Film and Media Studies, Vol. 20, 2021

Acta Universitatis Sapientiae The scientific journal of Sapientia Hungarian University of Transylvania (Cluj-Napoca, Romania) publishes original papers and surveys in several areas of sciences written in English.

Information about each series can be found at http://www.acta.sapientia.ro.

Main Editorial Board Márton TONK Editor-in-Chief Adalbert BALOG Executive Editor Zoltán KÁSA Member Angella SORBÁN Managing Editor Laura NISTOR Member Csaba FARKAS Member Ágnes PETHŐ Member

Acta Universitatis Sapientiae Film and Media Studies Executive Editor Ágnes PETHŐ (Sapientia Hungarian University of Transylvania, Romania) petho.agnes@kv.sapientia.ro Assistant Editor Melinda BLOS-JÁNI (Sapientia Hungarian University of Transylvania, Romania) Editorial Board Ruggero EUGENI (Catholic University of the Sacred Heart, Milan, Italy) Anne GJELSVIK (Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, Norway) András Bálint KOVÁCS (Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, Hungary) Florin MIHĂILESCU (UNATC, Bucharest, Romania) Lúcia NAGIB (University of Reading, UK) Jens SCHRÖTER (University of Bonn, Germany) András SZEKFŰ (King Sigismund College, Budapest, Hungary) László TARNAY (University of Pécs, Hungary) Ginette VERSTRAETE (VU University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands) Ying ZHU (The City University of New York, USA & Hong Kong Baptist University, People’s Republic of China)

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Acta Universitatis Sapientiae

Film and Media Studies Volume 20, 2021

Sapientia Hungarian University of Transylvania Scientia Publishing House

Acta Universitatis Sapientiae, Film and Media Studies is indexed by the following databases: Central and Eastern European Online Library (CEEOL) Web of Science – Emerging Sources Citation Index ERIH PLUS (European Reference Index for the Humanities and Social Sciences) FIAF International Index to Film Periodicals NSD (Nordic Scientific Database)

Acta Universitatis Sapientiae Film and Media Studies Vol. 20, 2021

Sound, Vision, Emotion

(Screenshot from Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival, 2016.)

Contents Nicolás Medina and Miklós Kiss The Role of Experimenting with the Human Voice in Film Music in the Representation of the Human/Alien Divide: the Case of Arrival (2016) . . . . . 1 Morten Feldtfos Thomsen Body, Telephone, Voice: Black Christmas (1974) and Monstrous Cinema . . 20 Nick Redfern The Soundtrack of the Sinister Trailer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36 Aneta Wójciszyn-Wasil Silence as a Metaphor in the Polish Radio Reportages during the COVID-19 Pandemic . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52 Fátima Chinita A Tale of Sound and Fury Signifying Everything: Argentine Tango Dance Films as Complex Self-Reflexive Creation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68 Mircea Valeriu Deaca Circular Causality of Emotions in Moving Pictures . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 86 Amanda Rutherford and Sarah Baker Game of Thrones as a Gothic Horror in Quality Television . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111 Giorgos Dimitriadis Considering Eye-tracking as a Validation Tool in Cinema Research . . . . . . 129 László Strausz Instrumentalization of the Border Zone. Environment and Ideology in the Educational Films Made between 1955 and 1989 by the Hungarian Ministry of Interior’s Film Studio . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 151 Agata Waszkiewicz Non-Normative Gender Performances of Fat Video Game Characters . . . . . 165

Acta Univ. Sapientiae, Film and Media Studies, 20 (2021) 1–19 DOI: 10.2478/ausfm-2021-0011

The Role of Experimenting with the Human Voice in Film Music in the Representation of the Human/Alien Divide: the Case of Arrival (2016) Nicolás Medina and Miklós Kiss University of Groningen (The Netherlands) E-mails: m.kiss@rug.nl, n.medina.maranon@rug.nl

Abstract. This article focuses on the musical dimension of experimentation in the creative space of science fiction film, concerning its uncanny, new and fantastic places, and otherworldly encounters within fictional, but possible worlds. The aim is to consider the function and potential of the audible – to examine how sound is used in the filmic exploration of the boundaries between the human and the alien (the unknown). More particularly, we are interested in the role that human voice-like and human vocal sounds can play in this divide, as we believe manipulations with such audible qualities contribute greatly to the emotional dimension of cinematic stories of otherworldly encounters. For that purpose, we concentrate on Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival (2016) and its soundtrack composed by Jóhann Jóhannsson, who resorts to different singing practices and vocal techniques to accompany a story charting the territories between the human and the alien.

Keywords: voice, soundtrack, human/alien divide, Arrival, Jóhann Jóhannsson.

Introduction Science fiction seems to be the ideal generic context to raise all sorts of existential “what if…?” questions, hypothesize about possible dystopian and utopian futures, and ultimately reflect upon the very essence of human nature. Cara Marisa Deleon emphasizes the relevance of unfamiliarity as one of the key elements of the genre (Deleon 2010, 13). This article focuses on the musical dimension of how cinema addresses unfamiliarity within the science fiction genre’s uncanny, new and fantastic places, and otherworldly encounters. The aim is to consider the function and potential of the audible – to examine how sound is used in the filmic exploration of the boundaries between the human and the alien (the

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unknown). More particularly, we are interested in the role that voice-like and vocal sounds play in exploring this divide.

The voice, as the “faculty whereby human beings (and some other creatures) produce sound (speech, music and other sounds) through use of the lungs, throat and mouth as an acoustic system” (Shepherd et al. 2003, 455), is the most organic instrument at our disposal, and therefore often comes to signify humanness.

We believe that experimentation with the human voice (or voice resembling instruments) offers a series of productive affordances, which can contribute greatly to the emotional dimension of cinematic stories of otherworldly encounters – especially if we consider how many science fiction films seem to be looking to the unknown in order to reflect about our human selves. Recently, a few film sound designers and directors have been exploring this potential of the human voice – using its spectral features, exploring different vocal practices such as overtone singing, looping/splicing/processing – to humanize sounds marked as alien.

Foregrounding the organic/non-organic binary, this artistic work is an important part of a broader effort to create empathy and identification across difference and reduce the Otherness of the various Others, like the animal or the alien.

Our case study is Denis Villeneuve’s science fiction film Arrival (2016) and its experimental musical soundtrack using human vocal and voice-like sounds throughout the score. Composer Jóhann Jóhannsson employs different singing practices and vocal approaches to create the musical atmosphere of the film, making use of the varied affordances that vocal sounds might represent in this story about communication with alien species and among humans. The blending of natural and processed voices, the instances of overtone singing, or the sampling/looping of existing vocal recordings are techniques to create sounds which, although familiar to contexts such as avant-garde music, are rarely present in mainstream cinema. Our aim is to relate the soundtrack’s experimentation with human voices to the film’s unfolding notions of spiritualism, unpacking its contribution to the fiction’s understanding of the nonhuman as well as to a fantastic extension of our knowledge on humanness.

1. Scoring with Voices in Arrival Written by Eric Heisserer (based on the short novel by Ted Chiang), Arrival presents the story of linguist Louise Banks (Amy Adams) during the visit of twelve extraterrestrial spacecrafts in various locations on Earth. The US Army brings Banks and physicist Ian Donnelly (Jeremy Renner) to their encampment in Montana,

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where a whole team of experts struggles to decipher the aliens’ intentions, amid threats of global panic and crisis. As the story unfolds, the heptapods (a moniker coined by the scientists after the aliens’ seven feet) ultimately succeed in communicating their purpose: teaching humanity their special language, which entails the broadening of the perception of reality by changing humans’ linear perception of time. The movie reflects on the power of communication and language, both on an extra-terrestrial and human level, and it is precisely because of this core interest in charting the territories between the human and the alien that we deem it a stimulating case (of film music) to explore in depth.

Sharon O’Connell points out how Icelandic composer Jóhann Jóhannsson tends to treat his film scores as a constitutive element of the overall sound design, that is, not as an independent composition imposed on it (O’Connell 2016).1 This practice of sonic distribution in the soundtrack is what Rick Altman, together with McGraw Jones and Sonia Tatroe, called the mise-en-bande, as an equivalent of mise-en-scène (Altman et al. 2000, 341). The mise-en-bande is constructed in such a way that, at times, there seems to be no clear distinction between the constituents of the sonic cinematic space. Deleon explains this through the early example of Fred M. Wilcox’s Forbidden Planet (1956), in which “it is almost unclear as to where the score ends and the sound design begins; the same tones found in the score are present within the sound effects of the diegetic world” (Deleon 2010, 16). Jóhannsson uses a similar scoring approach in Arrival, resulting in enriched sonic spaces and, thus, a more vibrant diegetic universe.

Remarkably, the sound design team approached the project of constructing the sonic spaces of the otherworldly encounters resorting exclusively to natural sources of sounds. Sylvain Bellemare, supervising sound designer for Arrival, explains their decision to leave out any electronic sounds when creating the aural environments, opting for “something completely natural sounding, organic sounding,” including wind recordings (with different levels of processing) as well as rocks, earthquake or ice crackling (Clark and Stanze 2016a). Similarly, in charge of the heptapod vocals design, Dave Whitehead and Michelle Child worked with natural elements and sounds. They sampled from kokako and tui birdsongs, modified the pitch of camels’ gurgling sounds, they were breathing through bagpipes or Māori instruments like the pūtōrino or the didjeridu to get different noises, even created a lung out of rice paper filled with water to simulate breathing (Clark and Stanze 2016a).

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Other films featuring compositions by Jóhannsson are Prisoners (Villeneuve, 2013), Sicario (Villeneuve, 2015) or Mandy (Panos Cosmatos, 2018), to name but a few titles that could also support such an observation.

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Let’s highlight and briefly describe some of the key moments in which natural voices and voice-like sounds appear in Arrival’s score, serving an important role in building the film’s sonic spaces.

First, it should be noted that both Arrival’s opening and epilogue sequences, borrowing minimalist English composer Max Richter’s On the Nature of Daylight, differ in their use of music compared to the rest of the film. In an interview (Hall 2016), Jóhannsson recalls how Richter’s piece was used early on during the editing process, and how director Villeneuve’s decision to keep it resulted in a big contrast in tone with the rest of the film.2 In this way, Arrival seems to invert the schema of “readability” discussed by Deleon, who argues that classical orchestration eases the readability of the narrative within a genre that is already strange, providing “a level of comfort and a solid foundation, which is firmly established and its meaning known to the viewer” (Deleon 2010, 14). Deleon refers to Tim Burton’s Mars Attacks! (1996) and the film’s score written by Danny Elfman as an example, where the opening sequence “states that yes, this is a science fiction film, however, after the credits end, the score reverts to recognizable instruments and orchestrations” (Deleon 2010, 15). On the contrary, in Arrival, while Richter’s opening and ending segments channel unambiguous emotions, the bulk of the film features less straightforward musical experimentations.

The film’s initial steps towards such experimentations, the moment when voice-like sounds feature in the soundtrack for the first time, is when Louise Banks decides to take part in the investigation and is flown to the basecamp (Jóhannsson: Arrival at 00:17:34 in the film). Once her helicopter approaches the site, a series of shots and counter-shots place us in Banks’s internally ocularized and auricularized point of view, trying to locate the spacecraft. The soundtrack is first occupied only by the helicopter’s blades; this sound is slowly shifted to the background of the sonic space, leaving room for a deep and gradually increasing atmospheric sound created by a piano drone (analogue tape loop) – an auditory transition that contributes to the viewer’s growing thrill. Finally, she (together with the viewer) gets a sight of the spacecraft. A couple of seconds after the alien ship completely fills the screen in an extreme wide shot, a series of single notes, sang as wailing-like sounds, are heard, gradually accompanied by eerie string motifs and brass phrases. Recorded by vocalist Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe, these wailing noises seem to point not just at the presence of the spacecraft (to which 2

Ironically, the inclusion of this song in the final soundtrack disqualified Jóhannsson’s work for the 89th edition of the Academy Awards (2017) in the category of Best Original Score (Hall 2016).

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they are synced visually) but, most importantly, to its potential occupants: Are these alien creatures in pain? Are these sounds cries for help? Or is this just how they communicate? And ultimately, is this sound emanated by “them” at all? Concerning this last question, we see Jerrold Levinson’s concept of “musical fictional personae theory” in action. Levinson argues that “since expressing requires an expresser, that means that in so hearing the music the listener is in effect committed to hearing an agent in the music” (Levinson 2007, 93). We tend to associate a source, an agent to music, and thereby add expression of emotion to the sounds. Therefore, this simple rule would account for the listener’s default bias in hearing an agent into an otherwise unfamiliar sound. If such agency is established, considering the acousmatic3 nature of these voice-like utterances, that is, without seeing the source of the sound, it is easy to associate these sounds with whale song and all the possible meanings that come with it: signals deployed to map or explore new territories, to alarm for protection or to call for mating.4 The scene’s acoustic riddle, together with its real-world connotations, seems to foreshadow to some extent the film’s central theme of communication deciphering.5 At this point in the film, considering the scene’s internal focalization through Banks’s character, the narration’s communicativeness is quite restricted, making any of these possible readings of the heard voices plausible. While they could be deemed as diegetic voices identified with the aliens, the mysterious sounds in combination with the rest of the music might also be understood as merely part of the film’s experimental extra-diegetic soundtrack, setting the mood for our arrival to the camp. Once this establishing focalized/auricularized shot is concluded and we are on the ground with the passengers of the helicopter, the sonic space is rearranged once again: the music is sent to the background and the helicopter blades and other clearly diegetic sounds occupy the foreground.

Minutes later, when Banks and Donnelly are heading towards the spacecraft for the first time, a somewhat similar sonic atmosphere is created with Hydraulic 3

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“Acousmatic, specifies an old dictionary, is said of a sound that is heard without its cause or source being seen. We can never praise Pierre Schaeffer enough for having unearthed this arcane word in the 1950s” (Chion 1999, 18).

Using whale song in science fiction films is not a rare occurrence. For example, it happens in David Carson’s Star Trek: Generations (1994), about which Tom Kenny notes that, “The noise of the Klingon bird-of-prey spaceship contains the songs of whales, ironically enough.

The mysterious Nexus energy wave, which appears at the climax of Generations combined more than 30 elements, including animal cries to give it a subliminal sense of a living, deadly creature” (Kenny 1995, 78).

When asked “Why do whales sing?” Alison Stimpert, bioacustician at Moss Landing Marine Laboratories in California, claimed that clear answers concerning their communicating system remain a mystery (Yandell 2017).

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Lift (Jóhannsson, at 00:24:10 in the film). Noteworthy here is another instance of internal auricularization with Adams’s character, displacing the helicopter sounds to the background while foregrounding her breathing inside of the security suit she is wearing. As the scientists approach the spacecraft, voice-like wailing sounds, maybe even actual human voices, are heard. These, however, are processed in a way that ambiguates their human nature. The density of the sonic space increases as they enter the craft and access the gravity-shifting passage leading to the “meeting point.”

In the second encounter with the aliens, one of the two heptapods raises one leg, and an ink-like black liquid emanates from it, separating first into three parts, to blend back together creating a circular logogram and by that presenting their written language for the first time. At this precise moment, a tellingly titled track Sapir-Whorf starts to play, introducing the first clearly recognizable human voices to the soundtrack: female voices start singing meaningless vocables, immediately forming an ethereal chorus (Jóhannsson, at 00:38:00 in the film). Repeatedly singing phrases of phonetic units, these vocal sounds refuse to convey a clear semantic meaning to the listener. They seem to parallel the experiencing of a foreign language or unknown code, especially since the catalyst of these sounds was the aliens’ first act of (graphical) communication. Considering how we tend to repeat new words several times when we first learn/hear them (Banks herself is doing this: “Human… human…” while trying to communicate with the heptapods), the iterative nature of the voices in this segment might be seen to refer to, if not fully imitate, this strategy.

Later on, fearful about the heptapods’ intentions, two members of the military team decide to set explosives inside the spacecraft. Aware of this, the heptapods reveal their entire “alphabet” to Banks, right before the explosives detonate.

Featuring the track Properties of Explosive Materials (Jóhannsson, at 01:15:00 in the film), the scene is underscored by distorted and processed vocals playing in the background. The added layer of modulation to the already non-sensical voices, which could also be heard as instances of overtone singing practices, seems to further prevent the viewer from grasping meaning out of the vocalizations.

Furthermore, considering the overwhelming amount of information the scientists have just been granted access to, these modulating vocals could reinforce the idea of trying to make sense out of the logograms (to achieve the correct modulation in order to understand the complex data).

After the detonations, the heptapods distance the spacecraft further from the ground, although remaining on site. China announces their ultimatum to the

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spaceship located on Chinese territory, providing the aliens with 24 hours to either leave or face destruction. The same group of female voices that played during the heptapods’ first demonstration of graphical communication populates the soundtrack – Escalation (Jóhannsson, at 00:18:00 in the film) is adding a percussion layer to that, formed of mallets hitting on different types of wood. Soon after, a bigger orchestration joins the composition: strings, brass, percussions, and deep sustained male vocals culminate in a powerful build-up accompanying the growing tension in the story world.

While discussing the international crisis with the rest of the team, Banks’s nonlinear time experience intensifies, something that regularly happens with her since the first contact, and so she decides to approach the spacecraft seeking an explanation. Once again we hear the utterances resembling whale song, seeming to play a somewhat inviting tune for Banks. As a capsule descends from the spaceship and lifts Banks up, the soundtrack incorporates anew the processed, modulating, overtone singing vocals that played during the aforementioned Properties of Explosive Materials.

There is one last – key – scene during which voices and voice-like sounds are featured in the soundtrack with a major role. This is when Banks finally manages to decipher the heptapod language. A flash-forward, in fact a chronological glimpse into the future (the gift Banks receives from the aliens), shows the linguist unpacking copies of her just published book The Universal Language, accompanied in the soundtrack by the introduction of the piano tape loops used throughout the film (Jóhannsson: Decyphering at 01:37:00 in the film). This is alternated with Banks and Donnelly’s present time in the base camp (the film’s deictic centre from which Banks’s vision originates): looking at the recording of the entire alphabet the heptapods had shared with them previously. This crosscutting editing continues until we are focused on a close-up of Banks in a state of trance, when vocal sounds (the sort of modulating vocal sounds mentioned before) gradually gain presence in the sonic space, repeating the same sequence alternating two different pitches. On this occasion, as if Banks is hearing these, the voices seem to belong to the diegetic world, marking a decisive moment in the film – the moment of realization in which she all of a sudden understands the language fully and coherently: “I can read it.”6 Following this, we are presented with other flash-forward-like glimpses of future lectures that she will be giving on 6

Banks’s trance-like amazement is due to the realization of the effect of her supernatural ability that is her coming to understanding the paradox that she is able to read the alien language in the present because she has access to her own future and her then-published book on the translation of the logograms.

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the topic of the universal language, while the piano tape loops, the vocal sounds and a bass drum sequence play. All these conclude in Banks’s full mastery of the aliens’ gift: using the vision of her future encounter with Chinese General Shang (Tzi Ma) to change the present, that is to prevent the tense situation’s military escalation (Jóhannsson: One of Twelve at 01:40:45 in the film).7 Finally, during the end credits, the track Kangaru (Jóhannsson, at 01:50:50 in the film) features, which is a percussion-removed variation on Heptapod B (Jóhannsson, at 00:52:00 in the film) – the track that plays during a montage sequence halfway through the film, summarizing the knowledge scientists gathered about the aliens and their spaceship (we skipped it intentionally to examine it in more depth now). Since Kangaru accompanies only the end credits, we consider focusing on Heptapod B – that is, on the track’s diegetically more prominent version – more fitting.

1.1. Vocal Affordances in Heptapod B Heptapod B is featured during the explanatory montage that follows the first two encounters with the aliens – when small breakthroughs helping the team understand their language are starting to be made. The previous scene ends with Banks starting to experience the consequences of understanding such a language, that is, experiencing time as non-linear. The language used by the heptapods moves in circles, without a defined beginning or end, which seems to mirror the way they view time – as a circular concept. Banks references the theory of Linguistic Relativity or Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, according to which the language you speak determines how you think, rewiring your brain and affecting your world view and cognition. Heptapod B is played almost in its entirety during this sequence.

A pattern of female voices opens the sequence and occupies the entire soundtrack for about 10 seconds, followed by Donnelly’s explanatory voice-over, sending these vocal sounds slightly more to the aural background. The physicist starts wondering about the most obvious question: the nature of these creatures.

His ultimate “Who are they?” proceeds to highlight a series of aspects that remain unknown to the team, among others, the advanced technology they display, the 7

During a meet and greet participation event of the film, screenwriter Eric Heisserer divulged Banks’s mysterious message, presented in the film as a loose segment in Mandarin Chinese without subtitles, as a reminder of the passing words of the general’s late wife – “In war there are no winners, only widows” –, which wisdom, received in his top-secret private phone number, resonated enough with Shang to withdraw his military forces (Patches 2016).

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reason behind their choice of those twelve landing areas, or the question of whether they communicate among these locations. The narration moves on to describe the specificities of the findings regarding the language: the key characteristic being that it is semasiographic (semasia: meaning + graphia: writing); i.e. it is a nonphonetic based language conveying meaning without sound.

According to the structure of the track’s composition (see texture map – Figure 1), Heptapod B introduces different elements one by one: first tape loops creating the atmospheric background, then the voice-like sounds, the wood percussions, and the bass drum slowly transitioning from a minimalistic composition into a more saturated sonic space, finally woodwind instruments, strings and brass phrases reinforcing the strength of the song.

Let’s take a closer look at some of the elements of this track separately: Voice Pattern #1: This is the first voice sequence that opens the track. In contrast to the third leaping voice entering later in the track, this voice pattern seems to establish more of a rhythmic configuration, which will later be reinforced and syncopated by the percussion elements: the wood percussion and the bass drum (synth). This voice seems hardly processed, at least in comparison with the other voices in this song, providing it with an organic characteristic. In light of general binaries such as female/male and natural/technological, it is especially remarkable that this first voice is the one articulating the organicism, which, as the song progresses, gets slowly subsumed in the mix, proving quite hard to be separated from the rest of the musical texture. This, conveying an enfolding of the organic into something that is likely to be heard as machinic, foregrounds the interplay of binaries. As for the contents of this voice pattern, it consists of monosyllabic articulations, in succession one after the other and varying in duration, resembling at times coding schemes such as the dits and dahs of Morse Code.

Voice Pattern # 2: This second pattern seems to be adding layers of rhythmic complexity when it is combined with the first one. Similarly, the organic nature of this voice is reduced in comparison to the first voice pattern, that is, this voice track sounds more processed, less natural, moving along the organic-mechanic spectrum. Together they seem to create a somewhat unsettling sonic atmosphere, while, simultaneously, foreshadowing the percussion entering some seconds later in the soundtrack.

Leaping Voice: From the three voice-layers we can distinguish in the track, this one is most similar to utterances of a real (human) language. While the vocalizations do not seem to represent any clear intelligible words, at least in the languages we are familiar with, the higher pitch of these voices in comparison

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to the deep voices of the other two voice patterns could suggest a speaking voice (unknown as it may be). Still, at the same time, the voice sound seems to be processed, adding a slight robotic layer to the utterances. This voice starts featuring a sample by avant-garde singer Joan La Barbara (Erin – the fragment used in the Jóhannsson soundtrack starts at 3:10), creating two somewhat different sentences: (1) The first is repeated four times, the first two times the final syllable is left out, to be fully sang in the third and fourth iterations. (2) The same building process characterises the second phrase as well. Once this sequence of four repetitions is done, she goes back to the first phrase. Again, displaying the idea of building blocks of communication adds to the theme of constructing a language.

Choir: One minute into the song, a distant sounding choir of voices joins the track. Resembling the other voice patterns, these sing short articulated phrases, creating random melodic patterns that are later echoed by the strings. These voices seem to present a certain degree of processing, providing an ethereal aura to the entire piece.

Percussion: This element consists of mallets repeatedly hitting on what sound like different types of wooden materials. The rhythmic pattern these mallets create is not fixed, evolving and varying throughout the musical piece, both in its sound (because of the different drumming surfaces) and its speed. This percussion adds another layer of organicism to the mixture (together with the leaping voices, for example), further contributing to the rich interplay of processed and natural sounds. The organic feature of this percussion has a capacity to evoke primitive musical traditions, as far as their sonic naturalness is concerned.

Clearly, when analysed, the blend of actual image, film music and sound effects should be considered as a sort of textural unity, which, in turn, allows a series of possible connotations to emerge from this combination. As seen above, this track presents interplays between organic/mechanic voices as well as natural/processed sounds and utterances with varying degrees of recognizability as potential human language – ultimately emphasizing contrasts of human and non-human, subsumed and blended via rhythmic patterns. The ostinato and developing vocal utterances present in the track could be seen to emphasise a communicative dimension, while their varying degrees of organicism may broaden this dimension beyond the purely human context, as the voices approach greater levels of processing, therefore adopting a less human quality. Lastly, the reiterative hitting of mallets on wooden surfaces conforming the percussion layers, which seems more evocative of tribal rituals of spirituality and transcendental connection, further accentuates the binary nature of this soundtrack segment.

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1.2. Overtone Singing Practice in the Soundtrack Let us consider another aspect of the same issue. As we have noted throughout the detailed analysis of different passages of the film, a variety of vocal practices and techniques are present in the soundtrack. These are: whale song, overtone singing, looping existing vocal recordings as well as different degrees in the processing of these voices. In what follows, we concentrate on the overtone singing practice, as it appears in the Properties of Explosive Materials or the Decyphering tracks.8 Piero Cosi and Graziano Tisato locate this singing tradition mostly in regions of Central Asia (Bashkortostan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Altai and Tuva, Khakassia and Mongolia) as well as South Africa (Xosa women), but they also mention Tibetan Buddhist chants and Rajastan (Cosi and Tisato 2003). They define overtone singing as “harmonic singing with an intentional emphasis on the harmonic melody of overtones. This is the name used by Western artists that utilizes vowels, mouth shaping, and upper-throat manipulations to produce melodies and textures” (2003). Although all musical sounds contain overtones, or tones that resonate in a certain relationship above a so-called fundamental tone, this singing practice seems to split the voice in two, causing the listener to experience the unusual sensation of a pure, discarnate, sine wave emanating from the sound (2003). Cosi and Tisato explain how, despite the different and unique manifestations of musical traditions in these diverse cultures, some of these singing practices seem to share one commonality: the production of overtones in their respective vocal music styles. Additionally, it is remarkable how, in spite of the different specificities of each of these traditions and their particular cultural contexts, they share another quality: permeating overtone singing with a layer of otherworldliness. Well-being, spirituality and health are typical associations made with overtone singing in Tibetan and Gregorian Chant, while Tuvan overtone singing carries meanings like shamanistic, aesthetic and animistic (2003). Furthermore, the authors state that Tuvans regard this sound as “the way preferred by the spirits of nature to reveal themselves and to communicate with the other living beings” (2003). The West gradually adopted the overtone singing tradition, with Karlheinz Stockhausen’s 1968 Stimmung being credited as the first major Western musical composition based on a diphonic vocal technique.

In a similar way to what happened in the regions where it originated, overtone 8

Due to their skillful experimentations in harmonic and overtone singing, Jóhannsson worked with the Danish vocal ensemble Theatre of Voices, conducted by Paul Hillier. Speaking of these vocalists, Jóhannsson stated, “they’re very good at extended strange vocal techniques, like harmonic singing, coaxing these strange sounds out of the human voice” (Clark and Stanze 2016b).

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singing very soon turned as well to mystical, spiritual and even therapeutic applications (2003). Thus, it appears that there is a certain permeation into this vocal practice that seems to sparkle a kind of unearthly feeling in many listeners by revealing a somewhat hidden dimension of the voice. This has been ingrained, quite ironically as originally being “the bearer of a human personality” (Shepherd et al. 2003, 456), with varied associations to the unknown. All in all, such a strategy of triggering the concept of otherworldliness through exploring the potential affordances of overtone singing in the soundtrack of Arrival seems to be a subtle, but highly effective contributor to the film’s central diegetic question about the human/alien divide.

Roland Barthes concluded his seminal essay, The Grain of the Voice on a corresponding note. He defined the grain as the perception of the (human) body in the voice as we hear the utterances and signing of such voice, tracing an analogy to the nexus that exists between hand and writing, or limb and performing.

Simply put, according to Barthes, the voice is making us hear (thus bring into being) a body as the vocal sounds convey the materiality of the body speaking or singing (Barthes 1977, 188). There seems to be, thus, a clear connection between the perception of this grain in the voice and the human nature, the organicism we assign to the sounds. And this is something that is explored, as the above scanning of the soundtrack hopefully has shown, in several instances throughout the score of Arrival (especially in Heptapod B), where both natural – i.e. non-processed – and more machinic voices populate the sonic space of the film soundtrack, blending into one another or involving processes of subsumption.

The idea of exploiting the potential of such cognitively default anthropomorphization takes us to the work of Charity Marsh and Melissa West on binary oppositions in music. With regard to our case, their analysis of the music of Icelandic singer-songwriter Björk promises enlightening illustration. According to the authors’ initial observation on sound, what is normally considered natural is defined in direct opposition to what is considered technological (Marsh and West 2003, 182). Acknowledging how certain artists blend or blur these binaries, they analyse in detail the different vocal characteristics occurring in Björk’s 1997 album Homogenic. Marsh and West perceive Björk’s primitive-sounding screams, emphasized by a sampled and digitized beat, as natural while at the same time being manipulated by something completely technological: underscoring the technological qualities added by the distortion of the beats and her voice, they also associate chantlike characteristics to the methodical rhythm of the voice and the beat (2003, 195). Listening to Heptapod B while watching the montage

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sequence of Arrival, a certain parallel to this phenomenon of opposition is discernible. On the one hand, the different voices present different degrees of processing, with the one previously named Voice pattern #1 exhibiting an organicism later reduced with the second pattern, and then again contrasted with the main female Leaping voice (the fragment spliced from La Barbara’s original performance). On the other hand, however, it is not just the interplay of the organic and non-organic nature of the voices that partake in this binary interaction. For one, there is an atmospheric drone in the piece, which is also present throughout most of the film soundtrack (created with a 16-track analog tape loop, adding successively piano notes, without the attack of the note but just the tail of the sound, layered on top of each other, at different speeds). This background sound, consisting mainly of piano and magnetic tape, is almost nonprocessed, with the exception of some reverb (Clark and Stanze 2016b). Further, a very raw percussion, featuring different types of wood hit by mallets joins the sound combination, now with the percussion adding another layer of the natural to the piece, and therefore contrasting with the highly technological display of the film images during this sequence and the processed sounds of the music such as some of the voice patterns or the bass synth. In this way, the binary interplay between the different vocal layers of the soundtrack (subsumed by the rest of the musical layers) seems to complement the broader thematic concern of the film, that of the human/non-human explorations.

2. Avant-garde Influence Finally, zooming out of our close reading, we would like to take a look at how Jóhannsson’s work on Arrival embeds itself in a long-existing tradition of collaborations between musical avant-garde and the world of film music, as such a contextualization might contribute to our present aim of mapping the representational strategies of the alien/human divide.

The intention to experiment with novel forms of musical expressivity, novel in the realm of mainstream cinema, seems to be something Jóhannsson had in mind already from the early stages of his work on the film: “there were more things to avoid rather than things to use! There are some things that are clichéd or overused, elements that one associates with science fiction that I wanted to avoid” (Hall 2016). This is in line with what Lisa M. Schmidt warns about, seeing similar dangers when stating that the history of scoring within the genre of science fiction continues to be an exploration of certain conventions and tropes (Schmidt 2010,

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34). Intriguing then, in this respect, is the manner in which unfamiliar sounds eventually find their place in science fiction soundtracks. For example, Schmidt explains how, in relation to electronic music, the lack of minute alterations in electronic sounds, regardless of how pleasing to the ear, will always signify a certain anxiety about authenticity, predestined to be alien (2010, 36). Positioning the alien as something beyond the boundaries of the norm(al), much like the avant-garde itself (2010, 38), she then identifies a common ground between avantgarde music and sci-fi films in their shared pursuit of representing the alien.

In the case of Arrival, Jóhannsson embraced a series of techniques and practices informed by avant-garde traditions. For example, the tape loop, employed to create the background drones that set the tone of the film, is an old technique that has been used by composers like Karlheinz Stockhausen, Pierre Schaeffer or Brian Eno. As Jóhannsson explains, “we were doing sound-on-sound recording, recording over the sound while keeping the previous sound so we had this [sic!] ghostly remains of the previous loop” (Hirway 2016). The decision to compose a musical background using this looping technique directly refers to the film’s core idea of diegetic non-linearity and endless time recurrence. In line with this view, the resulting drone seems to repeat incessantly, featuring no sharp beginning or ending sounds, an effect achieved by including only the sustain and decay of the overlapping piano notes.

Jóhannsson also names Gérard Grisey and Horaţiu Rădulescu – seminal figures associated to the musical practices of spatialization and spectral music – as sources of inspiration for the score (O’Connell 2016). In particular, the saturation of the spectral space is notable throughout the film score, adding layers of sounds occupying different regions of the spectral space, usually building up from the lower ranges. With reference to spectrality, Lelio Camilleri explains how “the combination of the spectral content of sounds and their disposition can accentuate the various sensory experiences” (2010, 202). The sounds comprising the film music tracks seem to fill up the film’s sonic spaces, distributed both in terms of localized space and spectral space. Regarding the former, the different sonic elements (voices, strings, brass, drums, etc.) present variety in terms of their foreground/background placement in the sonic space as well as their motion within it (foreground to background, left to right and vice versa). In combination to this, the audience can perceive “the sense of saturation or emptiness due to the spectral content of the sounds used” (Camilleri 2010, 202), that is, the timbre of the different sounds which characterizes the compositions. This approach has been purposely employed by Jóhannsson throughout his previous collaborations with Villeneuve:

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in Prisoners (e.g. The Keeper, 2013) and Sicario (e.g. The Beast, 2015), similarly to Arrival. Figures 2–4 show three screenshots taken from an online spectrograph tool we fed with Jóhannsson’s Heptapod B, demonstrating the progression in saturation of the spectral space in the track.9 Looking at the spectrograph at three consecutive moments in time, one can appreciate how the spectral space is slowly saturated as the piece progresses, potentially contributing, as Camilleri argues, to the heightening of the sensory experiences afforded by the film.

In resorting to techniques such as these, Jóhannsson’s score for Arrival partakes in the dialogue of avant-garde music tradition informing mainstream film music making, commonly employed in cases of sci-fi’s explorations of the unknown, like the one Arrival is concerned with.

Mentioned by Jóhannsson (Baines 2016) as an influence on his work, vocalist Meredith Monk argues that the voice is a kind of language that somehow crosses cultural and linguistic barriers, “speaking directly to people on an intuitive level” (Lentjes 2017). This is the dimension explored by the soundtrack we have focused on herein, that is, the intrinsic power of the voice to represent humanity, and, at the same time, the potential offered by its experimentation for charting unknown territories. Jóhannsson’s utilization of a wide range of vocal experimentations is a thoughtful approach to capitalize on such a power of the voice and to justify its use within a film which deals with this very subject matter. While this is not remarkably new in the world of music in general, it represents an innovative practice leaking into mainstream cinema.

References Altman, Rick, McGraw Jones, and Sonia Tatroe. 2000. Inventing the Cinema Soundtrack: Hollywood’s Multiplane Sound System. In Music and Cinema, eds. James Buhler, Caryl Flinn, and David Neumeyer, 339–359. Hanover: Wesleyan University Press.

Baines, Josh. 2016. We Got Jóhann Jóhannsson to Conjure Up a Mythical and Futuristic Playlist. Vice. https://www.vice.com/en_uk/article/jp9xy7/jhannjhannsson-mythical-futuristic-playlist. Last accessed 20. 03. 2021.

Barthes, Roland. 1977. Image, Music and Text. London: Fontana Press.

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The online spectrograph tool is a project of Edward Ball at Academo (UK) and Prof. Michael J. Ruiz at UNC Asheville (USA), based on work by Boris Smus of Google (USA). https://academo. org/articles/spectrogram/. Last accessed 20. 03. 2021.

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Brend, Mark. 2012. The Sound of Tomorrow: How Electronic Music Was Smuggled into the Mainstream. New York and London: Bloomsbury Academic.

Camilleri, Lelio. 2010. Shaping Sounds, Shaping Spaces. Popular Music vol. 29, no. 2 (May): 199–211.

Chiang, Ted. 2005. Stories of Your Life and Others. New York: Pan MacMillan.

Chion, Michel. 1999. The Voice in Cinema. New York: Columbia University Press.

Clark, K. and Stanze, E. (2016a). Acoustic Signatures: The Sound Design.

Behind the scenes featurette of Arrival [Blu-ray Disc], Paramount Pictures.

Clark, K. and Stanze, E. (2016b). Eternal Recurrence: The Score. Behind the scenes featurette of Arrival [Blu-ray Disc], Paramount Pictures.

Cosi, Piero and Graziano Tisato. 2003. On the Magic of Overtone Singing. In Voce, Canto, Parlato. Studi di Onore di Franco Ferrero [Voice, Song, Speech.

Studies in the Honour of Franco Ferrero], eds. Piero Cosi, Emanuela Magno Caldognetto, and Antonio Zamboni, 83–100. Padova: Unipress.

Deleon, Cara M. 2010. A Familiar Sound in a New Place: The Use of the Musical Score Within the Science Fiction Film. In Sounds of the Future, ed. Mathew J. Bartkowiak, 10–21. Jefferson, North Carolina, and London: McFarland.

Hall, Jacob. 2016. Interview: Arrival Composer Jóhann Jóhannsson on How You Score First Contact. Slashfilm. https://www.slashfilm.com/johann-johannssonarrival-music/. Last accessed 20. 03. 2020. Hirway, Hrishikesh. 2016. Song Exploder: Jóhann Jóhannsson on the Secrets of Arrival’s Score. Vulture. https:// www.vulture.com/2016/11/arrival-score-johann-johannsson-song-exploder. html. Last accessed 20. 03. 2021.

Kenny, Tom. 1995. Star Trek Generations. Mix: Professional Recording, Sound and Music Production vol. 19, no. 1 (January): 72–83.

Lentjes, Rebecca. 2017. The Essence of Voices. VAN Magazine. https://van-us. atavist.com/against-the-grain. Last accessed 20. 03. 2021.

Levinson, Jerrold. 2007. Contemplating Art: Essays in Aesthetics. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.

Marsh, Charity and Melissa West. 2003. The Nature/Technology Binary Opposition Dismantled in the Music of Madonna and Björk. In Music and Technoculture, eds. René T. A. Lysloff and Leslie C. Gay, 182–203. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press.

O’Connell, Sharon. 2016. Arrival composer Jóhann Jóhannsson: People are hungry for new sounds. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/ music/2016/nov/26/arrival-johann-johannsson-soundtrack-oscar-nominated.

Last accessed 20. 03. 2021.

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Patches, Matt. 2016. The Mystery Line in Arrival Revealed. Thrillist. https://www. thrillist.com/entertainment/nation/arrival-chinese-line-ending. Last accessed 20. 03. 2021.

Schmidt, Lisa M. 2010. A Popular Avant-Garde: The Paradoxical Tradition of Electronic and Atonal Sounds in Sci-Fi Music Scoring. In Sounds of the Future, ed. Mathew J. Bartkowiak, 22–41. Jefferson, North Carolina, and London: McFarland.

Shepherd, John, David Horn, Dave Laing, Paul Oliver, and Peter Wicke.

2003. Continuum Encyclopedia of Popular Music of the World, Volume II: Performance and Production. London and New York: Continuum.

Yandell, Kate. 2017. The Mystery of Whale Song. The Scientist. https://www.thescientist.com/features/the-mystery-of-whale-song-31945. Last accessed 20. 03.

2021.

List of Figures Figure 1: Texture map of the track Heptapod B.

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Figure 2: Spectrograph-screenshot of Heptapod B at 00:07, low saturation of spectral space.

Figure 3: Spectrograph-screenshot of Heptapod B at 00:55, medium saturation of spectral space.

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Figure 4: Spectrograph-screenshot of Heptapod B at 02:12, high saturation of spectral space.

Acta Univ. Sapientiae, Film and Media Studies, 20 (2021) 20–35 DOI: 10.2478/ausfm-2021-0012

Body, Telephone, Voice: Black Christmas (1974) and Monstrous Cinema Morten Feldtfos Thomsen Karlstad University (Sweden) E-mail: mortfeth@kau.se

Abstract. This article investigates the role of the telephone as both an engine of suspense and a metaphorical double of cinema in Black Christmas directed

by Bob Clark (1974). Employing Michel Chion’s concept of acousmatic voice, the article first explores the role of the telephone in creating both narrative suspense and diegetic cohesion. It then investigates how the film implicitly establishes a pattern of resemblance between the telephonic and cinematic mediums centred on their capacities for diffusion and disembodiment.

Finally, the article explores the meta-cinematic implications of its preceding findings, arguing that the fears and anxieties associated with the telephone in Black Christmas ultimately concern cinema itself and its possible cultural impact. Although it attempts to enforce certain categories of knowledge and identity, Black Christmas ultimately engages with cinema’s capacity for subverting rather than enforcing ideology.

Keywords: Black Christmas, slasher cinema, telephone, technology, acousmatic voice.

Introduction Horror cinema is riddled with threatening telephone calls. In the Italian giallo, for instance, it is an often-used medial motif, and in countless US productions – such as I Saw What You Did (William Castle, 1965), When a Stranger Calls (Fred Walton, 1979), or Wes Craven’s Scream films (1996, 1997, 2000, 2011) – it is a central catalyst of narrative momentum. At its most basic, the purpose of the motif is simply to create suspense by setting the stage for an often unknown and potentially dangerous individual lurking somewhere outside the frame of the cinematic image.1 In the 1974 Canadian teen slasher Black Christmas, however, 1

On the history of the motif not only in horror cinema, but in the suspense and noir genres, see Debatin and Wullf (1991), Gunning (1991, 2004), Schantz (2003, 2008), Bohnenkamp (2014),

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the motif also reflects anxieties concerning the possible erosion of established categories of knowledge and identity, particularly as it relates to a range of overlapping and ideologically charged dualisms dominant in Western culture: self/other, male/female, human/machine, reality/illusion.

I will return to these dualisms at various points throughout the following analysis. My primary focus, however, is on the meta-aesthetic – or meta-cinematic – implications and impulses associated with the telephonic motif. Not only does the motif function as a site for the collapse of established cultural boundaries and the production of monstrous difference, but it also works as a double of, or standin for, the cinematic medium.2 Consequently, the film implicitly situates cinema itself within the realm of the monstrous.

Building primarily on Michel Chion’s concept of acousmatic voice – that is, a voice, which is heard, but whose cause or origin is not visible within the frame of the cinematic image – this article argues that the telephonic motif in Black Christmas metaphorically articulates a highly anxious and ambivalent understanding of cinema and its possible cultural impact. On the one hand, Black Christmas implicitly understands cinema as a device for the reproduction of ideology, that is, a representational machinery employed to enforce certain hierarchies of social and political power as well as the categories of knowledge and identity that underpin them. On the other hand, it also dwells anxiously upon the capacity of cinema to create modes of thought and experience that subvert such processes, thereby undermining the representational strategies through which ideology promulgates. Even as a vehicle for the reproduction of ideology, to put it another way, Black Christmas anxiously engages with its own capacity for subverting the very system of power that it attempts to enforce. In consequence, the telephonic motif in Black Christmas ultimately concerns the monstrous possibilities and potentials of cinema itself.

Vision and Voice Black Christmas tells the story of a mysterious killer stalking a group of sorority sisters during the Christmas holidays. Hiding in the attic of their sorority house, the

2

Wagner (2014) and Boillat (2015). Bruhm (2011) also explores the motif specifically in relation to modern cell phones. He briefly discusses Black Christmas but focuses primarily on the 2006 remake, Black X-mas (Morgan 2006), and other more recent examples.

To be clear, my use of the concept of “the cinematic medium” does not rely on an essentialist or reductionist position. I use it synonymously with “cinema” to refer broadly to the projection and recording of moving images.

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killer uses a second telephone line to call and harass them while simultaneously murdering them one by one.3 Throughout the film, the killer is kept off-screen, and one of the key formal strategies through which this is accomplished is subjective camerawork. Indeed, Black Christmas is often cited as one of the first horror films to make extensive use of what has since become a cliché of the slasher subgenre, namely the point-of-view shot.4 From the beginning, this technique is established as a central stylistic device, as the opening wide-shot of a Christmas decorated sorority house is followed by a cut to the killer’s point of view as he scales and enters the house via an attic window. Throughout the film, the viewer is repeatedly returned to the killer’s point of view as he sneaks around the house unseen, stalking and observing his soon-to-be victims. These point-of-view shots are a central engine of suspense, providing the viewer with knowledge of the killer’s proximity to the unknowing protagonists. Furthermore, the distinction between subjective and objective camerawork is often blurred, making the viewer unsure of which shots belong to the killer and which do not. This ambivalence imbues much of the camerawork in the film with a sense of uncertainty and tension. Another feature of the point-of-view shot, of course, is that it obscures the killer’s identity by excluding him from the image and confining him to a vaguely defined space outside of the frame. We see his seeing, but he never becomes the object of ours. While the point-of-view shot thus strongly indicates presence, it does not provide the kind of visualization that would place the killer under the control of the camera’s gaze, and establishes a notable tension between presence and absence, on-screen and off-screen.5 Within this particular narrative and stylistic framework, the telephone plays a significant role, primarily by working as a vehicle for the killer’s acousmatic voice. Coined by Michel Chion, the concept of acousmatic voice refers to a voice which is heard, but whose point of origin – meaning the person to whom the voice belongs – does not appear on-screen. Such voices are a staple of horror cinema, and here help to produce a range of effects that work in tandem with the film’s camerawork. One key effect of the killer’s acousmatic voice, such as 3

4

5

The film builds on a well-known telephonic narrative, namely the urban legend known as The Babysitter and the Man Upstairs, which concerns a babysitter harassed via telephone by a murderer who turns out to be hiding upstairs (Danielson 1996).

“Black Christmas was one of the earliest English-language films to employ Killer POV extensively.

As I see it, the technique comes less from Hollywood’s experiments with the subjective camera […] than it does from the pioneering Italian gialli of Mario Bava and Dario Argento” (Hart 2020, 91).

My analysis of the use of subjective camerawork in Black Christmas is indebted to Hart (2020), whose work, in turn, builds on extensive previous research into the use of point-of-view in the slasher genre done by scholars such as Vera Dika (1990) and Carol Clover (1992).

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established via the telephonic motif, is the strong blurring of the distinction between the film’s on-screen and off-screen spaces, emphasizing the killer’s possible transgression of the boundary between them, i.e. the frame of the cinematic image. Functioning as a signifier of the killer, the acousmatic voice plays a key role in establishing narrative suspense, simultaneously signalling both the absence and the presence of the killer. In so doing, it allows the character behind the voice to become functionally ubiquitous. Since the viewer does not know where the killer is, he might in principle be anywhere, see anything, know and do anything (Chion 1999, 24). Both the subjective camerawork and the acousmatic voice, thus, allow the killer to become a quasi-embodied or even disembodied entity, simultaneously on-screen and off-screen, present and absent, everywhere and nowhere.

Further emphasizing this sense of uncertainty is the fact that much of the film’s narrative space is structured around the telephone, thereby limiting the viewer’s respite from the threat it poses. An illustrative example of this strategy is the depiction of the killer’s first telephone call. As the film’s protagonist, Jess answers the downstairs telephone, the camera remains focused on her as she calls out to the other sorority sisters. While they subsequently gather around the telephone, the camera remains completely static, as if paralysed by the voice on the telephone. There are no reaction shots of the sorority sisters to Jess’s outcry nor any cuts to their individual advances towards her. All the viewer sees is a static medium wide-shot of Jess holding the telephone as the other protagonists successively enter the frame. Everything here revolves around the telephone and the acousmatic voice emanating from it, calling both the narrative space of the film and the characters within that space into order.

Furthermore, the telephone often works as a visual anchoring point. On numerous occasions, shots begin with a close-up of the telephone and then pan over to the action, establishing in visual terms a sense of continuity between the apparently passive object and the active subjects surrounding it. In other instances, the telephone is placed within the frame, but near its edges or in the background to suggest its presence even in cases where it does not have any direct narrative impact. Such compositional strategies suggest continuity between technological environment and acting bodies as the telephone becomes a potentially active body within the frame, threatening to collapse the distinction between passive background and active foreground that often governs mainstream cinema (Adams 2011). Throughout Black Christmas, therefore, the telephone is almost always there; a seemingly innocuous everyday household object transformed into an

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uncanny presence that may at any instance signal the intrusion of horror into the supposedly safe world of the main protagonists.

Another example of the telephone’s terrible power is its role in the film’s penultimate narrative climax, as the police finally manage to trace the killer’s calls back to the sorority house. Consisting entirely of crosscuts between four different spatial positions, the sequence works as a veritable chase scene. At the sorority house, Jess listens to the killer’s incoherent ramblings on the living room telephone, attempting to keep him on the line long enough for the trace to work. A medium close-up showing Jess on the telephone is intercut with shots of the killer’s point-of-view in an upstairs bedroom as he speaks frantically into the telephone mouthpiece. Added to these shots are shots of the police listening in on the call at the downtown police station, as well as shots of a technician running through rows of exchange terminals at the telephone company central in order to physically trace the call back to its originating terminal. Throughout the sequence, the killer’s voice functions as a reference point, linking the various actions depicted at each location into a meaningful chain of connected events. As a result, it works as a central cohesive force of cinematic montage, placing itself at the centre of the film’s narrative unfoldment. This is noteworthy because the telephonic motif has played an important role in the history of narrative cinema, particularly in relation to the emergence of crosscutting (or parallel editing).6 Tom Gunning, for instance, singles out the telephonic narrative in D. W. Griffith’s The Lonely Villa (1909) as the locus classicus of crosscutting in narrative cinema, pointing out that cinema’s interest in the telephone predates the advent of sound (1991, 188). Also referencing Griffith’s work, Chion similarly notes that although we might commonly associate stories built around telephones with sound cinema, “the telephone, and everything having to do with the circulation of sounds and voices, was as interesting to silent film as it was a challenge to depict” (1999, 62–63). Going back all the way to the silent era, then, we find a telling interaction between the telephonic motif and the use of crosscutting as filmmakers used the telephone to make the plasticity of cinematic space and time more easily legible to viewers. The collapse of time and space made possible by the telephone – speaking now to someone located elsewhere – became an interpretive blueprint for the manipulation of time and space as established in narrative cinema. Consequently, the telephonic motif became a way for filmmakers to “naturalize film’s power 6

For more on this subject, see Debatin and Wullf (1991), Gunning (1991, 2004), and Olsson (2004).

Chion also touches briefly upon this specific subject, noting that “the phone scene encourages parallel editing” (Chion 1999, 63).

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to move through space and time” (Gunning 1991, 187). In Black Christmas, the telephone takes on a similar role, effectively making the killer’s voice the guarantor of diegetic cohesion and narrative unfoldment and thus establishing the telephone’s terrible power as the film’s central organizing principle.

Disembodiment and Difussion In Black Christmas, therefore, the telephone is a somewhat paradoxical object, simultaneously attractive and repulsive in both stylistic and narrative terms.

Most notably, however, much of the film’s tension derives from the ways in which its stylistic strategies relate to the figure of the killer – in particular the way in which subjective camerawork and acousmatic sound separate vision and voice from the body in which they are situated, thereby establishing the killer as a diffuse, disembodied presence both within the film’s diegetic space and upon the representational surface of the screen. Even if the voice enables diegetic cohesion, it simultaneously works as a cipher for the ostensibly dangerous processes of technological disembodiment and diffusion. Because of this, the film’s central narrative trajectory focuses on returning vision and voice to the body from which they originate, thereby divesting the killer of the power bestowed upon him by technological disembodiment. This search for coherence and unity is a significant feature of many slasher films. As Vera Dika (1990) notes, a key step in defeating the killer in many slasher films is for him or her to become visible within the frame of the image, not only to the on-screen characters but to the viewer as well. Although not discussing the slasher film specifically, Chion makes a similar argument regarding acousmatic voices more generally, noting that in order to divest the acousmatic voice of its power, the viewer needs to see the speaking mouth from which the voice originates, that is, “for the person speaking to inscribe his or her body inside the frame” (1999, 27). The end-point of this process of de-acousmatization is for the speaking mouth to become visible, allowing the viewer to identify, locate and re-embody the voice. Without binding the voice to a specific body via the explicit on-screen depiction of the speaking mouth, this process will remain incomplete, and the voice will retain its powers (Chion 1999, 28). Hence, slasher films featuring subjective camerawork and/or acousmatic voices often work towards returning both vision and voice to the body from which the representational machinery of the film itself has often separated them in order to create suspense.

Placing this search for coherence front and centre in both narrative and stylistic terms, Black Christmas in turn codes the processes of diffusion and

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disembodiment as not only highly suspect, but even dangerous. One obvious example of the danger posed by diffusion and disembodiment is the role of the telephone in the death of Jess’s boyfriend, Peter. Lurking upstairs, the killer overhears Jess and Peter arguing downstairs. During a later telephone call with Jess, the killer repeats certain phrases uttered by Peter during the argument, causing Jess to suspect that Peter may be the killer. This suspicion plays a central role later, when Jess – believing Peter to be the killer – batters him to death with a fire poker. Rather than being a tool for communication, the telephone in this way becomes a dangerous device of miscommunication and confusion.

In Black Christmas therefore, the telephone’s dissociation of voice from body is ultimately a deadly danger, because it allows identities to become unstable and detached from any definite or stable point of reference. By allowing the voice to float free, no longer bound to a specific physical body, the telephone functions as a site for the unmooring of fixed identities. In semiotic terms, the telephone uncouples signifier and signified, thereby establishing the killer as the monstrous dramatization of a free-floating signifier.

The killer’s monstrously disembodied voice, furthermore, transgresses the spatial and temporal boundaries of the film’s diegesis. Indeed, in one key moment it is established as the film’s one and only trans-diegetic phenomenon. When first we hear the killer’s voice separate from the telephone, he is quietly singing a lullaby to his first victim in the sorority house attic. Initially his voice is low and intimate, as would plausibly be the case given the particular acoustic environment presented on-screen. After a few lines of singing, however, a notable amount of echo is added to his voice, providing it with an almost otherworldly quality, as if it no longer resonates just within the small attic-space we see on-screen, but rather within a larger off-screen space, functionally beyond the diegesis itself.

In moving, thus, into an extra-diegetical space, somewhere between the film’s inside and outside, the killer’s voice becomes functionally supernatural, since it no longer abides by the spatial rules that otherwise govern the film’s diegetic space. Moreover, the addition of echo is coupled with a slow cross-dissolve to an exterior shot of the college campus square some time the next day. This particular stylistic choice further foregrounds the killer’s diffusion by suggesting that his presence goes beyond the specific spatial location from which the voice originates to pervade not just the entire diegesis but even beyond it. He is simultaneously here, there and everywhere.

To be clear, this is not a case of the sound design producing a rupture of diegetic coherence or viewer integration in order to establish a kind of Brechtian

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sense of estrangement or detachment. Rather, it is a subtle gesture towards the possibility of such a rupture. Because it is never realized, however, the effect is one not of estrangement or distance but rather of unease and anxiety. While it gestures towards the killer as an entity somehow in violation of the film’s representational paradigm – which remains solidly realist – it never establishes him as supernatural in actual terms. Black Christmas, in other words, does not deal with the supernatural per se. Instead, it establishes a sense of tension between the ostensibly realist narrative and the “unreal” or “supernatural” representational strategies through which that narrative unfolds, specifically in relation to depictions of the killer. In other words, the killer is dangerous not only because he kills, but also because he implicitly constitutes a kind of representational anomaly that threatens to collapse the film’s diegetic integrity and narrative unfoldment.

Patterns of Resemblance Beyond establishing the killer as a quasi-supernatural entity, the most important aspect of the scene described above is that it suggests the ways in which Black Christmas implicates cinema itself in the dangerous processes of diffusion and disembodiment. It does so by mirroring (and enhancing) the telephonic disembodiment of the killer with cinematic effects, thereby metaphorically establishing a link between the two. Notably, the particular use of sound evident in the scene foregrounds how the film establishes the killer as a diffuse and disembodied entity not only intra-diegetically, from the perspective of the onscreen protagonists, but also extra-diegetically, from the perspective of the viewer.

As the echoes of the killer’s mysterious voice reach out beyond the film’s diegetic space, we experience his presence much in the same way as the protagonists, that is, as a being or entity which does not adhere to the established spatial and temporal rules that otherwise govern the film. A central difference, however, is that his apparent ubiquity from our perspective results not from telephonic disembodiment but rather from cinematic. As a result, the scene establishes a pattern of resemblance between the telephonic and the cinematic mediums, linking them together as devices of diffusion and disembodiment. This pattern of resemblance is suggested in other ways as well, perhaps most notably via the interaction of acousmatic sound and subjective camerawork, specifically the ways in which the film’s subjective camerawork mirrors the processes of diffusion and disembodiment associated with the telephonic motif. The ways in which the use of

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subjective camerawork establishes the camera itself as a dangerous presence within the film’s diegetic space constitute a key element in this regard. Because point of view shots precede more or less all of the killer’s acts of violence in the film, the disembodiment afforded to the killer via the camera is deemed equally dangerous to that of the telephone’s – if not even more so. As Hart notes, the point-of-view shot found in films such as Black Christmas “abstracts the look, removing it from reference to a familiar or concrete character who is doing the looking. It presents the act of looking to the audience and should […] be understood as a depiction of that look. That is, the look itself is just as much the object of the camera’s gaze as are the victims-to-be who appear on camera” (2020, 98). While the point-of-view shot might align the viewer tangentially with intra-diegetic characters, it more dominantly aligns the viewer with the camera itself. Furthermore, because pointof-view signals the possibility of an attack, it implicitly renders the camera itself dangerous, not in narrative terms, of course; but in functional terms, since without the presence of the camera, there would be no threat. As noted earlier, this threat is specifically established as a result of diffusion and disembodiment, since these are the very processes that allow the threat to materialize both metaphorically and literally. In this way, the interaction of the telephonic motif and the subjective camerawork foregrounds the metaphorical relationship between telephone and cinema by establishing a pattern of resemblance centred on their capacities for disembodiment and diffusion.

This further entails that while the distinction between the killer and the telephone collapses at the intra-diegetic level, the distinction between the killer and the camera similarly collapses at the extra-diegetic level. From both perspectives, therefore, the killer becomes inseparable from the medium through which he is literally made present. Within this context, the previously described narrative trajectory of de-acousmatization can be understood as an attempt to establish a clear boundary between subject and technology by grounding the killer’s acousmatic voice within a specific physical body, which can then be made subject to the control of law. Black Christmas’s narrative focus on dispelling the dangerous forces of technological diffusion and disembodiment thus metaphorically articulates a highly anxious relationship to cinema, which itself becomes a dangerous engine of such forces.

Hence, it is particularly significant that the killer is never made fully visually present to the viewer, and thus consistently resists de-acousmatization. As previously mentioned, the use of subjective camerawork plays a key part in this, but even when not presented via point-of-view, shots of the killer are carefully

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framed and composed in ways that allow him to escape the camera’s gaze.

Throughout the film, therefore, he is never seen speaking and appears to the viewer only in dissociated fragments. Even in the two brief moments where we actually see the killer’s face, careful framing ensures that only one of his eyes is actually visible. Presenting the killer as a constantly shifting patchwork or medial assemblage, rather than a cohesive subject, the film allows neither the camera, nor the viewer any sense of clarity or control.

Consequently, Black Christmas offers no escape from the dangerous processes of technological diffusion and disembodiment associated with both with the telephonic and cinematic mediums. Instead, it implicitly suggests a profound and highly dangerous interpenetration of human subjectivity and technology – a process of which the telephonic and cinematic mediums become monstrous engines and the killer an equally monstrous cipher. Highly suggestive of this interpenetration is the way in which the film’s sound design foregrounds the non-verbal elements of the killer’s voice, that is, the various sonic elements that surround, but are not part of speech proper. As Conner (2000, 380) notes, the telephone does not merely transmit articulate sounds but also the “accidental noise of the voice, the sonorous excrescences which are incidental to the message, but nevertheless [make] up a voice’s individuating timbre.” When listening to a telephonic voice, we hear “the pants, gasps, and hisses, the clicks, pops, and percussions, of the breath sounding amid its originating body and amid the sensitive body of the telephone apparatus” (Conner 2000, 380). In other words, the telephone does not neutrally transmit the human voice, but foregrounds certain elements as well as ads others to it by way of the interaction between the speaking mouth and the telephone itself. By emphasizing such features, the sound design foregrounds the hybrid characteristics of the killer’s voice, establishing it as neither purely human nor purely mechanical, but rather a combination of the two. In some of the scenes, even where we hear the killer’s voice separate from the telephone – like when he whispers incessantly before killing one victim, or when he screams wildly while attempting to break down a door –, it retains many of the sonorous characteristics of his telephonic voice. Throughout the film, the killer’s voice thus remains implicitly telephonic even in instances when he is not heard speaking through the telephone; and because he is never actually seen speaking, of course, he remains disembodied as well. The implicit effect of this is to establish him as a hybrid entity who never really exists outside mediation, so to speak, but is always enmeshed by it; present only as a kind of continuously displaced medial assemblage, rather than a coherent, unified subject.

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Reproductions of Ideology The telephonic motif in Black Christmas thus reflects deep-seated cultural anxieties concerning technology and its possible impact upon human identity and subjectivity. Indeed, the motif is central to the film’s implicit idealization of the cohesive and ultimately autonomous humanist subject, dominant – though not hegemonic – throughout much of Western culture going back at least to Kant’s concept of the transcendental subject and possibly to Descartes’s cogito ergo sum.

Employing the telephone as metaphor for cinema, furthermore, Black Christmas implicitly involves cinema itself in the dangerous processes of technological diffusion and disembodiment of the subject, and engages with the potential of cinema to function as a site for the production of monstrous difference.

In order to gain a fuller understanding of the role this monstrous potential plays in the film, however, it is necessary to investigate further the ways in which the dangerous collapse of distinction between subject and technology is mirrored by the collapse of several other identity categories. It is worth noting, for instance, that the unusual character of the killer’s voice is foregrounded from the very first telephone call, as our attention is drawn to its fragmented and disjointed form.

Following the killer’s outburst of excited slurping, groaning and screaming, one of the sorority sisters worriedly asks if it could really be just one person speaking.

At a later point, Jess notes: “It was weird. Some man screaming. Then a woman wailing.” Throughout the film, the killer’s voice is presented as a patchwork of different voices among which his “true” voice remains elusive. While ostensibly presented as male, he oscillates between female and male as well as adult and child voices. Moreover, his voice is reminiscent of various animal or animal-like sounds.

The resulting identity fluidity is clearly coded as dangerously pathological, with the voice functioning as the signifier of a monstrously unstable and incoherent psyche, liable to violate the norms and morals of the reigning social order.

In Black Christmas, therefore, the telephonic acousmatic voice of the killer serves as a way of dramatizing the dangers of any form of identity fluidity that violates established identity categories. Within this context, the previously described process of de-acousmatization – as well as the film’s implicit fight against forces of technological diffusion and disembodiment in general – can be understood not only as the attempt to separate the voice from the technologies through which it promulgates, but also to return it to a stable and acceptable gender identity by situating it within a safely gendered body. Because we never see the killer, however, this attempt fails, and the killer remains a threat to the

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systems of meaning and knowledge that underpin traditional gender categories.

That a film released in the wake of second wave feminism would exhibit concerns and anxieties regarding the destabilization of established gender identities is hardly surprising. Indeed, Black Christmas conforms quite nicely to Klaus Riser’s argument that while the slasher film in general seems to deviate from more traditional gender norms found in Hollywood cinema, it nonetheless conforms to that cinema’s “patriarchal signification” (Riser 2001, 370). This tension between progressive and conservative impulses is particularly interesting in relation to Black Christmas because the film is overtly feminist, seemingly championing women’s rights in the face of abusive patriarchal authority. It does so not only by focusing on a group of young female protagonists, but also through the inclusion of an abortion subplot, which finds protagonist Jess rejecting her boyfriend’s controlling and abusive behaviour and asserting her right to selfdetermination. As Richard Nowell (2011, 68–78) has pointed out, this particular political bent was intended by the film’s producers to attract progressive females following the surge of second wave feminism in the early 1970s, and, thus, was part of a calculated effort to make the film as appealing as possible to that specific demographic group. Its overt feminism aside, the film remains fundamentally opposed to any destabilization or transgression of established gender categories or norms, clearly coding such transgressions as dangerously pathological. This is done not only via the figure of the killer, but also through several of the film’s character portrayals, most notably the characters of Barb and Mrs. Mac, who both display traits that clearly violate the norms of traditional gender behaviour, i.e. the association of women with femininity and men with masculinity. In both cases, their transgressions are clearly coded as socially problematic: while Barb’s seeming disregard for various gendered rules of decorum and behaviour is explicitly presented as the result of a dysfunctional relationship with her mother, Mrs. Mac’s is presented as the result of rampant alcoholism.

The film’s reproduction of certain norms of gendered behaviour is also evident in the portrayal of its male protagonists, who are hardly representatives of ideal masculinity as conceptualized under patriarchal capitalism. Clare’s father, for instance, spends most of the film confused, scared, and incapable of helping or taking action. He comes across more as a form of comic relief than a commandeering figure of authority. Another figure of male ineptitude is Sergeant Nash, who fails to help Jess and her friends at every turn. In general, the police are of little help, and are either incompetent or dangerous to the female protagonists.

Even the only officer who seems capable of helping, Lieutenant Fuller, ultimately

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fails when at the film’s end he leaves an unconscious Jess alone in the sorority house with the undetected killer still inside.

Even so, the film is hardly anti-patriarchal in any meaningful sense of the word.

It seems relatively clear that what the film disparages is not patriarchal authority as such, but rather a particular model of inept and impotent masculinity. It calls not for an end to patriarchy, but for a reformation of the model of masculinity underpinning it. Simultaneously, it also presents a model of acceptable femininity, which is self-determinant only to the extent that it remains dependent upon patriarchal power. As the film ends with this ideal feminist subject abandoned by incompetent masculinity to die at the hands of the queer monster, the film implicitly calls upon the ostensibly male viewer to articulate and enact an improved masculinity, that is, to save the damsel in distress and thus reassert the legitimacy of patriarchal authority. The implied female viewer, on the other hand, is left pondering the risks of rejecting patriarchal power and the safety it hypothetically offers. Subjecting the viewer to a clear case of ideological interpellation, the film thus implicitly attempts to enforce extant hierarchies of social and political power by fiercely patrolling the borders of those gendered identity categories upon which such hierarchies rest.

Even if Black Christmas contains certain elements which might reasonably be described as socially and politically progressive for its time, these elements are better understood within a larger narrative framework, which is marked by decidedly more conservative and even reactionary tendencies.

Monstrous Cinema As this brief exploration of the film’s gender politics suggests, Black Christmas clearly works as a device for the reproduction of ideology, attempting to safeguard and enforce a range of cultural categories and boundaries, perhaps most overtly those relating to gender and sex. Even if the representational machinery of cinema is, thus, used as a device of ideological interpellation, there is within the film an anxious undercurrent, too, which is concerned with the potential of cinema to subvert and possibly undermine the forces that allow for ideological interpellation in the first place. Black Christmas thus works as an engine for the reproduction of ideology, while implicitly engaging simultaneously with the monstrous potential of cinema to subvert the very ideology it attempts to assert.

In this regard, the telephone remains a focal point, working as a double of or stand-in for cinema. As noted earlier, the telephonic motif is a central generative

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and organizing force within the film, serving as a focal point of not only narrative unfolding, but also diegetic cohesion. It is, in other words, a central cog in the film’s representational machinery and therefore, ultimately, the source of the film’s capacity for ideological interpellation. In the meantime, however, it is also clearly linked to the dangerous processes of diffusion and disembodiment. These powers are a threat to the film’s implicit ideological project – i.e. the enforcement of certain categories of identity and knowledge – since they allow precisely for the destabilization of identity and knowledge.

Throughout the film, the telephone is thus presented as potentially dangerous to the reining social order. Working as promulgator of monstrously fluid and unstable identities, it provides the threat of difference upon which the film’s idealization of rigid identity positions rests, and which the film can then use to place the viewer in a position of anxiety ostensibly making him or her susceptible to ideological interpellation. In other words, coding fluid and unstable identities as dangerous, is a central step in the film’s attempted enforcement of established and socially acceptable categories of identity. Even while presenting the telephone and its powers of diffusion and disembodiment as a device for the production of dangerous difference, however, the film cannot escape returning to and consistently foregrounding the telephone’s many resemblances to cinema.

As detailed in this article, Black Christmas implicitly establishes a remarkable pattern of resemblance between the telephonic and cinematic mediums. If the telephone’s powers of diffusion and disembodiment make it a danger to the established social and political order, it seems that cinema belongs in that category of dangerous cultural forces as well. Indeed, insofar as cinema allows identities to become fluid and malleable, that is, insofar as it is itself an engine of monstrous difference, cinema is itself a threat to the ideological structures that the film attempts to impose.

The telephonic motif in Black Christmas is, thus, a focal point for the film’s implicit engagement with cinema itself and with the question of its possible cultural and political impact. Even as it attempts to employ the ideological machinery of cinema to enforce normative categories of knowledge and identity, the film simultaneously dwells implicitly upon the capacity of cinema to disrupt and destabilize such categories. In consequence, the telephonic motif in Black Christmas can be understood both as a cipher for the promulgation of ideology through representation and as a possible path beyond it.

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References Adams, Ross Exo. 2011. Foreground, Background, Drama: The Cinematic Space of Le Mépris. Critical Quarterly vol. 53, no. 1: 14–28.

Bohnenkamp, Björn. 2014. “You can get anything you want.” Telefonie im Film. In Medienreflexion im Film. Ein Handbuch [Mediareflections in Film.

A Handbook], eds. Kay Kirchman and Hens Ruchatz, 349–365. Bielefield: Transcript Verlag.

Boillat, Alain: 2015. The Social Imaginary of the Telephone. Fictional Dispositives in Albert Robida’s Le Vingtième Siècle and the Archeology of “Talking Cinema.”

In Cine-Dispositives. Essays in Epistemology across Media, eds. Franois Albera and Maria Tortajada, 217–247. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.

Bruhm, Steven. 2011: Cell Phones from Hell. The South Atlantic Quarterly vol.

110, no. 3: 601–620.

Chion, Michel. 1999 [1982]. The Voice in Cinema, ed. Claudia Gorbman. New York: Columbia University Press.

Clover, Carol J. 1992. Men, Women, and Chain Saws. Gender in the Modern Horror Film. New Jersey: Princeton University Press.

Conner, Steven. 2000. Dumbstruck. A Cultural History of Ventriloquism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Danielson, Larry. 1996. Folklore and Film: Some Thoughts on Baughman Z500– 599. In Contemporary Legend. A Reader, eds. Gillian Bennet and Paul Smith, 55–67. New York: Garland Publishing Inc. Debatin, Bernhard and Hans Jürgen Wullf. 1991. Telefon und Kultur. Das Telefon im Spielfilm. [Telephone and Culture. The Telephone in Fiction Films], Berlin: Volker Spiess.

Dika, Vera. 1990. Games of Terror. Halloween, Friday the 13th, and the Films of the Stalker Cycle. Rutherford: Associated University Press.

Gunning, Tom. 2004. Fritz Lang Calling: The Telephone and the Circuits of Modernity. In Allegories of Communication. Intermedial Concerns from Cinema to the Digital, eds. John Fullerton and Jan Olsson, 19–37. Rome: John Libbey Publishing.

Gunning, Tom. 1991. Heard over the phone: The Lonely Villa and the de Lorde Tradition of the Terrors of Technology. Screen vol. 32, no. 2: 184–196.

Hart, Adam Charles. 2020. Monstrous Forms. Moving Image Horror across Media.

New York: Oxford University Press.

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Nowell, Richard. 2001. Blood Money. A History of the First Teen Slasher Film Cycle. New York: Continuum.

Olsson, Jan. 2004. Framing Silent Calls: Coming to Cinematographic Terms with Telephony. In Allegories of Communication. Intermedial Concerns from Cinema to the Digital, eds. John Fullerton and Jan Olsson, 157–192. Rome: John Libbey Publishing.

Riser, Klaus. 2001. Masculinity and Monstrosity: Characterization and Identification in the Slasher Film. Men & Masculinities vol. 3, no. 4: 370–392.

Schantz, Ned. 2008. Gossip, Letters, Phones: The Scandal of Female Networks in Film and Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Schantz, Ned. 2003. Telephonic Film. Film Quarterly vol. 56, no. 4: 23–35.

Wagner, Hedwig. 2014. “Leave your conscious after the beep.” Der Anrufbeantworter im Film [The Answering Machine in Films]. In Medienreflexion im Film.

Ein Handbuch [Mediareflections in Film. A Handbook], eds. Kay Kirchman and Hens Ruchatz, 367–382. Bielefield: Transcript Verlag.

Acta Univ. Sapientiae, Film and Media Studies, 20 (2021) 36–51 DOI: 10.2478/ausfm-2021-0013

The Soundtrack of the Sinister Trailer Nick Redfern

Independent scholar (United Kingdom) E-mail: nickredfernres@outlook.com Abstract. In this article, I analyse the soundtrack of the green band trailer for Sinister (Scott Derrickson, 2012), combining quantitative methods to analyse the soundtrack with formal analysis. I show that, even though Sinister is a narrative about a demon who lives in images, the horror in the soundtrack of this trailer is articulated through the sound design. I describe the structure of the soundtrack and analyse the distribution and organisation of dialogue, the use of different types of sound effects to create a connection between the viewer and the characters onscreen, as well as the use of specific localised sound events to organise attention and to frighten the viewer. I identify two features not previously discussed in relation to quantitative analysis of film soundtracks: an affective event based on reactions to a stimulus and the presence of nonlinear features in the sound envelopes of localised affective events. The sound design of this trailer is consistent with the principles of contemporary sound design in horror cinema, but also demonstrates some variation in its use of sound as a paratext to its parent film.

Keywords: horror cinema, film trailers, sound design, sound effects, computational film analysis.

Trailers are the most common way viewers learn about a film and have the strongest impact on movie choice for audiences (Hixson 2006; Karray and Deberntiz 2017). They exist as paratexts in relation to their reference films and combine cinematic pleasures with the marketing functions of advertising to create audience expectations (Johnston 2009; Gray 2010). Jensen (2014) argues that trailers prioritize genre by emphasising the dominant emotional tone of a film at the expense of narrative to create a prototype of the reference film with heightened emotional intensity and reduced narrative complexity. The emotional engagement of the viewer with a trailer arises through the use of an intensified visual and sonic style that combines discontinuity editing, changes in tempo and image brightness, the use of music, and features of the sound design (e.g. changes in volume, event onset, the use of overlapping sounds – Iida, Goto, Fukuchi and Amasaka 2012).

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Deaville and Malkinson write that, of the formal resources available to trailer producers and consumers, sound is “arguably more dynamic, formative, and foregrounded in trailers than in feature film” (2014, 125) and takes on a range of functions: establishing the narrative coherence of the diegesis, creating sonic hooks for the audience through dialogue, maintaining textual continuity in relation to high levels of narrative and visual fragmentation, and creating an “aural continuum” that interweaves music, sound, and silence into a “continuous soundscape” (2014, 124). They argue that the organisation of these soundscapes varies according to genre, but note that there is little research focusing on specific sound practices in particular genres. Despite recent attention to sound design in horror cinema (see, for example, Bullins 2013; Collins 2009; Donnelly 2009; Whittington 2014), studies of sound design in horror film trailers are limited. Redfern (2020) analysed sound in trailers for fifty contemporary Hollywood horror films released between 2011 and 2015, finding that sound is organized in such a way that different elements of the soundtrack perform different functions, with dialogue being primarily responsible for presenting narrative information, while sound creates an emotional experience for the audience, and that the soundtracks feature a range of sonic affective events associated with different types of horror (e.g. surprise, apprehension).

In this article, I analyse the use of sound in the green band trailer for Sinister (Scott Derrickson, 2012). By focusing on a single trailer, I adopt a functional approach to style (see Carroll 1998) aiming to account for the sound design of this trailer and how its different elements work in order to achieve the different objectives of a film trailer – the presentation of narrative information to the viewer, the creation of an emotional experience characteristic of the genre, and the marketing of a film. Viewed against the contemporary norms of trailer sound design for this genre set out in Redfern (2020), this detailed analysis of a single trailer allows me to establish the specificity of sound practice for a particular trailer. I combine quantitative methods to analyse and visualize the soundtrack with formal analysis, looking at its large-scale structure and the structure and use of localized affective sound events, the role of dialogue, and the uses of different types of sound effects. The combination of methods makes it possible to go beyond the purely qualitative approach adopted by Deaville and Malkinson (2014), which identifies and defines the functions of relevant audio content in a trailer but tends towards a static description of a soundtrack, to provide a richer understanding of sound design in film trailers in which sound is a dynamic element of film style and where focusing on the shape of the audio envelope (attack, sustain, release, linearity v. non-linearity, etc.) can help us to understand

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not only what sounds are present and the functions they fulfil, but also how and why the soundtrack was put together.

Structure Nine months after the brutal murder of the previous residents, true-crime writer Ellison Oswalt moves his family – wife Tracy, and children Trevor and Ashley – into their new home. In the attic, Ellison discovers a box containing an 8 mm film projector as well as several films apparently depicting a series of grisly murders dating back to the 1960s, associated with child disappearances. Noticing the same pictogram and demonic figure in each film, Ellison consults with a local sheriff’s deputy about the murders and is put in contact with Professor Jonas, an expert in occult phenomena. Jonas tells Ellison the demonic figure is Bughuul, a Babylonian deity who inhabits images and who kills entire families, taking one of the children so that he can consume their soul. One night, Ellison finds the missing children seated in the attic watching one of the films, and Bughuul appears on the screen before suddenly appearing in front of Ellison physically.

Fearing for the life of his family, Ellison burns the films and moves everyone back to his old house only to re-discover the projector and films in his attic, this time with “extended cut endings” that show the killers in each of the murders were the missing children. Possessed by Bughuul, Ashley uses an axe to remove her father’s head and dispatch her mother and brother, using their blood to paint on the walls. Bughuul carries Ashley into the film, and the movie ends with a new film in the projector box waiting for the next family.

The trailer for Sinister condenses the above narrative into 144.9 seconds, relating to the viewer the key facts omitting only the fact of the second house move and the final murders, whilst incorporating scenes from this part of the film, with some changes to the order and context of certain scenes. For example, in the trailer, Trevor’s night terrors appear to be related to Bughuul and his growing threat to the family when in fact it is an unrelated nightmare that comes near the beginning of the film. Falsification in this trailer is, however, limited and the narrative follows the structure of the film in a straightforward manner without giving away the final twist. As Sinister is a horror film, the dominant emotional tone is fear, but this trailer employs a limited set of stylistic devices to emotionally affect the viewer. There is no gore or physical violence. The hanging of the previous occupants of the house is featured but kept largely off-screen (we see the whole event in the film); and though we see a car explode into flame,

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we are unaware that a family is burning to death inside. We do not see Ashley decapitate her father; nor do we see the paintings she daubs on the wall in her family’s blood. In the absence of many of the horrific stylistic devices used by this film, sound takes on the primary role of creating fear in the audience.

To visualize and analyse its structure and key features, I downloaded the trailer for Sinister1 from YouTube as an MP4 file and removed the MPAA rating certificate from the beginning of the video file. I exported the soundtrack as a stereo 16-bit PCM wave file sampled at 48 kHz (see Figure 1.A). The soundtrack was loaded into Python (v.3.7.6) and analysed using the librosa package (v0.7.2; McFee, et al.: 2020). The short-time Fourier transform (STFT) is a common method used in time-frequency analysis to analyse non-stationary signals whose energy distributions vary with time and frequency (Goodwin 2008). This is visualized as a spectrogram with time on the horizontal axis, frequency on the vertical axis, and amplitude as colour. Figure 1.B presents the log amplitude spectrogram of the Sinister trailer’s soundtrack remixed to mono at 48 kHz using librosa’s librosa.core.to_mono module, which averages the two channels of the original stereo file. This step is necessary to produce the STFT and as there are only small differences between the left and right channels of the stereo sound file, averaging the channels does not have an impact on the analysis. I calculated the normalized aggregated power envelope by summing the amplitude values in the original STFT and dividing by the sum to normalize the envelope to a unit area (see Cortopassi 2006). I calculated the power envelope using the original STFT rather than the log amplitude spectrogram in Figure 1.B because, while summing the spectra in the log amplitude spectrogram produces the same time contour plot, the resulting plot is rendered with a linear y-axis that is potentially misleading. Redfern (n. d.) provides a detailed discussion of the methods used here along with code examples for audio analysis in Python. Figure 1.C presents the normalized aggregated power envelope with a fitted loess trendline.

The normalized aggregated power envelope (Figure 1.C) shows the trailer’s soundtrack has three sections. The first section (0.0–50.7 seconds) front-loads narrative content to establish the premise of the film, define key locations, and introduce the principal characters. During this first section of the trailer, silence is a structural feature marking transitions in time. The silence at 8.9 s occurs after the news report that functions as false voice over narration describing the murder of the previous occupants of the Oswalts’ house and accompanies a title card informing the viewer that it is now “9 months later.” The aggregated power 1

See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rnDwBSVKgsM. Last accessed 22. 09. 2020.

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envelope after this silence shows no overall trend until 50.7 seconds when Ellison sets out to investigate the films of the murders he has discovered. The main part of the trailer (50.7–132.6 seconds) sees Ellison deepen his interest in the mysteries of the previous families and his growing obsession impact on his own family.

Here the dominant emotional tone of the trailer takes over from narrative and there is an overall trend of increasing power to the peak at 132.6 seconds. In this section of the trailer, silence functions emotionally contributing to the creation of a state of fear in the viewer (this will be discussed below). The final part of the trailer runs from 132.6 to 144.9 seconds as the trailer plays out over title cards announcing the film’s title, advertising the film’s release social media information and, maintaining the motif from the opening of the trailer, the film of the trailer burns out. In this section the power of the soundtrack decreases rapidly.

Dialogue The function of dialogue in the trailer is to unambiguously convey information to the viewer, establishing background information for the viewer, identifying characters, presenting narrative motivation, and narrative explication.

To transcribe and produce exact timings for dialogue, I uploaded the soundtrack as a mono 16-bit PCM wave file to Amazon Transcribe, a cloud-based automatic speech recognition service provided by Amazon Web Services, and then made final corrections to the data by hand, where words were incorrectly transcribed or missed. The dialogue in the trailer comprises 208 words in 33 sentences totalling 59.8 seconds, or 41.2% of the running time. Dialogue is spoken by seven different characters, though only two of those account for more than 10% of the dialogue.

Ellison accounts for 103 words. Professor Jonas’s function within the film and the trailer is narrative exposition, explaining the mythology of Bughuul, and as such has 47 words of dialogue. No other character has more than 19 words in total.

Figure 2 presents the distribution of dialogue in the trailer, which falls into three main clusters that convey different types of information to the viewer at different stages. The trailer opens with the off-screen voice of a news reporter, who establishes the key location of the film as the home of a family that was previously murdered. This is used as false narration to set up the central mystery of the film before we move forward several months. The first dialogue cluster (11.6–23.4 seconds) then establishes why the Oswalts have moved into their new home and sets up Ellison’s job as a writer. Some characters (the sheriff, Trevor, Tracy) only function in the trailer to ask questions Ellison can respond to.

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This results in a question-answer structure repeated throughout the trailer, with one character asking a question followed by a series of sentences that may be taken from different points in the film to provide a response that clarifies some aspect of the film. For example, the dialogue exchange comprising the second cluster (50.8–68.6 seconds) is triggered by the sheriff’s question, which is then interpreted by Ellison and clarified by Professor Jonas: Sheriff: Do you think these are serial murders?

Ellison: I don’t know. First one I found dates back to the sixties. The only link between all these cases is the symbol.

Professor Jonas: The symbol is associated with a pagan deity named Bughuul. He consumes the souls of human children.

The final cluster (90.5–100.9 seconds) is organized thematically around the disappearance of children, beginning with Professor Jonas telling us that children are particularly vulnerable to Bughuul and moves straight into a dialogue exchange between Ellison, Ashley, and Tracy about Stephanie, one of the house’s previous occupants, linking Ashley’s strange behaviour with the missing girl. In this cluster, Ellison asks a question for the first time as things start to spin out of his control.

Alongside these clusters, there are also periods in the trailer where dialogue is sparse. Between the first and second sentence clusters there are only three sentences, in which Ellison’s dialogue clarifies for the viewer what he has found in the attic and identifies the family in the home movie as he talks to himself. Similarly, between clusters two and three we have dialogue from Ellison commenting on the significance of his discovery (“I’ve never been onto something this big before”) and Professor Jonas that contextualize the affective events that startle the viewer (see below). There is no dialogue in the final 27.3 seconds of the trailer as the sound design takes over to build towards an emotional climax.

Sound Design The dominant theme of the film – namely, that dangerous things live in images – is, to a significant extent, articulated through the sound design of its trailer. The use of hard and foley sound effects located within the narrative world of the film and the off-screen effects and designed sounds (Winters 2017) repeatedly draw attention to this idea at a meta-narrative level, linking the idea of watching films in two contexts: the horrific films that become Ellison’s obsession and the viewer in the theatre.

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The trailer presents itself to the viewer as a film. Against the flickering images of the production company’s logo, the first sound heard – off-screen – is of a film projector starting up, placing the viewer in a position similar to Ellison’s, who finds himself fascinated by the mysterious films he discovers in his attic: we are watching one of the films Bughuul inhabits and we are in danger. If only we understood our situation at this stage of the trailer, perhaps we would avert our eyes. The soundtrack uses designed sounds to reinforce this theme at key points in the trailer. Glitch effects – as though the trailer were being watched on videotape, at 3.4 and 5.0 seconds during the news report on the previous occupants of the Oswalts’ new home – are associated with the intrusion of shots just a few frames in length into the flow of the trailer as though something were trying to break out of the trailer. The use of title cards during the trailer for promotional or emotional effect is accompanied by sound effects linked to viewing films. At 28.0 seconds, the white noise of an empty soundtrack as film runs through a projector is the only sound heard with the title card linking the producers to their earlier films. At 89.6 seconds the sound of a running projector plays under the title card confirming that once you have seen Bughuul “nothing can save you” and continues into the next shot as we see the projector in the foreground and we see Ashley watching one of the mysterious films. The trans-diegetic nature of the sound effects and the use of “you” in the title card, which may or may not be addressed directly to the viewer, blurs the boundaries between the space of the viewer in the cinema and the onscreen diegetic world to create uncertainty as to whether this trailer describes a set of events or is an imminent threat to the audience.

The glitch effects return at 92.9 and 94.0 s and are again associated with momentary shots of leader film that interrupt the narrative flow as Ashley’s behaviour becomes strange now that she is taken over by Bughuul. The trailer brings us back to this idea of watching a film in its final moments as the sound of the film projector recurs over the film’s promotional title cards before the image and sound of a film burning out brings the trailer to a close allowing the viewer some relief.

The use of hard sound effects and foley sound effects in the trailer is limited to the theme of horrors lurking in image technologies. When Ellison handles the 8 mm films he has discovered in his attic – sorting through the film cans, loading and running the projector, burning the films – or when he sets up a digital projector and opens a QuickTime movie file to view a digitized version, his actions are accompanied with synchronized sounds that heighten the realism of the trailer.

These sounds draw attention to the importance of images and image technologies, because these types of effects do not occur in any other context in the trailer – doors opening and closing make no noise; items being moved as the Oswalts move

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into their new home are silent; Ellison’s typing makes no sound when using the computer; and there are no footsteps as characters move around locations. The use of sound effects is limited specifically to the role of images as a source of horror.

This features in other elements of the sound design, too. Although Sinister is a film about a demonic spirit who uses images as portals to harvest the souls of children, it is through sound that Bughuul is brought to the Oswalts’ (and the viewer’s) world.

These are indicated in Figure 1.B as features B.1, B.2, and B.3. There is a tone at ~1.62 kHz at 26 seconds, when Ellison discovers the box containing the projector and the films in the attic, and this recurs at 35.2 seconds, when he takes the first film from the box, presaging the arrival of the monster. Once this imminent threat arrives, and Bughuul features on screen for the first time, all other sounds drop away as a pure tone at 2.18 kHz dominates the soundtrack from 71.0 to 74.0 seconds. These are designed sounds that do not exist within the narrative world of the trailer. Alongside this thematic use of sound design, the trailer also uses designed sounds to create the overall atmosphere of the trailer. There is no music in the trailer and – in its absence – sound is used throughout to fulfil the functions traditionally associated with music. Low frequency drones run under dialogue to create suspense in the absence of underscore as we hear, for example, during the opening news report or running under the constructed family discussion about Ellison’s new book that comprise the first, narrative section of the trailer. These sounds function structurally to impose unity on sequences created from different parts of the film in which there is no direct relationship between soundtrack and image or in which the dialogue is cut together form different parts of the film. Low frequency impacts draw attention to key pieces of information, such as at 40.7 s when one of the victim families appears on screen for the first time. As noted above, moments of horror, such as the images of this family’s murder (at 46.5 s), are not shown on screen and are represented visually by Ellison’s reactions to these images and sonically by distorted sounds that use a much broader range of frequencies. There is a clear distinction between the prolonged use of low frequencies in the sub-bass and bass ranges (0.02–0.25 kHz) to produce a fearful atmosphere that emotionally primes the viewer and the momentary use of a wider range of frequencies (up to 15 kHz) to produce intense and specific instances of terror.

Affective Events The envelope of a sound event comprises three stages: the initial onset and increase in energy of the sound until a desired level of amplitude is reached

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(attack); the maintenance of that level for a desired period of time (sustain); and the fading of the sound from its sustained level until it is no longer perceivable (release). Moncrieff, Dorai, and Venkatesh (2002) identified four specific envelopes associated with particular emotional states in horror cinema (Types 1–4). Looking at the sound events in the Sinister trailer we can add a fifth type of event with a rapid attack and long release stage where the affect is dominated by the viewer’s response to a horrifying stimulus rather than anticipation of that stimulus and which serves to maintain attention during the presentation of key narrative and marketing information. Table 1 summarizes the shapes and affects associated with these envelopes.

The Sinister trailer features twelve sound events that match the envelopes described in Table 1. These events serve two functions within the trailer: engaging and maintaining the viewer’s attention with the film’s narrative and its marketing information; and engaging the viewer emotionally to create a frightening experience. There is also one occasion where these functions are combined.

Event C.5 uses a stutter edit over low frequency rhythmic beats increasing in power to produce a riser emphasizing the camera’s movement as our attention is focused on to an image of Bughuul on Ellison’s computer screen so that we see the demon move in the image. Table 2 summaries these events, which are labelled C.1 through C.12 in Figure 1.C. The attentional function operates in the first and last events in the trailer.

In the first Type 5 event in the trailer (C.1) the step edge attack occurs when Bughuul’s symbol (at this stage unknown to the viewer) interrupts a single shot of a house and precedes the false voice over narration of the news report, and the release stage of the event ties together images of the family and the house for which viewers have yet to define a context in which they can make sense of this information. The Type 5 event at 132.7 (C.11) provides the ultimate climax to the trailer as Bughuul suddenly appears in the foreground, invading Ellison’s (and our) personal space to provide the ultimate shock in its sudden onset, after which emotional engagement gives way to marketing as the release stage plays over the trailer’s marketing title cards that reveal the title of the film and its tag line (“Have you seen him?”) and social media information (Facebook site, etc.) to maintain viewers’ engagement with the primary function of the trailer – selling the film. This is then followed by a Type 1 event (C.12), re-engaging the viewer with the marketing information on screen as the title card “Coming soon” burns out to finally bring the trailer to an end. Given the diverse functions of the trailer, the startle event (Baird 2000) is as much about information as it is about fear as

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these events attract attention through their step edge attack, their sudden bursts of sound triggering our bottom-up attention system without requiring us to be already orientated towards a stimulus (Kim et al. 2014), and their long release stage maintaining that attention to the key information the viewer is expected to acquire. Both C.1 and C.11 events exhibit approximately exponential release stages as the sound energy in these sections of the soundtrack declines nonlinearly.

Moncrieff, Dorai, and Venkatesh (2002) did not note this nonlinearity in their discussion of affective events in horror soundtracks.

The uneven distribution of affective events maintains the clear distinction between narrative and emotion in the structure of the trailer. Other than event C.1, which calls the viewer to attend to the narrative information in the trailer, there are no affective events until Ellison sees for the first time a murder in the home movies (event C.2). This event marks the transition point between the first and second sections of the trailer, so that the establishment of the diegetic world of the film and the articulation of the dominant emotional tone of the trailer are discrete. Seven of the affective events in the movie occur in the final 45 seconds of the trailer as the viewer is moved through a sequence of shocks, and narrative information becomes increasingly fragmented and incoherent as the Oswalts react to their situation.

Event C.2 is predicated on the hanging of the previous occupants of the house, but this murder is not shown in the trailer and a cut to Ellison’s shocked reaction as he recoils from the screen means the response of the viewer is to Ellison’s reaction rather than to the horrifying event itself. This association of affective sound events with Ellison’s reactions rather than the causes of those reactions recurs throughout the trailer. The onset of the attack of event C.4 is synchronized to the appearance of Bughuul in the garden of the Oswalts’ home, but the peak in the envelope and the release occurs with the next shot as Ellison recoils form the window alarmed by what he has just seen. Other events (C.6, C.7, and C.8) are based around Ellison’s reactions to the continuing intrusion of Bughuul into the family home as he comes to realize how much danger he and his family now face.

Affective events also occur in combination. The climax of the trailer builds through the sequencing of three events (C.9, C.10, and C.11). Event C.9 terminates the narrative progression of the trailer with a bass drop synchronized to another interruption of leader film into the image flow of the trailer. The Type 4 event at 119.0s (C.10) immediately follows over the course of a sequence of shots of film flicking through a projector, Ellison cowering in fear, an axe dragged across the floor, and Bughuul carrying a child into his realm that have no causal connection and are further fragmented by black frames. At this point the viewers are unable

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to piece together what is happening as the narrative of the trailer breaks down and they are left only with fear. Combining Ellison’s distorted screams with low frequency rhythmic booms and the repetitive sound of the loose film flicking through the projector, the resulting effect is a non-linear ticking riser that builds the tension of the trailer to a climax with an exponential increase in power. This climax is, however, delayed as the power of the soundtrack drops at 130.9 s for 1.8 seconds before the onset of event C.12. This gap in the soundtrack between these two events is a valley of uncertainty in which the apprehension of the viewer is extended by the delay of the trailer’s climax. In contrast to the first section of the trailer when its function was structural, silence here functions emotionally to create a pause in the soundtrack where the viewer must hesitate before reacting.

Conclusion Over the course of its two minutes and 25 seconds duration, the trailer for Sinister must establish the narrative of the film, introduce the main characters, and – above all – frighten the viewer. It must also communicate essential marketing information.

Sound is fundamental to the effectiveness of this trailer in all these areas. The use of sound in this trailer is particularly interesting because sound is so dominant in a trailer for a film based in visual horror. While the trailer does create a monomaniac emotional prototype of the film, it is evident that narrative clarity is not sacrificed for emotional engagement, and that the soundtrack is organized in such a way that different functions are handled by different components and different segments of the soundtrack. Dialogue bears responsibility for what we know and sound design for what we feel. The structure of the soundtrack also shows a clear distinction between the different goals of the trailer, with a three-part structure in which a particular function dominates each part: narrative, emotional engagement, and marketing. This is consistent with the three-part structure of contemporary horror film trailers identified in Redfern (2020). Even though the theme of the film is that demons live in images, the horror in the trailer is articulated through the sound design, combining extra-diegetic designed sounds with hard and foley sound effects to reinforce the theme of watching films that link the viewer’s position in the cinema to the characters’ on the screen. The trailer also uses tones at specific frequencies in the absence of music to anticipate and introduce the film’s monster.

Affective events create specific moments of fear in a manner consistent with their use in horror feature films, but are also used in this trailer to organize the attention of the viewer to emphasize narrative and marketing information. In analysing the

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structure of localized sound events, I also identified a fifth type of sound event not previously discussed in relation to quantitative analysis of film soundtracks and the use of nonlinear features as part of the sound design of the trailer. Overall, the sound design of this trailer is consistent with the principles of contemporary sound design in horror cinema, but also demonstrates some variation in its use of sound as a paratext to its parent film.

References Baird, Robert. 2000. The Startle Effect: Implications for Spectator Cognition and Media Theory. Film Quarterly vol. 53, no. 3: 12–24.

Bullins, Jeffrey. 2013. Hearing the Game: Sound Design in the Saw Film Franchise.

In To See the Saw Movies: Essays on Torture Porn and Post-9/11 Horror, eds.

James Aston and John Wallis, 176–193. Jefferson: McFarland.

Carroll, Noël. 1998. Film Form: An Argument for a Functional Theory of Style in the Individual Film. Style vol. 32, no. 3: 385–401.

Collins, Karen. 2009. Like Razors Through Flesh: Hellraiser’s Sound Design and Music. In Terror Tracks: Music, Sound and Horror Cinema, ed. Philip Hayward, 198–212. London: Equinox.

Cortopassi, Kathryn A. 2006. Automated and Robust Measurement of Signal Features. https://web.archive.org/web/20150428060121/http://www.birds. cornell.edu/brp/research/algorithm/automated-and-robust-measurement-ofsignal-features. Last accessed 22. 09. 2020.

Deaville, James and Agnes Malkinson. 2014. A Laugh a Second?: Music and Sound in Comedy Trailers. Music, Sound, and the Moving Image vol. 8, no. 2: 121–140.

Donnelly, Kevin J. 2009. Saw Heard: Musical Sound Design in Contemporary Cinema. In Film Theory and Contemporary Cinema, ed. Warren Buckland, 103–123. New York: Routledge.

Goodwin, Michael M. 2008. The STFT, Sinusoidal Models and Speech Modification. In Springer Handbook of Speech Processing, eds. Jacob Benesty, M. Mohan Sondhi and Yiteng Huang, 229–258. Berlin: Springer.

Gray, Jonathan. 2010. Show Sold Separately: Promos, Spoilers, and Other Media Paratexts. New York: New York University Press.

Hixson, Thomas Kim. 2006. Mission Possible: Targeting Trailers to Movie Audiences. Journal of Targeting, Measurement and Analysis for Marketing vol.

14, no. 3: 210–224.

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Iida, Takayuki, Akira Goto, Shoya Fukuchi, and Kakuro Amasaka. 2012. A Study of the Effectiveness of Movie Trailers Boosting Customers’ Appreciation Desire: A Customer Science Approach using Statistics and GSR. Journal of Business and Economics Research vol. 10, no. 6: 375–384.

Jensen, Catherine Sun. 2014. Reduced Narration, Intensified Emotion: the Film Trailer. Projections vol. 8, no. 1: 105–125.

Johnston, Keith M. 2009. Coming Soon: Film Trailers and the Selling of Hollywood Technology. Jefferson: McFarland.

Karray, Salma and Lidia Debernitz. 2017. The Effectiveness of Movie Trailer Advertising. International Journal of Advertising vol. 36, no. 2: 368–392.

Kim, Kyungtae, Kai-Hsiang Lin, Dirk B. Walther, Mark A. Hasegawa-Johnson, and Tomas S. Huang. 2014. Automatic Detection of Auditory Salience with Optimized Linear Filters Derived from Human Annotation. Pattern Recognition Letters no. 38: 78–85.

McFee, Brian, Vincent Lostanlen, Matt McVicar, Alexandros Metsai, Stefan Balke, Carl Thomé, Colin Raffel, Ayoub Malek; Dana Lee; Frank Zalkow; Kyungyun Lee; Oriol Nieto; Jack Mason; Dan Ellis; Ryuichi Yamamoto; Scott Seyfarth; Eric Battenberg; Виктор Морозов; Rachel Bittner; Keunwoo Choi; Josh Moore; Ziyao Wei; Shunsuke Hidaka; nullmightybofo; Pius Friesch; Fabian-Robert Stöter; Darío Hereñú; Taewoon Kim; Matt Vollrath and Adam Weiss. 2020. Librosa/ librosa: 0.7.2. Zenodo. https://zenodo.org/record/3606573#.YVqwD5pBxPY. Last accessed 22. 09. 2020.

Moncrieff, Simon, Chitra Dorai, and Svetha Venkatesh. 2002. Determining Affective Events Through Film Audio. In Media Computing: Computational Media Aesthetics, eds. Chitra Dorai and Svetha Venkatesh, 131–157. Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishing.

Redfern, Nick 2020. Sound in Horror Film Trailers. Music, Sound and the Moving Image vol. 14, no. 1: 47–71.

Redfern, Nick. n.d. Computational Analysis of a Horror Film Trailer Soundtrack with Python, https://www.academia.edu/43289938/Computational_analysis_ of_a_horror_film_trailer_soundtrack_with_Python. Last accessed 17. 09. 2020.

Whittington, William. 2014. Horror Sound Design. In A Companion to the Horror Film, ed. Harry M. Benshoff, 168–185. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons.

Winters, Patrick. 2017. Sound Design for Low and No Budget Films. New York: Routledge.

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List of Figures Figure 1. The soundtrack of the trailer for Sinister (Scott Derrickson, 2012): A. The amplitude envelope of the waveform of the signal as a 16-bit stereo PCM wave sampled at 48 kHz. B. The log-amplitude spectrogram of the short-time Fourier transform of the waveform averaged to mono at 48 kHz, with a Hann window of length 2048 and a hop length of 512. C. The normalized aggregated power envelope, with fitted loess trendline.

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Figure 2. The distribution of dialogue by speaker in the Sinister (Scott Derrickson, 2012) trailer. Each bar represents a sentence and the width of the bar indicates the duration of that sentence.

List of Tables Table 1. Affective sound events in horror films Event Attack Sustain Release

Type 1 Step edge Brief or none Step edge

Affect

Startle, surprise, alarm

Type 2 Slope Long None specified Apprehension

Type 3 Step edge Long None specified Surprise followed by a sustained level of alarm

Type 4 Slope Brief or none Step edge

Type 5 Step edge Brief or none Slope

Build-up of apprehension to a climax

Surprise followed by sustained attention

Table 2. Affective sound events in the Sinister (Scott Derrickson, 2012) trailer Event C.1

Onset (s) Type 3.4 5

C.2

46.5

1

C.3 C.4 C.5

57.6 78.7 86.0

1 1 4

C.6

102.4

1

C.7

105.9

3

Description A mysterious symbol interrupts a shot of the house, followed by the news report on the murder of the previous occupants The hanging of the previous occupants of the house and Ellison’s reaction A car bursts in to flames Bughuul’s first appearance at the house and Ellison’s reaction A stuttering riser as the camera closes in on Bughuul’s image on a computer screen, who then moves at the peak of the attack Leader footage interrupts the trailer as Ellison realizes his family is threatened by Bughuul, linking Ashley’s painting of Stephanie to earlier home movie footage Trevor emerges screaming from the box and Ellison reacts

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Event C.8

Onset (s) Type 113.7 1

C.9 C.10

118.6 119.0

1 4

C.11

132.7

5

C.12

140.0

1

Description Ellison reacts on seeing Bughuul’s symbol daubed in blood on the walls of his home Bass drop over leader footage as the Oswalts flee their home Non-linear ticking riser builds as Ellison climbs into the attic a final time to find the missing children watching a film with Bughuul on screen Bughuul disappears from the screen and suddenly re-appears in the foreground followed by the film’s title card and social media information Late sting over “Coming soon” title card

Acta Univ. Sapientiae, Film and Media Studies, 20 (2021) 52–67 DOI: 10.2478/ausfm-2021-0014

Silence as a Metaphor in the Polish Radio Reportages during the COVID-19 Pandemic Aneta Wójciszyn-Wasil

The John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin (Poland) e-mail: aneta.wojciszyn-wasil@kul.pl Abstract. Silence became one of the important aspects of the lockdown during the COVID-19 pandemic. This article discusses how this social experience was presented in radio reportages, for which silence is not only a topic but also an element of the construction of the message. The reports of the Polish Radio, produced in lockdown conditions, document silence in a double perspective: the transformation of the broadcast sphere of large metropolises and the private sound space of the characters. Silence, as a phonic phenomenon, functions as a universal metaphor for fear, threat, “curse of isolation,” but also hope. Experiencing silence goes beyond the individual feeling thanks to a metaphoric line through which the recorded stories gain a universal context. The analysis of audible materials shows the mechanism of the constitution of these meanings, as well as selected media functions of silence as a tool for modelling content and managing the recipients’ attention.

Keywords: COVID-19 pandemic, radio reportage, sound, silence, metaphor.

Introduction Radio broadcast is an uninterrupted stream of sound. Different types of sounds: voice, music, acoustic effects constitute a semantic structure proper for the aforementioned medium. Silence is a unique element in the audile framework, which is used rarely but represents at the same time its strongest component.

The communicative and aesthetic potential of silence is most fully exploited by artistic radio genres, including sound reportage. The said audible form combining journalism and art is a record of authentic events and, at the same time, an orderly arrangement of sound elements, precisely organized by means of editing technology. In no other media does silence constitute such a strong means of communication as in the radio broadcast due to its non-visual character.

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During the COVID-19 threat, silence became one of the common social experiences. The transmission of the SARS-CoV-2 virus has been declared a pandemic by the World Health Organization (WHO 2020) since the 11th of March 2020, forcing people to implement restrictive measures to limit their social activity and functioning in public space. As a result of the lockdown, noisy metropolises turned into “cities of silence” overnight: devoid of the characteristic hustle and bustle, the prevailing noises of transport or the buzz of passers-by. An unexpected audio-sphere transformation started to function as one of the elements of the media narrative concerning the worldwide pandemic. In New York “all the usual sounds of Lower Manhattan – car horns, idle chatter and the frequent rumble of the subway down below – have been replaced by the low hum of wind and birds” (Bui and Badger 2020). A similar tone at the other end of the globe was used to describe how the usually vibrant Cebu City in the Philippines died: “Only the roosters crowing and dogs barking to break the silence” (Mahjoub 2020). Social media were flooded with video materials recorded by drones (drone footage) titled “The Silent City,” “ghost town,” “eerie quiet” presenting Chicago, Rome, Budapest, Liverpool or Warsaw all stuck in motion. “The difference between silence and noise has finally ceased to be just a theory. Many of us have managed to experience it with our own ears.” (Nowicki 2020.)

The aim of the present study is to investigate documents broadcast in audio media, for which the indicated acoustic phenomenon is not only a topic but also an element of the message structure, in order to illustrate the effects of silence experienced during the pandemic. The analysis targeted the radio reportages made from March to May 2020, when Poland suffered the strictest restrictions related to COVID-19. The study included the Polish Radio reportages aired both on national and 17 regional radio stations also made available on the stations’ websites in the form of podcasts. The selection involved the productions directly referring to auditory experiences without considering a number of recordings on other aspects of the pandemic, such as remote education, the health care situation, volunteer work or economic problems caused by the appearance of the coronavirus. The aim of the present analysis is to provide answers to detailed questions concerning the description of silence in the radio reportages made during the said period and the use of silence as a phonic tool for creating meanings.

The presented characteristics are based on audible material. Its subsequent stages take into account the structure of the radio work and the conditions of radio broadcasting that directly determine the shape of the message. The transcripts of fragments of radio broadcasts presented below include notes inserted in square

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brackets, which regard the information concerning the middle-distance sounds, non-verbal elements of the statement and meta-textual comments.

Radio Reportage within the Context of Sound Studies The acoustic dimension of the pandemic documented in the radio reportage is studied in the context of sound studies defined as “an interdisciplinary area that studies the material production and consumption of music, sound, noise and silence” (Pinch and Bijsterveld 2012, 7). The phenomenon of sound within the framework of sound studies is analysed in terms of diverse aspects, i.e. acoustic ecology (Schafer 1994 [1977], Truax 2001 [1984]), sound design, sound art, listening practice, acoustemology (Feld 2015) and anthropology of sound (Schulze, 2018, 2020). This diversity of possible approaches makes Jonathan Sterne define sound studies as “the interdisciplinary ferment in the human sciences that takes sound as its analytical point of departure or arrival” (2012, 2).

The notion of soundscape proposed by R. Murray Schafer (1994 [1977]) is the starting point for reporting sound in terms of perception and society. He regards sounds characteristic for a specific space or situation as an element of sonic environment. That category does not only include a set of audible feedback – sound features of reality, but also subjective feeling and sound experience.

Marshall McLuhan (1962) defines a phonic stratum as “acoustic space,” underlying the necessity for detachment from visuality in communication. In the Polish discourse, sound is often defined as “audiosphere” (Stanisz 2012, Losiak and Tańczuk 2014, Szpunar 2020) implemented into scientific research by Maria Gołaszewska (1997) as an aspect of “easthetics of senses.”

Exhibiting sound draws attention to the activity of listening, raising awareness, and acoustic sensitivity. Schafer points to the need for modelling these skills and for special preparation to the listening experience, naming the process “ear cleaning” (1994, 208–211). In what concerns this perspective, the reflections of Pauline Oliveros, who introduced the notion of “deep listening,” are particularly valuable (2005). The composer recommends the practice of focusing intensively not only on musical sounds, but also on the sounds of nature, daily life, and mindset.

In radio reportages, registration and composition of acoustic details is combined with generation of emotions and development of narration, and particularly with the use of personal narrative (Lindgren 2016). Radio reportages documenting volatile sound space during the pandemic can be distinguished from other audial

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projects, for instance #Stayhomesounds on the sonic portal, Cities and Memory (Droumeva 2021).

Radio Reportage in the Period of COVID-19 According to Monika Białek: “radio reportage presents a coherent image of the external reality registered on the spot. This image is painted with sounds, it has some aesthetic value highlighted by the whole set of radio ways of expressions and is composed by the journalist on the basis of authentic events” (Białek 2018, 109–110). The documentary quality of the broadcast is stressed by the characters’ natural, spontaneous statements and the real acoustic background of the recorded place. Another distinguishing element of the genre is its non-accidental composition and dramaturgy. The registered conversations and events build an independent story. As researchers emphasize (Klimczak 2011b, Ryczkowski 2018, McLeish and Link 2015) reportage, without giving up its informative function, combines the latter with an aesthetic one, which is associated with the conceptual framework of artistic journalism (Postema and Deuze, 2020). Reportage gains its expressive power through authenticity, personal character of the spoken word, sometimes extremely intimate, as well as through the sound qualities of a given recording.

Making any radio reportage has always required advanced competencies and a mature journalistic style. However, in the conditions of social isolation and the COVID-19 threat, this task has become a real challenge. “How can we make reportages and podcasts when we cannot leave the house?” – the esteemed reporters of the Polish Radio, Hanna Bogoryja-Zakrzewska and Katarzyna Błaszczyk, asked on their blog in March 2020. “We cannot visit a particular site, that is, we cannot do what is most important for a reporter. We are devoid of a possibility to meet another man.” (Bogoryja-Zakrzewska and Błaszczyk 2020.)

The recordings on the phone or instant messaging as well as the inclusion of amateur recordings made by the characters themselves in the broadcasts became a solution. In this way, the protagonists became co-creators of the programmes.

The creator-protagonist role reversal functioned the other way, too: more often than usual, the author’s voice and a record of his or her everyday life can be heard in reportages. These turned the journalist into a protagonist of a broadcast.

Reporters used social media more frequently than ever before. Social media started to function not only as a platform for the promotion of programmes, but also as a space for contacts with the characters as well as recording of the content material. The reporters of the Polish Radio in Gdańsk and Lublin, Magda

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Świerczyńska-Dolot and Katarzyna Michalak, led a joint sound project called I Do Not Hear (Nie słyszę, 2020).1 Their original idea reversed the traditional production strategy and distribution of audio content: firstly, the journalists were collecting audio materials on the Internet for a few weeks, placing short audio recordings on a specially created blog. Secondly, the statements compiled in this way were exploited only in the next stage to be aired on a radio station. The reportage sound layer – likewise, the everyday lives of the characters in these broadcasts – was/were saturated with the sounds of Internet communicators, smartphones and computers. The human voice modulated on the phone was provided with an “electronic” sound and the statements were often accompanied by acoustic pollution: wind striking the microphone, crackling, signal fading, providing a new aesthetic of the professional radio reportage focusing so far on pure sound and perfect acoustics. Unusual types of radio reportages made during the pandemic resulted from the limitations imposed on editorial work and, at the same time, from the need to find solutions that could be attractive to the listener.

Radio reportages are, therefore, a valuable documentation of the lockdown as an exceptional social moment and a repository of original stories about the “quiet contemporaneity.”

Reporter Stories as the Documentary of Silent Cities The main components of the polyphonic narrative structure of radio reportage are: the human voice, acoustic effects, music and silence (Wójciszyn-Wasil 2018).

Individual sequences of a recording build overlapping layers of sound, creating a soundscape: expressive sounds in the foreground and acoustic background coming from afar. In the specific sound texture, all elements have their own meanings.

The first group of reporter stories can be regarded as documentaries of silent cities. The protagonists of Joanna Sikora’s reportage Listen to Silence (Posłuchaj ciszy, 2020)2 describe how the bustling streets of Rome, Bilbao and New York usually sound. The inhabitants of the mentioned cities, like professional reporters, provide accounts from the place of the events: “It’s going to be a little shaky because I’m walking down the street. I need to buy something to eat so I left home. [pause] Beautiful sky, a walk down an empty street.” “It is a beautiful, sunny afternoon in Spain, for now I am the only person here. [distant hum] Attention! There is a car, something unusual.” “Hi, hello. We’re broadcasting live from New York. I’m 1 2

Online: https://nieslysze.pl/. Last accessed 01. 05. 2021.

Online: https://www.radio.bialystok.pl/reportaz/index/id/181986. Last accessed 01. 05. 2021.

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going to work. I also wanted to show you that there’s no one around, the streets are deserted.” The silence looming out of the quoted statements is only signalled in the verbal layer by the terms: “An empty street,” “a car – something unusual,” “there’s no one around,” and it is complemented and at the same time authenticated by the sound of the middle-distance. Instead of the sound of street cafes, car horns and shouting crowds or the music of street musicians, a weak, steady noise reaches the listener’s ears from a distance. The seemingly ordinary situation of going out for shopping or to work, which becomes an event worthy of media attention, emphasizes the uncommonness of the situation in pandemic conditions.

The description of a quiet metropolitan street in another part of the programme is supplemented with further details: “It’s just empty everywhere, there’s nobody. There’s a bus or a car coming through from time to time. Generally, it’s very quiet. When I wake up during the year, there are a lot of shops around with the external shutters pulled down by the shops for the night and lifted up in the morning; these blinds make an awful big bang which can be heard everywhere [the police car signal is getting stronger in the background] the Carabineers drove by [the police siren signal, hum] [the protagonist comes back to the interrupted thought] no one is lifting them, this sound is absent.”

Silence becomes an acoustic synonym for absence. In a literal sense, it expresses the absence of sounds characteristic of a given place, such as the sound of the lifted-up shop roller blinds – constituting some kind of acoustic reference point for the inhabitants of the Italian capital – mentioned by the protagonist of the radio broadcast. In a broader context, silence refers to the loss of active life, everyday rush rhythm, intense social interactions. According to the findings of audio anthropologists, hustle and bustle is understood as an “evidence for the significance and power of the city and the well-being of its inhabitants” (Losiak 2012, 15). As Brandon LaBelle notes: “noise is not only environmental disturbance. Rather, it remarkably provides a key experience for the establishment of an acoustic community in the making” (2014, 82). He further defines noise as “a relational exchange where sound is also voice, dialogue, sharing, and confrontation,” “a rich encounter for the making of responsibility” (2014, 82).

The sense of security, prosperity and an encounter during the pandemic has been taken away not only from the inhabitants of large cities. Silence has become a universal symbol of the sense of threat, fear and uncertainty.

The moment when a police siren is heard in the background of the protagonist’s speech draws attention in the above reportage excerpt. The woman tries to ignore

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the siren, but the sound is so strong that it interrupts the issue being discussed.

Then the sound of the siren enters the foreground, filling the pause. The character refers to this sound, unambiguously identifying it with words: “the carabineers drove by” and only after a while does she continue the unfinished sentence.

The described scene lasts only 7 seconds, but the cumulated sounds and their peculiar dramaturgy create a suggestive image that advances to the rank of a sound metaphor. Authentic announcements and words recorded in a real, concrete space lose their literalness, opening new dimensions of interpretation.

“By taking the interpretation to a deeper level, we touch on some general truth about reality, we read the story on several levels of meaning” (Klimczak 2011a, 132). The moment of reality recorded in the sound shows how fear and danger interrupt everyday life, come to the fore and necessitate changes.

The police sirens and statements “Stay at home,” issued through a megaphone, are not the only contrasts to the silence of the big city. Concerts on balconies and applause for medical service are also characteristic sound accents of the pandemic.

They are a sign of solidarity and a sense of community in ghost cities and they give encouragement and hope. The noise generated by spontaneous actions brings back vitality for a moment and a sense of causality. Breaking the silence removes social distance. The discussed programme by Sikora includes an extensive sequence of amateur applause recordings for health service. The author mixes sounds from Rome and New York, displaying their supra-local dimension. A similar commentary provided by one of the protagonists reveals how the city’s audiosphere and its experiencing change: “At the beginning of the quarantine we had such a social initiative that we met and sang together on the balconies. We organized the said balcony concerts because it still seemed to all of us that it was okay, well, we believed that it was enough just to stay at home and we would overcome it all [breathing], but when we saw these growing numbers, we stopped laughing and I guess, nobody felt like having fun or singing on the balconies or playing loud music [sighing], I really had the impression that there was a bit – literally – like the silence of the grave. It was a moment when I didn’t even see my neighbours on the balconies. When I was going out on the balcony, I saw an empty world and I had the feeling that in this silence there was such a great tension [pause] [sigh], fear, terror [breath] such a great mourning [pause], such even national mourning. [pause] Although nobody really talked about it, [pause] I felt it floating somewhere.”

The silence, which at the beginning of the pandemic was perceived as an annoying effect of forced isolation, turned into a symbol of tension, fear and mourning in the following weeks. Its significance became increasingly negative.

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The reasons were the worsening epidemiological situation, further information about infections and deaths as well as the (individual and collective) reaction to the said dramatic circumstances. The evolution of the sensual perception of silence presented in the protagonist’s statement is simultaneously a record of the transformation of emotions accompanying her feeling. Personal reference to the context models its meaning. The same character who described silence as “frightening,” “of the grave” can give it a positive overtone, calling it “the silence of hope, of some concentration” at the moment of the decreasing range of COVID-19. As she explains, silence means for her then that “the situation is slowly improving for us, that we can manage and that we should stay locked down for some time, that we still need to endure more and that we can’t give up.”

The specificity of silence as an acoustic phenomenon allows it to become a sign of extreme existential experiences: both mourning and hope can be a prelude to catastrophe as well as an expectation for a better future. Its semantics emerges in confrontation with a contrasting sound. The observations made here are in line with the findings of other researchers (Komisaruk 2014, Losiak 2011), who stress the fact that silence refers to a specific situation, redefining its meaning and value each time.

“Within the four Walls” – Silence of Enclosed Spaces Radio reports document not only the unique sound environment of the pandemic period, but also the experience of lockdown “from the inside,” showing what life is like for people locked down in their own homes for weeks. The listener is given insight into a private space accessible only to co-inhabitants, which introduces a personal perspective to the narrative. Reporters often arrange recordings in the space where the protagonist operates on a daily basis, as it is one of the ways of audile character identification as well as a provision of a psychological mechanism facilitating greater honesty on the part of an interlocutor. When paying visits to people in their own flats became impossible during the COVID-19 threat, their function was taken over by recordings made by the characters themselves, which at the same time enriched the construction of radio broadcasts and strengthened the authenticity of the conveyed messages. The above form of cooperation facilitated the creation of the reportage entitled: In isolation (W izolacji)3 by Magda Świerczyńska-Dolot from Radio Gdańsk. “Some time ago 3

Online: https://m.radiogdansk.pl/audycje-rg/manufaktura-reportazu/item/109343-jak-bedziewygladal-swiat-po-koronawirusie-czy-wroci-jeszcze-normalnosc-reportaz-w-izolacji.

Last accessed 01. 05. 2021.

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I wrote a message on a social network. I asked my friends for audio recordings concerning the time of isolation” (Świerczyńska-Dolot 2020). In one of the first sequences of the recording, the question “Do you hear?” is uttered and after a pause, when no sounds reach the listener’s ears, the answer is given: “This is silence.” It is puzzling why this “sound emptiness” draws so much attention.

The protagonist explains: “In such a large family like ours, with seven people, silence is a deficit, we still miss it. I miss it when I run between the kids, plug something in, when they have online lessons, I miss it when they argue. And now there’s silence. And I miss it.” Family life inside four walls is getting more intense. Family members function within a limited, common space and are forced to undertake various, sometimes mutually exclusive, activities. One of the characters notices: “Our home has become home, school and workplace at the same time, in exactly that order of priorities.”

Remotely based work and education in lockdown conditions forces each person staying in a flat to perform tasks simultaneously. In such a reality, the home ceases to be a natural “refuge of peace and quiet.” This situation is illustrated by Katarzyna – the main character of Hanna Bogoryja-Zakrzewska’s reportage: “Rose at one desk, having her ZOOM classes; Jeremiah at the other end of the room, sitting back to Rose, has his classes. Marcin, in the other room, is involved in whole day long saxophone classes with his students; I have my own classes with students and there is one more person – poor little Jonah –, who usually gets a tablet to play educational games. And simply, everybody is engrossed in talking to their screen” (Bogoryja-Zakrzewska 2020).

The radio broadcast bears a telling title, Where Silence is Missing (Tam, gdzie ciszy brak)4, and portrays two families through their everyday activities: three children are raised in one family and seven kids are brought up in the other one.

Both families play music, the children deal not only with their homework, but also practice playing the instruments and there is a new-born baby as well, who needs care. All the said circumstances make silence a difficult state to maintain.

This is evidenced by means of mobile phone recordings made by a mother and her daughter. Expressive conversations, joint learning, singing as well as loudly voiced children’s rebellions against their duties are heard in them. One of the characters says straightforwardly: “I miss silence, I miss silence the most in the world” and adds: “when I find a moment to write something, I have to put on my headphones and cut myself off from the world with some other music, so I 4

Online: https://www.polskieradio.pl/80/1007/Artykul/2500537,Tam-gdzie-ciszy-brak-reportazHanny-BogoryjaZakrzewskiej. Last accessed 01. 05. 2021.

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miss silence.” Two overlapping layers of sound constitute the background to the quoted statement: a lively exchange of opinions between children and playing the saxophone. The second trick to enhance the impression of noise is to modify the levels of sound intensity: the sound in the background is so loud that the words that should be well heard in the foreground blend in and, consequently, the listener is forced to make more effort to understand them. With these acoustic solutions, an overwhelming hustle and bustle of the recorded family is not only referred to by the characters, but becomes a listener’s direct experience, too.

The need to combine work, education, household duties and the diversity of needs and expectations of each family member makes silence – even the one that remains at the level of a dream – an escape from intense stimuli, rest, an equivalent of peace and suppressed emotions. It is also a longing for an orderly daily rhythm, concentration, sometimes listening to oneself, regaining control over one’s life.

The silence experienced within four walls recorded by radio reporters has yet another dimension: slow motion, distance, suspension of daily routine. One of the participants of the sound project I Do Not Hear notes: “At the beginning of the pandemic, the silence denoted some calmness and rest from everyday life and duties. It was only later that we started to notice things connected with this silence [pause]. It is due to the fact that I miss not only sounds, but also silence that is not burdened with a sense of distance and coolness” (Michalak and ŚwierczyńskaDolot 2020). Other statements point to a longing for silence experienced in a museum, office or forest, “a specific silence as it is not altogether quiet in the forest” (Michalak and Świerczyńska-Dolot 2020). The references mentioned above show that the protagonists express their desire to return to direct contacts, to work with others, to change their place and to have a close, uninterrupted virtual contact with art. Marcin, who recorded his poignant speech in Australia, referred to an empty church, to which he, as a priest, refused admission to people usually seeking consolation and spiritual strength there: “Maybe someone even knows I’m inside, I don’t know. I can’t let the person in, it’s very painful.” Staying silent requires people to refrain from reacting to one another, from spontaneous kindness and to give up meetings. Silence becomes an expression of longing for the other person, for conversation, common laughter and the natural sound of human voice, not deformed by the Internet communication, in which “this subtlety and these nuances, something that is difficult to describe in words and which is always obvious when we meet someone live, escape” (Michalak and Świerczyńska-Dolot 2020). Therefore, silence becomes synonymous with loneliness, abandonment, the “curse of isolation” (Świerczyńska-Dolot 2020).

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It is significant that the issue of increased acoustic sensitivity returns in the stories of silence compiled during the pandemic. Experiencing a muffled space forces us to listen carefully: “Now when I’m in the garden, the singing of birds seems to be more distinct,” “now I start listening again, I’m curious to discover new sounds,” “now I can hear every little detail, every sound of my house more clearly” (Michalak and Świerczyńska-Dolot 2020). A sharpened perception stimulates a deeper reflection, in which silence ceases to be merely a lack of stimuli: “After many, many years it has come to my attention that this silence has as many shades as the white colour includes.”

Silence as a Tool for Creating Meanings in Audile Messages According to Joanna Sosnowska, “silence is not directly synonymous with absence or emptiness in the media message. It is a specific form of existence of meanings and emotions, which cannot be conveyed through other means of expression” (2019, 101). However, radio researchers stress that silence, as a stylistic element of the message, occurs “on an exceptional basis” (Kita 2017, 38). Grażyna Stachyra writes about a perceptible “fear of pause” in the media, especially on the radio (2019, 72).

In artistic genres like the reportage, silence is a sparingly and precisely used tool for modulating meaning. It is opposed to sound and has great potential for expression: “strengthens, highlights, exposes, marks the dramatic moment” (Wójciszyn-Wasil 2012, 109). Monika Białek notes that: “Silence can be heard most clearly in the radio reportage. It does not only sound, it also plays” (2010, 87). It can be noticed that this phonic sound is exploited mainly as an acoustic background and a pause separating words and phrases in the reports of the COVID-19 pandemic period.

The absence of background sounds in the sound-rich reportage structure facilitates the exposition of the foreground sounds. Michał Kaziów, writing about this function of silence, compares it to the whiteness of a canvas or a blank sheet of paper (1973, 107), as it does not distract the recipient but focuses his/ her attention on the content. The most personal statements of the protagonists, often concerning painful experiences, breakthrough decisions, moments of reevaluation of life are usually recorded in silence. The sequence of Joanna Sikora’s programmes, in which the character sincerely acknowledges her powerlessness and fear, was recorded in such an arranged environment without any additional noises: “Me during coronavirus... [voice suspension] [pause] [breathing] I guess it’s really the greatest lesson of humility in my whole life [the voice breaks]

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[prolonged pause] that there are so many things that are... [pause] beyond my control and I can’t help it [pause]. All I can do is accept it, get over it [pause], [shivering breath], live with the hope that everything will be all right, that we will be able to get through, that we will overcome it, [pause], that we will come back to life that may even be better than ever before” (Sikora 2020).

The narrative is a confidential confession requiring the attention of the recipient.

Silence reinforces the said effect, forcing the recipient to become more involved.

Silence as a pause between the words or phrases of a monologue does not only serve the purpose of taking in air, it also has an intonational function that enhances the meaning of the words following the pause and enables the recipient to understand the text (Bloch 2013, 69). In a monosensory, audible message, the aim is usually to shorten the utterance as much as possible in order to achieve a dynamic and colloquial effect. Breaking with this principle in reportage emphasizes the uniqueness and range of a given issue and its personal character. Sometimes, nonverbal elements, such as a sigh, loud breathing with a clearly audible quavering revealing a hardly restrained sob, appear in this space filled with silence. The lack of fluency typical of spoken language (Majewska-Tworek 2014, 154) is a sign of reportage authenticity. According to Maciej Drygas, author of radio plays and reportages: “a man who glides smoothly through his life often sounds less believable than the one who laboriously evokes image after image from his memory” (2010, 323). More often than usually, silence occurs as an important component of the message in radio reports on the pandemic. The intervals between individual sound sequences are long and clear, which slows down the pace of speech and deprives the recipient of the perceptual comfort. In this way, tension is built, the drama of the situation is emphasized and emotions are generated. It confirms the potential of silence as an effective tool for managing the recipient’s attention.

Conclusions Silence and its experience in the media narrative about the pandemic are particularly interesting in radio broadcasts based on auditory experiences. The reports of the Polish Radio, produced from March to May 2020, document unusual lockdown circumstances, while at the same time make people sensitive to new sounds, resulting from lifestyle changes in the face of the threat of COVID-19.

The broadcasts discussed above include both reporter recordings from Spain, Italy and the United States presenting big cities devoid of the characteristic hustle and bustle, as well as personal stories about the silence of apartments

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where the protagonists of the recordings were locked for weeks. Silence ceases to be understood solely as the elimination of noise, and becomes a metaphor for danger, fear, loneliness, longing for a return to daily activities, and on the other hand, it is read as a sign of deeper reflection, greater attention and hope.

These multi-directional and even contradictory connotations are not mutually exclusive, since the meaning and value of silence is constituted in contexts.

Experiencing silence goes beyond the individual feeling thanks to a metaphoric line through which the recorded stories gain a universal context. The researchers and media creators regard the aforementioned approach “an essential structural element of good radio reportage” (Sygizman-Klimczak 2018, 37). The metaphor takes the form not only of a lexical juxtaposition but of an elaborate configuration of various sounds, shaping multidimensional scenes.

Tackling the subject of radiophonic silence requires a deeper reflection on its location and function in the structure of the sound material. Silence as background for the leading voices plays the role of an acoustic stage design, as a backdrop to the narrative situation. The pauses in the protagonists’ statements not only segment the content, but also emphasize the importance of individual phrases. They also point to the spontaneous and emotional character of the argument as well as confirm its authenticity. The “Space of Silence” in the radio broadcast facilitates the management of the listeners’ involvement, because the silence perception demands their participation. Silence has become a productive formula for a media narrative in a radio reportage about the pandemic, which provided an opportunity to discover new possibilities of audile communication and expose the value of sound. Radio broadcasts are a record of the state of silence and a kind of watchful listening so unusual for modern civilization. This new aesthetic of sound provides an impulse for further research into the evolution of audio production and the function of silence in the media.

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Acta Univ. Sapientiae, Film and Media Studies, 20 (2021) 68–85 DOI: 10.2478/ausfm-2021-0015

A Tale of Sound and Fury Signifying Everything: Argentine Tango Dance Films as Complex Self-Reflexive Creation Fátima Chinita

Lisbon Polytechnic Institute (Portugal) E-mail: chinita.estc@gmail.com Abstract. This article equates the multidimensional artistic form of Argentine tango (dance, music and song) with the innately hybrid form of film. It compares Argentine tango culture to the height of French cinephilia in the 1950s Paris, France, arguing that they are both passionate, erotic and nostalgic ways of life. In Carlos Saura’s Tango (1998) and Sally Potter’s The Tango Lesson (1997), the intertwining of the related skills of tango practice and filmmaking are an audio-visual treat for the senses and a cognitive challenge for the mind. Their self-reflexivity promotes excess and the result is a highly expressive and complex form. They evince a cross-fertilization of reality and fiction, of art and life, typical of a perfect mise en abyme as described by Christian Metz. These films are also art musicals, although they depart from the Hollywood musical conventions. Yet, one cannot speak in their case of intermedia reflexivity, according to Petr Szczepanik’s definition, because both of them retain their qualities in a symbiotic relationship of likeness that highlights their mutual aura.

Keywords: Argentine tango, meta-cinema, self-reflexivity, hybridity, intermediality, cinephilia.

Introduction: To Begin with, or La Salida Argentine tango is a threefold art made up of dance, song and a purely instrumental form (Bloomsbury Encyclopedia 2014, 826). The authors of Tracing Tangueros consider it to be a “multidimensional” artistic form combining dance, music and poetry: “just as the dance strikes a pose in a sensual embrace, the music cries with the woeful sounds of the bandonéon, and the poetry laments a bygone time” (Link and Wendland 2016, 1). García Brunelli goes farther in that he does not limit the poetry to the lyrics, considering it instead part of a full-fledged cultural legacy: “poetry is the product of a wonderful poetic quality and an appealing

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cultural density” (2015, 4, my translation). In fact, on the 30th of September 2009, UNESCO provided grounds for these and other related arguments when it declared “tango” (music, dance, and song) part of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity and charged all professionals dealing with it, in one way or another, with the responsibility of protecting and preserving tango culture.1 Because it is multidimensional, most of the times, tango is also interdisciplinary.

There cannot be tango dance without tango music, with or without lyrics. Omar García Brunelli claims that when tango is meant to be danced, a special communication between musicians and dancers is established (2015, 26). Furthermore, Brandon Olszewski argues that dancing to the music (i.e. in synch with it) while adjusting to one’s partner’s highly improvisational movements contributes to Argentine tango’s renowned complexity (2008, 72).2 Even Ástor Piazzolla’s Tango Nuevo, a type of intellectual instrumental music not meant to be danced to, can actually be danced to, as attested by Sally Potter’s and Pablo Verón’s rendition of Libertango in the film The Tango Lesson (1997). Indeed, the Bloomsbury Encyclopedia claims that “any tango can be danced, whether it is a song or an instrumental piece” (2014, 826).

In what follows, I approach tango dance from this interdisciplinary perspective, focusing on two case studies from the 1990s: Tango (1998, written and directed by Carlos Saura, original music and orchestration by Lalo Schifrin, a co-production between Spain and Argentina) and The Tango Lesson (1997, written and directed

by Sally Potter, music by Fred Firth and Sally Potter, a co-production between UK, France, Argentina, Germany and the Netherlands).

I follow an intermedial purpose: to conflate two different art forms − dance and cinema, and more specifically the already hybrid subcategories of tango and metafilms – in order to highlight a discourse on inter-art creativity. According to Petr Szczepanik (2002, 29): “reflexivity constitutes a fundamental feature of all kinds of intermediality.” Saura’s Tango and Potter’s The Tango Lesson are both metafilms and which, for the purpose of this article, I consider to be films about films, in which the auteur, consciously and recurrently, portrays cinema in the act of being made or watched.3 According to Lucien Dällenbach (1977), all films that portray the 1 2

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See the full text here: https://ich.unesco.org/en/RL/tango-00258. Last accessed 15. 07. 2021.

Unlike ballroom tango, Argentine tango – from which the former derives – has no choreography whatsoever when practiced socially. Although there is a set of key steps, the pairs simply improvise upon them.

I do not restrict this filmic category to the classical products that merely depict the film industry and/or the lives of those involved (Hollywood-on-Hollywood Films); neither do I exclusively regard it as the modernist variety defended by William C. Siska (1979). What I consider to be meta-cinema exists at the exact intersection of the former two aspects: films about the activity of filmmaking that are also (self-) reflexive. For the sake of simplicity, I consider meta-films to

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agents, the process and the context of production and/or reception can be said to be enunciative mise en abymes (in English: “mirror images”). The more self-reflexive a film is, the more powerful and complex the mirroring becomes. In my two case studies, self-reflexivity directly serves the film’s theme together with the film’s specific subject. It is my contention that in these two films, the art and practice of filmmaking directly reflect tango’s musical and choreographic complexity (as well as its philosophy of life), binding the two art forms closely together.

For the Sake of Passion Cinema and Argentine tango have much in common and it is rather surprising that, to my knowledge, the connection has never been made before. Both are art forms and passionate institutionalized cultures. More importantly, there is something inexplicably enticing about Argentine tango and cinema alike. Murray Pfeffer, in his brief history of tango, observes: “El tango no es en los pies. Es en el corazón” [“Tango dance resides not in the feet, but rather in the heart”].4 For all moviegoers, and especially confessed cinephiles, that diehard category of viewers, cinema is also an intense experience.

Robert Farris Thompson asserts that “Tango is the art history of love. It is the dance that teaches the world to love and to live in the idiom of Buenos Aires” (2005, 275). Brandon Olszewski (2008) claims that under normal circumstances, there is a kinetic relationship between two people who dance in an embrace on a dance-floor in synch to the music. Sometimes that connection, termed by him cuerpo de baile, is so strong that it conveys the impression of the partners merging into a single entity. Sadly, that connection must come to an end. Kathy Davis adds: “it is this transitory quality that forms an essential feature of tango passion.

Connection is not only about people coming together. It is also about leaving one another and longing to return another time, for another dance, again and again and again” (2015, 12). Director Sally Potter states that “there is something about [tango] that really inspires obsession, even addiction” (Béhar 1997). Kathy Davis, a feminist academic who dances the tango, concurs with her opinion. She considers it a “bodily activity that is intensely pleasurable, addictively desired, but also unsettling, disruptive” (2015, 3).

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be films that belong to the overall category of meta-cinema, and not films that reveal their own construction (as argued by Christian Metz 1991). http://www.trio.garufa.com/tango-history.html. Last accessed 15. 07. 2021. All translations in square brackets are mine.

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As historically noted by Antoine de Baecque (2003, 9), the same was felt in the height of cinephilia in the 1950s Paris, France, by the various “tribes” of specialized filmgoers, whose lives were entirely organized around films. They, too, were intent on establishing a personal and intense relationship with the films they watched, mesmerized by the images and the filmic moment, as explained by one of the film-buff protagonists of Bernardo Bertolucci’s film The Dreamers (2003): “I was one of the insatiables. The ones you would always find sitting closest to the screen. […] we wanted to receive the images first, when they were still new, still fresh, before they cleared the hurdles of the rows behind us, before they had been relayed back from row to row, spectator to spectator, into worn out second-hand the size of a postage stamp to return to the projectionist cabin.”

Argentine tango and cinema are both cults and ways of life. The “Tango culture” − originally referring to the practices and customs of the early disadvantaged “porteños,”5 mostly European immigrants from Italy and Spain, peasants from the Argentinian hinterland (the gauchos) and descendants of liberated African slaves − meant a dress code, a certain bodily communication, a social stratum and specific sites.6 Today, it is still an all-consuming pastime for many Buenos Aires residents, who dance through the night at neighbourhood dance clubs known as milongas, where tourists hardly ever enter. As for the Parisian cinephilia of the 1950s, it was in the beginning, according to de Baecque (2003, 19), a “counterculture,” an underground community turned inwards and confined to its own rituals, bound together by a complicity of taste, a practice of writing and talking incessantly about films as well as undertaking a fetishistic smuggling of directors’ filmographies and screenplays (de Baecque 2003, 20–21). There was even a film theatre of choice for each group of cinephiles.

The Argentine tango is a dramatic dance, full of emotion expressed from inside out, and deeply erotic by nature. The dancers are suffused with emotion, but do not express it outwardly, dancing with blank expressions (cara fea) and in absolute silence. Argentine tango is a dance of solely corporeal communication, 5 6

Residents of Buenos Aires. They got their name from the port area of the Río de la Plata.

The “compadrito” a ruffian, thief and pimp, wore a brimmed hat thrown over one eye, a white handkerchief tied around his neck, a short tight coat, baggy trousers, a knife at his side, and had a waddling gait. Most commentators argue that tango was originally danced at poor and/ or ill-reputed venues: brothels, academias (where locals danced with in-house dancers), peringundíns (taverns in which both couples and single men danced), conventillos (miserable and highly populated tenement buildings for immigrants), and the street (where compadritos exhibited their skills, often challenging one another) (Cámara de Landa 2003, 98). For a detailed description of the tango culture upon its inception, see Jorge Luis Borges’s four conferences on tango (2018).

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performed in close embrace (i.e. chest-to-chest, with joined bodies moving on their axis) and in which only the legs are free for downward extensions and other manoeuvres. R. F. Thompson claims that “if tango were only sex the art would evaporate. […] But all the best dancers combine art and sensuousness, exploring the consequences” (2005, 276). Some movements − the boleo (a rapid kick backwards), la metida (a leg quickly introduced between one’s partner’s legs), the quebrada (a lateral torsion of the hips), and the ocho (in which the woman twirls in front of the man, imitating the figure eight) − are brisk but exciting movements, reinforcing the syncopated rhythm of the music and its intrinsic fluctuations, caused by marcato (playing some notes with more strength than others), and arrastre (e.g. a stroke that changes the speed), among others. Link and Wendland observe that “Arrastre further accentuates tango accompaniment by creating an aural impression of yearning and striving.” (2016, 30).

Similarly, cinema as lifestyle in the Paris of the 1950s was imbued with erotomania. Both for the “Young Turks,” a group of radical young writers for Cahiers du cinéma, and for the older critics of specialized film magazines, love for women was inseparable from their love for films. According to de Baecque (2003, 269), the younger generation of cinephiles had their own sentimental education in the film theatres. Nonetheless, in my opinion, it is the experience of cinema as a whole irrespective of the films’ contents that matters most for the comparison that I am trying to establish here. Indeed, Christian Metz, in his book The Imaginary Signifier (1980, 75–76), describes the Seventh Art as a voyeuristic activity, one in which the film projected on the screen serves as an exhibitionist to the spectators’ desire to watch. Via the cinematic institution, a dual consensual relationship is thus metaphorically established between film watcher and film watched, in which the latter, especially in fictional and classically structured films, captivates the spectator in a darkened immersive atmosphere, which is in itself erotic inasmuch as the film is offered to the viewer through the filmic apparatus. Everything in the film (i.e. characters, actions, camera placement and mise en scène) is transparent, as if the viewer did not exist. Moreover, due to the inherent conditions of production and reception, film viewers are never present in the act of filmmaking, nor are they on the screen upon which the film is being shown. Thus, according to Metz, films are always in an inaccessible, “primordial somewhere, highly desirable (= forever unobtainable) in a scene of absence” (1980). The impossibility of fusion transforms the spectators’ longing into a perpetual condition of cinephilia. Consequently, sacred eroticism is attained through sublimation: cinephilia, the exacerbated love for cinema, consists in

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placing the film at an altogether different (and higher) level of existence from where it can be worshipped from afar. This much is granted by Sally Potter about tango in The Tango Lesson, in which, at some point, she makes the dancer Pablo Verón say: “Je crois qu’il faut mieux sublimer l’attirance qu’on a l’un pour l’autre dans le travail” [“I think it’s best to sublimate the attraction we have for each other and direct it towards our work together”] (Grunes 2007).

Thomas Elsaesser contends that in all types of cinephilia, but especially that of the first generation (in the 1950s Paris), the transience of the cinematic experience and the sense that it is unrecoverable always induces nostalgia, a feeling of anxiety and mourning (2005, 33). However, Jenna Ng asserts that cinephilia is infused with much more: death, nostalgia, regret, bleakness, longing, hopelessness, reminiscence (2005, 66). In short, all what Argentine tango evokes. The famous Argentinian lyricist Enrique Santos Discépolo contends that “El tango es un pensamiento triste que se baila” [“Tango is a sad thought expressed through dance”] (quoted in Link and Wendland 2016, 11). Throughout Argentine tango’s history, its lyrics have been filled with all types of misery and misfortune. From the deceit, abandonment, frustration and lost love contained in the first tango song − Mi noche triste (1917, music by Samuel Catriosta and lyrics by Pascual Contursi) − to the social uprooting of the immigrants, their disappointments, nostalgia for the homelands left behind as well as the fatalities and unhappy endings of the 1920s and 1930s, tango song has been “the exaltation of failure” (García Brunelli, 2015, 24, quoting Rosalba Campra, my translation).

Labyrinthine Steps Beyond art form practices, reception models, and genre conventions; the analogy between Argentine tango and meta-cinema may be carried right into the story and the way it is conveyed. Both Saura’s Tango and Potter’s The Tango Lesson are asserted discourses on creation, representing the absorbing nature of filmmaking and the effort it demands from its principal maker, the art house director as leader of the project, just as the best tango dancers obsess about practicing their moves and attaining excellence.

Saura’s Tango begins in deadlock. The protagonist, the director Mario (played

by Miguel Ángel Solá), has been left by his female life partner, the dancer Laura (played by Cecília Narova), and remains in sentimental denial, despite the fact that she is now living with another man. Eventually, by working on his tango project − a musical with dance, song and intradiegetic film projection – he is

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empowered again, and becomes able to lead his own life as he leads the project with stern resolution (even going against the investors’ recommendations). At one point he observes: “Oh, inspiration where are you? And what is inspiration if not work, work, work?”7 His new take on life involves courting a young dancer, Elena (played by Mía Maestro), who befriends a mobster. Mario, therefore, plays with fire and the exhilaration of danger.

In Potter’s The Tango Lesson, the protagonist, Sally (played by the director, Sally Potter, herself) chooses to abandon a filmic project on fashion models that she was preparing. She does this because she cannot gain the investors’ trust to make it exactly as she wanted, opting for a more personal project on tango instead. It is quite relevant that the creative character in her abandoned film is a disabled male stylist (quite literally without legs), whereas the protagonist of her own dance film is a woman who can stand − and dance − on her own two feet. The entire Tango Lesson, thus, depicts the struggle for power of a woman in a man’s world, or more precisely, how others end up socially and emotionally accepting her already existent power. Tango serves as a metaphor both for the commitment that relationships require and the involvement and “trust” that filmmaking calls for. Empowerment, of the right kind, comes only through sacrifices and suffering.

In fact, upon finding out that she dances the tango, a taxi driver in Buenos Aires ventures that she must have lived and suffered in order to be able to understand his country’s tangos.

Nevertheless, in both Saura’s Tango and Potter’s The Tango Lesson, tango is not only the catalyst of creation; it is the very means by which the creation comes to exist. Indeed, these films convey their message by intertwining the related skills of tango practice and filmmaking in an audio-visual treat for the senses and a cognitive challenge for the mind. Both are hybrid and highly complex, as befits an approach to the Argentine tango, unanimously considered by theorists and practitioners to be the pinnacle of creativity and inspiration in traditional dances, thereby replicating the complexity contained in the instrumental form.8 The bandonéon – a type of concertina, tango’s most iconic musical instrument with its predominant sound – is considered by Link and Wendland “a devilishly difficult instrument to play” (2016, 26),9 just as the dance is extremely “complex 7 8 9

All quotations from the films are taken from the translated DVD versions I consulted.

The Bloomsbury Encyclopedia, for example, states that “tango has endured as one of the bestknown and complex popular music forms (instrumental, sung or danced) in the world” (2014, 839).

The bandonéon has 71 buttons in total (38 on the right side and 33 on the left side). The musical notes are organized according to pitch and change entirely depending on whether the bellows are opened or closed, which effectively doubles their number (Link and Wendland 2016, 26).

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in transitions and mood shifts” (Thompson 2005, 170).10 Both Saura’s Tango and Potter’s The Tango Lesson are actually more than just films on filmmaking (i.e. reflexive films) in that they do away with the transparency of classical cinema.

In them, the disclosure of the apparatus and other self-reflexive devices function as an acknowledgement of the constructed nature of cinema, furthering the relationship with tango, which since its inception at the end of the nineteenthcentury has always been a musical genre replete with ornamental excesses that cause the rhythm to move upbeat and downbeat and the music to change tempo.

The concept of cinematic excess, as developed by Kristin Thompson (1977), can be invoked here to emphasize the relationship between these two art forms, especially when applied to the cases in question. According to Thompson (1977, 55), “excess” occurs when the form overcomes the narrative, which thus seems to be devoid of real motivation. Form shines through colour, textures, use of decor, composition, musical accompaniment, or any other filmic aspect that is rendered strange in a particular context when there is no narrative explanation for it. Kristin Thompson comments that certain film styles (i.e. personal recurrent directorial choices) can use some elements in a highly exaggerated manner, possibly leading the spectator into an awareness of excess (1977, 60). Although it is a general film philosophy rather than a style, self-reflexivity promotes excess and, in the case of the two tango dance films under scrutiny here, the result is highly expressive and complex. In these films, ornaments exist for sensorial reasons instead of narrative ones; rather than being a mere flourish, they convey the essence of the works themselves.

In Saura’s Tango, the extreme colour saturation and silhouette effects contribute to the general mirroring undertaken in the film. Saura is very keen on the transmission of the mood through colourful ambiances and the textural impression of inscribing the dancers’ bodies against the background or fashioning them with light. For example, at one point, the renowned artist Juan Carlos Copes, who plays the diegetic choreographer, is rehearsing with part of the dance troupe to the sound of piano and bandonéon. He starts to show some routine steps to the dancers in absolute darkness, despite the fact that they cannot see him properly, but allowing for a grandiose silhouette effect for the film viewers.

In his film, Saura’s use of large panels (panós) that can be illuminated from the front or the rear and have their colour and brightness manipulated in the middle 10

This intricacy of the dance stems from the constant improvisation, which requires maximum attention to one’s partner actions and an extremely quick deductive reasoning in order to react accordingly (Olszewski 2008, 69–72; Thompson 2005, 293).

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of a shot by employing theatrical dimmers is the main self-reflexive tool, to which all the strategies revealing the filmic apparatus are anchored. To begin with, they work as screens upon which metaphorical films as well as some real ones can be projected.11 Every time the dancers interact in front of these panels, they can be said to be enframed and tango becomes the object of the image twice, in the dancers themselves moving to the music and in the general subject being portrayed. Since many scenes in Saura’s film are dancing, singing and performing rehearsals taking place in such a framed environment, they can be considered hermetic unities operating as films within the film. These are an important tool for glamourizing tango in Saura’s film.12 For example, staff members working in the lighting and set design (gaffers and prop people), who are seen transporting ladders, panels and so on, are not colourfully lighted or framed against the panels as tango musicians or dancers are. [Fig. 1.]

Because of their framed nature and similar ability to section space, mirrors are often used to encase dancers in Saura’s film, with the added advantage that they relay reflexes, multiplying the image in manifold ways, extending the invisible into the visible (i.e. into the frame) and vice versa. This device is particularly effective in the musical number Tango del atardecer (composed

by Lalo Schifrin) in which the two female lead dancers, Laura and Elena, figuratively fight for one of the leading men [00:54:00 – 00:57:40]. In this scene, the three walls of the dance studio are panelled with top-to-bottom mirrors reflecting the actors standing up as well as the company dancers sitting on the floor and watching the leads rehearse. The remaining side of the studio, corresponding to the theatrical fourth wall, features a camera mounted on a crane, which is also reflected on the back, opposite, wall. The overall colour is saturated green, the very colour of jealousy,13 the passion that the choreography of this particular dance depicts. [Fig. 2.]

The total coincidence of two films (intra- and extradiegetic), directed by two different filmmakers (the fictional Mario/Sally and the real Saura/Potter), is what Metz (1966) considers to be a perfect mise en abyme, the point at which two narratives/processes become one, reflecting one another. In Dällenbach’s terminology (1977) this corresponds to the most complex variety of fictional mise en abyme, which he calls “aporetic.” The word is quite apt since such a device 11 12 13

For example, an excerpt of the film Tango! (1933, directed by Luís Moglia Barth) and another one with Carlos Gardel singing.

The same strategy is applied to both danced and instrumental musical pieces.

Hence the expression “the green-eyed-monster.” In English, green is also the colour of envy (“green with envy”).

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is based on a double conundrum: the film reflects both ways (from the insideout of the fiction, and from the outside-in of the extra-diegetic procedures of the director), engendering impossibilities. The end of Tango is by far the best evidence of this. Throughout the film we are led to think that the supposed mobster, Angelo Larroca, has a violent temper and is quite capable of vengeance.

When everything seems to be heading for disaster, typical of tango plots, where usually drama is an outcome of jealousy, there is no murder. Instead, the mobster laughs and asks: “Have I been convincing?” Someone else replies: “Let’s see what the director has to say.” Have we been watching a fiction all along?

Saura’s film casts that doubt from the very beginning. Following the opening credits, which start in a lateral pan of the Río de la Plata docks and end inside an apartment, “Mario,” the diegetic director, is seen reading a screenplay illustrated with storyboard vignettes, entitled Tango. The document describes the credits we have just watched and the interior of the apartment in which the pan ended and introduces the protagonist, the intra-diegetic Mario Suarez, ending with the statement: “Mario is pensive” (upon which “Mario,” Saura’s protagonist, does become pensive). [Figs. 3–4.]

The film conducts a ruse all along and by the climactic end the film’s viewers feel they have been attending the realization of Saura’s Tango film instead of Mario’s work-in-progress project. In fact, the intertwining of these two artworks and realities is so masterfully accomplished that we seldom find the presence of cameras strange (in what seems to be merely preparatory work). In fact, it is not absolutely clear what kind of work is being done, since in the conversation with the main investor the word “film” is never pronounced; the set design, the lighting, the theatrical configuration of the space and the long shots point to a stage show, but the omnipresence of the camera, mounted on a crane, points to cinema instead. Whatever it is, it is very much under construction as the film viewers watch it. In a scene occurring one hour into the film, Mario is still reflecting on the narrative: “You need more discipline. What’s the dramatic line that unifies all this?” Significantly, at the end of the scene, Mario looks straight at the camera, towards the film viewers.

In Potter’s film, this cross-fertilization of reality and fiction, of art and life, attains its climax near the end, when the viewers realize that they have been watching the tango movie all along. In The Tango Lesson, after “Sally” has given up on her original film project, and while looking for a studio rental space in Buenos Aires, Pablo asks her: “What are we doing?” [if there’s no money for the film yet]; to which Sally replies “We’re doing it anyway.” Diegetically, “Sally’s”

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film is at a standstill, but in fact Potter’s The Tango Lesson is evolving in front of us and reads like one of the most creative opuses on dance ever directed.

Learning the Tango Chords Saura claims to have “entered the world of the musical film [because of his] obsession… to be able to fit the camera to the music. He wanted the camera to be one of the dancers” (Castro, in Willem 2003, 134). Although the idea to do a project on tango was not his to begin with, he embraced the challenge willingly (Ponga, in Willem 2003, 150). Saura’s tango film is a chronicle of tango history as well as a compendium of tango styles, be they instrumental, danced, or sung, as much as it is a compendium on filmmaking (including the stages of conception and shooting). Very few scenes in Saura’s Tango are devoid of intradiegetic music. The few that exist are, however, imbued with the spirit of tango culture and serve – via the narrative and the characters’ interaction – as further explanations thereof. For instance, when Mario takes the young Elena to dinner they talk about women’s beauty, men’s dominance, vigour, desire and the will to live (all undertones of the tango philosophy).

Saura’s Tango presents practically all possible variations of tango dance in Argentina: group dancing, solo performer, pairs of dancers, male duel [el tango del compadrón], trio and even the more recent queer tango (in this case an all-male collective number charged with a homoerotic feeling). There is even a choral tango ensemble à la Broadway about the period of the Argentinian military dictatorship (La Guerra Súcia, or “Dirty War”) which is also part of the history of Argentina, and there is no Argentina without tango.14 As one character explains: “The torturers played tangos very loudly so that the cries of the tortured would not be heard.” One dance in this sequence is accompanied by no music whatsoever. Abolishing the music in this way enables the cries of the tortured to symbolically come through. Additionally, this void reinforces the overall importance of music in the film, which features only one piece of music apart from tango: the operatic chorus “Va, pensiero” from Verdi’s opera Nabucco, meant to represent the European immigrants’ arrival in Argentina and their predominantly Italian (and Spanish) roots. The last section of the film, in which this operatic chorus is inserted, is staged as a dress rehearsal and strongly resembles the Hollywood musical “ballet sequence,” for three reasons: it is longer 14

Even though this was the period when tango was less prominent in the country, for political reasons.

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than other musical sequences, is placed at the end of the film and is envisaged as a spectacular closure.

Sally Potter acknowledges her two decade-long wish to make a musical film, one that would reinvent the genre for the present and employ a different artistic language than the Hollywood musicals of the 1940s. However, as she confesses, throughout this period of time, she had absolutely no intention of making a film on tango (Béhar 1997). She ended up making a musical hybrid, just like Argentine tango itself increasingly incorporated – from the 1960s onwards – other musical influences, such as classical music, jazz, and electronic music. The protagonist Sally and the dancer Pablo always end up tangoing together, even when heavy rain constitutes a serious meteorological hindrance (Gene Kelly also danced under similar circumstances in Singin’ in the Rain). The film evokes the tradition of classical Hollywood musicals, only to demystify it. The character Pablo Verón wishes to become a film star as renowned as Gene Kelly and performs some tap dancing in order to convey his point to Sally. The intertextual parallel established between Potter’s The Tango Lesson and An American in Paris (Vincente Minnelli, 1951 – the quintessential musical film set in the French capital, where Potter’s diegesis is also partially set), reinforces the influence of Hollywood musicals on her movie. Yet in Potter’s film, which has a more cohesive narrative than Saura’s – as it focuses on the sentimental attachment of the lead couple and their respective quests for identity −, the dances are not staged as downright musical numbers or made to appear in unrealistic settings portrayed in a stylized way.

Quite the opposite. Potter’s film, about the “true” Argentine tango, is mostly shot in black and white; only Sally’s ultimately abandoned fashion film is seen in colour (as a product of her imagination). Glamour is, consequently, abandoned in favour of genuineness.

On a first apprehension of the title, the word “lesson” seems inappropriate to describe what is really going on in the film’s structure. In fact, throughout the film “Sally” takes not one, but twelve tango lessons − singled out to the film’s viewers by means of white titles upon a dark background. These so-called lessons, however, do not strictly coincide with scenes in which she is seen either learning or practicing tango; they also include other scenes where no dancing whatsoever takes place. Ultimately, the film teaches only one big lesson about tango, learned by the protagonist Sally and conveyed to us in song at the end: “You are me and I am you. / One is one and one are two.” This is her recipe for the right amount of leading and following required by tango. Be neither a leader, nor a follower, but both – she indirectly claims.

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In reality, tango as a highly complex dance requires the follower, traditionally the woman, to be extremely technical in order to be able to accompany the leader, usually the man. She needs to be able to walk backwards with her eyes closed and to react to her partner’s hand and body pressures (a subtle gesture known in tango language as la marca). One of Tango’s choreographers, Juan Carlos Copes himself, once said: “La marca is part of the shared intimacy of tango, ‘not she and I but us’” (quoted in Thompson 2005, 279). Brandon Olszewski, a male tango instructor in the United States, claims that this intimacy between the two partners is where the fascination as well as the creativity of tango resides. This places both dancers on equal footing, so to speak. “Unlike ballroom dance this ambiguity promotes a somewhat egalitarian relationship between leader and follower […] and also contributes to excitement and expressiveness of the dance” (Olszewski 2008, 70). In his opinion, “Good dances are connected dances, and connected dances have not two dancers, but one dancer with four legs” (2008, 68). Upon careful observation, it seems more difficult to follow than to lead, so it would perhaps be appropriate for leaders to express their leading powers with modesty. In Potter’s The Tango Lesson, the symbolic melody mentioned in the previous paragraph is played only after Pablo – Sally’s teacher and dancing partner, the real-life tango dancer Pablo Verón – accepts her role as the leader of the technical crew in the making of the film, which makes him a follower of her directorial cues. Hence, the tango sung by Sally comes to exist in plenitude.

Although, as previously mentioned, Saura stated that he wanted to make the camera dance, it is Potter who best achieves this goal, something she also voices in an interview: “I wanted the camera to dance, I wanted it to do everything it can do in a normal film: dive, duck, go behind, go in front, up, down, around, move intimately as part of the thing, not just a point of view on it” (Béhar 1997).

On dancing interludes, she opts for medium shots, slightly wider than Saura’s, framing half of the dancers’ legs or their full legs at once and not just their feet, thus conveying the leg work technique more fully and allowing for the perception of the steps, in a textbook manner. Notwithstanding this, the camera in The Tango Lesson circles and flutters around the dancers, following them in walks across the various dance floors featured in the film, a process which is indisputably linked to the music. In fact, during the dance practice with Pablo Verón in lesson number nine, the pair is having trouble connecting their steps and dancing as one until the professional dancer turns on the tape recorder in his apartment. The instrumental part of the song called Pensàlo bien − with music by Juan D’Arienzo, one of the composers most featured in Potter’s film − is heard. Instantly, they get into synch.

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To prove that Sally and Pablo make a good dance pair, Potter jumps from scene to scene using musical sound bridges, in which the dance flows in musical continuity despite the change in settings and contexts. As if the pair was dancing across time and space, in perfect motion but frozen in the moment, their moment together in the tango universe. This coming together in dance finds its metaphorical climax towards the end of the film, during the performance of Ástor Piazzolla’s Libertango in an empty dance hall. Sally dances with Pablo Verón, but also with Gustavo Naveira and Fabián Salas, two Buenos Aires tango instructors, who are playing themselves in the film, and from whom she took some of the lessons. The foursome walk, turn and spin to the music at a high tempo, improvising frantically in a cry of freedom.15 The jumpy, strong notes of the bandonéon, accompanied by rhythmic percussion in staccato, highlight the dancer’s flexing torso and legs. The scene, representing the happy outcome of Sally’s quest for identity and all her tango lessons, contrasts with a previous dance in which she performed publicly in a theatre with Pablo Verón, to the famous notes of La Yumba (by Osvaldo Pugliese, 1946), but in which they were not moving as one.

Conclusion: In closing, or cadenza final Ultimately, both Saura’s and Potter’s films can be interpreted as full-blown metacinematic musicals, although the former is stagier and seems to have more music in it than the latter. In fact, the difference is insignificant: there are twenty-one tangos in Saura’s film and seventeen in Potter’s.16 If, apparently, they rewrite the Hollywood musical tradition under the guise of the art-house film (auteur film), they do it not to dwell on a film genre, but rather on an art genre: tango. They do not honour music, dance and song in general; they specifically pay tribute to tango and its culture. If Hollywood musicals are intertextually present, that is simply to reinforce the difference from escapist spectacle, which resembles much more the European variety of tango, characterized by the artificially rigid smiles of the dancers and their broad leg and arm movements. The films I presented in this article correspond broadly to what Jane Feuer calls “art musicals” (2001), based on the creation of a show or connected to artistic forms. They are, indeed, self-reflective as Feuer contends, and they seem to follow her three axioms for the genre (2001, 32): (1) there is always some “falsehood” involved, something that 15 16

In Spanish, Libertango is an agglutination of libertad (freedom) and tango.

Three tangos feature in both films: La cumparsita (music by Gerardo Matos Rodríguez and lyrics

by Pascual Contursi, 1916), possibly the most famous tango ever; the aforementioned La Yumba (1946); and Quejas de bandonéon (Aníbal Troilo).

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does not correspond to reality; (2) these spectacles are imbued with “aura”; (3) there is an interchange between demystification and re-mystification. However, Saura and Potter do not aim to assign value to entertainment and its mythical status; quite the opposite. By choosing to make two tango musical metafilms – that use mise en abyme to interrelate tango and life just as much as cinema and art – Saura and Potter reinforce the artistry of their own art and, in the meantime (and this is the real tour de force), its mythical value on par with the mythical value of tango itself.

Both tango films are unquestionably intermedial works, as already mentioned here, but where they excel and what makes them worthy of further analyses added to the already existing ones (e.g. Pieldner 2019), is the very nature of their hybridity. Seemingly, it could be argued that they are examples of Petr Szczepanik’s intermedia reflexivity (2002) because reflexivity is their main cinematic strategy and formal outcome. Yet, Szczepanik’s concept does not equate with each other the art forms involved in such an interrelation. He conceives of one as being superior to the other (“one media form takes over and transforms the structural components of another” 2002, 29) and reinforces the differences in “hybrid forms of images” (e.g. those of cinema and video in Jean-Luc Godard’s films).

Although in Saura’s Tango and Potter’s The Tango Lesson reflexivity operates at a representational level in a quite experimental fashion, these films are more sensorial and synaesthetic than Szczepanik considers: they are not simply a feast for the eyes, they are a feast for the sensorium. They are also reflexive on the level of the diegesis, but their reflexivity is not the product of a genre-bound formula, least of all fantasy, as the quoted commentator argues. This explains why I left the word intermediality out of the article’s title.

In my comparison of tango to cinema and in Saura’s and Potter’s specific approach to these two arts forms, I do not perceive an in-betweenness or an intersenses, according to Dick Higgins’s concept of intermedia (1965/1981). Tango and reflexive cinema are hybrid forms in themselves, being brought together to generate further hybridity. They are different, in that they retain their qualities; but also alike, in that they mutually benefit from their symbiotic relationship. They do not mix to the point of fusion, or else they would be examples of screendance, as I argue elsewhere in relation to Saura’s “pure musicals” (as he terms his so-called documentaries from Sevillanas [1992] onwards (Chinita, 2021, forthcoming). The camera does not only dance with the dancers, but decomposes and (re)assembles their movements; it lays the ground upon which they dance, a narrative ground.

Consequently, music/dance/singing are cinema’s triplets and their mirroring is

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what these two films are really about. When all is said and done, these films are remembered not merely because of their cinematic artistry, but because tango shines through and makes them memorable. They are truly imbued with aura, an aura which depends entirely on the association of these two art forms/cultures.

References Béhar, Henri. 1997. Sally Potter on The Tango Lesson. Film Scouts. http://www.filmscouts.com/scripts/interview.cfm?File=sal-pot. Last accessed 05. 10. 2014.

Borges, Jorge Luis. 2018. O Tango: Quatro Conferências. [Tango: Four Conferences], Lisbon: Quetzal Editores.

Cámara de Landa, Enrique. 2003. Il tango argentino. In 59ª Settimana Musicale Senese (Fondazione Accademia Musicale Chigiana), 95–107. Siena: Monte Dei Paschi di Siena.

Castro, Antonio. 2003. Interview: Carlos Saura (1996). In Carlos Saura: Interviews, ed. Linda M. Willem, 52–64. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.

Chinita, Fátima. Dance and the Mediated Immersive Flux in Carlos Saura’s Musical Hybrids with Live Feed. In The Intermediality of the Screen: Mediation, Performance, Immersion, eds. Ian Robinson and Shana MacDonald.

Forthcoming.

Dāllenbach, Lucien. 1977. Le Récit spéculaire. Essai sur la mise en abyme [The Mirror in the Text]. Paris: Éditions du Seuil.

Davis, Kathy. 2015. Should a Feminist Dance Tango? Some Reflections on the Experience and Politics of Passion. Feminist Theory vol. 16, no. 1 (March): 3–21.

De Baecque, Antoine. 2003. La Cinéphilie, invention d’un regard, histoire d’une culture, 1944–1968. Paris: Arthème Fayard.

Elsaesser, Thomas. 2005. Cinephilia or the Uses of Disenchantment. In Cinephilia: Movies, Love and Memory, eds. Marijke de Valck and Malte Hegener, 27–43.

Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.

Feuer, Jane. 2001. The Self-Reflective Musical and the Myth of Entertainment. In Hollywood Musicals, the Film Reader, ed. Steve Cohan, 31–40. London and New York: Routledge.

García Brunelli, Omar. 2015. Los estudios sobre tango observados desde la musicología. Historia, música, letra y baile. [Tango Studies from the Perspective of Musicology. History, Music, Literature and Dance], El oído pensante [The

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Ear That Thinks] vol. 3, no. 2: 1–32. http://ppct.caicyt.gov.ar/index.php/ oidopensante. Last accessed 22. 02. 2020.

Grunes, Dennis. 2007. The Tango Lesson (Sally Potter, 1997). http://grunes.wordpress.com/2007/06/16/the-tango-lesson-sally-potter-1997.

Last accessed 05. 10. 2014.

Higgins, Dick. 1965/1981. Synesthesia and Intersenses: Intermedia. Audiovisual e Multimédia II. https://am2intermedia.wordpress.com/intermedia/. Last accessed 26. 12. 2020.

Horn, David et al. (eds). 2014. Tango. In Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of Popular Music of the World. Vol. IX – Genres: Caribbean and Latin America, eds. David Horn and John Shepherd, 826–843. London et al: Bloomsbury.

Link, Kacey and Kristin Wendland. 2016. Tracing Tangueros: Argentine Tango Instrumental Music. New York: Oxford University Press.

Ng, Jenna. 2005. Love in the Time of Transcultural Fusion: Cinephilia, Homage and Kill Bill. In Cinephilia: Movies, Love and Memory, eds. Marijke de Valck and Malte Hagener, 65–79. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.

Metz, Christian. 1972. A Construção “em abismo” em Oito e Meio de Fellini, 1966. [The Mirroring Image Construction in Fellini’s 8½]. In A Significação no Cinema [Film Language: A Semiotics of the Cinema], 217–224. São Paulo: Editora Perspectiva.

Metz, Christian. 1980 [1977] O Significante Imaginário: Psicanálise e Cinema [The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema], Lisboa: Livros Horizonte.

Metz, Christian. 1991. L’énonciation impersonnelle ou Le site du film. [Impersonal Enunciation, or the Place of Film], Paris: Méridiens Klincksieck.

Olszewski, Brandon. 2008. El Cuerpo del Baile: The Kinetic and Social Fundaments of Tango. Body and Society vol. 14, no. 2: 63–81.

Pfeffer, Murray. A Brief History of Tango. http://www.triogarufa.com/tangohistory.html. Last accessed 05. 10. 2014.

Pieldner, Judit. 2019. From Paragone to Symbiosis. Sensations of In-Betweenness in Sally Potter’s The Tango Lesson. Acta Universitatis Sapientiae, Film and Media Studies, vol. 17: 23–44.

Ponga, Paula. 2003. Tango according to Saura (1998). In Carlos Saura: Interviews, ed. Linda Willem, 150–155. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.

Siska, William C. 1979. Metacinema: A Modern Necessity. Literature/Film Quarterly vol. 7: 285–289.

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Szczepanik, Petr. 2002. Intermediality and (Inter)media Reflexivity in Contemporary Cinema. Convergence vol. 8, no. 4: 29–36.

Thompson, Kristin. 1977. The Concept of Cinematic Excess. Ciné-Tracts vol. 1, no. 2: 54–63.

Thompson, Robert Farris. 2005. Tango: The Art History of Love. New York: Vintage Books.

List of Figures Figures 1–4. Carlos Saura’s Tango.

Acta Univ. Sapientiae, Film and Media Studies, 20 (2021) 86–110 DOI: 10.2478/ausfm-2021-0016

Circular Causality of Emotions in Moving Pictures Mircea Valeriu Deaca

University of Bucharest (Romania) E-mail: deaca@dnt.ro Abstract. In the framework of predictive coding, as explained by Giovanni Pezzulo in his article Why do you fear the bogeyman? An embodied predictive coding model of perceptual inference (2014), humans construct instances of emotions by a double arrow of explanation of stimuli. Top-down cognitive models explain in a predictive fashion the emotional value of stimuli. At the same time, feelings and emotions depend on the perception of internal changes in the body. When confronted with uncertain auditory and visual information, a multimodal internal state assigns more weight to interoceptive information (rather than auditory and visual information) like visceral and autonomic states as hunger or thirst (motivational conditions). In short, an emotional mood can constrain the construction of a particular instance of emotion. This observation suggests that the dynamics of generative processes of Bayesian inference contain a mechanism of bidirectional link between perceptual and cognitive inference and feelings and emotions. In other words, “subjective feeling states and emotions influence perceptual and cognitive inference, which in turn produce new subjective feeling states and emotions” as a self-fulfilling prophecy (Pezzulo 2014, 908). This article focuses on the short introductory scene from Steven Spielberg’s Jaws (1975), claiming that the construction / emergence of the fear and sadness emotions are created out of the circular causal coupling instantiated between cinematic bottom-up mood cues and top-down cognitive explanations.

Keywords: emotions, emergence, embodiment, predictive coding, Bayesian inference.

The propositions and analyses presented in this study originate from the embodiment-of-the-mind hypothesis, i.e. the enactive approach in which cognition is the enactment of the world and the mind (Maturana and Varela 1992; Varela, Thompson, and Rosch 1991; Johnson 1987, and Thompson 2007). The central idea of the embodiment hypothesis is that it is unproductive to dissociate mind and body, when we are speaking about mental phenomena. The mind and brain-body support and guide each other. The patterns and processes our body

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is familiar with, are constantly mapped upon the stimuli provided by the world.

Humans engage with and grasp patterns, making sense of the surroundings by projecting the body relations and processes they experience at a conscious and unconscious level.1 For instance, body-based orientational schemas provide interactive engagement with the world. As a consequence, “the significance of a specific object will be established by its affordances for possible sensorymotor-affective engagements with creatures of our particular bodily makeup, need, desires, and goals” (Johnson 2015, 10). At a fundamental level, cognition and sense-making are emergent properties of a body-brain-mind complex that thinks in the world. Cognition depends on embodied action, whereas meaning is emergent from the basic-level embodied patterns of interaction. Embodied meaning is linked to the motor and affective engagement with the world.

Meaning is derived from correlations and cross-mappings between domains of experience. Skeletal patterns or schemas in addition engage our emotions.2 One such pattern is the control cycle cognitive model. The model was used extensively in the Cognitive Grammar developed by Ronald W. Langacker (1987; 2008; 2009).

The model has several in-built stages that define the interaction between a region of internal control and access and an external entity, a target defined in space and time. The model is a hard “glued” gestalt-like composite that enlists several image schemas components [Fig. 1]. Langacker summarizes the basic form of the control cycle as follows: “In the static baseline phase, an actor (A) (in a broad sense of the term) controls an array of entities (small circles) which collectively constitute its dominion (D). In the next phase, some target (T) enters the actor’s field (F), or scope of potential interaction. This creates a state of tension, for the actor has to deal with the target in some manner. The typical means of dealing with it is by somehow bringing it under the actor’s control, i.e. exerting force (double arrow) resulting in its incorporation in the actor’s dominion. The result of this action is a modified situation that is once more static (a state of relaxation)” (2009, 130, 306).

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As Wojciehowski and Gallese (2011, 16) indicate, embodied simulation hinges on the immediate and involuntary mirrored experience, i.e. “our brain-body system re-uses part of its neural resources to map others’ behavior. When we witness actions performed by others, we simulate them by activating our own motor system. Similarly, by activating other cortical regions we reuse our affective and somatosensory neural circuits to map the emotional and somatosensory experiences of others.”

Lakoff argues that the “human brain is mapped by thousands of embodied metaphor mapping circuits” and “primitive concepts have a schema structure that mediates between embodiment circuitry and complex concepts that are expressed by linguistic structures in natural language” (Lakoff 2014, 6).

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The present study explores several hypotheses: cinematographic artifacts mirror the patchwork of the brain’s functional systems, which are engaged in an interplay of competitive and cooperative interactions (Thompson 2007, 206); dynamic hierarchies are established ad-hoc once the attention mechanism targets one layer or another and one system takes control of the others; a dynamic pattern –the control cycle – drives the behaviour of neural populations. Sense making in filmic contexts involves a circular coupling between two or several control cycles. The interaction between the coupled control cycles can be externalbounded or nested. Its behaviour has an exploratory-projection facet and a phagocytosis introjective aspect. The behaviour of the control cycle is manifest in low-level feature-detectors and high-level cognitive functions that exert topdown modulations.

The sense-making process is based on a biological-like network of control cycles that are engaged in a continuous interexchange / trade-off of “reciprocal parasitism” and hierarchical coupling structures. Life cycles or dynamic processes of coupling between self and environment give raise to different domains of interaction. Networks of coupled and nested control cycles weave the conceptualization fabric. Coupling takes place when two structures are enmeshed in a dynamic process of bidirectional causation, which generates a functional whole (i.e. a stable state, pattern or shape). Coupled control cycles – based on bidirectional causation – generate functional wholes, i.e. stable states, patterns or shapes in domains of interaction in a bottom-up manner. The emergent patterns constrain, in turn, in a top-down way the components – such as boundaries that – are created. Connectivity and coupling take place in closed systems at different spatial and time-scales. Fine grained networks of reciprocal coupling – circular loops – emerge as coarse units at higher levels. Subsequently, these units that have their own “rate of change, rhythm, and duration” behave as components in new emergent units that subsequently constrain their behaviour (Kirchhoff and Kiverstein 2019, 21). Stacked patterns form a hierarchy of layers, which exist at different but synchronized time scales. Patterns of coupling can take place at the same level or between different levels [Fig. 2].

The Elaboration Site and the Kuleshov Effect Relationships of schematicity are useful in Cognitive Grammar for identifying syntagmatic valences of elements. Sentences contain some (sub)structure in one component structure that corresponds to an entity or a substructure in its vicinity

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that serves to elaborate, i.e. characterize in finer grained detail (Langacker 2008, 198; Tuggy 2007, 105) The schematically characterized substructure is an elaboration site or an e-site. The e-site is a skeletal (coarse grained) or summarylike representation of a concept (Sapolsky 2017, 717). We can envision the e-site as a kind of “motor intention” (a “spatial index” or a “deictic pointer”) that belongs to an array of associated concepts that are aggregated by an automatic process.3 The e-site represents a schematic region in the situation evoked by a simulation of a state of affairs and brings sense-making control. In a sense, e-sites create, in advance, the continuation of the discourse that is extended over the expressive boundary of a channel of conceptualization, e.g. the word or sentence and the cinematographic frame of attention or shot. The brain’s activity is ahead of our mental states and our subjective experience is a post factum rationalization of antecedent choices.

Hence, we start the cinematic analysis from the assumption that the meaning constructed by the viewer from a sequence of constituent shots is a symbolic construction different from the meaning of each shot considered individually (Anderson et al. 2006). The conjugation of shots A and B constructs a conceptual unit different from A and B separately. For example, the gist of the scene evoked in shot B in [Fig. 3] is a constructed simulation that contains an e-site (e.g. human affective behaviour in high arousal situations) that categorizes and is elaborated by the perception of a facial expression in shot A (Barrett 2017, 43).

The image in B elaborates a winner role in a tennis sports event. The affect e-site constrains the array of simulations around the intensity value of the feeling, but is indeterminate as far as the hedonic value is concerned. The feeling is “high arousal” but the value of pleasure/displeasure is indeterminate, i.e. has an open range of potential values. This open-ended set of potential simulations is the e-site that awaits elaboration.

Understanding the meaning of the scene depicted in shot B and constructing a simulation of the scene gives access to an e-site for categorizing perceptual information in shot A. In other words, “if one explains verbally the first photo’s context – winning a crucial tennis match the viewer’s brain applies conceptual knowledge of tennis situations and winning competitions situations in order to simulate/ evoke facial configurations of people experiencing exultation” (Barrett 3

A “spatial index” or a “deicitic pointer” can be used by visuomotor routines in order to situate the object’s location in the environment: “if this spatial pointer is associated with some kind of coarse semantic information, for example, a pattern of activation in one of the language cortices, auditory cortex, or even visual cortex, then the spatial pointer can be triggered when sensory input activates that semantic information” (Spivey 2007, 295, 299).

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2017, 43). An e-site is a shorthand that holds together bits of pieces of suffering/ exultation situations memorized by the viewer. Based on this summary of summaries, the brain of the conceptualizer can predict and explain the perceptual stimulus from shot A. The e-site from shot A constructs in a top-down manner the perceptual and content information and the perceptual information in shot B elaborates in a bottom-up fashion the information about context: winning situations and appropriate behaviour and emotions.4 Filmic Kuleshov effects are based on the same mechanism. Two adjoined shots generate an emergent multimodal blend and can mix beliefs and expectations with the perceptual processing of sensory signals. Cognitive processing makes use of a combination of top-down knowledge and bottom-up sensory signals in order to construct a concept just enough for the subject’s goal in context (Kirchhoff and Kiverstein 2019, 87).

The Thief vs. Wind Case and Circular Causality The following argument describes the mechanism of predictive coding as explained in Pezzulo (2014). The top-down predictions of causes that explain sensory stimulus are coalitions of domains. Much like situated conceptualizations, the predictions are models of the world that include aspects of experience, properties of objects, exemplars and prototypes, relevant relations and rules, actions and affordances,5 the setting, agents and their behaviour, perceptions, and bodily as well as mental states (emotional and cognitive operations). These predictions described by the model can often be mapped upon the introspective states experienced by the human experiencer. The top-down predictions can be acquired through cultural learning (instances of descriptive systems) but “still remain grounded through the linkage with lower-level events” (Pezzulo 2014, 906). The predictive coding “cascades” at multiple levels, replicating the prediction-error minimization process for each pair of consecutive levels (906).

The winning hypothesis is the one that produces the least error in the whole hierarchy.6 The following example is discussed by Pezzulo: “if you hear a window squeaking in the night after watching a horror movie, you may consider plausible 4 5

6

See about top-down effects of expectation on perception also in Barsalou (Barsalou 2016, 22).

See Pezzulo: “action-based approaches to cognition argue that objects can be recognized in terms of the expected sensory consequences of possible actions produced by forward models; for example, a sponge can be understood in terms of the (anticipated) softness when squeezing it or imagining squeezing it” (Pezzulo 2014, 908).

See the description of the mechanism as free energy minimization in Friston (2005; 2010).

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a very unlikely hypothesis (e.g. a thief, or even the bogeyman) because it explains both what you sense (e.g. the window squeaking in the night) and how you feel (e.g. your high heart rate)” (2014, 902).

Arousal can be construed as an instance of emotion. Feelings and emotions depend on the perception of changes in the body (Seth, Suzuki, and Critchley 2012). Sapolsky describes vividly the mechanism in which interoceptive information influences, “if not determines” sense-making and emotions (2017, 94). For instance, “you subliminally note the lion, speeding up your heart; then your conscious brain gets this interoceptive information, concluding, ‘Wow, my heart is racing; I must be terrified.’ In other words, you decide what you feel based on signals from your body” (Sapolsky 2017, 94).7 According to this way of thinking, in “a thief intruding in a house” scenario the interoceptive signals of arousal are categorized as an instance of “fear.”

The top-down conceptualization of the thief scenario also includes the interoceptive information of the correspondent emotion of fear. If our subject is alone in the night, at home, and hears the sound of a window squeaking and if (s)he evokes the scenario that a probable thief intrudes, (s)he will categorize the interoceptive information as an instance of fear. Recursively, the state of arousal is evidence that explains the thief-hypothesis and, as a consequence, reinforces the thief scenario. A mood previously created (a car accident or a horror movie) can generate the arousal (heart rate or sweating) in the first instance and prime the categorization. Emotional responses persist longer than the emotional stimulation phase (Smith, 2003).

As Pezzulo remarks, confronted with uncertain auditory and visual information a multimodal internal state assigns more weight to interoceptive information (rather than auditory and visual information) or visceral and autonomic states as hunger or thirst (motivational conditions) (2014, 905–907). The thief hypothesis explains more satisfyingly the evidence coming from the most reliable source, i.e. interoception, and “the idea of a thief seems so vivid that you can almost see a silhouette moving in the shadows” (Pezzulo 2014, 907). The wind hypothesis where the movement of the window is caused by the wind explains only the less reliable evidence, i.e. auditory and visual. This closely resembles the recipe of the horror movie where the dangerous entity is depicted by uncertain cues on a background of emotional arousal.8 Is the off frame sound a symptom of the 7

8

“(a) forcing depressed people to smile makes them feel better; (b) instructing people to take on a more ‘dominant’ posture makes them feel more so (lowers stress hormone levels); and (c) muscle relaxants decrease anxiety” (Sapolsky 2017, 94).

See Carroll who speaks about the “criterially prefocusing scenes and sequences in which the

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intruder? Is the movement of a door knob caused by the intruder? Is the shaky camera focusing through the foliage the POV of the entity or is it just the cinematic narrator’s vantage point?

In this context, the extra diegetic musical score serves as a source of arousal and mood constraint. The double bind can be obtained on this background affect (intensity of arousal and valence of the affect). As visual and diegetic auditory cues are uncertain, i.e. they can belong to different situated conceptualizations, the background emotional arousal is more reliable as evidence for the scenario of the “dangerous entity.”

Pezzulo remarks that “if we consider interoceptive information to be a source of evidence just as we consider sensory events, it naturally follows that it can influence perceptual inference, belief formation, and choice” (2014, 905). In the example at hand, “the way that the horror movie or the small car accident influences the current (wind vs. thief) inference is through the body state” (2014, 905). Interoceptive information is considered by the brain a high reliable source and “perhaps this is why the bogeyman only visits us in the dark” (2014, 905).

Let us briefly recapitulate. The thief situation categorizes the arousal cue as a symptom of the fear emotion and, in turn, the fear construct categorizes the cue sound event as a fragment of the thief intruding conceptualization. A circular loop of control is set up [Fig. 4].

1. A schematic component of the emotion category of fear – a schematic arousal symptom – is elaborated by the thief intrusion conceptualization as an instance of fear emotion. The state of arousal explains (is a model that causes) the thief scenario as one instantiation of the goal concept of things that generate fear (the “fear of thieves” or a “thief fear”). The “thief fear” is a constructed emotion. The verbal structure would be: Why is there a thief?

Because I have an emotional state and a sound is produced.

2. Schematic/summary components of the thief scenario – the sound of the window and the fear emotion – are further elaborated as the arousal caused by the intrusion. The arousal is one instance of the fear emotion. The thief scenario explains the state of arousal. The verbal structure would be: Why do I feel aroused? Because there is a thief intruding. eliciting factors pertinent to provoking a certain emotion are made salient, typically by means of variable framing” (Carroll and Seeley 2013, 68). See also Greg Smith theory about the cues that enhance a specific mood in film upon which an emotional episode can be grounded (Smith 2003).

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The thief scenario contains the schematic emotion of fear that categorizes the sound. The emotion of fear contains the schematic situation of an unexpected danger causing the emotion that categorizes the sound of the window as an element of the thief scenario. The thief situation is an instance of fear. This mechanism introduces a circular causality in which “sympathetic arousal (for example) can be both a cause and consequence of emotional or salient perceptual states” (Pezzulo 2014, 907).

The mechanism is described as: “the belief that a thief has entered the home produces predictions about elevated heart rates that are fulfilled automatically, through sympathetic reflexes. These, then, may reinforce the embodied predictive coding of uncertain auditory cues and produce cascading effects that ultimately reinforce the bogeyman belief” (Pezzulo 2014, 907). The idea of a bogeyman is “a form of self-fulfilling prophecy” because “a terrified child can take his or her terror as evidence that the bogeyman exists (and is probably close), and the terror itself can increase due to the circular causality mentioned earlier” (2014, 909).9 Part of the conception of the bogeyman is construed out of cultural information (“‛tales’ heard from parents or friends”). The concept of the bogeyman includes representation of entities (wind, thief) and interoceptive information (2014, 908).

Performative Discourses Pezzulo’s approach can be translated in the framework of mental spaces and conceptual integration theory (Fauconnier 1994; 1997; Fauconnier and Turner 1998; Fauconnier and Turner 2002). Depictive utterances are “attempts to make one’s words fit the world [and], performative utterances are attempts to make the world fit one’s words” (Coulson and Oakley 2000, 184). Metaphor involves the interplay between a source mental space – the space of representation – and a target mental space – the represented world. Some metaphoric construals instantiate the circular coupling: “if the representation is taken as fitting the represented space, then the relation between the spaces is depictive or representational. [….]

If, on the other hand the represented space is taken as fitting (being causally influenced or changed by) the representation, then the relation is performative.

The act of representation, by its performance, constitutes (or performs as a causal agent in) the structure of the represented space” (Sweetser 2000, 312).

9

Pezzulo mentions that this idea resonates with the argument that some abstract concepts (including emotional concepts) can be grounded in interoceptive information (2014, 909; Vigliocco et al. 2013).

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Sweetser gives the example of a “painting of a buffalo hunt on a cave wall” (Sweetser 2000, 312). Is the painting a depictive record, “following and modelling itself on events in the represented world” or is it a performative one that is magically intended to “bring about in reality the situation it represents”? (Sweetser 2000, 312). This dual nature of representations is considered to hold for metaphorical representations and literal ones, too. Sweetser considers that, in rituals, the same representation is simultaneously depictive and performative: “does kneeling to a divinity metaphorically represent the already extant differential in power and status between worshipper and god (a depictive use), or help to bring the worshipper into the right state of humility (a performative use)? Perhaps both” (Sweetser 2000, 315). Kneeling in front of the monarch is a depictive recognition of status, and is a performative use of signs that causally inflict a change of status of the individual.

For instance, “white clothing is worn by brides to depictively represent their innocence, and performatively by penitents in the hopes it will help to purify them” (Coulson and Oakley 2000, 185). In this case, the direction of fit is the direction of control. A circular loop is instantiated between the two spaces integrated in an emergent whole. Propaganda films are salient examples where depiction of a state of affairs is simultaneously the performative construction of a new state of affairs in the world. Metafilms also blend a depictive and a performative use.10

Force Dynamics of Emotion: “Fear Is an Opponent in a Struggle” Let us turn now to a filmic example. Fahlenbrach (2008) analyses the spatial motif of the maze in The Shining (Stanley Kubrick, 1980) that creates the impression of threat representing by metaphorical mapping the cause of the emotion and the proper state of the emotion. The spatial features of the maze invoke the trapping, i.e. the sentiment of being captured by an external entity. The closed-isolated and labyrinthine space of the hotel in which Jack, Wendy, and their child live during winter profile the anxiety generated by the hidden menace. The correspondent metaphor is “fear is a hidden enemy” (Kövecses 2000, 23). Avoidance of capture is invoked in the stairs episode when Jack threatens and “pushes” Wendy up the stairs [Fig. 5]. For Fahlenbrach the stairs and “the camera, the editing, and the sound concretely mediate in their audiovisual gestalt the opponent metaphor: ‘fear is an opponent in a struggle’” (Fahlenbrach 2008, 93). Character movement and facial expressions, as well as movement of the camera towards the victim 10

See the analysis done by Roger Odin (2000, 113–125) of Le Tempestaire (Jean Epstein, 1947).

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and editing activate sensorimotor simulations. In terms of the grounding of the emotional concept of fear vs. a predator’s rage in bodily movement, it becomes apparent that the approach/avoidance action is highly imbued with emotional valence (Pecher et al. 2011, 225).

The high pitch of Wendy’s voice and the dissonant extra diegetic music coupled with the slow advancement of the fear factor intensify the feeling of tension due to entrapment and the impossibility of avoidance/escape out of the grip of the emotional state (Fahlenbrach 2008, 94). The episode of Jack menacing Wendy with a baseball bat generates the “cross-modal matching of duration, tempo, and intensity in pictures and sound” (2008, 94). Fahlenbrach concludes that “space, physical force, and movement are key source domains in audiovisual media for the metaphorical conceptualization of emotional states, causes, and coping strategies” (2008, 94).11 The dissonant sound of voice and music create a negatively valenced feeling of irritation, which is categorized as an instance of fear. An intense emotion is correlated with sound intensity and pattern. Chattah (2015, 86–88) talks about the correlations that map loudness and crescendo onto psychological tension, pitch frequency to psychological tension, and timbral distortion to states of distress.12 Sheets-Johnstone (1999, 455) advocates the idea that “emotion arises out of or from motion.” Hence the qualitative affectivekinetic dynamics of “felt dynamic stirrings, felt inner commotions – a bodily ‘earthquake’ as it were, spanning a strikingly varied range of possible dynamics and thereby a strikingly varied range of possible magnitudes or intensities” (Sheets-Johnstone 1999, 456). Following this point of view, one can consider that emotions elaborate in detail the force-dynamic phase of the control cycle.

We observe that the episode is structured by a bidirectional categorization trajectory. The first direction is traced from content elements. The situation depicts the action of capture performed by an aggressive and menacing agent and the incapacity of the victim to escape. The second direction emerges from the schematic qualities of slow movement and tone of voice contrasted with the shrill voice of Wendy, her jerky gestures of defence, and the dissonant sounds of extra diegetic music. Slow movement of advance, the capture-like gestures of Jack, and his decreased tone of voice enhance the suspense created by the expectancy of surprise. The slow pace postpones the action phase and extends 11

12

“By relating typical acoustic attributes of objects or figures with general concepts and categories, sound design systematically construes metaphorical structures that use universal and kinaesthetical patterns of experience like the force-schema or the path-schema” (Fahlenbrach 2008, 97).

See Chattah (2015) on the cross modal metaphoric mappings.

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the tension phase of the control cycle. The cinema viewer is in the position of the victim since (s)he is, much like Wendy, unable to escape the experience of a dangerous entity advancing towards the optical point of reference, i.e. the screen.

Both the viewer and Wendy are trapped in a simulated “freeze” mechanism of fear. Circularity is at work here; more fear (instantiated as the aggression scenario) means more freezing, which, in turn, certifies the presence of more fear.

The Aggression Scenario and the Circular Loop: “Fear Is a Hidden Enemy” Let us see the case of a visual mediated representation, which depicts a young woman in a dangerous situation. I divided in two parts the introductive scene from Jaws (Steven Spielberg, 1975) that depicts the aggression event suffered by a young swimmer. The introductory part (A) takes place before the attack of the shark (shots A1 to A7) and the second part (B) depicts the actual attack and the closure of the event (shots B8 to B15) [Fig. 6]. In this scene, the fear emotion is cued by the musical score, by the “unusual” vantage point used in shots A3 and A6, and by the opacity of the water. The opacity of the water is the hidden menace.

The hidden menace is a situation similar to the bogeyman menace (uncertain visual and auditory cues combined with interoceptive feeling). The background mood is one of arousal due to expectancy and interest: “what will happen next?”.

Fear also evokes the aggression scenario, where the agent of the control cycle is a threatening entity, i.e. an aggressor that will control or entrap the target/victim.

In light of the previously presented argument, one can note that: 1. The fear emotion contains a schematic arousal combined with a negative valenced feeling that explains and is elaborated by the aggression scenario instantiation and by the hidden menace. A series of cues (opacity, sound design, unusual framing) instantiate the emotional state of distress.

2. The aggression scenario contains a schematic fear emotion that explains and is elaborated by the arousal of the fear emotion. This time the same expressive cues are interpreted as instantiations of the aggression scenario.

The elaboration of fear Fear is elaborated by the setting and the agents involved in the attack scene. Both the aggression scenario and the hidden menace evoke an agent, a harmful action,

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and a target-victim. The emotional markers are clustered around the agent: focused attention or violent action, and around the target: fear, and agony. In the hidden menace, the agent is characterized as the unseen danger. The absence of visual cues that would display the perceptual features of the menacing entity increases the emotional intensity of fear (of the uncontrollable unknown) that, in turn, certifies and explains the menace.13 The musical extra-diegetic score, the point of view tracking shot of a virtual entity blended with the water, the track forward of the point of view of a virtual entity, and the opacity of the water that hides from view a potential menace are categorized by the aggression scenario and the hidden menace situation as instances of fear.

The elaboration of the aggression and the hidden menace Paradoxically, the fact that the victim is unsuspicious of the lurking danger reinforces the hidden threat. The unsuspecting young woman swimming on a clear night in calm waters is evidence that a threatening agent and possible danger are “hidden” from view. Being out of reach and beyond the visual field reinforces the idea of the hidden aspect of danger. The fear provoked by the menacing entity and experienced by the victim is conceptualized by the viewer as evidence of the hidden menace and aggression scenario. The agent of the aggression scenario/the agent of the menace is elaborated by the underwater POV and by the fear that is mildly suggested by a phobia of water (unclear expanse of water, fear of drowning and suffocation). In terms of the control cycle, what is unknown/uncontrollable creates distress and fear. The phobia is evoked by the difference in scale between the human and the natural in A1/ B 15 and by the underwater POV in A3/ A6.

The underwater POV – in terms of the control cycle – is a form of perceptual and epistemic capture of the woman. The agent of aggression is elaborated as a pure attentional focusing on a victim and by the lack of features of the agent performing the viewing action. The aggressor’s features are metaphorically reduced to movement, darkness and an action of visual capture in a boundless expanse (the depth of the water). The absence of a body is still an elaboration of the aggressor, e.g. a bodiless aggressor, and, due to the “bogeyman” emotional effect, a powerful emotional construct. The constructed emotion of fear explains, as a prediction hypothesis, the aggression.

The choice of the POV framing in shot A6 elicits disgust. The viewer is cued to adopt the vantage point of the bodiless menace. The evocation of 13

See about fear and anxiety in Bishop (2007).

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drowning, suffocation, absence of light, and falling down (or being engulfed in life threatening water) elicits fear of contamination and internal harm due to an unknown agent, i.e. disgust. The viewer is captured by the vantage point of the hidden menace and is contaminated by a harmful agent from “within,” i.e. from his inescapable own perceptual activity. The interoceptive affective quality of disgust is attributed to the bodiless menacing entity. Disgust predicts and explains the disgusting character of the shark. The description model/prediction of the disgusting shark explains the network of evoked components – drowning, suffocation, fall, opacity – as instantiations of fear and disgust. Elicited disgust reinforces and explains the hidden menace and the aggression scenario.

At the same time, the cinema viewer is in the position of not being in control of the situation. He/she cannot change the future fate of the victim and (s)he cannot avoid the simulation of the aggressor’s state of mind. To contemplate the aggression situation from the vantage point of the unknown (bodiless) aggressor projects the viewer in a disgusting moral situation. Visceral repulsion of contamination by an unknown entity and moral disgust elicited by being in the position of the aggressor are mingled. The cinema viewer is threatened to be captured by an unknown (loss of identity and body) evil (loss of moral stance).14 In brief, the viewer is projected in the victim’s role, i.e. a target that is captured by another agent.

The aggression scenario is further elaborated in the second part as action and movement of the victim’s body (B10–B11), close-up on the expression of fear (B8–B12), aggressive water movement (B9–B11), and the final stage of the capture, in which the victim entity is “absorbed” in the aggressor’s control field of control (B13–B15).

Mixed Feelings In a mediated representation, the situation of a character can be construed from an internal-immersed perspective (processed by an empathic distress brain system – “feeling with” or empathy) and from an external perspective processed by an empathic care system – “feeling for” or compassion (Andrews-Hanna et al. 2017; Raz and Hendler 2014). The two construals are entertained by the viewer in a dynamic unstable state. The viewer-conceptualizer can, by phase transition, shift (change his mind) between the two alternate perspectives. The 14

“The core of the intermixing of visceral and moral disgust is a sense of threat as well” (Sapolsky 2017, 576).

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overall conceptualization can keep both alternate construals in tight balance in a dynamic bidirectional link. Shared components are schematic slots that can be elaborated by one or another construal, and facilitate transition. For instance, the ego-like point of origin of the cinematic viewing act is one of them, i.e. the cinematic viewers. The cinema viewer-conceptualizer temporarily simulates the character’s immersed perspective in the situation and, therefore, will be called here the experiencer (the viewer, who experiences empathy “with”) while an external conceptualizer’s allocentric perspective of the situation will be called here narrator (the entity which experiences sympathy “for”).

What about the interplay between empathy (empathic distress or “feeling with”) and sympathy (empathic care or “feeling for”) experienced by the cinema viewer?

The swimming woman scene in part A is apprehended by three conceptualizers, each with his/her own vantage point and epistemic stance: the extra diegetic narrator, the intra diegetic experiencer (the young woman) and the intra diegetic aggressor (the shark). The shark will be left aside for the moment, since its main characteristic is its hidden profile and, in terms of the emotional engagement of the viewer, it is a secondary character. It is an important instantiation of the agent in the aggressive action scenario, but the movie profiles more insistently in the foreground of conception the emotional display of the woman. The cinema viewer is “aligned” with her stance on the situation (Murray Smith 1995). This does not mean that the viewer cannot empathize with the aggressor’s stance and enjoy the capture of the victim in a hunting action.

Shot A5 [Fig. 6] is a visual expression that contains two vantage points and two conceptualizers of the scene: the extra diegetic narrator, and the intra diegetic experiencer. The verbal expression that describes the scene can be: The woman is sure there is no danger. But there is danger.

The feeling for and the feeling with are constructed in a symbolic unit, which constrains their subordination relationship. The narrator’s vantage point and conception of reality is the matrix clause, while woman’s conception of reality is the subordinate clause. A control cycle binds the clausal relationship between the two conceptions of reality and elicited emotions. The feeling for is compassion for a potential victim in an aggression scenario. This conception is guided by the narrator role and is a region of epistemic stance and ego-like role. It is a matrix clause in this construction, in which the narrator does not necessarily embrace the woman’s point of view; (s)he just describes it. The feeling with is embedded in the matrix conception as a complement clause. The viewers simulate the vantage point of the woman. They perceive her happiness as she enjoys swimming. But

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they also anticipate the virtual suffering of the woman (non-real – possible and non-immediate – in the future). Her possible suffering is also simulated, but projected in the virtual. Affective qualities can be attributed to future states and objects (Russell 2003, 147; Friston 2017).

The anticipated suffering is unavoidable, since the viewers can’t intervene, help, and interrupt the aggression act. As a schematic control cycle in which an agent-aggressor does a harmful act to a target-victim, the aggression scenario is evoked. The woman instantiates the schematic target of the aggression scenario.

As the control cycle is a 4-stage process, the simulation will contain the victim’s both emotional stances. The unsuspecting victim stands for the potential stage situated at the beginning of the control cycle, followed by uncertainty, doubt and prediction testing in the tension phase as well as rage, distress or suffering in the action phase, ending with either extinction or relaxation due to escape in the last phase. The whole cycle is evoked by shot A5, i.e. the woman is blissfully ignorant of the danger. The viewers simulate the happy present stance of the woman (a happy woman is sure that there is no danger) and the future virtual suffering of the woman (but there is danger). The viewers “know” that there is fear and an aggressor in the scene and they know that the woman is the victim. In a sense, her present happiness cues future unhappy circumstances - the merrier she is now, the worse one expects her future to be. The whole sequence of stages of the event of aggression capture unfolds and the cinema viewer can simulate the distress from an immersed perspective before it actually takes place. The present moment is apprehended in the time lapse of the whole emotional construal of the control cycle. The present emotion of cheerfulness is unfolded and warped as fear, rage and agony due to the expansion of the control cycle. The emotion simulated by the viewer is a dynamic event that starts from a relaxed state and evolves into an emotion of fear and agony.

The whole event of aggression is invoked. The event is apprehended from the vantage point of compassion guided by the narrator and from the nested subordinate perspective of the victim. The emotional state of the woman that blends happiness and distress is experienced in a sequential order. One state seamlessly translates into the other generating a hybrid whole. The narrator’s emotional vantage point prevails, and is correlated with the future fear of the victim. The future fear of the victim is the present fear for the fate of the victim. Her future fear is the viewer’s present fear. Emotions are blends. They are constructions or “synthesized” blends. Different coalitions of neuronal networks are involved in the emergence of one emotion instance and specialized areas participate in multiple instances

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of emotions. Blends can have partitions that are synthesized/fused together by a control mechanism into higher order conceptualizations. The conceptualization of a scene can contain two partitions: one is an allocentric view and the second one an egocentric perspective on the situation.

Sadness and Melancholia The discrepancy between the perspective of the narrator for whom visual cues are mapped as instantiations of the fear emotion and the aggression scenario (the future rage and agony), and the joyful perspective of the woman creates an emotion of sadness. Sadness is cued by the impossibility of avoiding the outcome of the aggressive event; it is also due to the apprehension of the fact that the woman is unaware of the cues that are around her in the scene, and that it is impossible to change this situation. The woman is doomed to be a victim in a scenario. She is unable to see the signs announcing the future aggression. For her, the sea water is enjoyment, but the viewers perceive, feel, and know that the water is a hidden menace.15 The viewers feel compassion not for the actual suffering of the woman but for a human being, who is unaware of an already doomed destiny. They have a meta-emotion directed at their incapacity to help.

The viewers feel sadness, because they are trapped in the victim’s condition.

The woman’s fate is doomed, since nobody will change her fate at the end of the scene. The viewers, in spite of being aware of the nefarious future, cannot alter the predicted sequence of events. The menacing factor is instantiated by the fear emotion and by the amorphous substance of the water that impedes viewing.

The viewers witness the tragic fate of a woman, who is absorbed in a painful and agonistic way in a homogeneous substance (an indefinite mass substance), and, in a metaphorical mapping, witness also the “erasure” of her image, i.e. shot B13. What is felt and categorized as a threat creates a state of tension and fear. The diegetic water and the visual mass of indefinite water dominate almost all the images. The horizon line is extremely high placed and creates a sense of cramping, suffocation and claustrophobia. Water engulfs the character and the visual blur covers the transparency of the image with a relentless tense movement and blocks visual access to the scene. The perspective taken involves more than simulation and is a task that activates an elaborate Theory of Mind. The viewer has to visualize the scene from another mind perspective (e.g. the narrator, the 15

In Bartsch (2010) we find the common metaphors for sadness: “drowning in a sea of sorrow,” being “flooded with tears” associated to darkness, falling, and drowning (Bartsch 2010, 250).

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shark), and has to infer the moral and social outcomes of the aggression scene.16 Shots B14 and B15 mark a phase of relaxation. The line of horizon is lowered to a more classical composition.

To summarize, the episode condensed in shot A7 [Fig. 6] is a roller coaster of constructed emotions that dynamically unfolds and adopts several perspectives on the scene [Fig. 7]. The viewers entertain happiness with the actual woman, they experience compassion for her future and virtual tragic fate, entertain distress and pain with a virtual suffering and a molested human being, fear in an immersed/absorbed, but extra diegetic position in front of a hidden menace, and sadness before the inevitability of fate and loss. Shot B14 highlights the epistemic stance of unawareness. The young man lying on the shore is incapable of help and unaware of the tragic event. Sadness here mixes the “for” position with a human being, who cannot change the future events (the woman, e.g. I feel sad for her), with the self-condition since the viewer cannot change the script of a film (e.g. I feel sad that I cannot change the course of events). Bodily feelings of loss of control over one’s own body are categorized as an instance of sadness. The bodily feelings that were categorized as fear at the beginning of the episode are now sadness. The viewer is captured by the control cycle of containment and restraint cued by the fictional world and the expressive channel of the filmic artefact. The emotional construction prompts further abstractness and can be apprehended as a generalization involving a moral and social reasoning, e.g. the human condition is a sad one, since awareness of future events or lack of knowledge will not modify the predicted outcome. The emotion belongs to the class of painful experiences, e.g. physical or psychic pain (social exclusion, anxiety, disgust, embarrassment) (Sapolsky 2017, 542). Sadness and melancholia are inward oriented and allow abstract thinking and social thinking (Wager et al. 2015; Andrews-Hanna 2012; Bartsch 2010; Guo et al. 2014, 7; Hyett et al. 2015, 665). The emotion constructed by the viewer does not have a conventional linguistic label and lasts as long as (s)he experiences the sequence of mental dynamic emergence. The emotional episode has an innovative, yet fleeting character. The viewer may keep a memory trace of it as a distinct instantiation of a type of fear-sadness.17 As Murray Smith noted, emotions elicited by fictional artefacts have a “unique and original ‘flavour’” dependent on the “circumstances evoked” by the fictional world (Smith 2017, 202). Works of art create distinctive emotional tones and blended constructs.

16 17

See Sapolsky (2017, 492).

Barrett mentions the emotion concept of “Fago” in Ifaluk (Micronesian) that can mean “love, empathy, pity, sadness, or compassion, depending on context” (Barrett 2017, 147).

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Cinematographic discourse can construct hybrid entities that blend figurative features out of different source entities (e.g. Batman as man and bat) and thus, similarly construct new emotional blends in the domain of affective qualities.

Emotion elicited by fictional artefacts is inscribed in a circular loop. Emotions are caused by cues and stimuli of the fictional scene that categorizes them (e.g. the hidden menace and the aggression scenario), and, at the same time, explain or give reason for the affective stimuli of the fictional scene. We see that emotion, perception and cognition share common structures and are closely related.

From a similar perspective, Smith, when commenting on empathy, draws the distinction between functional and aesthetic experience: “in life, empathy is always functional, a means to an end; in narrative art, it becomes an end as well as a means” (Smith 2017, 194).18 As Aristotle recommended, Spielberg’s story of a woman victim is for the cinema viewer a story worth telling, e.g. having a “cathartic” effect, because it depicts events in a way capable of generating pity and/or fear. Loss of clear boundaries between selves, e.g. the cinema viewer, the narrator, the character, obtained via the blending of the feeling with and feeling for creates the premise for compassion for “all sentient beings” (Varela, Thompson and Rosch 1991, 248). The sense of loss which, in a first stage, elicits sadness converts into compassion. Quite often loss of control perceived in mediated aesthetic artifacts, as Varela and colleagues note, is the simulation of loss of the ground of self or world. A groundless relationship between self and world leads to “nonegocentric compassion” (1991, 250). Letting go of the “grasping mind” (i.e. the mind that controls the world or the self as objective and permanent entities) leads to the ethics of a “transcendental generosity,” and opens the mind of the cinema viewer to an open ended/unconditional “responsiveness to oneself and others as sentient beings without ego-selves” (1991, 251).

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List of Figures Figure 1. The four stages of the control cycle cognitive model.

Figure 2. Patterns of circular coupling.

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Figure 3. Expression of emotion in a two-shot construction. (Illustration from Barrett et al. 2011, 287.)

Figure 4.

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Figure 5. The Shining (Stanley Kubrick, 1980).

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Figure 7. Summary of the perspectives adopted and the emotions unfolding in the episode condensed in shot A5 above.

Acta Univ. Sapientiae, Film and Media Studies, 20 (2021) 111–128 DOI: 10.2478/ausfm-2021-0017

Game of Thrones as a Gothic Horror in Quality Television Amanda Rutherford and Sarah Baker

Auckland University of Technology (New Zealand) E-mails: amanda.rutherford@aut.ac.nz, sarah.baker@aut.ac.nz Abstract. Quality television at its heart is designed to reward sustained viewing and involvement on the part of the audience. It has distinctive visual styles, serial characters and storylines and a filmic quality, all of which is evident in Game of Thrones (2011–2019). This article discusses how the scale and cinematic production values of quality television, adds value to the Game of Thrones series through the enhancement and articulation of the Gothic horror.

Keywords. Game of Thrones, Gothic horror, fantasy, quality television, violence.

Game of Thrones (created by David Benioff and D. B. Weiss, 2011–2019) is a prime example of quality television and a phenomenal worldwide success, featuring cinematic staging, complex narratives and diverse multi-layered roles.

Filled with elements of Gothic horror, which includes sinister power struggles, extreme torture, gratuitous violence and an impending apocalyptic event, the audience is transposed into the world of Westeros, where contemporary cultural issues and anxieties can be examined. In this article, we argue that the extreme popularity of Game of Thrones confirms that there is a growing global demand for programmes that explore and fuel an ever-increasing fascination with violence, horror and torture, utilizing quality television as the mode of delivery to push the boundaries of horror to new levels. According to Stacey Abbott, “television horror has always been a thriving part of TV” (2012, 25) and this series mixes horror with a Gothic historical-mythical fantasy setting to create a violent world where acts of cruelty, torture and pain are normalized as part of the society of the time. Game of Thrones also combines genre hybridity, self-reflexivity and intertextuality (Fuller 2013). Through the historical setting, the series utilizes the brutality and gore associated with acts of war as a platform for horror and destruction.

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Simultaneously however, the narratives portray a high level of Gothic intimacy presented in terms of the close interactions between individual characters and story arcs. This is witnessed for example, through the cruel and sadistic acts by Joffrey Baratheon upon others, or the depiction of the extreme torture bestowed upon Theon Greyjoy by Ramsay Bolton. The programme juxtaposes scale and violence with snapshots of intense physical and psychological torture.

The development of quality television in the twenty-first century has brought about some interesting generic relationships because of its tendency to break established rules and to utilize contentious subject matters to draw audiences (Thompson 1997). One of these developments can be observed in the alignment that quality television has formed with horror and the Gothic, where the bar on conventional limits of fear and terror in television is redefined. Graphic horror is now found in television series such as Vikings (Michael Hirst 2013–) or Spartacus (Stanley Kubrick 2010–2013) for example, where the historical background further provides a sense of the Gothic through place and time. Lawson (2013) suggests “it used to be that viewers knew what to expect from a BBC drama, or an ITV comedy, but increasingly the lines are blurring and that’s no bad thing.” In this respect, the genres in television have shifted stylistically and thematically, and Lawson credits this change to “the rise of hybrid genres, influenced by US independent cinema and cable TV in which a joke can lead to a death, or viceversa” (Lawson 2013). Therefore, this article will explore how Gothic horror has become the means through which HBO continues to push the boundaries of quality television by repeatedly transgressing lines of acceptability and social taboos, broadcast on a global stage.

From the 1980s to the 2000s television changed to a multi-channel environment, but with the arrival of subscription television like HBO and others the same need to keep advertisers happy did not exist. Without the same regulation as network TV, subscription television was able to provide edgier and more provocative programmes. The content produced could push the boundaries and Game of Thrones is a prime example of this change with strong horror themes and multifaceted storylines. No expense is spared to rain layers upon layers of complex storylines and variations of the horror genre, depicting all conceivable representations of blood, torture and pain on the screen. We examine the way these boundaries are stretched, and how Quality television serves as the facilitator to the development of the Gothic horror genre, through its portrayal in Game of Thrones.

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Game of Thrones as Global Quality TV Game of Thrones first aired in 2011 through HBO’s American cable channel, with the first season sold to numerous subscription and television channels across the world. Its success as a cable programme mirrors that of AMC’s zombie apocalypse series The Walking Dead (Billy Gierhart, Ernest R Dickerson, Frank Darabont, Guy Ferland, Gwyneth Horder-Payton, Michelle MacLaren, Phil Abraham, and Stakka Bo 2010–) which premiered in 2010 and by season five was a ratings sensation, pulling in 17.3 million viewers (King 2015), making it the most watched show in cable television history at the time. Game of Thrones had similarly become the largest “hit” for HBO by 2014, whilst simultaneously amassing the largest global piracy record (Lotz 2017). This inspired HBO to reconsider the release options for season five, and by working with 170 markets across the world, they managed a simultaneous release across the globe (Lotz 2017). The popularity of this series has seen it enter mainstream popular referencing, and though quality television was originally believed to be a niche audience phenomenon, the series has reached massive levels of global audiences. The show no longer assumes limited appeal to specific target markets and brings unparalleled attention to the horror genre on television. In 2011, same day viewership was at 2.51 million per episode for season one, increasing substantially in season six to 7.72 million. By season seven, the viewership had risen to 12.1 million (Home Box Office), with the final episode of season seven drawing 16.5 million viewers, as it aired across the globe, “making it the most-watched episode in series history” (Otterson 2017). When factoring in delayed viewing across all platforms, season seven averages 30.6 million viewers globally (Koblin 2017). This figure has increased to 32 million by May 2019 after release of Season eight, and according to HBO, season eight viewership is at 44.2 million per episode (Porter 2019).

The large ensemble cast in Game of Thrones allows for multi-layered storylines and more controversial subject matters to be discussed, whilst being comparable to a filmic experience. Delivery is aimed at niche markets, with varying platforms on which to watch the products, and as such these paid subscription channels are not curtailed by the regulations of the broadcasting television standards (Fuller 2013). This means that Game of Thrones can produce narratives which are contentious and edgy, pushing the accepted norms of television, including scenes of extreme horror and torture, to cater for an ever-increasing horrorconsuming, horror-aware audience.

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Cardwell says that Quality Television pivots on “an intense level of audience appreciation” and “fast-paced style” (2007, 26). This creates a raised level of engagement, encouraging the viewers to interpret and critique the work, and to evaluate it. Game of Thrones has maximized the concept of distinguishable visual aesthetics by combining the medieval placement in time, with ancient customs and castles, weapons and battles, with a fantasy world where dragons, giants, White Walkers and the Children of the Forest are meshed and entwined as one workable space in time. This has given the creators the opportunity to layer and utilize their canvass to “portray massive destruction and virtual realities on the screen” (Ostwalt 2000, 14), surpassing previous television boundaries by destabilizing the portrayal of traditional television horror, and recreating fear as a high culture form of popular entertainment. Themes are projected of allencompassing Gothic horror through narratives of sinister power struggles, mass killings and war, patriarchal hierarchies empowered by fear, gruesome tortures and rapes, which culminate in the threat of the White Walkers – the reanimated dead – and the total annihilation and destruction of Westeros in an apocalyptic event. This Gothic mode is used not only to deliver on the themes such as death, destruction, horror and brutality, but more importantly as an uncanny, yet highly relatable measure and facilitator of expression for the dire times in which contemporary society lives today. Spooner suggests that “Gothic texts offer a means of reflecting, expressing or processing already existing anxieties and traumas in the ‘real’ world” (2017, 11), and as such this Gothic platform is well-utilized to spring-board these dark tropes and feelings of being inadequate, anxious or in despair, while conceptualizing the horror of issues and events we do not adequately investigate in modern society.

It is useful to contextualize this programme in a discussion of the horror genre in contemporary television. Jowett and Abbott (2012) argue that television scholars tend to categorize the production of television horror into three broad periods TV1 (roughly 1959–1975), TV II (1975–the 1990s), and TVIII (from the 1990s onwards). Game of Thrones, as a horror within the current period, is thus defined as television that has moved beyond its reputation as “mainstream, mass entertainment aimed at the lowest common denominator” (2012, 10), into the realm of quality television of a higher culture value than seen before in television.

Similar trends are seen in other successful quality horror television series like The Walking Dead, for example, as although the programme remains focused on the individuals that have survived the zombie apocalypse, “this is not at the expense of graphically depicted decaying bodies, zombies eating human flesh

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and humans exterminating zombies. This commitment to delivering the plot and spectacle typical of a cinematic zombie film in long-running serial format is the ‘something more’ drawing audiences to the series” (Jowett and Abbott 2012, 12).

Television horror has changed and is frequently seen to take flagship status on cable networks, with quality television programmes like True Blood, The Walking Dead and Game of Thrones placed front and centre of their schedules. These shows focus on representing “the materiality of the body and the visual display of its destruction” (Creed 1995, 128), effectively heightening audience popularity and engagement. There are numerous examples of the destruction of the body in Game of Thrones with its realistic and pronounced horror and destruction of the body, including the “crowning” of Viserys with a molten gold helmet, the poisoning of Joffrey, beheadings and numerous brutal murders. Though similar in its production values to other quality horror television programmes, that encapsulate Gothic themes of isolation, alienation and disease, to name a few, Game of Thrones includes a unique historical setting in time, placing it firmly within the early Gothic era, and its multi-layered character narratives transpose the audience into the period where barbaric customs reinforce the horror that takes place.

Within the dense narratives that take place in Game of Thrones there are several additional tropes of the Gothic in the series, including the Gothic romance. Often the heroines, like Sansa Stark, are tortured by an overpowering patriarch or sadistic male. For example, she is forced to marry Ramsay Bolton against her will, raped and tortured, and mostly used as a pawn in the play between powerful families. Another Gothic theme is that of the protagonist as hero and anti-hero.

In Game of Thrones confusion arises between which of the characters are good or evil as their narratives twist throughout the storylines. Many characters are truly honourable and courageous, but this often changes, and the individuals lose status and/or support. Stannis Baratheon, for example, held the best claim to rule over Westeros as the eldest son of Robert. He was held in high regard by Ned Stark and was portrayed as a loyal servant to the throne, however, in a desperate attempt to lead he offered his own daughter to be burnt alive. Stannis Baratheon is one of the characters, who serve to blur the lines between the hero and antihero, like that of Tyrion and Jaime Lannister, Varys, Petyr Baelish and Arya Stark.

Emotions stirred by these characters, whether they be positive or negative are intense, and sometimes full of terror.

Henry Giroux suggests that the “public pedagogy of entertainment includes extreme images of violence, human suffering and torture splashed across giant movie screens, some in 3D, offering viewers every imaginable portrayal of violent

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acts, each more shocking and brutal than the last” (2012, 263). He explains that there is a growing public interest in sadism and death acts. This has resulted in the need for film and television to constantly turn up the heat, so to speak, on increasingly graphic and violent acts of horror, to retain audiences. The Game of Thrones producers have embraced this public interest and strive to challenge entertainment and television norms by depicting extreme violence and acts of torture, traditionally found in cinema, on the television screen. Under the umbrella term of quality television, the cinematic experience of horror is brought to television, producing episode after episode of exaggerated violence that Giroux (2012) explains is a direct result of the audience interest to witness more and more explicit and dark themes, as forms of entertainment. The extreme popularity of Game of Thrones confirms a global fascination with violence, horror and torture.

HBO’s success is based on viewership and subscriptions, making it paramount to introduce material that will be considered innovative and edgy. They “lavish more money on the production of their drama series than any of the broadcast networks can possibly afford” (Anderson 2008, 35), with costs running in the range of $6 million per episode for season one1 and is believed to cost over $15 million per episode for season eight (Shepherd 2017). At the time of its broadcast, Game of Thrones dominated popular culture film and television conversation.

Research made by Parrot Analytics, found that Game of Thrones was the most popular television series worldwide – across all social media platforms, blogging and illegal pirating for 2017, with an average daily audience demand of 11.28 million (Nederdog 2017).

Cinematic Experience The horror genre in television has been transformed and incorporated into a cinematic quality television experience, which can be seen for example in the episode The Battle of the Bastards (6.9). We argue that the combination of the cinematic quality with the high level of graphic violence in some ways contradicts the negativity that has been associated with slasher or graphic violence before.

The quality of the filming and realism for example links the gore, horror and quality aspects together. This episode commences with Jon Snow and Ramsay Bolton meeting on the battlefield, with negotiations of surrender from either 1

See: Emmie Martin: Here’s how much it costs HBO to produce one episode of Game of Thrones (2017. August 6), https://www.cnbc.com/2017/08/04/it-costs-millions-to-produce-one-episodeof-hbos-game-of-thrones.html. Last accessed 09. 10. 2021.

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side proving fruitless. Ramsay is known in the series for being the sadistic “bastard,” projecting dread and horror through his torturous acts, and Jon Snow is believed to be the bastard son of Eddard Stark. Polan says that horror films are continuously showcasing horror as “a part of us, caused by us” (2004, 143), indicating that it is the actual individuals, who are the creators of the horrors experienced, through their personal desires such as the controlling of others or in their pursuit of power. Horror here can also act as a metaphor for the violence and brutal acts that people commit amid political struggles, and not unlike narratives seen in Spartacus or Vikings. This is seen when Ramsay for example, has taken over the Stark home of Winterfell, and has abused and raped Jon’s sister Sansa, and holds his brother Rickon Stark prisoner. The battle begins with a vast, deep focus panoramic shot of the outskirts of the Winterfell grounds. The camera then scans across the impressive set to capture the view of the army of Jon Snow with archers in front, followed by rows of cavalry and then hundreds of foot soldiers behind. Banners are displaying the sigils of each clan present, plus the Wildlings (people of the North) and a giant.

Botting explains that “the macabre repertoire of terror is designed to have disturbing effects on characters’ […] imaginations, prolonging the interplay of anticipation and apprehension” (1999, 5), and this is clearly realized within this episode. It is an epic production utilizing a battle format to facilitate another level of horror on a colossal scale. The opening scene sees a wide and deep focus pan across the landscape, zooming into the mid-field view of flayed burning corpses on the battlefield. This epitomizes an “iconographic depiction of the terrors of death” (Cook 2012, 4), with the bodies presented chained upside-down, with the burnt expressions of torture and pain etched into their faces. In this way, the narrative presents horrifying acts of violence which is representative of historic Gothic tradition.

Cardwell says that “it is not that a particular pace or style of camerawork, or level of detail in the mise-en-scène, or type of performance, or particular set of themes, make a programme good – though these things may make it quality television – but that the way in which these things are integrated can create a coherent whole that has stylistic integrity” (2007, 30). Ramsay is dragging Rickon by rope behind him, and turns, as if to slit his throat, before releasing him to run to the safety of his brother Jon while he begins to shoot at him with his arrows.

This is done to emphasize the evilness of humanity and gives the audience the interpretive means to identify man from monster (Halberstam 2014). The monster Ramsay is toying with Jon to enrage him and lure him into poor judgement, to

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lose concentration on the battle at hand, which is precisely the outcome. In this psychological game of terror, the desperation of Jon is almost tangible, as he charges on his horse to rescue Rickon, whilst the arrows are released one by one.

He fails, and Ramsay’s arrow pierces Rickon’s heart moments before Jon reaches him. This is emphasized through the sound score, heightening the unsettling and ominous experience as it unfolds, and instilling panic and horror. The ensuing battle that occurs presents the entire scene as one of epic proportions. As Jon’s horsemen charge into the battle the noise is thunderous, and the ground level filming heightens the experience and realism. The galloping horses are seen in slow motion giving time to absorb each detail of their determination and movement. Giles says that in the horror genre, what “the film industry sells to the viewer is not a material thing but an experience, or promise, of pleasure” (2004, 37), and the suspense at this moment is visceral as the audience watches and anticipates every movement to follow.

While cinematic in form in many ways, this battle continues as part of a complex, and networked production system and narrative, and ensures an aesthetic continuity which forms part of the Gothic horror experience of the entire series. Far from traditional cinematic film, this production alters the experience of death within a typical battle format. Ramsay instructs his archers to reign arrows over the battlefield, killing and maiming hundreds of both his and Jon’s men. It is this realization that he purposely sacrifices the lives of his own men, that highlights the extent of his evil nature, and confirms that it is the actual acts of horror that are being represented and not the act of the war. There is an unprecedented scale of death as layers upon layers of dead and injured men lie on the ground, creating small hills which soon become a wall of bodies that the soldiers must scramble over, slipping in their blood and bodily fluids, and including sights of the entrails of the dead and still living, writhing in pain.

This is synonymous of the Gothic grotesque, where we see “bodies that straddle categories, perhaps covered with effluent substances that render what should be on the inside of the person onto its outside” (Mukherjea 2012, 114). As the battle seems lost for Jon and his men, being surrounded by Ramsay’s army, yet another wave of horsemen swoop into the battle in the form of the Petyr Baelish cavalry, who destroy Ramsay’s forces from behind and the battle is won for Jon Snow.

Much of the discussion around the rise of quality or prestige television has centred around the role of showrunners and writers who have energized television. In the last decade “the schisms between the small and big screens dwindled. And not merely in the scope of the stories or quality of the scripts:

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never before has television looked so good, from inventive camerawork to glossy lighting” (Nevins 2018). The focus on the affect and aesthetic in this scene is keenly evident and meets the criteria of quality television whilst altering the parameters of how horror is usually displayed in television.

Torture Porn and Complex Narratives The complex narratives seen in the HBO cable network series fulfil the parameters of quality television with its “cutting-edge, in-your-face television that employs liberal amounts of sex, violence and swearing as well as serious or adult themes in an artful and stylistic package” (Cherry 2012, 3). These narratives continuously intertwine themselves through the fantasy-medieval setting with the producers proving “unafraid to be confrontational in their writing or in their explicit visuals” (Cherry 2012, 7).

The focus of the series is often on explicit visuals and conventions, which are associated with the horror subgenre torture porn. Jones suggests that “torture porn discourse highlights confusions regarding how taboo is defined” (2013, 2), and that, it is a site of discursive struggle. Torture porn largely focuses upon the spectacle of physical and psychological suffering being inflicted, and in Game of Thrones the characters are frequently seen in confined spaces; being subjected to physical and psychological suffering; or subjected to varying forms of calculated infliction of human cruelty. For example, there are two key characters who torture their victims solely for their own pleasure; King Joffrey and Ramses Bolton. In the Garden of Bones (2.4), prostitutes Ros and Daisy have been called to give sexual pleasure to the new King Joffrey Baratheon, and it becomes apparent that it is not sex that he wants, as he instructs Ros to hit Daisy, then beat her with a belt, and then a stag head sceptre. Torture porn is seen as a sub-category of the horror genre, and has been compared to earlier subgenres, such as slasher and splatter films (Jones 2013). David Edelstein says that “explicit scenes of torture and mutilation were once confined to the old 42nd Street… whereas now they have terrific production values and a place of honour in your local multiplex” (2006). In this respect, torture porn can be seen to constitute itself not only in scenes of physical torture, but in the aesthetics, which bring to the fore tropes of violence, and carry viewers through an unforgettable spectacle. In The Climb (3.6), Ros the prostitute, now gifted to King Joffrey for his pleasure, has been tied to Joffrey’s bed and shot several times with his crossbow, culminating with a final arrow into her heart. The pleasure taken from this and the explicit nature

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of this scene shows where aspects of torture porn have slipped into the Game of Thrones narrative and how witnessing such violence on television lures audiences into retained viewership and has grown to become an expectation of the audience. Jones (2013) states that some critics suggest torture porn in the horror genre replaces narrative depth and characterization, however, we argue that this is not the case in Game of Thrones. Whilst at times the sadistic violence together with torture seems the central aspect of the plot, the focus on horror is crucial to the characterization of protagonists like Joffrey and Ramsay and there is a constant weaving between individual characters as well as storylines without loss of quality or the over-arching themes. Consequently, the use of torture brings further layers of depth to the show.

Having discussed the sadistic violence and torture that are central to the plot it is important to consider why such aspects would appeal to an audience. Carrol suggests that “there is something paradoxical about the horror genre. It obviously attracts consumers; but it seems to do so by means of the expressly repulsive” (1990, 159). As Creed writes, “the horror film abounds in images of abjection, foremost of which is the corpse, whole and mutilated, followed by an array of bodily wastes such as blood, vomit, saliva, tears and putrefying flesh” (1995, 253). The horror genre therefore gives pleasure to its audience, but it does this by going into areas that cause distress and displeasure. In other words, the audience feel compelled to watch even if this viewing causes distress. In this regard, horror often deals with the abject, where the audiences’ reaction to blood or vomit or dead bodies generates a breakdown in meaning, which is caused by the loss of the distinction between subject and object or self and other. A corpse for example, reminds the viewers of their own materiality (Kristeva, 1982). Thus, much horror works through this mixture of attraction and repulsion.

Game of Thrones is a world of unfolding betrayal, torment, anguish and pain, with only rare and short-lived glimpses into any form of peace, unity or happiness. Ramsay Bolton is a sociopath known for gaining pleasure from extreme torture, and physical as well as mental cruelty. Lowrey and deCordova (2004) say that one of the key experiences of the horror film is the creation of fear and excitement. Ramsay takes immense pleasure in activities such as the terrorizing and hunting of women in the woods with his dogs (4.2); he murdered his father Roose (6.2), then his stepmother Lady Walda and newborn brother, feeding them to his dogs (6.2). Ramsay’s physical and psychological torture and subsequent castration of Theon Greyjoy was extreme and unrelenting, as Ramsay turned Theon into his “pet” named Reek, thus emphasizing how “sadism and

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the infatuation with violence have become normalized in a society that seems to take delight in dehumanising itself” (Giroux 2012, 260). Though torturing a character does not necessarily make a film or series torture porn, the legacy of the torture porn subgenre is an increased level of explicit and extreme horror across the genre. The delight that Bolton takes in the level of torture and the positioning of the audience in this arc suggests that this is not just horror, but contains elements of torture porn with the repellent treatment of Greyjoy, and further aligns the audience with torture porn dynamics, watching and enjoying the explicit violence, while also being repulsed by its portrayal.

“When girls or young women enter the plots, the threat of the monstrous bridegroom is primarily sexual” (Warner 1998, 74) as seen on the night of Ramsay’s wedding to Sansa. Ramsay takes her to his quarters and has Reek (the name taken by Theon after his subjugation to Ramsay following his castration) watch as he rapes her. Theon weeps as he watches, yet is unable to defend Sansa as he is so afraid of Ramsay. During an interview actor Iwan Rheon (Ramsay) said that Game of Thrones is “a true depiction of the world that we’ve created… it’s true of what happened when this was hypothetically based. And it’s true of what’s happening today in the world” (Bennion 2016). When studying the horror film, Telotte says that there is a heavy reliance on the “evocation of audience participation”, and the “ability to convince us that its threats have some measure of reality about them. They exist within a context of their own making, a world which we, in unspoken agreement, certify as a real, although aberrant, part of our own environment; hence, they represent a threat not just to our existences, but to our very human nature” (Telotte 2004, 23). Ramsay is a monster of modern times, featuring in a complex and almost deranged narrative that fits the remit of quality television, and represents broader social fears and anxieties in a very intimate, Gothic manner.

The show also signals its quality through the way horror tropes become embedded within complex narratives surrounding religion. The series features several varying belief systems, faiths and religions, values and morals, in many instances orchestrated to address contemporary societal problems and issues of the twenty-first century. Within the faux historical context of Game of Thrones, these issues are presented in a barbaric manner at times, yet pertinent to the relevance of the destructive nature of humankind in our world today. In the opening scene of Winter is Coming (1.1), Will finds a group of dead Wildling bodies, dismembered and formed into a gruesome and ritualistic pattern in the snow, with their heads poised upon spikes in the ground. The example of the

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Gothic grotesque body is seen here, “incomplete, lacking in vital parts” (Edwards and Graulund 2013, 2) with multiple pieces of multiple bodies missing. Another pattern is seen in the episode Walk of Punishment (3.3) where a spiral shape is seen made from horse heads and parts and then a similar patterning of the spiralling stones around the sacred Weirwood tree, where a First Man was transformed into the Night King with a dragonglass dagger (Blood of My Blood 6.5). These gruesome spiral shapes left by the White Walkers resemble those found on the hill where Will was beheaded (1.1). Perhaps both humans and White Walkers are worshippers of the same gods, through a transposed memory taken with the transformation of the First Man into the Night King, but the gruesome body parts emphasize for viewers their differing respect for human life.

Dickstein says that the “decline of religion and the increasing secularization of society have given more and more mythical resonance to popular culture, which provides us with binding and common experiences and satisfies some primitive needs. The subcultural material in horror films is one form of this return of the repressed” (2004, 55), and the complex spiritualistic narratives in Game of Thrones can be a means of contemplation regarding religious beliefs or theories about the origin of life in contemporary society. In line with the horror genre in general, and the tendency of quality television towards narrative complexity, distinguishing which deities are good is not necessarily clear for the audience. For example, the Lord of Light, worshipped by the priestess Melisandre, is undoubtedly dark. Melisandre receives messages from her god by watching burning flames and performing ritual sacrifices. In Garden of Bones (2.4) she births a demon spirit “shadow” which is used to kill Renly Baratheon, one of the claimants to the Iron Throne. “The actions of witches, sorcerers, demons, and devils provide the rationale for displays of virtuosity on the part of the filmmaker” (Russell 2004, 66) and it is interesting to see the portrayal of Melisandre, advising Stannis Baratheon to burn three prepared leeches, to enable the destruction of his enemies Robb Stark, Balon Greyjoy and Joffrey Baratheon.

Hence, this scene displays the narrative complexity commonly seen in quality television programmes and demonstrates that morality in Game of Thrones is not a clear cut or black or white thing. By the end of season six all three men are dead and Melisandre convinces Stannis to sacrifice his daughter Shireen as a gift to her Lord of Light to win in battle. The gruesome burning of his child, however, (The Dance of Dragons 5.9) does not prove successful. This scene is both engrossing and appalling, full of moral ambiguity and confusion. The audience is rendered unable to comprehend that the child will actually be burnt, and expecting that

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the parents will put an end to the travesty. In this respect “scariness has gained ground as pleasure” (Warner 1998, 4), and by the audience engagement HBO is successfully operating its horror on the platform of quality television.

The multi-narrative twists again when Jon Snow, one of the lead characters in Game of Thrones, is murdered by fellow members of the Night’s Watch in the final episode of season five (Mother’s Mercy 5.10). The “particular notion of hardness and aggressive masculinity has become commonplace in a society in which digestible spectacles of violence are endlessly circulated through proliferating media forms” (Giroux 2012, 263). The men of the Night’s Watch epitomize such mediated males as they are dangerous and aggressive men, known through all of Westeros for their horror and crimes. Jon Snow is dead, murdered by his own men of The Wall, and a main protagonist, recognized as the prime candidate for some sort of salvation amid the series’ grotesque and violent world, is taken. In a bizarre turn of events Melisandre, the priestess, resurrects Jon Snow after his brutal stabbing (Home 6.2) with the “magic” of her dark Lord. As a result, his aggressive murderers are shown not only as incapable of removing Jon from his position of power and control, but also having inadvertently awarded him an enormous amount of power. These men are later killed by Jon for their betrayal.

There are other forms of faith and witchcraft seen in Game of Thrones and the audience meets the witch Mirri Maz Duur, who advises Daenerys Targaryen that as a “godswife,” priestess of the Lhazareen god, she has the power to save the life of her husband by using “blood magic” (Fire and Blood 1.10). In Gothic texts “the witch is a person, usually female, who is responsible for maleficium, evil acts, expressed through charms, portents, curses, the mid-wife who kills or delivers deliberately deformed children” (Russell 2004, 63). Drogo is dying, and Daenerys allows the witch to perform her blood magic by sacrificing the life of his horse, despite fierce opposition from the Dothraki. This blind faith shown by Daenerys is poorly calculated as the witch seeks vengeance for the crimes to her family and a Gothic theme of entrapment and torture emerges as she leaves Khal Drogo alive, but in a seemingly brain-dead state. Furthermore, when Daenerys’s baby is born the witch advises her that it was born a monster, full of deformation, and thus speaks to the argument by Russell (2004), where the witch presents a Gothic act of deformed and death in the child, aligning with another common Gothic trope.

The narrative consistently reminds viewers that “winter is coming,” a threat to all mankind. It is a period known in their ancient history of great cold, suffering and the almost indestructible White Walkers, who will again threaten extinction of man. “Like much dystopian science fiction, the apocalyptic or post-

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apocalyptic can be interpreted as a Gothic mode, as despite its apparent future setting, it deals not with the development of civilization (as in the majority of science fiction) but with its posited decline and fall, thus creating a situation in which its protagonists constantly live either with the shadow of the past within a hostile present environment, or with the prospect of a dystopic society’s imminent collapse” (Lloyd Smith 2004, 164). The over-arching theme of the entire series is not unlike that of Vikings (2013–), where the tale of a long-past harsh and unforgiving period becomes the landscape for violence, torture and a Gothic framed exploration of terror. The threat of an apocalyptic event manifests in season 8, and the reality is that all inhabitants are required to fight against the threat of the White Walkers who are near-impossible to defeat.

Conclusion Albeit set against a fantasy backdrop, Game of Thrones is ultimately about betrayal, jealousy and hatred though it is situated in a pseudo-medieval world that incorporates the supernatural as well as historical settings. By combining these elements, Game of Thrones creates a complex world, addressing and exceeding audience expectations of what is defined as quality television. The subscription channels have had a strong presentation of horror within their programmes, using graphic style body horror, and are now once more pushing these boundaries by encapsulating a Gothic mode intertwined with all forms of horror within the narrative. According to Dickstein, “fright and terror have never really been out of style” (2004, 50) and it is under this premise that the producers framed the series with combinations of these themes. Game of Thrones combines a distinctive visual style, serial characters and storyline development, and a focus on star performers, while bringing a new level of horror to global audiences. In contrast with series such as Vikings, which share the setting and plotting among characters for the throne, Game of Thrones distinguishes itself by the unrelenting and highly detailed depiction of terror and horror through the series presented as a normal part of everyday life in that time, and the number of parallel multilayered narratives. It is however, the significant level of violence seen in Game of Thrones combined with the aesthetics of quality television that make this a unique benchmark in how the levels of horror and terror have been raised. The combination of horror in its many forms meshed with the aesthetics and narrative format of quality television make this an example of how Game of Thrones has pushed the boundaries of acceptability with regard to genre on television. In so

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doing, the adoption of horror tropes in Game of Thrones has also taken quality television to new levels and set a new benchmark for the expectations of both audiences and producers by normalizing brutality and horror in a Gothic setting, enthralling a global audience in an unprecedented scale, and bringing to the foreground a global appreciation of the horror genre on television.

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Acta Univ. Sapientiae, Film and Media Studies, 20 (2021) 129–150 DOI: 10.2478/ausfm-2021-0018

Considering Eye-tracking as a Validation Tool in Cinema Research Giorgos Dimitriadis

Aristotle University (Thessaloniki, Greece) E-mail: geodim@enl.auth.gr Abstract. The use of eye-tracking in data collection, when accompanied by the proper research questions and methodology, is a powerful tool that may provide invaluable insights into the way viewers perceive and experience movies. Film theory can use eye-tracking to test and verify research hypotheses not only with unprecedented accuracy, but also with the ability to address a significant variety of theoretical questions. Eye-tracking can help build contemporary film theory by supporting its various fields of research, and also even assist the production of films themselves by helping filmmakers make more informed creative decisions. The present article is an overview of eye-tracking and its gradual implementation in cinema research; in the context of discussing some recent examples of academic work based on eye-tracking, it considers the technology of eye-trackers and the way in which human vision handles visual information on screen. By testing the attentional behaviour of viewers, eye-tracking can produce more solid answers to questions regarding the way films are experienced; therefore, it may very well prove to be the spearhead of a more robust body of film theory in the near future.

Keywords: eye-tracking, gaze data, visual perception, cinema, cognitive film theory.

Introduction Cinema has always been a showcase for new imaging technologies. Driven by the power of a constantly evolving digitization, film production is perpetually on the verge of something new, a condition which more often than not produces corresponding dynamics for the research approaches that serve it. Probably among the most significant of these approaches, currently under the spotlight of a growing and, most notably, interdisciplinary body of researchers, is the use of eye-tracking. Eye-tracking is expanding rapidly to all aspects of research

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that entail human vision, such as psychology of perception, marketing and commerce strategies, interactivity in software and web design, education, hardware operation, etc. Cinema was bound to be included in the list, especially since cognitive approaches entered film theory. The continuous technological development of eye-tracking systems has made their use significantly easier and far less invasive, also leading to a remarkable improvement in their accuracy and overall usability with a much broader body of participant groups. This, in turn, opens up tremendous possibilities in cinema research, given the extreme popularity of the medium among a considerable number of target groups and their combinations as well as its inherent diversity in style and technique. The same diversity should naturally be expected in cinema-related research that is based on eye-tracking as well.

The tools that eye-trackers have made available to researchers with the development and refinement of relevant technology over the past few years have steered research towards relatively new directions. Neuroscientific testing and data collection are encrusted with an aura of authority that provides them – and, therefore, the conclusions drawn from their analysis as well – with a desired impact of scientific credibility. Regardless of the eventual validity of each of these results, which is still subject to correct methodology related to a number of parameters ranging from the overall design of the study to the interpretation of results, such approaches are difficult to be matched by what could potentially be a passion-driven, but not necessarily scientifically backed film theory.

Eye-tracking can work equally well with currently emerging theories as well as retrospectively. Tim Smith makes a solid case for the use of eye-tracking in cinema research, noting that the desire to know where exactly people look when watching a movie has only recently been fulfilled after decades of significant efforts, which, nevertheless, have been intuitive and predictive rather than subject to empirical testing and verification (2013, 169). For example, Smith refers to Sergei Eisenstein’s beliefs about the possibility of a director guiding the viewer’s gaze on screen by carefully considering the way shots are composed; or, to Edward Dmytryk’s guidelines on optimal cutting, which he formulated – based on the time needed for viewers to shift their gaze – by measuring his own saccades years before eye-trackers became commercially accessible (2013, 169). Smith notes that cognitive approaches to film theory, in particular, have addressed various issues concerning the mental processes of film viewers as well as the possibility of directorial decisions being able to affect the experience of watching a movie as a whole. He, thus, proposes a framework by which the concerns of cognitive

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film theory can be made to communicate with those of empirical psychology and also benefit from its tools and methods, with eye-tracking conveniently offering “a real-time measure of how a viewer is watching and processing a film” (2013, 165–166), a once unattainable luxury for cinema scholars. In addition to this, eye-tracking brings the power of statistical analysis into play: as Adrian G. Dyer and Sarah Pink note, eye-tracking can enable testing a specific visual scenario in a demographically controlled sample of participants (2015).1 Testing pre-determined hypotheses about the way the viewer’s eyes respond to specific parts of a visual stimulus can enhance even further the findings and conclusions drawn from research based on visual gaze data.

The present article aims at providing an overview and defence of eye-tracking as a useful tool in contemporary research in film, considering the physiology of human vision. Eye-tracking can significantly support film theory and even provide it with entirely new directions. Using this as a starting point, the article first introduces some elementary features and concepts of eye-tracking technology that are particularly pertinent to studies concerning the moving image, before moving on to an essential understanding of the way human vision picks up information from the environment. Within this framework, an overview of some key findings from eye-tracking research on the perception of film will be discussed; these findings reveal the importance of understanding the operations of the human visual system when it encounters a dynamic scene, particularly in mainstream narrative cinema, and, by extension, highlight some of the ways in which eye-tracking can provide more solid foundations to film theory in general.

Understanding the Basics of Eye-tracking Eye-tracking tracks and records the human gaze, providing patterns of the way human eyes see and observe a practically unlimited array of visual stimuli: if something can be placed in front of a participant’s eyes, it can probably be tracked. Eye-trackers commonly use infrared cameras to capture the reflection of an infrared light source on the eyes, thus being able to map their mobility patterns typically – but not exclusively – on the surface of a screen. According to Andrew Duchowski, eye movement analysis that makes use of systems based 1

The authors stress, though, that eye-tracking can only tell researchers what participants are looking at. It cannot by itself explain “why, what they are experiencing, what their affective states are, nor how their actions are shaped by the wider social, material, sensory and atmospheric environments of which they are part,” for which they suggest turning to phenomenological anthropology (Dyer and Pink 2015).

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on gaze detection requires focusing on the way the gaze repositions itself in the visual array with quick jumps (saccades), tracks a moving target (smooth pursuits) and stabilizes itself on specific stationary locations such as objects (fixations), under the assumption that these movements “provide evidence of voluntary, overt visual attention,” without excluding at the same time their involuntary use or nonuse (2007, 47).2 By doing so, such systems are capable of recording data about the visual behaviour of participants: researchers can locate the areas and points on a screen that attracted the participants’ gaze and are therefore potentially important as well as track the routes that eyes take as they jump from one fixation to the other. Eye-trackers record and measure the participants’ patterns of looking at something in order to answer the questions “where,” “how long,” and “where next.” The analysis of data collected during an eye-tracking experiment can potentially reveal relationships linking fixations and saccades to cognitive processes, therefore aspiring to offer insights into the foundations on which human perceptual mechanisms operate.

Although eye movement has attracted researchers’ attention for a remarkably long time, the past decades have seen a rapid development in both its methods and technology of analysis. Before that, the techniques used in eye movement research were far from optimal due to the invasiveness of the equipment used, which made the process uncomfortable for participants; early research on eye movement even involved direct contact of the equipment with the cornea (Jacob and Karn 2003, 574; Smith 2013, 166). Technological developments changed that situation by enabling the widespread usability of eye-trackers, thus also enhancing the validity, accuracy and ease of data collection. Eye-trackers using emission of infrared light and one or more infrared cameras capturing its reflection on the retina are the most common ones. A very basic hardware distinction is between screen-based eye-trackers and glasses. Screen-based eyetrackers may be stable lab equipment, in the sense that the entire eye-tracking system is incorporated in the hardware of a screen connected to a computer, which delivers to the participants pre-determined visual stimuli; or they may 2

In relation to this, Keith Rayner lists four types of eye movement: saccade, pursuit, vergence and vestibular, stressing the prominence of saccades in the context of eye movement research, as they are “more relevant in typical information processing tasks.” To these he adds three additional types of small movements, i.e. nystagmus, drifts and microsaccades, which are usually treated as “noise” and not considered during eye movement experiments (1998, 373– 374). Their existence, though, betrays a “less-than-perfect control of the oculomotor system by the nervous system;” the constantly occurring tremor of nystagmus, for instance, renders fixations as “something of a misnomer,” as the word is used to denote stillness of the gaze, whereas in reality eyes never remain completely still (1998, 373–374).

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be ultra-portable rods that are connected normally to a laptop and utilize its camera, thus taking advantage of the relative portability of laptops, which makes them practical for use in field experiments and data collection. Glasses, on the other hand, are normally intended for recording real life scenarios (e.g. driving, shopping habits in a store, etc.) outside the laboratory. Infrared trackers as well as cameras are built in the frame of the glasses; trackers are faced inwards so that they can capture the infrared reflection from retinas, while cameras record the participants’ visual array as they interact physically with their environment within the given scenario so that fixations and saccades can be mapped on the exact parts of the environment that participants observe. This variation of equipment broadens the range of studies that eye-trackers can accommodate. In addition to this variation, relevant software can further customize the process of data collection: “areas of interest” (AOIs), i.e. specific key areas of the image that are potentially interesting or important for the purposes of a particular research project, are marked and isolated both spatially and, in the case of videos, temporally so that gaze data from those areas only will be considered during data analysis. Isolating AOIs enables the formulation of more targeted research questions as well as more accurate findings. As Dyer and Pink note, such an ability may allow more detailed or specialized studies within film theory, e.g. on the factors that influence the perception of narrative (2015).

The gaze data that can be obtained from an eye-tracker are not only numerical, i.e. sets of data subject to statistical analysis, but also visual, which facilitates a quick interpretation of viewer behaviour. The main forms of gaze data visualization today are “gaze plots” or “scanpaths,” “gaze videos,” “bee swarms,” “heat maps” or “dynamic heat maps,” and “focus maps” (Bojko 2013, 218). The eye-tracker software normally superimposes these visualizations on the stimulus (image video, text, etc.) used in the experiment. Gaze plots or scanpaths are sets of circles connected by lines; the circles appear exactly on the fixation positions on the screen, and the lines connecting them show the direction from one fixation to the other. Each set of circles and lines may be coloured to represent different participants and, normally, the longer the fixation is, the bigger the equivalent circle appears. Gaze videos use the same type of circles and lines, but these are presented in motion for each participant, effectively replaying on screen the gaze pattern of the participant exactly as it was recorded. Bee swarms do not show the directions of saccades, they use only small circles or dots to represent fixations, also presented in replay; each circle grows in size during the replay to represent a longer duration of a fixation. The moving gaze points of each participant are

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eventually visualized in the form of small moving circles which look like insects flying around in a swarm in front of the screen. Similarly, heat maps also take into account only fixations; the areas of fixation on the screen are covered by a form of coloured clouds, the colour of which reflects the duration of the fixation. Instead of changing size, the level of attention that each area attracted is represented accumulatively with the use of shades of green, yellow and red. The difference between usual heat maps and dynamic heat maps is that the latter offer a live preview of the clouds changing shape and colour during the participants’ gaze duration, similar to gaze videos and bee swarms. Finally, focus maps work more or less on the same principles as heat maps but, instead of colours, different levels of clarity are used; i.e. the entire image appears blurry, with only the fixated areas appearing clear and in focus. These varied visualization options may be used to address different sets of data, depending on the aims of the research.

It is obvious that the ability to record and see exactly where, when, and how people look at the environment or a specifically designed visual stimulus provides researchers with a significant level of power to address questions of visual perception and cognition. The data that can be obtained from fixations on specific parts of the visual array as well as the order in which they occur, the direction of the gaze between consecutive fixations, durations of both fixations and saccades, etc. can potentially open a window into the perceptual mechanisms that guide the movement of the eyes and enable humans to acquire the information they need in order to interact with their environment as well as with moving images such as film. The value of such data lies in the fact that these can be derived from actual interaction with the environment, as is the case with eye-tracking glasses, as well as from custom stimuli created to serve tailored experiments, which, in turn, enables the study of actual human observation habits in the context of specific research objectives.

Visual Tasks: How the Viewer’s Gaze Works In order to fully appreciate how eye-tracking can help film theory, and cinema research in general, it is important to have first an elementary understanding of the way vision works, especially when it handles visual stimuli containing motion and rapid changes, such as edited films. The reason for this is the fact that the physiology of human vision poses significant constraints regarding the amount of information accessible to the viewer through the eyes, a fact which should obviously be taken into account when considering visual art and its reception. In addition

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to the way vision works, it is also important to understand its connections with mental activity. In fact, Jacob and Karn note that relevant research on the relation between eye fixations and cognitive functions started only after the 1970s, with the development of eye-tracking systems (2003, 575). This section presents some elements that explain the selectivity of human vision as well as a short literature review on the correlation between eye movement and cognitive operations. It is crucial to stress here that most of these works concern a number of different visual scenarios, e.g. reading, abstract stimuli, static media, or dynamic but unedited media such as real-world scenes, rather than edited moving image stimuli such as narrative films; these works indeed support the potential for selectivity that vision has, but the way this selectivity works appears to be different in edited movies.

The next section will subsequently treat all this information from the perspective of narrative cinema specifically, so that it becomes clear why narrative film theory probably requires its own branch of eye-tracking research.

The function of the human eyes does not allow either continuous or homogeneous access to all parts of a scene. At the centre of the retina, the fovea is essentially its only part that can see in great detail and focus on whatever it is directed towards, but the visual field that is projected on it is only approximately 2° wide; on the other hand, the peripheral retina is equipped with photoreceptors that are quite sensitive to low light and motion, without the same acuity as the fovea, but covering a much broader area both horizontally and vertically. Therefore, visual resolution deteriorates as we move farther away from the fovea and its maximum acuity, towards the low-resolution but sensitive surface of the peripheral retina (Henderson 2003, 498; Findlay 2004, 136; Hoffman 1998, 119; Majaranta and Bulling 2014, 41; Smith 2013, 167–168; Dyer and Pink 2015; Cohen 2017, 271). As a result, while looking at a scene, the eyes perform a sequence of saccades during which a number of fixated points of focus are collected and processed; these fixations last about a quarter of a second (Hoffman and Subramaniam 1995, 787; Hoffman 1998, 120; Hyönä 2010, 173; Majaranta and Bulling 2014, 40). In fact, since information is only collected during fixations, viewers are effectively blind for the small time that saccades last (Hoffman 1998, 120), an effect called “saccadic suppression” (Matin 1974; Smith 2013, 168). Given the already existing physical human inability to see the entire 360° of visual environment without using head and body movement (Hoffman 1998, 119), the fact that saccades allow only a rather small clear sampling of the environment adds even more limitations to human vision: the part of the scene that is seen clearly and in focus is considerably smaller than the entire scene, a

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fact which makes perception “inherently selective” (Cohen 2017, 271). Therefore, the eyes move around a scene and focus on parts of it in a very economically selective way, collecting and combining visual information in the process, thus compensating for their lack of homogeneity in visual acuity. Indeed, the eyes never see a scene clearly in its entirety, instead demonstrating what seems to be a selection path while they fixate successively from one point to another.

Evidence of selectivity is present even in early studies on visual perception – using, in fact, equipment for monitoring eye gaze that would now seem primitive – as well as in more contemporary references in the relevant literature. Only a small fragment of these publications will be mentioned here. One of the cases of research on visual perception that is most cited by eye-tracking scholars is that of Alfred Yarbus, due to the fact that in the 1960s he explicitly associated the direction of saccades to an internal motivation to seek the potentially most informative areas in a viewed scene. Yarbus demonstrated that “the pattern of eye fixations that a given observer produces is influenced by properties of the scene as well as the goals and interests of the perceiver” (Hoffman and Subramaniam 1995, 787); he summarized his finding in the claim that “people who think differently also, to some extent, see differently,” thus connecting the direction of viewers’ gaze to the purpose of a task given to them (Yarbus 1967, 211), and it is in this context that Brown calls Yarbus “the ‘godfather’ of eye-tracking studies” (2015). But several decades before Yarbus, Guy Thomas Buswell (1935) studied the perception of images showing different types of artwork and found that the content of pictures would produce regular patterns of eye movements among participants, who favoured certain areas over others, thus offering early evidence on the cognitive and perceptual operations taking place during a viewing task (Henderson, Weeks Jr., and Hollingworth 1999, 210). In a more recent article, Hoffman and Subramaniam refer to Keith Rayner and Alexander Pollatsek’s (1989) findings that the choice of a viewer’s next fixation is apparently guided rather than random (Hoffman and Subramaniam 1995, 787). Finally, Henderson discusses “gaze control,” i.e. the real-time, active directing of the gaze to fixate on informative areas when viewing a scene, “in the service of ongoing perceptual, cognitive and behavioural activity” (2003, 498). For Henderson, considering gaze control is important for three reasons: first, the active direction of the gaze towards useful information is connected to the visual task at hand; second, eye movements betray the way attention is allocated in a viewed scene, thus revealing the ways in which the inner attentional system works; and third, eye movements offer a direct source of behavioural patterns that indicate continuous visual and

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cognitive processing (2003, 498). The present references are only indicative of the list of scholars that have addressed this issue.

This idea of selectivity during saccades and fixations has been under the spotlight in relevant research, regarding mainly the cognitive processes that potentially guide and control the gaze to form such patterns of selectivity. Given the different functions of the fovea vs. the peripheral retina, i.e. the ability for visual acuity vs. sensitivity to light and motion as described earlier, it is obvious that the two coordinate in order to guide the attention of the viewer so that the viewing task is, in a sense, optimized. According to Cohen, it is considered that the peripheral retina picks up potentially informative areas, for the fovea – with its economically selective sampling – to be subsequently directed to those areas so that they are seen in detail. The fact that these successive fixations create patterns stands as an “observable indication of selective processing, especially in visual scanning tasks;” and yet, Cohen notes, although widely acknowledged in the relevant literature, the mechanism mobilizing this process of selection is only partially comprehended (2017, 271–272). An essential element in understanding the complexity of this selectivity is the relation between “overt” and “covert” visual attention. The former refers to the movement that eyes perform when exploring a visual array, in order to bring to the centre of the fovea an interesting part of the scene so that it is clearly discerned; the latter, on the other hand, refers to a much faster, but hidden visual attention mechanism that processes interesting areas internally and is thus related to the direction that overt attention takes; consequently, covert and overt attention should not be studied independently of one another (Hoffman 1998, 119; Henderson 2003, 498). A saccade towards the next potentially interesting point of fixation may occur involuntarily due to an “exogenous” change in the visual features of the observed object, e.g. sudden movement, brightness or appearance of a stimulus; or voluntarily due to an “endogenous” cognitive operation connected to the taskrelated goals or expectations of the viewer which dictates, in a sense, the shift of attention (Hoffman 1998, 119–120; Hyönä 2010, 173; Remington, Johnston, and Yantis 1992, 279).3 Finally, there is “partial interdependence” between eye movements and attention, in the sense that attention is able to change direction regardless of eye movements, but the eyes require the change of attention before they move (Hoffman 1998, 119–120).

3

Exogenous and endogenous control of attention produce different types of saccades as well. Saccades that are the result of exogenous control (image salience) are called “reflexive saccades,” whereas the ones caused by endogenous control (the viewer’s internal decisionmaking mechanisms) are called “volitional saccades” (Dyer and Pink 2015).

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The parts of a visual stimulus on which subjects fixate, therefore, appear to be determined by two factors, one that is generated by the visual environment itself and another one that is triggered by the perceiver’s cognitive operations, which are considered to be task-related. The first one is based on “bottom-up” features, i.e. consisting of external characteristics visible in the scene itself; and the second one is a “top-down” factor, which refers to structures of knowledge that guide the direction of the eyes (Henderson 2007, 219; 2011, 596). During movie-watching, examples of bottom-up factors are characteristics of a scene that draw the viewer’s attention, such as colour, lighting, edges, and motion; examples of top-down factors are the tasks that viewers have to perform, along with their individual preferences as well as mental formulations of a scene at the time of viewing (Hutson et al. 2017, 3).4 Dyer and Pink comprehensively summarize all these points by describing eye movements as “‘bottom-up’ processing when the eye makes reflexive saccades to salient stimuli within a scene, or ‘top-down’ when a viewer uses their volitional control to direct where the eye should look;” the authors also stress the importance of studying both these types of saccades “for understanding how we interacted with complex scenes in everyday life” (2015).

Interestingly enough, Henderson also notes that research has only recently began to study ways of combining the two (2011, 596); the recent period that he refers to roughly coincides with a burst in commercial applications of eye-tracking research and the development of new tools (Płużyczka 2018).5 Film theory and studies on movie-watching in general can only benefit from such a coincidence, as it is a remarkable opportunity for them to be substantiated by actual gaze data that will incorporate eye movement and cognitive operations together. One of the main reasons for this claim, as stated at the beginning of this section as well, is the fact that research on various types of media has shown potential differences in the way information is obtained from them visually; the properties 4

5

Hutson et al. also note here that even within top-down processes there are those that are volitional, i.e. related to a goal that a viewer might have while watching a movie clip, and others that are more mandatory or unintentional, such as directing attention to the character who is speaking (2017, 3).

Płużyczka draws from iMotions, a company that provides eye-tracking research solutions (“Exponential Growth in Academic Eye Tracking Papers over the Last 40 Years!” 2011).

Nevertheless, the exact numbers that she uses to describe the surge in academic publications on eye-tracking in the late 1990s and early 2000s might not be entirely accurate, since Google Scholar, in which the search was made, is not an exhaustive database of all research papers. In addition to that, iMotions states that only the term “eye tracking” was used for the search, but relevant research may be referred to by scholars using other terms such as “gaze data,” “eye movement,” etc. Nonetheless, the numbers remain indicative of the sharp rise in relevant work since 2000 or so.

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of narrative film seem to produce different eye movements as well, which may be an indication of differences in the way those movements connect to cognition compared to e.g. reading (Hutson et al. 2017, 4). The following section reviews work that has been conducted on this consideration.

Eye-tracking and Filmmaking Much of the research cited here explains how eyes work in general, a fact which imposes on movie-watching the same insurmountable constraints as it does to all visual tasks, and this is taken into consideration in eye-tracking studies that focus specifically on cinema. Brown discusses the fact that human eyes selectively pick up only a small set of available visual information through fixations, added to the inescapable “blindness” that occurs during saccades, sleep, and normal blinks; he stresses the necessity of this temporary blindness for survival, and that our vision is “deliberately, ‘perfectly’ imperfect” (2018, 20). Moreover, the phenomenon of saccadic suppression, i.e. the loss of sensitivity of human vision during saccades, rather than being a deficiency, in fact allows us to see clearly during fixations, as the world before our eyes does not blur in a distracting way while jumping from one fixation to another (Brown 2018, 18; Smith 2013, 168);6 this makes it “a structuring principle of vision itself,” in the sense that seeing and not seeing are not mutually exclusive but combined features of vision (Brown 2018, 18; Smith 2013, 168).

Humans do not perceive this temporary blindness, as their visual experience of both the real world and cinematic action are similarly perceived as uninterrupted; and yet – due to saccadic suppression as well as the fact that a person’s field of vision can cover only approx. 3.8 percent of an average cinema screen – in reality viewers literally do not see as much as 96.86 per cent of a movie, which means that they only get to actually see roughly the remaining 3.14 per cent (Brown 2018, 21–22; 2015; Smith 2013, 168).7 The obvious consequence of these limitations is that they can potentially affect every aspect of film spectatorship out there; if the medium of film perception itself, the human eye, has fundamental functional constraints, then it is probably precarious to attempt any argumentation on film theory without adding those constraints to the equation.

6 7

In fact, saccadic suppression is easy to verify by our own inability to see our eyes moving in the mirror (Matin 1974, 899; Tatler and Trościanko 2002, 1403).

Brown further enhances his point (2018, 22) by also referring to Mary Ann Doane’s estimation that film viewers are sitting in the dark for approx. 40 per cent of a movie, due to the black leader intervening between film frames as they rapidly succeed one another in analog projections (2002, 172).

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Apart from the way they affect the reception of movies, an interesting side-effect of these constraints with regard to eye-tracking research involves film creation as well, i.e. the creative decisions of filmmakers. Smith stresses how important it is for filmmakers to know exactly what viewers are looking at, especially given the extremely small percentage of a movie that viewers actually get to see (2013, 168).

Naturally, the question arises whether filmmakers are in fact able to control what and where viewers see, and if they indeed do so. This question has been discussed over many years, both inside and outside the context of eye-tracking studies; but it is within the latter that a renewed understanding of human movie-watching behaviour has started illuminating not only how viewers see movies, but also how filmmakers have been creating them. Obviously, based on the discussion so far, the question can be rephrased as whether bottom-up features in the filmic image can be considered powerful enough to grab the viewers’ attention in a way that overwhelms top-down processes; and at the same time, what role narrative comprehension plays in this.

Concerning the level of impact that bottom-up factors may have on viewing, eye-tracking analysis of movie-watching considers observations that have been made on vision, such as that of “attentional synchrony” in perception studies.

The term refers to certain bottom-up features, e.g. motion being strong enough to collectively attract the attention of multiple viewers, with that attraction being observed at the same points in time during watching and on the same parts of the image, as demonstrated by the viewers’ clustered fixations on these parts.8 Attentional synchrony is used for observing the intensity of the effect that exogenous features have on viewer attention mainly with regard to the preference that human vision may show for elements such as e.g. motion and human presence.

Nevertheless, attentional synchrony presents differences both between free and task-oriented viewing,9 as well as between different kinds of dynamic scenes, i.e. edited movies in contrast to natural, unedited clips.10 More specifically, it has been found that the existence of specific tasks or instructions given to participants 8

9 10

The element of temporal coincidence is important in understanding attentional synchrony.

Although the bottom-up points of interest in an image that will attract viewer attention are generally predictable regardless of an image being static or dynamic, attentional synchrony is much higher in dynamic scenes. In static scenes viewers look at those points of interest at the same time far less frequently (Smith and Mital 2013, 1; Hutson et al. 2017, 2–3; Smith 2013, 170).

“Free” viewing in this context means that the viewer is not provided with specific task instructions.

Hutson et al. describe natural clips as those dynamic scenes that do not have “a narrative or any filmmaking techniques” (2017, 3).

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during free viewing of dynamic natural scenes may override the influence of exogenous factors, thus decreasing the level of attentional synchrony (Smith 2013, 183–184; Smith and Mital 2013, 1; 20). The case with edited dynamic scenes, which concern the overwhelming majority of mainstream cinema production, is not that straightforward. There is some evidence that the existence of tasks given to viewers can indeed change the levels of observed attentional synchrony, but their effect is not constant throughout the duration of a movie; during the time viewers are watching a movie, the existence of a task competes with the effect of directorial decisions such as mise-en-scène, staging, and editing. It is obvious, therefore, that the effects of endogenous vs. exogenous factors while watching edited dynamic scenes – for instance, during narrative film viewing – has not been conclusively resolved yet, something that Smith himself also acknowledges (2013, 184–185).11 Attentional synchrony is essentially a marker of the collected spatial and temporal interest of multiple viewers on parts of the image that are thus considered informative or semantically important, and eye-tracking can support theoretical assumptions with regard to that importance. According to Smith, saccade frequency as well as attentional synchrony have been found to peak immediately after a new shot is introduced, and decline afterwards, when the content of the shot becomes familiar to viewers (2013, 176). Acknowledging this fact and conducting further research today with contemporary eye-tracking technology can also support the foundations of an older theory by testing it with equipment unavailable at the time it was originally formulated. Julian Hochberg and Virginia Brooks worked in 1978 on the comprehension of non-overlapping shots in edited movies and used the term “visual momentum” to describe the phenomenon by which viewers rapidly sample the image on the display with selective fixations, constantly looking for landmarks that appear across successive views, which would help them put together a continuous mental image of the cinematic space shattered across edited shots. This “impetus to obtain sensory information, and to formulate and test a schema,” Hochberg and Brooks explain, helps viewers comprehend what they see on screen, and this is a “motivating factor” for them to maintain this foveal sampling in their continuous search for visual comprehension. Visual momentum actually explains why edited shots are considered more interesting to watch than continuous ones; in the latter, as soon as saccades scan the screen in rapid succession they exhaust the informative parts 11

Smith refers here to the work of Janna G. Spanne (2006) on eye-tracking and narrative fiction film.

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of the image and visual momentum declines (Hochberg and Brooks 2007, 207– 208). Hochberg and Brooks thus predicted when a scene becomes “cinematically dead,” i.e. presenting no further interest to viewers, which is also manifested in the frequency of the viewer’s glances (2007, 207–208), and they did so without having the eye-tracking technology that is commonly used today (2007, 209– 210; 214–215).12 As Smith notes, this means that film editors are in the position to control visual momentum by renewing the interest of viewers in a sequence of edited shots e.g. by reframing scenes or cutting to new ones when necessary (Smith 2013, 177).

The level of control exogenous factors have on viewing edited narrative movies in particular has attracted more attention in recent years. In fact, observing the level of attentional synchrony in movie clips, which is entirely feasible today with eye-tracking equipment, has been used as a measure of the extent to which the endogenous, cognitive-driven control of attention may succumb to the power of exogenous, visual control. Loschky et al. have made a series of important observations: they indeed re-affirm the fact that viewers attend differently to edited narrative scenes compared to both static scenes and dynamic unedited ones; in the latter two cases, endogenous control, i.e. providing viewers with a task, may very well override the exogenous ones, i.e. the visual attributes of a scene, in attracting viewer attention. But when viewers watch an edited narrative movie, the continuity editing style is powerful enough to produce and maintain high levels of attentional synchrony among viewers; and this is also true as filmmaking has evolved over the decades, using more intense editing, motion and visual contrast (Loschky et al. 2015, 1–3).13 In other words, despite the fact that viewers of edited movies are operating under the task of comprehending the narrative, which is an endogenous, higher-level cognitive operation, this task is not enough to produce differences in their eye movements on screen as it could do with static or unedited scenes. Loschky et al. use the term “tyranny of film” to refer to this overwhelming power that mainstream Hollywood moviemaking 12

13

As Hochberg and Brooks describe, in their experiments on visual momentum they used pictures in the form of slideshows instead of videos (2007, 209–210; 214–215); Smith, writing in 2013 and aware of the potential of eye-tracking, notes that Hochberg and Brooks lacked the kind of eye-tracking equipment available today (2013, 177), which is an indication of his trust in this technology.

Hutson et al. (2017, 21) also note in their article that their findings significantly agree with those

by Loschky et al. Moreover, Loschky et al. cite David Bordwell’s work on the stylistic changes in continuity editing that have taken place over the past four decades or so, collectively called “intensified continuity:” Bordwell notices an increase in the rapidness of editing, the increasing use of lenses with more extreme lengths, the intensification of close-ups in dialogues, and the use of free ranging cameras (Bordwell 2002, 16–21).

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techniques have to attract the gaze of viewers to specific parts of the scene, which probably allows very little room for differences in the way viewers behave visually when watching a movie (2015, 18).14 The impact of narrative comprehension seems to be an important issue in eyetracking studies of edited films. Smith stresses that narrative is prominent among endogenous factors potentially affecting movie-watching, and possibly even inscribed in viewers’ gaze patterns (2013, 185). In his own work on Attentional Theory of Cinematic Continuity (AToCC), Smith associates the term “continuity” as it has been used in film theory with “the continuity of viewer cognition: what they are attending to, what they are perceiving, and what they are expecting” (2012, 2). He describes cognitively active viewers, who are constantly attentive to a flow of usual elements – such as dialogue, off-screen audio, motion, gaze direction, gestures, etc. – as motivational cues for their attention to be guided naturally across the content of consecutive shots (2012, 2; 2013, 174). He used eye-tracking when formulating the AToCC, collecting gaze data from various types of shots, in order to demonstrate “how the continuity editing rules create the conditions necessary for continuity perception but also how films that do not adhere to the continuity editing rules can also result in continuity” (2012, 2). By doing so, Smith notes, the AToCC becomes a proposed way by which experimental research on vision can catch up with decades-long intuitions of filmmakers (2012, 23). Therefore, as exemplified by AToCC, eye-tracking is a key component in the methodology of this research and its importance goes both ways. On the one hand, common and established filmmaking methods such as continuity editing can become the inspiration for vision scientists to further explore perception by reverse-engineering those practices that have been successfully used in cinema for so long, but never received adequate scientific substantiation as to the physiological and cognitive grounds of that success. On the other hand, the same substantiation, once achieved, can provide some kind of formal codification for those filmmaking methods that can further benefit filmmakers: in the present example, beyond simply knowing that continuity editing enables viewers to follow action and narrative across cuts, becoming 14

In the experiment that Loschky et al. conducted, even when a test group of viewers with prior access to the context of the test clip was compared to another test group that was not given the same context, the authors indeed noticed an increased comprehension of the narrative in the former group, but the levels of attentional synchrony were only subtly different between the two groups. Surprisingly, as the authors note, similar results were observed in a subsequent experiment with a single long-take (unedited) clip, which they performed in order to test the general applicability of their initial findings (2015, 18–19).

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aware of the perceptual basis as to why and how this works can make filmmakers appreciate more formally and systematically the tools at their disposal.

It is more than obvious that mainstream Hollywood cinema and the power of the continuity editing style are important enough to bring the concept of narrative comprehension into play, effectively forcing a separate line of eyetracking studies just for their sake. It should be fairly obvious by now that, unlike the practice of simply observing and re-applying a successful mode of making movies, eye-tracking has begun shedding light on established observations on viewer attention by filmmakers and the drives behind that attention, in a way that it can better inform such creative choices. Eye-tracking provides filmmakers with “physical evidence” of the otherwise inaccessible information of viewers’ mental activity (Hutson et al. 2017, 2). This condition is not only fairly unprecedented in the history of moviemaking technique, but also probably the most groundbreaking one so far.

Research Directions The extent to which eye-tracking studies can be widely applied to cinema is a matter that has met certain counterarguments as well. Brown comments in particular on the work of Smith in this field; he notes that Smith sidesteps the important issue of the universal applicability of eye-tracking studies, because of the latter mainly focusing on Hollywood mainstream cinema, thus also legitimizing one film form over others. In addition, Brown continues, Smith also downplays the practical effectiveness that movie-watching itself had both for testing of film theories and in the movie industry, long before the existence of eyetrackers. By doing so, eye-tracking is implicitly made to appear as the pinnacle of authority with regard to knowledge about film (2015). Nevertheless, there is risk in such positions that underestimate the power eye-tracking has in any study of perception, let alone film watching. It seems unreasonable to be offered with a tool that can help verify or falsify assumptions about visual perception of film in relation to cognitive operations and be suspicious of it on the basis that intuitions of skilled filmmakers eventually worked after years of trial and error. It is true that accurate findings require proper research methodology so that errors are eliminated and those findings should cover as much of the art of cinema as possible without being limited to Hollywood narrative cinema; but that is a condition that depends on the scope of researchers and the way that scope may change over time, and should not concern the validity of eye-tracking per se.

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On the part of research itself, there is a difference between claiming universal applicability of findings and admitting that findings concern a specific category of cinema, in this case mainstream narrative cinema; the fact that a tool is used by researchers with specific scopes does not mean that the tool itself is to blame for the results of that research being applicable to a specific type of movies only.

Moreover, the popularity or dominance of a certain kind of film production may reasonably affect the scope of a significant part of academic research and the application of new tools, at least in its early steps. It is true that mainstream Hollywood-style films represent a considerable part of film production today; and with eye-tracking having started to be seriously used in cinema research in relatively recent years, it is natural to expect an initial tendency to focus on films with the most widespread impact. Nevertheless, eye-tracking research is already being carried out on a wider variety of film types. Tessa Dwyer and Claire Perkins, for instance, focus on what has been called “slow cinema,” i.e. non-mainstream films that have an internal “narrative, aesthetic and/or political preoccupation” with the concept of time. Films of this type often have unusual durations or a slow rhythm “characterized by static camerawork, minimal editing and scarce or slow movement within the frame” (Dwyer and Perkins 2018, 103). The authors discuss whether such films involve “a distinctive form of seeing – whether taking one’s time and experiencing the phenomenon of ‘dead time’ might facilitate an embodied, subjective mode of viewing” (Dwyer and Perkins 2018, 103) and acknowledge the contribution of eye-tracking in providing “a unique opportunity to examine these ideas at an empirical level” (Dwyer and Perkins 2018, 104). Among other things, Dwyer and Perkins consider long takes, a technique which is in itself worthy of more specialized research.

The impact that long takes have on film viewing compared to edited scenes has attracted the attention of film theorists, but can be explored in different depth when gaze data from viewers is taken into consideration. The observation that long takes bring along a sense of continuous time and space in contrast to “the synthetic continuity of time that is achieved in continuity editing” (Gibbs and Pye 2017, 6) creates associations with the way reality is experienced, which clearly brings into play the way human vision works.

Eye-tracking has also been used in areas within film theory that one might consider to be less obvious, but are still significant in relation to the experience of movie-watching. One such area is the contribution of sound to the way viewers visually respond to movies. Dwyer and Perkins note that sound design is one of the additional factors, along with composition of shots and camera movement,

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that need to be related to the length of shots so that visual momentum can be properly understood (2018, 120). Recent examples of relevant eye-tracking research include work on the way the direction of viewers’ gaze can be affected by film music (Mera and Stumpf 2014), the combination of music, dialogue, and sound effects (Batten and Smith 2018), or even the availability and setup of sound equipment that is used during movie-watching (Korshunova et al. 2019).

All this work is an important contribution to the wider literature of film theory, supported by an increased sense of credibility that the use of eye-tracking is capable of promising.

Closing Remarks Although applications of eye-tracking in film theory have been a fairly new addition to academic research, results already appear to be encouraging. The insights that eye gaze data offer both to the filmmaking process itself and as support to formulations of theoretical questions are invaluable research assets today, especially after several years during which cognition-based film theories are gradually gaining more ground. Eye-tracking is a tool, which can facilitate the rapid acceleration of such approaches to film theory, and it is exactly the kind of acceleration that film theory needs, now that the cinema industry has entered a new era of production. Bearing in mind that new technologies of imaging and audience immersion – such as interactivity, 3D, augmented reality and VR environments, etc. – are gradually finding their way into filmmaking, the role of the viewer should probably be comprehended as thoroughly as possible in traditional moviemaking before moving into such media. Being able to decode and unlock the process of viewers’ active engagement with the content of a movie can help film theory be more prepared when all these technologies will be fully incorporated in commercial cinema. With all its current shortcomings, eyetracking can be of help in that direction.

The aim of this article has been to present an overview of the complexities of both the visual system and human perceptual mechanisms, and also to highlight the opportunities that technology provides to film theory today for tackling those complexities. The fact that cinema production is already showing signs that it outgrows practical intuitions and trial-and-error methodology is in itself a call for better substantiation and more accuracy of theory, which will hopefully communicate even more with filmmaking practice as well. With the ongoing improvement in eye-tracking technology, one can expect that even the last traces

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of invasiveness during experiments will be eliminated, thus producing even more natural responses by viewers and more acceptable results. This is an opportunity for film theory to expand and evolve along with it.

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Tatler, Benjamin W. and Tom Trościanko. 2002. Last but Not Least. Perception vol. 31, no. 11: 1403–1406.

Yarbus, Alfred L. 1967. Eye Movements and Vision. New York: Springer Science.

Acta Univ. Sapientiae, Film and Media Studies, 20 (2021) 151–164 DOI: 10.2478/ausfm-2021-0019

Instrumentalization of the Border Zone.

Environment and Ideology in the Educational Films Made between 1955 and 1989 by the Hungarian Ministry of Interior’s Film Studio László Strausz

Eötvös Loránd University (Budapest, Hungary) E-mail: strausz.laszlo@btk.elte.hu Abstract. Analysing the output of the Hungarian Ministry of Interior’s own film studio, which produced educational films between 1955 and 1989, this essay investigates the modes in which the border zone was represented during the decades of state socialism. Considering the vicinity of the border as an area, where ideological confrontations are battled out, the article argues that there is a significant difference between the films produced in the 1950-60s, and those from the mid-1960s onwards. The earlier pieces depict an emotionally charged border zone the defence of which is a social-political duty: father-type superiors teach rookie soldiers about this obligation in coming-of-age stories. However, from the mid-1960s onwards, the films seem to confine themselves to an instrumental mode of persuasion, which presents border protection as a merely technical question. The article briefly ties these shifts to the changing modes in official discourses during the decades of state socialist Hungary.

Keywords: educational film, state socialism, border zone, Hungary, instrumentalization.

A border patrol officer walks into a train compartment to check the passports of the travellers. As he steps up to a young woman, the camera assumes the visual position of the officer looking at her smiling face and eventually checking her documents. Suddenly, the film cuts to a close-up shot showing her previously unbuttoned décolletage from his perspective. Dissonant music swells to emphasize the tension of the moment. The officer’s awareness is fooled, and he unknowingly lets the criminal and her companion pass… It might appear as if the described scene stemmed from an espionage thriller, but in fact it is part of the educational film Identification (Személyazonosítás, director unknown, 1972)

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by the Hungarian Ministry of Interior’s film studio (BM Filmstúdió) – a piece presenting the techniques of smuggling and using counterfeit travel documents.

The ways in which the film studio discursively constructed the environment of the border zone and its protection shifted significantly during the decades, from the 1950s towards the late 1980s, and revealed a great deal about the changes in the social-political imagination of the films’ commissioners. In this article, I will track these changes by analysing the subject positions constructed by the films for their audiences in order to create the ideologically charged environment of the border zone. In this essay, the border will be construed both in the sense of the literal national border of the country, but references will also be made to internal borders, such as the border of the army or police barracks or the immediate surroundings of army exercises and the fences of industrial buildings.

The interdisciplinary perspective of the so-called spatial turn in the natural and social sciences and the humanities insists that one should analyse space not simply as a geometrical phenomenon, which can be measured, divided, and thus controlled; but one should also consider that the users of space contribute through their movements and actions to the production and perception of space. Consequently, the social production of space highlights processes that cannot be separated from the subject, who crosses a zone with her myriad of social-historical particularities. Authors such as Henri Lefebvre (1991, 33–38) and Michel de Certeau (2000, 104–109) argued that a dialectical connection can be discerned in the relationship of the top-down cartographic-controlling attempts of the institutions and the bottom-up daily performances of the users of space. In this article, I will use the methodological entry point of the social production of space to investigate the changes in the representation of the border in the educational films made by the Hungarian BM Filmstúdió. This model is significant for my analysis, because in the films the border becomes a construct clearly devoid of any quotidian aspects. The structural absence of any reference to what the Iron Curtain historically represented for state socialist Hungary (a border that prevented people from travelling, isolated Hungarians from their families in neighbouring countries as well as a fortification zone where violators were killed etc.) makes it even clearer that the films’ spaces speak of the ministry’s political imaginary, and not the everyday experiences of Hungarians.

The historical significance of the educational films made by BM Filmstúdió consists in their direct delineation of the official production of space. From 1955 to 1989, the studio’s depiction of the vicinity of the border zone underwent significant changes: the psychological-moralising narratives on this highly

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ideological environment changed into instrumentalized representations, which did not discuss the causes why it needed to be protected. Overall, I will argue that the ways, in which the rhetoric of the films about the border zone changed, can be understood as part of the general social-political transformations in the consolidating Kádár-regime, which aimed at depoliticising society in exchange for relatively good living standards. Realising that instructional and educational films were consumed by wide audiences in the former Eastern Bloc because of state exhibition practices (educational pieces preceded the screening of any feature in theatres), my aim hereby is to continue the work done by scholars in the field of useful cinema.1 Charged with the task of producing educational films for both internal use (police and secret services) and the wider public, BM Filmstúdió churned out motion pictures between 1955 and 1989. These black-and-white as well as colour films include traditional short and full-length features (fiction), various types of documentaries, reportages, newsreels (non-fiction) shot on 16 mm, 35 mm and during the 1980s also on video. Additionally, the films use a wide array of narrative devices, such as: diegetic- and non-diegetic narrators, silent segments with no speaking parts, re-enactments, re-edited archival material etc. To make things more complicated, the fate of the surviving films resembles a detective story,2 and it remains unclear what percentage the surviving films represent as compared to the entire output of the studio. My interpretation is based on the body of films that was found, viewed and eventually stored by the archivists of the Open Society Archives in Budapest.

In this article, I will refer to this diverse cinematic body as educational or instructional films, since the terms express the attitude of the authorities, which led to these films being produced. I intentionally avoid the use of the notion propaganda films, a widely used term that has, however, the potential to employ a passive model of spectatorship with viewers defenceless against the manipulations of the films’ rhetorical arsenal. While it is beyond the scope of this article to outline a general model of spectatorship for the BM Filmstúdió films, I am convinced that viewers possessed the means to resist the films’ rhetorical 1

2

The field has received more attention from scholars in the Anglo-Saxon world; see among others Acland and Wasson (2011), Hediger and Vonderau (2009), Grieveson and MacCabe (2011), Orgeron, Orgeron, and Streible (2011). Work covering Eastern European aspects of useful cinema include Česálková (2012), Lovejoy (2014), Sarkisova (2016) and the yet unpublished work of Adina Brădeanu. Studies in Eastern European Cinema published recently a special issue (11:2) on the archives in Eastern Europe, which includes several articles on the topic.

Some reels were located in the basement of the film studio, but other films were found dumped on a dog training site that belonged formerly to the Ministry of Interior.

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apparatus.3 However, an entirely different methodology would be necessary for investigating this issue. My goal here is to analyse the shifting narratives and stylistic trends in the representation of the border zone, and how these trends connect to more encompassing social-political discourses during the state socialist period in Hungary. It is important to note that, in this article, I can only briefly hint to the complex connections with the social-historical context of the Kádár-era. These links will be explored in a more detailed manner in the forthcoming stages of this project.

In the 223 surviving films, the theme of the border as a fortification protecting the state socialist country is dominant: 24 films, i.e. more than 10% tackle this topic. The films generally play down the fact that many citizens tried to escape Hungary, and talk about the border as a zone, which guards socialist society from foreign intervention. In order to see how the studio addresses this question, the genre of the films can serve as a strong initial orientation point. A significant majority of the films can be described as technical films (these explain the usage of a specific policy, device, technology or a measure). My sample includes 5 works, which are non-technical films, but construct a dramatic storyline – either fictional or non-fictional – with cinematic devices. Remarkably, even if one looked only at the dramatized films of the studio, which allow the audiences to visually, and subsequently emotionally align with the characters, the shift from the moral-psychological mode towards instrumentalization becomes already visible.

Nonetheless, almost all technical films instrumentalize – quite understandably – the discourses on the border zone, since they instruct the viewer about the steps to follow in order to protect the country. To highlight these discursive transformations, I will first look at the narrative-expressive devices employed by the five non-technical films, and subsequently analyse the ways in which they address their viewers.

Dramatizing the Environment of the Border Two dramatized educational films directed by Tamás Rényi depict the border as an emotionalized landscape: Emergency Situation (Rendkívüli esemény, 1958) and Friendly Stranger (Barátságos idegen, 1959). Both pieces show recruits in training, who at some point make bad decisions, but recognize their mistakes 3

I can offer personal evidence to strengthen this point. My memories of visiting movie theatres with my grandfather in the 1980s include audiences talking and socializing through the newsreels and educational films that were always projected before the main feature. Not paying attention to these parts of the program was one possible way of resisting their rhetoric.

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with the help of their superiors. These films allow audiences to emotionally align with their protagonists, and thereby present the thematized political discourses as psychological-emotional issues that, importantly, are also resolved psychologically.

The flashback structure of Emergency Situation creates a narrative frame that allows an effortless point of entry for audiences into the story, told in hindsight by the reminiscing characters. Starting from a position where the morale of the story is already presented, viewers are taken back to the beginning of the fable where the protagonists, Jámbor and Vadas, are rookies in drill in a border patrol unit. While in training, their unit is shown patrolling the picturesque Hungarian border zone with its rivers, valleys and mountains, forests and fields. The various landscape shots with forests, rivers, meadows set up the dramatic role of the environment in the film. The space of Hungarian state socialism is under serious threat from imperialists spies, who have no idea about “our way of life” – as the characters spell out in the prologue. The safety (but also the beauty) of the national landscape, which is initially depicted as untouched nature with no humans present, is guaranteed and protected by the appearance of the border patrol unit.

Vadas, a prodigal son, is presented as a well-intentioned, but impulsive character, who cannot resist the temptations of his earlier civilian life while in training. He leaves his machine gun unattended when chatting up three girls in a picturesque orchard, fires his weapon on an animal in the forest landscape, and finally gets drunk and unintentionally wounds Jámbor during an open-air wedding party on a field. Each of these events, occurring in the environment that harbours “our way of life,” could have ended in a major disaster, and only luck kept that from happening. Importantly, the lush landscape is presented at the beginning of each episode as an environment that seduces the men, especially Vadas, who cannot resist. Subsequently, he is court martialled and sentenced for his reckless actions, but is finally shown as having learned his lesson from his earlier mistakes. As the film returns to the reminiscing character of Vadas from the intro, he actually agrees with the prosecutor’s evaluation of the events.

Ultimately, it is the landscape of the border zone that triggers the learning trajectory of the protagonist: Vadas’s realisation turns the landscape into an environment of moral, and thus, political development.

In the second film, Friendly Stranger, the hardships of newly enlisted soldiers in a training camp are recounted again. As a prelude, the film’s first scene shows five recruits in frontal close-ups, looking directly into the camera and reciting sentences from their military oath, pleading allegiance to the people’s republic.

Through the framing, the producers attempt to immediately create an emotional

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bond with the viewers. However, these images stand in stark contrast with the following sequence, which depicts the recruits as immature youngsters eating home-made food and looking at photos of attractive women, i.e. not yet attuned to the goals of their training. In a lengthy montage scene accompanied by playful music, we witness the youngsters exercising: initially clumsy with equipment and on manoeuvres, they gradually become more mature and expert in their actions, under the tutelage of their demanding, but caring superiors. Within a few minutes, the movie effectively activates several visual and thematic parameters of the war film genre: the figures of the scatter-brained, cheeky rookies and the benevolent drill sergeant as a father character. Through these well-placed genre markers, viewers can relate to the characters and their hardships in a psychologicalemotional way, which in turn creates accessible points for affective alignment.

Taking a predictable turn, the film continues with the protagonists on leave, travelling home. As they journey to their hometown, they cross the landscape which hides unexpected dangers: already on the train, they are approached by a friendly stranger, who appears first as a pleasant companion trying to pass the time. Soon, however, he attempts to blackmail one of the protagonists to smuggle out of the army base the plans of a new radio transmitter. The film brings up the usual connotations of civilian environment and the military border zone.

Seemingly innocent and welcoming, the civilian setting does not protect the rookies. Much rather in opposition to the safe haven of the army camp, where morality is clear-cut, they are now in ambiguous territory. The smuggling of the plans across the border between the sphere of the military and civil life would constitute a major violation of his oath, and Füzesi is seen in dramatic scenes struggling with his conscience. By envisioning this struggle, the film reaches its emotional epicentre. Hard contrast, low-key lighted close-ups of the turning and tossing Füzesi in bed are intercut with low angle medium shots of the two parties that contest for his decision: his superior officers and the blackmailer, aka the friendly stranger. This visualization of the moral dilemma is reminiscent of “the angel and the devil arguing over a character’s shoulder” device, which in this film is also used as an audio technique via the two men’s voice-over sentences. It is hardly surprising that Füzesi finally comes to the right decision and reports the spy’s attempt to blackmail him. As a result, the spy ends up being caught by the authorities. Significantly, the film denies our expectations about the dichotomy of the military and civilian environments, and turns the dilemma of the protagonist about the violation of the border into a problem of the main character’s conscience. Both films directed by Rényi progress along conflicts in

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character psychology and a perceived sense of moral-ideological development.

Thereby they reveal that the border zone is a space constructed primarily through ideological persuasion: the films emphasize why the processes of aligning with the official position are so important. This psychological and moral dilemma and its solution opens up the channels of identification for the audiences, creating easily inhabitable subject positions in line with the official discourses.

Made several years later, the Defence of Military Buildings (Katonai objektumok védelme, director unknown, ca. 1965–67) is a hybrid piece: it launches with a long intro montage sequence, which attempts – in a classic Eisensteinian way – to emotionally engage the viewer through the quick juxtaposition of images. The subsequent film shifts into technical mode and dryly educates the audiences on the methods of averting foreign intelligence services’ activities at external and internal borders as well. In this sense, the film already represents a shift towards the instrumentalized modes of engagement which, as I will show, dominate the films produced from the mid- and late 1960s onwards. With its visually engaging intro sequence to the long and dull technical piece that follows, the film shows that its producers still considered necessary to explain to the viewers why the defence of Hungary’s military bases is a crucial task that has to be taken very seriously.

The introductory montage sequence starts with an outline of the global political situation during the height of the Cold War. A voice-over narrator discusses how the United States poses as the saviour of freedom and democracy, although in the meantime, subjects leftists political governments and movements in Latin America or South East Asia to sanctions. However, saving in this case means the creation of aggressive military blocks and the intensification of the arms race.

During the voice-over, the film shows the military complex of the imperialist powers through shots of airplane carriers, fighter jets, rocket launchers and massive cannons fired. After a long shot of a huge cannon, the film cuts to military commanders pointing out an invisible target and covering their ears. Next, the weapon is being fired. Here, in an Eisensteinian fashion, the sequence progresses by a rapid succession of a very brief shots: one, two, three different buildings can be seen collapsing. The cuts are placed on movement, seamlessly connecting the obliteration of the buildings and thereby generalizing the destruction caused by imperialist warfare. The shot of the third collapsing building is followed by an equally brief shot of a collapsing horse in front of a carriage.4 By cutting to 4

The filmmakers create here a direct reference to the 1925 Eisenstein film Strike and its slaughterhouse sequence, where shots of workers being mowed down by a machine gun are intercut with the killing of a cow at the slaughterhouse. The shot, where the animal collapses is remade in the intro montage sequence of film Defence of Military Buildings.

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the dying animal, the toll of warfare on living beings is emphasized, and this verdict reaches its strongest form with the subsequent extremely long shot depicting an atomic explosion. Here, the overtonal montage mixes the rhythm of the collapsing downward movement of the building and the horse, and of the upward movement of the atomic cloud with the emotional tone of destruction, which dominates the entire intro scene. Lines of the voice-over narrator such as “the ugly face of American imperialism can be discerned most clearly by the light of the burning Vietnam” also play on the empathy of the viewer, especially since they are accompanied by horrific shots of ground infantrymen terrorizing the civilian population. Overall, the intro plays on the engagement of the audiences through dramatization, as in the two films described earlier.

However, the film that follows this montage intro sequence shuns expressive modes completely and switches to the technical description of how the authorities can protect the internal borders of the country (such as army bases, field exercises) from imperialist spies. The film discusses the know-how of setting up road blocks around the perimeter of an army field exercise in order to prevent foreign agents from entering the area, or what kind of practices military police units should follow when patrolling the fences of army bases. Using advanced illustrative devices such as split screens or animated inserts, it displays all the characteristics shared by the large majority of technical films about the border zone. What is noteworthy about this significantly different expressive mode within the same film is that it does not discuss at all the reasons why the internal borders of the country need to be protected. Refraining from persuading the viewer about anything, it thereby withdraws completely from the terrain of social-political argumentation, and resorts to the discussion of the instruments of protecting the border zone as if a consensus about the political necessities had already been battled out. It is in this sense that the Defence of Military Buildings can be categorized as a hybrid film, which mixes the expressive modes of moralpsychological persuasion and instrumentalized education.

Produced in 1977, the film Secrets and People (Titkok és emberek, János Lestár) continues the discussion about the protection of the country’s internal borders,5 but without the dramatic introduction that made the Defence of Military Buildings emotionally so engaging. Referencing the goals of imperialist NATO forces of finding out as much as possible about Warsaw Pact units, the film immediately plunges into the discussion of situations, in which enemy intelligence might 5

In fact, some shots are recycled across the two films, a practice which is fairly common for the productions of the BM Filmstúdió.

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intercept secret information from and about army and border patrol units. It is important to note that the film does create dramatic situations, but these are completely devoid of emotional dimensions: the recreated scenes serve merely as illustrations of mistakes made by soldiers, which might lead to leaking of information across the borders. No attempts are made to attach audiences to the psychological-emotional state of the characters; the scenes remain completely descriptive instead. For example, in the film’s first episode, an officer violates the communication ban and uses a high-power radio station to send private messages to a buddy, which leads to the enemy radiolocating his position from an airplane.

In another scene, a member of a border patrol unit misses the last bus, and hitches a ride home only to be picked up by a seemingly friendly enemy agent. In each of these educational episodes, the “morale” of the story is quite simple: obeying orders is paramount! The characters do not have to understand the larger context or the significance of their actions, they should merely follow the instructions of their superiors. It is this attitude of the films that I aim to describe through the concept of instrumentalization: unlike earlier films, in which the protagonists learn something and become better border patrol agents, or more generally, better socialist citizens, the instrumentalized films merely demonstrate certain steps to be followed or avoided. Both the external and the internal border zone in the two films is emptied out of its social-political dimension and turned into a technical sphere. The subject position constructed for the viewer remains devoid of psychological-emotional overtones.

The last dramatized production of my sample constitutes another form of instrumentalization: the withdrawal to the sphere of complete dramatic implausibility. Made at the end of the state socialist years, the piece Hunting – Trophies (Vadászat – Trófeák, Tamás Czigány, 1988) shuns the emotionally engaging characters of the other dramatized films. However, instrumentalization here means apart from ignoring the larger political context and depicting the border zone as a mere tool, as is done in Secrets and People, also the hollowing out of dramatic consistency and believability in which the border plays an important part. Hunting – Trophies takes the logic of instrumentalization to the point of completely disassembling the coherency of the film’s diegetic world. By interweaving two similar storylines, in which symbolically important players who regularly cross the border (a secret service officer and a fighter jet pilot) are blackmailed by foreign agents, the film underlines the necessity of reporting such attempts to the authorities. The officer is threatened through photos taken of him in a strip club, and the fighter pilot through the politically questionable

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actions of his fiancée. Following painfully didactic plot twists, both men redeem themselves by exposing the foreign agents’ attempts. In one episode, for example, the foreign agents plan to blackmail the fighter pilot through his pregnant fiancée, who was made a successful businesswoman with the assistance of the agents.

They want to lure her abroad by threatening her that they will inform Hungarian authorities about her privately made business transactions and her private savings in foreign bank accounts. If this plan succeeds, the child will be born in the West, and the pilot can be pressured abroad to visit his child. These twists are so overcomplicated and ridiculous, the construction of the characters so onedimensional, and the acting so bad that the entire film loses its plausibility. It could be argued that these characteristics are just signs of a very low value movie, but other pieces of the BM Filmstúdió have shown that the unit was capable of producing dramatically coherent and psychologically engaging films. Hence, the question arises: what are the effects of education-instruction, when the depicted diegetic world and the characters are totally unbelievable?

The case of Hunting – Trophies demonstrates that, by the late 1980s, the plausibility of the educational film’s diegetic world was completely irrelevant for the producers. Moreover, the environment of the border zone was turned into an implausible territory, which revealed the falsehood of the official production of space. The causal connection between the political reality of Hungarian society and the dramatic reality of the films was by this time absent. Cynically, the producers made apparently no efforts whatsoever to create a more credible setting, storyline and characters. Considering this piece, the development of the dramatized films follows a clear path, which starts with psychologicalmoral persuasion by storytelling in the late 1950s, continues with technicalfactual education during the late 1960s and 1970s and reaches total narrative implausibility in the 1980s. The instrumentalization of the border zone in the educational films made by BM Filmstúdió can already be seen in the dramatized productions, which are numerically far outnumbered by the technical films.

The temporal distribution of the latter pieces also reflects the trend highlighted through my analysis of the dramatized films: the trend of instrumentalization is tied to the attempt of depoliticizing Hungarian society.

Depoliticizing the Border Zone The nineteen productions, which thematize the border zone using a technical discourse, tackle specialized situations: the searching of freight train cars, the

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organization of the daily duties of border guards, methods used by violators at border control points, the guarding of narrow border territories, human trafficking across the border etc. Each step is carefully demonstrated and redundantly displayed so that audiences (members of the armed forces in training) understand the processes to be followed while implementing border protection measures.

The overwhelming majority of the films use re-enacted scenes and voice-over narration. Re-enactment here refers to the fact that the re-staging of the border scenarios is openly addressed, and the male voice-over narrator, as an instructor, guides the viewers through the educational material. The fact that the films refrain from using speaking parts also emphasise the total control of the narrator.

Characters become mute extras, who merely illustrate the skill, measure or device under demonstration. A significant part of the technical-instructional pieces makes use of graphic material (animated maps, drawings, inserts, charts etc.), too, that are often overlaid on the photographed scenes. The technical nature and instrumentalization of the films’ diegetic world becomes even more explicit through these dual-exposure scenes, where the graphic layer apparently exercises total control over the human agents, but more generally, also over the officially produced spaces of state socialism underneath. The films get bogged down with border protection skills to such extent that dramatization as a discursive strategy disappears entirely. It is probably not surprising that the technical films do not use the narrative devices of moral persuasion or psychological motivation.

However, when taking into consideration the temporal distribution of the studio’s productions, the trends become all the more visible: the dramatized-psychological films virtually disappear around the late 1960s, while the 1970s are characterised by a visible rise in the production of instrumentalized educational films, which refrain from the interpretation of social-political topics and limit themselves to illustrative goals. In other words, the topic of border and the border zone is thematized in the large majority of the films produced during the entire period in the context of technical knowledge (how to protect the border?) and not as a political theme (why is it important to protect the border?). In the educational films made by BM Filmstúdió, the official production of the space of the border zone displays a strong tendency of instrumentalization.

After the end of World War II, the border, and especially the Western border with Austria (and to some extent the Southern border with former Yugoslavia as well) was regarded as a fortification, which protects the country from imperialist influences. The large emigration wave following the 1956 revolution – when approximately 170 thousand citizens left the country – further intensified

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the rhetorical construction of the border as a line that needs to be defended: physically, but discursively as well. The films produced by the BM Filmstúdió during the late 1950s and early 1960s reflect this discursive construction via the moral-psychological argumentation adopted. By allowing audiences to visually, and consequently psychologically align with the protagonists, who through their stories learn about the necessity of territorial protection, the films display a certain logic of governmentality. According to this logic, political-ideological persuasion is devised through the construction of binary character pairs (politically wise father figures vs unexperienced rookies or evil antagonists) and character identification.

Melinda Kalmár characterizes this mode of political discourse as literary: “[during the 1950s] cultural ideology, and the institutions of public space were transformed in such a way that they functioned according to a conservative literary mode. This aesthetic mode of ideology wanted to affect people emotionally, it was didactic and cultic” (Kalmár 1998, 53). The rhetoric of the early dramatized BM films, thus, fits well into this broader pattern of governmentality where the psychological processes of identification play the central role.

After the defeat of the 1956 revolution and further into the 1960s, the party under the leadership of secretary general János Kádár provided relative affluence and existential security to citizens, while demanding in return tacit acceptance of the status quo: “Kádár’s tactics could be described as having evolved towards a strategy – depoliticize society and keep the population sweet through economic concessions” (Schöpflin 2016, 97). In a broader sense, the discursive shifts in the official space consisted in the simulation of consent: instead of emphasizing the process of learning and insight, the Kádárist system acted as if an agreement about the common goals had already been arrived at. “The language of argumentation (…) is pragmatic, it refers to reasoning and interests.” (Kalmár 1998, 75.) This shift can be seen in the instrumentalized rhetoric employed by the educational films made in the BM Filmstúdió from the mid-1960s onwards. The characters in the emotionalized films produced during the first phase of the state socialist decades engage extensively with the principles why the border zone needs to be protected. However, these principles are left undiscussed in later films, regardless whether these are dramatized or technical pieces. In the dramatized productions, characters retreat into a sphere where motivation rests almost solely on individual-material interests. This strategy overlapped seamlessly with the regime’s intentions. As Takács puts it, “instead of allowing open criticism of the party line or public discussions [of] sensitive political issues, people were left to arrange their private life or careers in a freer way. The better living standards

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and the satisfied consumerist urges contributed essentially to a social atmosphere where loyalty to the political regime and keeping distance from the political decision-making could be equally required” (2010, 116). In this new situation, the rhetorical construction of the border turned into a set of technical considerations that also had to keep up with the changing status of the border: from the 1960s onwards, the regime started to allow some citizens to travel to the West. Thus, the educational films ceased to make attempts to morally-psychologically persuade, but instead instructed audiences about the technical-instrumental processes of border protection. In the films themselves, the decisive shift consisted in the fact that the reasons why the frontier needed to be protected were left undiscussed.

The unbuttoned décolletage of the attractive foreign agent misleading the border patrol officer in the mentioned scene of Identification was discussed by the film’s voice-over narrator in a detached manner as a “device,” which distracted the soldier’s awareness. Moving away from the typical objectifying-affective use of this sexist imagery (but not for progressive reasons), the décolletage in a closeup turns out to be a technical instrument that marks the transformations of governmentality during the Kádár-era Hungary.

References Acland, Charles R. and Haidee Wasson. 2011. Useful Cinema. Durham: Duke University Press. Česálková, Lucie. 2012. Cinema Outside Cinema: Czech Educational Cinema of the 1930s under the Control of Pedagogues, Scientists and Humanitarian Groups. Studies in Eastern European Cinema vol. 3, no. 2: 175–191.

De Certeau, Michel. 2000. Walking in the City. In The Certeau Reader, edited by Graham Ward, 101–118. Oxford: Blackwell.

Grieveson, Lee and Colin MacCabe, eds. 2011. Empire and Film. London: Palgrave Macmillan and British Film Institute.

Hediger, Vinzenz and Patrick Vonderau. 2009. Films That Work: Industrial Film and the Productivity of Media. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.

Kalmár, Melinda. 1998. Ennivaló és hozomány. A kora kádárizmus ideológiája.

[Eatables and Dowry. The Ideology of the Early Kádár Regime], Budapest: Magvető.

Lefebvre, Henri. 1991. The Production of Space. London: Wiley-Blackwell.

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Lovejoy, Alice Osborne. 2014. Army Film and the Avant Garde: Cinema and Experiment in the Czechoslovak Military. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Orgeron, Devin, Marsha Orgeron, and Dan Streible. 2011. Learning with the Lights Off: Educational Film in the United States. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Sarkisova, Oksana. 2016. Screening Soviet Nationalities: Kulturfilms from the Far North to Central Asia. London: Bloomsbury Publishing.

Schöpflin, George. 2016. From Communism to Democracy in Hungary. In PostCommunist Transition: Emerging Pluralism in Hungary, eds. András Körösényi, András Bozóki, George Schöpflin, 96–110. London: Bloomsbury.

Takács, Ádám. 2010. Totalitarianism as an Atmosphere: Morality and Mentality in Hungary under the Kádár Regime. Divinatio vol. 31: 113–123.

Acta Univ. Sapientiae, Film and Media Studies, 20 (2021) 165–180 DOI: 10.2478/ausfm-2021-0020

Non-Normative Gender Performances of Fat Video Game Characters Agata Waszkiewicz

Marie Curie-Skłodowska University (Lublin, Poland) E-mail: agata.anna.waszkiewicz@gmail.com Abstract. While video games unquestionably became more diverse and inclusive in the past decade, there is still a striking underrepresentation of characters whose bodies do not conform to the heterosexist concept of normativity, including those perceived as fat. My article begins with the introduction of fat studies as the interdisciplinary field concerned with the ways media construct fat people as unattractive, undesirable, and asexual.

Next, it discusses how these prejudices are reflected in a medium in which fat has been historically coded as villainous and monstrous. The last part includes two case studies of positive fat representation: Ellie from the mainstream game Borderlands 2 (Gearbox Software 2012) and the eponymous character from the independent title Felix the Reaper (Kong Orange 2019).

Their gender performances are coded equally as non-normative.

Keywords: fat studies, independent video games, female masculinity, soft masculinities, performativity.

Introduction The aim of this article is to show that preconceptions about fatness are strongly embedded in discourses and representations in popular culture, and video games in particular. Notwithstanding the significant increase in inclusive and diverse narratives as well as characters during the last decade, the non-normative bodies and identities still remain vastly underrepresented in video games.

Additionally, despite substantial critique aimed over the years at hypersexualised, unrealistically skinny women designs, not much attention has been given to the lack of representation of fat bodies outside of the monster or enemy design, in which case fatness signals strength and difficulty level.

The article sets out by introducing the discipline of fat studies and summarizing the main discourses about fat bodies, various prejudices that surround them,

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and their representation in the media. Next, it moves to analyse the portrayal of fat characters in video games, from the “fat villain” trope to the very few positive characters, revealing that even the latter are often unable to escape the misconceptions and stereotypes.

Fat Resistance: Introduction to Fat Studies While it has been over fifty years since the first size acceptance movements were established in the US (the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance, Fat Liberation Front, and Fat Underground), fat studies is still a very young research field. Marilyn Wann, who was among the first to use the term (Rothblum 2012), ties its beginnings to a 2004 conference at the Columbia University Teachers College entitled Fat Attitudes: An Examination of an American Subculture and the Representation of the Female Body (Wann 2009, xi). Both the movements and the field of study challenge the socially constructed notions of beauty concerning one’s appearance and the predominantly negative associations with fat bodies.

Both strive to reclaim the word “fat” as opposed to the medical and often derogatory as well as oppressive meaning of such terms like “obese” and “overweight.”

Wann stresses that especially the latter is “inherently anti-fat” (2009, xii) since it establishes a vaguely defined, idealized, and, thus, often unattainable “norm” and positions fat bodies outside of it. Although persistent voices argue that fatness is a medical and health issue, writers like Amy Erdman Farrell, author of Fat Shame: Stigma and the Fat Body in American Culture (2011), point out that this process of stigmatization is cultural and precedes modern medicine’s interest in weight.

As scrutiny targets mainly the bodies, especially those perceived as feminine, a complex relationship emerges between external beauty standards, the internalized drive for thinness, one’s sexuality, and one’s mental health. The endorsement of Western beauty standards in media and popular culture is continuously linked to dissatisfaction with one’s body shape, which often results in low self-esteem and a number of mental health conditions, including, but not limited to, eating disorders (see e.g. Kim and Lennon 2007, Dalley et al. 2009, Raisborough 2016, Ravary et al. 2019). Not only is fatness considered non-normative, but discourses tackling it tend to be largely omitted from the discussions of the inherent experiences of subversive bodies, while the tendencies to marginalize fat bodies still prevail in scholarly work and texts of popular culture.

Fat has been primarily discussed in the context of bodies considered female and feminine, with less attention devoted to those coded as male. Furthermore, it

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is important to notice the different expectations and stereotypes relating to how Black, Latina, POC, or White women should look like1. Nonetheless, it is equally noteworthy that while the fat on the female body is ridiculed as unattractive; on certain areas of a male body such as the stomach, it can signify masculinity, while on others (e.g. breasts or hips), it is subjected to social ridicule because of being considered effeminate, strengthening the negative demands regarding what a female body should be (Richardson 2010, 81–82). Furthermore, considering fatness a feminine trait enhances the associations between male fatness and queerness. Unsurprisingly then, the majority of research on male fat concentrates on marginalized gay identities and groups (Beattie 2014) with less attention devoted to heterosexual male bodies.

Nonetheless, Queering Fat Embodiment edited by Jackie Wykes together with Cat Pausé and Samantha Murray in 2014 was a first volume drawing direct parallels between fatness and queerness, exploring the “parallels between fat and queer experience, investigat[ing] the intersection of fat and queer, or even argu[ing] that fat necessarily is queer” (4). Wykes agrees that “potential queerness – and queer potential – of fat has long been an important part of the political project of fat activism and scholarship” (2014, 3).

By queering fat studies one continues the efforts of feminist writers, who commented on the “tyranny of slenderness” (Chernin 1981) and deemed fat as “a response to the many oppressive manifestations of a sexist culture” (Orbach 1979, 21), facilitating a more in-depth analysis of the intersections between race, class, sexuality, desire, and embodiment, while also allowing for the exploration of how fatness is entangled with the hegemonic structures of oppression.

Fat Representation in Video Games Since “fat” is a socially and culturally constructed concept, “what counts as fat and how it is valued is far from universal, indeed, these judgments are saturated with cultural, historical, political, and economic influences” (Braziel and LeBesco 2001, 2) with different standards applying depending on one’s race, gender, class and age. As a consequence, fat becomes a threat to be avoided, while the ideal thin state is defined by negation, as “not being fat.” In turn, this “fat stigmatization” 1

For more in-depth analysis of the way Western ideals of beauty are used as means of oppression and are opposed by Black people see Andrea Shaw’s Embodiment of Disobedience: Fat Black Women’s Unruly Political Bodies (2006) and for the historical origins of the prejudices towards Black fat bodies see Sabrina Strings’s Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia (2019).

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(Himes and Thompson 2007) leads not only to disregard and ridicule of fat characters in media, but to their demonization and/or villainization.

The most common, yet somewhat contradictory representations depict fat women as deviant, unattractive (Regan 1996, Gailey 2012), “asexual, out of control, or morally repugnant” (Johnston and Taylor 2008, 945). Fat characters tend to be presented as lacking interest in romantic or sexual relationships, and their desire for one is often structured as a source of comedy. Similarly, Marie Harker, who was examining the cultural representation of fat male sexuality, noted that although it “rarely enters mainstream cultural production, when it does, these twinned tropes of fat masculinity as gluttonous child or sexual incompetent conjoin in darkly reflexive images of corpulent sexuality. Such representations (...) are marked with the contours of the horrific Monstrous: a sexuality in which normative masculine sexual agency is transformed into the scandal of Waste, with a concomitant consumption/destruction of the desire object” (2016, 986–987).

This is closely paralleled in the video game context. Although due to the popularity of independent video games created by small studios or individual creators, their content is becoming increasingly inclusive, the mainstream games are still often criticized for portraying characters as overwhelmingly White, cisbodied, heterosexual, able-bodied, and adhering to the idealized, unrealistic body types, including highly sexualized silhouettes for women and overtly muscular frames for male characters (Jansz and Martis 2007). While currently more and more game titles include diverse characters with the focus on non-heterosexual and non-White identities, the vast majority of the characters belong even now to the types described above. Albeit in recent years even the big-budget corporate developer studios began to react to the changes in the industry, and this resulted in the growing number of Black, POC, and non-heterosexual characters, the change is visibly slower than in the games developed by independent creators.

However, there is still a severe underrepresentation of characters who do not conform to the Western, White, and heterosexist “normativity,” including those who perform queer genders and those who are perceived as fat.

This absence is particularly striking in the titles that allow very detailed and complex customization of the player character with several types of facial features, eye colours, or body types. Often, the selection of the latter is restricted to a few choices ranging from masculine body-builders to skinny frames for women, omitting usually the build, which could be considered fat (Harper 2019).

Among the notable examples one can find the life simulator The Sims (Maxis

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2000–2019) and the action series The Saints Row2 (Volition 2006–2015), which relays parodic exaggerations.

However, as it was already mentioned, the absence of fat characters – either controlled by the player or non-player characters (NPC) – does not mean that fatness is completely missing from video games. In order to provide clear, easy to understand feedback to players, many humanoid monsters and opponents are designed as fat and large to signal their strength and the higher difficulty levels.

According to Sarah Stang (2018 and 2019), the excessive fatness of many video game monsters is, in fact, meant to evoke feelings of contempt, grotesque, and, in consequence, terror. Analysing differences in portrayal of male and female monsters, she states that “fat female monsters and antagonists are constructed as grotesque specifically in connection to their gender, sexuality, and fecundity.

Male monsters and antagonists, on the other hand, are presented as grotesque not in relation to their gender but due to their wealth, laziness, compulsive eating habits, or infection” (2018, 2).

When presented not as something to be afraid of and disgusted by, fat can be an object of ridicule in the media. One can give as examples the controversial game entitled Fat Princess (Fun Bits Interactive 2009) and its sequel, Fat Princess Adventures (Fun Bits Interactive 2015), both published by Sony Computer Entertainment, which parody the “rescue the princess” narratives of many platformer games (Adams 2015, 43). Here, the players need to save the captured princess and bring her back to the base. However, to hinder the opposing team in accomplishing the same task, one needs to feed the other team’s princess pieces of cake, which cause her to substantially gain weight, becoming too heavy to be carried.

Strong, Unapologetic and Sexy: Performing Alternative Femininities Although the practice of introducing characters belonging to various body types observable by many current independent titles needs to be acknowledged, this article concentrates only on games that feature human or humanoid characters (i.e. with human-like body proportions). Regarding these, one must note that the majority of fat characters perform supporting roles and are not playable.

2

Saints Row 2 (Volition 2008) includes several Build Presets for the larger frame such as Overweight, Athletic, Obese, Bodybuilder, and Burly. However, the absurd and provocative humour for which the series is known codes the non-normative as comedic and laughable.

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Examples of fat characters can be found in visual novel dating simulator titles, which often provide a diverse cast of characters for the player character to romance. Fat characters are available as potential love interests in two titles recognized for their queer and diverse content: Dream Daddy: A Dad Dating Simulator (Game Grumps 2017), which features a single father, who can engage in romantic relationships with other single fathers living in the same neighbourhood; and Monster Prom (Beautiful Glitch 2018) set in a high school for monsters.

Whereas the former subverts the stereotype of associating fatness with laziness by introducing Brian Harding as the highly competitive, proud father of a prodigy daughter, the latter presents a fat woman, who is feminine, sexy and smart.

Monster Prom is notable for its self-referential humour and the inclusive design. This game allows a still rare selection in games options: the player characters can choose the neutral gender pronoun (they/them) for themselves; furthermore, there is no constraint on who can be dated regarding this choice. At the moment of writing this article, there is only one fat woman, who can be dated by a protagonist in a sequel game, Monster Prom: Monster Camp (Beautiful Glitch 2020): Joy Johnson-Johjima, one of the three Witches of the Coven introduced in the original game. While Joy is presented as feminine, wearing clothes with synched waist and emphasized cleavage, her dark make-up and clothes that signal identification with both goth subculture and witchcraft, position her within alternative femininities.3 Another example of a woman, whose gender expression is considered nonnormative, is Ellie from the second part of the mainstream first-person shooter game series, Borderlands 2 (Gearbox Software 2012). Borderlands, featuring four main games developed by Gearbox Software, several DLCs, and a spin-off point-and-click adventure game by Telltale Games, is a space western, dystopian science fiction series known for its dark humour and recognizable art style with often exaggerated proportions and traits. Each game features a group of Vault Hunters, mercenaries on a Pandora planet searching for one of the legendary alien Vaults in order to find the treasures buried inside.

Ellie is an NPC character encountered in Borderlands 2 with a recurring role in Borderlands 3 (Gearbox Software 2019). As a mechanic specializing in bandit vehicles – and like many characters populating the gameworld – she is independent, unapologetic and strong. She is fat, but also tall with 3

During the production of Monster Camp, the lead artist of the sequel, Tsing Tsing Wu changed the design of the character to represent the fat distribution through the body more accurately, changing the thinner waistline of the character to a more realistic one.

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disproportionately short legs, long torso and large breasts, as well as short hair and a heart tattoo on her chest, which is explained to be “a Hodunk clan thing.

Kinda like brandin’ cattle, but way creepier somehow.” Although not much information is given about her personal life, she is revealed to be the daughter of Mad Moxxi, a significant NPC present in all three main segments of the game and several DLCs. The two women have opposite personalities. Moxxie, who is a hostess of Colosseum matches and the owner of several bars on the planet, is portrayed as slim, with a heavy circus make-up and red clothes including a top hat, emphasizing her sadistic and seductive behaviour, which often leads to her many sexual relationships. Ellie, on the other hand, is tall and heavy, with disproportionately large breasts, typically dressed in simple shirts and overalls, emphasizing a much more down-to-earth personality. In one of her dialogue options, Ellie admits that the two them “ain’t exactly been on speakin’ terms fer a while. Don’t get me wrong – love her to death, and if it weren’t fer her, I’d be dead. But she thinks a woman ain’t worth a damn if she can’t fit into a corset, and you can only take so much of that crap” (Borderlands 2).

While it is not known whether Ellie had any romantic relationships, she is definitely not presented as adhering to stereotypes of fat persons as asexual, since she can be heard emphasizing her own sexuality or commenting on others.

For example, in Commander Lilith & the Fight for Sanctuary DLC (Gearbox Software 2019): “Me an’ that bandit boy with the bod are really hittin’ it off, if you catch my subtle and erotic drift.” Ellie’s body positivity is enforced through her comments, which make it clear that she is not only accepting her body, but is satisfied with it, repeatedly emphasizing its sexual appeal and sexiness. This is further reinforced in the fourth DLC to the second game, Tiny Tina’s Assault on Dragon Keep (Gearbox Software 2013) in which Ellie gives the player a quest to procure an armour for her. When the first type found by the player is a metal bikini in a parody of what is now considered a trope of many fantasy and science fiction video games, Ellie rejects it as too small for her (“Have you seen me? That little scrap would’t even cover half a tit”). If the player chooses to give her the bikini option instead of the proper armour at the end of the quest, she comments how attractive she looks in it, allowing the player no mockery or shaming of her body. As Kaitlin Tremblay remarks “Just like Moxxi doesn’t need the player to dictate her romantic and sexual relationships, Ellie doesn’t need the player to affirm for her how sexy she is” (2017, 89).

Ellie represents a strong, independent, and both body- and sex-positive woman, but her femininity once again is coded as non-normative. Female masculinity is the

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concept developed by Jack Halberstam, who stressed the importance of analysing masculinity outside of the context of the male, middle class, white body with which it is most often associated (1998, 3). Rather than discussing binary genders, he analysed sets of behaviours and traits that can be considered masculine in people identifying as female, encouraging researchers to explore the ideas of alternative masculinities and femininities through the non-normative and nonconforming behaviour. For Halberstam, female masculinity is most interesting in the context of the “excessive masculinity of the dyke” (1998, 28), since it is less socially accepted than the one performed by heterosexual women. Furthermore, the non-normative gender expressions are more acceptable in women than men; still, both female masculinities and what is sometimes referred to as “soft masculinities” in men (Coles 2008) tend to be subjected to prejudice and abuse.

Despite the positive depiction of these characters, one needs to recognize the dangers of homogenous representations within one medium, which equate fat femininity with alternative modes of expression, as these have the potential to further marginalize rather than normalize fatness. Instead of presenting fat bodies as normal and healthy, these games show them as necessarily queer and, thus, maintain their Otherness. The next section of the article examines further how fat men are queered and how fat women continue to be coded through their sexuality.

Queering the Dancing Body Felix The Reaper (Kong Orange 2019) is a 3D puzzle game featuring the eponymous Felix, an employee of the Ministry of Death, whose job is to cause fatal and, often, gruesome accidents by manipulating objects in the given environment. Since he can only move in the shadows, the main gameplay mechanic requires players to adjust both the position of the sun and the objects, such as barrels and boxes, to lead him to his goals. This restriction of movement is also significant for the narrative. At the very beginning of the game, it is revealed that the sole reason for which Felix became a grim reaper was his desire to meet Betty the Maiden, the object of his affection and desire. However, the two cannot meet since as an employee of the Ministry of Life she can only move in light. While the game lacks any resolution for this story and the two never meet, it becomes additionally obvious that Betty is unaware of his existence. Furthermore, despite the game’s presentation of Felix as a charming and likeable character, it is difficult to perceive his behaviour as anything but obsession-driven stalking.Although all characters portrayed in the game are fat, Felix is still othered through his behaviour, and,

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specifically, his constant dancing, which seems to be an object of permanent mockery from the other Reapers. Dancing, which is not controlled by the player, is featured both as an idle animation between the player’s actions – being inserted during cut-scenes, – and is used as Felix’s walking animation. Although it is not uncommon to incorporate a possibility of dance movements for the comedic effect in multiplayer games such as World of Warcraft (Blizzard Entertainment 2004) or Fortnite (Epic Games 2017), it is however rare for single player games to incorporate a character, whose movement is exclusively limited to dance.4 The game is narrated by Felix’s mysterious manager talking him through his first days of work. Although he directs his commentary as if towards Felix himself, Felix never acknowledges or reacts to it. At the very beginning, the voice comments on the dancing: “Ehm, by the way, about your little quirk... As we’ve discussed, some of the other Reapers find it somewhat... um... unnerving. So, while you’re in the field, do try to keep the dancing to a minimum.” While the narrator seems to have certain fondness of Felix, the phrasing and the tone seem patronizing, which in turn structure the player’s reading. The narrator repeats this sentiment at the end of the game, commenting on Felix’s obsession with Betty the Maiden.

Although he admits to being fond of Felix and, even, rooting for his happiness, he brings up his habit of dancing, showing disapproval once more: “whatever instalment of this weird saga you will be serving me next, I will play along, I’m hooked! However, Felix, for the sake of decency, do try to keep the dancing to a minimum!” This continuous positioning of the dancing as unnerving or unwelcome is surprising, considering that through the game neither Felix, nor his habit is ridiculed or shown as clumsy to the player – quite the contrary: his movements are smooth and enjoyable to witness. Thus, the game conveys a contradictory message: while Felix is presented to the player as likeable, the narrator’s scolding infantilizes him, indicating clearly that his behaviour is not “proper,” hence othering him further.

Recognizing that the act of dancing frequently offers freedom of selfexpression to members of marginalized groups, game researchers discussed how dance and movements incorporated in the game experience challenge the stereotypes of tough masculinities connected usually with the gamer identity.

Although the dance game genre is dominated by only a few very popular titles, including especially Dance Dance Revolution (Konami 1998–2019), Just Dance 4

One example worth noting is Bound (Plastic Studios 2016), which features a woman confronting memories of her parents’ divorce through her imagined childhood alter-ego, a Princess, whose movements are based on ballet dancing, evoking the therapeutic properties of dancing (Waszkiewicz 2019).

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(Ubisoft 2009–2019) and Dance Central (Harmonix Music Systems 2010) it has been thoroughly researched (Behrenshausen 2007, Hutton and Sundar 2010, Charbonneau et al. 2011, Miller 2015, Sterczewski 2015). Furthermore, dance and kinaesthetic theories tend to be used in the context of game embodiment and movement, with Graeme Kirkpatrick stating that video game play is literally a form of dance as he compared the interaction with the controller to dancing with one’s hands (2011). Felix the Reaper differs substantially from these games since it does not rely on the player’s movements, nor does it allow them any influence. Somewhat similarly to Ellie’s case, this establishes the independence of the character who – while being controlled by the players – is not affected by their perception and potential prejudices concerning their bodies.

As Jane Desmond argues “dance provides a privileged arena for the bodily enactments of sexuality’s semiotics and should be positioned at the centre, not the periphery of sexuality studies” (2001, 3). Despite the absence of prejudices against male dancers in Western cultures prior to the 20th century, when the association between gay culture and dance began to emerge, dancing tends to be perceived currently “as primarily a ‘female’ art form” (Riser 2009, 58). The heterosexist cultures favouring tough masculinities create contexts in which men, in order to avoid the stigma of homosexuality (regardless of their actual sexuality) avoid activities that tend to be perceived as “feminine, homosexual or unmasculine to any degree” (Riser 2009, 62). Thus, as Grant Tyler Peterson and Eric Anderson note, “homophobia does more than just marginalize gay men; it also regulates and limits the behaviour of straight boys and men” (2012, 5). Even if the male dancing body does challenge the image promoted by tough masculinity, it still continues to signify a body that is slim, lean, and flexible. Although Peterson and Anderson aptly observe the emergence of “inclusive masculinity” and the shift in the perception of male beauty standards in the 1990s, allowing for the creation of the “metrosexual,” a label which “has given men a long-awaited popular justification for the ability to associate with femininity and to cross previously stigmatized boundaries of homo-sociality” (2012, 10), there still is no space for the fat male dancing body. In her analysis of the portrayal of young, fat Monica Geller in the TV-series Friends, Niall Richardson comments on the scene in which the character is depicted dancing by herself “for the spectator’s amusement” (2010, 83). She furthermore notes that “it is funny to watch a fat person dance [...] because, as so many critics have already considered [...] the fat woman is removed from the scheme of attractiveness given that her size violates traditional ideas of feminine iconography” (2010, 83). In that interpretation, dance is considered inherently

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erotic and it expresses an “insatiable sexual appetite” (2010, 83) of the dancer, which is denied to fat people.

The paradox of eroticism of dance and the perception of a fat person as unable to seduce anyone is reflected in Felix the Reaper. Despite the patronizing tone of the narrator’s comments, which suggest that Felix might have been subjected to mockery from other employees of the Ministry of Death, neither his dancing, nor his weight are meant to be laughed at by the player. Quite the contrary: since the movements do not influence the gameplay, they can be enjoyed just for their smooth animation and the way they help construct Felix’s personality and subvert some of the previously discussed stereotypes. However, as it is revealed at the beginning of the game, Felix and Betty never met as “he’s fallen in love watching her from the train window commuting to work everyday for ages” (Kong Orange 2019). Furthermore, during the game it becomes obvious that Betty does not reciprocate these feelings as she is unaware of his existence. According to the description, “he’s taught himself to dance, because he’s convinced, that will win Betty over” (Kong Orange 2019). Dancing, which initially was meant to be a tool of winning over Betty’s affection, became an inherent trait of this character, touching perhaps on the beliefs discussed by Richardson.

However, the problems arise regarding the way in which his relationship with Betty is presented, in the end problematizing the representation of nonnormative gender roles. Even though Felix is pursuing a relationship that could be interpreted as heterosexual; interestingly, it is hardly coded as heteronormative.

Felix’s performances of soft masculinity are contrasted by Betty the Maiden, who is almost completely absent from the game and appears only in still pictures. She is clearly meant to represent traits that are completely opposite to those of Felix’s.

Whereas Felix is shy, she is confidently presenting her almost naked body with body hair showing under her armpits, with her breasts and genitalia covered by what appears to be a pink floral bikini, contrasting with leather gloves and tights.

While Felix is driven by emotions, she embodies raw, unapologetic sexuality.

Whereas the opposition of soft masculinity performed by a male character and the strong and independent femininity of a woman can be a powerful tool of subverting the heteronormative and heterosexist relationships and expressions of desire, here it fails to fulfil its transgressive potential.

Rather, Felix obsesses over Betty, attempting to replicate the heterosexual relationship model, objectifying her in the process due to the way she chooses to present herself. The game ends somewhat abruptly and lacks a resolution: Betty appears after his last task and he is able to see her from a distance, but

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she remains oblivious to his presence in the shadows. The voyeuristic, stalking behaviour was signalled earlier, in the illustrations of Felix’s life and thoughts.

Hence, he represents a form of failed masculinity both through his behaviour and personality, but also because he does not succeed in his pursuit of a woman.

Conclusions Acknowledging that because of the scarce representation of fat characters in video games so far, there has been little overlap between game studies and fat studies, the article scrutinized the portrayal of two characters featured in two vastly different games, showing that even the positive representation can be used to signal Otherness by, for example, the construction of fatness as inherently non-normative and necessarily connected to alternative gender identities or performances. In order to be able to subvert the stereotype that fat people are undesirable and asexual, Ellie needs to embrace the alternative and masculine femininity, while Betty’s body is stripped of agency and subjectivity, positioned there instead solely as an object of Felix’s fixation. Felix, however, defies normative masculinity by his frivolous dancing, which is considered charming only if it is simultaneously coded as naive and childish.

One can only hope that with more, consciously diverse content in upcoming video games, fat representation will become less homogenous, and bring about the normalization of various body types. With more attention devoted to fat representation, video games could become a more significant medium in analyses pertaining to the field of fat studies.

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List of Figures Figure 1. Different outfits worn by Joy in Monster Camp.

Figure 2. Screenshot showing Felix’s dancing pose.

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