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A Cognitive Approach to Embodying
History in Film:
An analysis of Son of Saul and Sunset
Jasper Koopmans 10719105
jasperk2010@hotmail.com
University of Amsterdam
Research Master’s Thesis Media Studies 20/6/2020
Supervisor: Mrs. dr. M.A.M.B. (Marie) Lous Baronian Second reader: Mr. dr. A.M. (Abe) Geil
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Acknowledgements
I would, above all, like to thank Marie Baronian for the constructive feedback that I received over the last few months. Although these were (and still are) surreal times due to the corona crisis, I could always count on Marie for pointing me in the right direction.
Second of all, I would like to express my gratitude towards the UvA and the IMACS programme for providing me the opportunity of studying abroad for a semester during the Research Master. My time in Rome has been essential in shaping the ideas for this thesis.
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Abstract
The two Hungarian films, Son of Saul (2015, László Nemes) and Sunset (2018, László Nemes), present history in new and exciting ways. Both films are created in the post-memory era, which means that the living, communicational connection with the represented events is fading out (Margitházi 2018). In the case of Son of Saul, the unspeakable is presented in the form of the Holocaust; and in the case of Sunset, the pre-WW I turmoil of 1913 Budapest is brought to the screen. Two approaches in cognitive film theory, the mood-cue approach and Embodied Simulation (ES) Theory, show how these films bring back alive the post-memory era. The former allows to analyse both films on the basis of redundant emotion cues. These emotion cues provide an emotional orientation, a mood, toward the films that is similar to the emotional orientation that we experience in day-to-day life (Smith 2003). In the case of
Son of Saul, it is the mood of emptiness, and in the case of Sunset, the mood of frustration. Whereas the
mood-cue approach illuminates the emotional configuration of Son of Saul and Sunset, ES theory shows how the viewer may physically respond to it (and to the film in large). The findings of mirror neurons in the human brain shows that we are able to physically mirror actions and emotions that we observe, also the ones depicted on-screen (Gallese and Guerra 2019). When films are successful in this regard, we speak of embodiment and when we deem them unsuccessful (this may be a conscious or unconscious feature of a film), we speak of disembodiment. In line with this theory, Son of Saul walks the line between embodiment and disembodiment through techniques as the close-up and the hand-held camera.
Sunset is largely experienced as a disembodying film through techniques as jump-cuts and fake POV
shot/reverse shots that frustrate the viewer. The results from the cognitive approaches are interesting in collaboration with the field of ‘memory studies’. Namely, the structure of film and memory is very similar; both rely on narrative for sense-making, both elicit emotion and provide a physical experience. Accordingly, Alison Landsberg (2004) has argued that mass media such as film are able to create a ‘prosthetic memory’ for the spectator. This shows that Son of Saul and Sunset may be experienced as a real memory. Moreover, emotion research and other (historical) sources prove that the physical and emotional coding of the prosthetic memories created by Son of Saul and Sunset links well to how individuals with a closeness to the represented events remember them. Thus, Son of Saul and Sunset are able to bring the spectator closer to individuals with a closeness to the events by creating a memory that is, at least to a certain degree, similar.
Keywords: Cognitive film theory, mood-cue approach, Embodied Simulation Theory, Holocaust, prosthetic memory.
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Table of contents
Introduction………...………1
1. Cognitive Film Theory: A fragmented and reactionary field…... ………..……...………5
1.1 Psychoanalytic Film Theory: From paradigm to foster child……….………5
1.2 The Early Years of Cognitive Film Theory……….……….…...…….7
1.3 Cognition and Emotion………...………..12
1.4 A Pre-cognitive Approach: Embodied Simulation………...……….15
2. A Hybrid Cognitive Approach to Son of Saul and Sunset……….…………18
2.1 Son of Saul: Embodying the emptiness of the Holocaust……….………..18
2.2 Sunset: The frustration of disembodiment……….25
3. Cognitivism as an Empirical Basis for Prosthetic Memory………..33
3.1 Prosthetic Memory………...…………...……….33
3.2 The Imaginary Worlds of Son of Saul and Sunset……….……….36
3.3 Embodying History in Hollywood? ………....…………..………41
Conclusion……….….47
Bibliography………...50
1
Introduction
The idea for this thesis began on the 29th of March 2019. In the half-filled room 4 of the Eye Filmmuseum
Amsterdam, László Nemes is present for the Q&A of his film. Son of Saul has just been screened and the 42-year old director stands in front of the small audience to answer questions. It becomes clear right away that Nemes is a filmmaker who is confident about his ideas and has a clear vision of his practice. He is not afraid to attack Martin Koolhoven1, who asked Nemes a question from the audience, on the
topic of shooting on film vs. digitally, and he looks down on the world-renowned cinematographer Roger Deakins for the same ideas; in the mind of Nemes, Deakins chooses safety over art for shooting digitally. After the Q&A, I manage to hijack Nemes and talk with him about Kubrick, Tarkovsky, about overvalued film schools and what not. The Hungarian film director fascinates me. As a prodigy of Hungarian film legend Béla Tarr, Nemes has developed clear and specific ideas about how to approach a film; shooting on 35mm, lingering long takes, close-ups into the souls of his characters, the off-screen as a trigger of the imagination, and atmospheric sounds are as important as the words in a dialogue. Moreover, Nemes proves to be a literate man. As a child he moved with his mother to Paris where he studied History, International Relations and Political Science at the Institut d’Études Politiques. Nemes’s knowledge extends beyond the medium of film and he uses that to his advantage in his projects. His feature films, Son of Saul (2015) and Sunset (2018), and short films, With a Little Patience (2007) and The Counterpart (2008), are all set in historic periods that have to do with the transformation of Europe into how we know it today. Of the films, Son of Saul has garnered the most attention. The uncompromising portrayal inside the extermination camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau was awarded with the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film of the Year. The film won another 62 awards and managed to gross over four times its budget (“Saul Fia (2015)”). After having talked with Nemes and reading more about the praise that he received not only from film critics but also from historians and other academics, I knew that I needed to find out what makes his films so special and how his films might be of relevance in their depictions of history.
Nemes’s feature films, Son of Saul and Sunset, focus on specific attributes of history that have relatively been left untouched by history books and cinema. Son of Saul is a Holocaust film that centres on the specific role and tasks of Sonderkommando. Sonderkommando were (mostly) Jewish prisoners that were placed into ‘special squads’, wherein they were forced, on threat of their own deaths, to work in the extermination camps. They had to perform unimaginably horrific work, part of which was guiding their fellows to the gas chambers, operating the crematoria, and cleaning the blood, body fluids and pus from the chambers (Didi-Huberman 4). Apart from the Nazis themselves, the Sonderkommando were the only witnesses of the Nazi’s policy of mass murder; and it was thus of absolute importance for the
1 Koolhoven is one of the Netherlands’s most popular film directors. Known for films such as Brimstone (2016)
2 Nazis to isolate them from other camp inmates. This is one of the reasons that relatively little information exists on the topic of the Sonderkommando and that Son of Saul is only the second feature film to depict the Sonderkommando, after The Grey Zone (Tim Blake Nelson, 2001).
Sunset takes place even further back in time, in 1913 Budapest. Nemes has said that the film can
serve as a prologue to Son of Saul, because it is an attempt to find out ‘how we ended up with the concentration camps’ (Grey, “‘Sunset’ Sheds Light on the Days Before World War I”). He has added that in the represented period “There was an expectation that something was going to happen. There was a thirst for the mythical, the unknown, along with science and a firm belief in technology… At the same time, below the surface, some dark, repressed, untamed forces were threatening this sophisticated world” (Keslassy, “Laszlo Nemes on Venice title ‘Sunset’ as a Period, Political and Personal Piece”). Sunset is not unique in depicting these currents in history2, but the narrative is definitely at the margin of the
portrayals of early 1900s Europe, where a large part of the films either centre on World War I or are packaged into biopics of great men and women that lived through these times.
In their approach to filmmaking, Son of Saul and Sunset are also different from the so-called historical film. They present history not in immediate detail but from a limited and subjective perspective. In the films, the camera focuses very closely on the protagonists, which confines the factual historic events to the background, out of focus. This specific approach creates an interesting relationship between film and viewer. Critics have praised the films for their immersive qualities and some have even compared the films to video games for the fact that the camera always circles around the main character, as if the character is operated by the viewer (e.g. BFI.org, Filminquiry.com). This specific approach of framing the viewer as part of the narrative makes Son of Saul and Sunset quite unique in recreating and representing historical periods on film. The interrelation between spectator and film has therefore become the prime focus in this thesis to research the possible historical relevance of Son of
Saul and Sunset. In order to explore this interrelation, I turn to the field of cognitive film theory.
Cognitive film theory is a well-known but highly contested field in film studies. At the University of Amsterdam this is not much different3. Finishing my sixth and last year of studying film
(as part of the Media Studies department) at this university I have rarely encountered courses that, albeit slightly, focus on cognitive theory. I can think of several reasons for this neglect. One of those might be the fact that cognitive film theory is a dispersed field that is deemed incoherent by many scholars, as I will explain in this thesis. Another point that has been brought up by some scholars is that cognitive theory’s turn to the hard sciences is an attack of cultural relativism, most often present in the humanities
2 Other films that deal with these currents are, among others, Sunrise (István Szabó, 1999), Capcana Mercenarilor (Sergiu Nicolaescu, 1981) and the miniseries Fall of Eagles (John Elliot, 1974).
3 The first time that I encountered cognitive film theory was, therefore, not at the University of Amsterdam but at
the university of Roma Tre, where I spent a semester as part of the IMACS programme. In Rome, I followed prof. Enrico Carocci’s course titled “Interpretazione e analisi del film” wherein we discussed cognitive scholars like Stefano Calabrese, Greg M. Smith, Vittorio Gallese and Michele Guerra. These scholars do, unsurprisingly, also play a key role in this thesis.
3 (Rhym 84). Film scholar Bill Nichols, one of the pioneering scholars at the side of ‘cultural relativism’, has for example stated that “the most regressive current in contemporary film study is the nomination of analytic philosophy and cognitive psychology as global theoretical frameworks” that are incompatible with the “politics of multiculturalism and social representation” that are so crucial to cultural studies (42).
I would like to contest the above-named reasons for not adopting a cognitivist perspective. In my view, the fact that cognitive theory is a dispersed field asks for explicit positioning of the methodologies and concepts within the field. This does not provide incoherence, but rather a well-defined and focussed research. Moreover, I think it is wrong to recognize the cognitive approaches as an attack of cultural relativism in film studies; they can rather serve as a bridge between biology and culture in our area of research (Bondebjerg 13). Ib Bondebjerg explains: “Society and culture shapes the human mind, but our brain and body—our whole biological structure— comes with structures, dispositions and biological functions and mechanism that also, to a large degree, influence the way we experience reality and communicate about it” (14). Thus, by adopting a cognitive perspective I don’t advocate for substituting culture with nature, but I theorize the film viewer as a creature that is also biological (Bondebjerg 13).
In simple terms, a cognitivist perspective enables the film scholar to research the psychology of the spectator. Cognitivist scholars research processes like recognition, comprehension and imagination that are at work in the spectator’s interaction with film (Bordwell 1989: 13). They turn to the hard sciences to assemble empirical evidence as a foundational support for these studies. In this respect, the cognitive approaches are ‘modest’, as they focus on scientific deduction as opposed to the Grand Theories like psychoanalysis and narratology that prescribe their outcome (Smith, “Film Criticism after Grand Theories”). Accordingly, I will turn to neurobiology and neuropsychology to research how the spectator interacts emotionally and physically with Son of Saul and Sunset. This locates the spectator as a natural being, who reacts to film in the same ways as he reacts to the world around him, namely as a creature that is shaped by biological processes.
The usefulness for a cognitivist perspective also extends to historicity in film. When talking about the interrelation between history and film, film scholars turn to the multidisciplinary field of ‘memory studies’. Namely, talking about memory in contrast to ‘history’ creates a better understanding of the dialogic relationship between the ‘then’ and the ‘now’; memory shows how the past is activated and experienced in the present (Grainge 1). The cognitive studies create further insights in the interaction between film and memory, because both are entangled in cognitive processes. In fact, film and memory both rely on narrative for sense-making, both elicit emotion and provide a physical experience. In other words, film and memory provide very similar experiences in the interaction with the past. Thus, the combination of these fields will eventually help me in answering my central research question: How do the films Son of Saul and Sunset enable the viewer to experience history in a cognitive manner?
4 The thesis is divided into three chapters, each building toward the answer of the central research question.
In the first chapter, I focus on the general field of cognitive film theory. As I have mentioned, cognitive film theory is a dispersed field that many seem incoherent. Therefore, I examine both the founding theories and the current state of the field in this chapter. This will be done on the basis of the following subdivision: firstly, cognitive studies will be examined as a reaction to the paradigm of psychoanalysis in film studies; and, secondly, the field is explained on the basis of the founding theories of Bordwell and Carroll. In the second part of the chapter, I provide a review of the epistemological and neuroscientific notions that are needed to understand my reasoning in the following chapters (Gallese and Guerra 2019: xxi). This will be done by discussing the two approaches that will guide this thesis: the mood-cue approach and Embodied Simulation (ES) theory.
In the second chapter, I combine the mood-cue approach and ES theory into a hybrid cognitive approach. This will be applied to my two case studies, Son of Saul and Sunset, to provide insights into how these films activate an emotional and embodied spectator.
The third chapter is dedicated to the interrelation between cognitive film studies and memory studies. The chapter deals with a consideration of the cognitive capacities that are involved in film watching and the storing and recalling of memories, and analyses on what basis the two are related. Consequently, the results from the hybrid cognitive approach are measured against research that has been done into the represented historic periods in Son of Saul and Sunset. The spectatorial cognitive investment in the films will be compared to emotion research, source material and other sources, to examine whether the spectator’s experience of Son of Saul and Sunset resonates with existing memories of the represented periods. Lastly, the final chapter offers a starting point for further reflections on the hybrid cognitive approach for embodying history in film. Two Hollywood counterparts of my case studies, Schindler’s List (Steven Spielberg, 1993) and The Immigrant (James Gray, 2013), will be tested for the adaptability of the approach. With these two additional case studies, the framework of the approach can be extended, creating better insights into what particular films are better (or worse) fit to construct a memory of the past.
In the end, the purpose of this thesis is to create additional and, hopefully, better insights into how historical films can open a dialogic relationship with the past. Through the analyses of my case studies, my aim is to show that cognitive studies can offer a greater understanding of the interrelationship between film, viewer, and the memory of a historical past. This will not only show that, with extensive
a priori research, historical films are able to create emotional and physical experiences that recreate a
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Chapter 1. Cognitive Film Theory: A fragmented and reactionary field
The discipline of cognitivism is defined as the study in psychology that focuses on mental processes. Thus, when the discipline found its way to film studies, scholars turned away from the filmic text and started focussing on biological and mental processes that are employed by the spectator. Cognitivists turn to empirical evidence to arrive at insights about these processes. For example, findings in emotion studies and neurosciences have, as will be discussed in this chapter, shown that we orientate emotionally and interact physically with film in the same manner as we do in our day-to-day lives. In studying this, cognitivists apply an interdisciplinary framework that ranges from the cognitive sciences to neurosciences and philosophical aesthetics. On the basis of research purposes, the cognitivist film scholar weighs the field to appropriate ‘the best available theory’. This does not entail that cognitivists are necessarily interested in committing to these sciences, but rather that they appropriate the suggested methods (Plantinga 21). Consequently, most of the advocates of cognitive film theory state that it is not a unified theory but a research tradition. I will, therefore, to avoid confusion, use the term ‘cognitive film theory’ when I analyse the historical or conceptual aspects in broader terms; rather, when I focus on a specific methodology or its application, I will turn to the term ‘cognitive approach’.
In this chapter, I will be focussing on the following two aspects. Firstly, I will research the origins of cognitive film theory and make a case for its relevance. Secondly, I will position myself in the widespread field of cognitive film theory and explain the usefulness of the chosen approaches in relation to my case studies.
1.1 Psychoanalytic Film Theory: From paradigm to foster child
Cognitive film theory didn’t only derive from developments in the cognitive- or neurosciences, but it also marked a break with contemporary theories in film studies. I will break the discussion of this into two parts: in the present section, I concentrate on the most important theory that cognitivism moved away from: psychoanalysis; in the second section, I will discuss how the breaking points with psychoanalytic film theory led to cognitive theory. Understanding the former will prove fruitful for uncovering the foundations of the latter. It is worth noting, however, that the reaction to psychoanalysis was only one of the many tendencies that has led to cognitive film theory; accordingly, these sections are not meant to be read as a linear historical account but rather as a conceptual consideration of two confronting theories.
During the 1970s and a large part of the 1980s, psychoanalysis was considered the reigning paradigm in film studies. Journals like Screen and the scholars and film theorists Christian Metz, Jean-Louis Baudry, and Laura Mulvey were the focus of attention (Quiqley 13). It was not until the mid- or late 1980s that cognitive film theory questioned the appropriateness of psychoanalysis within the study of cinema (Plantinga 17). Herein, Noël Carroll was one of the predominant critics of psychoanalysis. In his 1988 book Mystifying Movies: Fads and Fallacies in Contemporary Film Theory he wrote that such
6 theory has “… impeded research and reduced film analysis to the repetition of fashionable slogans and unexamined assumptions” (234). Before focussing on this paradigmatic shift, it is useful to pay attention to the prevailing psychoanalytic approaches of the 1970s and early 1980s that were later discarded by Carroll and others.
Most of these prevailing psychoanalytic approaches were, at least to a certain extent, inspired by Freudo-Lacanian psychoanalysis, and more specifically by the Lacanian mirror stage. Even if the mirror stage is an incredibly complex notion with large numbers of papers and books designated to it, my short treatment of the mirror stage is only in function of understanding the spawned theories in film studies. In that respect, I find Jane Gallop’s brief description of the mirror stage a useful entry:
… in the mirror stage, the infant who has not yet mastered the upright posture and who is supported by either another person or some device will, upon seeing herself in the mirror, "jubilantly assume" the upright position. She thus finds "already there" in the mirror image a mastery that she will actually learn only later. The jubilation, the enthusiasm, is tied to the temporal dialectic by which she appears already to be what she will only later become. (120)
Thus, the infant is confronted with a totalized self. The projected image (the reflection) anticipates the developments that the infant will face in later stages of growing up.
For Lacan and his followers, the mirror stage is decisive in man’s development. This stage marks the creation of our ego (and with that desire), mediated by the illusory image reflected in the mirror (Gallop 121). In his earlier essays, Lacan described the act of looking in the mirror with the notion of the ‘gaze’ as a mastering force that leads to narcissism; but in later works he would complicate this notion. As McGowan analyses, “The gaze is not the look of the subject at the object, but the point at which the object looks back” (28-29). In other words, at the same time as our ego is created, also an uncanny feeling comes to exist. On the one hand, we project our desire onto the mirror, which, on the other hand, stares back at us to reflect our own nothingness. It is in the lack of desire that we actually continue to desire (Felluga, “Modules on Lacan”). Therefore, according to Lacanian beliefs, man is captured in this endless cycle after first recognizing himself in the mirror.
Traditional Lacanian film theory has applied the mirror stage and the notion of the gaze for the theorization of spectatorship (McGowan 28). According to this theory, the screen replaces the mirror as the mediator of the illusory image. Christian Metz writes in his canonical The Imaginary Signifier:
Psychoanalysis and Cinema (1977) that “The spectator is absent from the screen as perceived, but also
(the two things inevitably go together) present there and even 'all-present' as perceiver. At every moment I am in the film by my look’s caress” (54). Following Metz’s interpretation of the Lacanian mirror stage, the spectator has full mastery over the filmic experience (McGowan 28). He is both free from any influence from the outside and omnipotent in his power as perceiver. In this interpretation of the mirror
7 stage, the gaze is considered a mastering force and not – as Gallop indicates in her analysis – a disruption of mastery and desire.
Other scholars such as Jean-Louis Baudry and Laura Mulvey have built slightly differently upon Lacan’s mirror stage compared to Metz, but they have also focussed on the mastery of the gaze as their guiding principle. For Baudry, the gaze of the spectator is cemented in the apparatus: “the arrangement of the different elements - projector, darkened hall, screen - in addition to reproducing in a striking way the mise-en-scene of Plato's cave ... reconstructs the situation necessary to the release of the 'mirror stage' discovered by Lacan” (539). The spectator’s identification with the camera presents an ideological danger for Baudry because the spectator is blind to the process of production and thus masters a ‘reality’ that is not symbolically situated (McGowan 30). For Mulvey, who also bases her theories on classical Hollywood cinema, the gaze is gender-constructed: in classical Hollywood cinema, the male spectator finds his screen surrogate in a male protagonist that gazes at a female object. Through that masochistic gaze, the male (both spectator and character) aggregates full mastery over the female that is presented on-screen. Here, again, an ideological danger is presented, because women are presented in their traditional exhibitionist role to serve the male gaze (Mulvey 309). This danger is amplified by the fact that, according to Baudry and Mulvey, the spectator is actually controlled by another gaze, either that of the camera or that of the male protagonist. Consequently, the spectator has no control over his own gaze, and his mastery is guided by external forces.
As previously mentioned, the stream of psychoanalytic approaches during the 1970s and early 1980s relied on a limited interpretation (a misinterpretation one could argue4) of Lacan’s mirror stage.
In more recent years we have seen a revival of the psychoanalytic approach with works of Slavoj Žižek, Gaylyn Studlar and Todd McGowan5. These scholars distant themselves from the notion of the mastery
of the gaze and focus on man’s desire to lack power; on the desire of submission; and the idea that the gaze disrupts the ability of an omnipotent perceiver. Nevertheless, it has been necessary to explore the approaches opted by Metz, Baudry and Mulvey, because, as the next section will demonstrate, cognitive film theory was a strong reaction against this (then) reigning paradigm. It distanced itself from the predominant gaze and payed attention to other aspects of spectatorship. From the year 1985 this new branch in film studies started to receive more recognition.
1.2 The Early Years of Cognitive Film Theory
Carl Plantinga, one of the early supporters of cognitive film theory, writes in 2002 that the “approach has a small but growing number of adherents” (16) and that it “has a future in the interdisciplinary study of film” (16). Plantinga wrote this as a reaction to the third biennial symposium of the Center for
4 McGowan’s The Real Gaze (2007) shows that scholars such as Metz and Mulvey misinterpreted the Lacanian
gaze. In the manifesto, the scholar indicates that for Lacan the gaze comes from the object and not – as Metz and Mulvey interpreted - the person who is looking.
5 Slavoj Žižek’s The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989); Gaylyn Studlar’s “Masochism and the Perverse
8 Cognitive Film Studies of the Moving Image6, to which I will refer to as SCSMI. The biennials organized
by SCSMI were refigured in 2009 into an annual conference that is still running today. The expansion of the biennials and the conferences is an indication of the dissemination of cognitive theory in film studies; the number of speakers rose from twenty-five in 2002 (Plantinga, 16) to over a hundred in 2019 (Program Book for SCSMI Conference).
Next to the increasing amount of attention for the SCSMI conferences, the number of journals that concentrate on cognitive film theory have also grown over time (e.g. SCSMI’s own award-winning
Projections: The Journal for Movies and Mind was established in 2009; and there’s Cinema: Journal for Philosophy and the Moving Image). Moreover, the amount of works and notions have rapidly
developed over time7. To name a few: David Bordwell writes about perception; Joseph Anderson about
the organism and the environment; Carl Plantinga and Greg M. Smith about emotion and empathy; and Vittorio Gallese and Michele Guerra write about embodied simulation. It becomes evident that these scholars have a different focus than the previously discussed psychoanalytic approach; alternatively, they emphasize the role of the spectator’s brain and body in reaction to film. This does not make cognitive film theory unique, because phenomenology and affect theory focus on the same areas (Sinnenbrink, “Cinempathy”). However, in contrast to the subjectivity of these approaches8, cognitive
film theory follows a naturalistic perspective and is dedicated “to the highest standards in reasoning and evidence” (Nannicelli, “Cognitive Film Theory”). In that respect, cognitivists rely on the ‘certainties’ of science in contrast to the vagaries of interpretation (Vescio 384).
In this section, I further outline the grounding of cognitive film theory by concentrating on the origins of the field. Once more, it is not my desire to present a linear historical account of the matter. In my view, it is necessary to consider the primary theories to understand my reasoning in the present. Cognitive theory is a much debated and a dispersed field, so the early theories will give us an indication of the rationale behind the use of a ‘cognitive approach’ to film studies. Consequently, I will also demonstrate on what basis cognitive film theory breaks with the psychoanalytic theories that I discussed in the previous section.
The origins of cognitive film studies can be traced back to two scholars9: David Bordwell and
Noël Carroll. The former published two books in 1985: Narration in Fiction Film and, in collaboration
6 The Center for Cognitive Film Studies of the Moving Image was renamed in 2006 as the Society for the
Cognitive Study of the Moving Image (SCSMI).
7 For an overview, see the Oxford Bibliography for Cognitive Film Theory:
https://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780199791286/obo-9780199791286-0142.xml
8 “About one hundred years ago, for Husserl’s philosophical Phenomenology, it was crucial that the study of
consciousness be undertaken from the subjective, first-personal point of view of reflecting upon conscious experiences and the ways of givenness of their objective correlates. Nowadays, the study of consciousness is again enjoying considerable interest, not only within analytic philosophy of mind, but equally so in some branches of the natural sciences, especially in the cognitive neuroscience, where objective, third-person methodologies are all-important” (Marbach 385).
9 Others, most notably Sergei Eisenstein from the 1920s to the 1940s, had already worked with approaches
similar to the ones related to cognitive film studies. However, these were mostly individual cases. Only from 1985 onwards the cognitive approaches developed into a concrete field.
9 with Janet Staiger and Kristin Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of
Production to 1960. Abandoning the idea of psychoanalysis, these books turn to spectator psychology
(Plantinga 17). The important difference between the two is the fact that the latter is invested in theories of perception and cognition (Bordwell 1985: 30), whereas the former is related to the study of the unconscious mind. Bordwell further constructs the cognitivist methodology in the 1989 journal article “A Case for Cognitivism”:
For psychoanalytic theory in general, the paradigm cases are the neurotic symptoms (the core of the core), the bizarre dream, the bungled action, the slip of the tongue … On the whole, cognitive theory focuses on a different set of core phenomena. It is, in general, more concerned with normal and successful action than in the Freudian framework. [For example,] What enables someone to recognize a face? (12)
With this logic, Bordwell shows that cognitivists do not depart from the exceptional cases, but rather focus on biological processes that apply to any human.
According to Bordwell’s methodology, the continuous act of perception presents the brain with a stream of information. Already at the lowest perceptual activity, higher level cognitive activity is involved (Bordwell 1989: 18). Let us take the example of recognizing a face in a crowd: whenever we recognize this face, built-in assumptions and hypotheses are employed (Bordwell 1989: 18). We possess a mental picture of the distance between the eyes, the face width and the texture of the skin of the face that we recognize. The constant cognitive processes in our brain are able to connect the perceptual information that enters the brain with this mental picture. This is a process of give- and take, of anticipation and reaction. Bordwell describes it as ‘bottom-up’ and ‘top-down’ processes; the former is activated by perceptual input; whereas the latter is guided by expectation, background knowledge and problem-solving processes (1985: 31). The same processes are at work for any activity (at different levels of intensity), may it be cracking a mathematical code or watching a movie with your friends.
To better understand how cognitive theory differs from psychoanalytic theory, Bordwell demystifies the Lacanian mirror stage:
It is not enough to say that between the ages of 6 and 18 months the child spontaneously recognizes itself in the mirror as the image of the other. Unless this is a miracle, one needs to show that certain conditions (such as maturational factors) enable this to happen. To (mis)recognize your reflection, you must already be able to pick out a figure from the ground, extract texture ingredients and assign them to continuous objects … The theorist needs, in short, an account of the many perceptual skills necessary to the mirror-effect, as well as an account of how they became available to the child prior to this moment. (1989: 20)
10 To reiterate, man is involved in a constant process of learning. The child does not (mis)recognize itself in the mirror’s reflection from one day to another, but from the moment of its birth the child is involved in perceptive and cognitive processes. These processes gradually enable the (mis)recognition of a child in the mirror. The study of the perceptive and cognitive activity that is involved in the gradual learning process is central to cognitive (film) theory.
We can adapt the same logic for the interaction between the spectator and the film when we refocus on film studies; over time the spectator learns symbolic conventions, emotive keys and also uses ‘life lessons’ to interact with a film. In studying these elements, the cognitivist wants to understand processes ranging from recognition and comprehension to judgement and imagination (Bordwell 1989: 13). Cognitive film theory is interdisciplinary in this respect, because, as indicated in the introduction of this chapter, cognitivists weigh the wide range of fields and traditions for the best available theory. Whereas Bordwell focusses on constructivist psychology10 as the base for his cognitivist approach of
perception, others have turned to analytic philosophy11, evolutionary psychology12, ecological
psychology13, neurosciences14 and other fields. The apparently open interaction with the academic world
has also led to a lot of critique of cognitive film theory. Is ‘cognitive’ the right term for this approach since it also flirts with other disciplines? Does the dependence on other disciplines lead to scientism of film studies? Or is cognitive film theory too unfocussed by interacting with a wide range of fields? These are all relevant questions that I will try to answer in the remainder of this chapter.
As previously stated, two names have been crucial in the rise of cognitive film studies. I discussed the first with David Bordwell, so I will now turn to the second with Noël Carroll. Although I have indicated the disagreements that Bordwell poses with psychoanalysis, he was actually more interested in constructing a new methodology than criticizing the reigning ones (Plantinga 17). He did this at the basis of constructivist psychology and he applied his theories on all facets of cinema. On the contrary, Carroll was unequivocally interested in discrediting contemporary film theories15 (Plantinga
10 “According to Constructivist theory, perceiving and thinking are active, goal-oriented processes … A
Constructivist theory permits no easy separation between perception and cognition. Speaking roughly, the typical act of perception is the identification of a three-dimensional world on the basis of cues. Perception becomes a process of active hypothesis-testing” (Bordwell 1985: 31).
11 Analytic philosophy holds that philosophy should appeal to the modern sciences in order to arrive at
conceptual clarity (“Analytic Philosophy”).
12 Evolutionary psychology is a theoretical approach to psychology that attempts to explain how our mind (thus
perception, emotions, memory, etc.) is shaped by natural selection (“Evolutionary Psychology”).
13 Ecological psychology is a subdiscipline of perceptual psychology and focusses on the assumption that the
“environment is directly perceived without mediation from nonperceptual processes” (Heft and Richardson, “Ecological Psychology”).
14 “The aim of neuroscience is to understand underlying mechanisms of the neurons, their interaction and the
overall architecture of the brain, but also the functional processes of the brain, stretching the areas of inquiry to human cognition and mind” (“Neuroscience”).
15 Bordwell and Carroll later moved on to work together on the 1996 book Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies. Herein, the visions of both scholars collide in the form of a firm criticism of contemporary theory and a
11 17). With his book Mystifying Movies: Fads and Fallacies in Contemporary Film Theory, not only psychoanalysis but also Marxism, semiology and narratology pay the price. I will not go into too much depth how Carroll discredits each separate discipline, but I will rather highlight how Carroll’s reactionary work proposes ‘mid-level’ theory building as opposed to the ‘Grand Theories’16 of the other
disciplines.
The starting point for Carroll’s Mystifying Movies is to contest the central tenets of contemporary film theory and, with that, Carroll presents his suspicion of Grand Theories. Breaking with the latter is central for cognitive film theory and can be understood by a simple analogy: a religionist asks “why the flowers died, the breaks jammed, and the sun rose” (Carroll 1991: 196), only to receive the following response: God made it happen. The same, Carroll states (he writes in specific about suture theory17 in
this passage, but it seems to me that it can be extended to other Grand Theories), could be said about contemporary film theory (1991: 196). By bringing every interpretation back to the same all-encompassing explanation the theories are rendered meaningless. This also relates to the endless looking for unity, between body and film, mirror and screen, etc. (Zucker 160). If we once more take the example of the mirror stage in cinema: a mirror is not the same as a screen; a spectator is not the same as - and cannot blindly identify with - a ‘surrogate’ protagonist; and not every male spectator accepts the male gaze as it is offered to him. However, as I have already indicated in the previous section, it is not my intention to renounce every psychoanalytic film theory as worthless. What is important for me to take from Carroll’s critique is the need for a more “modest” approach, which contrasts to the Grand Theories of psychoanalysis, narratology and other disciplines. In this vein, cognitive film theory does not strive to bring everything back to one explanation but tackles middle-range problems. This mid-level theory building is based on localised theories that function on the basis of scientific deduction, as opposed to the Grand Theories that prescribe the outcome of their research (Smith, “Film Criticism after Grand Theories”). This middle-range methodology of cognitive film studies opens up the possibilities for independent research and diverse perspectives (Plantinga 23).
It must be noted that Bordwell’s and Carroll’s theories haven’t been received without criticism. Here, I shortly discuss two of the critiques that both scholars have received. In the book Image and Mind (1995), Gregory Currie discards Bordwell’s use of constructivist psychology by advocating for a realist perspective. For Currie, the perceptual-cognitive logic of constructivist psychology falls short in explaining the mental operations in narrative comprehension (85). Currie argues that mental operations
16 “theory that uses inductive methods and offers totalizing theories to account for all film effects” (Zucker 156). 17 Suture theory is strongly related to the theories of Jacques Lacan and the deriving psychoanalytic theories.
Magrini explains: “Suture is a system of filmic grammar and syntax, incorporating the spectator as signifier within a system of “signifiers,” producing meaning while simultaneously instilling and establishing a sense of subject-hood, which is to say, the effect of suture produces the phenomenon of spectator as “subject”. Through identification with the film, the spectator as subject is “spoken,” and therefore “named,” established and fixed within the formal cinematic structure of the film’s discourse. The cinematic model of the “system of the suture” is based on Jacques Lacan’s notion of subject formation and Jacques-Alain Miller’s subsequent work on this topic” (“On the System of the “Suture” in Cinema”).
12 are the product of both conscious and unconscious processes, so cognitivists should take both into account (85). Others, like Peter Lehman, have criticized Carroll for an oversimplistic attitude toward contemporary theory. Lehman argues that the manner in which Carroll posits the ‘correct way’ of studying film (mid-level theory building) can be recognized as the same sort of fads and fallacies that Carroll himself has criticized in contemporary film theory (244). Both of these critiques show the need in film studies for middle-range methodologies. Currie demonstrates that there are different approaches to arrive at a small and manageable truth; and Lehman’s critique proves the danger in assuming that cognitive film theory holds, in the words of Bordwell, “the next Big Theory of Everything” (1989: 33). As will be discussed in the following sections, the wide variety of cognitive approaches address different parts of the brain and body. Per research or per case study, it is necessary to consider the different approaches to adapt the most appropriate one, depending on the research purposes. This is what the following sections will focus on in respect to the intentions of this research.
1.3 Cognition and Emotion
The early efforts by Bordwell and Carroll have been useful to introduce cognitive film theory, but these efforts have also been on the generic side. Most cognitive approaches that followed have used Bordwell and Carroll’s work as a foundational layer to further specialize in the field. I will discuss two of these approaches, the mood-cue approach and the embodied approach to mental simulation, in the coming sections.
This is also the point where the case studies, Lazlo Nemes’s feature films Son of Saul and Sunset, enter the picture. I will research the films in-depth in the second chapter, but for now it is already important to identify the relevant characteristics of the discussed approaches in relation to the case studies. This will elucidate my selection of the approaches in the service of the thesis and it will make clear the advantages and disadvantages of both approaches. Therefore, I will alternate between a reading on the approaches and a reading on the films to indicate how both can service each other.
One of the most interesting approaches in cognitive film theory, as I wish to demonstrate, is the field of emotion research. Any film viewer will agree that the medium of film elicits emotion. However, the study of emotions has historically been neglected by many academic disciplines, thus also in film studies18 (Smith 2003: 3). One of the reasons for this neglect was the fact that emotions were considered
too unpredictable to be studied alongside the reigning classical logic (Plantinga and Smith: 2). In the last half century, the study of cognition has become increasingly sophisticated and the knowledge about the brain and the ‘subjective’ states has rapidly extended. Thus, from the late 1980s, academic
18 Smith further elaborates: “From the fifties to the seventies, few academic disciplines gave precise attention to
the topic of emotions. Cultural anthropologists had difficulty reporting such highly “subjective” states of mind using traditional methods of observation on other cultures … Sociology’s agenda led academics to areas in which socialization was most clearly at work … In psychology, behaviorism’s influence led theorists away from anything located within the “black box” of the human organism … Like these other disciplines, film theory has historically paid only spotty attention to emotional effects…” (2003 4-5).
13 disciplines began to incorporate the neglected topic of emotions (Smith 2003 4). In the field of film studies, two pioneering books were released: Passionate Views: Film, Cognition, and Emotion (1999) by Plantinga and Smith, and Film Structure and the Emotion System (2003) by Smith. In the books, Plantinga and Smith move away from the (psychoanalytic) concepts of pleasure and desire. Alternatively, the scholars advocate for a perspective on filmic emotion that is related to cognitive research into mental functions (1999: 3; 2003: 5).
Prior to analysing how emotions are triggered by cinematic events, it is important to focus on the physiological and neurological structure of the emotion system (Smith 1999: 107). Herein, Smith’s chapter “Local Emotions, Global Moods, and Film Structure” in Passionate Views: Film, Cognition,
and Emotion will be the guiding framework. Smith proposes an associative model to analyse the emotion
system. Following this model, emotions are understood as multidimensional response syndromes: “They are a group of responses (including action tendencies, orientating responses, and expressions) connected to several possible eliciting systems … the emotion system can also be invoked by several possible subsystems … facial nerves and muscles, vocalization, body posture …” (Smith 1999: 107). However, none of these subsystems is able to invoke emotion by itself. Only one component has been found necessary to emotion: ‘the limbic system in nonconscious central nervous processing’ (Smith 1999: 108). Smith explains the central function of the limbic system as follows:
The limbic system is a highly interconnected neurological center that receives information from a wide range of input systems. Its function is to evaluate information, to provide an emotional coding based on this evaluation, to trigger an initial response, and to monitor the stream of emotional stimuli and responses (in conjunction with conscious processing). The limbic system (particularly the amygdala) is the common neural pathway traveled by emotional data. (1999: 108)
During the course of monitoring the emotional stimuli, the limbic system creates an initial emotional valuation. This is a nonconscious process. Further, the limbic system creates an emotional ‘colouring’ for the received data, which, in turn, interacts with the processes of emotional expression and experience (Smith 1999: 108).
The associative model proposed by Smith takes account of the interconnected structure of the limbic system. To reiterate, in the model the “various components of the emotion system are connected by a series of associative links. Emotions and emotion states … are tied to particular thoughts and memories as well as patterns of physiological reactions” (Smith 1999: 108). The more channels of the emotion system provide emotion cues the more likely the experience and expression of emotion. This means that the limbic system is flexible, but it is not flighty; multiple stimuli provide redundant cues that tell us what emotion is called for (Smith 1999: 109). One process is primarily cognitive (the conscious processing of data in the cortex) and the other is primarily emotive (the feeling tone in the
14 limbic system) (Smith 1999: 109). The foundation for the associative model consists of the parallel processing of both. Herein, the model distances itself from a one-way prototypical approach (structured by goals, objects etc.) and instead treats the emotion system as flexible; both non-prototypical and prototypical emotion states are the basis for emotional functioning (Smith 1999: 109-10).
Since we have determined the central functions of the emotion system, it is also necessary to consider these functions in our daily routines. One final notion is crucial here: mood. In fact, emotions are brief states that only last seconds; for the rest of our emotional life we experience a baseline state (Feinstein 9), or better yet: a preparatory state. In this preparatory state, we orientate toward our ever-changing environment (Smith 1999: 112-13). Therefore, the general role for, wat is termed, orientating emotions is to ready the body and to encourage action-oriented emotion states (Smith 1999: 113). The primary set of this orientating emotion state is called mood. It is an expectancy of a particular emotion, and it helps orientate toward a situation and interpret our environment (Smith 1999: 113). Smith describes mood as the emotion system’s equivalent of attention (1999: 113). In contrast to emotion, mood is a low-level emotion state (Smith 1999: 113). It is longer lasting and more diffuse. However, it requires the brief, intense surges of emotion to continue. Otherwise a mood will extinguish. Smith explains: “Brief periods of emotion can provide the urgency and speed needed to deal with sudden changes in the world, but they cannot provide the steady emotional orientation required to deal with a stable environment” (1999: 114). This implies that emotion and mood coexist and reinforce each other’s effect.
The interdependency of emotion and mood is critical for Smith’s mood-cue approach. Smith follows the idea that a film’s primary goal is to create a mood (1999: 115). In this sense, a film can be linked to our emotional orienting state; the film is a predisposition toward experiencing emotion (Smith 1999: 115). Thus, a film is experienced as a lower-level emotional state, occasionally supported by brief, higher-level surges of emotion. The latter are provided by redundant emotive cues like facial expressions or music. These filmic elements are often non-narrative and non-stylistic. Smith terms these elements ‘emotion markers’; their main goal is to set an emotional orientation within the film. Emotion markers can be further subdivided in prototypical and non-prototypical emotion states; weak or strong goal-orientated functionality; weak or strong diegetic aim; and a film can be analysed in how densely informative it is regarding emotions and cues (Smith 1999: 120). Smith’s mood-cue approach can be categorized as a bottom-up approach: the scholar analyses a film for emotion markers and positions the markers within the larger structure of the film. In other words, the mood-cue approach allows the scholar to remain close to the surface of particular films (Smith 2003: 79).
The associative model and the related mood-cue approach are a good example of mid-level research, as it was introduced by Bordwell and Carroll. The mood-cue approach focuses on particular brain areas (such as the limbic system) that can be related to redundant cues that shape the spectator’s emotional reaction. Herein, the approach doesn’t proclaim to arrive at a definitive truth, but it rather focuses on a manageable analysis of specific elements of a film’s text. Accordingly, the mood-cue
15 approach presents useful insights into how specific films are shaped to influence our emotional response. This will also be important in the analysis of Son of Saul and Sunset. As we will see in more detail in the following chapter, these two films have a distinct way of shaping the spectator’s emotional response. Techniques such as the hand-held camera and shallow focus, as I will further examine in more details, intensify the feeling of proximity and, accordingly, leave much of the environment unseen. As a consequence, a large part of the environment and the spectator’s emotional response is shaped by facial expressions and atmospheric sounds. The mood-cue approach is useful in this respect, because it does not focus on the narrative or stylistic elements but rather on redundant cues. In analysing these cues, the approach will demonstrate how Son of Saul and Sunset are structured to impact the spectator emotionally in unique fashion.
It is also important to highlight the disadvantages of the mood-cue approach. As discussed, Smith’s associative model departs from neurophysiological research in the limbic system. However, the mood-cue approach itself does not take this neuropsychological interaction between spectator and film into account. The approach focuses on specific marked elements (emotion markers) in the film’s text that should theoretically elicit emotion. Whether and how emotions are experienced by the spectator is only assumed by the approach. I, therefore, suggest a hybrid model to study the spectator’s emotional and psychological interaction with film. Here, the mood-cue approach serves to unmask the emotional configuration of a film’s text; and the embodied approach to mental simulation, as the following section will demonstrate, serves as an indicator for the spectator’s neurobiological interaction with film.
1.4 A Pre-cognitive Approach: Embodied Simulation
How is it possible that we feel along the plastic characters represented in film? Why is film such a well-suited medium to elicit emotional response? Why do we often experience films as if we are encountering reality? How do we actually interact with film? These questions guide the work of Vittorio Gallese and Michele Guerra. While Smith has turned to the emotion markers that are implanted in a film; Gallese and Guerra take a step back. Why would these emotion markers function? Why do spectators accept the emotional intent of a film’s structure? To answer all these questions, the Italian scholars turn to cognitive neuroscience. They state that “recent studies … bring out strong evidence of a continuity between perceiving scenes in movies and in the world, as the dynamics of attention, spatial cognition and action are very similar in direct experience and mediated experience” (2012: 183-84).
The work of Gallese and Guerra is part of a relatively new subdivision in cognitive film theory, which they term ‘pre-cognitive’. I have described the interaction between top-down (perceptual) and bottom-up (cognitive) processes as the basis for Bordwell’s theorization of cognitive film theory. Gallese and Guerra’s Embodied Simulation (ES) Theory ‘updates’ this line of thinking. With the recent discovery of mirror neurons in the human brain it is proven that “observing an action causes in the observer the activation of the same neural mechanism that is triggered by executing that action oneself” (Gallese and Guerra 2012: 184). This applies to both the parieto-premotor cortical regions that are active
16 during mouth-, hand-, and foot-related acts (Gallese and Guerra 2012: 184), as well as to viscero-motor and sensory-motor areas that are related to emotions and sensations (Gallese and Guerra 2012: 184-85). To reiterate, perceptual input is already processed and coded before one can generate a cognitive reaction. This provides the following results: the brain-body system is able to map others’ behaviour; perceiving a manipulatable object activates the canonical neurons without necessary action (seeing a key is enough to activate the brain area that is active when opening a door); the action domain is dependent on our peri-personal space19 (Gallese and Guerra 2012: 185-86).
Returning to the study of film, the same is true as for our natural environment. We perceive film as we perceive the world (Gallese and Guerra 2012: 187). While film phenomenologist Vivian Sobchack states that film is a living entity20; Gallese and Guerra state that film’s vitality is detectable in the relation
between movie and viewer (2012: 189). That is, for Gallese and Guerra it is not the film’s dynamic presentation (the structure) that is lived, but the spectator’s body. The spectator deciphers the film’s movement by simulating it internally (2012: 189). This internal simulation happens on a pre-reflexive and non-linguistic scale (Gallese and Guerra 2012: 191). In other words, the moving image, as classical film theorist Kracauer already pointed out, engages the viewer “physiologically before he is in a position to respond intellectually” (Kracauer 158). Gallese and Guerra explain: “the tracking process is shaped by motor programs and somato-sensory and interoceptive “representations” in bodily format activated in the observer” (2012: 193). In ES Theory, this process is called “Feeling of the Body”; the spectator mirrors (or feels) the actions, emotions and sensations depicted on-screen. Herein, acting is the first stage of embodiment but not the most important one. It is the camera that serves as the spectator’s body and its movements determine the relations within the film (Gallese and Guerra 2012: 199). It is, for example, neurobiologically proven that “The sense of movement evoked by the Steadicam21 gives the
impression that the spectator is moving independently within the scene, as evidenced by the stronger activation of the motor simulation resulting from the activation of the mirror neurons” (Gallese and Guerra 2019: 115).
The idea that the actions and emotions depicted on-screen are mirrored in the spectator’s body is not something new. For instance, Gregory Currie termed the Simulation Hypothesis in 1995. With this theory, Currie hypothesized that humans understand and interpret others by putting themselves in their place (Carroll 2001: 306). This led him to the conviction that the process of simulation also functions with narratives and fictional worlds. In other words, Currie hypothesized that a spectator can engage mentally with the fictional world of film (148). The recent neurobiological discoveries show that Currie’s Simulation Hypothesis was in the right direction. Today, with ES Theory we can prove and extend Currie’s hypothesis. The neurobiological grounding of mirror neurons shows that it is not only
19 The space close around our bodies, the so-called ‘personal zone’.
20 In the words of Sobchack, “the cinema uses “lived modes” of perceptual and sensory experience (seeing,
movement, and hearing the most dominant) as “sign-vehicles” of representation” (74).
17 mentally but also bodily that a spectator represents the fictional world. The spectator does not only understand and interpret the characters and actions on-screen, but also mirrors their intentions and emotions. ES Theory proves scientifically what preceding theories have hypothesized or assumed.
The above leads me back to the mood-cue approach. As indicated, the mood-cue approach analyses a film for emotion markers that should elicit the spectator’s emotional response. On the other hand, the embodied approach to mental simulation presents the possibility to analyse how the spectator embodies the actions and emotions of a fictional world. The former falls short when it comes to understanding when (and how) a spectator responds emotionally to a film, whereas the latter fails to present a functional approach for analysing the film’s emotional configuration. The hybrid approach that I will employ in the second chapter combines the best of both worlds. Herewith, we can analyse a film’s text for emotion markers and dissect these emotion markers (and other filmic elements) to understand how the spectator is able (or unable) to embody them. This will prove effective in the analysis of Son of Saul and Sunset. The analysis of the redundant cues that I mentioned in the previous section will give us insights into the emotional configuration of both films, but only in collaboration with ES Theory can we link these cues to the embodied response of the spectator. In analysing stylistic and technical elements like the handheld camera, we can understand how the spectator mirrors the fictional world. Therefore, as I hope to show in the coming chapter, the hybrid approach I am suggesting in this thesis is able to reveal how Son of Saul and Sunset are configured emotionally and also how the spectator embodies the films internally. Both aspects will also be crucial in the third chapter in the analysis of Son
18
Chapter 2. A Hybrid Cognitive Approach to Son of Saul and Sunset
László Nemes’s first feature film Son of Saul brought the terror of the Holocaust to the screen by representing the horrifying work of the Sonderkommando. Nemes’s second feature Sunset went further back in time to picture the pre-World War I turmoil of 1913 Budapest. Interestingly, Son of Saul and
Sunset are two very different films that deploy distinctive techniques and aesthetic devices to bring the
past back alive. At the level of narrative, Son of Saul follows a classical three-act structure that is goal-driven. As this chapter will show, the objective of the titular character Saul is presented in the first sequence of the film and, after many hinders arise that endanger Saul’s ‘mission’, he accomplishes his goal to a certain degree in the end. At the same time, Sunset lacks a goal-oriented focus. The main character in the film, Írisz Leiter, is more ambiguous in her motivations. In this respect, the viewer is challenged to discover what the film is about and whereto the narrative proceeds. However, both films do more than telling a narrative; they invite for a particular cognitive investment.
In the present chapter, I am interested in how the activated spectator experiences these films emotionally and, accordingly, how these emotions are related to the sensation of embodiment or disembodiment that is produced by the interrelationship between spectator and film. In the previous chapter, I have suggested a hybrid model, wherein I combine the mood-cue approach and Embodied Simulation (ES) Theory. The combination of these approaches allows me to analyse Son of Saul and
Sunset on the basis of emotional configuration and spectator embodiment. Following this model, I will
scan both films for emotion markers and analyse the films for the possibility of embodied simulation.
2.1 Son of Saul: Embodying the emptiness of the Holocaust
As it has been noted in the previous chapter, the mood-cue approach assumes that the primary objective of a film is to set a mood. This is accomplished by redundant cues that give an emotional coding to the film’s text. Turning to Son of Saul, the film opens with an out of focus shot of men approaching the camera. After some time, Saul Ausländer (Géza Röhrig), the main protagonist of the film, enters the frame in profile. The expression on his face looks empty (Figure 1) and it remains more or less the same for the continuation of the film. There is no supporting music to set an ulterior mood, but only active and passive off-screen sounds. On the one hand, the active sounds feature what we can assume are German officers shouting directions to the newly arrived victims; on the other hand, the atmospheric (passive) sounds are constructed by the shouting and screaming from the victims. At the centre of all the turmoil, the hand-held camera (I discuss the effect of style and technique in the second part of this section) seems as if it is stuck to the body of Saul. This makes the spectator’s emotional orientation toward the events, for a large part, dependent on Saul’s acts and expressions. As Saul’s acts seem automized and his emotional expression is one of emptiness, it is communicated to the spectator that
19 Saul is caught in the mechanical rhythm of the destructive machine of the Nazis. The only way to survive in the extermination camp of Auschwitz is to disconnect from any human emotions.
Figure 1.
Claire Henry defines the disconnection from human emotions as the mood of emptiness in her book Revisionist Rape-Revenge: Redefining a Film Genre, wherein she argues that this mood is developed in the disconnectedness between sound and visuals (92). This becomes evident in Son of Saul from the first scene. Saul accompanies the newly arrived victims through the camp. We hear mumbled German instructions and children’s voices as Saul and the other Sonderkommando guide the camp inmates towards the ‘dressing rooms’ of the gas chambers. The camera remains limited to Saul’s automized handling of the situation while the victims remain out of focus in the background. They are ordered to unclothe themselves and are transported to the gas chamber. When the doors close, the sounds of horrifying screams increase. Saul has to stand next to the doors to prevent them from opening. The visual input from his expressionless face does not match the aural input from the utterly horrifying off- screen sounds. The latter ties into the possible extradiegetic cues that the spectator could be acting on, like advertising, trailers or genre conventions (Smith 2003: 87). Since we would expect that most spectators are well aware of the fact that Son of Saul is a film about the Holocaust22, they certainly have
an expectation of the environment that the film takes place in. The off-screen screaming of the victims in the gas chambers confirms these expectations. Here, the sound design provides access to a world in a
22 In the opening titles of Son of Saul, we read: “Sonderkommando. A German term that was used in the
concentration camp. The members of the Sonderkommando were separated from the rest of the camp. They worked for a couple of months and were then executed.”
20 way that the visual cannot. The aural emotion cues present an extra layer of narrative and emotion, because, in disconnecting from the empty expressions of Saul’s face, they give the off-screen space a quality of ‘nearness’ (Smith 2003: 62).
In the book Film Structure and the Emotion System, Smith demonstrates that there is a difference between ‘feeling for’ or ‘feeling with’ a character. In the case of the former, the viewer knows more about a certain situation and they can rely on their own understanding of what an appropriate emotional reaction is (Smith 2003: 90). In the case of the latter, the viewer knows as much as the character; accordingly, “the character exemplifies what the viewer’s appropriate reaction should be” (Smith 2003: 90). The latter is true for Son of Saul. On account of the fact that the camera rarely leaves the body of Saul, the viewer knows as much about the narrative situation as he does. As we have seen, the aural cues present an extra layer to the story, but they ‘only’ make audible what Saul hears. Thus, emotion cues like we have seen in Figure 1 urge the viewer to feel with Saul. As the camera swings around Saul, the viewer always observes and even accompanies a part of his body. Either they are bound to Saul’s back and receive a glimpse of the out of focus horrors of the Holocaust or they testify to the empty expression of Saul in reaction to the horrors around him.
When the screams have stopped and the victims have been exterminated, the Sonderkommando enter the gas chamber and start cleaning the ground. Saul has to scrub the ground for blood, pus and other body fluids. The shocking and disgusting sight of it gives the spectator a clear idea of the horrifying work that Saul performs. This is repeated in the next scene, wherein Saul is observed as he drags a corpse to the crematorium (Figure 2). I argue that these shocking moments can be termed emotion cues. The spectator is shocked by the horrific images and sounds but, at the same time, mentored by Saul how to deal with the unbearable situation. Therefore, in the feeling with Saul, the dominant mood that the spectator experiences in Son of Saul is indeed one of emptiness.
As has been noted in the previous chapter, mood is an orienting state that cues an emotional response through stylistic techniques. Correspondingly, Henry argues in Revisionist Rape-Revenge that the mood of emptiness enables the viewer to understand the futility and ambivalence of a certain situation (92). This brings me to the central narrative focus of Son of Saul: the burial of Saul’s son. With the setting of Auschwitz in the background, Saul finds an objective when he discovers a boy that he recognizes as his son. The boy has miraculously survived the gas chamber, but is later shot by a German officer. Saul steals the corpse and, during the continuous work as Sonderkommando, he makes every effort to find a rabbi to perform the impossible; that is, to burry ‘his’ son according to the Jewish tradition, in the middle of the extermination camp.
As Saul’s mission unfolds, hundreds of victims are murdered in the gas chambers. Saul’s determination to find a rabbi and bury his son seems ambivalent at the least. These feelings are accentuated in the scene where Saul does find a rabbi. With thousands of newly arrived victims, there is a shortage in the gas chambers and crematoriums. Therefore, the Germans decide to execute all of the camp inmates by shooting and burning them directly in the burning pits. Amidst of this chaos, Saul
