Ecologies of the Moving Image: Cinema, Affect, Nature

5. Anima Moralia: Journeys across Frontiers

5 ‫ﱚ‬ ANIMA MORALIA Journeys across Frontiers [The] world does nothing but signify. To be a world is to effervesce with an excess of signification. That this should be so is the product of an apparent contradiction: the world communicates because it is not whole. Sean Cubitt, EcoMedia1 Cinema is a sensuous object, but it also comes – and becomes – before us a sensing and sensual subject and, in the address of the eye, allows us to see what seems a visual impossibility: that we are at once subject and object, the seer and the seen. From Grizzly Man (2005). Directed by Werner Herzog. Credit: Lions Gate Films/ Photofest. Shown:Timothy Treadwell with grizzly bear. 194 ANIMA MORALIA [. . .] the cinema provides us with a philosophical model that gives us concrete and empirical insight into and makes objectively visible the reversible, dialectical, and social nature of our own subjective vision. Vivian Sobchack, The Address of the Eye2 There is no manifestation of life which does not contain in a rudimentary state – latent or potential – the essential characters of most other manifestations. [. . .] [T]here is not a single property of vegetable life that is not found, in some degree, in certain animals; not a single characteristic feature of the animal that has not been seen in certain species at certain moments in the vegetable world. Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution3 Animal images in art, religion, and dreams are not merely depictions of animals. Animal images are also showing us images as animals, living beings that prowl and growl and must be nourished; the imagination, a great animal, a dragon under whose heaven we breathe its fire. James Hillman, Egalitarian Typologies versus the Perception of the Unique4 They’re here! Poltergeist (1982) EXPANDING ON A NOTE in Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s late writings, film phenomenologist Vivian Sobchack writes that “more than any other medium of human communication, the moving picture makes itself sensuously and sensibly manifest as the expression of experience by experience. A film is an act of seeing that makes itself seen, an act of hearing that makes itself heard, an act of physical and reflective movement that makes itself reflexively felt and understood.” Cinema, she continues, “transposes, without completely transforming, those modes of being alive and consciously embodied in the world that count for each of us as direct experience.” Cinema “uses modes of embodied existence (seeing, hearing, physical and reflective movement) as the vehicle, the ‘stuff,’ the substance of its language.”5 Sobchack focuses much of her analysis of cinema on the relationship between the viewer and the viewed, which is more complex in the case of film than one may initially think. Cinema, in her assessment, is not only a viewed object but also a viewing subject. It is bi-directional in that it selects views of the world to show us, its viewers. While this relationship between the viewer—the abstract “us” or the concrete me, you, and others—and the “viewed view,” or the film, will be an important part of what I examine in this Journeys across Frontiers 195 chapter, my main focus will be on the film-world itself. Specifically, it will be on the biomorphic dynamism of film-worlds—that is, on the animate forms that specific film-worlds present to us. In any such world, the things viewed can also be “viewed view(er)s,” and the heard objects can be expressive, speaking or sounding subjects. As we witness the play of relations between viewers and viewed, hearers and heard—the relations that constitute the liveliness of what is shown to us in a film—we, the final viewers, become engaged in that dynamism, because we recognize it as more or less the same kind of dynamism as that of the world that precedes the film. If film is “the expression of experience by experience,” it moves us because we recognize it as experience. And if the universe is “experience all the way down,” as process-relational philosophy asserts, then film can also be a medium for communicating the experientiality that is part of all living form. In its focus on the play between a film’s anthropomorphism, its geomorphism , and its biomorphism, this chapter builds on the previous two. The three morphogenetic registers are ultimately inseparable, since the former two emerge out of the dynamism making up the third: they are temporary resting points at either...