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Home , Docufiction, Ethnofiction, Grey Gardens, This Is Not a Film

Nadica Denic Student nr: 10603557 [email protected]

EMBODYING HYBRIDITY: Enactive-ecological approach to filmic self-perception and self- enactment in contemporary

Research Master Thesis Department of Media Studies University of Amsterdam

Supervisor: Patricia Pisters Second reader: Abe Geil

I express my gratitude to a number of people. I am thankful to Patricia Pisters for her guidance through my film-philosophical curiosities. To my family, for always being there. And to Adel, Mare and Matthias, who always made friendship a priority.

Table of Contents Introduction ...... 1 Chapter 1: Enactive-Ecological Theory of Perception ...... 7 1.1 Embodied Cognition ...... 7 1.2 Ecological Affordances ...... 10 1.3 Cultural Modification of Affordances ...... 12 1.4 Mediation of Bodily Presence ...... 15 Chapter 2: Affordances of Filmic Self-Perception ...... 19 2.1 Mediating Spatiality ...... 19 2.2 Mediating Temporality ...... 24 2.3 Mediating Intersubjectivity ...... 27 2.4 A Landscape of Filmic Affordances ...... 31 Chapter 3: Filmic Self-Enactment in Docufiction ...... 33 3.1 in Filmic Perception ...... 33 3.2 Documentary Hybrids ...... 36 3.3 Docufiction Performance ...... 38 3.4 Enactment of Subjectivity ...... 40 Chapter 4: Embodying Hybridity...... 45 4.1 Disclosing Visibility in All These Sleepless Nights ...... 45 4.2 Recovering Memories in You Have No Idea How Much I Love You ...... 49 4.3 Modifying Roles in Olmo and the Seagull ...... 53 Conclusion ...... 58 References ...... 62

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What happens when our expressive technologies also become perceptive technologies – expressing and extending us in ways we never thought possible, radically transforming not merely our comprehension of the world but also our apprehension of ourselves? - Vivian Sobchack, Carnal Thoughts

Introduction

Visual technologies such as film and photography, as well as reflective surfaces such as mirrors, are media that present us with instant or temporally extended presentations of bodies. Mirrors enable one’s reflection in the present, while photography confronts us with a captured instant of the past. Film, on the other hand, while also referring to the past, allows us to perceive temporal objects, or events as opposed to instants. More precisely, bodies of film are bodies that persist through time, and when presented to the spectator, this duration refers to the time passed. We encounter instances of bodily presentations daily through the aforementioned media, as well as in their further mediation through digital technology. We see bodily presentations of people other than ourselves, but we also encounter images of our own bodies. For example, it is myself that I perceive in the mirror or see a child that I was in family photographs or home-videos. These are instances of self-perception. Namely, we have access to media that present us with mediated images of ourselves, of our actions and of our bodily and facial visibility. They do so in ways that natural perception does not directly allow, meaning that our immediate perceptual field cannot include our own visibility, but that of others and the world around us. To reiterate this point in other terms, the aforementioned media afford us visibility of ourselves to ourselves, a mediated self-experience. The filmic-self of this experience is not of a mere physical body, but of a lived body as engaged with the world. In , this bodily presence is of a fictional subject. In documentary, it can, for example, be of an observed body or a body in interaction with the director. However, recent documentary and fiction hybrids – – have employed the method of enactment for the presentation of their subjects. Self-enactment is a process in which the subject performs him- or herself by improvising an 2 aspect of their identity. The central preoccupation of this thesis is an exploration of the phenomenon of filmic self-perception, carried alongside the aim to understand its relation to the phenomenon of self-enactment. How is the manner in which we are able to perceive ourselves in film related to the way in which we can enact ourselves for one? This is the primary problem I aim to address in this thesis. Let us start its exploration with a note that bodily presence has been one of cinema’s original focal points. In 1895, Felix-Louis Regnault used chronophotography and stop-motion techniques to conduct an ethnographic study of bodies in motion, while early actuality films were usually focused on a bodily performance of a single action (Russel 51-55). Rather than driven by a structure, these early films express the tendency to posit a body as an “attraction” (Gunning 190). An example of this tendency is also the of facial close-up, common in early cinema and principally focused on mere display of facial expressions (Popple and Kember 91). A fascination with cinema’s peculiar ability to capture bodily and facial gestures was also present in early film theory, which was seen as invaluable not only to film as art, but for the study of and psychology as well (Balázs, The Visible Man). Similarly, this interest was also reflected in the early film reviews’ description of film as a “living picture” (Popple and Kember 2). These examples indicate film’s achievement in presenting the spectator with the living activity of the body, recording and projecting its movement and expressiveness. Furthermore, the directors of early films have also pointed the camera toward their own bodies in particular. This tendency is, for example, present in the footage of Robert Falcon Scott’s Terra Nova expedition (1910-13), which was later compiled into a The Great White Silence (Herbert G. Ponting, 1924). After Scott’s sudden death during the expedition, the footage of the journey, including portrayal of his death, was reworked as a means of “looking at death through the lens of the movie camera” (Balázs, “Compusive Cameraman” 51). This example shows that cinema has since its origins not only focused on the presentation of bodies in motion, but it did so from two perspectives. The former tendency, that of exploring the lives of those around us, is a tendency of the documentary of filmmaking, and to which aforementioned actualities and studies of bodies in motion are predecessors. Two most prolific modes of filmmaking that express the latter ability to conduct a cinematic exploration of our own 3 lives are the first-person documentary and home-video.1 While The Great White Silence can be categorized as a first-person documentary, the proliferation of the autobiographical documentary mode started with the access to video technology that facilitated such use of the medium (Renov). Overall, I have attempted to briefly account for different engagements with the medium of film that explore bodily movement and gestural expressions of others, as well as one’s own. The above-mentioned examples show us that filmic self-perception is a phenomenon enabled by numerous documentary practices, thus pointing to a variety of ways cinema has afforded the spectator an encounter with their filmic-self. Moreover, as mentioned at the outset of the introduction, this filmic-self is performed for the film by a subject. While performativity in film has traditionally been associated with the domain of fiction film, documentary history testifies that methods such as reenactment were employed even in the earliest documentary examples, as is the case in (Robert Flaherty, 1922). Documentary theorists have not only argued that performativity is an integral part of the documentary mode, but that film reflects the inherently performative nature of subjectivity (Bruzzi; Backman Rogers; Hongisto). These arguments also question the boundary between documentary and fiction. When documentary employs fiction aesthetics as a tactic for portraying reality, the results in a hybrid mode of filmmaking called docufiction (Landesman). One of the methods in which docufiction filmmakers have been collaborating with their subjects is that of enactment, in which the subjects are asked to actively perform themselves for a film, resulting in a filmic self-enactment. Not only can filmic self-perception be of a filmed self- enactment, but self-perception can also inform the process of enactment. Namely, on the basis of the proposition that perception and action exist in a dynamic relationship (Noë; Gallagher; Gibson), I will argue that the possibilities for self-enactment are dependent on the conditions of a filmic appearance of oneself. By studying the relationship between filmic self-perception and self-enactment, I will explore a specific use and engagement with the medium of film, with the focus on the role of mediation for our bodily awareness, where mediation is understood as a relationality between the human and the technical (Mitchell and Hansen xii). A few more words on the theoretical perspectives used to explore these phenomena.

1 It is worth mentioning that these latter modes do not necessarily depict the filmmaker’s body: they can be concerned with different aspects of the filmmaker’s life, the people, sights, or objects with which they engage (Lebow 1). 4

Cinematic bodily presence has until now gained significant academic attention from multi- disciplinary perspectives. For example, mediated bodily presentation has been explored in terms of visual self-representation and the variety of ways we use technology to digitally represent our own bodily image (Rettberg; Peraica). Visual technology has also been explored in relation to the formation of visual culture and the creation of a visual subject who partakes in that culture (Mirzoeff). From a psychoanalytic perspective, digital self-representation has been discussed in relation to subject-formation in a virtual world (Ibrahim). These are all insightful approaches that take visibility of the self and its presentation through visual technologies as one of its key themes. In essence, their insights are focused on the culture of self-representation and the implications it has for the subject’s sense of self. Rather than focusing on the issue of bodily representation in film (including one’s own body), my departing point is the study of perception of one’s own moving image and enactment of oneself for the moving image. In focusing on the relationship between the subject and the medium, my approach is primarily in line with that of cinematic phenomenology. In a foundational text of this approach, The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience (1991), Vivian Sobchack has explored the encounter between the spectator’s body and the film’s body in terms of shared abilities to perceive and to express.2 Moreover, these “objective encounters”, not only with film but media in general, have the ability to “transform us as embodied subjects” (Sobchack, Carnal Thoughts 89), meaning that the process of mediation shapes the way we perceive the world, others, and ourselves. Nevertheless, cinematic phenomenology has not specifically addressed the difference in the experiential nature of perceiving oneself on screen in contrast to perceiving others. In my thesis, I uncover the mode of perception particular to encountering a filmic-self on screen, thereby differentiating between the perception of a bodily moving image of oneself and that of others. Moreover, by utilizing insights from embodied cognitive science on direct perception of action possibilities in an environment, I further uncover a relationship between filmic self- perception and filmic self-enactment as resulting in a subject’s state of “embodied hybridity”,

2 Vivian Sobchack’s cinematic phenomenology directly builds on Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s embodied phenomenology. That the film’s “body” is able to perceive and express refers to the process of recording and projecting moving image. Other key authors adopting this approach include Jennifer Barker (The Tactile Eye: Touch and the Cinematic Experience, 2009) and Laura U. Marks (The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses, 1999), which have predominantly addressed cinematic experience in relation to the haptic nature of spectatorship. 5 which I will exemplify by attending to three recent docufiction films that employ enactment as a filmmaking method.3 In this way, I create an interdisciplinary framework by bringing together cinematic phenomenology, embodied cognitive science and documentary studies. On the one hand, cognitive theories are helpful for understanding certain aspects of documentary engagement and spectatorship. On the other, understanding of issues pertaining to documentary studies, such as boundaries between reality and fiction, or observation and performativity, inform how we approach the relationship between mediation and cognition. The thesis is divided into following chapters. Chapter 1 is an introduction to the enactive- ecological approach in cognitive sciences, with a focus on its understanding of the nature of self- consciousness and the possible role media and the process of mediation can have in modifying bodily awareness. Based on the key notions from this approach, such as embodied cognition and affordance-based perception, Chapter 2 is focused on what filmic self-perception affords to the spectator and how these affordances modify our spatial, temporal, and intersubjective perceptual experience. 4 In Chapter 3, I directly build on the exploration of these affordances and postulate a direct relationship between filmic self-perception and filmic self-enactment. Here, I also provide an account of documentary performances in order to arrive at an understanding of the method of enactment in contemporary docufiction film in terms of embodied hybridity. Chapter 4 will exemplify this relationship by attending to the use of enactment in three recent docufiction films in order to reflect the variety of ways the subjects can enact themselves in respect to the affordances of filmic self-perception. The films explored in Chapter 4 are All These Sleepless Nights (Michal Marczak, 2016), You Have No Idea How Much I Love You (Pawel Lozinski, 2016) and Olmo & the Seagull (Petra Costa and Lea Globb, 2015). As I will propose, self-consciousness is specified by what the environment affords to the individual at stake. In the case of film, the individual attends to a mediated environment, and my interest is in the implications that such a mediated environment can have for the nature of self-

3 In “Film and the Phenomenology of Art: Reappraising Merleau-Ponty on Cinema as Form, Medium, and Expression” (2017), Daniel Yacavone urged for an exploration of phenomenological aesthetics rather than the more traditional emphasis on the perceptual conditions of film as a medium (161). In addressing the creative employment of self-perception and self-enactment in documentary history, I will attempt to encompass both of these approaches. First by exploring the mediated nature of seeing and acting oneself for a film, and second by carefully attending to the presentation of these mediated experience in three recent docufiction films, thereby also contributing to a phenomenological aesthetics of docufiction. 4 An earlier version of this exploration was submitted for a final research project of Media Theory II. Chapter 2 is a revised and expanded version of that essay. 6 consciousness. By focusing on filmic self-perception and self-enactment, my goal is to discern how a self-presence is mediated in the processes of perceiving and enacting oneself in a film. I argue that a closer look at the relationship between these two phenomena can provide an understanding of how mediation specifies self-consciousness in an encounter with a spatially, temporally and intersubjectively mediated filmic self. In turn, this encounter provides affordances for new forms of embodied engagement with the world that are reflected in the process of filmic self-enactment.

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Chapter 1: Enactive-Ecological Theory of Perception

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

1.1 Embodied Cognition

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

5 Intentionality is one of the fundamental concepts in phenomenology and embodied cognitive science. In the most basic terms, intentionality entails that consciousness is always directed outside of itself: consciousness is always consciousness of something (Merleau-Ponty). 8

The claim that an embodied subject and the world one is embedded in co-constitute each other can be traced to the early work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, notably in Phenomenology of Perception (1945). Francisco J. Varela, Evan Thompson and Eleanor Rosch have furthered this approach in what is now a classic work of embodied cognitive science, namely The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience (1991), where the aforementioned definition of embodied cognition was originally defended. In essence, the aim of Varela et al.’s work was to naturalize phenomenology by connecting it to contemporary research in sciences of the mind. This approach is also known as the enactive approach to cognition.6 Varela et al. further propose to understand the co-constitution of mind and the world through the notion of “structural coupling”, which involves that an embodied mind is an autonomous and complex system that enacts a world through coupling with the chosen milieu (151). Structural coupling results in a spatiotemporal reconfiguration (ibid). On the basis of its autonomy – one’s embodiment and lived experience – a system enacts a domain of significance in an environment in which the system is embedded (156). In other words, through the process of structural coupling with a milieu, a system enacts a world. It is worth mentioning that such a stance is in strong opposition to a realist attitude of classical cognitive science in which the task of cognition is to recover a pregiven world. In arguing for embodied cognitive science, Varela et al. urge us to consider cognition as “embodied action” (172). They clarify it as following: By using the term embodied we mean to highlight two points: first, that cognition depends upon the kinds of experience that come from having a body with various sensorimotor capacities, and second, that these individual sensorimotor capacities are themselves embedded in a more encompassing biological, psychological, and cultural context. By using the term action we mean to emphasize once again that sensory and motor processes, perception and action, are fundamentally inseparable in lived cognition (173). Cognition, therefore, should be understood as embodied action resulting from a co-constitution between the mind and the world. At the same time that it enacts a world, cognition is dependent on it through being embedded in it. An organism is, therefore, simultaneously embodied and embedded, existing in an active, sense-making (or enactive) relationship with its chosen milieu.

6 Evan Thompson’s Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology and Sciences of the Mind (2007) pursues the same project by building on the research present in The Embodied Mind (1991), which Thompson co-authored. 9

An approach to cognition under the initialism 4EA has been getting more attention in the past decade, and its philosophical basis is in line with an understanding of cognition in terms of embodied action. The initialism stems from the program’s focus on the embodied, embedded, enactive, extended and affective understanding of consciousness. “Extended” refers to the mind’s ability to include “elements outside the body as proper mechanisms that constitute mental states”, while “affective” refers to the “affectivity of every organism and its needs and strivings” (Fingerhut 34). The way in which 4EA understands cognition as extended should not be confused with the “extended mind hypothesis”, which postulates that technology can expand the space of reason and cognition (Clark and Chalmers). Under 4EA framework, “extended” refers to the ability of external objects to actually shape our perceptual experience of the world (Fingerhut 48). An understanding of cognition as extended is particularly helpful when dealing with the issue of mediation, as one needs to explore how a medium that is outside of a body creates a relationship with it and in which manner does it consequently modify our perceptual experience. That elements outside of the body such as media are capable of extending the mind has also been proposed by media theorist Marshal McLuchan in his seminal book Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964). Extended theories of mind, therefore, provide new information on debates present in media studies. In line with the 4EA approach, Fingerhut proposes to understand pictures in general as “tools”, arguing that “pictures have the power to depict previously inaccessible details, as well as abstract contents and complex topics and make these all available in ways that would not be graspable in the perception of a natural scene or in alone” (44). In the interaction between perception and pictures, pictures do not only provide new content for perception but afford us a different mode of perception, thereby enlarging and changing our faculty of perception (46). In summary, the relationship between mediation and perception entails that perception “includes and can change according to the different mediums (tools, technologies) through which we gain access to the world and through which the world affects us. They are not just input to the system but essential parts of the means of our access” (Fingerhut 46). Building on these ideas, the process of mediation is best understood as a specific form of structural coupling between an organism and its environment, which results, among other things, in a reconfiguration of a broader spatiotemporal environment. Therefore, perceptual engagement with the medium of film accordingly results in a changed mode of access to the world. How the 10 process of filmic mediation affects our faculty of perception can be approached in a more specific manner by referring to the notion of affordances.

1.2 Ecological Affordances

The term “affordance” was first proposed by James Jerome Gibson in The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (1979). Visual ecology proposes that affordances are aspects of an environment that are both relational to an individual and exist as resources available in an environment that provide possibilities for action (Gibson). They are “relations between aspects of a material environment and abilities available in a form of life” (Rietveld and Kiverstein 335). When an individual is in a particular environment, some affordances will stand out for the individual while others will be ignored (Bruineberg and Rietveld). Moreover, due to the relational nature of affordances, there is a plurality of ways in which the affordances that do stand out can acquire meaning for the individual. Nevertheless, as Gibson himself posed the question, if perception is indeed perception of affordances in an environment, “how do we go from surfaces to affordances?” (127). How do we move from a superficial understanding of our being in an environment to the one invested with a meaningful engagement with it? Gibson clarified it as following: The composition and layout of surfaces constitute what they afford. If so, to perceive them is to perceive what they afford. This is a radical hypothesis, for it implies that the “values” and “meanings” of things in the environment can be directly perceived. Moreover, it would explain the sense in which values and meanings are external to the perceiver. [I]t implies the complementarity of the animal and the environment (127). To understand perception as “picking up” of affordances is in accordance with understanding cognition as embodied action. Both of these approaches understand the relationship between an individual and their environment in terms of complementarity, or co-constitution. Affordances appear in relation to the perceiver; they are aspects of an environment deemed significant for and by the individual. If we refer back to Varela et al.’s notion of structural coupling, in which an organism selects a domain of significance in a chosen milieu, we can understand one’s response to the affordances available in an environment in an analogous manner. 11

It is worth stressing that affordances are not to be understood as physical properties of surfaces (Gibson 127). For example, a surface can be horizontal and rigid, and these would constitute its physical properties. Affordances, on the other hand, “have to be measured relative to the animal” (ibid). In this case, the physical properties of a surface could afford support to an individual, thus making support an affordance. In essence, an affordance is the way in which we make an object meaningful in relation to our embodiment. Importantly, this further implies that even though affordances are essentially relational, this does not mean that they do not exist independently of the individual. Affordances have an objective reality that is relative to a form of life and its members (Rietveld and Kiverstein 338). Moreover, affordances are not only provided by objects in one’s environment, but by other people too, thus also being useful for understanding of intersubjectivity. Gibson proposes to consider our engagement with others in terms of “mutual affordances”, stating that “behavior affords behavior” (135). Just as an object has a shape and a surface to which we relate, so does the surface of the other’s body specify what they afford us, and what we might have afforded them. Social affordances arise in the interaction between two or more individuals and require mutual perception of each other’s affordances. Lastly, while each object or a person in our environment might affords us something, this does not mean that affordances exist in isolation from one another. Bruineberg and Rietveld propose that the best way to understand affordances is through the concept of “landscape of affordances”, which aims to denote the “interrelatedness of the available affordances”, and not specify them as “a set of separate possibilities for actions” (3). Therefore, in an encounter with an environment, an individual simultaneously relates to its multiple affordances, which interrelate and form a landscape of affordances (Rietveld et al. 15). As Rietveld et al. have argued, affordances provide context for one another, which is an important consideration when dealing with the affordances of a certain phenomenon, as they can not only be multiple, but also inform each other (ibid). In summary, affordances have to be measured relative to the individual who engages with objects in a particular environment. Even though they relate to the physical properties of intended objects, affordances are meant to denote the complementarity of an organism and its environment. They entail the values that are significant for the individual at stake and exist in interrelation with other affordances deemed as significant in the chosen milieu. Nevertheless, if 12 affordances are measured relative to an individual, how should we understand the manner in which affordances are “picked up”, or given significance? In other words, why do some affordances stand out, while others are ignored? In Varieties of Presence (2011), Alva Noë proposes that the kind of access one will achieve in an encounter with an environment depends on the skills of the individual. This means that our “conceptual and sensorimotor skills are not means of representation” but “means of achieving access to things” (124). What the environment affords, then, is dependent on the skills necessary in order to access the possible affordances. As Noë argues, “a theory of direct perception requires us to appreciate anew the role played by skills and understanding in perceptual experience. The object’s nearby existence does not suffice to enable the object to show up for perceptual consciousness” (Noë 125). Therefore, when we think of one’s encounter with an object, we should not think “we only see affordances” but that “we can see affordances” (Noë 121). Noë’s “theory of access” clarifies that if we do not possess skills necessary to establish a relationship with an object, we will not be able to directly encounter the possibilities for action this object provides: its properties would not amount to affordances. A theory of perceived affordances thus postulates that perception is not a representation of the object of perception: the world does not simply show up in perceptual experience and “sensory events alone, without skill and understanding, are blind” (Noë 123). Rather, we achieve access to the world around us through skills and acts of understanding. We can perceive meanings and values of the objects we intend, that is, we can achieve access to what an environment affords through the skills available in our ecological niche. Noë’s theory of access is, therefore, in line with Varela et al.’s understanding of cognition as embodied action. Perception of affordances is directly dependent on our embodiment, our biological, psychological and cultural context. We enact a world of affordances by achieving access to it.

1.3 Cultural Modification of Affordances

If perception enacts a world, that also means that “objects of perception always have hidden, nondisclosed parts or aspects” (123). Noë’s theory of perceptual access to the world additionally indicates the possibility of failing to achieve access to the object’s affordances, either partially or 13 completely. Things in the world, therefore, appear to us in a variety of ways. However, affordances as resources are available even before they are actually deemed meaningful by an individual, which opens the possibility for “picking up” affordances that haven’t been engaged with before, as well as creating new ones. As Gibson argues, one can change the shape and substances of an environment in order to change what it afford them (130). Rietveld and Kiverstein elaborate that an “account of affordances as being both relational and environmental resources suggests that applying skills in unconventional ways can be sufficient to allow one to discover new affordances offered by already familiar aspects of our environment” (340). Therefore, in changing our environment, we also change what the environment affords. In short, we create new possibilities for action and new forms of embodied engagement with our milieu. This changed environment should not be understood as a “new environment” but as “the same old environment modified by man” (Gibson 130). Namely: It is a mistake to separate the natural world from the artificial as if there were two environments; artifacts have to be manufactured from natural substances. It is also a mistake to separate the cultural environment from the natural environment, as if there were a world of mental products distinct from the world of material products. There is only one world, however diverse, and all animals live in it, although we human animals have altered it to suit ourselves. […] We all fit into the substructures of the environment in our various ways, for we were all, in fact, formed by them. We were created by the world we live in (Gibson 130). Therefore, not only is perception essentially affordance-based, but the nature of these affordances can be changed through human modification of their environment. We can form new affordances, and in turn our perception will also be formed by them, thus pointing to the aforementioned complementarity of an individual and their environment. Gibson’s position on the modification of the organism’s environment thus entails that perception will also be modified, as perception is based on the relationship an organism forms with a particular environment. Therefore, not only is the enactive-ecological approach to perception essentially anti-representationalist, but it establishes that through the organism’s coupling with the environment, the organism can change what the environment affords them and in turn develop new perceptual skills and accordingly a new form of embodied engagement with the environment. 14

In his book Strange Tools: Art and Human Nature (2015), Alva Noë expresses an analogous argument in relation to the creative use of affordances by proposing that human beings acquire second natures through the creative use of technology (31). Namely, Noë argues that artistic practice can employ technology in a creative manner so as to explore different aspects of our existence, in turn reshaping our existential practices. Technology here is considered in a broad sense and includes writing and graphics, as well as more contemporary forms of media of which film is a part (Noë, Strange Tools). The argument Noë presents is that in finding new ways of using technology through art, we reorganize ourselves and adopt new forms of organized activities, or, in his terms, acquire second natures (Noë 30). Art is a strange tool, and art reorganizes us (31). Or, as Fielding has argued, art has the ability to cultivate perception (280). Noë’s argument is based on the view that art discovers new affordances by skillfully, and sometimes unconventionally, engaging with available resources. Moreover, a recent anthology edited by Christoph Durt, Thomas Fuchs and Christian Tewes, titled Embodiment, Enaction and Culture: Investigating the Constitution of a Shared World (2017), sets out to explore embodied cognition and enaction of a world according to Varela et al.’s thesis. Yet, their central focus is the cultural embeddedness of perception. Namely, they stress that “culture permeates sense-making processes from pre-reflective motor- perceptive levels to the highest forms of significance. The products of culture, such as artifacts, technology, and institutions, in turn become an integral part of sense-making processes” (Durt et al. 3). In line with this view, Joerg Fingerhut and Katrin Heimann have explored the relation between embodiment, enaction, and film. Namely, they propose that filmic perception should be understood as a distinct modality of perception (Fingerhut and Heimann 364). Building on a vast literature from embodied cognitive science, the authors argue that “media competence is not naturally given, but is acquired over time”, leading them to argue that filmic perception is not only different from natural perception, but that it requires the development of specific perceptual skills needed for comprehending a film (369). Namely, “a succession of images that deviate more strongly from our perceptual habits – such as “cuts across the line”, “jump cuts”, and artificial camera movement – initiate differential responses of the motor system” (368). Consequently, in developing a new set of perceptual skills through engagement with the filmic medium, one also learns “ forms of embodied engagement” (Fingerhut and Heimann 364).

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1.4 Mediation of Bodily Presence

Before exploring the affordances of the phenomenon of filmic self-perception and the forms of embodied engagement enabled by these affordances, different forms of bodily self-awareness should first be clarified in order to explore their modification upon an encounter with new affordances. In this section, then, I set to provide an understanding of self-consciousness in light of the enactive-ecological theoretical approach. The first important distinction, traditionally made by phenomenologists, is between pre-reflective and reflective bodily awareness (Merleau- Ponty; Sartre). The embodied first-person perspective is of a pre-reflectively lived body, while a reflective bodily awareness refers to intending the body as an object of reflection (Gallagher and Zahavi). This distinction clarifies that the body is primarily experienced “as a field of activity and affectivity, as a potentiality of mobility and action”, while this experience can only be secondarily reflected on, an in which one moves from pre-reflective to reflective bodily awareness (Gallagher and Zahavi 8). Therefore, when one speaks of perception and cognition as being embodied, as it was outlined above, bodily self-awareness consists of an experience of the lived body, as it perceives and engages with the world. As Gallagher and Zahavi further clarify, “every visual or tactile experience is given in correlation to a kineasthetic experience”, “we experience the world bodily, and the body is revealed to us in exploration of the world” (9). This means that first-person embodied experience is positioned as our primary form of bodily- awareness. What does such embodied experience further consist of? In The Visible and the Invisible (1968), Merleau-Ponty argues that an essential aspect of our perception is its reversibility. Namely, just as I exist as a subject of perceptual experience, so I can become an object of perception for another person. An embodied consciousness, thereby, exists in two modes, as a “seer” and a “visible” (Merleau-Ponty 139). What Merleau-Ponty stresses is that the reversible nature of the senses is inherent to perception and that bodily awareness exists in a form of doubling. This reversibility is between a sense-making, or a sentient being, on the one hand, and a sensible being on the other. Importantly, rather than these two aspects of perception being merely reversible, they intertwine: “my seeing body subtends this visible body, and all the visibles with it” (138). This means that one does not change modes of being (from sentient to sensible, and vice versa) but rather embodies both simultaneously. 16

Experience of such reversibility is therefore part of the first-person embodied perspective (Gallagher and Zahavi). When speaking of the visible body, Merleau-Ponty here intends both the human body and other bodies present in the world for perception. To claim that my body subtends other bodies is to assert the primacy of perception as well as the “participation in and with the visible” (138), the intertwining between the sentient and the sensible, and the reversibility of the senses that makes my body akin to other bodies. Nevertheless, while Merleau- Ponty refers to the essence of perception more generally, a paradigmatic case for the intertwining of the sentient and the sensible is the phenomenon of self-touch, the ability to touch an object with one hand and then touch this hand with the other hand (133). During the experience of self- touch, I am both the tactile subject of perception and a tangible object for perception. I embody a sentient and a sensible, and primarily tactile and tangible, modes of being simultaneously. Moreover, Merleau-Ponty stresses that it is an encounter with the other that enables the intertwining of the visual and the visible (143). He argues that in being aware of another’s look of ourselves, we become aware of our own visibility, writing that “through other eyes we are for ourselves fully visible” (143). Merleau-Ponty stresses the phenomenological aspect of the relation between myself and the other, that being visible marks a structure of our being, of not only being a subject who can see, but of capability of being seen. Jean-Paul Sartre, who has also written on the relation between self and the other, reflects on this encounter as the one in which the other is primarily encountered as a subject for whom I exist as an object for perception (294). A relation between self and the other is a confrontation with one’s own objectivity to which one does not have a direct perceptual access (Sartre 285). This experience is marked by the doubling of sentient and the sensible, or the visual and the visible, as being not only my factual situation (an encounter with the other who sees me) but my ontological structure. When confronted with a look of the other, “I appear to myself completely turned inside out under my own eyes” (143). For Merleau-Ponty, this is a confrontation with a body as “a surface of inexhaustible depth” or being an expressive body (143). We can understand this claim in relation to the proposition above that the visual, or seeing, subtends the visible. When confronted with an experience of being an object for perception, of being visible to the other, I become also visible for myself in a sense that I am aware that my body exists as an expressive body for others (Merleau-Ponty 144). In Being and Nothingness (1943), Sartre summarized these different modes of bodily awareness in the following manner: “I exist my body, this is its first dimension of being. My 17 body is utilized and known by the other: this is its second dimension. But in so far as I am for others, the Other is revealed to me as the subject for whom I am an object. [I] exist for myself as a body known by the other. This is the third ontological dimension of my body” (375). One’s existence for the other as a sensible body brings forward the consciousness of one’s body not as a lived body but of a body as it appears to the other (Sartre 376). This third ontological dimension of the body that is posited by Sartre is equivalent to Merleau-Ponty’s claim that the sentient and the sensible are not only reversible but exist in the mode of intertwining. Or, as Gallagher and Zahavi elaborated, “we find ourselves related to others through self-conscious experience that is motivated by the other’s gaze” (10). Self-consciousness is therefore ontologically determined by its existence in an intersubjective context. I do not only exist as a sensible object for others to intend, but it is my own self-consciousness that is being determined by encountering other bodies. Self-awareness is, then, inherently related to one’s social environment, and the relationship between self and other is essential for self-consciousness. Therefore, self-presence can be understood as having three modes. These can be summarized as 1) my lived body, 2) my body as known by the other, and 3) an awareness of my lived body as known by the other. As elaborated, the enactive-ecology theory of perception stresses the complementarity between an individual and the environment, or their co-constitution. This means that self- consciousness is in a direct relationship with its environment: “To perceive a world is to coperceive oneself” (Gibson 141). In other words, self-experience is specified by the affordances present in an environment (Gibson; Gallese and Sinigaglia). If this is the case, then the change in the affordances with which one engages reflects a change in self-consciousness. Or, to refer to Sobchack’s understating of our engagement with different media, “insofar as the photographic, the cinematic, and the electronic have each been objectively constituted as a new and discrete techno-logic, each also has been subjectively incorporated, enabling a new and discrete perceptual mode of existential and embodied presence” (Carnal Thoughts 139). In other words, technology has “transformed us so that we presently see, sense, and make sense of ourselves as quite other than we were before each of them existed” (ibid). What implications does this have for exploring the filmic mediation of self-presence? First, we can argue that the use of the medium of film so as to afford filmic self-perception is an example of modification of available resources in an environment through which we have 18 created a new set of perceptual skills. Second, in changing the use of the medium for this purpose, we have not only created new affordances available through filmic self-perception but have also modified the perception of our own bodily presence. That is, in the process of mediation that denotes the relation between the individual and the mediated self in a moving image, self-consciousness undergoes a reconfiguration. Third, in modifying bodily awareness through this process, we have also created new forms of embodied engagement with our environment. And fourth, film as an art form has creatively explored these affordances, in turn further reinventing itself as a medium. On the basis of these arguments, the following chapter sets to explore the perceptual affordances of filmic self-perception and how self-presence is mediated in the encounter with these affordances, as well as how filmmakers have responded to these affordances by engaging with the medium in a particular manner. An exploration of the mediation of self-presence will be carried out along the following postulates. The enactive-ecological approach allows us to argue that an engagement with a mediated environment results, first of all, in a spatiotemporal reconfiguration (Varela et al.). Namely, technological mediations of space and time modify our experience of them (Mitchell and Hansen 101; Sobchack, Carnal Thoughts 135). Secondly, as film is essentially an individual’s mediated perceptual experience, an encounter with a filmic-self will also be explored in terms of an intersubjective reconfiguration (Sobchack, The Address of the Eye). These processes can be addressed by attending to the reconfiguration of bodily awareness through an encounter with different filmic affordances. Thereby, Chapter 2 essentially addresses the following question. What does a filmic mediation of self-presence afford and how do these affordances mediate spatial, temporal and intersubjective bodily awareness? An analysis of these affordances is further driven by the aim to explore the kind of bodily engagement incited by these affordances. That is, as the affordances interrelate and form a landscape of affordances with which one engages, how are we to understand the kind of embodied engagement enabled by filmic self-perception? This will be addressed in detail in Chapter 3, which aims to account for the relationship between filmic self-perception and filmic self-enactment.

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Chapter 2: Affordances of Filmic Self-Perception

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

2.1 Mediating Spatiality

When it comes to the spatial configuration of our field of view, we can first of all posit that due to its particular configuration, one’s bodily and facial visibility cannot be included in it as a direct object for perception. Our field of view can, for example, include a part of our nose, and we can see our limbs or parts of our body. But it cannot be occupied by the one who observes.7 As elaborated in the introduction, in order to see our bodily and facial gestures, we rely on media to show them to us. Merleau-Ponty noted that the other’s presence in one’s field of view makes

7 For a further explication of our “field of view”, see Gibson, Chapter 7. 20 them aware of them being an object for perception. We should note here that the outcomes of the phenomenon of the look of the other is not analogous to the phenomenon of self-touch described before, even though they are both concerned with the reversibility of the senses. The key difference is that during self-touch, I am for myself both tactile and tangible. The look of the other does not allow me a perception of myself in the same manner as in the case of self-touch, as the other’s perceptual experience is directly unavailable to me. However, as Sobchack has argued, a phenomenology of the moving image is characterized as being a mediated perceptual experience of a subject, or an expression of another’s perception (The Address of the Eye). While self-touch is possible without mediation, visual technologies mediate bodily presence so as to allow it to become an object of self-look. More precisely, in order to see myself – my body as I am able to see bodies other than my own – I need to rely on a medium that is capable of affording it as such. The aforementioned visual media grant us instances of self-look: I am simultaneously the one seeing and the one being seen, the doubling of being sentient and sensible occurs again in the form of visual and visible. Filmic self-perception grants us a temporal object of ourselves as subjects of perception: we see ourselves seeing and engaging with the world. In perceiving ourselves as subjects of perception in a moving image, we perceive our own conduct in the world, our bodily and facial gestures as we engage with an environment. Thereby, the body is not only experienced as a lived body but as an expressive body. Mirrors, photography and film allow us a direct intertwining of the visual and visible nature of our perceptual experience. As it was noted in the introduction, photography presents us with an instant, and film with an event of the past, while mirrors afford a reflection of our present self. Let us take a closer look at what mirror self-perception consists of, so that we can better understand the distinct affordances of filmic self-perception. Drawing from Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, Dan Zahavi argues that “the mirror not only permits the child to perceive her own facial features; it also affords the child a very different apprehension of her own bodily unity than what is available from interoceptive, proprioceptive, and exteroceptive sources” (203). In mirror self-experience, one’s body becomes “a clearly delineated object”, and for one to realize the specular image as being of themselves is to become a spectator of oneself (Zahavi 203). Zahavi further argues that mirror self-experience brings a realization of living in an intersubjective space, that I am now seeing myself as others see me (204). Namely, “the enigmatic and uncanny of mirror self-experience is precisely due 21 to this intermingling of self and other. It is me that I see in the mirror, but the me I see hasn’t quite the same familiarity and immediacy as the me I know from immediate experience. The me I see in the mirror is distant and yet close; it is felt as another, and yet as myself” (204). Zahavi’s conceptualization reflects the third ontological dimension of the body as argued by Sartre and Merleau-Ponty. In mirror self-perception, I see the body as it is visible to others. A mirror does not merely bring a contrast between our own bodies and those of other people, but a tension in being both a subject and object of a perceptual experience. It introduces a new form to our perception, a perception of self that was not available before the encounter with a specular double in the mirror. More precisely, mirror self-experience involves the intersubjective character of our perception, a presentation of a dimension of self that is “self as a social object” (Zahavi 206). While mirror self-perception involves recognition of my visual body in the present, filmic self-perception is an encounter with my visible body as from the past, or a perception of myself as I was. Just as the self in the mirror is not the one readily available to me in my immediate experience, so the film grants us a temporal image of ourselves in the past. Moreover, filmic self- perception affords a presentation of my body as engaged with the world, as responding to the objects and people in its surrounding. Namely, as Merleau-Ponty asserted in “Film and the New Psychology”, “a movie is not thought; it is perceived” (Sense and Non-Sense, 80). He clarified this distinction by pointing to a medium-specific presentation of the subject’s existence in the world, namely that films “do not give us his thoughts, as have done for so long, but his conduct or behavior; [t]hey directly present to us that special way of being in the world, of dealing with things and other people, which we can see in the sign language of gesture and gaze and which clearly defines each person we know” (80). This focus on perceptual experience stresses that what films confront us with are the behavior and gestures of another person. When we perceive another’s bodily presence, “we are not only confronted with a physical body but with gestures that immediately express and communicate a meaning”, that is, “the facial expressions, intonation and bodily posture are all perceived as being imbued with meaning” (Kiverstein 535). And what filmic self-perception affords us is our own conduct in the word, a confrontation with our physiognomy and gestural responses in a specific past situation. In experience, perception and expression are in a dynamic relation of reversibility, so that a lived-body is always in the act of perceiving expression and 22 expressing perception (Barker 8). Bodily visibility afforded by filmic self-presentation, therefore, should be understood as being expressive of a past-self in relation to the other, as the two following sections will explore. The central point I want to make in relation to filmic mediation of spatiality is its ability to include the spectator into their own field of view. That is, not only, as in the look of the other, to become aware of their own visibility, but to directly perceive ourselves as expressive beings, the manner in which our behaviors, gestures, and physiognomy are sensible to others. This, of course, makes filmic self-perception also relevant for the mediation of intersubjectivity, which will be explored after accounting for mediation of temporality. Filmic self-perception, therefore, simultaneously constitutes as a subject of perception and an object for perception. In its ability to afford a perceptual experience of one’s own bodily comportment and its temporally extended gestural expressions, a cinematic self-look is a unique experience of this doubling. Just as a mirror creates a tension between myself as a subject and myself as an object, so does filmic self- perception create a tension to appropriate a temporally extended image of the self that I was into the present self-experience. To summarize, filmic self-perception affords a perceptual experience of oneself as an object for perception within one’s own field of view, and crucially, this filmic- selfentails temporally extended visibility of a past-self. Filmic self-experience is enabled through various modes of filmmaking, as noted in the introduction. Film’s affordance of self-look has also been utilized within the filmmaking process itself, thus granting spectators direct access to its use as a filmmaking method. Namely, there are documentary examples in which the subjects of the film have been presented with the footage of themselves and their response to the footage has consequently been recorded. Cinematic self- look is, for example, employed in (Edgar Morin and , 1961), where the subjects commented on the difference between first-person lived experience and that of their visible selves, regarding the latter as “unnatural” or elsewhere commenting on the inability to “express themselves”. Others, however, commented on the truthfulness of their mediated visibility, noting how “you don’t lie in front of the camera”. In no other film, to my knowledge, has the relation between mediated and non-mediated self-presence been so extensively discussed as in Chronicle of a Summer. For this reason, I will return to this film in Chapter 3 when discussing the relation between self-perception and self-enactment. 23

Similiarly, In Ladies and Gentlemen, Mr. Leonard Cohen (Donald Brittain and Don Owen, 1966), the film’s is also presented with the footage of himself. While watching it, Leonard Cohen makes the following comment: “I think I’ve had a very mistaken conception of what style of man I was”. This comments also reflects the tension between oneself as a visual subject and one’s body as a visible, expressive body. It speaks of difference between consciousness of one’s visibility for the other and a confrontation with this visibility through cinematic self-look. In a more recent cinematic achievement by Joshua Oppenheimer, (2012), Anwar Congo, the leader of a death squad during Indonesian genocide of 1965- 66, watches himself reenacting the murders from the perspective of the victim. At one occasion, struck by his own reenactments, he says: “Did the people I torture feel the way I do here?”.8 In addition to highlighting the affective nature of confronting one’s visibility, Anwar Congo’s comment also reveals an important dimension of filmic self-experience, namely the confrontation with a past-self as experienced from the present. The temporal dimension of this experience is of extreme importance for Congo, but it should be noted that the subjects of Chronicle of a Summer and Ladies and Gentlemen, Mr. Leonard Cohen also engage in perception of their past-selves. This opens the further question of mediation of time- consciousness in relation to filmic self-perception, which is the focus of the following section. There is, however, one other crucial difference between the situations for self-perception created by these environments that must be addressed before continuing. In Chronicle of a Summer and Ladies and Gentlemen, Mr. Leonard Cohen, the subjects are presented with the final footage of their filmic presence. In The Act of Killing, however, Anwar perceives himself reenacting, but this footage will only later be placed in the film as the viewer sees it. In other words, these reenactments will only later gain context through editing, which is something Anwar is yet unaware of when he sees them.9 This difference points to the importance of the relationship developed by the filmmaker and the subjects, or the mediation of intersubjectivity, which is something I will attend to after accounting for the mediation of temporality.

8 The context of Anwar’s filmic self-perception is vastly different from those in Chronicle of a Summer and Ladies and Gentlemen, Mr. Leonard Cohen, as it primarily involves an encounter with a traumatic past. It is not my attempt to essentialize the mode of spectatorship enabled by this method. Rather, these examples point to its varied use – and importantly also varied effect – on the subjects. Namely, due to the context of the project, the scope of critical investment enabled by self-perception is larger for Anwar Congo than for the other mentioned . 9 This difference was indicated to me during a presentation of these ideas at Docusophia conference (Tel Aviv, May 2018). Many thanks to Ohad Landesman for his insightful remark. 24

2.2 Mediating Temporality

In the previous section, I have deemed filmic self-presentation as being temporally extended. It is of a body that is undergoing change and transformation as it engages with the world, and we witness such a presentation as a filmic event. I have previously differentiated between pre- reflective and reflective self-consciousness. Pre-reflective self-consciousness is characterized by the perceptual experience as it is lived and this experience has a temporal structure. We have memories of past objects and events, and we also anticipate the future ones. In Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind (2010), Evan Thompson has elaborated on time-consciousness in the following manner: Experience itself is temporal, and particular experiences are temporally related to each other. We are aware of our experiences and mental activities as arising, enduring, and ceasing, and as followed by other experiences and mental activities, all related to one another in complex ways. Time-consciousness thus comprises both awareness of external things and their temporal characters, and awareness itself as temporal and as unified across time (318). Thereby, not only are perceptual experiences temporal, but so too is self-consciousness. Importantly, it is the temporal structure of pre-reflective self-consciousness that poses limitations for reflective self-consciousness. Being temporal in itself, reflective self-consciousness can take the objects of lived experience as its objects of reflection, but it can never coincide with them (Gallagher and Zahavi 7). Therefore, we can investigate our past experiences from the present, but there is always a fracture between the two, a difference between “the lived” and “the understood” (ibid). As elaborated in the section above, film’s ability to mediate perceptual experiences grants us access into ourselves as subjects engaging with the world, thus bringing a past-self into the present field of view. What kind of implications does that phenomenon have for filmic mediation of temporality? In “Towards a Phenomenology of Nonfiction Film Experience” (1999), Vivian Sobchack lays out the phenomenological structures of the cinematic experience of film-souvenirs that can be beneficial for further exploring the relation between filmic self-perception and time- consciousness. Film-souvenirs, or home videos, contain footage of events we have previously 25 experienced, of people, objects or sights we have been existentially familiar with in our lives. Documentary or fiction films, on the other hand, present us with film-worlds that we have not previously experienced, although both do so in a different manner. Sobchack notes that in the experience of film-souvenirs, we engage in a “constitutive activity” the aim of which is to recover the experience of a person or event we now perceive through the moving image (244). This means that film-souvenirs function as catalysts for a reactivation of our past lived experiences. She explains this process in the following manner: I see my son through the image, his smile evoking an ensemble of gestures and looks in excess of the image’s specificity, evoking the person I know whose existence and comportment form a general whole that I try to remember from this image fragment of him. Similarly, the image fragments of the backyard of the house I once lived in do not provoke intense scrutiny, but rather evoke a coherent, eventful, and lived space I wish to recall in excess of what is given to me on the screen (248). What Sobchack stresses here is that existential familiarity with the footage does not evoke scrutiny of the image in the attempt to understand its place within the film-world, as seeing a documentary or a fiction film would. Rather, a perceptual experience of a home video evokes a lived space through which I can recall past fragments of my own life. What I see is not a part of the film-world as a whole, but part of my own past lived experiences. Home videos prompt us to rejoin lived experiences from the past to our present consciousness. They, as Jamie Baron has suggested, have an “archive effect” (105). To perceive a footage as “archival” means to perceive it as produced in a different time period, to experience it as being of the past (Baron 105). While Baron’s concern is with the appropriation of footage for historical purposes, home videos delineate a personal disparity between the past and the present. They give us a sense of a personal history. This will hold independently of whether it is myself I see on the screen, a member of my family or a friend, or sights such as the house I lived in. Nevertheless, as noted before, filmic self-perception affords us a moving image of ourselves in relation to the world, that is, in relation to those past sights and people that one has memories of. Thereby, the affordance is also constituted by the additional dimension of one’s memories. Next to the attempt to evoke the presence of the past lived experience, filmic self-perception creates a tension to unite the past lived experience with the perception of my past-self as engaging in that experience. In becoming 26 a spectator of my own past as I engage with it, I am offered an additional aspect to my memories. Namely, my bodily expression from the past is available to me as a temporal object for perception in the present. In filmic self-perception, then, the archival effect regards my own body as a temporal object: I enfold my visible self of the past into my present self. This disparity of the past-self as experienced from the present has been dealt with in films such as Stories We Tell (Sarah Polley, 2012) and As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpse of Beauty (Jonas Mekas, 2000). The former explores the director’s personal past through the use of the home videos joined with the interviews in the present, thus delineating between a sense of the past and one’s regard to it from the present moment. As the director herself has noted in the film, it concerns how “the truth of the past is often ephemeral and hard to pin down”, thus tackling the value our personal filmic archives have for the questions we hold regarding the role our past experiences have in the present. As I was Moving Ahead is a compilation of home video footage by Mekas, which is used to construct the narrative of his personal history. In this, it is a remarkable attempt to join together multiple personal filmic archives into a holistic presentation of his temporal existence. Moreover, the Up Series (Michael Apted, 1964 – Present) deals with filmic self-presentation and how this presentation changes over time. In filming a group of people every seven years, the series offers us a perspective on how one’s body is affected by the passing of time, into “the changes wrought by the years” (Baron 105). Therefore, not only does filmic self-perception incite the lived experiences of the past, but it affords us an opportunity to see our bodily relation to the events of our memory. The first two films are examples in which the directors themselves explore the value of their personal filmic archives. In the Up Series, as in The Act of Killing, self-presentation is mediated by somebody other than the subjects of the footage. This further points to the mediated relation between self and the other, and the following will discuss the relevance of the intentional subject behind the film for one’s filmic self-experience, thus accounting for the mediation of intersubjectivity.

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2.3 Mediating Intersubjectivity

When it comes to intersubjective interaction, I have earlier pointed out to the notion of mutual affordances as developed by Gibson. Mutual affordances denote that intersubjective interaction is always reciprocal. Other’s behavior affords a certain kind of response from ourselves when we are interacting with them, “a reciprocal, dynamic, and enactive response to the other’s action, taking that action as an affordance for further action rather that as the occasion for replication” (Gallagher 77). We do not have access to a perceptual experience of another subject, but we do perceive actions and bodily and facial gestures of others as being intentional, and we respond to those intentions. Such a framework allows us to understand social cognition as being essentially dynamic and enactive (Gallagher). How does film in general, and filmic self-perception in specific, mediate intersubjectivity? As noted before, Sobchack has famously characterized film as granting us access into a mediated perceptual experience of another person. This means that film mediates intersubjectivity so as to afford a perceptual experience of the other, which is something we do not have access to in a non-mediated manner. On the other hand, first-person film also allows oneself to present their own moving image to the other. The following paragraphs aim to differentiate between these two mediations of intersubjectivity. Alva Noë has argued that perceptual experiences are movement-dependent and object- dependent, meaning that the “changes in how things look must track both how things are and what one does” (Varieties of Presence 23). It is crucial for Noë’s account of perception that we are always in a sensorimotor relation to the objects in our environment (25). This means that the subject of perception and object for perception exist in a relational nature. For example, in moving around, toward or against an object, we gain new perspectives on it, and consequently also different access to it. If we perceive other people, they can use their sensorimotor skills to respond to our physical approach to them: they can, for example, smile back at us, or move against us, so as not to be the object for our perception. Perception is always relational: our perceptual experience, being object-dependent, accommodates the change in the object. This insight is relevant for thinking about the filmmaker’s approach to their subject and the consequent utilization of cinematography. It can help us understand how film can be a mediated perceptual experience. 28

Namely, the camera is to be understood as a mediator between the subject and the object for perception. The subject that is the filmmaker uses the camera so as to record their perception, and they do so in a way that extends natural perception: one moves around with the camera or moves the camera in order to capture the object of their interest. One pans, tilts, zooms, moves towards or around what they are recording. When presented on a screen, a perceptual experience does not have a horizon (Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception 70). This means that the spectator cannot choose what to pay attention to in the environment but is confined to the cinematographic choices of the filmmaker. The camera becomes a tool with which one records a perceptual experience by accommodating the object-dependence of that perceptual experience, which is also in line with Sobchack’s understanding of film experience. The recording establishes our sensorimotor relationship to the object, as well as how the filmmaker has responded to the changes in the object. Cinematography, then, is utilized so as to establish an expression of the filmmaker’s perception: “moving images to some extent execute the perceptual exploration of a scene for us” (Fingerhut and Heimann 365). To summarize, one perceives expression by engaging their sensorimotor skills in relation to the object of perception, and the recorded footage accordingly becomes a mediated perceptual experience that embodies the relation between the subject of perception and the object for perception. Filmic self-perception, then, affords insight into not only how I appear to the other, but what kind of relation the other establishes towards me, as well as vice versa. This is because, as I have argued, the film embodies the movement-dependent and object dependent nature of perception. On the one hand, the filmmaker’s use of the camera to explore the subject, as well as his verbal and bodily presence, are expressive of the approach taken towards the subject. On the other hand, the subject of the film as an object for perception responds to the filmmaker’s approach, which is also captured on film. Therefore, film can be expressive of both of these aspects of perception, of the mutual affordances of intersubjective interaction. When illustrating self-look, I mentioned that in the documentary The Act of Killing the director presents Anwar Congo with the footage of his reenactments. When Anwar perceives his self-presence on screen, it is his body in relation to the filmmaker that he sees. In the encounter with his filmic-self, he is reenacting his memories from the perspective of the victim. The scene is shot in a long take that captures Anwar’s inability to continue the reenactment due to its overwhelming nature of enacting a victim about to be murdered. The long take here, for 29 example, is expressive of the filmmaker’s patient perceptual focus. When Anwar sees himself, it is also a mediated relation of the other towards himself that he sees. Moreover, some documentaries offer a direct cinematic exploration of the relationship between the filmmaker and the subject of the film. For example, Jane B. par Agnes V. (1988), explores the mode of visibility a filmmaker grants to their subjects. Here, Agnes Varda and Jane Birkin collaborate on Birkin’s presentation and are reflexive of the nature of their encounter, as well as how that encounter is made visible to others. In the case where one embodies both roles, that of a filmmaker and the subject of a film, filmic self-perception concerns one’s own relation towards their visibility. Here, the relationship between my lived experience and the body as I record it is marked by the presence of the other. Sartre’s third ontological dimension of the body is helpful for discerning the structure of this relationship, namely, that “I exist for myself as a body known by the other” (375). This means that my lived experience is governed by my visibility for others. In filmic self-presentation of which I am an author, I perform my visibility for someone other than myself. In this, I am aware of my body as an object for perception and I perform an intentional act to make myself visible to others. The recorded image of myself stands as a visual vehicle for communication between my own body in relation to the world, and the other as a spectator. To reiterate, awareness of self- visibility is inherent in all attempts of filming ourselves. As Jill Rettberg has also observed, there is an element of self-curation in mediated self-presentation (51). In accordance with this view of autobiographical filmmaking, Michael Albright has argued that “the filmmaker uses the camera to construct and perform a documentary persona”, adding that “the movements in the frame created by their hands constitute the unseen body movements of the cinematographer that are made visible by the camera” (35). Understanding autobiographical filmmaking as, at least partly, motivated by curation of one’s visible self, also allows us to appreciate it as a cinematic vehicle for communication. However, the disproportionate focus on the visible self as opposed to experiencing oneself as a primarily lived body, can point to the possible downsides of the use of the medium for such purposes. Writing at the beginning of the twentieth-first century, Sobchack indicated how our visual culture is preoccupied with images of bodies, thereby creating “the optical illusion that what we look like is identical to what we are” (179). While under this illusion so prevalent to our times, “we tend to forget that both our bodies and our vision have lived dimensions that are not 30 reducible to the merely visible” (Sobchack 179). As I have argued, in mediated self-presentation, one’s relationship to their own body accentuates its visible side. Or, as Sobchack has commented on the subjective of our own bodies, “to say we’ve lost touch with our bodies […] is not to say we’ve lost sight of them” (179). Therefore, another affordance of filmic self- presentation is that of one’s visibility as a sight to be curated for others. First-person film has extensively dealt with this affordance. For example, the director Agnes Varda has creatively dealt with filmic self-presentation by presenting what our contemporary culture has deemed invisible, such as the female ageing body. For example, in (2000), she films the wrinkles on her skin and her gray hair so as to portray her own ageing body, thus imposing its visibility on others. This action can be read as a gesture of reclaiming female bodily visibility. In (2005), where the footage was shot by Timothy Treadwell and later compiled into a documentary by Werner Herzog, a controversial issue is made visible, namely that of human and animal co-habitation. The footage also reveals a performative nature of filming oneself, thus pointing to the need to curate self-presentation for others. Another notable example of first-person documentary is This Is Not a Film ( and , 2011), in which the director records his experience of house arrest for making politically challenging films in his home country, . Panahi’s aim is to make his situation visible and inform others of the oppressive relationship between art and politics in contemporary Iran. The documentary, then, is an example of filming oneself for the purpose of informing the other. Moreover, in The Beaches of Agnes (2008), Agnes Varda discusses the role one embodies when attempting filmic self-presentation: “I am playing the role of a little old lady telling her life story. In my mirrors, I met others, the others”. She places numerous mirrors on a beach, mirrors that reflect others, as well as sights, so as to express the significance of the relationships she formed during her life, as well as where those relationships were formed. In a sense, Varda directly tackles the dichotomy expressed by Sobchack concerning the “lived dimension” not being reducible to the “merely visible” by presenting a visible body in relation to the experiences that it has lived.

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2.4 A Landscape of Filmic Affordances

As explored above, filmic self-perception can be considered as a phenomenon that mediates our bodily presence in various ways. It contains information that is relevant for our experience of spatiality, temporality and intersubjectivity, and that information results in certain affordances that I have explored in relation to self-consciousness. In an encounter with a filmic self, they altogether form a set, or a “landscape of filmic affordances” with which one interacts (Rietveld and Kiverstein). In elaborating one’s relation to affordances, Gibson stated that they have a certain “demand character” or calling forth of a certain action (129). As affordances are measured in reference to the one who encounters them, so are the possibilities for action they might enable. Namely, once the affordance becomes relevant for the individual, it can achieve the status of a solicitation, that is, the individual is able to achieve access to it and consequently engage in the action afforded by it (Rietveld et al.). Solicitations, then, can be defined as “the affordances that show up as relevant to a situated individual, and generate bodily states of action readiness” (Rietveld et al. 11). How one will approach what filmic self-perception affords is also a question posed relative to the observer of affordances. But affordances themselves, as I have explained before, have an objective reality: they are there to be perceived. Let us refer to Gibson for the explanation: The observer may or may not perceive or attend to the affordance, according to his needs, but the affordance, being invariant, is always there to be perceived. An affordance is not bestowed upon an object by a need of an observer and his act of perceiving it. The object offers what it does because it is what it is (130). Affordances denote a complementarity between an organism and the environment, or their co- constitution. For the spectator, the process of filmic self-perception in itself affords a mediated experience of spatiality, temporality and intersubjectivity. How one attends to these affordances and their action possibilities is a matter for the following chapter. One could perhaps perceive the action possibility of a certain object or event but not co-perceive one’s possible engagement with it. This accounts for the difference between proto-affordances and affordances proper (Siegel 3). As Siegel exemplifies, when we see two people walking fast in each other’s direction, we can perceive the action possibility of this event as being that of two people colliding (ibid). But this 32 affordance would not directly concern us and would amount to a proto-affordance. If we perceive an action possibility for ourselves in this event, for example, warning the passengers out loud to pay attention so as not to collide, then this is an example of an affordance proper. Moreover, if we feel like responding to this action possibility, then the affordance can be described as soliciting (Siegel 4). In a similar way, regarding the experience of filmic self-perception, one can perceive an action possibility but not co-perceive it as concerning themselves. Or the action possibility for oneself is perceived, but not acted upon. These action possibilities can either directly or indirectly concern a filmic environment. In the following chapter, I argue that the invitation for filmic self-enactment solicits a certain kind of behavior that can be understood as a response to the affordances of filmic self-perception. More precisely, the process of filmic self-enactment can encompass difference action possibilities of the soliciting affordances of filmic self- perception.

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Chapter 3: Filmic Self-Enactment in Docufiction

Following the exploration of perceptual affordances of encountering an embodied self on screen, Chapter 3 pursues to account for the phenomenon of filmic self-enactment by bringing these insights into discussion with issues present in documentary studies, namely the question of performativity in documentary and the essence of docufiction mode of filmmaking. On the basis of the enactive-ecological approach to perception and cognition, I argued that the affordances of filmic self-perception grant us novel forms of self-experience which in turn shape the embodied nature of our being. The question now arises of how can the affordances of filmic self-perception become solicitations for a certain kind of embodied engagement? As I will argue, enactment of identity as pursued in docufiction mode of filmmaking is an example of an attempt to embody the affordances of filmic self-perception.

3.1 Action in Filmic Perception

At the beginning of Chapter 1 I proposed an understanding of cognition as embodied action and perception as affordance-based. This enactive-ecological approach to cognition postulates a dynamic relationship between perception, cognition and action. In Action in Perception (2004), Alva Noë elaborates in depth on this relationship, ultimately proposing that perception should always be regarded as a skillful activity of the body. Perception itself consists of active sensorimotor engagement of the organism with its environment. Further unpacking of this claim so as to provide an understanding of the relation between perception and action will also allow for an understanding of the relation between affordances and action-readiness of the individual who encounters them. As Varela et al. have argued, an organism exists in the mode of coupling with the environment rather than inferring information from it. This is, as explained before, the crucial distinction between non-representationalist and representationalist theories of cognition. In Enactivist Interventions: Rethinking the Mind (2017), Shaun Gallagher elaborates on the coupling between the organism and the environment that is helpful in answering the issue at hand. It is worth quoting his elaboration on non-inferential perception in length: 34

The human brain not only evolved along with the human body and works the way it does because of that; it’s also not isolated, but rather is dynamically coupled to a body that is dynamically coupled to an environment. The organism (the brain-body system) is operating within the situation itself rather than on a model of the situation inferred by the brain. This coupling of brain-body-environment is structured by the physical aspects of neuronal processes, bodily movements, affects, anatomy and function, and environmental regularities. Co-variance is physical variance across all parameters – brain, body, environment. […] Change in any of these factors means that perception changes. […] The neural networks of perception are set up by previous experience. […] Whatever plastic changes have been affected in the visual cortex, or in the perceptual network constituted by early sensory and association areas, such changes constrain and shape the current response to visual stimuli (115). Gallagher makes multiple important points in this passage. First, that the organism must be understood as a brain-body system, or that the brain is always already embodied and has evolved along with this embodiment. Second, that the brain-body system always operates within a situation – is directly coupled with the environment – rather than representing a model of the situation it is in. This results in a brain-body-environment coupling. Third, and this is crucial for my analysis of the relation between filmic affordances and self-experience, is that the change in any of the aspects of brain-body-environment coupling results in a change of perception. Importantly, changes in environment can here be understood in terms of modification of affordances offered by that environment. Moreover, as Gallagher argues, these changes shape our future encounters and responses to sensory stimuli, thus accounting for the temporal nature of perceptual experience (ibid). If changes in the brain-body-environment system result in changes in perception, what implications does this have for the relation between affordances and the action-readiness of the organism who encounters them? In an article specifically focused on this issue, titled “How the Body in Action Shapes the Self” (2013), Gallese and Sinigaglia offer an additional argument in favor of the brain-body- environment coupling. Namely, by drawing from a range of empirical studies on the relation between perception and action, they explain that “the sight of an object may evoke a motor activation in the observer’s brain even in absence of any overt motor behavior, thus indicating that the object is encoded in the same way in both the execution and observation condition” 35

(127). This further suggests “not only that object perception is strictly intertwined with action, but also that action constitutively shapes the way we perceive, characterizing the perceived object in terms of motor acts it may afford – and this even in the absence of any effective movement” (ibid). This intertwining of perception and action is directly related to the intertwining of perception and self-perception, which I briefly brought into focus in Chapter 1. Taking up this concern again here, what can now be seen is they exist in a direct relationship. Namely, when I perceive an object as, for example, graspable, I simultaneously perceive myself as a body that can grasp, even in the absence of bodily engagement, which is in this case the act of grasping. Ecological affordances and action-readiness in relation to these affordances, therefore, are in a direct relationship with self-perception. For Gallese and Sinigaglia, this means that we ought to understand our bodies as “power for action” and the bodily self as a “manifold of action possibilities” (157-8). In this sense, self-perception is in direct relation to ecological affordances and the action-readiness exhibited in relation to these affordances. Overall, perception of affordances and action are always intertwined, and their separation can only be made theoretically. As Gallagher succinctly summarizes, “perception and action involve dynamical adjustments to physical, social, and cultural affordances defined in terms of organism-environment” (130). When one engages with the affordances of filmic self-perception, this should accordingly result in a coupling between a spectating self and a filmic-self as perceivable on screen, and in terms of affordances outlined in the previous chapter. How can we best understand this coupling and the action possibilities of the discussed affordances? Building on the framework of brain-body-environment coupling that results in a direct relationship between perception of affordances and action possibilities, it can be argued that an encounter with a filmic-self on screen is directly related to an attempt to embody oneself for the screen. Put otherwise, filmic self-enactment ought to be understood as a manifestation of action possibilities in relation to the affordances of filmic self-perception. In enacting oneself for the screen during the filmmaking process, one embodies the affordances of filmic self-perception. In this, there is a direct relationship between filmic self-perception and filmic self-enactment, or, more broadly, an intertwining between perception of affordances and action possibility afforded by their encounter. While exploring the affordances of filmic self-perception in Chapter 1, I illustrated how filmmakers have creatively made use of them through brief analyses of relevant documentary 36 examples. The move from self-perception to self-enactment allows us to consider the position of the documentary subjects themselves. Namely, rather than looking at the filmmakers’ creative employment of these affordance, I aim to explore how documentary subjects actively respond to them by attempting filmic self-enactment. In order to do so, I will provide accounts of different ways self-enactment can take place in relation to the affordances of filmic self-perception. To reiterate, Self-enactment can be understood as a filmmaking method that falls under the scope of docufiction and is usually conceived of as a performance of subjectivity. In the following sections, I will elaborate on the notion of docufiction and enactment of identity, so that we can better understand what the theoretical framework sketched above on the relation between perception and action can offer for an understanding of enactment as a method in documentary filmmaking.

3.2 Documentary Hybrids

Film theory traditionally separates fiction and non-fiction films, imagined worlds being opposed to the presentation of the historical world. And yet, despite this separation, filmic practices have often blurred this boundary. For example, the forms of neo-realism, reenactments, and , are identified as practices that draw from both traditions (Nichols). While these practices employ both fiction and non-fiction forms, documentary traditionally falls into the spectrum of non-fiction films. Yet, there is an emergent practice that produces a documentary and fiction hybrid: docufiction. In “Lying to be real: The aesthetics of ambiguity in docufictions” (2016), Ohad Landesman differentiates the new hybrid of docufiction from the aforementioned interactions between fiction and non-fiction forms: Docufictions invite a viewer to welcome and embrace their aesthetic hybridity as a formal strategy meant not so much to dupe, mislead, or mock, but to offer a different tactic that exists along a fact-fictional continuum. In other words, although mockumentaries emphasize the fabrication of truth, their documentary facet seems to be largely sacrificed to the fictional. Docufictions, on the other hand, displace that skepticism by foregrounding relationships with both fictional and factual discourses, and distill truth even from a constructed narrative (9). 37

Mockumentaries, but also neo-realism, reenactments and docudramas, are more inclined to emphasize their fictional side. Docufiction, according to Landesman, on the other hand, introduces fictional elements into non-fiction so as to expand its epistemological value without compromising its documentary essence (13). In other words, docufictions still ground themselves in a historical world yet introduce formal hybridity as an aesthetic strategy for portraying reality. In doing so, they nevertheless continue to invite a primarily documentary mode of engagement (Landesman, “In and out of This World”). Such an approach to defining docufiction is in line with understanding documentary in terms of the spectator’s subjective relation to it, or engagement with it, rather than the attempt to delineate strong ontological boundaries between the interaction of fictional and non-fictional forms in a film (Sobchack). As Landesman writes, “our relationship to various cinematic objects is never completely determined a priori but is always also dependent on our engagement with these objects during the experience of watching them” (Landesman, “Lying to Be Real”). Insofar as documentary is understood as a mode of response, an aesthetic hybrid such as docufiction is still experienced as documentary. Overall, docufiction is best theorized as an aesthetic strategy in which fiction inhabits documentary without compromising its authenticity. This strategy invites a documentary mode of engagement with the attempt to make a more nuanced argument about the authenticity of the historical world it grounds itself in and show how knowledge of it can be presented through the interaction between fiction and documentary. One way, then, to understand docufiction is to conceptualize it in terms of aesthetic hybridity. Such an approach, however, cannot account for the position of docufiction subjects. For example, practices such as a reenactment and enactment can introduce a fictional dimension into the filmmaking process by engaging the subjects in a specific manner. What can the filmmaking methods of docufiction, then, entail for the subjects who partake in this hybrid filmmaking mode? As I will make clear in the following chapter by attending to three docufiction case studies, documentary methods such as reenactments and enactments problematize the documentary and fiction divide by engaging with filmic subjects in a manner that borders on both; neither observing nor staging but enabling a (re)enactment of the filmic subject’s identity. Therefore, rather than merely introducing aesthetic hybridity, these methods function on the embodied level of the documentary subjects. Following Landesman’s understanding of aesthetic hybridity as reflecting contemporary reality, the method of embodying 38 hybridity can accordingly be understood as a reflection of contemporary subject’s experience of that reality.

3.3 Docufiction Performance

What has traditionally distinguished documentary from narrative fiction is the absence of performance and acting when it comes to the direction of subjects (Waugh 75). These differences in the subject’s filmic presence were blurred in various manners. In The Subject of Documentary (2004), Michael Renov notes that by and after 1990, and in relation to the growing availability of video technology, documentary history was marked “by the growing prominence of work by women and men of diverse cultural backgrounds in which the representation of the historical world is inextricably bound up with self-inscription” (176). In these films, subjectivity is no longer construed as “something shameful”, but is rather “the filter through which the real enters discourse, as well as a kind of experiential compass guiding the work toward its goal as embodied knowledge” (176). Renov’s remark makes clear that the traditionally objective stance of documentary filmmaking was being reshaped by the end of the twentieth century in order to bring to the fore the subjective perspective of the filmmaker: the subject in documentary became the subject of documentary. This performative self-inscription into the film displays a new subjectivity, giving rise to the enaction of identities: “fluid, multiple, even contradictory – while remaining fully embroiled with public discourses” (Renov 178). In such instances, the film is being used as a medium for the inscription of embodied experience, as a means of exploring and enacting identities. This is not only being done through first-person film, for example, but equally through the interaction between the filmmaker and the subjects of a documentary. Put otherwise, this new subjectivity can also be enacted through the interaction of the subjects with the medium and with the filmmakers, resulting in the transcendence of the divide between the observer and the observed (Russell, “Subjectivity Lost and Found”). Renov acknowledges Jean Rouch, a pioneer of cinéma vérité, as a key figure in inducing the display of enacted subjectivity as the product of the interactive mode favored by the director. For Rouch, this interaction results in a “a very strange kind of confession in front of the camera, where the camera is, let’s say, a mirror, and also a window open to the outside” (qtd. in Renov 197). 39

Therefore, in transcending the boundary between the observer and the observed, a new identity is enacted, a cinematic self-confession in which the camera becomes “a reflective surface that reintroduces us to ourselves” (Renov 197). Moreover, Renov stresses that the result of such an interaction offers important insight into the potential of the filmic medium, as the video apparatus is here used for the purposes of self-presentation and self-confession, as opposed to its traditional function of observing others. Not only is performativity present in these cases, but it is favored; and not only is identity being cinematically reproduced, “but the individual has now established the claim to construct that reproduction” (Waugh 92). In The Right to Oneself (2011), Thomas Waugh differentiates between multiple approaches adopted by the filmmaker when it comes to the performance of the documentary subject. For Waugh, documentary performances can be can be categorized under three general rubrics: representational, presentational or hybrid (76). Representational performance is the stance favored by the classical documentary approach, while presentational refers to the “convention of performing an awareness of the camera rather than nonawareness, of presenting oneself explicitly for the camera” (ibid). Hybrid in this case refers to the combination of both representational and presentational performance. The main difference between a presentational and representational performance is that in the presentational approach, the performance for the film is openly acknowledged rather than attempted to be made invisible for the spectator, as in the representational approach. Presentational performance is also what Stella Bruzzi acknowledges as favored by the modern performative documentary, which presents its “subjects in such a way as to accentuate the fact that the camera and crew are inevitable intrusions that alter any situation they enter” (Bruzzi 190). Moreover, in The Act of Documenting (2017), Brian Winston, Gail Vanstone, and Wang Chi, expand on Thomas Waugh’s differentiation between representational and presentational performance. They argue that the difference is best understood in terms of an “acting-being continuum”, ranging “from the presentational artificialities of even realistic acting, through to the presentational authenticity of being” (Winston et al. 89). The acting-being continuum discerns five different modes of performance: professional acting, professional reenacting, non- professional reenacting, non-professional enacting, and non-professional being or surveillance. In order to better understand presentational performance in documentary film, the categories of non-professional reenacting and non-professional enacting are of crucial importance. Namely, 40 non-professional reenacting entails that the subject of the documentary is reenacting aspects of their own life, while non-professional enactment entails that the performance is unscripted. While both reenactments and enactments entail self-performance and the use of the filmic medium for the purpose of enacting identity, Winston et al. argue that enactments necessarily involve subject’s direct awareness and acknowledgment of the medium. In other words, their identity is enacted through the acknowledgement of the performative nature of the situation, them being a subject of a documentary. As Bruzzi elaborates, in the performative documentary mode, subjects “are presenting themselves for assessment”; they are “not caught unaware or merely talking about themselves in an unpremeditated fashion, rather they are conscious of their involvement in a performative event, one that is simultaneously a description and an enactment of their lives and lifestyles” (192). Yet understanding documentary performance in such general terms does not allow us to appreciate the diversity of ways in which (re)enactment of identity can take place. Hence, the question that I am interested in here, is not whether subjectivity is always performative, and whether cinema is able to reflect it as such, but rather what the nature of that filmic performance can be, or variety of ones. The following section aims to clarify how self-enactment is a performance that can be understood in terms of embodied hybridity. By connecting self-enactment to the affordances of filmic self-perception, we can further delineate the nature of the performance at stake. Let us, first of all, start with a better understanding of enactment as documentary method.

3.4 Enactment of Subjectivity

In 2009, now nearly a decade ago, Jonathan Kahana reflected on the use of reenactments as a method that “troubles the “now” in which any definite statement of its coordinates or its meanings could be made” (55). Rather than attempting to observe a situation as it is given, the filmmakers who employ reenactments challenge such an approach by attempting to relate the “now” in which they find themselves to different subjective perspectives of it by emphasizing the relation between the present to history and memory. Errol Morris, Werner Herzog, Alex Gibney, Nick Broomfield and Joshua Oppenheimer are some of the more prominent directors for whom reenactments stand as a key documentary method, and each have appropriated it in a different 41 manner. For Kahana, the growing use of reenactments in documentary is a phenomenon that raises significant insights regarding the presentation of subjects in specific points in time: Documentary reenactments can be seen not as turning away from the present, but as a way of posing the question, “what now?” – a question whose meaning changes depending on how it is performed, and one that it might now and again be more important for documentary to ask than to answer (58). Reenactment, then, can be understood as a method of addressing the presentation of subjects in documentary. In this framework, documentary methods are history and situation dependent. They are attempts to present the contemporary situation of their subjects in their subjective relationship to an earlier, historical situation. This argument is analogous to Landesman’s understanding of docufiction as a tactic for portraying reality, a means of distilling historical truth from fictionalized situations. According to Kahana, the presentation of subjects is always in question for the filmmaker and “what now?” is a question that needs to be perpetually addressed. If we look back at documentary history, we can explicate different methods of addressing this question. Classical documentary, in line with , favored an observational approach. Cinéma vérité, on the other hand, relied more on the interaction between the filmmaker and their subjects. As Anna Backman Rogers succinctly summarized, “direct cinema fashioned its out of a ‘found situation’, but cinéma vérité accommodated artificial circumstances in the name of revealing hidden truths” (114). In the former, the filmmaker and the subjects of the documentary remain at a distance. In the latter, this distance is traversed through interaction. Moreover, the rise of video technology noted the growth of autobiographical method, in which the filmmakers themselves become subjects of documentary. Regarding the method of reenactment, the filmmakers’ involvement is crucial so as to enable a connection between present and past, but the method also requires that the documentary subjects themselves establish a connection between these two historical moments. If reenactments are a way of addressing the present so as to emphasize its dependence on the past and subjective memories of that past, in what way do enactments address the issue of presentation? Enactments are concerned with the subject’s experience of themselves in a present moment, prompting them to investigate and cinematically improvise their contemporary situation. As explained above, enactments refer to the performance of subjectivity in the present that is brought forward by the filmmaking process and is not scripted. The documentary classic 42

Grey Gardens (, 1975) is a key example of presentational performance that borders on enactment, and as such, it can help us exemplify the issue at stake. For Little Eddie, the documentary’s protagonist, the making of the film affords her “a theatre stage to act the roles she never had” (Hongisto, 78). The nature of her performance is openly presentational, but it is not scripted. In acting out a series of performances, she “makes herself up as she goes along” (ibid); Little Eddie is enacting her identity for the screen. The documentary is a collaboration between the filmmakers and the protagonists, and as such it is a key example of interactive filmmaking that aims to enable the performativity of their subjects. Moreover, as Ilona Hongisto points out, Little Eddie is aware of the complex dynamic present in the collaboration of which she is the filmed subject. She recognizes herself as a character in a narrative in which she needs to negotiate her identity for the filmmaker and for the spectator (Backman Rogers). In one instance, Little Eddie exclaims: “You don’t see me as I see myself. But you’re very good, what you see me as. I mean it’s okay”. Such a statement reveals her performance as an attempt to enact how she sees herself. In other words, she is aware of the role she is performing and that this role is enabled by the filmmaking process: these constitute the hybridity of her role as a subject of a film. In her analysis of performance in , Anna Backman Rogers argues that the film aims to how subjectivity is inherently performative: The centrality of performance and assuming a role to selfhood is perhaps the most salient feature of Grey Gardens. What the film accentuates is that there is no ‘true’ self or that the self is a confluence of gestures that is solidified through performance. […] That is, the film reveals the inherently performative and creative nature of selfhood as well as the inextricable link between the filmmaker and the documentary subjects who are bound up in the inventive and always provisional modes in which meaning and ‘truth’ are made (116-7). Hongisto’s and Backman Rogers’s understanding of performativity allows us to appreciate Grey Gardens as an important example of cinéma vérité that borders on the docufiction mode of filmmaking. Their framework closely resonates with the Deleuzian notion of “powers of the false”, which is focused on the potential of the intertwining of fiction and reality. Deleuze has also recognized Jean Rouch as the master of this approach, writing that cinéma vérité allows a creative performance of subjectivity, the “making fiction” of characters in which they can invent 43 themselves without ever being fictional. In this, cinema and reality become intertwined: “thus the cinema can call itself cinéma vérité, all the more because it will have destroyed every model of the true so as to become creator and producer of truth: this will not be cinema of truth but the truth of cinema” (Deleuze 156). “Powers of the false” reflects cinema’s potential to influence reality, to mediate it so as to contribute to what we deem true. It also allows us to appreciate what cinema can do for the characters in enabling a performance of their identity. Nevertheless, while such a viewpoint enables appreciation of documentary performance, it does not allow for a more specific insight into what the relationship with the medium of film is for these characters, and what kind of performance is enabled by this relationship. What I wish to stress is that documentary subjects can not only be aware of their performativity but be aware of their performativity for the film: their performance is a filmic enactment. In a broader sense, we should move toward an understand of performativity in film as being a medium-dependent performance. When we engage with the filmic medium, this engagement should be understood as being “bound by rules (perceptual, cognitive, emotional) that pertain specifically to this medium” (Fingerhut and Heimann 360). And the phenomena of filmic self-perception and self-enactment are two of the examples of the ways we can engage with the medium of film. Instances from certain recent documentaries can allow us to acknowledge this point better. For example, when Anwar is reenacting the murders in The Act of Killing, he turns to the director and says: “We need to reenact this properly”. Or when Sarah Polley is filming her brother in Stories We Tell, he asks: “Is this a good angle for me?”. Ilona Hongisto recognized the same behavior in Little Edie when she compared her to the aging star of Sunset Boulevard, who has readily exclaimed: “I am ready for my close-up”. These subjects are aware that their performance is for a film, and as such, they think about it cinematically, imagining how they will appear to the spectator, and which angle, take, or a type of shot might be best for their self-enactment. Chronicle of a Summer, which I have mentioned in providing examples of the “self-look”, is especially exemplary of this filmic self- reflexivity. What is so crucial about the method of this film is that subjects are asked to respond to how they appear in the film, as previously accounted for. Through their responses a tension is revealed in regards to the subjective experience of themselves as both a lived body and as an expressive body. Many of the subjects remark how their filmic-self is not representative of how they experience themselves, the expressive bodily dimension thus not being truly reflective of 44 the lived one. Others, however, exhibit no such issues, rather feeling that the footage has captured their true self and that it is precisely the intersubjective nature of the filmic performance that makes it authentic. Whether identifying with their filmic-self or not, a confrontation with it results in their hybridity, in co-existence between their visual and visible bodily awareness, as well as in relation to its temporal and intersubjective nature, how they have portrayed themselves in the past and in relation to the directors and the filmmaking process. Yet performances that could be classified as enactments appear only briefly in Chronicle of a Summer. In a scene in which Marceline Loridan walks down Place de la Concorde while recalling her personal experiences of the Holocaust, she engages in an enactment of the memories of the past. This is a scene in which the subject’s enactment is reflecting how the filmmaking process evokes an understanding of one’s presentational abilities (Winston et al. 101). Namely, in an interview with Joram ten Brink, Loridan has explained that it was her who proposed the making of the scene, as well as commented on the awareness of the process of self- enactment: “I understood everything. I understood how one could act oneself. I understood how one could use emotion and look good on film” (147).10 Both Grey Gardens and Chronicle of a Summer can, then, be seen as filmmaking projects that move toward the border of docufiction. The subjects partake in the process of enactment, yet what docufiction films that employ enactments do is place this process at its center, actively prompting the subjects to be aware of their self-presentation, be this in terms of their visibility, their past, or their relationship to the filmmaker, as the examples in the following chapter will reveal. The question that I will explore in Chapter 4 is what the process of self-enactment becomes once the subjects are actively prompted to embody the hybridity between a self and a filmic-self on screen. By relying on the exploration of affordances of filmic self-perception as presented in Chapter 2, I will delineate different forms of self-enactment in docufiction, while still being appreciative of the powerful way in which cinema can merge with subjectivity.

10 This scene is revelatory of the method Jean Rouch would often use in his latter projects, where subjects are prompted to engage in enactments that consist of of their own lived experience (Sjöberg 229). 45

Chapter 4: Embodying Hybridity

The process of embodying hybridity is the one in which subjects of docufiction enact the dynamic between a self and a filmic-self. The following sections, in the manner of three case studies, will aim to specify the nature of filmic self-enactment by relating it to the affordances of filmic self-perception and explicating the ways in which the subjects of documentaries enact themselves in accordance with these affordances. In doing so, I will explore different ways of embodying hybridity in docufiction – spatially, temporally, and intersubjectively. The focus of each section will be on the process of enactment and its aesthetic presentation in the film. While I have proposed to consider the affordances of filmic self-perception as being part a landscape of filmic affordances, I will present the process of enactment in each of the following films as primarily responding to one of the introduced affordances. For the exploration of All These Sleepless Nights, filmic self-perception’s mediation of spatiality is positioned as a soliciting affordance for the process of self-enactment. Mediation of temporality solicits the enactment in You Have No Idea How Much I love You, while mediation of intersubjectivity is at the center of Olmo and the Seagull.

4.1 Disclosing Visibility in All These Sleepless Nights

All These Sleepless Nights (Michal Marczak, 2016)11 is set in Warsaw, Poland and focused on the life experiences of two friends in their early twenties, Michal and Krzysztof. Spanning over two years in their lives, Sleepless Nights aims to present a portrait of youth in Poland’s capital. When asked about his daily occupation, Krzysztof, who eventually takes the center stage of the film, replies: “I look for what I am missing”. And even though the specific nature of this “missing part” is yet unknown, the protagonists keep searching for it. They do so through numerous parties, midnight conversations and romantic encounters: through the eponymous sleepless nights. The film ultimately becomes a collage of the protagonists’ lived experiences as they roam around the city seeking adventure. Let us take a closer look at Sleepless Nights’s employment of the method of self-enactment and its aesthetic presentation in the film.

11 I am thankful to Match & Spark, the film’s producer, for granting me access to the film’s preview. 46

While all of the filmed enactments are connected through the common of youth experiences, the film applies a to these events, thereby preventing them from being experienced as scattered by the spectator. We are at first introduced to Michal and Krzysztof, whose friendship will soon be broken up by Krzysztof’s new relationship. When the relationship ends, the film centers on Krzysztof alone and the continuation of his quest to find what is missing from his life. Through a voice-over, Krzysztof introduces the narrative theme of the film, thereby appearing as in control of his filmic presentation. The voice-over is accompanied by a panoramic shot of Warsaw with fireworks in the air: They say that if you combined an entire lifetime’s experiences and relived them all in one go, you’d end up starring at fireworks for roughly four days straight. I don’t know who came up with this number or why… But whoever did, also calculated that having sex would take up seven months. Fifty-one days of deciding what to wear and two weeks of eating potato chips. I wonder whose life they got that data from. For example, boredom… two years. That’s over seven hundred days of waiting around and hoping for something to happen. Four hundred days of pretending to be someone you’re not. Then another four months regretting decisions you’ve made. And seventeen hours of breakups. Fuck. Seventeen hours? That’s way too short. By using voice-over as an introductory technique, the film frames the experiences that are to follow as being narrated from the protagonist’s perspective. This is first of all noticeable as Krzysztof compares life experiences to fireworks, which is narrated over images of fireworks. In introducing us his own story, Krzysztof literally makes the leap from being the subject in documentary to becoming the subject of documentary, being in control of the identity about to be constructed for the spectator. In Renov’s terms, he inscribes himself within the film. This filmic inscription is accentuated by the process of self-enactment. Sleepless Nights follows Krzysztof and his friends, who are explicitly asked to engage in the process of enacting themselves. The film does not contain interviews, and the fourth wall is never broken. The interaction with the filmmaker is never made visible or audible. The subjects are performing themselves, yet the filmmaking process is never explicitly acknowledged by them. To follow Waugh’s terminology, the performance can be characterized as representational. Yet as Winston et al.’s distinction between non-professional reenactment and enactment argues, enactments necessarily involve the subject’s acknowledgment of the filmmaking process, even though this 47 acknowledgment does not have to be explicit, such as it was in Grey Gardens, for example. The protagonists of Sleepless Nights are all too comfortable with the presence of the camera. We witness many intimate moments of the protagonists’ life, making us aware that they have formed a close relationship with the filmmaker. As in cinéma vérité, interaction, even in its apparent lack, plays a crucial role in Sleepless Nights. When interviewed at the Sundance Festival 2016, where the film won a directing award in the World Cinema Documentary competition, the director explained the project as one in which the filmmaker and the subjects explore its aim together: “We are asked many times if we did something for the camera or if we did something we wanted to do anyway. […] If we did something for the camera or not is a question that nobody can really answer. We really wanted to go on that adventure together”.12 Marczak’s reflection expresses disinterest in the divide between documentary and fiction regarding his project. This is in line with how performance has been theorized in modern documentary, as was previously elaborated in relation to Renov’s and Bruzzi’s views on performativity and the use of the medium so as to acknowledge enacting identity or multiple identities. The question between truth and falsity regarding the protagonists’ performance appears irrelevant for Marczak, as that distinction seems to be unattainable in documentary practice in general. Rather, the director stresses the collaborative process through which the identity of the subject is being enacted. There isn’t a divide between the filmmaker as an observer and the subjects as observed: the protagonists themselves embrace the mediated nature of their performance and the camera appears as an intrinsic part of the life experiences we witness. It is worth accentuating this point, as such a relationship with the medium is not directly visible in the earlier examples of performativity in documentary. In Chronicle of a Summer and Grey Gardens, the spectator is aware of the mediating process inflicted by the presence of a camera. The subjects appear comfortable with their performance, but their relationship with the camera and the filmmaking process is certainly not as harmonious as in Sleepless Nights. The issue here is not the one of representational versus presentational performance, but of the outcomes collaboration can have. Little Eddie performs her role for the camera; that is, her role is a composite of her social role and the dramatic requirements of the film. But Krzysztof’s role

12 Marczak, Michal. Radio from Hell at Sundance 2016 | “All These Sleepless Nights.” YouTube, https://youtu.be/c HXMrS9cHA. Accessed 27 June 2018.

48 does not seem to navigate between these two oppositions. Rather, as I have argued, the camera seems to be integral to the very enactment of his identity, and the ability to delineate acting from non-acting becomes an impossible task, as the director has also pointed out.13 However, there is an instance in the film where Krzysztof becomes very self-conscious of his performance and is not sure how to continue engaging in a given situation (Figure 1). He is at a party where friends prompt him to dance, but he tries to avoid engagement. In a voice-over, he asks: “Maybe all of this comes down to acting? An ability to create a more spectacular version of yourself?” This is the only scene in the film in which he is reluctant to continue performing his role. This reluctance can be understood in terms of to the blurred line between a natural and a mediated environment, or a self and a filmic self. Krzysztof is not enacting himself for the camera, but also not in spite of it. Rather, he is attempting to embody this hybridity through the self-enactments. This sometimes entails that one is not sure how to continue the performance – how to maintain the intertwining between a self and a filmic-self – as the process itself is a mode of self-invention.

Figure 1: Krzysztof appears reluctant to continue the enactment

Sleepless Nights, therefore, employs enactment as a method by combining representational and presentational modes of performativity. On the one hand, through the use voice-over ,

13 Something similar happens in In Vanda’s Room (, 2000). This is one of the key examples used by Landesman to explicate the practice of docufiction. According to Landesman, “Costa decided that the neighborhood’s residents would play themselves and become characters in a movie about their life” (“Lying to be Real” 14), thereby creating a similar scenario, as well as effect, as Sleepless Nights. 49 diegetic sound and cinematography for dramatic purposes, the film strongly situates itself as being fictional in terms of its aesthetics. These techniques give a representational experience to the performance, as the film’s aesthetics envelops the subjects’ performances in a non-reflexive manner. Yet, the subjects are enacting their identity through exploring the project’s aim together with the filmmaker. Rather than explicitly acknowledging the camera, it rather seems as an inherent component to their identity. Most of the time, they appear to easily navigate the hybrid space they were invited into by the filmmaker. Therefore, while the film situates itself between documentary and fiction, this status is achieved not only by employing aesthetic hybridity, but also by the subjects’ state of embodied hybridity. In being in control of the self-enactment process, the subjects of Sleepless Nights come to embody the reversible nature of perception. Namely, in order to enact themselves for the film, they have to simultaneously embody the reversibility between being the visual subject of the filmmaking process and the visual object for the film. Due to the collaborative nature of exploring the project’s aim, rather than merely performing for the film and the filmmaker, they are exploring the limits of their own performativity. In enacting this reversibility, Krzysztof exists in a state of embodied hybridity: the distinction between a visual and a visible self collapses in the process of filmic self-enactment. The essence of Krzysztof’s performance is an embodiment of “self-look”, or the intertwining of the visual and the visible self. The manner in which enactment as method is employed in Sleepless Nights can be understood as reflecting Krzysztof’s approach towards his own visibility and bodily expressiveness for others. His enactments are an attempt to reconcile the visual self with the experience of the body as a gestural and expressive body, and thus capable of being an object of perception.

4.2 Recovering Memories in You Have No Idea How Much I Love You

You Have No Idea How Much I Love You (Pawel Lozinski, 2016)14 follows a series of therapy sessions between a mother and a daughter, Ewa and Hanna. Together with the psychotherapist, the three of them are the film’s only subjects. The psychotherapist addresses Ewa and Hanna as being related, which is also the spectator’s impression throughout the film. However, intertitles

14 Many thanks to Joost Daamen, IDFA’s senior curator, for his insightful comments regarding the presence of enactment in contemporary documentary film, as well as for his recommendation of the film discussed in this section. 50 at the end of the film reveal that they are playing the roles of a mother and a daughter. It is also clarified that these roles come from their personal experiences: “For the reasons of confidentiality, we were unable to film any genuine family sessions. In reality Ewa and Hanna are not mother and daughter. They drew on their own personal experiences without the use of a script.” In other words, Ewa and Hanna are enacting their respective roles of a mother and a daughter in a filmic . This setting is further constructed as being of family therapy sessions, which always occur in the presence of the psychotherapist. When it comes to self- enactment, Ewa and Hanna are enacting only one aspect of their identity, as it is the one that the setting and the filmmaking process enables, while the psychotherapist takes on a role that facilitates the process of enactment. From the onset of the film, the sessions reveal that the subjects have a troubled family relationship. Even though Ewa and Hanna are addressing each other in terms of a mother- daughter dynamic, the end of the film clarifies that they in fact have such a troubled relationship in reality, and not between each other. Nevertheless, the presence of the other part of the dynamics, for Ewa, that of a daughter, and for Hanna, of a mother, allows them to enact their own respective roles in a filmic setting. The role of the psychotherapist is to probe into their relationships by asking them questions about the past and the development of a problematic family dynamic over time. In this way, the spectator achieves insight into why they experience this relationship in such a manner. Hanna is mistrustful towards Ewa’s enactments, which reveals lack of trust towards her own mother: “I don’t know if I trust what you are saying”. On the other hand, Ewa claims that Hanna keeps her at an emotional distance, revealing a distant relationship with her own daughter: “She’s completely blocked towards me”. The therapist not only prompts both of them to examine these respective emotions, but also enquires into their past with the attempt to bring it into the present. In asking questions that catalyze painful memories, the psychotherapist evokes rather complex emotional experience in Ewa and Hanna. First of all, speaking of the past appears to be very difficult for both of them. However, even when they are not able to verbalize their memories, they become expressive of them through their bodily and facial gestures. These are conveyed through a range of close-ups, making the film a journey into the intertwining of the present and the past. At the core of Ewa’s and Hanna’s self-enactments are the roles they have agreed to play, but the setting of the film and the presence of a psychotherapist require that they do so through a connection with their 51 past-selves. As the therapist’s questions evoke painful memories, these memories are brought to the present through enactments, compelling the subjects to experience a unity of their past and present selves. Moreover, the intertwining of the past and the present also allows them a new perspective on the past, or more precisely, their past-self. In specific, the psychotherapist’s questions prompt them to approach their past experiences and react to their past-self from the present perspective. Namely, one of the crucial aspects of the film is that both Ewa and Hanna are encouraged to express sympathy for their past-self by revisiting the certain difficult experiences. For example, the psychotherapist asks Hanna to recover a childhood memory in which she felt neglected by her mother, to which she responds with hesitation: “I don’t entirely understand why we are digging into the past like this”. Her hesitation reveals a disconnection from the past and a need to forget, or repress, its painful aspects. She stutters, unwilling to continue, but the therapist prompts her to stay with the memory of her past-self: “Hanna, is there something you would like to say to that little girl now?”. A moment later, he adds: “As long as you dislike her, that little girl, it’ll go on being hard for you to like yourself”. In this manner, the subjects are asked to revisit these troubling experiences, but in a sympathetic mode, as if to alleviate its disquieting aspect. In this way, the psychotherapist is probing into Hanna’s detachment from certain childhood memories in order to unify them with her current perspective on her relationship with her mother. Essentially, as the presentation of the process of self-enactment clarifies, Hanna compels herself to achieve a connection with her past-self. Her initial response to the psychotherapist’s insistence to probe into the past is one of distrust. She responds to him by asking to clarify the nature of his enquiry: “You want me to give my avatar a hug, in my head?” (Figure 2). But it is at these moments that the enactment process becomes the most painful for Hanna. Stuttering, she adds: “For me to go up to my actual self and give myself a hug? Jesus…”. In these moments, Hanna appears to experience tension in achieving a unity between the past-self as experienced from the present and her present-self. The process of enactment evokes the experience of certain painful memories, which she is asked to revisit. Importantly, she is not prompted to revisit just the experience of the memories, but this “avatar” of her past-self as experiencing these difficult emotions. In referring to her past-self as an avatar, she revisits a version of herself that is contained in her memories. 52

Self-enactments are essentially employed here with the attempt to recover and relive certain aspects of the subjects’ past. In asking the subjects to be sympathetic toward their past- selves as “avatars”, the enactment process achieves a mode of temporal hybridity. In responding to the psychotherapist’s request, Hanna collapses the distinction between a present and a past- self. The difficulty to continue the enactment is reflected in her responses, her bodily and facial gestures, accompanied by moments of silence and stuttering. Importantly, this difficulty is expressive of the struggle to exist in the mode of temporal hybridity and achieve a unity between a present and a past-self that is not experientially difficult to maintain.

Figure 2: Hanna responds to the psychotherapist’s request to recover memories of her past-self

The subjects’ experiences of the enactment process are evoked by the present setting, that of a family therapy session, mainly by prompting them to revisit the experiences that they find crucial for the mother-daughter relationship having a problematic dynamic in the present. This is, first of all, achieved through the subjects’ perception of each other’s enactment. The enactment of two different identities at the same time creates an intersubjective setting that functions in terms of mutual affordances. Both of their roles develop in relation to the enactment of the other person. They enact themselves by probing into the past, but also by responding to the enactment of the 53 other role of the mother-daughter dynamic. Secondly, these self-enactments are made out of the intertwining of a past and a present-self. This is very different from how reenactments as a documentary method deal with the relationship between the past and the present. As discussed earlier, reenactments trouble the performance of subjectivity in the present moment by asking the subjects to act their memories in front of the camera. In enactments that are essentially related to the past, as in You Have No Idea How Much I Love You, the focus is how the past is experienced from the present, and what kind of approach the subjects can adopt towards their past. This process creates a state of temporal hybridity for the subjects, which collapses the distinction between a present and a past-self, with a focus on how the perspective of a past-self is related to a perception of oneself in the present.

4.3 Modifying Roles in Olmo and the Seagull

Olmo and the Seagull (Petra Costa and Lea Globb, 2015) is a film about the experience of maternity in relation to the protagonist’s acting career. Olivia Corsini is an actress at Théâtre du Soleil in Paris. Together with her partner Serge Nicolai, she is supposed to take part in the production of Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull. However, an unexpected pregnancy changes this plan, as it requires that she stays at home while her partner continues to take part in the production process. Hence, instead of the film’s original focus on her acting career, Olmo and the Seagull explores Olivia’s experience of maternity, and especially how this unexpected pregnancy interferes in her career decisions. The title of the film itself sets this relationship: Olmo is the name of her unborn child, while The Seagull was the play in which she was supposed to take a central role. The film opens by introducing Olivia as an actress: she is on a stage, in the midst of a performance. Moreover, the filmmaking process accentuates that this is also the role she is performing for the film we are seeing. The director can be heard as she guides Olivia’s movement for the camera: “That’s right, you’re in the frame”. The director’s remarks are instructions for Olivia’s performance to start. Her eyes start tearing, and the camera stays with her as she wipes them. As the director’s instructions continue to occur, the film emphasizes that Olivia is encouraged to perform a part of her identity for the film, that of being an actress. This opening sequence of a stage performance is juxtaposed with Olivia in her home, where she and 54 her partner discover that she is pregnant. In reenacting this discovery for the film, the spectator is introduced to the intimacy of their relationship. As the couple lays in bed undressing each other, the camera stays close to them, granting us an almost voyeuristic experience of their intimacy. The contrast between the two settings – the theatre and the home – reveals that the other role Olivia is enacting is that of a mother-to-be. In this way, the film indicates that the roles of an actress and a mother are essential to Olivia’s enactment process. When Olivia discovers that the pregnancy will require from her to stay at home, a performance of both of these roles becomes complicated. This makes Olivia doubtful about her overall presence in the film: “I don’t know what more we can do. I don’t know if we can continue”. Olivia is open about her doubts regarding the performance, revealing her insecurity about the roles she has agreed to enact. While comfortable with the role of an actress, she is unsure of how to perform the role of a mother. What kind of performance does this new role entail from her? When Olivia asks: “What do we do? What’s my role now?”, Costa replies to her by saying: “That’s what we’ll talk about”, thereby urging her to accept the new ambiguities of the self-enactment process (Figure 3). Importantly, the director’s presence in the discussion process regarding the protagonist’s role and her guidance through the enactment, points toward the complexity of the process of self- enactment in terms of the self-other dynamic. That is, the prime focus of the Olivia’s performance becomes that of enactment of her identity for the other – the director and the . Unlike in All These Sleepless Nights, where the protagonist performs his role with ease and is solely in charge of the enactment process, Olmo and the Seagull accentuates the intersubjective nature of the performance. Put otherwise, Olivia’s performance is essentially for someone other than herself. 55

Figure 3: Olivia doubts her self-enactment process

Her enactment thus becomes a filmic self-exploration. Together with Costa and Globb, Olivia explores the importance that the role of an actress has for her identity and how maternity has influenced this role. In introducing home-video footage from Olivia’s private archive, the film weaves the images of Olivia’s past into her present enactment. Olivia’s personal remarks are narrated over this footage, in which she is in an act of performance, and with a direct acknowledgment of the camera. In a voice-over, she comments on this footage and her desire to enact roles: “Always, always acting”. Enacting roles is what she has always done, and now she must play herself. The filmmaking process, therefore, allows Olivia to invent herself for the film by urging her to intertwine the roles of an actress with a role of the mother in her self- enactments. Importantly, this self-exploration is enabled by the intersubjective nature of the filmmaking process. Namely, the director’s continuous involvement in the enactment process emphasizes the filmic mediation of intersubjectivity. While Olivia agrees to continue the process of self- enactment, soon after we witness a fight with her partner regarding his acting commitments, where Olivia is complaining about his absence from the maternity process. In the midst of their argument, Costa interferes, suddenly bringing back her presence as a director into focus by 56 voicing her perception of their performance. Her comment indicates satisfaction with the enactment of the fight, yet that she would also prefer to see some variation in the way they communicate to each other. Such interference makes Olivia not only aware of the expressiveness of her performance, but that the role-enactment is essentially taking place in order to be perceived by others. Their discussions regarding the role are reflective of how intersubjectivity is mediated during the filmmaking process. The director’s requests bring awareness of the other as a subject of perception. Therefore, Olmo and the Seagull is an exploration of an intersubjective interaction within a film. In discussing the affordances of filmic self-perception, I have explored how mediation of intersubjectivity enables access into a mediated perceptual experience of ourselves by the other, as well as how it enables a mode of self-curation for the other. Olivia’s performance is directly related to both. Namely, director’s interference and specific demands from the enactment of her role requires from Olivia to curate her performance so as to accommodate how the other experiences it. The intertwining between the role of an actress and the role a mother-to-be are numerous times expressed through a voice-over narration, which is, similarly to Sleepless Nights, used as a mode of the subject’s self-inscription into the film. Enactment of this intertwining reveals that Olivia faces solitude now that she is unable to perform the role of an actress, as well as anxiety regarding the uncertainty of that role’s future. Instead of playing a role in a theater, the enactments, combined with a voice-over narration, constitute an opportunity for Olivia to write and perform her own role. In this process of self-curation, she exposes her vulnerability in face of these fears. As maternity confronts her with her aging, there is an instance in the film in which Olivia looks at herself in the mirror, with a comment that the pain of the characters she used to play in the theater is engraved on her forehead. Yet again, the director challenges her performance: “Could there be a line for infidelity?”, in this way gesturing towards the relationship with her ex- partner Alvaro. This comment prompts Olivia to reflect on the aspects of her self-enactment that she is attempting to conceal. While she initially tries to avoid a conversation about Alvaro, she eventually decides to incorporate her sentiments into the presentation of self-enactment. In a voice-over paired with a home-video footage of her and Alvaro, she discloses how valuable this relationship has been for her: 57

I’ve had many love affairs. Very passionate ones. I’ve had a lot of lovers. Way too many lovers. I used to feel I was so dependent on the love of others that I’d never be able to fall in love. […] I felt like I didn’t exist without the gaze of others. But for a long time, Alvaro was the embodiment of everything I had lost. Everything I could have been. Alvaro and I used to sleep on blow-up mattresses high in the mountains. In the Pyrenees. It felt like home. We made love a lot. Such moments… Your skin records them. Your pores record them. Her voice-over commentary reveals a need to be loved, accompanied by feelings of insecurity over her love for others, and the meaning this has for her love for Serge. The process of self- enactment made her revisit the past by delving into the emotions she has felt towards Alvaro. In this, the director has challenged Olivia to reexamine the relationship between her past-self and the process of self-enactment through the lens of the look of the other. Olivia’s reflection on her skin being a carrier of intimate moments with her past lover are juxtaposed with her caressing Serge’s skin, as they lay together in bed. At that moment, the enactment itself becomes a carrier of the past, a co-existence of affects past and present. There is a role that Olivia enacts for the film, but this role has continuously been challenged by the director, reminding her of her presence in the process of self-enactment. These interferences into Olivia’s performance are a reminder of the other’s perception of her role, and a challenge to adjust her enactment so as to acknowledge this presence. In this way, the filmmaking process mediates the intersubjective relationship between the director and the protagonist to the extent that the enactments are reflective of both Olivia’s and the director’s presence. In incorporating the enactments, voice-over narration, and home-video footage, Olmo and the Seagull explores the mediation of their relationship, as well as how that relationship has affected Olivia’s self-exploration.

58

Conclusion

The medium of film has the capacity to make our bodily presence perceptible to ourselves. In this thesis, I have approached the exploration of a perceptual experience of a filmic-self by drawing from the enactive-ecological theory of perception. I have proposed to understand the affordances of filmic self-perception in a threefold manner. While I have approached each of them separately for the purposes of clarity, these affordances are part of “a landscape of filmic affordances”, which entails their intertwinement. This means that these affordances give context to each other during an encounter with a filmic-self, as the filmic analyses later on have exemplified. The first aspect of this experience is the one of “self-look”, which entails a presentation of one’s body as engaged with the world. In self-look, one’s bodily comportment and its temporally extended gestural expressions form a direct object for perception. Secondly, a filmic-self is essentially of an expressive body of past-self. Next to evoking the lived experience one has engaged in, an encounter with a past-self as engaged in that experience forms an additional layer to the memory of it. The third aspect of an encounter with a filmic-self concerns the mediated relation between the self as a subject of the film and the other as a filmmaker. Filmic self-perception enables access to the relation that the filmmaker establishes toward the subject. In the case of autobiographical film, mediation of bodily presence affords one’s visibility as a sight to be curated for others. Filmic self-perception collapses the distinction between experiencing oneself as a visual subject and a visible object, present as opposed to a past-self, and the manner in which I see myself and how the other sees me. These seeming oppositions – visual and visible, present and past, self and other – come to intertwine as one engages with the affordances of this phenomenon. Moreover, these affordances specify self-consciousness and afford novel forms of self-perception. Whether the affordances achieve the status of solicitations, and in turn become possibilities for action, is measured in relation to the individual who encounters them. Various actions might stem from this perceptual experience, which can either directly or indirectly be related to film. As a case study, I explored the method of enactment in docufiction, thereby investigating the action possibilities in a filmic setting. An understanding of perceptual experience in terms of its dynamic relationship to action has allowed me to directly associate the phenomenon of self-perception to the process of self-enactment in film. 59

As a method employed in docufiction filmmaking, enactment brings forth a hybrid of both a presentational and a representational performance. I have proposed to understand it in terms of “embodied hybridity”. In the case studies explored in this thesis, the process of enactment consists of action possibilities of the soliciting affordances of filmic self-perception. To reiterate my argument on this point, the self as perceivable on film is dynamically related to the process of enacting oneself for a film. A closer look at All These Sleepless Nights, You Have No Idea How Much I Love You, and Olmo and the Seagull, revealed how these affordances have been enacted in specific filmic settings. As a filmmaking method, enactment is a response to the medium-specific conditions of a filmic appearance of oneself. During the process of self- enactment, the protagonists respond to the affordances of a perceivable filmic-self – a self as a visible subject, a past-self, and the relationship between the self and the filmmaker. Each affordance was explored as being central to one of the films. Nevertheless, the analysis of the films also revealed that they exist in the mode of intertwining, thus reflecting the initial proposition to understand the affordances of filmic self-perception as providing context for each other. On the basis of this exploration, it can be concluded that the process of self-enactment collapses the distinction between a self and a filmic-self, which places the subjects of docufiction in the state of embodied hybridity. Moreover, I have argued that documentary methods can be approached in terms of questioning the presentation of contemporary subjects, as is the case with the use of reenactment in documentary. On the basis of this view, docufiction employs aesthetic hybridity in order to distill truth from fictionalized situations. Analogously, the state of embodied hybridity reflects the subjects’ experience of their contemporary condition. This reflection gestures toward our engagement with media – and with filmic medium in particular – to the extent that the boundary between a self and a filmic-self collapses. For the subjects of the films analyzed in this thesis, the distinction between a mediated and a natural environment cannot be made in practice. Rather, these characters enter a process in which they navigate this hybrid space. Vivian Sobchack has continuously questioned the relation between media and the manner in which we understand the world and ourselves, as the epigraph of this thesis also reveals. “What happens when our expressive technologies also become perceptive technologies?” (Sobchack, Carnal Thoughts 135). This is not a question with a definite answer, but one worth posing anew. Different affordances might come into light as we question the ways in which we are continuously 60 extending through media. Media extend us, indeed, “in ways we never thought possible, radically transforming not merely our comprehension of the world but also our apprehension of ourselves” (ibid). A part of my analysis of the process of media-related “extensions” was through introducing the manner in which films enables self-perception. As the focal point of my understanding of this phenomenon was in its relation to action, this clarified that perception of affordances is not only value-laden but can essentially be of action possibilities in relation to our embodiment. When new modes of self-perception are introduced, they make themselves present in our “bodily comportment”, which, as Sobchack writes, “is not fixed but is rather a mobile style of always decomposing and recomposing myself in relation, response, and responsibility to the world and others” (203). The specific manner in which film grants us visibility, informs our memories, and mediates our bodily relation to others, has reorganized – and continues to do so – our relation, response, and responsibility to the world. It should also be noted that, as perception and action exist in a dynamic relationship, the process of self-enactment also has an effect on our faculty of perception. Embodiment of hybridity informs our perceptual capacities, as bodily engagement with the world is a constitutive part of our cognitive processes. Furthermore, there is a number of remarks I want to make on the implications of this research and its possible future directions. While my account of filmic affordances incorporated reflections on the embodied, embedded, enactive and extended nature of cognition, the affective aspect of their experience is largely absent. The enactive-ecological framework would benefit from the inclusion of the role of affect in embodiment (Colombetti). The filmmaking setting of docufiction prompts a response to the proposed filmic affordances, but further insight into the affective component of these enactments would be valuable in order to achieve a more comprehensive insight into their significance for the subjects. A proposal to explore the affective nature of the experience of these phenomena is connected to my second suggestion regarding possible further research. Namely, there is ongoing research on the use of the filmic medium for therapeutic purposes (Cohen and Johnson). For example, the process of archiving one’s personal life through home-video and its formation into a film has been considered helpful for regulating aspects of one’s life that could be considered a possible source of trauma (Harris). While my focus in analyzing both self-perception and self-enactment was not in relation to their possible therapeutic 61 value, the analysis of these processes could be of use in understanding the potential of the filmic medium for such purposes. In my film analyses, I have reflected on the process of embodying hybridity and what this process requires from the subjects in their respective filmic settings. Further research into other possible ways of employing self-enactment could be of value for establishing its connection with different therapeutic methods. Moreover, while I have brought into focus how the medium of film can blur the boundary between a self and a filmic self, the same exploration could be carried in relation to other forms of mediated self-presence. For example, the phenomenon of a “virtual mirror” has been explored in relation to the medium of Virtual Reality (VR) (Bailenson). A “virtual mirror” entails that the subject sees their reflection in a mirror that is part of a virtual version of the space that the subject is in. While in a VR setting, an avatar stands in for the subject’s mirror image, thereby reflecting the subject’s bodily movement. However, the avatar’s body can be recreated in different manners – as an ageing body, an opposite gender, a refugee, and so on. When confronted with a virtual avatar of themselves, the subjects begin to experience what is known as a “body transfer” – the avatar’s body is felt as one’s own. An enactive-ecological framework to this phenomenon would allow us to understand this process better by specifying the affordances of the virtual environment. In this way, we would also be able to compare different forms of hybrid environments, as well as what these differences entail for the subjects who engage with the respective media. While there are valuable possibilities for further research, this thesis is primarily intended as a contribution towards the ongoing discussion on the relations we form with media, and how these relations shape us. By limiting the scope of the current research to the phenomena of mediated self-perception and self-enactment, I explicated the possibilities of enactment as a docufiction method for embodying the ways in which media reshape our perception. This means that technologies do not only modify our faculty of perception, which grants them the status of perceptive technologies, but our whole way of being in the world, thereby also becoming embodied technologies.

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