Film as a remembering subject: A Phenomenological-philosophical Approach
to Andrei Tarkovsky’s The Mirror
Afonso de Almeida Santos
UvAnetID: 12283630
Dr. Tarja Laine
Master Thesis
June 28, 2019
Word Count: 18,132
Abstract
Over the last thirty years, the field of film studies has seen the emergence and development of a variety of novel approaches to cinema. The fields of film phenomenology and film-phi-losophy are both exploring cinema’s unique attributes, and going beyond the reductive defi-nition of the medium as a mere object of representation or a narrative. Film phenomenologist Vivian Sobchack approaches cinema as a ‘lived-body’, delineating the corporeal aspect of the medium and its manifestation in embodied acts of experience, such as seeing or hear-ing. Film philosopher Daniel Frampton explores the singular way in which films can think for themselves by approaching film as having an ‘active mind’ of its own. These theorisations, besides negating film’s existence as a mere object, draw attention to the conceptualisation of cinema as an autonomous entity, capable of enacting intentional projects for and by itself. Following this conceptualisation, and drawing primarily on the work of Sobchack and Framp-ton, this thesis hypothesises and demonstrates how a film can perform its own autonomous act of recollection. Andrei Tarkovksy’s 1975 film The Mirror is adopted as a case study to argue for the extent to which film can be regarded as an autonomous ‘being’ that is capable of aesthetically performing the act of remembering. In its broader scope, this study contrib-utes to the emerging areas in film studies of film phenomenology and film-philosophy and explores cinema’s ontological, phenomenological and philosophical characteristics.
Keywords: Film phenomenology; Film-philosophy; Memory; Cinematic embodiment; Cine-matic thinking.
Abstract 1
Introduction 3
CHAPTER 1: The Mirror as autonomous, independent and for itself 11
1.1 The Mirror’s seen world and seeing intention 11
1.2 The Mirror as intersubjective and transsubjective 18
1.3 Embodiment and Cinematic Thinking 22
CHAPTER 2: The Mirror aesthetics of remembering 25
2.1 The film’s body remembers 25
2.2 Remembering through the filmind 30
2.3 The Mirror as memory text 36
Conclusion 40
Introduction
The historical fact is that cinema was constituted as such by be-coming narrative, by presenting a story, and by rejecting its other possible directions. The approximation which follows is that, from that point, the sequences of images and even each image, a single shot, are assimilated to propositions or rather oral utterances. (25)
In the above quotation, film theorist Gilles Deleuze underscores the historical conception of which cinema has been a ‘victim’: its reduction to a mere narrative medium. As the scholar states, this rejects all other possible ways in which film can be interpreted. While a film with no narrative seems inconceivable, reducing cinema simply to ‘the telling of a story’ obfuscates other important aspects of the medium. Some emerging areas of film studies reject this reduction, and strive towards a new conception of cinema. Film phenomenologist Vivian Sobchack, for example, states that the “cinema (...) transposes what would otherwise be the invisible, individual, and intrasubjective privacy of direct experience” (11), which suggests that film possesses a certain degree of independence and individ-uality. Sobchack is here interpreting film’s manifestation as acts of direct experience (rather than a proposition), which, in a phenomenological context, generally indicate a sensuous and perceptive experience. In the same vein, the film theorist Daniel Frampton states that films are “autonomous and free to create or think anything they wish” (252), highlighting cinema’s unique existence and its ability to think. Both these statements and scholars, advancing beyond the reductionist ‘narrative conception’ of cinema, emphasise films as autonomous entities capable of enacting thought or
per-ception. Sobchack specifically argues that we can detect in film certain embodied and perceptive
acts of experience, such as seeing, hearing or moving, that belong solely to the film (4) while Framp-ton speaks of discovering “what the films alone are thinking” (227). Within both of these scholars’ theoretical conceptualisations, Sobchack uses the term viewing subject and Frampton the term filmind to designate film. Both postulate, to an extent, that cinema is endowed with a certain degree of autonomous existence, expressed by embodied acts of direct experience in Sobchack’s view and through cinematic thinking from Frampton’s perspective. These authors raise interesting points regarding cinema’s manifestation, opening new avenues of research to theorise various hypotheses about the autonomy and types of experience that a film can have and perform, respectively. Through the integration of both these approaches (i.e., film as viewing subject and as filmind) this research project hypothesises that a film can enact its very own act of recollection. With that goal in mind, the paper will focus primarily on film studies, specifically the fields of film phenomenology and film-phi-losophy, with some emphasis on memory studies.
Film and memory have a long-standing relationship as analogous concepts (Radstone, 326). From the early work of Hugo Münsterberg’s Photoplay (1916), who understood film as “presented in a form that mirrors the mental coding of memories” (Baranowki and Hecht, 11), to more recent studies, such as Alison Landsberg’s Prosthetic Memory (2004), which sees film as “memories that circulate publicly, that are not organically based” (Burgoyne, 224), the correlation between these concepts has been constant throughout the history of film. Susannah Radstone, in Memories: Histories, Theories and
Debates (2010), delineates the ways in which memory and film have long been in association with
one another. She detects three paradigms of research: memory conceived of by analogy to cinema, cinema understood as a mode of memory and a more recent perspective, from which cinema and memory are seen as boundless and interchangeable (326). The first paradigm of research, memory as cinema, emphasises “the often-noted visuality of memory” (327) and uses the phenomenon of cinema to better understand the workings of memory. The work of the philosopher Henri Bergson is representative of this paradigm, as he uses cinema “to demonstrate how the intellect differs from memory” by comparing “intellectual thought to the cinema’s mechanical animation of fragmented and isolated extractions of reality” (327). The second paradigm includes studies that investigate an inverse analogy, that of cinema as memory or as a mode of memory. There has been extensive research in this area, exploring film’s creative power to permeate the boundary between personal and social memory (328). Various studies of nostalgia, and heritage films have been conducted by many scholars,1 who perceive cinema as a distinct form of memory. The third paradigm dissolves the boundary between memory and cinema, and explores the similarities within both concepts. In this area of research, Annette Kuhn has explored in depth the many performances of memory in and with visual media, designating a particular type of text that film and other forms of media possess: the memory text (Kuhn, 2). These three fields of research have explored the many existing correlations between film and memory, but often reduce film to a mere form of representation without acknowl-edging its autonomous existence.
While Kuhn’s memory text will be useful for exploring how a film can perform “the ‘structure of feeling’ of memory”(2), most research of memory studies on film does not focus specifically on the inquiry pro-posed by this thesis. The thesis does not seek to explicitly explore the relationship between film and memory, but rather to examine a film’s autonomous act of recollection. Focusing neither on cinema as memory nor memory as cinema, the paper posits film’s individual ability to remember. As such, this research positions itself within a phenomenological and philosophical framework, in which it is ar-gued that film has its own independent existence and is capable of performing various ‘acts’ for itself. Film phenomenology is a field of research that focuses particularly on the embodied and intentional
dimensions of both film and spectator. This thesis will pivot exclusively on the attributes of the film, its own “intentional projects” (Sobchack, 25), rather than also taking the spectator into account. This pri-oritises the autonomous experience of the film for itself as opposed to the experience in which both film and spectator engage. Film phenomenology positions cinema, first and foremost, as ‘direct experience’ while exploring the extent to which cinematic images can relate and be equivalent to certain human conscious phenomena, such as perception. Within this field of research, it is conceivable that film can perform other existential acts besides seeing or hearing, or—in the case of this thesis—the act of re-membering.
However, there is another important field that also has strong ties to the notion of film as an indepen-dent and autonomous entity: film-philosophy. This branch of film studies explores the extent to which films can philosophise, and thus, think for themselves. Daniel Frampton’s Filmosophy (2006) is partic-ularly pertinent to this thesis as an intellectual project. Frampton not only states that film can think in a specific manner, but, more importantly, he considers this activity to be independent of any spectator’s engagement with the film. In other words, any form of thinking or ‘action’ on the part of the film exists in-dependently from that which a spectatorial experience of the film might construe: it is the film that thinks. Frampton devises cinema as an independent entity capable of enacting its own reasoning, the filmind, allowing for specific research into the unique ways a film can think, in this case, the ways in which film can remember through an unique aesthetic thinking.
It is with reference to these emerging fields of film phenomenology and film-philosophy that this the-sis intends to analyse Andrei Tarkovsky’s The Mirror (1975). By integrating Sobchack’s notion of the viewing subject with Frampton’s filmind, this thesis posits that a film, in addition to the acts of seeing, hearing and thinking, can also perform an autonomous act of recollection through its particular
inten-tional dimension and aesthetic particularities. Tarkovsky’s views on cinema have a strong connection
to memory, as the filmmaker loosely defines the medium’s purpose in relation to Proust’s idea of raising “a vast edifice of memories” (59). Of all Tarkovsky’s films, The Mirror presents an ideal example to draw on when hypothesising cinema’s ability to remember, particularly due to its autobiographical nature, non-linear temporal structure and direct connection to world history. Hence, this thesis will contemplate the notion that The Mirror is not only a viewing but also a remembering subject. If film can see, hear or think, why should it not be able to remember? The analysis will draw on previous phenomenological, philosophical and memory work on film as a viewing subject, filmind and memory text, respectively. Andrei Tarkovsky is one of the most influential filmmakers of the second half of the twentieth centu-ry. Born in 1932 in Russia (at the time part of the USSR), he had a troubled childhood marked greatly
by the absence of his father from when Andrei was aged five and by the war in the USSR that forced his family to move to the rural area of Yuryevets, about 500 kilometres from Moscow, where they stayed for over four years.2 These life events had a significant impact on the filmmaker, and were later reflect-ed upon and functionreflect-ed as the working basis for his 1975 film The Mirror. His career as a filmmaker was undoubtedly marked by the political climate of his homeland, as the director clashed with Soviet censoring authorities regarding all his films, which usually culminated in the limited domestic distribu-tion of his work throughout the USSR. As his notoriety increased, this troubled reladistribu-tionship between Tarkovsky and the Soviet political establishment only became worse, which prompted the director to leave the country in the 1980s never to return (his last two films, Nostalgia (1983) and The Sacrifice (1986), were made in Italy and Sweden, respectively). Tarkovsky’s cinema has been the object of var-ious studies focusing on memory, time, exile and the inability to return to an idealised past.3 As such, the director’s intimate relationship with these themes and the considerable amount of previous schol-arship that correlates memory with Tarkovsky’s oeuvre make his work ideal when considering film’s potential to remember.
The Mirror has loosely been defined as a dying man’s recollection of the essential moments of his life
(Synessios, 4). However, the film contains and enacts memories that transcend a single life. It follows three distinct moments of Tarkovsky’s alter ego Aleksei: his childhood prior to the war, around 1935; wartime, around 1940; and his adult life, around 1970. The film focuses on what could be described as the protagonist’s existential crisis, as it enacts various memories, dreams and visions of a bygone past and the existential angst and nostalgia that Aleksei experiences as a result of his inability to return to a time in his life during which everything was possible. Aleksei’s wife and mother play significant roles in the film, as both women are portrayed by the same actress and cast a large shadow over the protago-nist’s life as both child and adult. Finally, considerable attention is also given to collective memory, as Aleksei’s and other characters’ memories are interspersed with stock footage of various historical mo-ments of the twentieth century, from countries including the USSR, Spain and Japan.
The events of the film do not follow a linear or cause- and effect-driven sequentiality or plot develop-ment, opting instead for an experimental structure that functions more as a collage of memories. The film’s first five minutes depict Ignat, Aleksei’s son, in colour, turning on a television to then abruptly cut to footage of a hypnotherapy session in sepia tint which bears no relation to the film’s overarching narra-tive. This is then followed by a memory/dream of Aleksei’s childhood, partially presented both in colour and black and white. This initial temporal and spatial dislocation foregrounds the film’s inherent quality of a dislodged temporality. This is notably salient during a first viewing, when the spectator is confronted with a sequence of events that exhibit no clear temporal positioning. It is only through a posteriori
reflec-tion that the viewer can temporally and narratively locate and organise the film’s events.
However, within the phenomenological-philosophical perspective in which this thesis is positioned, particular attention is given to the film itself and not its relation to the spectator. Therefore, The
Mirror, as an independent entity, consistently evokes a dislodged temporality that emphasises
“cin-ema’s capacity to manipulate memory’s often involuntary divergences from linear temporality” (Rad-stone, 325), regardless of spectatorial engagement. This essentially means that, although repeated viewings and analysis can assist the spectator in more easily locating the events within a narrative chronology, the temporality evoked by the film is always dislodged in nature. Various shots, such as the wind blowing through trees in a forest, a pair of hands being warmed by a burning branch or the image of a red-headed girl, recur and appear somewhat randomly between scenes or during transitions from one episode to the next. There is also a notable lack of marks or cues such as “an intertitle, a dialogue hook, or a vivid optical transition and burst of sound” (Bordwell, 90) for the film’s many flashbacks and flashforwards. This immediate notable aspect of The Mirror’s temporal nature makes it a relevant case study for an investigation of how film can portray recollection through its aesthetics.
It is with a focus on The Mirror that this thesis proposes to conduct a phenomenological-philosophi-cal analysis to determine which of the film’s aesthetic attributes can characterise it as a remember-ing subject capable of independent acts of recollection. This research project’s intention is then to argue that film is not merely a narrative, a passive object or a psychological-ideological construct on the part of the spectator’s subjectivity. This thesis does not negate, criticise or diminish the academic value these previous conceptions hold within the discipline of film studies, but it does approach film as an active and autonomous ‘being’. Within the fields proposed, film is, in every sense of the word, ‘alive’ and independent of the spectator’s act of viewing. As such, an analysis of this nature may be beneficial to many emerging fields of film studies, as it approaches film in all of its aspects to build on the understanding of its ontological, philosophical and phenomenological characteristics.
Over the last thirty years, the field of film studies has seen the appearance of several novel ap-proaches to cinema. Refuting the previously established psychoanalysis, screen, formalist and structural theories that had dominated film studies for the previous two decades, these new ap-proaches sought to radically alter many preconceived notions pertaining to film analysis and include many works in film phenomenology and film-philosophy (e.g., Casebier 1991; Sobchack 1992; Sha-viro 1993; Mulhall 2002; Sobchack 2004; Frampton 2006; Barker 2009; Sinnerbrink 2011).
Film phenomenology is an emerging field in film studies which, in a narrow sense,4 attempts to describe and interpret “invariant structures of the spectator’s lived experience” with emphasis “on the film-as-intentional-object or the viewer-as-experiencing-subject” (Ferencz-Flatz and Hanich, 3). One of the most influential works in this field is Vivian Sobchack’s The Address of the Eye (1992) which, at the time of its publication, brought to the forefront an important debate among film theo-rists. Sobchak argued that “film theory has presupposed that film is a viewed object” and, as such, has refuted the possibility that film “might be engaged as something more than just an object of consciousness” (20). For Sobchack and subsequent film phenomenologists,5 cinema is not simply a viewed object but also a viewing subject, which presupposes that film shares with other indi-viduals “certain ways of being in, seeing, and grasping the world despite their vast differences as human and machine” (Barker, 8). Sobchack sees film as a subject “that manifests a competence of perceptive and expressive performance equivalent in structure and function to the same com-petence performed by filmmaker and spectator” and that it “transcends its existence as a merely visible object reducible to its technology and mechanisms” (22). Concomitantly, Jennifer Barker argues that “we share with film certain behaviours and structures of the skin, through which we perceive the world and express our relationship to it”, and that “viewer and film are two differently constructed but equally muscular bodies, acting perhaps in tandem or perhaps at odds with each other, but always in relation to each other” (78). These scholars focus on concepts such as the viewing subject, the film’s body and cinematic intentionality and embodiment, with a phenomeno-logical existential approach derived primarily from the work of Merleau-Ponty. They explore film’s intentional dimension, approaching cinema’s manifestation as an existential and embodied act. In addition to this field, recent studies in film-philosophy, with a substantial basis in Deleuzian film theory, have focused on the notion of cinematic thinking, that is, the ways in which films can think for themselves. Stephen Mulhall’s On Film (2002) and Robert Sinnerbrink’s New Philosophies of film:
Thinking images (2011) are important works in this field, with the latter author emphasising that films do
not “make abstract universal claims in theoretical or argumentative terms. Rather, they aesthetically disclose novel aspects of experience” (141). These scholars avoid approaching film as raw philosoph-ical material, arguing instead that film can think and philosophise for itself, films are “philosophphilosoph-ical ex-ercises, philosophy in action - film as philosophizing” (Mulhall, 2). This area of studies appeals for an inherent cinematic expression that is unique to film, paying particular attention to its aesthetic salience and seeking “pluralistic, non-reductionist ways of thinking through the film-philosophy relationship” (Sinnerbrink, 26). Frampton’s original work, Filmosophy, argues for the existence of cinematic thinking ‘in’ the film itself, as he states that “there is no “external” force, no mystical being or invisible other. It is the film that is steering its own (dis)course” (220). Accordingly, Robert Sinnerbrink defines cinematic
thinking as the “non-conceptual or affective thinking in images that resists cognitive closure or the-oretical subsumption” (139), further highlighting film’s autonomous existence. These studies speak to a reasoning that argues that film is fundamentally an independent entity rather than a theoretical argument that is proven, which relates to how Tarkovsky saw film as affecting a person’s emotions rather than their reason (165). This field explores how a film can think for itself and, therefore, is pertinent to this thesis.
By exploring the extent to which, through its particular aesthetics, The Mirror can perform recollec-tion for itself, this thesis contributes to the central claim in film phenomenology and film-philosophy that film is essentially an embodied, thinking, existential subject with its own unique form of ‘being’. While considerable attention has been given to how film represents memory (e.g., McQuire 1998; Ebbrecht-Hartmann 2011; Kilbourn 2013) these studies tend to position film as an object of repre-sentation, thus overlooking film’s existence as an autonomous entity. Therefore, I argue that some focus should be given to how memory (and not merely its representation) is actually part of the film, as is its act of recollection. To this end, I aim to bridge the fields of film phenomenology and philoso-phy to ascribe to The Mirror its own autonomous existence, acts and manifestation, and to delineate how its aesthetics construe an act of remembering. This thesis aims to disclose a new dimension of The Mirror as a remembering subject, which will consequently lead to a new understanding of the film and contribute to the idea of cinematic embodiment and thinking.
This thesis employs a phenomenological-philosophical approach to Andrei Tarkovsky’s The Mirror in order to understand how the film can be interpreted as an autonomous ‘being’ which through its aesthetics can perform an independent act of recollection. In its broader scope, the paper will con-tinue to question cinema’s individuality beyond established formalist or psychoanalytic readings of a certain film. More specifically, two complex questions are asked about The Mirror: (1) How can the film be conceptualised as an independent and autonomous entity?; and (2) How can its aesthetics be interpreted as enacting an act of remembering? These two central questions will guide the re-search project as it unfolds.
To address these questions, I will adopt a particular methodology. For the first question, drawing primarily on work by Sobchack and Frampton, the thesis will explore the relationship between the world that the film presents and the way in which it presents it, the extent to which subjectivity can be ascribed to the film and the correlation between the film’s embodied acts of experience and its cinematic thinking. Having grasped the basic ideas of these authors’ theorisations, for the second question, the thesis will then analyse the aesthetics of The Mirror through the concepts of the film’s
body, filmind and memory text from Sobchack’s, Frampton’s and Kuhn’s work, respectively.
The thesis will be divided into two chapters, the first of which will focus on the autonomy of The
Mirror, that is, its existence for itself. The paper will begin by exploring the dichotomy of what a film
presents and how it presents it. The purpose of this examination is to ascribe this ‘dual function’ to the film itself. This section will explore the extent to which The Mirror’s film-world is its own ‘creation’ and not a ‘copy’ of reality or dependent on any type of spectatorial engagement. By explaining how
The Mirror’s ‘dual function’ belongs to itself, the autonomy of the film will become clearer.
Subse-quently, the thesis will inspect The Mirror’s subjective nature. By analysing and comparing the no-tions of intersubjectivity and transsubjectivity in the film, it will be argued that The Mirror possesses a degree of subjectivity that further highlights its autonomous existence. Finally, a brief overview of the correlation between embodiment and cinematic thinking will explain how these concepts can be synthesised to not only grant The Mirror its autonomous existence but also to analyse the film’s aesthetics of remembering.
The second chapter will focus on the aesthetic qualities of The Mirror that indicate how the film per-forms recollection. In the first stage, the presence of embodied memory in the film will be explored through Sobchack’s concept of the film’s body. The thesis will examine the degree to which The
Mirror’s body can be interpreted as enacting embodied memory. Subsequently, Frampton’s
con-cept of the filmind will be employed to determine how the filmind aesthetically ‘simulates’ the act of recollection. And finally, the observable similarities that The Mirror shares with Kuhn’s concept of the memory text will be delineated to further explain how the film aesthetically performs the act of remembering.
_______________________ Notes for the introduction:
1 - See for example Jameson 1983 or Samuel 1994.
2 - For an extensive description of Tarkovsky’s life and creation of The Mirror, see Synessios 2001. 3 - See for example King 2008, McFadden 2012, Schmidt 2016.
4 - In What is Film Phenomenology (2016) Christian Ferencz-Flatz & Julian Hanich explain the dif-ficulty in defining film phenomenology, since it is a broad and multi-layered discipline. They use the words ‘narrow sense’ in their effort to define precisely the goal of film phenomenology.
Chapter 1.The Mirror as autonomous, independent and for itself
1.1 The Mirror’s seen world and seeing intention
The Mirror’s ‘activity’, and indeed the activity of every film, can be explored in relation to the “paradox
of creating and spectating the film-world” (Frampton, 142), or, in other words, as the presentation of a world (seen) and its intention towards the world (seeing). While these are apparently paradoxical and inseparable elements, they each merit attention, particularly the ‘seen’, as if the film is merely a duplication of a previously captured reality, any ‘activity’ that it performs cannot be considered au-tonomous as it merely reproduces a copy of reality.
Vivian Sobchack argues that this ‘seen world’ is made possible and visible as the embodied vision of an ‘other’ (10), and that the ‘creation’ of the film-world appears as a visible act of vision. By as-cribing the appearance of the seen to the film’s embodied vision, Sobchack is clearly arguing for the autonomy of film; the film sees for itself. Nonetheless, this reasoning poses the obvious question of who or what exactly this ‘other’ is. The most obvious answer would be the filmmaker(s); however, Sobchack continually stresses throughout her work that “film transcends the filmmaker to constitute and locate its own address” and that the “filmmaker’s presence” in the film experience “is indirect and only re-presented” (9). She does not deny a degree of influence on the part of the filmmaker(s), but argues that, in its manifestation, cinema’s presented world appears as an embodied act of vi-sion that, while not equal, is equivalent to a human’s act of seeing. The film appears as a unique embodied vision of the film-world. While the notion of some ‘other’ that perceives and expresses is explored more thoroughly in Merleau-Ponty’s work on phenomenology,1 its use when applied to film is somewhat problematic for this thesis, as it implies that there is a division between what a film sees (film-world) and what it experiences (film-subject). As such, it appears to suggest a kind of an-thropomorphic connection where film and film-world are separated from one another, but who can deny that film is also its ‘world’? How can a film exist ‘outside’ of itself? While Sobchack’s approach is novel and deeper than this notion, this division does pose a problem for the chosen case study and its hypothesised act of autonomous recollection. How can it be argued that the memories and act belong to the film if the world presented (the supposed memories) are separate from the film? The memories of childhood seen by the film, a part of its film-world, cannot exist outside it if the film itself recollects them. Although useful in other areas, it appears that, at the level of the film-world, Sobchack’s theorisation does not permit the film-world’s existence to be ascribed to the film itself. However, Frampton’s notion of the film-world seems more appropriate, as the author ascribes its creation to the filmind (229). By stating that the seen world belongs to and is a part of the film, Frampton’s conception supports the hypothesis that the memories depicted on screen are part of
“creates, composes, inhabits and controls the film-world” (231), it is The Mirror’s filmind that is re-sponsible for the appearance of the film-world and is thus the originator of its memories. Frampton highlights the importance of distinguishing a copy of reality from the film image by arguing that “real-world physical laws and properties” have never been present in the cinematic image and that the fact that “contemporary film is leaving those laws and properties behind” (233) is further proof of the need to separate film image from a copy of reality. This again reinforces the idea that what is presented on screen in The Mirror is not some fictionalised copy of Tarkovsky’s memories, but something that belongs solely to the film. This does not deny that films are made by humans and, as Jean Mitry would say, “with life itself” (379), but it does distinguish between the world that is ‘captured’ by the camera and the world that is created through cinematic images. This perspective is in line with Daniel Yacavone’s views on the film-world, which regard this concept as essentially constructed by “both cinematic and non-cinematic life experience” (xv). This synthetic combination of the film-world of cinematic and non-cinematic ‘experience’ prompts Frampton to decisively state that “the film-world is not real. Film is its own reality, its own world” (143).
This is particularly relevant for the film-world present in The Mirror, as the film contains a lot of found footage depicting events from twentieth-century history from various countries. As Rachel Jekanowski observes, “found footage is used to signify the historical past through the image’s in-dexical authority” (1). Therefore, it appears paradoxical to attribute its ‘creation’ solely to the film, as its connection to a shared collective memory is evident. Yet again, as part of the film-world and within the filmind, this ‘indexical authority’ serves only as a secondary quality, while its primary qual-ity is its function as part of the film’s thinking. For example, one instance of found footage in the film portrays soldiers crossing a lake and the only sound heard is their feet dragging through the water. This scene is preceded by a ‘fictional’ moment, in which an orphaned boy whose parents were killed in the war drags his feet along some wooden stairs, and the film overemphasises the sound that his boots make. The film connects the two sounds, perhaps highlighting the similarities between both moments and their sonic poignancy. As such, the film ‘creates’ this reality; it is only secondarily ar-chival footage, but is first and foremost part of the film-world generated by the filmind. As Frampton states:
Realising the film as thinking allows an intention at the very base of film’s actions, and more over helps us understand these moments via the classification of ’thoughtfulness’. A shot of a vista can be allowed its beauty and intrinsic nature, but the idea of a filmind gives a possible further aspect: that of ’comparison’ or ’equation’ to a previous scene, or silence or peace, or ontology (of nature), or whatever. (245)
pri-marily as an ‘intention’ of the film’s thinking.
In sum, questions about the nature of the ‘world’ depicted in film are complex and have been the focus of research for several other scholars.2 Within the context of this thesis, the key element is to ascribe the creation of this ‘world’ to the film itself. While Sobchack’s conception poses a problem by separating film from film-world, Frampton’s sees both as one and the same, and his view is there-fore more in line with this thesis’ hypothesis. Nonetheless, Sobchack’s views are relevant to several other areas of this thesis. As the paper progresses from the ‘seen world’ to the ‘seeing activity’ that is the ‘intention’ of the film, Sobchack’s phenomenology becomes increasingly important.
With the notion of the film-world analysed and its ‘origin’ ascribed to the film, the second ‘activity’ of
The Mirror—the way in which its ‘intention’ belongs solely to the film—requires further analysis. This
differentiates the film’s activity between what it shows and how it shows it, and works as a means of attributing the film’s ‘intention’ to itself so as to hypothesise its own act of recollection.
The concept of intentionality is at the core of Sobchack’s conception of a film’s ‘intention’ and act of ‘seeing’. Intentionality is a key concept in phenomenology: it consists of the notion that con-sciousness is always concon-sciousness of something, and that the subject always exists in relation to something, never in a vacuum. Edmund Husserl makes a distinction, with the aim of better con-ceptualising intentionality, between the phenomena of our experience (the noema) and the mode of experience (the noesis) in order. As he argues, these notions are always in correlation with one an-other: in describing the phenomenon, one is inadvertently also describing how the phenomenon is experienced within a certain mode (Dermot, 134). Following this line of thought, Sobchack highlights the intentional existence with which film is endowed, ascribing a two-fold function to its manifestation as presenting “not only the seen but also the seeing” (134). In other words, the images, sounds and movement presented on screen are presented to the spectator within a particular ‘style of being’ that is diacritical and intentional because it favours certain elements over others. A film’s act of vision or hearing, like a human’s, can never be in relation to ‘nothing’ but is always intentionally directed at ‘something’; as such, it is always unique and individual to a specific film. As Sobchack states, “the film may choose whether to attend visually to the world it physically inhabits or to a world it dreams, whether to move falteringly or smoothly, whether to hear or to close itself from the world’s sound or the sound of its own feeling” (256). In The Mirror, this is particularly apparent in the film’s hearing act (especially during the dream sequences), as the film portrays a silent atmosphere interspersed with specific sounds that are heard within a particular rhythm, structure and style. The Mirror hears within its own structured intentionality.
However, a difficulty arises with this conception: if film is experienced by humans who possess their own intentionality, how is it then possible to verify that the ‘experience’ of the film is not a diacritical and directed perception on the part of a spectator? The short answer is that it is impossible to verify this as, from a phenomenological perspective, human consciousness is always conditioned by its noesis. This means that the film’s perceived intentionality is always in correlation with the spectator who perceives it, but this would then appear to negate the autonomy of film’s intentionality. As to clarify this point and argue that, while it is true that film is always perceived within a specific inten-tionality, it is possible, to an extent, to distinguish personal intentionality from the film’s very own, I will use the work of film phenomenologist Allan Casebier, categorically his account of occurrent and dispositional properties in film.
In Film and Phenomenology (1991), Allan Casebier distinguishes between two types of properties that are inherent to film: occurrent and dispositional. It is important to note that Casebier is speaking about the properties of film as an object, but dispositional properties have been explored in other contexts, such as in persons and conditions.3 As such, they can be applied to film as a viewing subject or as a filmind. Casebier states that “occurrent properties are those that one senses in the moment, they occur in the moment” while “dispositional properties, by contrast, are [the] ones that last over time” (53). In film, the occurrent properties will then be their “visual and sound features” (53), which occur as the film unfolds. By contrast, a dispositional property will be, for example, its “dislocation affects” (53) of temporality and spatial nature, as these are always constant; they are always part of the film independently, to the extent to which a spectator is or is not experiencing. As such, we can discern in The Mirror its occurrent and dispositional properties, with the latter in-cluding, for example, its dislodged temporal nature. Consequently, there are properties of the film that, while experienced uniquely by different spectators, belong to the film alone and are not merely a production of spectatorial intentionality or response. This is a crucial assertion, as it permits the claim that certain ‘powers’ or ‘dispositions’ of The Mirror are features of the film itself. This thesis aims fundamentally to argue that the act of recollection is one feature of the film that “last[s] over time”. Through Casebier’s description of dispositional properties, it becomes clear that, although the film is always ‘experienced’ within a spectatorial intentionality, there are certain properties of the film that exist independently of spectatorial engagement. Every instance in which the film sees or hears is structured by its disposed intentionality. As such, there is, to an extent, access to the film’s own intentionality.
To sum up, a film’s acts of seeing, hearing, moving are, like a human’s, always in correlation with its intentionality; it is always particular and unique to the film. With Sobchack’s theorisation of the film’s
‘seeing’ as structured and a product of the film’s very own intentionality, it is then possible to ascribe to The Mirror its autonomous act of seeing through an individual ‘intention’. Although the separation between film-world and film ‘experience’ is problematic, Sobchack’s interpretation of film’s funda-mental intentional existence is a substantial argument in support of a formulation of film as an au-tonomous entity.
Likewise, Frampton’s conception of the filmind’s thinking is closely connected to Sobchack’s notion of film’s intentionality, as he states that the film ““decides” when to shift from one character to anoth-er, when to move along a street, when to focus on the background, when to show what a character sees, when to switch into black and white, when to frame a person’s face, when to slow the film down’”(243). The author concretely delineates how a film depicts its world, essentially the ways in which a film is a “selector, chooser, arranger” (251) of everything it depicts, “intentionally, this film-thinking is simultaneously a showing and an analysis or interpretation of what is shown” (250). This line of thought follows the work of previous scholars, such as Münsterberg and Arnheim, who “argued that film artistically transforms, rather than merely passively records, dramatic performance and visual display” (Sinnerbrink, 39). Frampton goes on to explain how the filmind ‘transforms’ its film-world by delineating three categories: basic, formal and fluid film thinking. Basic thinking is the film’s colour and frame ratio, its most basic form of intention in relation to an image; formal thinking includes the specific framing and movement of the image; and fluid thinking encompasses all the special effects and image morphing that may occur (248-249). The thesis will revisit these concepts in chapter 2. For the purpose of this chapter, however, the most important notion to grasp from Frampton’s conception is that this ‘thinking’ or ‘intention’ is one “that comes from within the film: it is not an extradiegetic or ghostly intention” (250). This claim is fundamental as it attributes the film’s intent to the film itself.
As has been shown, both Sobchack and Frampton agree that film, in its ‘intention’, possesses a certain degree of independence and autonomy. Whether through its intrinsic intentionality or its cine-matic hinking, cinema can exhibit certain traces of an independent ‘selection’ or ‘arrangement’ which is evidence of its larger identity as a ‘self-governing’ entity. With that said, the thesis has, until now, divided film-world from film’s intention; however, film in its manifestation appears as a synthesis of both these concepts. Therefore, to conclude this subchapter, I will briefly explore the interconnectiv-ity between film-world and the intention of a film.
While Sobchack’s division between film vision and film-world may at first seem incongruous with this thesis’ argument for The Mirror’s autonomous existence, it can be interpreted as a means of better
delineating a film’s experience by focusing on its similarities to human phenomenology. Sobchack sees a film as an embodied act of vision, which means that this vision, like a human’s, is felt and enacted through its body. As such, Sobchack frequently references the sensuous and material at-tributes of the film experience, as these are perceived first and foremost through one’s body. She argues for what Richard Dyer calls the basis of cinema, “cinema of sensation” (7). For both these scholars, the fundamental ‘activity’ of cinema is to sense and to be senseful, thus whatever type of communication achieved by film is only secondary to its primordial existence as a sensing ‘being’ (Sobchack, 4). As such, I read this division between the film vision and the film-world as an approx-imation between the cinema’s and the spectator’s existence as bodies ‘outside’ of a world that they both sense and perceive. As Sobchack states:
Cinema thus transposes, without completely transforming, those modes of being alive and con-sciously embodied in the world that count for each of us as direct experience: as experience “cen-tered” in that particular, situated, and solely occupied existence sensed first as “Here, where the world touches” and then as “Here, where the world is sensible; here, where I am. (4)
While this anthropomorphic parallelism seems incompatible with a film’s unique existence, as it in-terprets film’s ‘activity’ through a human’s ‘activity’, this approach does call attention to what Walter Benjamin has identified as cinema’s “tactile appropriation” (240), which is evident in the embod-ied manifestation of any film. Additionally, although its cognitive nature has been overemphasised, many memory studies have shown that remembering also has an important bodily dimension. Con-sequently, Sobchack’s conception of the viewing subject is useful for interpreting how a film’s act of recollection can be achieved at the level of the body. Although a phenomenological approach to film does entail an overreliance on the spectator’s experience to explain any film, it is beneficial in ascrib-ing The Mirror its own act of recollection, because it emphasises a film’s bodily existence, which can be analysed, to an extent, independently of spectatorial engagement. Therefore, for the purpose of this thesis, it is useful to see the viewing subject not as separate from the film-world, but emerging as an already crystallised and embodied vision of the world and, as such, individual, independent and unique to the film itself.
However, Frampton criticises this anthropomorphic parallelism that film phenomenology explores by stating that this interpretation deprives film of its uniqueness (142). In fact, there are some limita-tions to this type of approach, the most glaring of which, from the perspective of this thesis, is that whatever recollection a film can possibly perform will always be a unique act of the film and thus not exclusively human like. Frampton underscores this problem by arguing that Sobchack “seems more interested in how film “reveals” our consciousness, rather than investigating how we might describe cinema’s “new-consciousness”” (145). He reinforces the notion that film has its own particular
con-sciousness and, thus, an existence that may share some similarities with human concon-sciousness, but is always particular and unique to the film. Frampton’s views do not support this anthropomorphic reading of film; rather he sees all film’s activity as a product of the filmind and, thus, as a creator and subject of its world. Perhaps the use of the word ‘mind’ when applied to film is also anthropomorphic to the human mind but Frampton uses the term to suggest that “film has a content and a structure and a working nature” (222) and not to suggest its similarity to the human mind. In Frampton’s work, there is no incongruence between film vision and film experience; it is all the same, and the appearance of the film-world is already, in itself, an act of creation on the part of the film. Thus, the main division between Frampton’s filmind and Sobchack’s viewing subject (and what separates one approach from the other) is that the former regards film as having a unique existence while the latter considers it to be equivalent to a human’s existence, which is evident in his use of the term ‘film’s body. Frampton underscores film’s unique existence and the overreliance of film phenomenology on human consciousness connections by stating:
I would certainly agree with Sobchack that film “thinks” moods and desires through movement and colour and framing etc., but not in the same way as we experience our moods and desires. The way in which the film “thinks” does not phenomenologically mirror the way our consciousness audio-visually thinks. When I am in love with someone they do not always appear to me in soft-fo-cus. When I am envious of another, or feeling sick, the world does not turn green suddenly. Desire does not cloud my vision in a red haze. We cannot see in black and white, nor actually “zoom in” on things. (146)
Though apparently correct, Frampton’s conception also poses some problems for this thesis’ ar-gument. Remembering is, after all, a ‘process’ or ‘activity’ achieved through consciousness and, thus, to explore it in film requires, from my perspective, a certain degree of comparison to the act of recollection of human consciousness. Additionally, Frampton is objectively right when he states that no one sees in soft-focus; however, he is somewhat a victim of his own criticism against Sobchack here, in taking the anthropomorphism a step further. It is obvious that humans do not see in soft-fo-cus when they are in love, and that is not necessarily Sobchack’s claim; she simply argues that, for example, being in love will trigger a bodily reaction in humans that is embodied by the camera as soft-focus. The film’s mechanical nature differs from the human’s, as does its bodily response; as such, soft-focus is but one way for film to embody, through its technical body, a process, a state or an ‘intention’ that will be different in a human’s body. As much cognitive as it is bodily, the act of recollec-tion has an undeniable connecrecollec-tion to a ‘body’ through which the subject remembers. To completely ignore this corporeal link that both film and human share in their existence, would be to disregard what may be a substantial part of a hypothesised act of recollection on the part of a film. Frampton’s film thinking is very useful in interpreting how a film manifests its own existence, but Sobchack
elu-cidates this independent existence of a fundamentally bodily nature. Therefore, both theorisations are useful and may be used jointly to explore how film can perform its own act of recollection. To sum up, this subchapter has analysed the dichotomy of what is shown as the film-world and how this world is portrayed. The goal was to ascribe to The Mirror a certain degree of autonomy in what and how a film-world is shown and rendered, to grant the film its autonomous status. In its activities of embodied vision and cinematic thinking, The Mirror, can be conceptualised as an independent entity with its own intentionality and unique form of thinking. As such, the thesis has established that both the world and act of seeing belong solely to the film and, thus, all its acts, whether seeing hear-ing or rememberhear-ing, will belong only to the film itself. However, rememberhear-ing is an act that is mould-ed by its subjective nature, and therefore only achievmould-ed through a particular degree of subjectivity. By probing deeper into the question of cinematic subjectivity through Frampton’s and Sobchack’s approaches, this thesis intends to ascribe to The Mirror a certain degree of subjectivity to support the notion that film possesses an independent existence for itself.
1.2 The Mirror as intersubjective and transsubjective
The concept of subjectivity has been explored in various areas of film studies, such as phenome-nology, philosophy and narrative and film theory. It is a multilayered concept that involves questions about issues such as the nature of consciousness, personal individuality, the phenomenology of experience and the mind-body dichotomy. For the purpose of this thesis, in exploring film’s subjec-tive nature the paper will further strengthen the argument that film is an autonomous entity. The two main authors selected to interpret The Mirror’s subjectivity embody two contrasting ways in which a notion of cinematic subjectivity can be constructed: intersubjectivity and transsubjectivity. While apparently contradictory constructs, I will argue that both contain important insights about the sub-jectivity present in The Mirror and can thus be combined to ascribe to the film a certain degree of subjective existence, although the transsubjective aspect will be shown to be the most apposite of the two approaches.
Among the many recent film phenomenological studies conducted around the notion of subjectivity, scholars have begun to explore the concept of intersubjectivity. Very early on, Sobchack highlighted the importance of this concept and its definition as “the emergence and distinction of myself from other selves” (55). In fact, cinematic intersubjectivity is not concerned with interpretative represen-tations of subjectivity in film (Chamarette, 66); rather, it is an attempt to study the relation between ‘myself’ and the ‘other’. As film phenomenologist Tarja Laine states ““Self” is not an inner essence
to be realised, but a possibility as discovered in the relationship with the social world” (18) and, as such, cinematic intersubjectivity is this relationship established between film and spectator:
Intersubjectivity deals with that dimension of the self that links the subject immediately with the re-lational, interpersonal world, where the ‘outside’ of the collective experience becomes the ‘inside’ of the subject’s psychic life. This means that in order to fully understand subjectivity, one has to take the subject’s relationship with the Other into consideration. (10)
Through this concept, one of the main claims is that the dichotomy between object and subject be-comes obsolete. Film and spectator are not inherently subjective ‘beings’; rather, they both achieve subjectivity through the engagement of one with the other. Subjectivity is not an attribute; it is some-thing that is created in the interaction between ‘myself’ and the ‘other’. As such, subjectivity in cine-ma “emerges from an intersubjective “in-between” space” (10) between film and spectator. This the-oretical framework resolves several of the recurring issues that have plagued studies on cinematic subjectivity, particularly the uneasy distinction between objective and subjective cinematic images. Some techniques in film have long been associated with cinematic subjectivity—specifically the point-of-view (POV) shot, due to its mimicking of the embodiment of a character’s vision. As such, many studies have analysed specific moments of subjectivity enacted by film. However, within the concept of intersubjectivity presented, there are no moments of subjectivity, but rather film is always available to be intersubjectively engaged and, therefore, it embodies the potential for subjectivity that is consistently present. This then allows for the formulation of The Mirror as having, fundamen-tally, a subjective existence and, thus, an autonomous existence for itself.
Nevertheless, this phenomenological notion of intersubjectivity presents a glaring issue from the perspective of this thesis: its overreliance on the experience of ‘myself’ or, in this case, of the spec-tator. Through this perspective, the act of recollection of The Mirror is essentially dependent on the existence of another subject: “one defines his or her subjectivity according to how he or she is being seen by the Other” (Laine, 29). As such, this approach would be more skewed towards the postu-lation of a hypothesis of the film’s and spectator’s intersubjective act of recollection wherein both interact, and not towards an attempt to speak strictly of the film’s acts. Yet again, film phenomenol-ogy’s focus on the spectator’s experience is an area of study that this paper intends to avoid while nonetheless underscoring its importance. A phenomenological approach to cinematic subjectivity does contain several relevant arguments for this thesis, particularly for this subchapter on the ‘grant-ing’ of a subjective existence to The Mirror. Additionally, it includes a deeper engagement with film as an affective ‘being’, as a way to better describe cinema’s particular effects and ontology. In spite of this, a completely intersubjective approach to film in this paper would shift the focus of concern to the sphere of the spectator. Therefore, while it is important to grasp and to understand The Mirror as
having a subjective existence, a second concept, that of transsubjectivity, will be useful in furthering the argument towards a particular degree of subjective existence possessed by the film.
Frampton sees the issue of film’s subjectivity as an extremely relevant point, as many scholars tend to associate this concept with a character-subjective point of view. Frampton states that this type of subjectivity is limiting, in that “images are forced to fit as (to become) “subjective”” (256); for him, “a character never completely originates a narrative, the filmind is always giving us its version of what the character tells” (258). A film can be thinking about, towards, for and as a character (259); as such, to associate the film’s subjectivity with specific characters seems reductive, because film con-stantly shifts perspectives to include a subjectivity that goes beyond any single character. Thus, “a film image (a film-thought) from the head height of a character [POV] just shown is an interpretation of how the filmind feels he or she is thinking” (261). To differentiate between certain subjective and objective shots is thus somewhat pointless, as all are part of the film’s own perspective.
This is relevant for the analysis of The Mirror’s act of recollection, as the film explores not only Alek-sei’s memories, but also those of other characters, and even collective memories through the use of stock film. As such, the act of remembering can be seen as sometimes mimicking the recollection of a character, but on the whole it belongs solely to the film’s perspective, and thus it is the film in-dependently that performs recollection. The elastic shift that consistently occurs between memories of different individuals is emblematic of the act of recollection belonging solely to the film, such as, for example at the beginning of the film. The first 15 minutes after the prologue contain a memory/ dream about childhood that are clearly a ‘product’ of Aleksei’s consciousness, evident in its starting narration and the character’s retrospective reflection on the events the film shows as ‘his dream’. However, the following scene is a phone conversation between Aleksei and his mother, in which the latter mentions that her friend Lisa has died. After this, we are presented Aleksei’s mother’s memories of this friend. These are clearly ‘her’ memories, because Aleksei is nowhere to be seen in this scene. This sequence, then, shows the flexibility through which the film ‘jumps’ from memory to memory, from point of view to point of view, which underscores the film’s unique perspective.
Thus, Frampton declares film to be transsubjective. The philosopher Harald Wohlrapp denotes this concept as being “a heightening of subjectivity aimed at the potential for being compatible with the subjectivity of the Other” (401). Essentially, it differentiates itself from intersubjectivity in the rela-tionship it establishes between spectator and film. In short, to intersubjectively engage with film is to recognise that the ‘other’ is ‘me’, while to engage transsubjectively is to recognise that the ‘other’ is like ‘me’. Frampton underscores this point further by declaring that film “intends from a non-place or
realm of perspective rather than a singular point of view” and that “the same scene can appear as though subjective and then later as though objective” (262). As such, the filmind is neither subjective nor objective, but both at the same time:
The filmind shows itself here as a flexible, playful, transsubjective mind, which allows us to move away from reference to what may have previously been ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’ styles of film. Again, the filmind operates from a uniquely transsubjective non-place, thinking for itself or a ’nar-rator’ or a character, or whatever. (264)
This is a strong claim for the autonomy of The Mirror, as it positions the film’s intentionality as be-longing solely to the film and not to a character or spectator. Within this conceptualisation, every act the film performs belongs to itself, even if it is through a character. As such, no character remem-bers in The Mirror; the film rememremem-bers for itself through the characters or collective memory (found footage).
The perspective of Frampton’s transsubjective filmind functions, then, as a contrasting point to Sob-chack’s and other film phenomenologists’ ideas. It is fair to say that, for Frampton, the spectator need not recognise himself through the film, as Sobchack states. Rather, the spectator’s subjectivity is independent of the transsubjectivity that characterises film. However, Frampton does not explain or delineate how this transsubjectivity is experienced by the spectator, nor does he need to. This means that it can be conceptualised that a spectator experiences this transsubjectivity intersubjec-tively, recognising modes of being like ‘myself’ in the film’s manifestation. As such, these initially opposed concepts can co-exist.
Nonetheless, for the purpose of this thesis, the goal of this subchapter was merely to ascribe a certain degree of subjectivity to The Mirror and to argue for its autonomy. The concept of intersub-jectivity, though it grants film a subjective existence, relies entirely on the spectator’s experience and, as such, is not ideal for the topic this paper as positioned itself, solely on the film. Frampton’s conception of film as a transsubjective entity grants film a certain type of subjectivity that does not depend on the spectator’s subjectivity and, as such, refers only to the film itself. This conceptualisa-tion fails to account for how this transsubjective nature is perceived, although this is not necessary in the context of this thesis. In sum, this subchapter has reinforced the argument towards a perception of The Mirror as an autonomous entity, by delineating its transsubjective nature.
The first chapter will now conclude with a brief correlation and comparison between embodiment and cinematic thinking and how can these be complementarily used to account for The Mirror’s au-tonomous act of recollection.
1.3 Embodiment and Cinematic thinking
Although the cinematic thinking that Frampton describes and Sobchack’s viewing subject perspec-tive are in some ways at odds with one another, for the purposes of detecting and describing an autonomous act of recollection on the part of The Mirror, these contrasting views can be combined and used in a complementary fashion. This is an important point because it shows why both per-spectives are useful and necessary in ascribing The Mirror its own act of remembering.
The main point of conflict that has been highlighted throughout this chapter is film phenomenolo-gy’s overreliance on the spectators’ bodies to explain the film. As Sobchack states, “in the film ex-perience, all signification and all communication starts from the “affinity” that is the act of viewing, coterminously uniquely performed by both film and spectator” (23). To fully explain the film and its ‘effects’ Sobchack argues that the focus should be on the engagement between film and spectator and not necessarily on the film itself.
This thesis aims to focus solely on the film, as it is argued that its own act of recollection belongs solely to itself aside from any form of spectatorial engagement. However, the remarks that Sobchack and other film phenomenologists, such as Laura Marks, make when they speak specifically about the film draw attention to film’s bodily nature, which exists regardless of the presence of a spectator. Marks, for example, highlights film’s ability to graze rather than to simply gaze over surfaces, tex-tures and spaces through the concept of haptic visuality (xi). Although she too focuses on how this ‘ability’ brings spectators closer to things and provokes sensuous memories of touch or movement, this can also be read specifically in the film itself as accounting for the medium’s particular visual po-tential to not only ‘present’ images but also to underscore their material and corporeal nature. While this potential might be better understood through an analysis of spectatorial response, it can also be used to detect the specific ways in which the film itself expresses an embodied and corporeal ‘intention’ that can be linked to the concept of embodied memory.
The presence of the body or a somatic dimension in memory has been underscored in previous decades in areas including neurology or psychotherapy, and is particularly relevant for film phe-nomenology. The conception of a somatic dimension in memory became widely accepted in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s with the important discovery of two types of memory systems, explicit and implicit (Rothschild, 101). Consequently, a clear distinction was established between the declarative/ semantic (explicit) and the nondeclarative/sensory (implicit) systems of memory. As the psychother-apist Rothschild explains, “explicit memory is what we usually mean when we use the term memory”
as it includes conscious experience of “facts, concepts, and ideas” (102). However, there is another layer to our memory that is manifested in sensations and behaviours that originate from the body. Effectively, film phenomenology is then interested in determining to what extent these sensations and behaviours are apparent in a film’s body. How does a film behave towards a specific sound or visual? How does its body enact specific sensations or express a specific spatiality and temporal nature? Through the concept of Sobchack’s viewing subject, it is possible to elucidate some of these questions and to explore the presence of embodied memory in The Mirror.
Likewise, exploring the presence of a filmind in The Mirror will permit a fuller understanding of the ‘mental’ capacities of film and how these can function similarly to the act of recollection. Focusing instead on the thinking of The Mirror, the filmind will be used to determine how this concept influenc-es the film.The argument will not focus on the embodied memory prinfluenc-esent in the film; rather, it will detect and explain how the filmind moulds and ‘acts’ on the film, which causes its unfolding to mimic the ‘mental’ processes of the act of recollection.
Decisively, cinematic thinking and the embodied nature of film are not mutually exclusive concepts, as they simply call attention to different aspects of a film, which are all relevant to explain how The
Mirror performs recollection. As Rothschild emphasises, remembering is a process that is executed
both through one’s mind and body (131). With that said, the filmind is used primarily to study the ‘mental’ capacities that film can exhibit while the viewing subject will focus on the corporeal aspect of film. As such, they can be used in a complementary fashion to better account for the autonomous act of remembering on the part of The Mirror by paying attention to both its mental and bodily man-ifestations. Embodiment draws attention to the bodily aspect of memory while cinematic thinking allows for an analysis of how the filmind moulds the film’s ‘thought’ to simulate an act of recollection.
In conclusion, the concepts of cinematic thinking and cinematic embodiment have been discussed throughout this chapter, primarily through the notions of the filmind and viewing subject, respec-tively. Using these ideas, it is possible to ascribe to The Mirror its own autonomous existence by delineating how the film shows and intends towards its world and by attributing a certain degree of subjectivity to the film’s existence. Additionally, these two concepts, when applied to The Mirror’s act of recollection, focus on different yet equally important aspects of memory: its manifestation in the body and its processing by the mind.
With the autonomy of The Mirror established, the thesis’ second chapter will apply both these concepts to identify the particular aesthetics that characterise the film as a remembering subject. The paper will
also include a subchapter on the film’s similarities to the concept of the memory text as proposed by Annette Kuhn, which will further underscore how The Mirror’s aesthetics portray the act of recollection. ______________________
Notes for Chapter 1:
1 - See Merleau-Ponty 1962, 1968. 2 - See Yacavone 2014, Cavell 1979. 3 - See Cassam 2014, Machan 2011.
Chapter 2. The Mirror aesthetics of remembering
2.1 The film’s body remembers
To analyse the extent to which embodied memory is present in The Mirror’s aesthetics, the notion of the film’s body requires a brief introduction, as it is through this body that the film remembers. In a phenomenological sense, the film’s body is considered to be the direct means by which the film en-acts its intentional and embodied nature. While not reducible to its mechanics, the film’s bodily exis-tence is enabled by its technological attributes, hence their designation as the film’s body. Sobchack speaks at length about the bodily dimension of film, as it is expressed by its technology, stating that “cinematic technology functions to afford the film a material instrumentality for its perceptive and expressive intention, and to exist invisibly “behind” the film’s perceptive and expressive activity as the film’s ground, as its incarnate and substantial being, as the film’s body” (171). The author relies again on the correlation between the spectator’s and the film’s body, in that both are the means by which they enact their intentionality and embodied nature. As such, Sobchack correlates the spec-tator’s modes of intentional consciousness (which are manifested at the level of the body) with the technical methods of film, and with this she concludes that “film is to cinematic technology as human perception and its expression is to human physiology” (166). However, she also states that “the film is a dynamic and synoptic gestalt that cannot be reduced to its mechanisms” (169), which corrobo-rates Parker Tyler’s statement about cinematic mechanisms when he argues that “one cannot think of a set of rules, a repertory of camera manipulations, is anything but a shell, and a shell without pre-determined shape or extent” (104) and that “technique is sufficient to the motives thereof, but technique is never a substitute for motivation” (106). What these scholars mean when they refer to the irreducibility of the film experience or a ‘motivation’ is that the cinematic mechanisms cannot be independently seen to be the film’s body; it is only when they are enacted within a specific inten-tionality and embodied manifestation that the technology of the cinematic apparatus can be seen to function as the film’s body. Therefore, when we refer to the film’s body, what we are analysing is the way in which the intentionality of the film is made apparent and significant through its technology. As such, an account of The Mirror’s embodied memory cannot simply be a description of its mech-anisms, but must also include their correlation with the film’s intentionality towards the world. It is in this correlation that we can hypothesise The Mirror’s own act of remembering through embodied memory. The Mirror’s cinematic technology can then be said to function as the film’s body, as the direct means by which the film can express its intentionality and embodied existence.
With that said, I will now try to clarify how the correlation between the film’s body and its intentional and embodied structure functions. To this end, I will analyse two aesthetic attributes of a specific sequence of the film that exemplify how The Mirror’s body remembers, while also highlighting their presence in the film as a whole.
