The Cinematic Sublime

Negative Pleasures, Structuring Absences

Nathan Carroll

• Publisher: Intellect Books
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781789382396
• eBook ISBN: 9781789382402
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

This interdisciplinary volume is dedicated to exploring the idea of the cinematic sublime by bringing together the disciplines of film studies and aesthetics to examine cinema and cinematic experience. Explores the idea of 'the sublime' in cinema from a variety of perspectives; the essays range in focus from early cinema, through classical Hollywood, documentary, avant-garde and art cinema traditions, and on to contemporary digital cinema. The book aims to apply the discussion of the sublime in philosophy to cinema and to interrogate the ways in which cinema engages with this tradition.

Offers new and exciting insights into how cinema engages with traditional historical and aesthetic discourse. Original and wide-ranging, this clear and coherent volume is a useful resource for both post-graduate students and established scholars interested in the interrelations between film and philosophy. The range of material covered in the individual essays makes this a wide-ranging and very useful introduction to the topic.

A significant new contribution to the literature on Film-Philosophy. What sets this reader apart from the existing books on the subject is the wider scope. It embraces both philosophers and film scholars to consider films from throughout film history in light of theories of the sublime from throughout the history of Philosophy. In doing so it aims to demonstrate the diverse value of sublime approaches (versus a singular definition and philosophical perspective) to a wider range of films than has previously been considered. 

An original and stimulating collection of essays contributing new insights into the crossover between historical and aesthetic approaches to contemporary cinema and cinematic experience.

The main readership will be academic markets including film studies and philosophy, and academics with an interest in the legacies of Burke and Kant on aesthetics. Useful for teaching aesthetics through cinematic illustration and application.

Appropriate to final year undergraduate and postgraduate students with an interest in ideas at the boundaries of contemporary film studies.

PART I

Sublime Spectatorship

1

Sublime Spectatorship on Tour: The Early British Scenic and the Quest for the Perfect View

Samantha Wilson

The eighteenth-century British natural sublime remains one of the least explored philosophical discourses for contemporary film and environmental theorists. Usually associated with the German philosophical tradition rather than the British, the sublime has come to represent the placement of reason over the natural world in many critical and philosophical circles.¹ This interpretation of the concept largely ignores the philosophical discourse arising out of Great Britain during the same period.² At the center of those debates were questions over the role of spectatorship in defining what it meant to have an aesthetic experience in nature. The sublime explored that tension by introducing the concept of astonishment and redefining the role of contemplation in relation to taste and experience.

This essay explores the initial debates surrounding sublime spectatorship over the eighteenth century and considers the long-term effect of that discourse on the early British scenic film. Over the course of that period a peculiar through line began to emerge. The natural sublime was defined by not only the pairing of two contradictory models of spectatorship—astonishment and contemplation—but it also relied on the premise that the former was interrelated to the experience of the latter. That relationship operated through a precarious balance; sublime spectatorship could only be experienced under very specific internal and external conditions. While models of address were prescribed by many leading critics and philosophers, no single conceptual framework was able to crystalize these competing narratives. The importance of this ongoing conceptual instability—stemming from an emphasis on physical placement, mediation, and framing—cannot be overstated in the British context. The sublime emerged in direct opposition to each preceding notion of proportion, setting, and vantage point. While the aesthetic experience demanded its own particular mediating device, the period failed to provide a suitable and consistent framework. This lack of conceptual closure and precarious form of spectatorship would eventually allow the term to resurface outside of the philosophical sphere, constructing its very own cultural industry bent on resolving the dilemma which I have called the tourist’s sublime.

Topographical literature, walking tours, screen entertainment and, by the turn of the twentieth century, moving picture shows would all capitalize on the concept’s elusiveness and popularity by each presenting their own narratives on the role of immersion and contemplation in relation to making aesthetic judgments about natural spaces. Not only would British companies continue to make and distribute scenic films concerned with the sublime experience long after other national industries had transitioned away, but the sublime would remain the dominant metaphor for describing the point of mediation between observer and natural world.³ British producers like Cecil Hepworth and Charles Urban, who specialized in the genre, employed rhetoric and formal techniques associated with the eighteenth-century natural sublime in order to address increasing unease toward industrialization and the loss of traditional forms of labor and relationships with rural landscapes. What differentiated the two production companies was the larger overall importance they attached to the depiction of natural phenomena. Hepworth foregrounded the aesthetic, while Urban the scientific potential. But even with this divergence, both placed an incredible amount of value in the genre, seeing it as the establishment of a larger worldview rather than solely as a vehicle for tourism or spectacle. In this sense, the film medium was able to embed the technological within the natural sublime, straddling a dialectic of order and excess. It contributed to the equally precarious construction of subjectivity and spatial identity within modern Britain.

Sublime spectatorship

The majority of British contributors to the discussion of taste in the eighteenth century turned away from previously held conventions and authorities and began, as John Locke would put it, to “appeal to” their own “unprejudiced experience and observation.”⁴ Even those who remained Platonists, like the Earl of Shaftesbury and Francis Hutcheson, began to consider the complex relationship between our phenomenology of sensation and emotions which often seemed immediate and causally determined. Cultural historian Peter de Bolla described the period as that which defined “the complexities of affective experience, and it did so in the context of an emerging new understanding of the construction of the subject.”⁵ As the century proceeded, the sublime became the testing ground for many of these frameworks, either by Hutcheson, Joseph Addison, Edmund Burke, and Alexander Gerard in the philosophical sphere or by the increasing number of gentlemen interested in criticism in the larger intellectual and popular sphere.

Writing on the sublime began by focusing solely upon the experiential, placing the efficient cause in a taxonomy of material forces. It eventually expanded to the complex internal realm focusing on the affective state, and, by the end of the century, much of the debate became reflexive, critically examining the earlier emphasis on cause and effect.⁶ In 1712, Addison published his essay “Pleasures of Imagination,” in which he divided taste into three categories: the great, the uncommon, and the beautiful. He reserved the word “sublime” for when he discussed its rhetorical applications. The three categories refer to the “pleasures of the imagination, which arise from the actual view and survey of outward objects.”⁷ Addison’s initial description of “the great” provided the basic conceptual framework with which most critics worked throughout the rest of the century.⁸ While identifying specific natural objects, like the “vast uncultivated desert” and “huge heaps of mountains,” which could stimulate pleasure, he writes,

Our imagination loves to be filled with an object, or to grasp at anything that is too big for its capacity. We are flung into a pleasing astonishment at such unbounded views, and feel a delightful stillness and amazement in the soul at the apprehension of them . . . Such wide and undetermined prospects are as pleasing to the fancy, as the speculations of eternity or infinitude are to the understanding.⁹

We see the same emphasis on the ability of the internal faculties to extend as they come into contact with natural phenomena in Joseph Priestley’s writing in 1777:

The mind, as was observed before, conforming and adapting itself to the objects to which its attention is engaged, must, as it were, enlarge itself, to conceive a great object. This requires considerable effort of the imagination, which is also attended with a pleasing though perhaps not a distinct and explicit consciousness of the strength and extent of our own powers.¹⁰

And by associationalists like Alexander Gerard in 1759:

When a large object is presented, the mind expands itself to the extent of that object, and is filled with one grand sensation, which totally possessing it, composes it into a solemn sedateness, and striking it with deep silent wonder and admiration: it finds such a difficulty in spreading itself to the dimensions of its object, as enlivens and invigorates its frame: and having overcome the opposition which this occasions, it sometimes imagines itself present in every part of the scene, which it contemplates; and, from the sense of this immensity, feels a noble pride, and entertains a lofty conception of its own capacity.¹¹

While each of these definitions comes from a different decade (and is predicated on a different methodology), together they present a good overview of what most accounts have in common. A sublime experience involved the expansion of a specific internal faculty, usually the imagination, which as it reached (and sometimes breached) its limits, initiated a pleasurable emotion and ancillary ideas that reflected back upon the experience.

The shift toward an aesthetic framework and standard of taste which validated these experiences in nature necessitated a particular mode of address. If in fact certain natural objects and landscapes could elicit pleasure which was not dictated by classical rules of beauty, then a standard of discovery was in order. That model of spectatorship constructed a balance between proximity and distance out of discourses of cause and effect.

This debate took place from the outset. Addison argued that a specific distance and framing mechanism was necessary in order to experience the great and vast. He refers to this contemplative space in The Spectator when describing the role of the secondary pleasures of the imagination: “It is for the same reason that we are delighted with the reflecting upon dangers that are past, or in looking on a precipice at a distance, which would fill us with a different kind of horror if we saw it hanging over our heads.”¹² That overwhelming proximity prevents the observer the opportunity for self-reflection which is necessary to fulfill the requirements of a sublime experience.

A similar account is suggested by John Baillie three decades later. In “An Essay on the Sublime,” Baillie describes the astonishment which he associates with the sublime in two stages, writing that an “object can only be justly called the sublime, which in some degree disposes the mind to this enlargement of itself, and gives her a lofty conception of her own powers.”¹³ Baillie isolates vast or uniform objects, like a mountain range or ocean, as providing the appropriate visual cues which press the imagination to expand out to edges of the frame. This conceptualization of astonishment “rather composes, than agitates the mind”¹⁴ and constructs a “solemn sedateness”¹⁵ which mirrors Addison’s own description of “a delightful stillness.”¹⁶ Here, astonishment relies on contemplation and operates both physically and metaphorically in the external and internal realms. Aesthetic pleasure is a product of the intermingling of the two.

The shift between pleasure and agitation is likened to fear and correlated to the physical vantage point. Baillie uses the example of a storm, stating that if “a person is actually in one” the “dread may be so heightened . . . as entirely to destroy the sublime.”¹⁷ While the “sublime dilates and elevates the soul, fear sinks and contracts it; yet both are felt upon viewing what is great and awful.”¹⁸ Astonishment is defined here by a precarious level of physical detachment. Unlike beauty or the picturesque, the sublime relies on the perfect balance between immersion and detachment making it ostensibly a rare aesthetic occurrence.

Edmund Burke’s description of the sublime also relied on the interplay of proximity and distance when disentangling fear from the negative pleasure associated with aesthetic experience. While much of his framework derived from Addison’s concept of the imagination, Burke places even more importance on the relationship between the physiological properties of the subject and their affective response. He wrote,

Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain, and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversation about terrible objects, or operates ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Part I Sublime Spectatorship
• Part II Staging Sublimity: “Presenting the Unpresentable”
• Part III Time, Memory, and History: Ruptures and Fragments
• Part IV The Limits of Control: Sublime Cinemascapes
• Part V The Limits of Light: The Other(s)
• Bibliography
• Notes on the Contributors
• Index