“Film Experience and the Formation of Illusion: The Spectator as ‘Surrogate Body’ for the Cinema,” by Christiane Voss

Introduction

At a critical juncture in the history of film theory, about twenty years ago, the two main concerns of film theory were positioning and processing. Feminist film theory and semio-psychoanalytic approaches were interested in how the film positioned the spectator and defined her subjectivity. Meanwhile, arguing against the idea of a passively constructed spectator, cognitivist film theory conceived of the spectator in terms of information processing: the film offered a matrix of information, a series of cues, which the spectator processed in an exercise of mostly pleasurable problem solving. For all the turbulent sexual desire reflected on in feminist and psychoanalytic film theory, and for all the joy and peace of mind that emanates from duly processed chunks of information, both approaches were, in a way, intensely cerebral, wary or sometimes even distrustful of the corporeal aspects of the film experience in the case of feminist film theory, and mostly oblivious to any possibility of an embodied version of information processing in the case of cognitive film theory.

Since then, however, and mostly because of the impact of philosophy on film theory, the body has re-entered the frame and become a key focus of film theory. To cite two particularly influential examples, the work of Vivian Sobchack and Raymond Bellour may illustrate this point. Drawing on the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and arguing explicitly against the body-skepticism of feminist and psychoanalytic film theory, Sobchack argued in her 1992 book The Address of the Eye, and again in Carnal Thoughts from 2004, not only that we should think of the spectator as an embodied being but that the film itself has a body—that is, that there is a corporeal dimension to the aesthetics of the film that transcends, even though it interacts with, the individual body of the spectator.¹

Meanwhile, starting from within the scope of psychoanalytic film theory and inspired by Gilles Deleuze and his thinking of the film in terms of image and affect, and more particularly in terms of how affect traverses and transforms the subject, Bellour has developed seminal elements of a theory of the cinematic body, or rather of the film-as-body, over the past twenty years. “Le film est un corps de mémoire” (the film is a body of memory) is the opening line of one of Bellour’s most recent books, a brief study of “Menschen am Sonntag.” In just a few words this line sums up an argument about body, memory, and spectatorship which Bellour develops more fully in the more than six hundred pages of his 2009 book Le corps du cinema, focusing in particular on the film experience as a state of quasi-hypnosis and on aesthetic emotions on a presemantic, somatic level.

As different as their approaches and philosophical references may be—Sobchack, for instance, argues from within a phenomenological framework and develops her theoretical argument at a level of media theory, whereas Bellour, much like André Bazin before him, comes to theory from the engagement with specific works—both Sobchack and Bellour converge on the idea of the film’s body, or the film-as-body, which goes beyond any psychologically grounded attention to the tactile and other somatic aspects of film viewing as an individual and individually attributable experience. We chose to present the following essay by Christiane Voss to the readership of Cinema Journal not least because her work marks a notable contribution to the field of thinking about the corporeal dimensions of film delineated by the work of such authors as Sobchack and Bellour. Writing in German and coming from a philosophical background—her previous work was on the philosophy of emotions, with a particular focus on contributions from analytic philosophy—Voss picks up a thread from Sobchack’s argument about the corporeal dimensions of the film experience and combines it with a philosophical argument about illusion as a key element of aesthetic experience. Reviving a Kantian approach to illusion which posits it as a...