Courses by Jordan Schonig
Since the 1970s, movies have become increasingly dependent on digital technologies. This course e... more Since the 1970s, movies have become increasingly dependent on digital technologies. This course explores a range of issues related to the digitization of cinema’s production, distribution, and exhibition, including the cultural contexts and aesthetic practices surrounding these technological shifts as well as their experiential and political dimensions. In particular, we will explore such topics as digital cinematography’s relation to cinematic realism, emerging trends in editing practices, the political implications of digital special effects, and the ways that other digital media influence cinematic techniques. 6 video lessons374 views
Videos by Jordan Schonig
Accounts of early film spectatorship often explain the viewer’s fascination with peripheral detai... more Accounts of early film spectatorship often explain the viewer’s fascination with peripheral details—i.e. the wind in the trees of the Lumieres’ Repas de bebe—as an attraction to the “contingencies” indiscriminately captured by the camera. Such accounts tend to understand the attraction as an effect of cinema’s novel ability to show the autonomy of the world unfold independently of authorial control.
Rethinking the appeal of rippling waves, rising dust, and fluttering leaves in terms of unplannable movements rather than unplanned events, this video essay examines an unlikely sympathy between early cinema spectatorship and the recent attention to hyperrealistic details in computer-generated animation, such as the dust in Wall-E, the flowing hair in Brave, and the snow in Frozen. 49 views
Books by Jordan Schonig
The Shape of Motion: Cinema and the Aesthetics of Movement, a first book by Jordan Schonig, is a ... more The Shape of Motion: Cinema and the Aesthetics of Movement, a first book by Jordan Schonig, is a unique and deeply engaging foray into some of cinema's numerous and often overlooked motion forms. By studying six different forms of cinematic motion, the book also, and importantly, presents a method for critically engaging with the movements in and of cinema. Significantly, Schonig proposes what we could call an alternative phenomenology of cinematographic movement, a way to "re-examine an aspect of cinema so fundamental that it rarely garners sustained theoretical attention." 1 Throughout six chapters and a conclusion, Schonig consistently and convincingly highlights the fundamental strangeness of movement when it is imaged-that is, when it is framed (temporally and spatially) and made available for reviewing. Each chapter deals with a different kind of motion form, from the "wind in the trees" of early cinema to unusual camera movements to the novel effects of compression glitches. None of Schonig's examples are strictly limited to any particular period in film history, as he prioritizes tracing links between recognizable phenomena, regardless of their context or, for the most part, of their function within narrative films.
The Shape of Motion, 2021
This chapter examines the aesthetic properties and phenomenological effects of compression glitch... more This chapter examines the aesthetic properties and phenomenological effects of compression glitches—blocky image distortions that momentarily deform digitally compressed video. As visible expressions of the invisible processes of digital video compression, compression glitches offer unprecedented encounters with the technological production of cinematic motion. Two distinct consequences of these encounters are explored in this chapter. First, because compression glitches are more likely to occur when the compression algorithm is overworked by large volumes of onscreen movement, the ubiquity of compression glitches has yielded a spectatorial sensitivity to the magnitude of movement on screen. Second, because compression glitches extract movement itself (i.e., algorithmic motion instructions) from its original visual context, the visual qualities of such glitches heighten our attention to the formal qualities of movement as distinct from the actions and events that such movements comp...
The Shape of Motion, 2021
This chapter examines the perceptual and aesthetic properties of “spatial unfurling,” an effect a... more This chapter examines the perceptual and aesthetic properties of “spatial unfurling,” an effect achieved by moving the camera across space rather than into it, such as in lateral tracking shots. By emphasizing the flatness of the screen and the boundaries of the frame, spatial unfurling lacks the feeling of kinesthesia characteristic of forward camera movement. As a result, spatial unfurling illustrates the limitations of the long-held truism in film theory that camera movement produces an illusion of our own embodied movement through space. By critiquing the logic of this truism as it appears in phenomenological film theory, and by examining the perceptual effects of spatial unfurling in narrative and experimental films such as Mauvais Sang (Carax, 1986), La région centrale (Snow, 1971), and Georgetown Loop (Jacobs, 1996), this chapter argues for a phenomenological account of camera movement that forgoes analogies with bodily movement and instead emphasizes one’s perceptual encount...
The Shape of Motion
This chapter examines the phenomenological and aesthetic effects of “durational metamorphoses,” s... more This chapter examines the phenomenological and aesthetic effects of “durational metamorphoses,” slow movements of incremental change that result in a sense of visual transformation, such as a sunrise or the shape-shifting of clouds. These movements have become hallmarks of “slow cinema” in the last twenty years, but also can be traced back to the non-narrative experiments of structural film such as Fogline (Gottheim, 1970) or the landscape films of James Benning (e.g., Ten Skies, 2004). By analyzing sequences featuring durational metamorphoses across narrative films and video installations such as Silent Light (Reygadas, 2007), The Locked Garden (Viola, 2000), and Cemetery of Splendor (Apichatpong, 2015), this chapter demonstrates how a phenomenology of durational metamorphoses can help rethink the discourse of cinematic slowness, which often treats slowness and stasis as occasions to retreat away from the perception of the screen and toward contemplation. Against this common unders...
The Shape of Motion
This chapter examines the perceptual and aesthetic properties of the “follow shot,” a tracking sh... more This chapter examines the perceptual and aesthetic properties of the “follow shot,” a tracking shot that follows a human subject on foot from behind. Analyzing two films that conspicuously explore the follow shot as their core stylistic principle, Alan Clarke’s Elephant (1989) and Gus Van Sant’s Elephant (2003), this chapter shows how the formal properties of the follow shot—the camera’s forward movement, its denial of the subject’s face, and its sense of being tethered to its subject—are crucial to each film’s meditation on violence and human agency. By visually emphasizing the forward movement of its subjects while denying access to their interiorities (via the face), the follow shot attunes its viewers to its subject’s agency as a sense of pure “towardness” devoid of psychological insight, an effect the chapter calls “trajectivity.” Such a mode of representing subjectivity, the chapter argues, opposes cinematic traditions that rely on a seamless relation between psychological mot...
The Shape of Motion
This chapter examines fluttering leaves, swirling dust, and rippling waves as one of cinema’s ear... more This chapter examines fluttering leaves, swirling dust, and rippling waves as one of cinema’s earliest and most significant forms of motion. While most theorists maintain that such phenomena attracted early spectators because their unplanned appearance flaunted the indexical realism of cinema’s indiscriminate recording, this chapter shows how this attraction is part of a broader visual appeal of “contingent motion” that precedes the cinematic image and persists in the age of digital animation. Specifically, the chapter juxtaposes phenomenological insights about such phenomena in Kant’s Critique of Judgment, early spectators’ reactions to such phenomena in “wave films,” and contemporary spectators’ reactions to synthetic versions of such phenomena in computer-generated cartoons like Frozen (2013). In revealing a phenomenological consistency across these three different ways of encountering such phenomena, the chapter shows how early spectators’ astonishment at fluttering leaves and r...
The Shape of Motion
This chapter examines “habitual gestures”—everyday bodily movements, such as walking or sitting, ... more This chapter examines “habitual gestures”—everyday bodily movements, such as walking or sitting, that are ingrained as muscle memory—as a form of motion associated with postwar realist cinema. Closely reading scenes of ordinary household activities in Umberto D (De Sica, 1952), Best Years of Our Lives (Wyler, 1946), and Mouchette (Bresson, 1967), this chapter shows how an aesthetics of habitual gestures compels one to attend to the invisible bodily movements between and within willed actions. In doing so, this motion form foregrounds the body’s nonconscious and automatic ways of moving. Reading such gestures alongside the notion of “bodily habit” in the philosophy of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, this chapter ultimately troubles Gilles Deleuze’s notion of the time-image as the dominant lens through which the postwar aesthetics of laboring bodies is understood.
A brief article about The Shape of Motion: Cinema and the Aesthetics of Movement (Schonig, 2021) ... more A brief article about The Shape of Motion: Cinema and the Aesthetics of Movement (Schonig, 2021) for Binghamton University website.
Papers by Jordan Schonig
M/C Journal, 2024
https://journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/view/3081
In recent years, th... more https://journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/view/3081
In recent years, the word "porn" has been increasingly used as a kind of descriptive suffix in aesthetic categories like "food porn," “nature porn,” "trauma porn," and "poverty porn." This article distinguishes between categories of moral critique (e.g. trauma porn, poverty porn), which draw on pornography’s associations with exploitative sensationalism, and categories of aesthetic indulgence (e.g. food porn, nature porn), which draw on pornography’s associations with aesthetic excess. Drawing on aesthetic theory, this article examines how the usage of the word “porn” in the latter category acknowledges pornography’s status as an aesthetic concept devoid of necessary and sufficient criteria, a condition best exemplified by Justice Stewart's well known declaration about obscenity: "I know it when I see it." Ultimately, this article argues, the porn suffix has come to signify the role that mere aesthetic feeling (rather than logic or reason) plays in the creation of some of our most politically charged concepts.
New Media & Society, 2024
The social media phenomenon known as #thedress, a photograph of a dress that appeared to be eithe... more The social media phenomenon known as #thedress, a photograph of a dress that appeared to be either blue and black or white and gold, has been called one of the most viral debates of the twenty-first century. While many scientific explanations have been offered to explain the image's mysterious color ambiguity, this article analyzes #thedress as an example of a broader genre that I call viral ambiguity illusions, images or sounds that can be perceived in two or more ways, and which invite users to share their perception through likes, comments, and hashtags. Drawing on the social dimensions of aesthetic theory (especially beauty), I argue that viral ambiguity illusions satisfy a distinctly aesthetic desire to share our diverging perceptions with others at historically unprecedented scales, forming what I call aesthetic publics. Ultimately, this aesthetic understanding of viral ambiguity illusions can help nuance assumptions about the polarizing effects of social media.
Film Criticism , 2023
Introduction to a special issue of Film Criticism devoted to the topic of camera movement, co-aut... more Introduction to a special issue of Film Criticism devoted to the topic of camera movement, co-authored with Daniel Morgan.
Gilles Deleuze and Film Criticism, 2023
Deleuze has long been described as one of the foremost thinkers concerned with the movement of th... more Deleuze has long been described as one of the foremost thinkers concerned with the movement of the moving image. Not only do Deleuze's cinema books draw heavily from Henri Bergson's writings on movement and time, but he explicitly presents his unique approach to cinematic classification as a corrective to semiotic analyses that translate cinema's temporal flow into static linguistic concepts. For Deleuze, the inherent movement of the cinematic image lies at the center of his deepest claims about cinema's relation to thought. As he puts it, "Cinema, precisely because it puts the image in motion…never stops tracing the circuits of the brain" (Deleuze 2000: 283). But the multivalence of the term "movement" for Deleuze has led to much confusion about the role that cinematic motion-the movement
In Media Res, 2023
https://mediacommons.org/imr/content/rediscovering-water-cooler - A brief article for the online ... more https://mediacommons.org/imr/content/rediscovering-water-cooler - A brief article for the online publication In Media Res on the topic of "Contemporary Streaming Style." The article discusses the relation between Netflix's distribution practices and taste algorithms, music reaction videos on YouTube, and Kantian aesthetics.
Deep mediations: Thinking Space in Cinema and Digital Cultures, 2021
A hallmark of cinematic immersion, sensation, and shock, the "phantom ride" genre of early cinema... more A hallmark of cinematic immersion, sensation, and shock, the "phantom ride" genre of early cinema produced an illusion of moving through a picturesque landscape by mounting a camera on the front of a moving train. Marked by a sense of virtual inhabitation thanks to its z-axis movement through deep space, the phantom ride caused the spectator to become caught up in the animation of the unfolding world in its incompleteness and openness. In Tom Gunning's words, the spectator of the phantom ride "[chases] the horizon into the depth of an ever-unfolding image." 1 Scholarship on early cinema tends to present the phantom ride's immersive depth effects as an evolution from the flat views of space presented in actual train travel. 2 Restricted to the lateral view of space unrolling ribbonlike across the window, the train traveler was restricted to a view of space that was radically separated from her own physical emplacement in the train car. In what Wolfgang Schivelbusch calls "panoramic perception," the train traveler was treated not to a fantasy of immersion but to a perceptual confrontation with the landscape as a distant "painted surface." 3 It is this flatness and distance that the phantom ride transcended. According to Gunning, "The displacement from the lateral view provided by the train. .. to a head-on plunge into the centre of the image fundamentally transforms the distance Schivelbusch described as inherent in panoramic perception." 4 As a result, for Gunning, the phantom ride was both "more. .. dynamic" (55) and "more thrilling" (56) than the train traveler's view, for it "[realized] the centuries-old fantasy of penetration that had remained literally impossible in landscape painting" (58) and became "the richest and most dialectical experience offered by early cinema in its exploration of movement and point of view" (56). 5
Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, 2021
A new jargon was heard around the [Disney] studio. Words like "aiming" and "overlapping" and "pos... more A new jargon was heard around the [Disney] studio. Words like "aiming" and "overlapping" and "pose to pose" suggested that certain animation procedures gradually had been isolated and named. Verbs turned into nouns overnight, as, for example, when the suggestion, "Why don't you stretch him out more?" became "Get more stretch on him.". .. As each of these processes acquired a name, it was analyzed and perfected and talked about. 1
Screen, 2020
What Paul Willemen and Christian Keathley have called “cinephiliac moments” are brief fragments f... more What Paul Willemen and Christian Keathley have called “cinephiliac moments” are brief fragments from a film that inexplicably compel rapturous, loving description and which resist systematic analysis. Against intellectual paradigms that attempt to organize film experience into semantic units and large-scale systems of meaning, the cinephile is said to seize upon those fragments or details that remain unaccounted for in these systems, brief and often “contingent” moments that are indiscriminately captured by the indexical powers of the cinematographic apparatus.
Against such claims, this essay argues that the experience of cinephiliac moments has little to do with the truth claims bound up in the photographic process. Moving away from theories grounded on the indexical properties of photography, I provide an account of cinematic contingency based on what I call haecceity effects—the particularity or thisness of phenomena as they move in unrepeatable ways—which I argue better captures the kind of attention and pleasure manifested in cinephiliac moments. By locating cinephiliac moments in haecceity effects rather than index effects, I show how cinephiliac moments are not willfully idiosyncratic and private pleasures but intersubjectively shareable aesthetic judgments, and thus can be understood as integral to a film’s meaning and significance. In making such claims, I revise and rethink major assumptions about early and classical film theory in which the explanatory power of the index has exerted a stifling influence, entrenching habits of thought that have made it difficult to think cinematic specificity beyond photography’s chemical bond with the world.
New Media & Society, 2019
Social networks and media hosting sites have recently fostered a growing trend in meme culture: t... more Social networks and media hosting sites have recently fostered a growing trend in meme culture: the circulation of images within strangely specific categories of pleasure such as the "oddly satisfying" and the "mildly interesting." Difficult to define but collectively recognized, what I call aesthetic category memes are made up of images of ordinary things and processes that not only exemplify such categories of pleasure, but also provoke reflection on the peculiar nature of those categories. As a result, I argue, contributors to aesthetic category memes are unwittingly engaged in a philosophical project that tests the principles of aesthetic theory. Examining the growing archive of images and comments alongside key texts in aesthetic theory, I explore how aesthetic category memes reclaim the aesthetic faculties away from the presumed passivity of sharing, consuming, and "liking" online content, thereby revealing the philosophical foundations of what it means to share and "like" at all. Over the last 6 years, social networks and media hosting sites such as Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, Tumblr, and Reddit have fostered a growing trend in meme culture: the circulation of photographs, videos, and GIFs within strangely specific aesthetic categories such as the "oddly satisfying," the "mildly interesting," and the "mildly infuriating." Whether accessed via Instagram hashtag searches, Facebook groups, YouTube channels, or "subreddits," the content circulating in these categories is not the usual stuff of viral
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Courses by Jordan Schonig
Videos by Jordan Schonig
Rethinking the appeal of rippling waves, rising dust, and fluttering leaves in terms of unplannable movements rather than unplanned events, this video essay examines an unlikely sympathy between early cinema spectatorship and the recent attention to hyperrealistic details in computer-generated animation, such as the dust in Wall-E, the flowing hair in Brave, and the snow in Frozen.
Books by Jordan Schonig
Papers by Jordan Schonig
In recent years, the word "porn" has been increasingly used as a kind of descriptive suffix in aesthetic categories like "food porn," “nature porn,” "trauma porn," and "poverty porn." This article distinguishes between categories of moral critique (e.g. trauma porn, poverty porn), which draw on pornography’s associations with exploitative sensationalism, and categories of aesthetic indulgence (e.g. food porn, nature porn), which draw on pornography’s associations with aesthetic excess. Drawing on aesthetic theory, this article examines how the usage of the word “porn” in the latter category acknowledges pornography’s status as an aesthetic concept devoid of necessary and sufficient criteria, a condition best exemplified by Justice Stewart's well known declaration about obscenity: "I know it when I see it." Ultimately, this article argues, the porn suffix has come to signify the role that mere aesthetic feeling (rather than logic or reason) plays in the creation of some of our most politically charged concepts.
Against such claims, this essay argues that the experience of cinephiliac moments has little to do with the truth claims bound up in the photographic process. Moving away from theories grounded on the indexical properties of photography, I provide an account of cinematic contingency based on what I call haecceity effects—the particularity or thisness of phenomena as they move in unrepeatable ways—which I argue better captures the kind of attention and pleasure manifested in cinephiliac moments. By locating cinephiliac moments in haecceity effects rather than index effects, I show how cinephiliac moments are not willfully idiosyncratic and private pleasures but intersubjectively shareable aesthetic judgments, and thus can be understood as integral to a film’s meaning and significance. In making such claims, I revise and rethink major assumptions about early and classical film theory in which the explanatory power of the index has exerted a stifling influence, entrenching habits of thought that have made it difficult to think cinematic specificity beyond photography’s chemical bond with the world.
Rethinking the appeal of rippling waves, rising dust, and fluttering leaves in terms of unplannable movements rather than unplanned events, this video essay examines an unlikely sympathy between early cinema spectatorship and the recent attention to hyperrealistic details in computer-generated animation, such as the dust in Wall-E, the flowing hair in Brave, and the snow in Frozen.
In recent years, the word "porn" has been increasingly used as a kind of descriptive suffix in aesthetic categories like "food porn," “nature porn,” "trauma porn," and "poverty porn." This article distinguishes between categories of moral critique (e.g. trauma porn, poverty porn), which draw on pornography’s associations with exploitative sensationalism, and categories of aesthetic indulgence (e.g. food porn, nature porn), which draw on pornography’s associations with aesthetic excess. Drawing on aesthetic theory, this article examines how the usage of the word “porn” in the latter category acknowledges pornography’s status as an aesthetic concept devoid of necessary and sufficient criteria, a condition best exemplified by Justice Stewart's well known declaration about obscenity: "I know it when I see it." Ultimately, this article argues, the porn suffix has come to signify the role that mere aesthetic feeling (rather than logic or reason) plays in the creation of some of our most politically charged concepts.
Against such claims, this essay argues that the experience of cinephiliac moments has little to do with the truth claims bound up in the photographic process. Moving away from theories grounded on the indexical properties of photography, I provide an account of cinematic contingency based on what I call haecceity effects—the particularity or thisness of phenomena as they move in unrepeatable ways—which I argue better captures the kind of attention and pleasure manifested in cinephiliac moments. By locating cinephiliac moments in haecceity effects rather than index effects, I show how cinephiliac moments are not willfully idiosyncratic and private pleasures but intersubjectively shareable aesthetic judgments, and thus can be understood as integral to a film’s meaning and significance. In making such claims, I revise and rethink major assumptions about early and classical film theory in which the explanatory power of the index has exerted a stifling influence, entrenching habits of thought that have made it difficult to think cinematic specificity beyond photography’s chemical bond with the world.
http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/intransition/2018/03/08/follow-shot
This paper considers the philosophical significance of such "habitual gestures"—walking, sitting, reaching, smoking cigarettes, lighting matches, washing dishes—in classical theories of cinematic revelation. In contradistinction to Andre Bazin and Gilles Deleuze, who celebrated post-war auteurs' aesthetic emphasis on such gestures as instruments of non-narrative temporalities, I argue that habitual gestures encourage a heightened attention to the plenitude of automatic bodily movements that often go overlooked in ordinary perception. Examining a diverse body of films, from the post-war realism of De Sica and Bresson to the avant-garde work of Martin Arnold, I argue that habitual gestures, by compelling our attention to the invisible bodily movements between and within willed actions, can help us rethink film theory's fundamental assumptions about the relations between agency, performance, and the cinematographic inscription of the moving body.
My talk aims to qualify this anthropomorphic identification with the moving camera by examining lateral movement as an ordinary form of camera mobility that subtly shifts the terms underlying action-oriented theories of perception and existential phenomenology. In foregoing the feeling of directed intention, anticipation, and kinesthesia characteristic of movement-into-depth, lateral camera movement—in which the camera moves sideways with respect to the direction it faces, often parallel to a scene—more readily recalls the experiences of passengers in locomotives or automobiles than those specific to the agential moving body. Reading Wolfgang Schivelbusch’s account of the “panoramic perception” of train travel alongside sequences from the films of Bruce Baillie, Leos Carax, and Gus Van Sant, I locate the forms of visual rhythm and flat abstraction uniquely produced by lateral camera movement within a proto-cinematic history of technologized spatial experience. By foregrounding the presence of the frame, such visual forms suggest that anthropomorphic identification is merely one perceptual aspect of the moving camera that varies in proportion to perceiving the screen as surface. Ultimately, I argue, lateral movement reacquaints us with the strangeness of moving images as zones of perception radically disassociated from our bodies.
Rethinking the appeal of rippling waves, rising dust, and fluttering leaves in terms of incalculable movements rather than unplanned events, I trace a philosophical attention to ungraspable motion forms long before the invention of the moving image. Specifically, I consider Kant’s suspicion of contingent motion in the Analytic of the Beautiful, in which the protean formlessness of fire and water pose epistemological problems and aesthetic pleasures that were perhaps reinvigorated and transformed by the invention of the moving image. Denying the stable boundaries required for judgments of beauty, such ephemeral phenomena become perfectly repeatable, newly shareable temporal inscriptions when captured on camera.
Opening up the discourse of cinematic contingency through Kant’s aesthetics, I argue, helps us develop an unlikely sympathy between early cinema spectatorship and the recent attention to hyperrealistic details in computer-generated animation, such as the dust in Wall-E, the flowing hair in Brave, and the snow in Frozen. Convincing digital simulations of such phenomena—what animators have called “fuzzy objects”—require stochastic algorithms, thereby deploying contingency to simulate contingency. In breaking down comfortable distinctions between creative control and accident, and in displaying the virtuosity of artistic precision at the same time as it forsakes it, the digital manufacture of the “wind in the trees” reincarnates the aesthetic experience of early spectators. Like early cinema, computer-generated imagery has the capacity to compel a revelatory reflection upon the capacities of perception in the face of the contingency of the natural world.
In such accounts, the absorptive experience of camera movement denies the formal distancing between spectator and screen, thereby precluding our aesthetic awareness of the mobile frame as a condition particular to the experience of cinematic motion. What perceptual role does the frame play in our experience of camera movement? When does the moving camera draw our gaze toward the edges of the frame? In attempting to work out a phenomenology of the mobile frame, I examine Bela Tarr’s Werckmeister Harmonies (2000) in conjunction with the experimental films of Bruce Baillie, which, at key moments, similarly produce perceptual ambiguities by drawing our attention to the novel visual forms produced by the framing of motion. Instead of manifesting the camera's agency as an embodied subjectivity (Sobchack), these peculiar camera movements deny an easy analogy with our own embodied movement by exploiting the ambiguities of figure/ground relations.
Thus, such subtle visual experiments reveal the limits of current phenomenological theories of camera movement while still calling upon phenomenological inquiry to investigate their pleasures and ambiguities. Drawing jointly on Maurice Merleau-Ponty's and Jean Mitry's separate accounts of Gestalt psychologist Max Wertheimer's experiments, I argue for a phenomenological understanding of cinema that, in loosening the analogy to embodied human perception, is more open to the aesthetic particularities--perceptual ambiguities, formal patterns, visual rhythms--produced by a distinctly framed cinematic perception.
When we place the monolith, a structure visually marked by its imposing stature and geometric simplicity, in the context of American minimalism, a number of new questions emerge: How does the contemporaneous critical discourse on minimalism, which attempted to empty the metaphysical idealism from modernist aesthetics, change our experience of 2001 as a paradigm of cinematic modernism? What might it mean that Kubrick looks outside the possibilities of cinema--to minimalist sculpture--in a film that has been figured as a self-reflexive exploration of cinema's technological possibilities? And what might it mean that the metaphysical gap between pre-hominid ape and early human--i.e. the very mystery of human origin--is crystallized in the form of a tangible minimalist sculpture, an object whose emphasized physicality would appear to belie its undoubtedly metaphysical powers?
Situating the monolith within the contemporaneous debates surrounding minimalism and its consequences for the future of art, I consider the ways in which 2001’s representation of human origin--as both empirical anthropology and metaphysical myth--lies at the center of the film’s status between ideal and secular modernism. Juxtaposing philosopher Bernard Stiegler's post-structuralist anthropology with competing theories of modernism, and looking closely at the monolith's narrative function and aesthetic presentation throughout the film, I argue that the monolith oscillates between a minimalist encounter (i.e. as epistemological tool, emphasizing the observer’s movement in space ) and a modernist experience (i.e. as abstract art, emphasizing the observer’s absorptive, atemporal experience), thereby enacting the problems built into minimalism’s philosophical project. Complicating simplistic accounts of cinematic modernism that emphasize medium specificity and formal experimentation, I argue that 2001 bespeaks an anti-metaphysical shift in the state of modernism at the same time as it denies that shift on the grounds of its own metaphysical aspirations.
Thus, by attempting to bridge the gap between film experience (the inarticulable multiplicities of affect, memory, and sensibility rather than intelligibility) and a critical responsibility to the film object (the film as object of analysis, as text to be dissected and explored), figural criticism, I will argue, brings to mind the often under-theorized--or largely overlooked--effect that viewing practice has on theories of film experience and ontology. So instead of placing figural criticism within a trajectory that rejects representation in favor of process (i.e. as an isolated reaction against mise-en-scene and semiotic analysis), I will trace its emergence out of a new attention to the ways in which viewing practices and technologies of viewing shape theories of film.
My two primary case studies, each lying on opposite sides of the polarity between film experience and film materiality, emblematize two opposing theories tied to a specific form of viewing practice. First, I examine Vivian Sobchack's phenomenological film theory as an account of film experience that takes as its object the singular, ideal encounter with a projected film in a darkened theater space; understanding the film as a seeing subject rather than an object or text to be beheld, Sobchack eschews the fundamental changes in film experience introduced by VCR and DVD because they encourage the objectification of the film text through repetitive, manipulative viewing. Conversely, Laura Mulvey's Death 24x a Second celebrates the new viewing practices that DVD makes available, arguing that by temporally modifying the linear flow of narrative film, digital technologies afford us the paradoxical discovery of film's material basis in photographic stills, and hence, allow us to engage with the non-narrative pleasures (gestures, movements, contingencies) usually unnoticed within the hegemony of narrative temporality. Thus, Mulvey's theory of film, which necessitates film's new status as possessed, fetishized object, is tied to her penchant for a cinephilic viewing practice (repeated viewings), while Sobchack, who understands film as a subject in itself, idealizes the film experience as a single, interpersonal encounter.
Ultimately, I want to suggest that, in between these opposed theories that implicilty rely on specific practices of engaging with film, figural analysis both offers a reconcilation--between a consciousness of our experience and an attentiveness to the film object--and a model of criticism that foregrounds our method of engagement with films.
But these dichotomies of scale are more than markers of genre, for as the film depicts characters struggling to gauge the speed and proximity of a rogue planet as it imperceptibly rushes towards Earth, Melancholia implicitly investigates the problems of vision that have concerned classical film theorists. Exploring Mary Ann Doane’s recent work on the schizophrenia of cinematic scale, I will argue that Melancholia presents a crisis of vision that articulates and complicates paradoxes of cinematic scale--the confusion between size and proximity, the conception of the close-up as both detail and totality, the boundary between representational and spectatorial space, the tension between the theoretically disembodied spectator and the materially embodied spectator.
I will pursue this set of concerns by looking at two contradictory yet complementary strategies within the film. First, by focusing on specifically cinematic techniques--from forms of visual point of view to studies of motion and deferred or extended time--Melancholia broadens the anthropocentrism of cinematic scale (with the human body as perceptual anchor, both spatial and temporal) into a non-anthropocentric, even cosmic logic. Second, by exploring cinema’s relationship to other, explicitly non-cinematic media--from telescopes and crude optical devices to Wagner’s music and a tradition of sublime Romantic painting--the film looks for ways to expand, perhaps even transcend, the possibilities of cinematic forms. The stakes of Melancholia, then, are to show that total catastrophe can only be cinematically represented at the difficult confluence of medium specificity and media plurality. Ultimately, as the film breaks down the distinctions between human and cosmic bodies, it simultaneously rethinks the boundaries between media, suggesting that only the alternative forms of experience afforded between media can expand the possibilities of cinematic scale and representation beyond familiar forms of visual presentation.