A Cognitive Approach to Embodying History in Film
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A Cognitive Approach to Embodying History in Film: An analysis of Son of Saul and Sunset Jasper Koopmans 10719105 [email protected] University of Amsterdam Research Master’s Thesis Media Studies 20/6/2020 Supervisor: Mrs. dr. M.A.M.B. (Marie) Lous Baronian Second reader: Mr. dr. A.M. (Abe) Geil Word count: 22.998 i ii Acknowledgements I would, above all, like to thank Marie Baronian for the constructive feedback that I received over the last few months. Although these were (and still are) surreal times due to the corona crisis, I could always count on Marie for pointing me in the right direction. Second of all, I would like to express my gratitude towards the UvA and the IMACS programme for providing me the opportunity of studying abroad for a semester during the Research Master. My time in Rome has been essential in shaping the ideas for this thesis. Lastly, I want to thank my friends and fellow students on whom I can always rely for advice and support. iii Abstract The two Hungarian films, Son of Saul (2015, László Nemes) and Sunset (2018, László Nemes), present history in new and exciting ways. Both films are created in the post-memory era, which means that the living, communicational connection with the represented events is fading out (Margitházi 2018). In the case of Son of Saul, the unspeakable is presented in the form of the Holocaust; and in the case of Sunset, the pre-WW I turmoil of 1913 Budapest is brought to the screen. Two approaches in cognitive film theory, the mood-cue approach and Embodied Simulation (ES) Theory, show how these films bring back alive the post-memory era. The former allows to analyse both films on the basis of redundant emotion cues. These emotion cues provide an emotional orientation, a mood, toward the films that is similar to the emotional orientation that we experience in day-to-day life (Smith 2003). In the case of Son of Saul, it is the mood of emptiness, and in the case of Sunset, the mood of frustration. Whereas the mood-cue approach illuminates the emotional configuration of Son of Saul and Sunset, ES theory shows how the viewer may physically respond to it (and to the film in large). The findings of mirror neurons in the human brain shows that we are able to physically mirror actions and emotions that we observe, also the ones depicted on-screen (Gallese and Guerra 2019). When films are successful in this regard, we speak of embodiment and when we deem them unsuccessful (this may be a conscious or unconscious feature of a film), we speak of disembodiment. In line with this theory, Son of Saul walks the line between embodiment and disembodiment through techniques as the close-up and the hand-held camera. Sunset is largely experienced as a disembodying film through techniques as jump-cuts and fake POV shot/reverse shots that frustrate the viewer. The results from the cognitive approaches are interesting in collaboration with the field of ‘memory studies’. Namely, the structure of film and memory is very similar; both rely on narrative for sense-making, both elicit emotion and provide a physical experience. Accordingly, Alison Landsberg (2004) has argued that mass media such as film are able to create a ‘prosthetic memory’ for the spectator. This shows that Son of Saul and Sunset may be experienced as a real memory. Moreover, emotion research and other (historical) sources prove that the physical and emotional coding of the prosthetic memories created by Son of Saul and Sunset links well to how individuals with a closeness to the represented events remember them. Thus, Son of Saul and Sunset are able to bring the spectator closer to individuals with a closeness to the events by creating a memory that is, at least to a certain degree, similar. Keywords: Cognitive film theory, mood-cue approach, Embodied Simulation Theory, Holocaust, prosthetic memory. iv Table of contents Introduction……………………...………………………………………………………………………1 1. Cognitive Film Theory: A fragmented and reactionary field…... ……………………..……...………5 1.1 Psychoanalytic Film Theory: From paradigm to foster child……………………….………5 1.2 The Early Years of Cognitive Film Theory…………………….………………….…...…….7 1.3 Cognition and Emotion……………………………...……………………………………..12 1.4 A Pre-cognitive Approach: Embodied Simulation……………………...………………….15 2. A Hybrid Cognitive Approach to Son of Saul and Sunset………………………………….…………18 2.1 Son of Saul: Embodying the emptiness of the Holocaust………………….………………..18 2.2 Sunset: The frustration of disembodiment………………………………………………….25 3. Cognitivism as an Empirical Basis for Prosthetic Memory…………………………………………..33 3.1 Prosthetic Memory………………...…………...………………………………………….33 3.2 The Imaginary Worlds of Son of Saul and Sunset……………………….………………….36 3.3 Embodying History in Hollywood? …………………....…………..………………………41 Conclusion………………………………………………………………………………………….….47 Bibliography…………………………………………………………………………………………...50 Filmography……………………………………………………………………………………………55 v Introduction The idea for this thesis began on the 29th of March 2019. In the half-filled room 4 of the Eye Filmmuseum Amsterdam, László Nemes is present for the Q&A of his film. Son of Saul has just been screened and the 42-year old director stands in front of the small audience to answer questions. It becomes clear right away that Nemes is a filmmaker who is confident about his ideas and has a clear vision of his practice. He is not afraid to attack Martin Koolhoven1, who asked Nemes a question from the audience, on the topic of shooting on film vs. digitally, and he looks down on the world-renowned cinematographer Roger Deakins for the same ideas; in the mind of Nemes, Deakins chooses safety over art for shooting digitally. After the Q&A, I manage to hijack Nemes and talk with him about Kubrick, Tarkovsky, about overvalued film schools and what not. The Hungarian film director fascinates me. As a prodigy of Hungarian film legend Béla Tarr, Nemes has developed clear and specific ideas about how to approach a film; shooting on 35mm, lingering long takes, close-ups into the souls of his characters, the off-screen as a trigger of the imagination, and atmospheric sounds are as important as the words in a dialogue. Moreover, Nemes proves to be a literate man. As a child he moved with his mother to Paris where he studied History, International Relations and Political Science at the Institut d’Études Politiques. Nemes’s knowledge extends beyond the medium of film and he uses that to his advantage in his projects. His feature films, Son of Saul (2015) and Sunset (2018), and short films, With a Little Patience (2007) and The Counterpart (2008), are all set in historic periods that have to do with the transformation of Europe into how we know it today. Of the films, Son of Saul has garnered the most attention. The uncompromising portrayal inside the extermination camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau was awarded with the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film of the Year. The film won another 62 awards and managed to gross over four times its budget (“Saul Fia (2015)”). After having talked with Nemes and reading more about the praise that he received not only from film critics but also from historians and other academics, I knew that I needed to find out what makes his films so special and how his films might be of relevance in their depictions of history. Nemes’s feature films, Son of Saul and Sunset, focus on specific attributes of history that have relatively been left untouched by history books and cinema. Son of Saul is a Holocaust film that centres on the specific role and tasks of Sonderkommando. Sonderkommando were (mostly) Jewish prisoners that were placed into ‘special squads’, wherein they were forced, on threat of their own deaths, to work in the extermination camps. They had to perform unimaginably horrific work, part of which was guiding their fellows to the gas chambers, operating the crematoria, and cleaning the blood, body fluids and pus from the chambers (Didi-Huberman 4). Apart from the Nazis themselves, the Sonderkommando were the only witnesses of the Nazi’s policy of mass murder; and it was thus of absolute importance for the 1 Koolhoven is one of the Netherlands’s most popular film directors. Known for films such as Brimstone (2016) and Oorlogswinter (2008). 1 Nazis to isolate them from other camp inmates. This is one of the reasons that relatively little information exists on the topic of the Sonderkommando and that Son of Saul is only the second feature film to depict the Sonderkommando, after The Grey Zone (Tim Blake Nelson, 2001). Sunset takes place even further back in time, in 1913 Budapest. Nemes has said that the film can serve as a prologue to Son of Saul, because it is an attempt to find out ‘how we ended up with the concentration camps’ (Grey, “‘Sunset’ Sheds Light on the Days Before World War I”). He has added that in the represented period “There was an expectation that something was going to happen. There was a thirst for the mythical, the unknown, along with science and a firm belief in technology… At the same time, below the surface, some dark, repressed, untamed forces were threatening this sophisticated world” (Keslassy, “Laszlo Nemes on Venice title ‘Sunset’ as a Period, Political and Personal Piece”). Sunset is not unique in depicting these currents in history2, but the narrative is definitely at the margin of the portrayals of early 1900s Europe, where a large part of the films either centre on World War I or are packaged into biopics of great men and women that lived through these times. In their approach to filmmaking, Son of Saul and Sunset are also different from the so-called historical film.