'what makes a film tick?': cinematic affect, materiality and mimetic innervation

331 Pages·2013·36.51 MB·English

‘WHAT MAKES A FILM TICK?’: CINEMATIC
AFFECT, MATERIALITY AND MIMETIC
INNERVATION

ANNE RUTHERFORD

PhD by publication

2006

University of Western Sydney
I confirm that this work has not been submitted for a higher degree at ay other
institution. All work is my original work.

Anne Rutherford

Abstract

‘What Makes a Film Tick?’: Cinematic Affect, Materiality and Mimetic
Innervation

This PhD explores questions of cinematic affect and its relationship to mimetic
experience. Through an examination of cinematic materiality, it argues that film
must be inscribed across the sensorium if it is to arouse affective experience for
the spectator. Drawing on Miriam Hansen’s readings of Walter Benjamin and
Siegfried Kracauer, the thesis argues that cinematic affect can most productively
be understood in film as a process of mimetic innervation.

The thesis is comprised of seven published essays and an overarching chapter.
The introductory chapter, ‘A Paradigm Shift in Film Studies’, situates the
published essays in the context of recent debates about embodied spectatorship
and affect, arguing the need for a revision of key paradigms of film theory.

The first series of essays argues the centrality of embodied affect to cinema
spectatorship, and proposes a nexus between mimetic visuality, affect and mise-
en-scène, linking the analysis of mise-en-scène to Kracauer’s discussions of
cinematic materiality. The essays extend this nexus to rethink genre through the
lens of affective mimetic experience, arguing that both genre and visual style
work mimetically. The arguments are explored through studies of the work of
Mizoguchi Kenji, Theodorus Angelopoulos and Lee Myung-Se.

The second series examines spectatorship in documentary cinema, raising
questions about historiography, embodied knowledge, inter-cultural dialogue, and
the affective elements of cultural specificity. The essays interrogate the
universalist claims of conventional documentary form, and its assumptions of a
disembodied spectator. They contest the assumed opposition in documentary
theory between affect and signification and draw affect and mimetic experience
into the core conceptualisation of documentary film. The studies explore an
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Australian television documentary series, an Indonesian political docudrama and
three hybrid documentaries—two Indian and one French.

Through these studies, the thesis argues that affective embodied mimetic experience
is at the core of cinema spectatorship.
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Acknowledgments

For their support during the final year in which I have written the introductory
chapter, I am most grateful to my supervisors, Peter Hutchings and Anna Gibbs.
Anna Gibbs’ initial enthusiastic response to the published essays was crucial in my
decision to go ahead with the PhD by publication, and she was unfailingly positive
and encouraging in the face of many drafts full of wayward tangents and of
indeterminate quality. Her many suggestions and her knack for creative problem-
solving were invaluable in shaping the work, and her final injunction, ‘Do not
digress’, channelled me on the arduous path to completion. Peter Hutchings’
thorough work on every section of the manuscript saved me from committing any
more folly than I might have in the work’s final form. He pulled out all stops to
support me in the final stages of writing and thesis preparation and his generosity
has made the completion process much smoother than it might have been. His
unflinching willingness to answer any question, from the most arcane to the most
tediously technical, and at the most inopportune times, has been exemplary.

I have benefitted from the assistance of many people in the preparation of each of
the published works included here, and these people are acknowledged at the foot
of each essay.

In addition, I am particularly grateful to Anjali Monteiro and K. P. Jayasankar for
their generous hospitality and advice during my stay in Mumbai in 2003, and for
making available the video library and studio resources of the Unit for Media and
Communications at Tata Institute of Social Sciences. This made it possible for me
to view a large range of Indian documentary films in a very short time. Even
among a cohort of imaginative and challenging work, Monteiro and Jayasankar’s
films stand out for their wit and innovativeness. I thank them also for providing
the stills included with ‘“Buddhas Made of Ice and Butter”’, and I would like to
thank Sudhir Patwardhan for kind permission to publish the reproductions of his
paintings with that essay.

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I would like to thank Louise Malcolm, who transcribed what was an exceptionally
long and challenging interview with Amar Kanwar, at very short notice and with
great care.

I am very grateful to Rob Leggo, who prepared the images in the introductory
chapter for print with great diligence and patience under the pressure-cooker
conditions of the final thesis production deadline.

I would also like to thank my Head of School, Carol Liston, who gave me a little
room to move when the pressure seemed insurmountable.

Much of this project has been written during a period of very difficult personal
circumstances that threatened to derail it at many points. For repeatedly helping
me get back on the horse to continue, I am indebted to Margaret Bruce, Peter
Green and Myra.
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Note on spelling, abbreviations, names and reference styles

I have retained the original spelling in all citations, despite the possibility of
confusion. This is most pertinent with the use of the term, mise-en-scène, spelt and
punctuated differently by each writer, and sometimes shifting over time within the
work of a given writer.

I have retained the East Asian tradition of listing family name first for all East
Asian names, except where the author or filmmaker uses the Western tradition.

Where possible I have included scanned copies of the published versions of the
essays. Where this has not been possible, due to layout or formatting constraints, I
have included the originals as provided to the publishers. Each essay, therefore,
may have a different style for referencing and notes.

Where several sources from a given author are referred to repeatedly, I have used
acronyms for the source title. A list of these is given at the beginning of the list of
works cited.
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Preface

Giuliana Bruno writes of discovering the ‘map of the land of tenderness’ of
Madelaine de Scudéry, drawn up in the seventeenth century—a map that marks out
the emotional sites that form the ‘topos’ of Scudéry’s novel, that she says ‘makes a
world of affects visible to us’.1 With this as her model, Bruno draws a cartography
of architecture, art and the moving image as a geography of the emotions. The
compilation of essays presented here works in a similar way, drawing together
films from diverse physical geographies into a cartography that explores the
contours of cinematic affect. Key to this cartography is an understanding that the
body is central to understanding cinematic affect—that film spectatorship is an
embodied process and that film itself is embodied—that the film with which the
embodied spectator engages is a material body.

This project explores a certain kind of embodied affective experience in cinema
spectatorship. Through an analysis of films from widely disparate contexts, the
essays form a portfolio of works that each pursues a common enquiry through a
different terrain. All but one of the films can be read as an exploration of ways to
ground the affective work of film in an enhanced sensory encounter with the
materiality of the image and sound. The one exception is a television documentary
interrogated here for the far-reaching implications of the way it marginalises this
encounter.

The first part of this project explores the centrality of sensory-affective, mimetic
experience in feature film. The essays cover Mizoguchi Kenji’s Japanese classic,
Story of the Last Chrysanthemums,2 Theodorus Angelopoulos’ historical epic,
Ulysses’ Gaze,3 often described—in a nomenclature that this essay contests—as a
modernist film, and Lee Myung-Se’s hybrid Korean action film, Nowhere to
Hide.4 Through close analyses of these films, the essays extend questions of

1 Bruno, Giuliana. Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture and Film. New York: Verso,
2002: 2. Bruno refers to Scudéry’s novel, Clélie, Histoire Romaine (1654).
2 Story of the Last Crysanthemums (Zangiku Monogatari). Dir. Mizoguchi Kenji. Prod. Shochiku,
1939.
3Ulysses’ Gaze (To Vlemma Tou Odyssea). Dir. Theo Angelopoulos. Prod. Theo Angelopoulos
and The Greek Film Centre, 1995.
4 Nowhere to Hide (Injongsajong Kot Optta). Dir. Lee Myung-Se. Prod. Chung Tae-Won, 1999.
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mimetic experience and affect into the understanding of mise-en-scène, genre,
visual style and spectatorship. These three essays lay out the major theoretical
frameworks for the whole project.

The second part of the project extends the discussion of affect and mimetic
experience to documentary. The first essay here discusses the assumptions of a
disembodied language of documentary in the Australian television documentary
series, Frontier.5 Through an interrogation of the paucity of sensory-affective
grounding in the film, its political justification, and its limitations, this essay
functions as the springboard for the subsequent enquiry into the role of embodied
affect in documentary aesthetics and its theoretical exposition. The following
essays examine the affective work of the Indonesian political docu-drama, A Poet,
directed by Garin Nugroho,6 and two hybrid documentaries—Indian director Amar
Kanwar’s A Season Outside7 and The Gleaners and I, directed by one of the
founders of the French New Wave, Agnès Varda.8 The final essay brings together
the threads of the two parts of the project through a study of Saacha, directed by
Indian documentary makers, Anjali Monteiro and K. P. Jayasankar.9 This piece
explores the centrality of affective mimetic experience in the film to challenge
many of the key assumptions of documentary theory.

In writing of the film theory and practice of Jean-Luc Godard, Jonathan
Rosenbaum writes that, as well as being an often insightful and rigorous writer of
criticism, Godard also produces ‘criticism composed in the language of the
medium’—that the films themselves are vigorous interrogations of cinematic
aesthetics.10 The same could be said of each of the directors whose work is
featured here. Each pushes the parameters of film in dynamic and invigorating
ways. In each film there is a rigorous exploration of cinematic ideas that is often
much more incisive than is common in film theory. It is no accident that every one

5 Frontier. Dir. Bruce Belsham. Prod. Bruce Belsham, 1997.
6 A Poet: Unconcealed Poetry (Puisi Tak Terkuburkan). Dir. Garin Nugroho. Prod. S.E.T.
Audiovisual Workshop and Garin Nugroho, 1999.
7 A Season Outside. Dir. Amar Kanwar. Prod. Rajiv Mehrotra and Foundation for Universal
Responsibility, 1997.
8 The Gleaners and I (Les Glâneurs et la Glâneuse). Dir. Agnès Varda, 2000.
9 Saacha (The Loom). Dir. Anjali Monteiro and K.P. Jayasankar. Prod. Unit for Media and
Communications, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, 2001.
10 Rosenbaum, Jonathan. Placing Movies. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995: 21.
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