Left speechless, motionless but our guts bubbling with a feeling. One that does not seem to have a description, one that rests in the projected image. We realise our bodies mirror the functions of this power source, providing light to a cell moving through camera to screen to our blood pumping around our bodies.
It is unsurprising as academic discussion of philosophy through film receives attention, that the suggestion of inward sensorial responses are also at play. These responses are curated from a deeper meaning which boils down to attraction and disgust, the physical attributes from the muscular responses from human bodies and consciousness (Barker, 2009). Here we become embodied spectators who take films in with our whole bodies and an unconsciousness, that perhaps lies in the mind’s eye, left to process information of another level (Elsaesser & Hagener, 2015). The aesthetics of the film are essential to take into account when discussing cinematic phenomenology. Film relies on the aesthetic experience to facilitate the consciousness and emotional responses (Shaw, 2008). In this essay I argue that these aesthetics within several films are the key attributes to the visceral responses of disgust and nostalgia. In further discussion, aesthetics in phenomenology act as the connection between both subjective and objective aspects and the structure of the string of a conscious act that latches to the object itself (Barker, 2009).
It should be noted that this paper recognises the shift from the written word and its functions in relation to cinematic philosophy. These are accepted linguistics developing thought and theories; words bending cognitive functions into philosophical thought. However, philosophy of the film demands the recognition of the image. The transformation from linguistic language to a pictorial system which therefore signifies the birth of the language of film. It is this cinematic language inspired by Deleuze and Eisenstein through montage and surface level of consciousness (Shaw, 2008) that I will apply to my arguments and analysis of phenomenology and cinema. It is clear that the status of an image has now changed and a noetic consciousness is one that does not limit itself to the written word (Shaw, 2008). It is important to note, however, that this paper investigates past the skeleton of conscious and rather the perception of film living in the body itself (Elsaesser & Hagener, 2015). This essay therefore demonstrates the argument of embodied spectatorship and how this achieves (1) disgust within Dumplings (Fruit Chan, 2004) and Hunger (Steve McQueen, 2008) and (2) nostalgia within Ratatouille (Brad Bird, 2007) and Pleasantville (Gary Ross, 1998).
When discussing the sensory experience of disgust, it is automatically associated with the horror genre. The stomach churning and toe curling responses are ones viewers can relate to, but for a visceral response, the film demands to penetrate deep into our emotional attachments rather than just a simple scare-jump. Dumplings (Fruit Chan, 2004) tells the story of an ex-television star in pursuit of the secret to youth. This mysterious ingredient is smuggled from China by the infamous Aunt Mei (Bai Ling) and cooks up arguments of ethics, uncomfortable political statements mixed with the deep insecurities we have as humans. The cinematography, use of sound and editing in this film captures perfectly the extreme discomfort viewers experience. For example: the painfully long shots of eating, digesting with the viewer’s stomach anticipating in horror. There is a contrast of shocking reveals of gruesome and gory imagery of unborn foetuses with explicit sounds of preparation in the kitchen, this introduces terms such as sudden disgust and anticipatory disgust. (Hanich, 2011). This asymmetry acts as a trigger for the spectator’s expectation and in-turn their empathic participation. The importance of food when discussing this film is one which presents the argument of the phenomenology of Dumplings. Food can penetrate the real, integrating the aesthetics with subjectivity (Onfray et al, 2015). The plot of the film explores ordinary concerns amongst the abnormal. This sense of realism is created by production design and the cinematography which focuses on the capitalism rooted in the history of China. An example of this shown in the film would be through the production design of the interior, most notably the difference of Mrs. Li (Miriam Chin Was Yeung) and Mei’s homes. These economic differences show the capitalist pull of impoverished rural workers to obtain employment in the developing cities.Thus, spectators interpret the manufacturing of the dumplings as a service to the awaiting consumer (Kleinhans, 2014). It is these interpretations that penetrate viewers, leaving the viewer’s stomach bubbling with a sour taste of capitalism in the back of their throats. These visual oxymorons expressed throughout the film are highlighted in the viewer’s emotional responses. Despite the horror and greed surrounding Mrs Li’s hunger, spectators surprisingly feel sympathy for Mrs Li as the director normalises the unsettling exchange. While graphically, the film tests the boundaries as Mrs Li spirals, the viewer’s focus is instead on the insuperability of a woman wanting to be desired. Therefore, Chan uses the endocannibalism to prioritise the hard to answer questions, the posing of ethics and the dissolve of a capitalist system (Miller, 2017). In a phenomenological sense, viewers notice they have been starved like Mrs Li of a fulfilment, a lack of humanity in consuming of humanity itself. It is this hunger that is felt; a visceral symptom.
Disgust felt as an embodied spectator can be further identified in Hunger (Steve McQueen, 2008). This film follows an IRA hunger strike, led by Bobby Sands (Michael Fassbender) which provides an account of a mind and body pushed to the uttermost limit. Hunger relies on its aesthetic structure to starve us, leaving us empty and steals our appetite for more. This film strips back humanity to the bare bones, and leaves an ache. Similar to Dumplings, the disgust viewers feel is within the aesthetics of the image. With use of silence and painfully long cuts, viewers are forced to see images as transparent. The film does not rely on a consistent dialogue and instead chooses to instil discomfort in the shift from linguistic to pictorial (Goarzin, 2014). The film begins with images of rotting food in the corner of a bare prison cell. Shockingly, faeces cake the walls, smeared into cave art. Cellmates resembling cavemen, stripped down and living amongst the disgust (McNamee, 2009). Here, the director uses these images to merge the rational and the animality (Goarzin, 2014) and this relates to the paradox approach to fathom the unfathomed. Viewers are plunged deeper into the revulsion of the conditions of the prison, and throughout the film viewers are forced to see what prisoners see, and much like the prisoners over time the mind’s eye begins to wander. The director releases the visual imagery, and viewership seeks beyond the initial disgust (Melvin, 2011). During a scene in which there is a deep clean of the cell’s walls, a cleaner washes away the disgust for a moment. At this moment viewers are left with a permanent image burned into their retinas, into their own memory. The spectatorship in this sense is embodied, and viewers accept the moments of disgust as they unfold, the discomfort remains (Goarzin, 2014).
Furthermore, in the space of acceptance, the director focuses on the details, and draws the attention into the ordinary for viewers to reflect on. The film reads as an intense mediative experience, sharpening visual intensity in a sequence like a knife ready to penetrate viewers’ senses (McNamee, 2009). An example of this is highlighted in the monotonous sweeping scene, in which there is a guard cleaning up a river of urine (Melvin, 2011). Though the viewer’s noses immediately screw up, viewers watch hypnotised as the pendulum of the mop swings back and forth. In this way, viewers are forced to understand the complexities behind the initial disgust of this image. McQueen also uses this parallel in the opposed lifestyles of the prison guard and the prisoner, and this is predominately shown at the beginning of the film (McNamee, 2009). Cuts of a guard cleaning his hands, a lone snowflake on his knuckles contrast with the prisoner’s routine of protesting filth. These aesthetics of parallel between two different humans, in the ordinary and the extraordinary, shares a familiarity with Dumplings. The clinical ending of the film witnesses the gradual decay of Bobby as he starves himself in protest. The treatment of the film is detached, we watch in pain as his body begins to shut down. The eye remains the only coherent passage for viewers, the director does not treat the eye like a fixed organ; one that will fade (Goarzin, 2014). Death at the end of the film is treated with Deleuze’s plane of immanence, instead of the transcendence death we expect in films (Goarzin, 2014). Through use of montage, viewers gain a complete image and this raises the film’s ability of expression (Shaw, 2008). Viewers feel the stages of the death, the weight of the blanket against his bruised body with his bones pointing out of his skin. This is achieved through the use of montage, the recollection of images suggests viewers are able to encounter where memory lives (McNamee, 2009). The last sequence of the film is a reminder of how the film uses the appreciation of aesthetics to investigate the viewer’s interpretation. These images create a language that cannot linguistic explain the un-bearable or the un-figurable, and instead transfer meaning from one object to a subject to a renewed meaning settling deep within the visceral responses of viewership (Goarzin, 2014).
Just as cinema can embody our discomfort and our disgust through aesthetics and a pictorial system which reaches beyond. Cinema can dive into pleasure, causing our hairs to prick and our senses to relax. In some cases, it provokes a universal nostalgia deep within us and such films that are successful in this rely on similar aesthetics to previously discussed films. Ratatouille (Brad Bird, 2007) tells the unusual but fun story of a rat and his talent for cooking who aids a clueless kitchen worker at a famous Paris restaurant. As an animation, the film demonstrates a fluidity of movement which evokes an intensified response from viewers. It could be argued that the film’s delicacy and intricacy defines its cinema par excellence (Barker, 2009). I would argue the fluidity of animation, in particular to Ratatouille, is able to contribute to phenomenology due to Deleuze’s haptic visuality. This reduces the distance between cinema and the spectator, the ocular relationship of surface level detail is therefore dissolved (Herhuth, 2014). Behind the image, this distance between the spectator is metaphorically explored through the involuntary behaviours of Linguini’s (Lou Romano) character and his necessary surrender to his character’s senses. The viewers rely on a kin-haptic visuality that organises a synesthetic relationship between the sensible logic and the extraordinary (Herhuth, 2014). For example, viewers can easily imagine the exact touch of Linguini’s hair and the weight on the rat perched on their heads, even in the extraordinary situation unfolding in a fantastical genre. With reference to Deleuze, this can further explain the theory of Francis Bacon’s paintings, describing how colours and the space from colours travelling to the viewer is one that provokes the visual responses of what we can touch and what we can see (Deleuze, 2002). I would argue further than the surface of these colours, and the initial narration of interpretations run deeper and place emphasis on the skin of a film.
It is interesting that Ratatouille uses food and taste to provoke nostalgia, and this is possible through the activity of cooking. Taste is a common concept when discussing phenomenology within cinema. In terms of Ratatouille, the activity of cooking is arguably an act of humanity, one that establishes the difference between beast and human (Brandes & Anderson, 2011). Ratatouille is nourishing as a film and uses the irony of a rat, known for their intrusion into the human world, to remind viewers of the importance of senses which are able to digest nostalgia. Just as Anton Ego (Peter O’Toole) tucks into his childhood, this represents the phenomenology of the film as a whole. Furthermore, food throughout the film acts as a bridge of the paradox of the real and the taste we remember (Herhuth, 2014). Much like Hunger and Dumplings this hybrid of the ordinary and extraordinary leads to the space of a phenomenological production. Similar to Hunger’s visceral response to the origin of memory and the bridge of immanence, here too does Ratatouille transport spectators to a nostalgia rooted in the unconsciousness through the flawless aesthetics. Phenomenology in this sense lives in the familiar, in the experience of taste and the humanity of cooking. The realism of the kitchen and Pixar’s hyper-real style aids a depiction of community and interprets a wider meaning of humanity and belonging (Herhuth, 2014). Ratatouille does not starve, it feeds. Viewers are left full, and satisfied.
This satisfaction is also explored in Pleasantville (Gary Ross, 1998) and presents a political imprint of nostalgia throughout. One that neatly asserts itself into a comedy-drama genre, exploring the world of a 1950s sitcom. When David Wagner (Tobey Maguire), a teenager obsessed with the television show ‘Pleasantville’, zaps himself and his sister into this televised landscape, their influence dramatically changes the perfected world. This film notably transforms a monochrome movie into a gradual colourised spectacle, and one that focuses on the rooted nostalgia in the concept of a suburb. Within this film, the space of a suburb is organised and managed which asserts a conceptualisation of a good life (Dickinson, 2006). The American dream and 1950s desires are eloquently shown in the white picket fences and Edenic gardens which remain unquestioned in this world (Dickinson, 2006), and this harbours a pleasure of community. This pleasure is heightened through the aesthetics of the film, predominately through the monochrome visuals. Despite the film’s colour as black and white, the images seem sharper and more attractive to the viewer (Dickinson, 2006) and intentionally appeals to the familiar. This familiar is similar to the familiarities explored in Ratatouille and I would argue a common trope in provoking a visceral nostalgic reaction. Here, cultural and aesthetic memory is embedded in viewership (Grainge, 2018). The quintessential conservative lifestyle is fetishised throughout the film and creates an image of citizenship. This image is one that is interpreted by viewers, formed from a prelapsarian outlook.
However, the film uses the same paradoxical discourse previously discussed in this essay. The colour injections that appear throughout the film highlight the dangers and risks of poster-modernity. One that threatens the carefully portrayed nostalgia. A metaphorical example of this in the film would be Mr Johnson’s (Jeff Daniels) artwork which is of a modern pop-art style, one admired by the estranged Betty (Joan Allen) and it is this introduction of modernist which inevitably breaks the traditional family dynamic. This device creates an image of the past, one which causes an anxiety amongst the perfected suburban life. And yet, this causes a perverse nostalgia, one which draws on the paradox of the sublime. The viewers are comfortable in the simplicities of suburbia and take pleasure in the escape, but the discomfort in fascist and cultural disjunctions are still present in the same images. It is this that reflects the epistemological film-going conditions, spectators cannot become participants (Jarvie, 1987). Moreover, this contributes to notions of film as body, and one Pleasantville uses through aesthetic structures to inflict on spectators.
Overall, it is clear that embodied spectatorship is formed from digestible aesthetics that reach beyond an image and into the body itself. This spectatorship is one that relies on deeper interpretation that can evoke senses and metaphorically display wider notions. Through my discussion in this essay, I have dissected several techniques in films and how these aesthetics achieved can influence visceral responses. I have reflected on the theme of disgust and the discomfort of the extraordinary verses the ordinary and how this can create an upheaval in the body. These paradoxical extremes often relate to a starvation of reflection, in the cases of Hunger and Dumplings — both reflect on the ethics of life and leave spectators questioning the true horrors. In addition, I have also considered nostalgia and pleasure and how these emotions can be embodied through aesthetics of humanity and what it means to be human. This was discussed in regards to Ratatouille and Pleasantville, in which both films explore a sensorial logic rooted in domesticity. Fundamentally, all films penetrate the construction of the self and leave interpretations deep within the visceral.
This essay proves that despite genre differentiations, films offer an invitation to the spectator and this is accepted despite the reality of a viewer drenched in intense sound and light, in a dark room (Jarvie, 1987).
Bibliography
Barker, J. (2009) The Tactile Eye: touch and the cinematic experience. University of California Press. E-Book retrieved from: https://discoverlibrary.stir.ac.uk/iii/encore/record/C__Rb2923286
Brandes, S. & Anderson, T. (2011) Ratatouille: An Animated Account of Cooking, Taste, and Human Evolution. Journal of Anthropology, V76, Issue 3, 277-299. Retrieved from: https://doi.org/10.1080/00141844.2011.569559
Deleuze, G. (2002) Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation. (Smith, D. TRANS). University of Minnesota Press. Minneapolis
Dickinson, G. (2006) The Pleasantville Effect: Nostalgia and the Visual Framing of (White) Suburbia. Western Journal of Communication, V70, Issue 3, 212-233. Retrieved from: https://doi.org/10.1080/10570310600843504
Elsaesser, T. & Hagener, M. (2015) Film Theory: An Introduction through the Senses. Second Edition Routledge, New York.
Grainge, P ( 2018) Colouring the past: Pleasantville and the textuality of media memory. Memory and Popular Film. Manchester University Press. Retrieved from: https://doi.org/10.7765/9781526137531.00018
Goarzin, A. (2014) Seeing “Seeing” in Steve McQueen’s “Hunger”. Nordic Irish Studies, V13, Issue 2, 79-97. Retrieved from: https://www.jstor.org/stable/24332410
Hanich, J. (2011) Towards a Poetics of Cinematic Disgust. Film-Philosophy. V15, Issue 2. Retrieved from: https://www-euppublishing-com.ezproxy-s1.stir.ac.uk/doi/10.3366/film.2011.0023
Herhuth, E. (2014) Cooking like a Rat: Sensation and Politics in Disney-Pixar’s Ratatouille. Quarterly Review of Film and Video, V31, Issue 5, 469-485. Retrieved from: https://doi.org/10.1080/10509208.2012.679507
Jarvie, I. (1987) Philosophy of the Film: Epistemology, Ontology, Aesthetics. Routledge & Kegan Paul Inc, USA
Kleinhans, C (2014) Serving the people - Dumplings. Jump cut: A Review of Contemporary Media. Retrieved from: https://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/jc49.2007/Dumplings/5.html
MacKenzie, S. (2014) Film Manifestos and Global Cinema Cultures: A Critical Anthology. University of California Press. Retrieved from: https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/stir/reader.action?docID=1650802
McNamee, E. (2009) Eye witness - memorialising humanity in Steve McQueen’s Hunger. Cambridge University Press. V5, Issue 3, 281-294. Retrieved from: https://doi.org/10.1017/S1744552309990127
Melvin, A. (2011) Sonic motifs, structure and identify in Steve McQueen’s Hunger. The Soundtrack, V4, Issue 1, 23-32. Retrieved from: https://doi.org/10.1386/st.4.1.23_1
Miller, C. (2017) What’s eating you? Food and Horror on Screen. Bloomsbury Academic.
Onfray, M et al. (2015). Appetites for Thought: Philosophers and Food. Reaktion Books, Limited. Retrieved from: https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/stir/reader.action?docID=1939080
Shaw, S. (2008) Film Consciousness: From Phenomenology to Deleuze. McFarland & Company, Inc.
Filmography
Lewis, B. (Producer) & Bird, B (Director) (2007). Ratatouille. [Motion Picture] United States: Pixar Animation Studios
Peter Chan et al. (Producer) & Chan, F (Director) (2004). Dumplings. [Motion Picture] Hong Kong: Applause Pictures Ltd.
Ross, G et al. (Producer) & Ross, G (Director) (1998). Pleasantville. [Motion Picture] United States: Larger than Life.
Smith, L et al. (Producer) & McQueen, S (Director) (2008). Hunger. [Motion Picture] Ireland: Film4 Productions.
Comments
Post a Comment