulated, perhaps as well as it can be, by Merleau-Ponty, in the essay “Cézanne’s Doubt,” where he writes that “although it is certain that a man’s life does not explain his work, it is equally certain that the two are connected. The truth is that this work to be done called for this life.”⁷³

Despite the difficulties and limitations of more author-centered accounts of film art and (creative) expression discussed and debated for what is now more than fifty years—as well as even more long-standing critiques of creator-focused theories and proposed definitions of art in general—the constellation of artistically relevant, “globally” expressive causes and effects I am attempting to describe has not only a certain phenomenological but inductive validity; that is, it finds apparent support in comparisons among films. Although the cineaesthetic world-feelings of Inland Empire or Solaris, for instance, are singular affective realities, they are likely closer to that of Lynch’s and Tarkovsky’s other films than to any other director’s works. If we may trust our informed intuitions here as viewers, many films are rightly regarded as versions or variations on the same authorial expression. This translates into the existence not only of a number of affectively, as well as formally and thematically, similar Lynch or Tarkovsky film worlds, but of a cinematic “universe” of a filmmaker, as one that his or her individual films come to make visible and exemplify. Thus, as well as being similar in terms of the presence of the same or similar characters, locations, themes, allusions, genres, techniques, and stylistic templates—all of which may, of course, also form patterns and viewer experiences that reflect both an individual cinematic style and an artistic personality—we may further envision such a creator universe as comprising films bound together by characteristic world-feelings created and conveyed by them. Like that of a painter or novelist, a filmmaker’s creative signature may reside in more diffuse, less directly representational but at the same time more intimate, tones, moods, durations, and atmospheres, every bit as much as a known penchant for (say) jump cuts, wide-angle lenses, circular narratives, or existential themes. Moreover, in experiencing several films by the same director, we may hope to become more receptive to the differences among the films constituting a body of work in this major, affective-expressive respect.

Acknowledging such proprietary or “creator-owned” film-world expression (or feeling) does not necessarily challenge the affective and experiential singularity and alterity of an individual film work and world. Bazin, for instance, was keen to preserve and defend this inviolable singularity of a film’s own “world” against the radical auteurism espoused by the younger Cahiers du cinéma critics (and future directors) in the late 1950s. For Bazin (and some subsequent theorists) auteurism, even in moderate forms, is always in danger of lapsing into an “aesthetic personality cult.”74 It risks regarding a director’s body of work as a homogeneous, over determined entity, omnivorously absorbing and absolving significant generic, stylistic, and experiential differences among films. Yet recognizing and appreciating an affective and affecting “Lynch world” or “Tarkovsky world” is, of course, predicated on first experiencing and coming to know and appreciate the aesthetic world-feeling of, for example, Blue Velvet and Lost Highway, Andrei Rublev and The Sacrifice, individually. The attribution of all such creator worlds (and their distinctive affective designs), no matter how immediate and obvious their existence may sometimes seem, is still an interpretive, critical, or second-order extrapolation from individual works. To evoke Michel Chion’s description (for his own film-critical and theoretical enterprise), such a frame of reference, centering on the identification of recurrent, expressive properties, instead serves to “bring the politique of auteurs into a dialectical relationship with the politique of the work.”75 Like the exemplified features of artworks in general, the global affective atmosphere established by a cinematic work is and can only be a sample of itself, something of and for which the work itself is the concrete manifestation and symbol (in a certain sense).

In fact, the relevance of samples, descriptions, and the related concept of artistic exemplification in this context shows that even here, with respect to an irreducible and “subjective” affective expression conveyed by a film world as a whole, we have not totally escaped, or moved beyond, all relevant symbolization. As we saw in chapter 5, exemplification as a referential process is a matter of a work’s foregrounding one property or sensible aspect of itself—whether simple or complex, perceptually given or symbolically mediated—relative to (some) others possessed. Although a global, relational property of the film world as experiential object or event for viewers, cine aesthetic world-feeling is still selected, featured, and, in effect, offered up for experience by the work. And, like other exemplifications throughout art, it elicits and inspires viewers, critics, and theorists to attach relevant semantic labels to this holistic phenomenon, in the hope of capturing at least some better sense of (what is, after all) a primarily nondiscursive, artistic, and affective presence. However, turning again to our actual, critical practice (and following Dufrenne’s lead on this point), in addition to applying such adjectives as lyrical, tragic, grotesque, and many others to local, as well as more global, instances of cinematic expression, it is both revealing and appropriate that the labels in question are frequently ad hominem. That is, we speak of the “atmosphere” or “tone” or “mood” of Kurosawa or Antonioni or Murnau versus that of Ozu or Fellini or Lang; or, again, we speak simply of the feeling of a “Kurosawa world” or an “Antonioni world.”⁷⁶ Thus, as akin to Langer’s stated view that the artwork as a whole is an externally objectified manifestation and symbol of irreducible subjective “feeling” finding artistic objectification, the global, aesthetic world-feeling of a film can be seen as a kind of “meta-exemplification” tied to its creator’s attitudes as well as cognitive intentions.

CINEAESTHETIC IMMERSION

Since the world-feeling of a film is by nature a nonempirical, intentional property, brought into being in a relation between features of the work and the empathetic or other feeling capacities of viewers, its relation to immersion is a close and, as might be said, intimate one. The attentive viewer moves into the affective and temporal “interiority” of a film as experienced, seemingly beyond or below its perceptual surface, in order to be in position to both apprehend this form of cumulative expression and yield to its persuasion—in the sense that we associate feeling and affectivity with a depth going “beyond appearances.” What Sarris terms ineffable “interior meaning” and Dufrenne describes as an irreducible affective and aesthetic world-atmosphere are present, or disclosed, only for viewers who are in certain senses receptive to the film world as an artistic event (as I will elaborate on in the next chapter), which may also be conceived as virtually entering into the cinematic work’s world. In other words, if the aesthetic experience of film typically involves a series of local affective and imagined entrances and exits into various represented, implied, and imagined “spaces” (including fictional-narrative ones), there is also, as overlapping and building on it, a more general, and often more profound, form of psychological immersion, and (to some degree) “surrender,” for which cineaesthetic world-feeling is a primary vehicle.

Like other experiential worlds, but in a highly concentrated fashion, the world of a cinematic work concretely “feels like something” one is actively involved with, participating in, and absorbed by. (In attempting to further account for this basic human sensitivity to the composite and irreducible feelings and atmospheres of individual worlds, both within and without the realm of art, Dufrenne speculates about the existence of an “affective a priori,” something like the innate, or a priori, mental categories that Kant famously posits.)77 Correspondingly, and as is true of other enclosed worlds of experience, to be affected by a film world’s total created expression entails already being within the particular experiential fold or arena that it creates through the artistic use of a given moving-image media. The concept of immersion is here taken to involve and require entry into the full aesthetic reality of a film as temporarily substituting a perceptual and imaginative participation with represented characters, environments, and situations—and a singular atmosphere of feeling in, through, and around them—for the viewer’s ordinary perceptual environment and feeling-world(s). Generally speaking, however, and contrary to some representation-focused and illusion- and “make-believe”-centered accounts of film viewing and immersion, the relevant aesthetic immersion in a film during its experience, together with its difference in kind from an imagination-based (and what I have called cognitive-diegetic) engagement and immersion in a fictional narrative or story-world (in-and-for-itself), is aptly described by Dufrenne as “the acquisition of an intimacy with what the object expresses. It is no longer a question of pretending that Hamlet is real so that we may become interested in his adventures. Instead, we make ourselves present to Hamlet’s world so that it may touch us and flow into us” (406). Thus, a significant part of a film’s aesthetic experience can be seen as a matter of a “sympathetic reflection which strives to grasp the work from the inside” (i.e., of its experience as a work) as he also advises, wherein such reflection occurs at the “instigation of feeling” (423) as opposed to being only intellectually grasped or recognized from a distance, as it were. Like its local cognitive-diegetic and sensory-affective analogues, cine aesthetic immersion is especially encouraged and foregrounded in some film worlds, just as it may be deemphasized, discouraged, and thwarted in others (a fact that perhaps misleads some theorists in regard to its film-artistic significance).

Just as with respect to the primarily sensory “bombardment” or seduction of which cinema is obviously capable, the aesthetic immersion (and “surrender”) in question, it must be emphasized, is also not necessarily equivalent to some kind of mesmeric, hypnotic fascination before the screen. This is true even if, with respect to some celebrated works by celebrated directors like Dreyer, Herzog, and Tarr, such reaction and engagement may doubtlessly be one common, appropriate, and intended response to a given cinematic work-world and a fair description of the core of its perceptual and affective experience. If such immersion is not rooted in any form of cognitive illusion (in itself), however, then neither is it a matter of work-conveyed feeling alone. Aesthetic immersion in the world of a cinematic work, like that of a novel or a theatrical performance, is also tied to thinking through and working out issues, questions, puzzles, or problems that it poses to the viewer on narrative, reflexive, conceptual, or even “philosophical” levels of address. Such cognitive, reflective engagement may precede or accompany the taking up of a stance or attitude that is more “internal” to the work and submits to its temporal development: here it comes to be accompanied by the intimacy, depth, and subjectivity of an affective response.78 This is tantamount to saying that to mentally and emotionally enter the world of a film in aesthetic fashion, one may first have to become acquainted with it and, in that concrete sense, to “know” it.

Concerning the relation between aesthetic feeling and reflective thought in the experience of a film, Mitry rightly argues that the “aesthetic attitude in the cinema” is a matter of “participation” or “active contemplation” rather than contemplation alone, given that no other art is so fully capable of synthesizing the “two languages . . . of reason and emotion, reaching the one through the other in an interdependence of whose reciprocity remains constant.”79 With respect to the counterintuitive cause-and-effect intricacies of time travel (Lajetée, Primer), the morality of terrorism and counterterrorism (The Battle of Algiers), the associative cultural relations among Marilyn Monroe, Joseph McCarthy, and the atomic bomb (Insignificance), and many other complex and thought-provoking issues and realities, narrative films may make considerable demands on the viewer’s intellect, as required to function in real time. Yet no matter how abstract, conceptual, or purely formal the features of a given film world are, aesthetic reflection on them during a film’s experience is often marked by an affective charge or valence, and hence a meaning for the viewer from which the perceiving and feeling I cannot be (entirely) excluded.

As implied here, what may be termed cine aesthetic immersion is inherently both self- and work-reflexive. It necessarily involves some attention to, and reflection on, a film as a created work, but it also includes, quite often, reflection on one’s own dynamic and changing experience of it. What Elliott writes of aesthetic immersion in the world of a poem holds also for film, namely that it entails “an awareness of certain qualities of an objective content” but combined with a “reflexive awareness of certain aspects of the experience as such.”⁸⁰ This is at least one differentia of film and dream experience. Unlike being metaphorically lost in a dream, or a daydream, aesthetic immersion in a film world carries along some sense that everything one feels and thinks occurs in the context and confines of an aesthetic experience that is not only uniquely occasioned by the work but is also a direct consequence of its artistic forms and purposes (however these are attributed) and our responses, as viewers, to them. (This is where the affective and aesthetic experience provided by a cinematic work-world overlaps with the hermeneutic event of understanding and truth its viewing also entails, in ways to be addressed in the next chapter.) Thus the “surrendering oneself” that has been mentioned should be thought of not as passive acceptance but rather as an active, on going negotiation between the self and a created film world as an aesthetic object (as bound to its interpretation, understanding, and truth), in the form, that is, of a kind of experimentation, including in the feeling dimension, that is also an exploration.

In this context we come back yet again to one of the principal themes of our account—namely that for viewers the appreciation of cinematic art requires more or less simultaneous attention to a film as (a) an audio visual, sensory presentation; (b) a narrative-fictional, imagination-enabled reality; and (c) a specially created, symbolically constructed, and artistically intended work. All three forms of attention constitute a film world in aesthetic and experiential terms and realize a unique, total (or “global”) feeling or affective atmosphere and an often pronounced immersion as intimately related to it. And however relatively resistant to precise analysis the feeling-constellation and immersion in question may be, they cannot be removed from, or neglected in, any adequate, let alone would-be more comprehensive, theorization of narrative cinema as art.

The basic character of film worlds as symbolic constructions (or, if one prefers, intentional communicative objects) entails that the viewer’s deepest aesthetic relation to a film—as taking the form of participatory immersion—is not passive but responsive. And, with reference to one prominent way in which all aesthetic experience has been traditionally theorized, although neither practical nor involving major actions of the body, it is certainly never “disinterested” (affectively or otherwise). Yet, and as we will now turn to reflect on further in the final chapter, as well as to experience and feel, the artistic event of a film world is also a quest to learn and understand. Paralleling and overlapping the immersion in film viewing we have discussed, this understanding occurs in an equally global sense and on an equally global film-world scale, that is, with respect to the total meaning and presence of a cinematic work (as it may be ascertained). Crucially, it involves both a mental and cultural situating of a film world, as this artistic (and narrative) totality, in relation to other worlds—real and imagined, cinematic and noncinematic, narrative and nonnarrative.