The Place of Breath in Cinema by Davina Quinlivan (review)

Aleksandr Sokurov describes his films as unfolding not through shots or scenes but as series of “breaths.” Sometimes this term feels mimetically descriptive, as when the title figures in Mother and Son (1997) inhale and exhale together as the mother dies while conjuring votive visions of their shared past. The locution feels just as apt, if less literal, regarding Sokurov’s oneiric depiction of a Chechen battlefront in Alexandra (2007), where younger and older generations stare down mortality in different ways, or his dramatization of Hirohito’s last gasps as emperor in The Sun (2005). Most famously and flamboyantly, Russian Ark (2002) condenses a ninety-minute tour of the Hermitage and a raspy elegy for three hundred years of Russian history within a single, continuous camera movement, or “in one breath.”¹ These films approach their subjects through dialectics of transparency and opacity, of austerity and sensuality, and of isolation and togetherness, whether natal or national in scope. Meanwhile, they breathe their death rattles, divine winds, and dreamer’s sighs.

Sokurov does not feature in Davina Quinlivan’s richly suggestive monograph The Place of Breath in Cinema. He stands, however, among many auteurs whom Quinlivan prompts me to reconsider, artistically and also philosophically, via her ambitious, intersubjective, and excitingly portable theorizations of breath within and beyond contemporary filmmaking. Her principal case studies comprise several works apiece by Atom Egoyan, David Cronenberg, and Lars von Trier, and devotees of these auteurs will find much to consider here. The Place of Breath may prove still more rewarding to readers invested in the phenomenology of cinema, in relations of sound to image, in models of collective being, or in the intellectual and ethical potentials of embodied spectatorship.

Given its title and unusual topic, The Place of Breath in Cinema quickly stokes reflection on famous characters or scenes for which breathing serves as an overt signifier, anywhere from Marlene Dietrich’s panting bride in The Scarlet Empress (Josef von Sternberg, 1934) to Darth Vader’s sinister sonority in Star Wars (George Lucas, 1977). For the most part, however, Quinlivan sidelines such manifest depictions of breathing per se. She refrains as well from seeking broad formal correlatives for the rhythms or sensations of breathing, as one might find, for example, in Terence Davies’s diaphanous dissolves or Andrei Tarkovsky’s long, meditative takes.

What breath instead connotes for Quinlivan, drawing heavily on Luce Irigaray’s treatments of this theme, is a constellation of linked dialectics similar to those I outlined in Sokurov’s work. As a biological mode, breathing signifies the externalities of nose, mouth, and chest, the internal conversions of vapor into vitality, and the insoluble relations among these, all of which Quinlivan encompasses within such flexible, perpetually renegotiated terms as (in)visibility and (im)materiality. These concepts merge perceptible and embodied phenomena of several types with less palpable ones: the body that breathes air, but also the spectator who “breathes” a film through its sounds and images, or the atmosphere that passes through all of us despite our manifold differences, both incarnate and ideological.

For Quinlivan, as for Irigaray, breath offers a venue for thinking through these complex dynamics of inside-outside, visible-invisible, embodied-ineffable, ocular-auditory, singular-multiple, and formal-ethical. The Place of Breath in Cinema rigorously unpacks this breath-centered turn within Irigaray’s philosophical project while opening new channels of insight into Egoyan, Cronenberg, von Trier, and contemporaneous auteurs who make cameo appearances in Quinlivan’s chapters. Indeed, among many other assets, this monograph valuably directs closer, creative attention to a key current in a major theorist’s work, which has often been overshadowed by the different critiques of patriarchy and models of feminine discourse in Irigaray’s 1970s texts.

Quite unfashionably, Irigaray’s articulations of breathing as a trope push further than Quinlivan does into blanket axiomatics of gender, verging on a reformulated theology. “It seems that the woman, in a way,” Irigaray contends, “is divine from birth, that she...