Theorist of Feeling

Dear Richard,

I wonder if you remember an evening walk in Stockholm in December 2010 when Jackie Stacey and I envisioned a book project for you: a collection of essays showcasing your pathbreaking work on feeling in cinema, packaged as your take on the ascending affective turn in cinema studies. During the walk from Filmhuset to Odenplan in crisp weather, Jackie and I enthusiastically proposed essays to be included—there were so many to choose from—and even invented what we thought was a brilliant title (which I have since forgotten). I remember it vividly, as I also remember your amused but unconvinced silence in the face of our—or at least my—eagerness. I so wanted to read such a book, especially an introductory chapter in which I imagined you would flesh out the theory of feeling lurking between the lines in your work from the early 1970s until today. I still hope such a book might be in the making, and while waiting, I offer my notes for the road. While never fully coming out as a theorist of feeling, in my reading you are a classic author in the field.

Your first book from 1973, Light Entertainment, the second volume in the BFI Television Monograph series, focused on pop shows and variety, programs "akin to show business, cabaret and musical comedy," prefiguring your later studies on the musical, stardom, performance, and songs in cinema.¹ At the heyday of screen theory, semiotics, and psychoanalysis in film studies, the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies paved the way for the study of feeling and a concern with "popular forms."² "Shows are entertaining," you argued, "because they assert against the unpleasantness of reality certain hopes and ideals for humanity, because they give pleasure by making their audiences feel what those ideals would be like were they realised."³ Light Entertainment reads as your first attempt to formulate an analysis of audiovisual entertainment as both a social and aesthetic experience, and to carve out a critical space that would allow for sociological and aesthetic concerns to coexist.⁴ Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall, and Richard Hoggart appear in the footnotes, as do Henri Lefebvre and Susanne K. Langer.

For affect studies today, your overall attunement to affective life, to sensory experience and media materiality as research questions, and your emphasis on the physicality of performer and viewer in this early piece is distinctive and pioneering. In your approach, the sociological, situated phenomenon of entertainment is examined aesthetically and as a form of vital potential. In Light Entertainment, you underlined "the fact of human energy in the vitality of the dance number, the pow of the singing, the snap of the humour, the sparkle of the sexuality," describing the force of entertainment as "a real life-assertive quality."⁵

What you discussed in 1973 as an aesthetic of escape emerged in your 1977 essay "Entertainment and Utopia" as a theory of the musical as a cultural form articulating and addressing "a utopian sensibility."⁶ This notion, a conceptualization of a horizon of experience, expectations, and desires rooted in the contemporary moment, provided an alternative to the language of psychoanalysis in understanding pleasure. While this essay makes no mention of Raymond Williams's concept of structure of feeling, you do evoke it in your 1976–1977 essay on The Sound of Music (Robert Wise, 1965): "Analysing the sensuous level of artistic signification means grasping the links between the formal, culturally developed rules of an artistic tradition . . . and a sensibility which is crucially, but probably not wholly, determined by a specific culture."⁷

Mobilizing Susanne K. Langer's vocabulary of forms and feelings, you stress the importance of studying nonrepresentational signs––"colour, texture, movement, rhythm, melody, camerawork"––beyond narrative and the representational frame.⁸ While introducing a phenomenological perspective in the high moment of semiotics and cinepsychoanalysis, you were careful to reject Langer's implication, as you put it, "that the emotion itself is not coded, is simply a 'human feeling.'" Instead, you were "inclined to see almost as much coding in the emotions as in the signs for them."^9...