SFAI essays - #4: Response to "The Cinematic Body"

this is an essay response to Steven Shaviro's The Cinematic Body (Theory Out of Bounds) - specifically, two chapters entitled "Lines of Flights" and "Literal Perceptions." it's a great book that challenges the cult-like wave of psychoanalytic film theory that usually misses the point of the visceral experience of film-watching.

you can find more about, or order, the book here:

http://www.amazon.com/Cinematic-Body-Theory-Out-Bounds/dp/0816622949



Steven Shaviro’s The Cinematic Body is like a breath of fresh air in the world of film criticism. By using a Foucaultian approach to analyzing film, he rightfully denounces the psychoanalytic critics and their essays, who seem to insist that the sole importance of a film is in what the images represent, to the extent that the images exist because of these ideas. This phrase from the “Lines of Flight” chapter sums it up succinctly: “The forms of ideology must indeed be included among immanent power relations, but they are not the basic, ultimate forms of power’s efficacy and intelligibility.”

Film criticism can be very heavy-handed with Freudian theories, castration hypotheses, and the like; to the point that I was starting to wonder if films I consider to be beautiful and visceral experiences (along with my own filmmaking) were not considered to be “good cinema” because they didn’t neatly fit into these pre-made symbolic categories. By emphasizing the inherent power of viscerally experiencing the image and its accompanying sound, Shaviro has restored the idea that filmmaking can be enriching and complex through mise-en-scene and montage, without even bringing the idea of representation into the mix. Suspiria is an ideal example of this.

There can be a plentiful amount of analyzation of this film - the way the brutally masculine hands penetrate the pure female bodies in the murder scenes, the manly demeanor of the female dance instructor, Madame Blanc’s name contrasting with the Black Coven, for some examples. But this film was obviously made as a sensory experience, and its critical praise should be based on that. In direct comparison to Shaviro talking about being violently affected by “this image and this sound,” Suspiria pushes our senses to the limits, creating a high amount of constant tension and fright to which most horror films can only aspire.

For instance, when Suzy Bannion first arrives in Germany, we know something is not right - partially because of the use of the creepy, foreboding soundtrack that we only hear when the doors to the outside darkness are opened. Later in the film, unrealistic, ultra-saturated washes of red light are visual cues of something horrendous about to happen. Quite often, the nightmarishly vibrant images combine with the abrasive, teasingly repetitive soundtrack to overload our senses to create what Shaviro calls an “automatism of perception” - a physical shock effect that disrupts the normal expectations of vision. The hyper-real sensory experience created by Suspiria intensifies this automatism of perception, making the viewing experience a physical one. Taking all of that into consideration, what symbols and representation can be attributed to these scenes that can compare with the feelings they produce?

Images are shot and edited a certain way for certain effects - I fully agree with Shaviro when he says that these images are really raw contents of sensation, first and foremost. Yes, you can attribute alternate symbology and representation by analyzing the plot to the nth degree. But, with a film like Suspiria, where image and sound are constructed so vividly and with such purpose, the result is visceral. And the visceral experience is something immediate that bypasses our reflective and cognitive responses.

If a film’s primary goal is to bring the audience into the film, to identify with the character, then Suspiria accomplishes this goal perfectly - by creating that “physical shock effect” through the mechanics of filmmaking to match the shock that the main character must be feeling when she encounters the supernatural. Any attempt to symbolize that shock will pale in comparison to the feelings that this film creates through the actual process of filmmaking.

And, yes, further analyzation of this film would most likely yield psychoanalytic theories of some sort - but, as Shaviro states, these symbols and representations do not create the film we are witnessing; rather, they are a consequence of the mechanisms of cinema. These ideas come after analyzation of the plot and characters; the plot and characters do not exist because of the ideas.