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Cinema's Bodily Illusions: Flying, Floating, and Hallucinating by Scott C. Richmond

2019; Volume: 58; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/cj.2019.0034

2578-4919

Laura Isabel Serna, Adriano D’Aloia,

Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy

Reviewed by: Cinema's Bodily Illusions: Flying, Floating, and Hallucinating by Scott C. Richmond Laura Isabel Serna and Adriano D'aloia (bio) Cinema's Bodily Illusions: Flying, Floating, and Hallucinating. by Scott C. Richmond. University of Minnesota Press. 2016. $94.50 hardcover; $27.00 paperback; also available in e-book. 232 pages. Cinema's Bodily Illusions: Flying, Floating, and Hallucinating by Scott C. Richmond. University of Minnesota Press. 2016. $94.50 hardcover; $27.00 paperback; also available in e-book. 232 pages. After its premiere at the seventy-first Cannes Festival, an "unrestored" edition of Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) was theatrically rereleased in June 2018 to commemorate its fiftieth anniversary. Kubrick fan Christopher Nolan revitalized the colors of the masterpiece's original 70 mm version and proved that the philosophical power of 2001 can still feed the debate on the nature and value of the film experience, especially when it takes place in a movie theater equipped with a big screen. In the age of the multiplication of screens and ways of viewing audiovisual media, the question is not whether the cinema is still able to involve the viewer in an engaging experience but rather what the nature of such engagement is. Whereas avant-garde, experimental, and modernist cinema voluntarily leave room for ambiguity, indeterminacy, incompleteness, and openness—as in Bazin's description of Italian neorealism in What Is Cinema?—in postmodern and contemporary mainstream cinema, the elicitation of physical reflexes through perceptual intensification prevails over cognitive reflexivity. Separating the mind and the body, however, is entirely impossible, even when we talk about a media experience such as viewing a film. In fact, we do not simply "watch" a film, nor do we only make inferences to "understand" a more or less complex story. Rather, we experience the expressive surface of the film through the depths of our bodies. This is precisely the point of Cinema's Bodily Illusions, a book that continues the [End Page 172] approach developed in Vivian Sobchack's Merleau-Pontian phenomenology of the film experience and, more recently, Jennifer Barker's Sobchackian phenomenology of cinematic synesthesia.1 In her famous 1969 essay on 2001, Annette Michelson argues that Kubrick's film is innovative because it elicited reflexivity and apperception by confronting the viewer with a disarticulated system of orientation, but Scott Richmond emphasizes its capacity to prompt a more immediate, directly perceptual, bodily, and unintellectual reaction.2 2001 does not address the viewer's mind as a disembodied system (the modernist stance), he argues, but instead tackles the body and its "proprioceptive reflexivity."3 The notions of proprioception and "proprioceptive aesthetics" lie at the heart of Cinema's Bodily Illusions.4 Although inhabiting the same zero-gravity or artificial-gravity environments as the astronauts in the sidereal space of the theater, the viewer experiences a sense of his own body through a set of perceptual modalities (in muscles and joints and via the vestibular sense in the inner ear) that provide information about the position of the body in the world. In short, as Richmond argues, "proprioception is a mediating term, coming between and coordinating the inside of the body and what lies outside it."5 Hence, a proprioceptive aesthetic "lies at the heart of the cinema as an aesthetic medium and as a technical system"; it is "an aesthetics of self-perception modulated by the cinema."6 Starting from this premise, the book is organized into six chapters focused on five films that give rise in the viewer to an equal number of illusions. The first chapter discusses Marcel Duchamp's Anémic cinéma (1926) and its stereo-kinetic effect, the illusory perception of depth arising from the rotation of discs, or "the sensation of traveling into a tunnel or descending into a hole."7 This kind of bodily illusion is pleasurable and palpable and, far from being intellectual or critical, modulates the viewers' embodied perception. In Anémic cinéma, Richmond concludes, "I encounter my nontransparency to myself."8 The same cinematic aesthetics of bodily illusion can be found in Godfrey Reggio's Koyaanisqatsi (1982), analyzed in the fourth chapter, "Proprioception, the Écart." Through the nearly nauseating alternation...