A Certain Tendency of Film Theory: Affect, Cinema, and the Aesthetics of Embodiment

By John Hodgkins (University of Rhode Island)

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In her essay "Cinema and Embodied Affect," Anne Rutherford calls for a shift in film theory away from the "insistence on scientific models" and toward an "articulation of an aesthetics of embodiment which recognizes the full resonance of embodied affect in the experience of cinema spectatorship" (1). Steven Shaviro endorses such a paradigmatic shift, arguing that film "is a vivid medium, and it is important to talk about how it arouses corporeal reactions of desire and fear, pleasure and disgust, fascination and shame" (viii). This new avenue of "affective" critical investigation is vital and necessary, both Rutherford and Shaviro suggest, because film viewing is-at its core-a sensuous and visceral experience, an agitation and excitation of the senses. All too often in contemporary theory, however, these somatic considerations are either ignored or subsumed into larger discussions of cinematic form and ideology; hence, the raw, palpable, tactile dimensions inherent in cinema (and their implications for film as a medium and art form) are rarely examined in any meaningful way. Furthermore, if Shaviro is correct when he posits that a filmgoer's "affective experiences directly and urgently involve a politics," then one can also view a more affect-oriented film theory as a possible heuristic for interrogating "power" and the ways in which it "works in the depths and on the surfaces of the body" (viii). By focusing more closely on the "affective potency" of cinema, therefore, film theorists may find a strategy for breaking free from the hegemonic grip of rigorous scientificity and forging a new methodology, one that does not shy away from film's sensory and somatosensory impact, and consequently offers new theoretical pathways for exploring cinema's artistic and sociopolitical potential. Robert Stam has described the history of film theory as exhibiting a kind of dialogue between "creative imagination" and "analytical critique," a productive "oscillation between ecstatic enthusiasmsand the dry analytical rigor of those who tidy up the enchanting mess the creative enthusiasts have made" (8-9). The critical creativity and enthusiasm alluded to by Stam is particularly evident in the work of the earliest film theorists. For instance, for all of his concern about optics, the "phi-phenomenon," and the technical apparatus of filmmaking, Hugo Munsterberg-as early as 1916-was also extolling in quasi-mystical language cinema's unique ability to tap directly into a viewer's "inner world, namely, attention, memory, imagination, and emotion" (402; italics in original). Bela Balasz took this intimate connection between audience and filmic image one step further, arguing that a close-up of a human face extracts viewers from spatial and temporal coordinates and thrusts us "out of space, our consciousness of space is cut out and we find ourselves in another dimension," that of pure "emotions, moods, intentions and thoughts" (306307). Such transcendental language would be echoed in Sergei Eisentstein's concept of "ecstasy," described as a "movement lifting one out of oneself" and into what Jacques Aumont depicts as a sort of "ecstatic vibration" (quoted in Rutherford 6); and in the work of Impressionist critics such as Louis Delluc and Jean Epstein. Epstein, in fact, nicely captured the essence of much earlier theory when he characterized cinema not so much as a storytelling or narrative-driven medium, as a tool for exploring "the non-linguistic, non-rational operations" of the human mind and body (quoted in Stam 36). Like all good things, however, this fertile, spirited, and suggestive early theory would not last. As Stam explains, as the cinema developed and evolved, critics began to search for a more disciplined, "objective" methodology, one less reliant on their own "neuro-glandular response to films" (92). This search for a scientific model led to what Rutherford would term a "somatophobic" trend in film theory-that is, a trend toward overlooking our bodily and phenomenological responses to cinema in

favor of a dispassionate, analytical consideration of film's grammatical and ideological components (7). The first major turn in this direction occurred in the 1960s, when theorists began to apply Saussurean linguistics and structuralist thought to the cinema. This resulted in, to employ Christian Metz's terminology, the rise of "filmolinguistics"-a film semiology that represented the "convergence of linguistics and cinephilia" (quoted in Stam 108). Filmolinguistics would gain ground and hold sway as the dominant discourse in film theory until the mid-1970s, when critics began to infuse their semiotic discussions with both Marxian (specifically Althusserian) concepts and psychoanalytic notions such as fetishism, scopophilia, and the Lacanian conception of the mirror stage, the Imaginary, and the Symbolic. Over the ensuing decades, these schools of thought were to become so influential (and institutionalized) in film theory that Steven Shaviro would eventually describe them as composing "an all-encompassing, hegemonic paradigm for the critical and theoretical discussion of film" (13). If one wants to write about cinema today and be taken seriously, it seems, one must write in the language of Saussure, Althusser, or Lacan. Considering the extent to which these "master discourses" have defined and delimited the field of recent scholarly inquiry, then, it is not surprising that theorists like Shaviro and Rutherford are looking to break new critical ground; for as Shaviro puts it, one cannot always reduce a filmgoer's "agitation of the senses and compulsive fascination" to the "effects of lack, disavowal, and ideological or Imaginary misrecognition" (14; 33). There is something else, something more, at work in our various responses to the cinema: an involvement of the flesh and the nerves and the viscera, an involvement that cannot be completely explained away by the scientific jargon of semiotics and psychoanalysis. Film viewing is, at the end of the day, not just an audio-visual experience, but also a kinesthetic and synesthetic one that arouses corporeal reactions; it is high time this fact was reflected and addressed in contemporary film theory. Certain theorists have already begun the process of returning "the body" to the corpus of film theory. In the 1980s, Gilles Deleuze launched a critique of the Lacanian and Sausserean influence in film studies, and recast cinema not as language but as blocks of movement and time; for Deleuze, film viewers are "carried away by the undulations of a great wave" as we experience lived duration and motion through our thoughts and bodies (Cinema 2 112). Brian Massumi, drawing from Deleuze, would introduce the term mesoperception, which he defines as "proprioception and viscerality taken togetherthe synesthetic sensibility: it is the medium where inputs from all five senses meet, across subsensate excitation, and become flesh together, tense and quivering" (62). Both Massumi and Deleuze are here conceptualizing the cinematic experience as a kind of multisensory exchange, an affective transaction in which the boundaries between image and body begin to blur. Building on this idea, Rutherford conceives of the viewing of a film as a type of "embodied vision," which is "an inherently tactile, and thereby simultaneously affective process" (7). For Rutherford, this movement toward an aesthetics of embodiment liberates cinema studies from its occluding "scientific" shackles and frees the critic to explore "the underside, the suppressed underbelly" of film theory: the effects of cinema on our living bodies, our bodies "with feelings, sensations, perceptions and emotions" (9; 2). Of course, the question then becomes: if film theory is once more going to turn its critical eye to "how the embodied affect of the spectator is aroused, activated, enhanced, brought into play" by cinema, how do theorists avoid the familiar accusation that they are relying too heavily on their own "neuro-glandular" responses (9)? How do they avoid, as Tim Groves phrased it, appearing too "confessional" and solipsistic in their writing (2)? Shaviro has an interesting response to this dilemma. Rather than striking a defensive posture, Shaviro goes on the offensive, and contends that the pleasures, constraints, and obsessions of writing theory "cannot be separated from the bodily agitations, the movements of fascination, the reactions of attraction and repulsion, of which they are the extension and elaboration" (10). Those theorists who do attempt to strike a dispassionate distance from filmic texts, according to Shaviro, are simply "constructing the most elegant,

rigorous, even lucidly self-interrogating discourses, only to ground and to justify their most singular pleasures, their most gratuitous obsessions, their most untranslatable sensations" (11). In other words, they demonstrate a "reflex movement of suspicion, disavowal, and phobic rejection" when it comes to directly contemplating the palpably visceral elements inherent in cinema, and instead attempt to obscure (or excuse) their intimate sensations and corporeal resonances amidst a scaffolding of dense scientific terminology (11). As a result, their writing all too frequently evinces a "bait and switch" quality: one can sense, beneath the terminology, that these theorists have had passionate, even physical responses to the cinema; yet such somatic considerations rarely enter into their theoretical concerns, much to film theory's detriment. In addition to glossing over one of cinema's primary attractions, "somatophobic" theory also tends to foreclose certain "potentials for resistance and subversion" (12). Using Laura Mulvey's seminal essay "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" as a case study, Shaviro demonstrates how Mulvey's psychoanalytic theory of classical Hollywood filmmaking serves to outline "a scenario of castration anxiety so all-encompassing that no form of narrative or visual enjoyment or engagement is exempt" (12). The unintended effect of this argument, Shaviro concludes, is that Mulvey cuts off any subversive "lines of flight" that may be "latent within mainstream, narrative film" (12). Her theory becomes so totalizing, so rigorously comprehensive and inflexible, that fresh and contrary readings of certain filmic texts are all but impossible. One way of breaking such hegemonic theoretical strangleholds is through an aesthetics of embodiment and embodied affect. Even Mulvey would have to concede that individual filmgoers can have very different physical and affective reactions to the same movie. What sense can we make of these disparate reactions? What do they tell us about a filmic text, the viewers, and cinema spectatorship itself? And, further, if affective responses do "urgently involve a politics," can we then extrapolate to reflect on issues of power, and how it operates in and on our bodies? These are the points of intervention for a new, affect-oriented theory, a theory more attuned to the dynamic, fluid, and tactile relationship between spectator and cinema-one that will plumb more fully cinema's artistic depths, and open up (rather than foreclose) novel and subversive theoretical "lines of flight." Works Cited Balasz, Bela. "The Close-Up." Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings. Eds. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. 304-311. Benjamin, Walter. "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction." The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Gen. ed. Vincent B. Leitch. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2001. 1166-1186. Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 1: The Movement-Image. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986. ---. Cinema 2: The Time Image. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989. Groves, Tim. "Cinema/Affect/Writing." Senses of Cinema (February 2003). 21 Feb. 2006 . Massumi, Brian. Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Post-Contemporary Interventions). Durham: Duke University Press, 2002. Munsterberg, Hugo. "The Means of the Photoplay." Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings. Eds. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. 401-407.

Rutherford, Anne. "Cinema and Embodied Affect." Senses of Cinema (2002). 21 Feb. 2006. . Shaviro, Steven. The Cinematic Body. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. Stam, Robert. Film Theory: An Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2000. Tomkins, Silvan. Shame and Its Sisters: A Silvan Tomkins Reader. Eds. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Adam Frank, and Irving E. Alexander. Durham: Duke University Press, 1995. Go to main menu