Olmo and the Seagull

Nadica Denic Student nr: 10603557 [email protected] EMBODYING HYBRIDITY: Enactive-ecological approach to filmic self-perception and self- enactment in contemporary docufiction film 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 Action 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 1 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 fiction films, 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 – docufictions – 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 narrative structure, these early films express the tendency to posit a body as an “attraction” (Gunning 190). An example of this tendency is also the genre 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 anthropology 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 documentary film 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 mode 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 Nanook of the North (Robert Flaherty, 1922). Documentary theorists have not only argued that performativity is an integral part of the

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