Embodying Hybridity: Enactive-ecological approach to filmic self-perception and self-enactment in contemporary docufiction film

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Nadica Denic Student nr: 10603557

nadica.denic@hotmail.com

E

MBODYING

H

YBRIDITY

:

Enactive-ecological approach to filmic perception and

self-enactment in contemporary docufiction film

Research Master Thesis Department of Media Studies University of Amsterdam

Supervisor: Patricia Pisters Second reader: Abe Geil

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Mare and Matthias, who always made friendship a priority.

Introduction

Visual technologies such as film and photography, as well as reflective surfaces such as mirrors, are media that present us with instant or temporally extended presentations of bodies. Mirrors enable one’s reflection in the present, while photography confronts us with a captured instant of the past. Film, on the other hand, while also referring to the past, allows us to perceive temporal objects, or events as opposed to instants. More precisely, bodies of film are bodies that persist through time, and when presented to the spectator, this duration refers to the time passed. We encounter instances of bodily presentations daily through the aforementioned media, as well as in their further mediation through digital technology. We see bodily presentations of people other than ourselves, but we also encounter images of our own bodies. For example, it is myself that I perceive in the mirror or see a child that I was in family photographs or home-videos. These are instances of self-perception. Namely, we have access to media that present us with mediated images of ourselves, of our actions and of our bodily and facial visibility. They do so in ways that natural perception does not directly allow, meaning that our immediate perceptual field cannot include our own visibility, but that of others and the world around us.

To reiterate this point in other terms, the aforementioned media afford us visibility of ourselves to ourselves, a mediated self-experience. The filmic-self of this experience is not of a mere physical body, but of a lived body as engaged with the world. In fiction films, this bodily presence is of a fictional subject. In documentary, it can, for example, be of an observed body or a body in interaction with the director. However, recent documentary and fiction hybrids – docufictions – have employed the method of enactment for the presentation of their subjects. Self-enactment is a process in which the subject performs him- or herself by improvising an

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aspect of their identity. The central preoccupation of this thesis is an exploration of the phenomenon of filmic self-perception, carried alongside the aim to understand its relation to the phenomenon of self-enactment. How is the manner in which we are able to perceive ourselves in film related to the way in which we can enact ourselves for one? This is the primary problem I aim to address in this thesis.

Let us start its exploration with a note that bodily presence has been one of cinema’s original focal points. In 1895, Felix-Louis Regnault used chronophotography and stop-motion techniques to conduct an ethnographic study of bodies in motion, while early actuality films were usually focused on a bodily performance of a single action (Russel 51-55). Rather than driven by a narrative structure, these early films express the tendency to posit a body as an “attraction” (Gunning 190). An example of this tendency is also the genre of facial close-up, common in early cinema and principally focused on mere display of facial expressions (Popple and Kember 91). A fascination with cinema’s peculiar ability to capture bodily and facial gestures was also present in early film theory, which was seen as invaluable not only to film as art, but for the study of anthropology and psychology as well (Balázs, The Visible Man). Similarly, this interest was also reflected in the early film reviews’ description of film as a “living picture” (Popple and Kember 2). These examples indicate film’s achievement in presenting the spectator with the living activity of the body, recording and projecting its movement and expressiveness.

Furthermore, the directors of early films have also pointed the camera toward their own bodies in particular. This tendency is, for example, present in the footage of Robert Falcon Scott’s Terra Nova expedition (1910-13), which was later compiled into a documentary film The Great White Silence (Herbert G. Ponting, 1924). After Scott’s sudden death during the expedition, the footage of the journey, including portrayal of his death, was reworked as a means of “looking at death through the lens of the movie camera” (Balázs, “Compusive Cameraman” 51). This example shows that cinema has since its origins not only focused on the presentation of bodies in motion, but it did so from two perspectives. The former tendency, that of exploring the lives of those around us, is a tendency of the documentary mode of filmmaking, and to which aforementioned actualities and studies of bodies in motion are predecessors. Two most prolific modes of filmmaking that express the latter ability to conduct a cinematic exploration of our own

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lives are the first-person documentary and home-video.1_{While The Great White Silence can be}

categorized as a first-person documentary, the proliferation of the autobiographical documentary mode started with the access to video technology that facilitated such use of the medium (Renov).

Overall, I have attempted to briefly account for different engagements with the medium of film that explore bodily movement and gestural expressions of others, as well as one’s own. The above-mentioned examples show us that filmic self-perception is a phenomenon enabled by numerous documentary practices, thus pointing to a variety of ways cinema has afforded the spectator an encounter with their filmic-self. Moreover, as mentioned at the outset of the introduction, this filmic-self is performed for the film by a subject. While performativity in film has traditionally been associated with the domain of fiction film, documentary history testifies that methods such as reenactment were employed even in the earliest documentary examples, as is the case in Nanook of the North (Robert Flaherty, 1922). Documentary theorists have not only argued that performativity is an integral part of the documentary mode, but that film reflects the inherently performative nature of subjectivity (Bruzzi; Backman Rogers; Hongisto). These arguments also question the boundary between documentary and fiction. When documentary employs fiction aesthetics as a tactic for portraying reality, the crossover results in a hybrid mode of filmmaking called docufiction (Landesman).

One of the methods in which docufiction filmmakers have been collaborating with their subjects is that of enactment, in which the subjects are asked to actively perform themselves for a film, resulting in a filmic enactment. Not only can filmic perception be of a filmed self-enactment, but self-perception can also inform the process of enactment. Namely, on the basis of the proposition that perception and action exist in a dynamic relationship (Noë; Gallagher; Gibson), I will argue that the possibilities for self-enactment are dependent on the conditions of a filmic appearance of oneself. By studying the relationship between filmic self-perception and self-enactment, I will explore a specific use and engagement with the medium of film, with the focus on the role of mediation for our bodily awareness, where mediation is understood as a relationality between the human and the technical (Mitchell and Hansen xii).

A few more words on the theoretical perspectives used to explore these phenomena.

1_{It is worth mentioning that these latter modes do not necessarily depict the filmmaker’s body: they can be}

concerned with different aspects of the filmmaker’s life, the people, sights, or objects with which they engage (Lebow 1).

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Cinematic bodily presence has until now gained significant academic attention from multi-disciplinary perspectives. For example, mediated bodily presentation has been explored in terms of visual self-representation and the variety of ways we use technology to digitally represent our own bodily image (Rettberg; Peraica). Visual technology has also been explored in relation to the formation of visual culture and the creation of a visual subject who partakes in that culture (Mirzoeff). From a psychoanalytic perspective, digital self-representation has been discussed in relation to subject-formation in a virtual world (Ibrahim). These are all insightful approaches that take visibility of the self and its presentation through visual technologies as one of its key themes. In essence, their insights are focused on the culture of self-representation and the implications it has for the subject’s sense of self.

Rather than focusing on the issue of bodily representation in film (including one’s own body), my departing point is the study of perception of one’s own moving image and enactment of oneself for the moving image. In focusing on the relationship between the subject and the medium, my approach is primarily in line with that of cinematic phenomenology. In a foundational text of this approach, The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience (1991), Vivian Sobchack has explored the encounter between the spectator’s body and the film’s body in terms of shared abilities to perceive and to express.2_{Moreover, these}

“objective encounters”, not only with film but media in general, have the ability to “transform us as embodied subjects” (Sobchack, Carnal Thoughts 89), meaning that the process of mediation shapes the way we perceive the world, others, and ourselves.

Nevertheless, cinematic phenomenology has not specifically addressed the difference in the experiential nature of perceiving oneself on screen in contrast to perceiving others. In my thesis, I uncover the mode of perception particular to encountering a filmic-self on screen, thereby differentiating between the perception of a bodily moving image of oneself and that of others. Moreover, by utilizing insights from embodied cognitive science on direct perception of action possibilities in an environment, I further uncover a relationship between filmic self-perception and filmic self-enactment as resulting in a subject’s state of “embodied hybridity”,

2_{Vivian Sobchack’s cinematic phenomenology directly builds on Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s embodied}

phenomenology. That the film’s “body” is able to perceive and express refers to the process of recording and projecting moving image. Other key authors adopting this approach include Jennifer Barker (The Tactile Eye: Touch

and the Cinematic Experience, 2009) and Laura U. Marks (The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses, 1999), which have predominantly addressed cinematic experience in relation to the haptic nature

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which I will exemplify by attending to three recent docufiction films that employ enactment as a filmmaking method.3_{In this way, I create an interdisciplinary framework by bringing together}

cinematic phenomenology, embodied cognitive science and documentary studies. On the one hand, cognitive theories are helpful for understanding certain aspects of documentary engagement and spectatorship. On the other, understanding of issues pertaining to documentary studies, such as boundaries between reality and fiction, or observation and performativity, inform how we approach the relationship between mediation and cognition.

The thesis is divided into following chapters. Chapter 1 is an introduction to the enactive-ecological approach in cognitive sciences, with a focus on its understanding of the nature of self-consciousness and the possible role media and the process of mediation can have in modifying bodily awareness. Based on the key notions from this approach, such as embodied cognition and affordance-based perception, Chapter 2 is focused on what filmic self-perception affords to the spectator and how these affordances modify our spatial, temporal, and intersubjective perceptual experience. 4 In Chapter 3, I directly build on the exploration of these affordances and postulate a direct relationship between filmic self-perception and filmic self-enactment. Here, I also provide an account of documentary performances in order to arrive at an understanding of the method of enactment in contemporary docufiction film in terms of embodied hybridity. Chapter 4 will exemplify this relationship by attending to the use of enactment in three recent docufiction films in order to reflect the variety of ways the subjects can enact themselves in respect to the affordances of filmic self-perception. The films explored in Chapter 4 are All These Sleepless Nights (Michal Marczak, 2016), You Have No Idea How Much I Love You (Pawel Lozinski, 2016) and Olmo & the Seagull (Petra Costa and Lea Globb, 2015).

As I will propose, self-consciousness is specified by what the environment affords to the individual at stake. In the case of film, the individual attends to a mediated environment, and my interest is in the implications that such a mediated environment can have for the nature of

3_{In “Film and the Phenomenology of Art: Reappraising Merleau-Ponty on Cinema as Form, Medium, and}

Expression” (2017), Daniel Yacavone urged for an exploration of phenomenological aesthetics rather than the

more traditional emphasis on the perceptual conditions of film as a medium (161). In addressing the creative employment of self-perception and self-enactment in documentary history, I will attempt to encompass both of these approaches. First by exploring the mediated nature of seeing and acting oneself for a film, and second by carefully attending to the presentation of these mediated experience in three recent docufiction films, thereby also contributing to a phenomenological aesthetics of docufiction.

4_{An earlier version of this exploration was submitted for a final research project of Media Theory II. Chapter 2 is a}

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consciousness. By focusing on filmic self-perception and self-enactment, my goal is to discern how a self-presence is mediated in the processes of perceiving and enacting oneself in a film. I argue that a closer look at the relationship between these two phenomena can provide an understanding of how mediation specifies self-consciousness in an encounter with a spatially, temporally and intersubjectively mediated filmic self. In turn, this encounter provides affordances for new forms of embodied engagement with the world that are reflected in the process of filmic self-enactment.

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Chapter 1: Enactive-Ecological Theory of Perception

The enactive approach in cognitive science focuses on one’s active engagement with an environment by positing a direct relationship between cognition and embodied action (Varela et al.), while an ecological approach takes as its focal point the relation between an organism and its environment (Gibson). Drawing these positions together, an enactive-ecological approach is one that places emphasis on skillful engagement with ecological aspects of one’s embodiment, including one’s social and cultural environment (Gallagher; Rietveld et al.). This chapter aims to account for the relevant ideas of this approach, such as embodied cognition and affordance-based perception, while also reflecting on the implications these theories have for our understanding of self-consciousness and the process of filmic mediation.

1.1 Embodied Cognition

To understand cognition as embodied entails that it cannot be adequately addressed without taking into account the organism’s embodiment and bodily interactions with an environment (Shapiro). While there is no academic consensus on the definition of embodied cognition, an influential definition has been the one that “knowledge depends on being in a world that is inseparable from our bodies, our language, and our social history – in short, from our embodiment” (Varela et al. 149). According to this view, bodily interaction with an environment is a partial realizer of cognitive processes (Gallagher). Broadly speaking, such a framework argues that cognition does not consist of representing or internally recovering a pregiven world, as classical cognitive science would assume. Rather, it consists of an enactment of that world, or “bringing forth of meaning from a background of understanding” (ibid). Knowledge is an enactment of meaning dependent on the lived experience of one’s biological, psychological and cultural embodiment. The world is not independent from the one who intends5 it – “knower and known” or “mind and world”, “stand in relation to each other through mutual specification or dependent co-origination” (Varela et al. 150).

5_{Intentionality is one of the fundamental concepts in phenomenology and embodied cognitive science. In the}

most basic terms, intentionality entails that consciousness is always directed outside of itself: consciousness is always consciousness of something (Merleau-Ponty).

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The claim that an embodied subject and the world one is embedded in co-constitute each other can be traced to the early work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, notably in Phenomenology of Perception (1945). Francisco J. Varela, Evan Thompson and Eleanor Rosch have furthered this approach in what is now a classic work of embodied cognitive science, namely The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience (1991), where the aforementioned definition of embodied cognition was originally defended. In essence, the aim of Varela et al.’s work was to naturalize phenomenology by connecting it to contemporary research in sciences of the mind. This approach is also known as the enactive approach to cognition.6

Varela et al. further propose to understand the co-constitution of mind and the world through the notion of “structural coupling”, which involves that an embodied mind is an autonomous and complex system that enacts a world through coupling with the chosen milieu (151). Structural coupling results in a spatiotemporal reconfiguration (ibid). On the basis of its autonomy – one’s embodiment and lived experience – a system enacts a domain of significance in an environment in which the system is embedded (156). In other words, through the process of structural coupling with a milieu, a system enacts a world. It is worth mentioning that such a stance is in strong opposition to a realist attitude of classical cognitive science in which the task of cognition is to recover a pregiven world. In arguing for embodied cognitive science, Varela et al. urge us to consider cognition as “embodied action” (172). They clarify it as following:

By using the term embodied we mean to highlight two points: first, that cognition depends upon the kinds of experience that come from having a body with various sensorimotor capacities, and second, that these individual sensorimotor capacities are themselves embedded in a more encompassing biological, psychological, and cultural context. By using the term action we mean to emphasize once again that sensory and motor processes, perception and action, are fundamentally inseparable in lived cognition (173).

Cognition, therefore, should be understood as embodied action resulting from a co-constitution between the mind and the world. At the same time that it enacts a world, cognition is dependent on it through being embedded in it. An organism is, therefore, simultaneously embodied and embedded, existing in an active, sense-making (or enactive) relationship with its chosen milieu.

6_{Evan Thompson’s Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology and Sciences of the Mind (2007) pursues the same}

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An approach to cognition under the initialism 4EA has been getting more attention in the past decade, and its philosophical basis is in line with an understanding of cognition in terms of embodied action. The initialism stems from the program’s focus on the embodied, embedded, enactive, extended and affective understanding of consciousness. “Extended” refers to the mind’s ability to include “elements outside the body as proper mechanisms that constitute mental states”, while “affective” refers to the “affectivity of every organism and its needs and strivings” (Fingerhut 34). The way in which 4EA understands cognition as extended should not be confused with the “extended mind hypothesis”, which postulates that technology can expand the space of reason and cognition (Clark and Chalmers). Under 4EA framework, “extended” refers to the ability of external objects to actually shape our perceptual experience of the world (Fingerhut 48). An understanding of cognition as extended is particularly helpful when dealing with the issue of mediation, as one needs to explore how a medium that is outside of a body creates a relationship with it and in which manner does it consequently modify our perceptual experience. That elements outside of the body such as media are capable of extending the mind has also been proposed by media theorist Marshal McLuchan in his seminal book Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964). Extended theories of mind, therefore, provide new information on debates present in media studies.

In line with the 4EA approach, Fingerhut proposes to understand pictures in general as “tools”, arguing that “pictures have the power to depict previously inaccessible details, as well as abstract contents and complex topics and make these all available in ways that would not be graspable in the perception of a natural scene or in imagery alone” (44). In the interaction between perception and pictures, pictures do not only provide new content for perception but afford us a different mode of perception, thereby enlarging and changing our faculty of perception (46). In summary, the relationship between mediation and perception entails that perception “includes and can change according to the different mediums (tools, technologies) through which we gain access to the world and through which the world affects us. They are not just input to the system but essential parts of the means of our access” (Fingerhut 46).

Building on these ideas, the process of mediation is best understood as a specific form of structural coupling between an organism and its environment, which results, among other things, in a reconfiguration of a broader spatiotemporal environment. Therefore, perceptual engagement with the medium of film accordingly results in a changed mode of access to the world. How the

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process of filmic mediation affects our faculty of perception can be approached in a more specific manner by referring to the notion of affordances.

1.2 Ecological Affordances

The term “affordance” was first proposed by James Jerome Gibson in The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (1979). Visual ecology proposes that affordances are aspects of an environment that are both relational to an individual and exist as resources available in an environment that provide possibilities for action (Gibson). They are “relations between aspects of a material environment and abilities available in a form of life” (Rietveld and Kiverstein 335). When an individual is in a particular environment, some affordances will stand out for the individual while others will be ignored (Bruineberg and Rietveld). Moreover, due to the relational nature of affordances, there is a plurality of ways in which the affordances that do stand out can acquire meaning for the individual. Nevertheless, as Gibson himself posed the question, if perception is indeed perception of affordances in an environment, “how do we go from surfaces to affordances?” (127). How do we move from a superficial understanding of our being in an environment to the one invested with a meaningful engagement with it? Gibson clarified it as following:

The composition and layout of surfaces constitute what they afford. If so, to perceive them is to perceive what they afford. This is a radical hypothesis, for it implies that the “values” and “meanings” of things in the environment can be directly perceived. Moreover, it would explain the sense in which values and meanings are external to the perceiver. [I]t implies the complementarity of the animal and the environment (127). To understand perception as “picking up” of affordances is in accordance with understanding cognition as embodied action. Both of these approaches understand the relationship between an individual and their environment in terms of complementarity, or co-constitution. Affordances appear in relation to the perceiver; they are aspects of an environment deemed significant for and by the individual. If we refer back to Varela et al.’s notion of structural coupling, in which an organism selects a domain of significance in a chosen milieu, we can understand one’s response to the affordances available in an environment in an analogous manner.

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It is worth stressing that affordances are not to be understood as physical properties of surfaces (Gibson 127). For example, a surface can be horizontal and rigid, and these would constitute its physical properties. Affordances, on the other hand, “have to be measured relative to the animal” (ibid). In this case, the physical properties of a surface could afford support to an individual, thus making support an affordance. In essence, an affordance is the way in which we make an object meaningful in relation to our embodiment. Importantly, this further implies that even though affordances are essentially relational, this does not mean that they do not exist independently of the individual. Affordances have an objective reality that is relative to a form of life and its members (Rietveld and Kiverstein 338).

Moreover, affordances are not only provided by objects in one’s environment, but by other people too, thus also being useful for understanding of intersubjectivity. Gibson proposes to consider our engagement with others in terms of “mutual affordances”, stating that “behavior affords behavior” (135). Just as an object has a shape and a surface to which we relate, so does the surface of the other’s body specify what they afford us, and what we might have afforded them. Social affordances arise in the interaction between two or more individuals and require mutual perception of each other’s affordances.

Lastly, while each object or a person in our environment might affords us something, this does not mean that affordances exist in isolation from one another. Bruineberg and Rietveld propose that the best way to understand affordances is through the concept of “landscape of affordances”, which aims to denote the “interrelatedness of the available affordances”, and not specify them as “a set of separate possibilities for actions” (3). Therefore, in an encounter with an environment, an individual simultaneously relates to its multiple affordances, which interrelate and form a landscape of affordances (Rietveld et al. 15). As Rietveld et al. have argued, affordances provide context for one another, which is an important consideration when dealing with the affordances of a certain phenomenon, as they can not only be multiple, but also inform each other (ibid).

In summary, affordances have to be measured relative to the individual who engages with objects in a particular environment. Even though they relate to the physical properties of intended objects, affordances are meant to denote the complementarity of an organism and its environment. They entail the values that are significant for the individual at stake and exist in interrelation with other affordances deemed as significant in the chosen milieu. Nevertheless, if

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affordances are measured relative to an individual, how should we understand the manner in which affordances are “picked up”, or given significance? In other words, why do some affordances stand out, while others are ignored?

In Varieties of Presence (2011), Alva Noë proposes that the kind of access one will achieve in an encounter with an environment depends on the skills of the individual. This means that our “conceptual and sensorimotor skills are not means of representation” but “means of achieving access to things” (124). What the environment affords, then, is dependent on the skills necessary in order to access the possible affordances. As Noë argues, “a theory of direct perception requires us to appreciate anew the role played by skills and understanding in perceptual experience. The object’s nearby existence does not suffice to enable the object to show up for perceptual consciousness” (Noë 125). Therefore, when we think of one’s encounter with an object, we should not think “we only see affordances” but that “we can see affordances” (Noë 121).

Noë’s “theory of access” clarifies that if we do not possess skills necessary to establish a relationship with an object, we will not be able to directly encounter the possibilities for action this object provides: its properties would not amount to affordances. A theory of perceived affordances thus postulates that perception is not a representation of the object of perception: the world does not simply show up in perceptual experience and “sensory events alone, without skill and understanding, are blind” (Noë 123). Rather, we achieve access to the world around us through skills and acts of understanding. We can perceive meanings and values of the objects we intend, that is, we can achieve access to what an environment affords through the skills available in our ecological niche. Noë’s theory of access is, therefore, in line with Varela et al.’s understanding of cognition as embodied action. Perception of affordances is directly dependent on our embodiment, our biological, psychological and cultural context. We enact a world of affordances by achieving access to it.

1.3 Cultural Modification of Affordances

If perception enacts a world, that also means that “objects of perception always have hidden, nondisclosed parts or aspects” (123). Noë’s theory of perceptual access to the world additionally indicates the possibility of failing to achieve access to the object’s affordances, either partially or

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completely. Things in the world, therefore, appear to us in a variety of ways. However, affordances as resources are available even before they are actually deemed meaningful by an individual, which opens the possibility for “picking up” affordances that haven’t been engaged with before, as well as creating new ones. As Gibson argues, one can change the shape and substances of an environment in order to change what it afford them (130). Rietveld and Kiverstein elaborate that an “account of affordances as being both relational and environmental resources suggests that applying skills in unconventional ways can be sufficient to allow one to discover new affordances offered by already familiar aspects of our environment” (340). Therefore, in changing our environment, we also change what the environment affords. In short, we create new possibilities for action and new forms of embodied engagement with our milieu. This changed environment should not be understood as a “new environment” but as “the same old environment modified by man” (Gibson 130). Namely:

It is a mistake to separate the natural world from the artificial as if there were two environments; artifacts have to be manufactured from natural substances. It is also a mistake to separate the cultural environment from the natural environment, as if there were a world of mental products distinct from the world of material products. There is only one world, however diverse, and all animals live in it, although we human animals have altered it to suit ourselves. […] We all fit into the substructures of the environment in our various ways, for we were all, in fact, formed by them. We were created by the world we live in (Gibson 130).

Therefore, not only is perception essentially affordance-based, but the nature of these affordances can be changed through human modification of their environment. We can form new affordances, and in turn our perception will also be formed by them, thus pointing to the aforementioned complementarity of an individual and their environment. Gibson’s position on the modification of the organism’s environment thus entails that perception will also be modified, as perception is based on the relationship an organism forms with a particular environment. Therefore, not only is the enactive-ecological approach to perception essentially anti-representationalist, but it establishes that through the organism’s coupling with the environment, the organism can change what the environment affords them and in turn develop new perceptual skills and accordingly a new form of embodied engagement with the environment.

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In his book Strange Tools: Art and Human Nature (2015), Alva Noë expresses an analogous argument in relation to the creative use of affordances by proposing that human beings acquire second natures through the creative use of technology (31). Namely, Noë argues that artistic practice can employ technology in a creative manner so as to explore different aspects of our existence, in turn reshaping our existential practices. Technology here is considered in a broad sense and includes writing and graphics, as well as more contemporary forms of media of which film is a part (Noë, Strange Tools). The argument Noë presents is that in finding new ways of using technology through art, we reorganize ourselves and adopt new forms of organized activities, or, in his terms, acquire second natures (Noë 30). Art is a strange tool, and art reorganizes us (31). Or, as Fielding has argued, art has the ability to cultivate perception (280). Noë’s argument is based on the view that art discovers new affordances by skillfully, and sometimes unconventionally, engaging with available resources.

Moreover, a recent anthology edited by Christoph Durt, Thomas Fuchs and Christian Tewes, titled Embodiment, Enaction and Culture: Investigating the Constitution of a Shared World (2017), sets out to explore embodied cognition and enaction of a world according to Varela et al.’s thesis. Yet, their central focus is the cultural embeddedness of perception. Namely, they stress that “culture permeates sense-making processes from pre-reflective motor-perceptive levels to the highest forms of significance. The products of culture, such as artifacts, technology, and institutions, in turn become an integral part of sense-making processes” (Durt et al. 3). In line with this view, Joerg Fingerhut and Katrin Heimann have explored the relation between embodiment, enaction, and film. Namely, they propose that filmic perception should be understood as a distinct modality of perception (Fingerhut and Heimann 364). Building on a vast literature from embodied cognitive science, the authors argue that “media competence is not naturally given, but is acquired over time”, leading them to argue that filmic perception is not only different from natural perception, but that it requires the development of specific perceptual skills needed for comprehending a film (369). Namely, “a succession of images that deviate more strongly from our perceptual habits – such as “cuts across the line”, “jump cuts”, and artificial camera movement – initiate differential responses of the motor system” (368). Consequently, in developing a new set of perceptual skills through engagement with the filmic medium, one also learns “novel forms of embodied engagement” (Fingerhut and Heimann 364).

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1.4 Mediation of Bodily Presence

Before exploring the affordances of the phenomenon of filmic self-perception and the forms of embodied engagement enabled by these affordances, different forms of bodily self-awareness should first be clarified in order to explore their modification upon an encounter with new affordances. In this section, then, I set to provide an understanding of self-consciousness in light of the enactive-ecological theoretical approach. The first important distinction, traditionally made by phenomenologists, is between pre-reflective and reflective bodily awareness (Merleau-Ponty; Sartre). The embodied first-person perspective is of a pre-reflectively lived body, while a reflective bodily awareness refers to intending the body as an object of reflection (Gallagher and Zahavi). This distinction clarifies that the body is primarily experienced “as a field of activity and affectivity, as a potentiality of mobility and action”, while this experience can only be secondarily reflected on, an act in which one moves from pre-reflective to reflective bodily awareness (Gallagher and Zahavi 8). Therefore, when one speaks of perception and cognition as being embodied, as it was outlined above, bodily self-awareness consists of an experience of the lived body, as it perceives and engages with the world. As Gallagher and Zahavi further clarify, “every visual or tactile experience is given in correlation to a kineasthetic experience”, “we experience the world bodily, and the body is revealed to us in exploration of the world” (9). This means that first-person embodied experience is positioned as our primary form of bodily-awareness. What does such embodied experience further consist of?

In The Visible and the Invisible (1968), Merleau-Ponty argues that an essential aspect of our perception is its reversibility. Namely, just as I exist as a subject of perceptual experience, so I can become an object of perception for another person. An embodied consciousness, thereby, exists in two modes, as a “seer” and a “visible” (Merleau-Ponty 139). What Merleau-Ponty stresses is that the reversible nature of the senses is inherent to perception and that bodily awareness exists in a form of doubling. This reversibility is between a sense-making, or a sentient being, on the one hand, and a sensible being on the other. Importantly, rather than these two aspects of perception being merely reversible, they intertwine: “my seeing body subtends this visible body, and all the visibles with it” (138). This means that one does not change modes of being (from sentient to sensible, and vice versa) but rather embodies both simultaneously.

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Experience of such reversibility is therefore part of the first-person embodied perspective (Gallagher and Zahavi). When speaking of the visible body, Merleau-Ponty here intends both the human body and other bodies present in the world for perception. To claim that my body subtends other bodies is to assert the primacy of perception as well as the “participation in and kinship with the visible” (138), the intertwining between the sentient and the sensible, and the reversibility of the senses that makes my body akin to other bodies. Nevertheless, while Merleau-Ponty refers to the essence of perception more generally, a paradigmatic case for the intertwining of the sentient and the sensible is the phenomenon of self-touch, the ability to touch an object with one hand and then touch this hand with the other hand (133). During the experience of self-touch, I am both the tactile subject of perception and a tangible object for perception. I embody a sentient and a sensible, and primarily tactile and tangible, modes of being simultaneously.

Moreover, Merleau-Ponty stresses that it is an encounter with the other that enables the intertwining of the visual and the visible (143). He argues that in being aware of another’s look of ourselves, we become aware of our own visibility, writing that “through other eyes we are for ourselves fully visible” (143). Merleau-Ponty stresses the phenomenological aspect of the relation between myself and the other, that being visible marks a structure of our being, of not only being a subject who can see, but of capability of being seen. Jean-Paul Sartre, who has also written on the relation between self and the other, reflects on this encounter as the one in which the other is primarily encountered as a subject for whom I exist as an object for perception (294). A relation between self and the other is a confrontation with one’s own objectivity to which one does not have a direct perceptual access (Sartre 285). This experience is marked by the doubling of sentient and the sensible, or the visual and the visible, as being not only my factual situation (an encounter with the other who sees me) but my ontological structure. When confronted with a look of the other, “I appear to myself completely turned inside out under my own eyes” (143). For Merleau-Ponty, this is a confrontation with a body as “a surface of inexhaustible depth” or being an expressive body (143). We can understand this claim in relation to the proposition above that the visual, or seeing, subtends the visible. When confronted with an experience of being an object for perception, of being visible to the other, I become also visible for myself in a sense that I am aware that my body exists as an expressive body for others (Merleau-Ponty 144). In Being and Nothingness (1943), Sartre summarized these different modes of bodily awareness in the following manner: “I exist my body, this is its first dimension of being. My

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body is utilized and known by the other: this is its second dimension. But in so far as I am for others, the Other is revealed to me as the subject for whom I am an object. [I] exist for myself as a body known by the other. This is the third ontological dimension of my body” (375). One’s existence for the other as a sensible body brings forward the consciousness of one’s body not as a lived body but of a body as it appears to the other (Sartre 376). This third ontological dimension of the body that is posited by Sartre is equivalent to Merleau-Ponty’s claim that the sentient and the sensible are not only reversible but exist in the mode of intertwining. Or, as Gallagher and Zahavi elaborated, “we find ourselves related to others through self-conscious experience that is motivated by the other’s gaze” (10). Self-consciousness is therefore ontologically determined by its existence in an intersubjective context. I do not only exist as a sensible object for others to intend, but it is my own self-consciousness that is being determined by encountering other bodies. Self-awareness is, then, inherently related to one’s social environment, and the relationship between self and other is essential for self-consciousness. Therefore, self-presence can be understood as having three modes. These can be summarized as 1) my lived body, 2) my body as known by the other, and 3) an awareness of my lived body as known by the other.

As elaborated, the enactive-ecology theory of perception stresses the complementarity between an individual and the environment, or their co-constitution. This means that self-consciousness is in a direct relationship with its environment: “To perceive a world is to coperceive oneself” (Gibson 141). In other words, self-experience is specified by the affordances present in an environment (Gibson; Gallese and Sinigaglia). If this is the case, then the change in the affordances with which one engages reflects a change in self-consciousness. Or, to refer to Sobchack’s understating of our engagement with different media, “insofar as the photographic, the cinematic, and the electronic have each been objectively constituted as a new and discrete techno-logic, each also has been subjectively incorporated, enabling a new and discrete perceptual mode of existential and embodied presence” (Carnal Thoughts 139). In other words, technology has “transformed us so that we presently see, sense, and make sense of ourselves as quite other than we were before each of them existed” (ibid).

What implications does this have for exploring the filmic mediation of self-presence? First, we can argue that the use of the medium of film so as to afford filmic self-perception is an example of modification of available resources in an environment through which we have

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created a new set of perceptual skills. Second, in changing the use of the medium for this purpose, we have not only created new affordances available through filmic self-perception but have also modified the perception of our own bodily presence. That is, in the process of mediation that denotes the relation between the individual and the mediated self in a moving image, self-consciousness undergoes a reconfiguration. Third, in modifying bodily awareness through this process, we have also created new forms of embodied engagement with our environment. And fourth, film as an art form has creatively explored these affordances, in turn further reinventing itself as a medium. On the basis of these arguments, the following chapter sets to explore the perceptual affordances of filmic self-perception and how self-presence is mediated in the encounter with these affordances, as well as how filmmakers have responded to these affordances by engaging with the medium in a particular manner.

An exploration of the mediation of self-presence will be carried out along the following postulates. The enactive-ecological approach allows us to argue that an engagement with a mediated environment results, first of all, in a spatiotemporal reconfiguration (Varela et al.). Namely, technological mediations of space and time modify our experience of them (Mitchell and Hansen 101; Sobchack, Carnal Thoughts 135). Secondly, as film is essentially an individual’s mediated perceptual experience, an encounter with a filmic-self will also be explored in terms of an intersubjective reconfiguration (Sobchack, The Address of the Eye). These processes can be addressed by attending to the reconfiguration of bodily awareness through an encounter with different filmic affordances. Thereby, Chapter 2 essentially addresses the following question. What does a filmic mediation of self-presence afford and how do these affordances mediate spatial, temporal and intersubjective bodily awareness? An analysis of these affordances is further driven by the aim to explore the kind of bodily engagement incited by these affordances. That is, as the affordances interrelate and form a landscape of affordances with which one engages, how are we to understand the kind of embodied engagement enabled by filmic self-perception? This will be addressed in detail in Chapter 3, which aims to account for the relationship between filmic self-perception and filmic self-enactment.

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Chapter 2: Affordances of Filmic Self-Perception

As explained above, affordances are measured relative to the organism who encounters them. While filmic bodily presentation can be said to consist of certain optic and acoustic information, how they are experienced differs in relation to whether the spectator encounters their own body on screen or that of somebody else. This chapter, then, sets to explore what an encounter of one’s own bodily presence in a film can afford to the spectator, and this exploration will be done in a threefold manner. First of all, I will reflect on how filmic self-perception mediates spatiality by referring to film’s ability to afford a spectator a simultaneous position of a visual and a visible subject of experience. I will refer to this phenomenon as the phenomenon of “self-look”. Secondly, in allowing us to see an enduring image of our past-self, there is a necessity to explore filmic self-experience as being of a temporal self-presentation from the past. In order to do so, I will reflect on filmic mediation of temporality. And thirdly, I will argue that in filmic self-perception, a film embodies a mediated relation between oneself as a subject and the other as a filmmaker, so that the experience differs in relation to whose perception the film mediates. I will refer to the previously introduced difference between using film to explore ourselves or other subjects, and thus provide different accounts of mediation of intersubjectivity. Moreover, I will present filmic examples of how these affordances have been explored by individuals in order to exemplify how they have been picked up creatively over time. Overall, the following is an exploration of film’s ability to afford us novel forms of self-perception by mediating our own bodily image.

2.1 Mediating Spatiality

When it comes to the spatial configuration of our field of view, we can first of all posit that due to its particular configuration, one’s bodily and facial visibility cannot be included in it as a direct object for perception. Our field of view can, for example, include a part of our nose, and we can see our limbs or parts of our body. But it cannot be occupied by the one who observes.7

As elaborated in the introduction, in order to see our bodily and facial gestures, we rely on media to show them to us. Merleau-Ponty noted that the other’s presence in one’s field of view makes

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them aware of them being an object for perception. We should note here that the outcomes of the phenomenon of the look of the other is not analogous to the phenomenon of self-touch described before, even though they are both concerned with the reversibility of the senses. The key difference is that during self-touch, I am for myself both tactile and tangible. The look of the other does not allow me a perception of myself in the same manner as in the case of self-touch, as the other’s perceptual experience is directly unavailable to me.

However, as Sobchack has argued, a phenomenology of the moving image is characterized as being a mediated perceptual experience of a subject, or an expression of another’s perception (The Address of the Eye). While self-touch is possible without mediation, visual technologies mediate bodily presence so as to allow it to become an object of self-look. More precisely, in order to see myself – my body as I am able to see bodies other than my own – I need to rely on a medium that is capable of affording it as such. The aforementioned visual media grant us instances of self-look: I am simultaneously the one seeing and the one being seen, the doubling of being sentient and sensible occurs again in the form of visual and visible. Filmic self-perception grants us a temporal object of ourselves as subjects of perception: we see ourselves seeing and engaging with the world. In perceiving ourselves as subjects of perception in a moving image, we perceive our own conduct in the world, our bodily and facial gestures as we engage with an environment. Thereby, the body is not only experienced as a lived body but as an expressive body. Mirrors, photography and film allow us a direct intertwining of the visual and visible nature of our perceptual experience. As it was noted in the introduction, photography presents us with an instant, and film with an event of the past, while mirrors afford a reflection of our present self. Let us take a closer look at what mirror self-perception consists of, so that we can better understand the distinct affordances of filmic self-perception.

Drawing from Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, Dan Zahavi argues that “the mirror not only permits the child to perceive her own facial features; it also affords the child a very different apprehension of her own bodily unity than what is available from interoceptive, proprioceptive, and exteroceptive sources” (203). In mirror self-experience, one’s body becomes “a clearly delineated object”, and for one to realize the specular image as being of themselves is to become a spectator of oneself (Zahavi 203). Zahavi further argues that mirror self-experience brings a realization of living in an intersubjective space, that I am now seeing myself as others see me (204). Namely, “the enigmatic and uncanny character of mirror self-experience is precisely due

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to this intermingling of self and other. It is me that I see in the mirror, but the me I see hasn’t quite the same familiarity and immediacy as the me I know from immediate experience. The me I see in the mirror is distant and yet close; it is felt as another, and yet as myself” (204). Zahavi’s conceptualization reflects the third ontological dimension of the body as argued by Sartre and Merleau-Ponty. In mirror self-perception, I see the body as it is visible to others. A mirror does not merely bring a contrast between our own bodies and those of other people, but a tension in being both a subject and object of a perceptual experience. It introduces a new form to our perception, a perception of self that was not available before the encounter with a specular double in the mirror. More precisely, mirror self-experience involves the intersubjective character of our perception, a presentation of a dimension of self that is “self as a social object” (Zahavi 206).

While mirror self-perception involves recognition of my visual body in the present, filmic self-perception is an encounter with my visible body as from the past, or a perception of myself as I was. Just as the self in the mirror is not the one readily available to me in my immediate experience, so the film grants us a temporal image of ourselves in the past. Moreover, filmic self-perception affords a presentation of my body as engaged with the world, as responding to the objects and people in its surrounding. Namely, as Merleau-Ponty asserted in “Film and the New Psychology”, “a movie is not thought; it is perceived” (Sense and Non-Sense, 80). He clarified this distinction by pointing to a medium-specific presentation of the subject’s existence in the world, namely that films “do not give us his thoughts, as novels have done for so long, but his conduct or behavior; [t]hey directly present to us that special way of being in the world, of dealing with things and other people, which we can see in the sign language of gesture and gaze and which clearly defines each person we know” (80).

This focus on perceptual experience stresses that what films confront us with are the behavior and gestures of another person. When we perceive another’s bodily presence, “we are not only confronted with a physical body but with gestures that immediately express and communicate a meaning”, that is, “the facial expressions, intonation and bodily posture are all perceived as being imbued with meaning” (Kiverstein 535). And what filmic self-perception affords us is our own conduct in the word, a confrontation with our physiognomy and gestural responses in a specific past situation. In experience, perception and expression are in a dynamic relation of reversibility, so that a lived-body is always in the act of perceiving expression and

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expressing perception (Barker 8). Bodily visibility afforded by filmic self-presentation, therefore, should be understood as being expressive of a past-self in relation to the other, as the two following sections will explore.

The central point I want to make in relation to filmic mediation of spatiality is its ability to include the spectator into their own field of view. That is, not only, as in the look of the other, to become aware of their own visibility, but to directly perceive ourselves as expressive beings, the manner in which our behaviors, gestures, and physiognomy are sensible to others. This, of course, makes filmic self-perception also relevant for the mediation of intersubjectivity, which will be explored after accounting for mediation of temporality. Filmic self-perception, therefore, simultaneously constitutes as a subject of perception and an object for perception. In its ability to afford a perceptual experience of one’s own bodily comportment and its temporally extended gestural expressions, a cinematic self-look is a unique experience of this doubling. Just as a mirror creates a tension between myself as a subject and myself as an object, so does filmic self-perception create a tension to appropriate a temporally extended image of the self that I was into the present self-experience. To summarize, filmic self-perception affords a perceptual experience of oneself as an object for perception within one’s own field of view, and crucially, this filmic-selfentails temporally extended visibility of a past-self.

Filmic self-experience is enabled through various modes of filmmaking, as noted in the introduction. Film’s affordance of self-look has also been utilized within the filmmaking process itself, thus granting spectators direct access to its use as a filmmaking method. Namely, there are documentary examples in which the subjects of the film have been presented with the footage of themselves and their response to the footage has consequently been recorded. Cinematic self-look is, for example, employed in Chronicle of a Summer (Edgar Morin and Jean Rouch, 1961), where the subjects commented on the difference between first-person lived experience and that of their visible selves, regarding the latter as “unnatural” or elsewhere commenting on the inability to “express themselves”. Others, however, commented on the truthfulness of their mediated visibility, noting how “you don’t lie in front of the camera”. In no other film, to my knowledge, has the relation between mediated and non-mediated self-presence been so extensively discussed as in Chronicle of a Summer. For this reason, I will return to this film in Chapter 3 when discussing the relation between self-perception and self-enactment.

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Similiarly, In Ladies and Gentlemen, Mr. Leonard Cohen (Donald Brittain and Don Owen, 1966), the film’s protagonist is also presented with the footage of himself. While watching it, Leonard Cohen makes the following comment: “I think I’ve had a very mistaken conception of what style of man I was”. This comments also reflects the tension between oneself as a visual subject and one’s body as a visible, expressive body. It speaks of difference between consciousness of one’s visibility for the other and a confrontation with this visibility through cinematic self-look. In a more recent cinematic achievement by Joshua Oppenheimer, The Act of Killing (2012), Anwar Congo, the leader of a death squad during Indonesian genocide of 1965-66, watches himself reenacting the murders from the perspective of the victim. At one occasion, struck by his own reenactments, he says: “Did the people I torture feel the way I do here?”.8

In addition to highlighting the affective nature of confronting one’s visibility, Anwar Congo’s comment also reveals an important dimension of filmic self-experience, namely the confrontation with a past-self as experienced from the present. The temporal dimension of this experience is of extreme importance for Congo, but it should be noted that the subjects of Chronicle of a Summer and Ladies and Gentlemen, Mr. Leonard Cohen also engage in perception of their past-selves. This opens the further question of mediation of time-consciousness in relation to filmic self-perception, which is the focus of the following section. There is, however, one other crucial difference between the situations for self-perception created by these environments that must be addressed before continuing. In Chronicle of a Summer and Ladies and Gentlemen, Mr. Leonard Cohen, the subjects are presented with the final footage of their filmic presence. In The Act of Killing, however, Anwar perceives himself reenacting, but this footage will only later be placed in the film as the viewer sees it. In other words, these reenactments will only later gain context through editing, which is something Anwar is yet unaware of when he sees them.9 This difference points to the importance of the relationship developed by the filmmaker and the subjects, or the mediation of intersubjectivity, which is something I will attend to after accounting for the mediation of temporality.

8_{The context of Anwar’s filmic self-perception is vastly different from those in Chronicle of a Summer and Ladies}

and Gentlemen, Mr. Leonard Cohen, as it primarily involves an encounter with a traumatic past. It is not my

attempt to essentialize the mode of spectatorship enabled by this method. Rather, these examples point to its varied use – and importantly also varied effect – on the subjects. Namely, due to the context of the project, the scope of critical investment enabled by self-perception is larger for Anwar Congo than for the other mentioned protagonists.

9_{This difference was indicated to me during a presentation of these ideas at Docusophia conference (Tel Aviv, May}

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2.2 Mediating Temporality

In the previous section, I have deemed filmic self-presentation as being temporally extended. It is of a body that is undergoing change and transformation as it engages with the world, and we witness such a presentation as a filmic event. I have previously differentiated between pre-reflective and pre-reflective self-consciousness. Pre-pre-reflective self-consciousness is characterized by the perceptual experience as it is lived and this experience has a temporal structure. We have memories of past objects and events, and we also anticipate the future ones. In Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind (2010), Evan Thompson has elaborated on time-consciousness in the following manner:

Experience itself is temporal, and particular experiences are temporally related to each other. We are aware of our experiences and mental activities as arising, enduring, and ceasing, and as followed by other experiences and mental activities, all related to one another in complex ways. Time-consciousness thus comprises both awareness of external things and their temporal characters, and awareness itself as temporal and as unified across time (318).

Thereby, not only are perceptual experiences temporal, but so too is self-consciousness. Importantly, it is the temporal structure of pre-reflective self-consciousness that poses limitations for reflective self-consciousness. Being temporal in itself, reflective self-consciousness can take the objects of lived experience as its objects of reflection, but it can never coincide with them (Gallagher and Zahavi 7). Therefore, we can investigate our past experiences from the present, but there is always a fracture between the two, a difference between “the lived” and “the understood” (ibid). As elaborated in the section above, film’s ability to mediate perceptual experiences grants us access into ourselves as subjects engaging with the world, thus bringing a past-self into the present field of view. What kind of implications does that phenomenon have for filmic mediation of temporality?

In “Towards a Phenomenology of Nonfiction Film Experience” (1999), Vivian Sobchack lays out the phenomenological structures of the cinematic experience of film-souvenirs that can be beneficial for further exploring the relation between filmic self-perception and time-consciousness. Film-souvenirs, or home videos, contain footage of events we have previously

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experienced, of people, objects or sights we have been existentially familiar with in our lives. Documentary or fiction films, on the other hand, present us with film-worlds that we have not previously experienced, although both do so in a different manner. Sobchack notes that in the experience of film-souvenirs, we engage in a “constitutive activity” the aim of which is to recover the experience of a person or event we now perceive through the moving image (244). This means that film-souvenirs function as catalysts for a reactivation of our past lived experiences. She explains this process in the following manner:

I see my son through the image, his smile evoking an ensemble of gestures and looks in excess of the image’s specificity, evoking the person I know whose existence and comportment form a general whole that I try to remember from this image fragment of him. Similarly, the image fragments of the backyard of the house I once lived in do not provoke intense scrutiny, but rather evoke a coherent, eventful, and lived space I wish to recall in excess of what is given to me on the screen (248).

What Sobchack stresses here is that existential familiarity with the footage does not evoke scrutiny of the image in the attempt to understand its place within the film-world, as seeing a documentary or a fiction film would. Rather, a perceptual experience of a home video evokes a lived space through which I can recall past fragments of my own life. What I see is not a part of the film-world as a whole, but part of my own past lived experiences. Home videos prompt us to rejoin lived experiences from the past to our present consciousness. They, as Jamie Baron has suggested, have an “archive effect” (105). To perceive a footage as “archival” means to perceive it as produced in a different time period, to experience it as being of the past (Baron 105). While Baron’s concern is with the appropriation of footage for historical purposes, home videos delineate a personal disparity between the past and the present. They give us a sense of a personal history.

This will hold independently of whether it is myself I see on the screen, a member of my family or a friend, or sights such as the house I lived in. Nevertheless, as noted before, filmic self-perception affords us a moving image of ourselves in relation to the world, that is, in relation to those past sights and people that one has memories of. Thereby, the affordance is also constituted by the additional dimension of one’s memories. Next to the attempt to evoke the presence of the past lived experience, filmic self-perception creates a tension to unite the past lived experience with the perception of my past-self as engaging in that experience. In becoming

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a spectator of my own past as I engage with it, I am offered an additional aspect to my memories. Namely, my bodily expression from the past is available to me as a temporal object for perception in the present. In filmic self-perception, then, the archival effect regards my own body as a temporal object: I enfold my visible self of the past into my present self.

This disparity of the past-self as experienced from the present has been dealt with in films such as Stories We Tell (Sarah Polley, 2012) and As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpse of Beauty (Jonas Mekas, 2000). The former explores the director’s personal past through the use of the home videos joined with the interviews in the present, thus delineating between a sense of the past and one’s regard to it from the present moment. As the director herself has noted in the film, it concerns how “the truth of the past is often ephemeral and hard to pin down”, thus tackling the value our personal filmic archives have for the questions we hold regarding the role our past experiences have in the present. As I was Moving Ahead is a compilation of home video footage by Mekas, which is used to construct the narrative of his personal history. In this, it is a remarkable attempt to join together multiple personal filmic archives into a holistic presentation of his temporal existence. Moreover, the Up Series (Michael Apted, 1964 – Present) deals with filmic self-presentation and how this presentation changes over time. In filming a group of people every seven years, the series offers us a perspective on how one’s body is affected by the passing of time, into “the changes wrought by the years” (Baron 105).

Therefore, not only does filmic self-perception incite the lived experiences of the past, but it affords us an opportunity to see our bodily relation to the events of our memory. The first two films are examples in which the directors themselves explore the value of their personal filmic archives. In the Up Series, as in The Act of Killing, self-presentation is mediated by somebody other than the subjects of the footage. This further points to the mediated relation between self and the other, and the following will discuss the relevance of the intentional subject behind the film for one’s filmic self-experience, thus accounting for the mediation of intersubjectivity.