The Routledge Encyclopedia of Film Theory

Edward Branigan, Warren Buckland, Edward Branigan, Warren Buckland

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781136472626
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Media Studies

The Routledge Encyclopedia of Film Theory is an international reference work representing the essential ideas and concepts at the centre of film theory from the beginning of the twentieth century, to the beginning of the twenty-first.

When first encountering film theory, students are often confronted with a dense, interlocking set of texts full of arcane terminology, inexact formulations, sliding definitions, and abstract generalities. The Routledge Encyclopedia of Film Theory challenges these first impressions by aiming to make film theory accessible and open to new readers.

Edward Branigan and Warren Buckland have commissioned over 50 scholars from around the globe to address the difficult formulations and propositions in each theory by reducing these difficult formulations to straightforward propositions.

The result is a highly accessible volume that clearly defines, and analyzes step by step, many of the fundamental concepts in film theory, ranging from familiar concepts such as 'Apparatus', 'Gaze', 'Genre', and 'Identification', to less well-known and understood, but equally important concepts, such as Alain Badiou's 'Inaesthetics', Gilles Deleuze's 'Time-Image', and Jean-Luc Nancy's 'Evidence'.

The Routledge Encyclopedia of Film Theory is an ideal reference book for undergraduates of film studies, as well as graduate students new to the discipline.

AFFECT, FILM AND

The term ‘affect’ was not widely used in cinema studies until the 1990s, when it emerged in research at the intersection of film and philosophy. This overview will begin by establishing how Linda Williams’s important essay ‘Film Bodies: Gender, Genre and Excess’ (1991) conceptualizes the affective impact of film on the bodies of audience members. It will then examine changing approaches to affect, with particular attention to cognitivist accounts and to phenomenological film theorist Vivian Sobchack’s noteworthy intervention in the field.

Affect

Although Williams uses the term ‘sensational’ rather than ‘affective’, in context both terms describe felt bodily responses and sensory reactions to cinema. Affect refers to sensations, feelings, and bodily states including visceral reactions, physiological arousal, and reflex responses to stimuli, such as flinching at startling sounds or movements. While affect is an essential component of emotion (for instance, blushing is a tell-tale sign of embarrassment), emotion is a broader category of feeling that also involves desire, imagination, and complex forms of cognition (see EMOTION, FILM AND).

Williams was not the first researcher to take affect seriously. Philosophers dating back to Plato and Aristotle have debated the instructive and negative influence of passionate responses to poetry, art, music, and theatre. Later, in Carnal Thoughts, Sobchack traced studies of film and affect to Soviet filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein’s ‘interest in the somatic effects of the cinema’ in the 1920s and to film theorist Siegfried Kracauer’s fascination in the 1940s with film’s capacity to ‘stimulate us physiologically and sensually’ (2004, 55). Until recently few film scholars followed these thinkers in tackling the importance of affect. Instead, approaches such as Marxist ideological criticism, semiotics, structuralism, and psychoanalysis dominated film theory until the 1990s. In particular, Laura Mulvey’s ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ (1975) (see GAZE THEORY) and Deleuze’s account of masochism (1971) inform Williams’s essay. While psychoanalytic film theory engaged with notions of desire and pleasure, it did not focus specifically on affect. Consequently, part of Williams’s challenge was to test how psychoanalysis could help explain how audiences engage with affective screen texts.

Linda Williams’s ‘Film Bodies’

‘Film Bodies’ commences by describing affective responses to what Williams terms ‘body genres’ – such as melodrama, horror, and pornography – that provoke strong visceral reactions, inducing ‘a physical jolt’ (Williams 1991, 2). Drawing on commentary from fans and critics, Williams’s article describes these genres as ‘excessive’, ‘gross’, ‘unseemly’ movies, referring to them as ‘tear jerkers’, ‘fear jerkers’, and ‘jerk-off films’ that provoke heated ‘arousal’ and elicit sensations including ‘sobs of anguish’, prickling eyes and constricting throats, or hairs on the nape of the neck ‘bristling’ frightfully. The language used to describe these genres and responses prompts Williams to examine cultural judgements about affect and its relationship to gender. Negative judgements about genres associated with an excess of sensation derive from a gendered hierarchy of value based on the mind/ body split of Cartesian dualism – the idea that human ontology is grounded in cognition, as proposed by philosopher Descartes in his famous adage ‘I think, therefore I am’. Williams points out that ‘the bodies of women figured on the screen have functioned traditionally as the primary embodiments of pleasure, fear, and pain’ in pornography, horror, and melodrama (1991, 4), thereby cementing presumptions aligning femininity with affect. While complicating gender biases associating women with embodiment rather than rationality, Williams’s choice of words nevertheless betrays the assumption that films have the capacity to wrest or ‘jerk’ reactions from the spectator’s body in ways that leave little room for resistance or critical interpretation. Later in the article Williams goes on to state that ‘[t]he rhetoric of violence of the jerk suggests the extent to which viewers feel too directly, too viscerally manipulated by the text’ (5). This suggests a lack of volition in affective responses, which renders them a suspect yet powerful and intriguing aspect of the film experience.

Williams’s central thesis is that there is value in analysing film affect, even in disparaged ‘body genres’ such as pornography, horror, and ‘women’s films’ or ‘weepies’:

sex, violence, and emotion are fundamental elements ofthe sensational effects ofthese three types of films … by thinking comparatively about all three ‘gross’ and sensational film body genres we might be able to get beyond the mere fact of sensation to explore its system and structure as well as its effect on the bodies of spectators.

(Williams 1991, 3)

Underpinning Williams’s work is a concern with gender that typifies feminist psychoanalytic film criticism. Yet, she is also concerned with the cultural position of certain genres in relation to their visceral qualities. The label ‘low cultural status’ is often applied to films with exaggerated affective qualities due to the devaluation of emotion and bodily sensation by comparison with critical distance and aesthetic and intellectual engagement. The success of these genres is based on their abilities to arouse affective or bodily responses that mirror, to a certain extent, those of screen characters: ‘what may especially mark these body genres as low is the perception that the body of the spectator is caught up in an almost involuntary mimicry of the emotion or sensation of the body on the screen’ (Williams 1991, 4).

Psychoanalysis

Williams contends that the attraction ofbody genres and their denigration as low cultural texts hinge on the sense in which, in psychoanalytic terms, ‘we are all perverts’ (Williams 1991, 6). She states that audience members are understood to derive perverse pleasure from feelings of masochistic powerlessness or sadistic, voyeuristic empowerment and the fantasies and affective stimulation films offer. Strongly affective films and the perverse pleasures they afford are distinguished by ‘an apparent lack of proper esthetic distance, a sense of over-involvement in sensation and emotion’ (5).

Williams establishes perversion as ‘a category of cultural analysis’ crucial to understanding genres based on affect and desire (6). She argues that affective responses to body genres function to address problems in our culture, sexualities, and identities (9), and concludes that: ‘The deployment of sex, violence, and emotion is thus in no way gratuitous and in no way strictly limited to each of these genres; it is instead a cultural form of problem solving’ (9), a cultural form that operates in relation to gender fantasies. This does not just involve mimicry of bodies on screen, but a more complex negotiation of changing ideas and feelings about gender and sexuality expressed through the physical release of tension in visceral narratives (11 – 12).

Williams is not alone in using psychoanalysis to theorize cinematic viscerality. The assumption of a strong relationship between gender, sexuality, and the unconscious disturbances and pleasures offered by narrative film is a defining feature of psychoanalytic criticism. Following Deleuze, Steven Shaviro argues in The Cinematic Body that ‘film moves and affects the spectator precisely to the extent that it lures him or her into an excessive intimacy’ (1993, 54). Shaviro views the dynamics of spectatorship as ‘masochistic, mimetic, tactile, and corporeal’ (1993, 56). Similarly, in The New-Brutality Film: Race and Affect in Contemporary Hollywood Cinema, Paul Gormley argues that sensational, violent films are ‘concerned with the dynamics of sadism and masochism in the viewing experience’ (2005, 192–3). These authors rely on accounts of psychosexual perversion to explain the affective impact of screen violence. Like Williams, Shaviro and Gormley assume perversions govern visual pleasure rather than adopting a holistic approach to affect that recognizes cognitive, evaluative aspects as well as its basis in sensation.

‘Film Bodies’ remains significant for its role in problematizing mimetic understandings of how audiences respond to screen characters’ expressions of affect, and for complicating psychoanalytic assumptions about the gendered pleasures of cinema by shifting the focus from unconscious fantasy and its ideological implications to physical sensation. This work legitimated the study of bodily reactions in disparaged genres, identifying their cultural significance.

Williams’s article was published at a turning point when scholars began to question psychoanalysis and to search for alternative understandings of spectatorship. Cognitivist and phenomenological accounts of affect have since gathered credence, placing unconscious fantasies and fears as secondary to affective experiences of the audiovisual, kinetic qualities of cinema.

Cognitivism

Psychoanalysis remained a dominant approach until Noël Carroll’s Mystifying Movies (1988) and The Philosophy of Horror, or, Paradoxes of the Heart (1990) and Murray Smith’s Engaging Characters (1995), which were among the first extended cognitivist studies of film affect. These cognitivists explore how empathic engagement – ‘feeling with’ screen characters – invokes the affective dimension of emotion (see IDENTIFICATION, THEORY OF; IMAGINED OBSERVER HYPOTHESIS).

Smith’s influential account discerns three distinct components of empathy: affective mimicry, autonomic reactions, and emotional simulation. Affective mimicry involves mirroring a character’s feelings via ‘perceptual registering and reflexive simulation of the emotion of another person’, ‘involuntary neuromuscular response’, or ‘kinaesthetic mimicry’ (Smith 1995, 99). For instance, close-ups of faces can cue empathy by prompting spectators to mimic a character’s expression; however, close-ups can also prompt a contrasting reaction such as perceiving someone’s rage and responding with fear. Autonomic reactions are involuntary: spectators relate to screen characters partly by experiencing coinciding responses to stimuli common to the screen world and the cinematic environment when, for instance, reacting to an unexpected loud noise (102). Emotional simulation comes closest to the lay definition of empathy. It involves simulating feelings by forming hypotheses about how one might respond to a situation. Spectators imaginatively project themselves into a character’s situation to the extent that they empathically share the character’s affective responses.

More recent research, such as Carl Plantinga’s cognitive-perceptual theory of specta-torship in Moving Viewers, concedes some ground to psychoanalysis by acknowledging unconscious responses that ‘bypass conscious inference-making’, while contending that the audience’s feelings about films and film characters are predominantly conscious and rational (2009, 8). Plantinga understands affective responses to cinema in relation to cognitive psychology, mirror neurons, and the paradigm scenarios, cultural scripts, or schemata through which members of a society learn affective and emotive responsiveness.

Phenomenology

Phenomenology is another philosophical strand of film theory that developed parallel to cognitivism (see PHENOMENOLOGY AND FILM). Differences in emphasis between these approaches are evident in their language use. Distinct from cognitivists’ concern with the rationality of ‘empathic reactions’, ‘cognitive-perceptual processes’, and ‘autonomic responses’, phenomenologists’ fascination with ‘carnality’, ‘embodiment’, and ‘the sensorium’ evinces their interest in the role of the body in film experience. Although cognitivism has a tendency to focus on aesthetic cues and intellectual responses in ways that abstract the affective dimensions of cinematic experience, many goals of cognitivism and phenomenology are complementary (see Hanich 2010; Plantinga 2009).

Instead of seeking the unconscious cause of pleasure or discomfort, or attempting to categorize and rationalize audience responses, phenomenology describes the experience of watching, listening, and responding to film, then considers what the effects or cultural implications of these reactions might be. Building primarily on philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s work, a number of film theorists have used phenomenology to analyse affect in relation to screen aesthetics and character engagement. Sobchack’s groundbreaking study Address of the Eye (1992) came to define the field, and by the new millennium phenomenology was emerging as an alternative to cognitivist and psychoanalytic interpretations of film affect. Sobchack positions her phenomenological methodology in relation to Williams’s ‘Film Bodies’, but eschews psychoanalysis in favour of a holistic account of embodied perception.

Sobchack’s work has led to an explosion of research on affective responses to cinema that seeks to redress the oversights of established film scholarship, with its focus on visual pleasure grounded in ideology and psychosexual theory. For instance, in The Skin of the Film (2000) and Touch (2002), Laura Marks examines how screen texts evoke affect through the tactile qualities of vision and sound. Marks discusses ‘haptic perception’, explaining that the tactile impression of indistinct, unfocused images or sounds prompts audiences to grasp for sensory meaning rather than intellectualizing what they see and hear. She suggests the texture of haptic imagery touches the viewer’s body in a direct, affective manner instead of just working through characterization or through acts of categorization and narrative interpretation (Marks 2000, 164). Such work demonstrates that film can elicit responses that may include but also exceed identification with or reactions to protagonists’ affective displays.

Marks’s account of hapticity informed Sobchack’s second volume on phenomenology, Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture (2004). This body of work provides the foundation from which researchers have developed phenomenological approaches to the moving image, including Jennifer Barker’s sensuous approach to the cinematic experience, The Tactile Eye (2009), and Julian Hanich’s account of genre, aesthetics, and affect in Cinematic Emotion in Horror...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of contributors
• List of entries A—Z
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction (I): The rationale behind the encyclopedia
• Introduction (II): Concept and theory
• Encyclopedia entries A—Z
• Epilogue: Death in (and of?) theory
• Index