Visual Music and Kinetic Ornaments

This essay traces the theorization of interwar animation through period analogies with painting and dance, paying special attention to the valorization of concepts such as dematerialization and embodiment, which metaphors of visual music and physical kinesthesis were used to promote. Beginning in 1919, and exemplified by her feature-length film Die Abenteuer des Prinzen Achmed (1926), Lotte Reiniger directed numerous silhouette films animated in an ornate style that embraced decorative materiality. This aesthetic set her in uneasy relation to the avant-garde, whose strenuous attempts to distance abstraction from ornament took the form of absolute film, and were screened together at the Absolute film Matinee of 1925. However, their claims for aesthetic integrity were staked on territory these artists largely had in common. By adopting a feminist approach that examines networks of collaboration, publication, and artistic production in Weimar Berlin, this essay reveals Reiniger as an early proponent of haptic cinema in interwar Europe and one of animation's earliest and most perceptive theorists.

Haptic Visuality and Film Narration. Mapping New Women’s Cinema in Spain

There is a trend in female film production in the 21st century in the context of Spain towards a type of cinema that we could classify as haptic. It is a mode of representation concerned with multisensory expression in film images. In this article, we shall study this haptic visuality in the works of four filmmakers: Isabel Coixet, Paula Ortiz, Mar Coll and Carla Simón, whose films in this century exemplify the trend. The method chosen is textual analysis, which will provide us with the necessary tools to study matters concerning representation (framing), narration (nuclei and catalysis) and communication (spectatorial subject). These three analytical categories together will enable us to set out the representational parameters of haptic cinema in filmic texts. The results obtained reveal that the elements related to framing (handheld camera usage, grainy images, and the recurrent presence of close-ups) help to express the characters’ subjective, sensory world. As for the narrative model, a prevalence of catalysis and descriptive function can be seen, which helps the characters’ affections and emotions to be widely expressed. Likewise, inferences and ellipsis help weave filmic discourses that involve the audience cognitively, constructing a communicative model that fosters interpretational openness and a kind of interpellation that seeks affective and intellectual communion with the spectatorial subject.

Hap-Tech Narration and the Postphenomenological Film

Within this paper, I explore the look and feel of the subjective point-of-view (POV) shot in narrative cinema and how it presents an awkward and uncomfortable space for the viewer to inhabit. It considers what David Bordwell has called the surrogate body: the concept in which viewers step into the role of an offscreen protagonist. In numerous films, this style invites the spectator to see and feel through the eyes and movement of a particular type of surrogate character, which as I argue, predominantly consists of killers, victims or socially inept characters. The term I give for this particular trait in cinema is hap-tech narration, which is inspired by Laura Marks’ concept of haptic cinema. Unlike Marks’ understanding of haptic which focuses upon sensual beauty, hap-tech narration considers phenomenological uncomfortableness which is considered through Don Ihde’s philosophy of technology. This paper incorporates Ihde’s framework of postphenomenology, which considers how experientiality is changed and filtered through technological devices (which in this analysis will be the technology of the camera and the frame of the screen). Using Ihde’s postphenomenological understanding of human–technology relationships (which this work explores in detail), I consider a range of narrative films that utilise POV camerawork, including: Delmer Daves’ Dark Passage (1947), Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom (1960) and Julian Schnabel’s Le Scaphandre et le Papillon (The Diving Bell and Butterfly, 2007). Each of these titles present events through the subjective gaze of a killer, victim or socially damaged character. This paper offers a rationale as to why this is the case by addressing POV through the philosophy of Ihde, enabling an understanding of hap-tech narration to be unpacked, in which viewers are placed into corrupted and damaged corporeality through the technological power of the camera.