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

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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.

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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.

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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

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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. They present history not in immediate detail but from a limited and subjective perspective. In the films, the camera focuses very closely on the protagonists, which confines the factual historic events to the background, out of focus. This specific approach creates an interesting relationship between film and viewer. Critics have praised the films for their immersive qualities and some have even compared the films to video games for the fact that the camera always circles around the main character, as if the character is operated by the viewer (e.g. BFI.org, Filminquiry.com). This specific approach of framing the viewer as part of the narrative makes Son of Saul and Sunset quite unique in recreating and representing historical periods on film. The interrelation between spectator and film has therefore become the prime focus in this thesis to research the possible historical relevance of Son of Saul and Sunset. In order to explore this interrelation, I turn to the field of cognitive film theory. Cognitive film theory is a well-known but highly contested field in film studies. At the University of Amsterdam this is not much different3. Finishing my sixth and last year of studying film (as part of the Media Studies department) at this university I have rarely encountered courses that, albeit slightly, focus on cognitive theory. I can think of several reasons for this neglect. One of those might be the fact that cognitive film theory is a dispersed field that is deemed incoherent by many scholars, as I will explain in this thesis. Another point that has been brought up by some scholars is that cognitive theory’s turn to the hard sciences is an attack of cultural relativism, most often present in the humanities

2 Other films that deal with these currents are, among others, Sunrise (István Szabó, 1999), Capcana Mercenarilor (Sergiu Nicolaescu, 1981) and the miniseries Fall of Eagles (John Elliot, 1974). 3 The first time that I encountered cognitive film theory was, therefore, not at the University of Amsterdam but at the university of Roma Tre, where I spent a semester as part of the IMACS programme. In Rome, I followed prof. Enrico Carocci’s course titled “Interpretazione e analisi del film” wherein we discussed cognitive scholars like Stefano Calabrese, Greg M. Smith, Vittorio Gallese and Michele Guerra. These scholars do, unsurprisingly, also play a key role in this thesis. 2

(Rhym 84). Film scholar Bill Nichols, one of the pioneering scholars at the side of ‘cultural relativism’, has for example stated that “the most regressive current in contemporary film study is the nomination of analytic philosophy and cognitive psychology as global theoretical frameworks” that are incompatible with the “politics of multiculturalism and social representation” that are so crucial to cultural studies (42). I would like to contest the above-named reasons for not adopting a cognitivist perspective. In my view, the fact that cognitive theory is a dispersed field asks for explicit positioning of the methodologies and concepts within the field. This does not provide incoherence, but rather a well- defined and focussed research. Moreover, I think it is wrong to recognize the cognitive approaches as an attack of cultural relativism in film studies; they can rather serve as a bridge between biology and culture in our area of research (Bondebjerg 13). Ib Bondebjerg explains: “Society and culture shapes the human mind, but our brain and body—our whole biological structure— comes with structures, dispositions and biological functions and mechanism that also, to a large degree, influence the way we experience reality and communicate about it” (14). Thus, by adopting a cognitive perspective I don’t advocate for substituting culture with nature, but I theorize the film viewer as a creature that is also biological (Bondebjerg 13). In simple terms, a cognitivist perspective enables the film scholar to research the psychology of the spectator. Cognitivist scholars research processes like recognition, comprehension and imagination that are at work in the spectator’s interaction with film (Bordwell 1989: 13). They turn to the hard sciences to assemble empirical evidence as a foundational support for these studies. In this respect, the cognitive approaches are ‘modest’, as they focus on scientific deduction as opposed to the Grand Theories like psychoanalysis and narratology that prescribe their outcome (Smith, “Film Criticism after Grand Theories”). Accordingly, I will turn to neurobiology and neuropsychology to research how the spectator interacts emotionally and physically with Son of Saul and Sunset. This locates the spectator as a natural being, who reacts to film in the same ways as he reacts to the world around him, namely as a creature that is shaped by biological processes. The usefulness for a cognitivist perspective also extends to historicity in film. When talking about the interrelation between history and film, film scholars turn to the multidisciplinary field of ‘memory studies’. Namely, talking about memory in contrast to ‘history’ creates a better understanding of the dialogic relationship between the ‘then’ and the ‘now’; memory shows how the past is activated and experienced in the present (Grainge 1). The cognitive studies create further insights in the interaction between film and memory, because both are entangled in cognitive processes. In fact, film and memory both rely on narrative for sense-making, both elicit emotion and provide a physical experience. In other words, film and memory provide very similar experiences in the interaction with the past. Thus, the combination of these fields will eventually help me in answering my central research question: How do the films Son of Saul and Sunset enable the viewer to experience history in a cognitive manner?

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The thesis is divided into three chapters, each building toward the answer of the central research question. In the first chapter, I focus on the general field of cognitive film theory. As I have mentioned, cognitive film theory is a dispersed field that many seem incoherent. Therefore, I examine both the founding theories and the current state of the field in this chapter. This will be done on the basis of the following subdivision: firstly, cognitive studies will be examined as a reaction to the paradigm of psychoanalysis in film studies; and, secondly, the field is explained on the basis of the founding theories of Bordwell and Carroll. In the second part of the chapter, I provide a review of the epistemological and neuroscientific notions that are needed to understand my reasoning in the following chapters (Gallese and Guerra 2019: xxi). This will be done by discussing the two approaches that will guide this thesis: the mood-cue approach and Embodied Simulation (ES) theory. In the second chapter, I combine the mood-cue approach and ES theory into a hybrid cognitive approach. This will be applied to my two case studies, Son of Saul and Sunset, to provide insights into how these films activate an emotional and embodied spectator. The third chapter is dedicated to the interrelation between cognitive film studies and memory studies. The chapter deals with a consideration of the cognitive capacities that are involved in film watching and the storing and recalling of memories, and analyses on what basis the two are related. Consequently, the results from the hybrid cognitive approach are measured against research that has been done into the represented historic periods in Son of Saul and Sunset. The spectatorial cognitive investment in the films will be compared to emotion research, source material and other sources, to examine whether the spectator’s experience of Son of Saul and Sunset resonates with existing memories of the represented periods. Lastly, the final chapter offers a starting point for further reflections on the hybrid cognitive approach for embodying history in film. Two Hollywood counterparts of my case studies, Schindler’s List (Steven Spielberg, 1993) and The Immigrant (James Gray, 2013), will be tested for the adaptability of the approach. With these two additional case studies, the framework of the approach can be extended, creating better insights into what particular films are better (or worse) fit to construct a memory of the past. In the end, the purpose of this thesis is to create additional and, hopefully, better insights into how historical films can open a dialogic relationship with the past. Through the analyses of my case studies, my aim is to show that cognitive studies can offer a greater understanding of the interrelationship between film, viewer, and the memory of a historical past. This will not only show that, with extensive a priori research, historical films are able to create emotional and physical experiences that recreate a subjective past, but might also offer more depth to the discussion surrounding cognitive studies.

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Chapter 1. Cognitive Film Theory: A fragmented and reactionary field

The discipline of cognitivism is defined as the study in psychology that focuses on mental processes. Thus, when the discipline found its way to film studies, scholars turned away from the filmic text and started focussing on biological and mental processes that are employed by the spectator. Cognitivists turn to empirical evidence to arrive at insights about these processes. For example, findings in emotion studies and neurosciences have, as will be discussed in this chapter, shown that we orientate emotionally and interact physically with film in the same manner as we do in our day-to-day lives. In studying this, cognitivists apply an interdisciplinary framework that ranges from the cognitive sciences to neurosciences and philosophical aesthetics. On the basis of research purposes, the cognitivist film scholar weighs the field to appropriate ‘the best available theory’. This does not entail that cognitivists are necessarily interested in committing to these sciences, but rather that they appropriate the suggested methods (Plantinga 21). Consequently, most of the advocates of cognitive film theory state that it is not a unified theory but a research tradition. I will, therefore, to avoid confusion, use the term ‘cognitive film theory’ when I analyse the historical or conceptual aspects in broader terms; rather, when I focus on a specific methodology or its application, I will turn to the term ‘cognitive approach’. In this chapter, I will be focussing on the following two aspects. Firstly, I will research the origins of cognitive film theory and make a case for its relevance. Secondly, I will position myself in the widespread field of cognitive film theory and explain the usefulness of the chosen approaches in relation to my case studies.

1.1 Psychoanalytic Film Theory: From paradigm to foster child Cognitive film theory didn’t only derive from developments in the cognitive- or neurosciences, but it also marked a break with contemporary theories in film studies. I will break the discussion of this into two parts: in the present section, I concentrate on the most important theory that cognitivism moved away from: psychoanalysis; in the second section, I will discuss how the breaking points with psychoanalytic film theory led to cognitive theory. Understanding the former will prove fruitful for uncovering the foundations of the latter. It is worth noting, however, that the reaction to psychoanalysis was only one of the many tendencies that has led to cognitive film theory; accordingly, these sections are not meant to be read as a linear historical account but rather as a conceptual consideration of two confronting theories. During the 1970s and a large part of the 1980s, psychoanalysis was considered the reigning paradigm in film studies. Journals like Screen and the scholars and film theorists Christian Metz, Jean- Louis Baudry, and Laura Mulvey were the focus of attention (Quiqley 13). It was not until the mid- or late 1980s that cognitive film theory questioned the appropriateness of psychoanalysis within the study of cinema (Plantinga 17). Herein, Noël Carroll was one of the predominant critics of psychoanalysis. In his 1988 book Mystifying Movies: Fads and Fallacies in Contemporary Film Theory he wrote that such

5 theory has “… impeded research and reduced film analysis to the repetition of fashionable slogans and unexamined assumptions” (234). Before focussing on this paradigmatic shift, it is useful to pay attention to the prevailing psychoanalytic approaches of the 1970s and early 1980s that were later discarded by Carroll and others. Most of these prevailing psychoanalytic approaches were, at least to a certain extent, inspired by Freudo-Lacanian psychoanalysis, and more specifically by the Lacanian mirror stage. Even if the mirror stage is an incredibly complex notion with large numbers of papers and books designated to it, my short treatment of the mirror stage is only in function of understanding the spawned theories in film studies. In that respect, I find Jane Gallop’s brief description of the mirror stage a useful entry:

… in the mirror stage, the infant who has not yet mastered the upright posture and who is supported by either another person or some device will, upon seeing herself in the mirror, "jubilantly assume" the upright position. She thus finds "already there" in the mirror image a mastery that she will actually learn only later. The jubilation, the enthusiasm, is tied to the temporal dialectic by which she appears already to be what she will only later become. (120)

Thus, the infant is confronted with a totalized self. The projected image (the reflection) anticipates the developments that the infant will face in later stages of growing up. For Lacan and his followers, the mirror stage is decisive in man’s development. This stage marks the creation of our ego (and with that desire), mediated by the illusory image reflected in the mirror (Gallop 121). In his earlier essays, Lacan described the act of looking in the mirror with the notion of the ‘gaze’ as a mastering force that leads to narcissism; but in later works he would complicate this notion. As McGowan analyses, “The gaze is not the look of the subject at the object, but the point at which the object looks back” (28-29). In other words, at the same time as our ego is created, also an uncanny feeling comes to exist. On the one hand, we project our desire onto the mirror, which, on the other hand, stares back at us to reflect our own nothingness. It is in the lack of desire that we actually continue to desire (Felluga, “Modules on Lacan”). Therefore, according to Lacanian beliefs, man is captured in this endless cycle after first recognizing himself in the mirror. Traditional Lacanian film theory has applied the mirror stage and the notion of the gaze for the theorization of spectatorship (McGowan 28). According to this theory, the screen replaces the mirror as the mediator of the illusory image. Christian Metz writes in his canonical The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and Cinema (1977) that “The spectator is absent from the screen as perceived, but also (the two things inevitably go together) present there and even 'all-present' as perceiver. At every moment I am in the film by my look’s caress” (54). Following Metz’s interpretation of the Lacanian mirror stage, the spectator has full mastery over the filmic experience (McGowan 28). He is both free from any influence from the outside and omnipotent in his power as perceiver. In this interpretation of the mirror

6 stage, the gaze is considered a mastering force and not – as Gallop indicates in her analysis – a disruption of mastery and desire. Other scholars such as Jean-Louis Baudry and Laura Mulvey have built slightly differently upon Lacan’s mirror stage compared to Metz, but they have also focussed on the mastery of the gaze as their guiding principle. For Baudry, the gaze of the spectator is cemented in the apparatus: “the arrangement of the different elements - projector, darkened hall, screen - in addition to reproducing in a striking way the mise-en-scene of Plato's cave ... reconstructs the situation necessary to the release of the 'mirror stage' discovered by Lacan” (539). The spectator’s identification with the camera presents an ideological danger for Baudry because the spectator is blind to the process of production and thus masters a ‘reality’ that is not symbolically situated (McGowan 30). For Mulvey, who also bases her theories on classical Hollywood cinema, the gaze is gender-constructed: in classical Hollywood cinema, the male spectator finds his screen surrogate in a male protagonist that gazes at a female object. Through that masochistic gaze, the male (both spectator and character) aggregates full mastery over the female that is presented on-screen. Here, again, an ideological danger is presented, because women are presented in their traditional exhibitionist role to serve the male gaze (Mulvey 309). This danger is amplified by the fact that, according to Baudry and Mulvey, the spectator is actually controlled by another gaze, either that of the camera or that of the male protagonist. Consequently, the spectator has no control over his own gaze, and his mastery is guided by external forces. As previously mentioned, the stream of psychoanalytic approaches during the 1970s and early 1980s relied on a limited interpretation (a misinterpretation one could argue4) of Lacan’s mirror stage. In more recent years we have seen a revival of the psychoanalytic approach with works of Slavoj Žižek, Gaylyn Studlar and Todd McGowan5. These scholars distant themselves from the notion of the mastery of the gaze and focus on man’s desire to lack power; on the desire of submission; and the idea that the gaze disrupts the ability of an omnipotent perceiver. Nevertheless, it has been necessary to explore the approaches opted by Metz, Baudry and Mulvey, because, as the next section will demonstrate, cognitive film theory was a strong reaction against this (then) reigning paradigm. It distanced itself from the predominant gaze and payed attention to other aspects of spectatorship. From the year 1985 this new branch in film studies started to receive more recognition.

1.2 The Early Years of Cognitive Film Theory Carl Plantinga, one of the early supporters of cognitive film theory, writes in 2002 that the “approach has a small but growing number of adherents” (16) and that it “has a future in the interdisciplinary study of film” (16). Plantinga wrote this as a reaction to the third biennial symposium of the Center for

4 McGowan’s The Real Gaze (2007) shows that scholars such as Metz and Mulvey misinterpreted the Lacanian gaze. In the manifesto, the scholar indicates that for Lacan the gaze comes from the object and not – as Metz and Mulvey interpreted - the person who is looking. 5 Slavoj Žižek’s The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989); Gaylyn Studlar’s “Masochism and the Perverse Pleasures of the Cinema,” in Nichols, Movies and Methods (1985); McGowan’s The Real Gaze (2007). 7

Cognitive Film Studies of the Moving Image6, to which I will refer to as SCSMI. The biennials organized by SCSMI were refigured in 2009 into an annual conference that is still running today. The expansion of the biennials and the conferences is an indication of the dissemination of cognitive theory in film studies; the number of speakers rose from twenty-five in 2002 (Plantinga, 16) to over a hundred in 2019 (Program Book for SCSMI Conference). Next to the increasing amount of attention for the SCSMI conferences, the number of journals that concentrate on cognitive film theory have also grown over time (e.g. SCSMI’s own award-winning Projections: The Journal for Movies and Mind was established in 2009; and there’s Cinema: Journal for Philosophy and the Moving Image). Moreover, the amount of works and notions have rapidly developed over time7. To name a few: David Bordwell writes about perception; Joseph Anderson about the organism and the environment; Carl Plantinga and Greg M. Smith about emotion and empathy; and Vittorio Gallese and Michele Guerra write about embodied simulation. It becomes evident that these scholars have a different focus than the previously discussed psychoanalytic approach; alternatively, they emphasize the role of the spectator’s brain and body in reaction to film. This does not make cognitive film theory unique, because phenomenology and affect theory focus on the same areas (Sinnenbrink, “Cinempathy”). However, in contrast to the subjectivity of these approaches8, cognitive film theory follows a naturalistic perspective and is dedicated “to the highest standards in reasoning and evidence” (Nannicelli, “Cognitive Film Theory”). In that respect, cognitivists rely on the ‘certainties’ of science in contrast to the vagaries of interpretation (Vescio 384). In this section, I further outline the grounding of cognitive film theory by concentrating on the origins of the field. Once more, it is not my desire to present a linear historical account of the matter. In my view, it is necessary to consider the primary theories to understand my reasoning in the present. Cognitive theory is a much debated and a dispersed field, so the early theories will give us an indication of the rationale behind the use of a ‘cognitive approach’ to film studies. Consequently, I will also demonstrate on what basis cognitive film theory breaks with the psychoanalytic theories that I discussed in the previous section. The origins of cognitive film studies can be traced back to two scholars9: David Bordwell and Noël Carroll. The former published two books in 1985: Narration in Fiction Film and, in collaboration

6 The Center for Cognitive Film Studies of the Moving Image was renamed in 2006 as the Society for the Cognitive Study of the Moving Image (SCSMI). 7 For an overview, see the Oxford Bibliography for Cognitive Film Theory: https://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780199791286/obo-9780199791286-0142.xml 8 “About one hundred years ago, for Husserl’s philosophical Phenomenology, it was crucial that the study of consciousness be undertaken from the subjective, first-personal point of view of reflecting upon conscious experiences and the ways of givenness of their objective correlates. Nowadays, the study of consciousness is again enjoying considerable interest, not only within analytic philosophy of mind, but equally so in some branches of the natural sciences, especially in the cognitive neuroscience, where objective, third-person methodologies are all-important” (Marbach 385). 9 Others, most notably Sergei Eisenstein from the 1920s to the 1940s, had already worked with approaches similar to the ones related to cognitive film studies. However, these were mostly individual cases. Only from 1985 onwards the cognitive approaches developed into a concrete field. 8 with Janet Staiger and Kristin Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960. Abandoning the idea of psychoanalysis, these books turn to spectator psychology (Plantinga 17). The important difference between the two is the fact that the latter is invested in theories of perception and cognition (Bordwell 1985: 30), whereas the former is related to the study of the unconscious mind. Bordwell further constructs the cognitivist methodology in the 1989 journal article “A Case for Cognitivism”:

For psychoanalytic theory in general, the paradigm cases are the neurotic symptoms (the core of the core), the bizarre dream, the bungled action, the slip of the tongue … On the whole, cognitive theory focuses on a different set of core phenomena. It is, in general, more concerned with normal and successful action than in the Freudian framework. [For example,] What enables someone to recognize a face? (12)

With this logic, Bordwell shows that cognitivists do not depart from the exceptional cases, but rather focus on biological processes that apply to any human. According to Bordwell’s methodology, the continuous act of perception presents the brain with a stream of information. Already at the lowest perceptual activity, higher level cognitive activity is involved (Bordwell 1989: 18). Let us take the example of recognizing a face in a crowd: whenever we recognize this face, built-in assumptions and hypotheses are employed (Bordwell 1989: 18). We possess a mental picture of the distance between the eyes, the face width and the texture of the skin of the face that we recognize. The constant cognitive processes in our brain are able to connect the perceptual information that enters the brain with this mental picture. This is a process of give- and take, of anticipation and reaction. Bordwell describes it as ‘bottom-up’ and ‘top-down’ processes; the former is activated by perceptual input; whereas the latter is guided by expectation, background knowledge and problem-solving processes (1985: 31). The same processes are at work for any activity (at different levels of intensity), may it be cracking a mathematical code or watching a movie with your friends. To better understand how cognitive theory differs from psychoanalytic theory, Bordwell demystifies the Lacanian mirror stage:

It is not enough to say that between the ages of 6 and 18 months the child spontaneously recognizes itself in the mirror as the image of the other. Unless this is a miracle, one needs to show that certain conditions (such as maturational factors) enable this to happen. To (mis)recognize your reflection, you must already be able to pick out a figure from the ground, extract texture ingredients and assign them to continuous objects … The theorist needs, in short, an account of the many perceptual skills necessary to the mirror-effect, as well as an account of how they became available to the child prior to this moment. (1989: 20)

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To reiterate, man is involved in a constant process of learning. The child does not (mis)recognize itself in the mirror’s reflection from one day to another, but from the moment of its birth the child is involved in perceptive and cognitive processes. These processes gradually enable the (mis)recognition of a child in the mirror. The study of the perceptive and cognitive activity that is involved in the gradual learning process is central to cognitive (film) theory. We can adapt the same logic for the interaction between the spectator and the film when we refocus on film studies; over time the spectator learns symbolic conventions, emotive keys and also uses ‘life lessons’ to interact with a film. In studying these elements, the cognitivist wants to understand processes ranging from recognition and comprehension to judgement and imagination (Bordwell 1989: 13). Cognitive film theory is interdisciplinary in this respect, because, as indicated in the introduction of this chapter, cognitivists weigh the wide range of fields and traditions for the best available theory. Whereas Bordwell focusses on constructivist psychology10 as the base for his cognitivist approach of perception, others have turned to analytic philosophy11, evolutionary psychology12, ecological psychology13, neurosciences14 and other fields. The apparently open interaction with the academic world has also led to a lot of critique of cognitive film theory. Is ‘cognitive’ the right term for this approach since it also flirts with other disciplines? Does the dependence on other disciplines lead to scientism of film studies? Or is cognitive film theory too unfocussed by interacting with a wide range of fields? These are all relevant questions that I will try to answer in the remainder of this chapter. As previously stated, two names have been crucial in the rise of cognitive film studies. I discussed the first with David Bordwell, so I will now turn to the second with Noël Carroll. Although I have indicated the disagreements that Bordwell poses with psychoanalysis, he was actually more interested in constructing a new methodology than criticizing the reigning ones (Plantinga 17). He did this at the basis of constructivist psychology and he applied his theories on all facets of cinema. On the contrary, Carroll was unequivocally interested in discrediting contemporary film theories15 (Plantinga

10 “According to Constructivist theory, perceiving and thinking are active, goal-oriented processes … A Constructivist theory permits no easy separation between perception and cognition. Speaking roughly, the typical act of perception is the identification of a three-dimensional world on the basis of cues. Perception becomes a process of active hypothesis-testing” (Bordwell 1985: 31). 11 Analytic philosophy holds that philosophy should appeal to the modern sciences in order to arrive at conceptual clarity (“Analytic Philosophy”). 12 Evolutionary psychology is a theoretical approach to psychology that attempts to explain how our mind (thus perception, emotions, memory, etc.) is shaped by natural selection (“Evolutionary Psychology”). 13 Ecological psychology is a subdiscipline of perceptual psychology and focusses on the assumption that the “environment is directly perceived without mediation from nonperceptual processes” (Heft and Richardson, “Ecological Psychology”). 14 “The aim of neuroscience is to understand underlying mechanisms of the neurons, their interaction and the overall architecture of the brain, but also the functional processes of the brain, stretching the areas of inquiry to human cognition and mind” (“Neuroscience”). 15 Bordwell and Carroll later moved on to work together on the 1996 book Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies. Herein, the visions of both scholars collide in the form of a firm criticism of contemporary theory and a contribution of ‘mid-level’ theory building. 10

17). With his book Mystifying Movies: Fads and Fallacies in Contemporary Film Theory, not only psychoanalysis but also Marxism, semiology and narratology pay the price. I will not go into too much depth how Carroll discredits each separate discipline, but I will rather highlight how Carroll’s reactionary work proposes ‘mid-level’ theory building as opposed to the ‘Grand Theories’16 of the other disciplines. The starting point for Carroll’s Mystifying Movies is to contest the central tenets of contemporary film theory and, with that, Carroll presents his suspicion of Grand Theories. Breaking with the latter is central for cognitive film theory and can be understood by a simple analogy: a religionist asks “why the flowers died, the breaks jammed, and the sun rose” (Carroll 1991: 196), only to receive the following response: God made it happen. The same, Carroll states (he writes in specific about suture theory17 in this passage, but it seems to me that it can be extended to other Grand Theories), could be said about contemporary film theory (1991: 196). By bringing every interpretation back to the same all- encompassing explanation the theories are rendered meaningless. This also relates to the endless looking for unity, between body and film, mirror and screen, etc. (Zucker 160). If we once more take the example of the mirror stage in cinema: a mirror is not the same as a screen; a spectator is not the same as - and cannot blindly identify with - a ‘surrogate’ protagonist; and not every male spectator accepts the male gaze as it is offered to him. However, as I have already indicated in the previous section, it is not my intention to renounce every psychoanalytic film theory as worthless. What is important for me to take from Carroll’s critique is the need for a more “modest” approach, which contrasts to the Grand Theories of psychoanalysis, narratology and other disciplines. In this vein, cognitive film theory does not strive to bring everything back to one explanation but tackles middle-range problems. This mid-level theory building is based on localised theories that function on the basis of scientific deduction, as opposed to the Grand Theories that prescribe the outcome of their research (Smith, “Film Criticism after Grand Theories”). This middle-range methodology of cognitive film studies opens up the possibilities for independent research and diverse perspectives (Plantinga 23). It must be noted that Bordwell’s and Carroll’s theories haven’t been received without criticism. Here, I shortly discuss two of the critiques that both scholars have received. In the book Image and Mind (1995), Gregory Currie discards Bordwell’s use of constructivist psychology by advocating for a realist perspective. For Currie, the perceptual-cognitive logic of constructivist psychology falls short in explaining the mental operations in narrative comprehension (85). Currie argues that mental operations

16 “theory that uses inductive methods and offers totalizing theories to account for all film effects” (Zucker 156). 17 Suture theory is strongly related to the theories of Jacques Lacan and the deriving psychoanalytic theories. Magrini explains: “Suture is a system of filmic grammar and syntax, incorporating the spectator as signifier within a system of “signifiers,” producing meaning while simultaneously instilling and establishing a sense of subject-hood, which is to say, the effect of suture produces the phenomenon of spectator as “subject”. Through identification with the film, the spectator as subject is “spoken,” and therefore “named,” established and fixed within the formal cinematic structure of the film’s discourse. The cinematic model of the “system of the suture” is based on Jacques Lacan’s notion of subject formation and Jacques-Alain Miller’s subsequent work on this topic” (“On the System of the “Suture” in Cinema”). 11 are the product of both conscious and unconscious processes, so cognitivists should take both into account (85). Others, like Peter Lehman, have criticized Carroll for an oversimplistic attitude toward contemporary theory. Lehman argues that the manner in which Carroll posits the ‘correct way’ of studying film (mid-level theory building) can be recognized as the same sort of fads and fallacies that Carroll himself has criticized in contemporary film theory (244). Both of these critiques show the need in film studies for middle-range methodologies. Currie demonstrates that there are different approaches to arrive at a small and manageable truth; and Lehman’s critique proves the danger in assuming that cognitive film theory holds, in the words of Bordwell, “the next Big Theory of Everything” (1989: 33). As will be discussed in the following sections, the wide variety of cognitive approaches address different parts of the brain and body. Per research or per case study, it is necessary to consider the different approaches to adapt the most appropriate one, depending on the research purposes. This is what the following sections will focus on in respect to the intentions of this research.

1.3 Cognition and Emotion The early efforts by Bordwell and Carroll have been useful to introduce cognitive film theory, but these efforts have also been on the generic side. Most cognitive approaches that followed have used Bordwell and Carroll’s work as a foundational layer to further specialize in the field. I will discuss two of these approaches, the mood-cue approach and the embodied approach to mental simulation, in the coming sections. This is also the point where the case studies, Lazlo Nemes’s feature films Son of Saul and Sunset, enter the picture. I will research the films in-depth in the second chapter, but for now it is already important to identify the relevant characteristics of the discussed approaches in relation to the case studies. This will elucidate my selection of the approaches in the service of the thesis and it will make clear the advantages and disadvantages of both approaches. Therefore, I will alternate between a reading on the approaches and a reading on the films to indicate how both can service each other. One of the most interesting approaches in cognitive film theory, as I wish to demonstrate, is the field of emotion research. Any film viewer will agree that the medium of film elicits emotion. However, the study of emotions has historically been neglected by many academic disciplines, thus also in film studies18 (Smith 2003: 3). One of the reasons for this neglect was the fact that emotions were considered too unpredictable to be studied alongside the reigning classical logic (Plantinga and Smith: 2). In the last half century, the study of cognition has become increasingly sophisticated and the knowledge about the brain and the ‘subjective’ states has rapidly extended. Thus, from the late 1980s, academic

18 Smith further elaborates: “From the fifties to the seventies, few academic disciplines gave precise attention to the topic of emotions. Cultural anthropologists had difficulty reporting such highly “subjective” states of mind using traditional methods of observation on other cultures … Sociology’s agenda led academics to areas in which socialization was most clearly at work … In psychology, behaviorism’s influence led theorists away from anything located within the “black box” of the human organism … Like these other disciplines, film theory has historically paid only spotty attention to emotional effects…” (2003 4-5). 12 disciplines began to incorporate the neglected topic of emotions (Smith 2003 4). In the field of film studies, two pioneering books were released: Passionate Views: Film, Cognition, and Emotion (1999) by Plantinga and Smith, and Film Structure and the Emotion System (2003) by Smith. In the books, Plantinga and Smith move away from the (psychoanalytic) concepts of pleasure and desire. Alternatively, the scholars advocate for a perspective on filmic emotion that is related to cognitive research into mental functions (1999: 3; 2003: 5). Prior to analysing how emotions are triggered by cinematic events, it is important to focus on the physiological and neurological structure of the emotion system (Smith 1999: 107). Herein, Smith’s chapter “Local Emotions, Global Moods, and Film Structure” in Passionate Views: Film, Cognition, and Emotion will be the guiding framework. Smith proposes an associative model to analyse the emotion system. Following this model, emotions are understood as multidimensional response syndromes: “They are a group of responses (including action tendencies, orientating responses, and expressions) connected to several possible eliciting systems … the emotion system can also be invoked by several possible subsystems … facial nerves and muscles, vocalization, body posture …” (Smith 1999: 107). However, none of these subsystems is able to invoke emotion by itself. Only one component has been found necessary to emotion: ‘the limbic system in nonconscious central nervous processing’ (Smith 1999: 108). Smith explains the central function of the limbic system as follows:

The limbic system is a highly interconnected neurological center that receives information from a wide range of input systems. Its function is to evaluate information, to provide an emotional coding based on this evaluation, to trigger an initial response, and to monitor the stream of emotional stimuli and responses (in conjunction with conscious processing). The limbic system (particularly the amygdala) is the common neural pathway traveled by emotional data. (1999: 108)

During the course of monitoring the emotional stimuli, the limbic system creates an initial emotional valuation. This is a nonconscious process. Further, the limbic system creates an emotional ‘colouring’ for the received data, which, in turn, interacts with the processes of emotional expression and experience (Smith 1999: 108). The associative model proposed by Smith takes account of the interconnected structure of the limbic system. To reiterate, in the model the “various components of the emotion system are connected by a series of associative links. Emotions and emotion states … are tied to particular thoughts and memories as well as patterns of physiological reactions” (Smith 1999: 108). The more channels of the emotion system provide emotion cues the more likely the experience and expression of emotion. This means that the limbic system is flexible, but it is not flighty; multiple stimuli provide redundant cues that tell us what emotion is called for (Smith 1999: 109). One process is primarily cognitive (the conscious processing of data in the cortex) and the other is primarily emotive (the feeling tone in the

13 limbic system) (Smith 1999: 109). The foundation for the associative model consists of the parallel processing of both. Herein, the model distances itself from a one-way prototypical approach (structured by goals, objects etc.) and instead treats the emotion system as flexible; both non-prototypical and prototypical emotion states are the basis for emotional functioning (Smith 1999: 109-10). Since we have determined the central functions of the emotion system, it is also necessary to consider these functions in our daily routines. One final notion is crucial here: mood. In fact, emotions are brief states that only last seconds; for the rest of our emotional life we experience a baseline state (Feinstein 9), or better yet: a preparatory state. In this preparatory state, we orientate toward our ever- changing environment (Smith 1999: 112-13). Therefore, the general role for, wat is termed, orientating emotions is to ready the body and to encourage action-oriented emotion states (Smith 1999: 113). The primary set of this orientating emotion state is called mood. It is an expectancy of a particular emotion, and it helps orientate toward a situation and interpret our environment (Smith 1999: 113). Smith describes mood as the emotion system’s equivalent of attention (1999: 113). In contrast to emotion, mood is a low-level emotion state (Smith 1999: 113). It is longer lasting and more diffuse. However, it requires the brief, intense surges of emotion to continue. Otherwise a mood will extinguish. Smith explains: “Brief periods of emotion can provide the urgency and speed needed to deal with sudden changes in the world, but they cannot provide the steady emotional orientation required to deal with a stable environment” (1999: 114). This implies that emotion and mood coexist and reinforce each other’s effect. The interdependency of emotion and mood is critical for Smith’s mood-cue approach. Smith follows the idea that a film’s primary goal is to create a mood (1999: 115). In this sense, a film can be linked to our emotional orienting state; the film is a predisposition toward experiencing emotion (Smith 1999: 115). Thus, a film is experienced as a lower-level emotional state, occasionally supported by brief, higher-level surges of emotion. The latter are provided by redundant emotive cues like facial expressions or music. These filmic elements are often non-narrative and non-stylistic. Smith terms these elements ‘emotion markers’; their main goal is to set an emotional orientation within the film. Emotion markers can be further subdivided in prototypical and non-prototypical emotion states; weak or strong goal- orientated functionality; weak or strong diegetic aim; and a film can be analysed in how densely informative it is regarding emotions and cues (Smith 1999: 120). Smith’s mood-cue approach can be categorized as a bottom-up approach: the scholar analyses a film for emotion markers and positions the markers within the larger structure of the film. In other words, the mood-cue approach allows the scholar to remain close to the surface of particular films (Smith 2003: 79). The associative model and the related mood-cue approach are a good example of mid-level research, as it was introduced by Bordwell and Carroll. The mood-cue approach focuses on particular brain areas (such as the limbic system) that can be related to redundant cues that shape the spectator’s emotional reaction. Herein, the approach doesn’t proclaim to arrive at a definitive truth, but it rather focuses on a manageable analysis of specific elements of a film’s text. Accordingly, the mood-cue

14 approach presents useful insights into how specific films are shaped to influence our emotional response. This will also be important in the analysis of Son of Saul and Sunset. As we will see in more detail in the following chapter, these two films have a distinct way of shaping the spectator’s emotional response. Techniques such as the hand-held camera and shallow focus, as I will further examine in more details, intensify the feeling of proximity and, accordingly, leave much of the environment unseen. As a consequence, a large part of the environment and the spectator’s emotional response is shaped by facial expressions and atmospheric sounds. The mood-cue approach is useful in this respect, because it does not focus on the narrative or stylistic elements but rather on redundant cues. In analysing these cues, the approach will demonstrate how Son of Saul and Sunset are structured to impact the spectator emotionally in unique fashion. It is also important to highlight the disadvantages of the mood-cue approach. As discussed, Smith’s associative model departs from neurophysiological research in the limbic system. However, the mood-cue approach itself does not take this neuropsychological interaction between spectator and film into account. The approach focuses on specific marked elements (emotion markers) in the film’s text that should theoretically elicit emotion. Whether and how emotions are experienced by the spectator is only assumed by the approach. I, therefore, suggest a hybrid model to study the spectator’s emotional and psychological interaction with film. Here, the mood-cue approach serves to unmask the emotional configuration of a film’s text; and the embodied approach to mental simulation, as the following section will demonstrate, serves as an indicator for the spectator’s neurobiological interaction with film.

1.4 A Pre-cognitive Approach: Embodied Simulation How is it possible that we feel along the plastic characters represented in film? Why is film such a well- suited medium to elicit emotional response? Why do we often experience films as if we are encountering reality? How do we actually interact with film? These questions guide the work of Vittorio Gallese and Michele Guerra. While Smith has turned to the emotion markers that are implanted in a film; Gallese and Guerra take a step back. Why would these emotion markers function? Why do spectators accept the emotional intent of a film’s structure? To answer all these questions, the Italian scholars turn to cognitive neuroscience. They state that “recent studies … bring out strong evidence of a continuity between perceiving scenes in movies and in the world, as the dynamics of attention, spatial cognition and action are very similar in direct experience and mediated experience” (2012: 183-84). The work of Gallese and Guerra is part of a relatively new subdivision in cognitive film theory, which they term ‘pre-cognitive’. I have described the interaction between top-down (perceptual) and bottom-up (cognitive) processes as the basis for Bordwell’s theorization of cognitive film theory. Gallese and Guerra’s Embodied Simulation (ES) Theory ‘updates’ this line of thinking. With the recent discovery of mirror neurons in the human brain it is proven that “observing an action causes in the observer the activation of the same neural mechanism that is triggered by executing that action oneself” (Gallese and Guerra 2012: 184). This applies to both the parieto-premotor cortical regions that are active

15 during mouth-, hand-, and foot-related acts (Gallese and Guerra 2012: 184), as well as to viscero-motor and sensory-motor areas that are related to emotions and sensations (Gallese and Guerra 2012: 184-85). To reiterate, perceptual input is already processed and coded before one can generate a cognitive reaction. This provides the following results: the brain-body system is able to map others’ behaviour; perceiving a manipulatable object activates the canonical neurons without necessary action (seeing a key is enough to activate the brain area that is active when opening a door); the action domain is dependent on our peri-personal space19 (Gallese and Guerra 2012: 185-86). Returning to the study of film, the same is true as for our natural environment. We perceive film as we perceive the world (Gallese and Guerra 2012: 187). While film phenomenologist Vivian Sobchack states that film is a living entity20; Gallese and Guerra state that film’s vitality is detectable in the relation between movie and viewer (2012: 189). That is, for Gallese and Guerra it is not the film’s dynamic presentation (the structure) that is lived, but the spectator’s body. The spectator deciphers the film’s movement by simulating it internally (2012: 189). This internal simulation happens on a pre-reflexive and non-linguistic scale (Gallese and Guerra 2012: 191). In other words, the moving image, as classical film theorist Kracauer already pointed out, engages the viewer “physiologically before he is in a position to respond intellectually” (Kracauer 158). Gallese and Guerra explain: “the tracking process is shaped by motor programs and somato-sensory and interoceptive “representations” in bodily format activated in the observer” (2012: 193). In ES Theory, this process is called “Feeling of the Body”; the spectator mirrors (or feels) the actions, emotions and sensations depicted on-screen. Herein, acting is the first stage of embodiment but not the most important one. It is the camera that serves as the spectator’s body and its movements determine the relations within the film (Gallese and Guerra 2012: 199). It is, for example, neurobiologically proven that “The sense of movement evoked by the Steadicam21 gives the impression that the spectator is moving independently within the scene, as evidenced by the stronger activation of the motor simulation resulting from the activation of the mirror neurons” (Gallese and Guerra 2019: 115). The idea that the actions and emotions depicted on-screen are mirrored in the spectator’s body is not something new. For instance, Gregory Currie termed the Simulation Hypothesis in 1995. With this theory, Currie hypothesized that humans understand and interpret others by putting themselves in their place (Carroll 2001: 306). This led him to the conviction that the process of simulation also functions with narratives and fictional worlds. In other words, Currie hypothesized that a spectator can engage mentally with the fictional world of film (148). The recent neurobiological discoveries show that Currie’s Simulation Hypothesis was in the right direction. Today, with ES Theory we can prove and extend Currie’s hypothesis. The neurobiological grounding of mirror neurons shows that it is not only

19 The space close around our bodies, the so-called ‘personal zone’. 20 In the words of Sobchack, “the cinema uses “lived modes” of perceptual and sensory experience (seeing, movement, and hearing the most dominant) as “sign-vehicles” of representation” (74). 21 A stabilizer for camera movements. 16 mentally but also bodily that a spectator represents the fictional world. The spectator does not only understand and interpret the characters and actions on-screen, but also mirrors their intentions and emotions. ES Theory proves scientifically what preceding theories have hypothesized or assumed. The above leads me back to the mood-cue approach. As indicated, the mood-cue approach analyses a film for emotion markers that should elicit the spectator’s emotional response. On the other hand, the embodied approach to mental simulation presents the possibility to analyse how the spectator embodies the actions and emotions of a fictional world. The former falls short when it comes to understanding when (and how) a spectator responds emotionally to a film, whereas the latter fails to present a functional approach for analysing the film’s emotional configuration. The hybrid approach that I will employ in the second chapter combines the best of both worlds. Herewith, we can analyse a film’s text for emotion markers and dissect these emotion markers (and other filmic elements) to understand how the spectator is able (or unable) to embody them. This will prove effective in the analysis of Son of Saul and Sunset. The analysis of the redundant cues that I mentioned in the previous section will give us insights into the emotional configuration of both films, but only in collaboration with ES Theory can we link these cues to the embodied response of the spectator. In analysing stylistic and technical elements like the handheld camera, we can understand how the spectator mirrors the fictional world. Therefore, as I hope to show in the coming chapter, the hybrid approach I am suggesting in this thesis is able to reveal how Son of Saul and Sunset are configured emotionally and also how the spectator embodies the films internally. Both aspects will also be crucial in the third chapter in the analysis of Son of Saul and Sunset and their role in the construction of history.

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Chapter 2. A Hybrid Cognitive Approach to Son of Saul and Sunset

László Nemes’s first feature film Son of Saul brought the terror of the Holocaust to the screen by representing the horrifying work of the Sonderkommando. Nemes’s second feature Sunset went further back in time to picture the pre-World War I turmoil of 1913 Budapest. Interestingly, Son of Saul and Sunset are two very different films that deploy distinctive techniques and aesthetic devices to bring the past back alive. At the level of narrative, Son of Saul follows a classical three-act structure that is goal- driven. As this chapter will show, the objective of the titular character Saul is presented in the first sequence of the film and, after many hinders arise that endanger Saul’s ‘mission’, he accomplishes his goal to a certain degree in the end. At the same time, Sunset lacks a goal-oriented focus. The main character in the film, Írisz Leiter, is more ambiguous in her motivations. In this respect, the viewer is challenged to discover what the film is about and whereto the narrative proceeds. However, both films do more than telling a narrative; they invite for a particular cognitive investment. In the present chapter, I am interested in how the activated spectator experiences these films emotionally and, accordingly, how these emotions are related to the sensation of embodiment or disembodiment that is produced by the interrelationship between spectator and film. In the previous chapter, I have suggested a hybrid model, wherein I combine the mood-cue approach and Embodied Simulation (ES) Theory. The combination of these approaches allows me to analyse Son of Saul and Sunset on the basis of emotional configuration and spectator embodiment. Following this model, I will scan both films for emotion markers and analyse the films for the possibility of embodied simulation.

2.1 Son of Saul: Embodying the emptiness of the Holocaust As it has been noted in the previous chapter, the mood-cue approach assumes that the primary objective of a film is to set a mood. This is accomplished by redundant cues that give an emotional coding to the film’s text. Turning to Son of Saul, the film opens with an out of focus shot of men approaching the camera. After some time, Saul Ausländer (Géza Röhrig), the main protagonist of the film, enters the frame in profile. The expression on his face looks empty (Figure 1) and it remains more or less the same for the continuation of the film. There is no supporting music to set an ulterior mood, but only active and passive off-screen sounds. On the one hand, the active sounds feature what we can assume are German officers shouting directions to the newly arrived victims; on the other hand, the atmospheric (passive) sounds are constructed by the shouting and screaming from the victims. At the centre of all the turmoil, the hand-held camera (I discuss the effect of style and technique in the second part of this section) seems as if it is stuck to the body of Saul. This makes the spectator’s emotional orientation toward the events, for a large part, dependent on Saul’s acts and expressions. As Saul’s acts seem automized and his emotional expression is one of emptiness, it is communicated to the spectator that

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Saul is caught in the mechanical rhythm of the destructive machine of the Nazis. The only way to survive in the extermination camp of Auschwitz is to disconnect from any human emotions.

Figure 1.

Claire Henry defines the disconnection from human emotions as the mood of emptiness in her book Revisionist Rape-Revenge: Redefining a Film Genre, wherein she argues that this mood is developed in the disconnectedness between sound and visuals (92). This becomes evident in Son of Saul from the first scene. Saul accompanies the newly arrived victims through the camp. We hear mumbled German instructions and children’s voices as Saul and the other Sonderkommando guide the camp inmates towards the ‘dressing rooms’ of the gas chambers. The camera remains limited to Saul’s automized handling of the situation while the victims remain out of focus in the background. They are ordered to unclothe themselves and are transported to the gas chamber. When the doors close, the sounds of horrifying screams increase. Saul has to stand next to the doors to prevent them from opening. The visual input from his expressionless face does not match the aural input from the utterly horrifying off- screen sounds. The latter ties into the possible extradiegetic cues that the spectator could be acting on, like advertising, trailers or genre conventions (Smith 2003: 87). Since we would expect that most spectators are well aware of the fact that Son of Saul is a film about the Holocaust22, they certainly have an expectation of the environment that the film takes place in. The off-screen screaming of the victims in the gas chambers confirms these expectations. Here, the sound design provides access to a world in a

22 In the opening titles of Son of Saul, we read: “Sonderkommando. A German term that was used in the concentration camp. The members of the Sonderkommando were separated from the rest of the camp. They worked for a couple of months and were then executed.” 19 way that the visual cannot. The aural emotion cues present an extra layer of narrative and emotion, because, in disconnecting from the empty expressions of Saul’s face, they give the off-screen space a quality of ‘nearness’ (Smith 2003: 62). In the book Film Structure and the Emotion System, Smith demonstrates that there is a difference between ‘feeling for’ or ‘feeling with’ a character. In the case of the former, the viewer knows more about a certain situation and they can rely on their own understanding of what an appropriate emotional reaction is (Smith 2003: 90). In the case of the latter, the viewer knows as much as the character; accordingly, “the character exemplifies what the viewer’s appropriate reaction should be” (Smith 2003: 90). The latter is true for Son of Saul. On account of the fact that the camera rarely leaves the body of Saul, the viewer knows as much about the narrative situation as he does. As we have seen, the aural cues present an extra layer to the story, but they ‘only’ make audible what Saul hears. Thus, emotion cues like we have seen in Figure 1 urge the viewer to feel with Saul. As the camera swings around Saul, the viewer always observes and even accompanies a part of his body. Either they are bound to Saul’s back and receive a glimpse of the out of focus horrors of the Holocaust or they testify to the empty expression of Saul in reaction to the horrors around him. When the screams have stopped and the victims have been exterminated, the Sonderkommando enter the gas chamber and start cleaning the ground. Saul has to scrub the ground for blood, pus and other body fluids. The shocking and disgusting sight of it gives the spectator a clear idea of the horrifying work that Saul performs. This is repeated in the next scene, wherein Saul is observed as he drags a corpse to the crematorium (Figure 2). I argue that these shocking moments can be termed emotion cues. The spectator is shocked by the horrific images and sounds but, at the same time, mentored by Saul how to deal with the unbearable situation. Therefore, in the feeling with Saul, the dominant mood that the spectator experiences in Son of Saul is indeed one of emptiness. As has been noted in the previous chapter, mood is an orienting state that cues an emotional response through stylistic techniques. Correspondingly, Henry argues in Revisionist Rape-Revenge that the mood of emptiness enables the viewer to understand the futility and ambivalence of a certain situation (92). This brings me to the central narrative focus of Son of Saul: the burial of Saul’s son. With the setting of Auschwitz in the background, Saul finds an objective when he discovers a boy that he recognizes as his son. The boy has miraculously survived the gas chamber, but is later shot by a German officer. Saul steals the corpse and, during the continuous work as Sonderkommando, he makes every effort to find a rabbi to perform the impossible; that is, to burry ‘his’ son according to the Jewish tradition, in the middle of the extermination camp. As Saul’s mission unfolds, hundreds of victims are murdered in the gas chambers. Saul’s determination to find a rabbi and bury his son seems ambivalent at the least. These feelings are accentuated in the scene where Saul does find a rabbi. With thousands of newly arrived victims, there is a shortage in the gas chambers and crematoriums. Therefore, the Germans decide to execute all of the camp inmates by shooting and burning them directly in the burning pits. Amidst of this chaos, Saul

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Figure 2 desperately questions the inmates whether they are or they know a rabbi. In doing so, Saul is taken as a victim himself and is lined up to be shot, only to be rescued just in time. When Saul actually finds a rabbi, the man is abruptly taken from him and (in one of the only wide shots in the film) killed (Figure 3). It is a rare moment in the film, wherein the viewer is not limited to the body of Saul and he/she is able to observe the extermination camp in focus. Here, the ambivalence of Saul’s mission is reflected to the viewer. What does the burial of one child mean in contrast to the indescribable horrors that occurred in Auschwitz? This wide shot might symbolize that the mood of emptiness in Son of Saul transcends its titular character and that it stands for the unbearable loss caused by the Holocaust.

I have analysed Son of Saul from the perspective of the mood-cue approach, so I will now turn to ES Theory to analyse the cognitive investment of the spectator in relation to the emotion markers in the text. In the previous chapter, I have already discussed the fact that it is not the character, but the camera that serves as the spectator’s body. This leads me to an important factor in Son of Saul: the hand-held camera work23. The idea of movement is important in this respect, because, as Heimann et al. have indicated, “skilled lens and camera movements are able to boost our immersion in the film by adding kinesthetic bodily cues as well as the sense of balance and gravity” (2019: 2). Put differently, camera movement is able to translate the subjective impression of moving through space by activating the mirror neurons. When the camera movement serves the purposes of plot and narrative well, it can become invisible to the human eye (Gallese and Guerra 2019: 93). Heiman et al. have, for example, studied the

23 Hand-held camera shooting is a technique where the camera is operated from the body of the cameraman, as opposed to a tripod or another base. 21

Figure 3.

brain areas that are activated by the movement of the camera (more specifically in the case of the Steadicam) and have come to the conclusion that even without an actor on-screen the sensorimotor cortex is likely to be activated when the camera moves (2019: 8-9). This is the area in the brain that is involved in, among others, the execution of movements. Therefore, the movement of the camera has a significant influence on the activation of the mirror mechanism (Heimann et al. 2019: 14). In fact, every single shot in Son of Saul has been filmed hand-held. Even the relatively stable shots have a slightly shaking quality to it. Interestingly, it is proven that the hand-held camera is not the most effective way to translate subjective character experience to the viewer. This can be accomplished with the Steadicam, which flows more fluidly in contrast to the shakiness of the hand-held images (Heimann et al. 2014: 2098). Due to the imperfect simulation of subjective movement, I argue that the viewer’s experience of the shots in Son of Saul moves from disembodiment to embodiment as the film proceeds. I will demonstrate this on the basis of two shots that I described earlier; the shots represented in Figures 1 and 2. In the opening shot of Son of Saul, represented in Figure 1, the camera hovers above the ground as it displays a foggy view of a forest. When Saul walks into focus, the camera begins to mirror his movements as he accompanies the newly arrived victims. The non-fluid movement of the camera presents a chaotic sensation that ties into the tension that is represented in the off-screen voices and screams. The, as Gallese and Guerra term it, ‘jumpiness’ of the hand-held images does present a lesser sensation of moving independently within the scene (2019: 115). The mirror mechanism is expected to react to the movement of the camera, but the spectator will also sense a form of disembodiment in reaction to the unnatural movement that the hand-held images generate. These ‘jumpy’ images may

22 distance the viewer from Saul’s character in the opening scene. However, where the visual input may lead to spectator disembodiment, the sound design makes the environment present at all times. As I have already indicated, the sound design is able to provide ‘nearness’ to the surroundings. Consequently, Mark S. Ward argues in “Art in Noise” that the “perceptual immersion inducts core affect, mood and feeling-states within the body of the audience through (mostly) pre-attentional, nonconscious mechanisms …” (164). Thus, the spectator is immersed in the tension of the environment, before being able to react to it intellectually. This tension is also present in the camera movements. In line with the sound design, the ‘jumpy’ images do not yet align to the character of Saul, but rather create a bodily experience of stress. This can be recognized as a simulation of the horrific tension that camp inmates must have experienced upon arrival in Auschwitz. The shot that is represented in Figure 2 is featured around the twenty-minute mark of the film. This is just after Saul has set out to find a rabbi for the burial of his son. In the preceding shot, Saul informs about a rabbi in the camp when he is hit on the back by a German officer. The officer hurries Saul to transport the corpses from the gas chamber and the shot passes abruptly into the shot that I am concerned with. Saul rushes into the chamber and grabs a corpse. The camera follows him very closely, with the jumpy characteristic. There is a big difference with the opening shot that I described before. This is the fact that Saul, as well as the viewer, has an objective to focus on: the burial of ‘his’ son. All the surrounding circumstances (e.g. the close surveillance of the German officers, the almost continuous work as Sonderkommando, etc.) form a hinder to this mission. In this respect, the hand-held camera movement serves the plot; the narrative obstacle that is initiated by the German officer is mirrored by the jumpy images. In other words, the instability of Saul’s mission is now embodied by the camera, aligning the viewer with his character. As the viewer is drawn closer to Saul, the many close-ups of his face serve a new function. Namely, as Gallese and Guerra argue, the close-up can cause an increase in attention and “acts as a sensory field of attraction and appeal that enhances the emotive and empathic force of the movie” (Gallese and Guerra 2019: 149). In the case of a close-up of facial expressions, the viewer is likely to activate the same facial muscles. Gallese and Guerra term this ‘facial mimicking’, as the viewer is expected to mimic the emotional facial expressions that they observe (2019: 34). Consequently, the sensory-motor system enables the simulation of the relative corporeal state of the represented character (Gallese and Guerra 2019: 34-36). This makes it possible for the viewer to recognize the emotions, in this case the emotions of emptiness, externalized by Saul, by mimicking them externally and simulating them internally. The idea of mimicking the emotional facial expressions of a character connects ES theory directly to the mood-cue approach. It shows that the emotion cues of emptiness are embodied by the spectator. As described, these brief emotion states extend into a mood, which is an orientating state that is directed towards a goal. The mood of emptiness in Son of Saul is goal-oriented as well; although it seems ambivalent in the context of Auschwitz, where thousands of Jews were murdered every day, the

23 mood still directs the viewer toward the burial of Saul’s son. There are obstacles, like I have described with Figure 2, that “… endanger the hero, allying the audience with him …” (Smith 2003: 45) and resolutions, as the following shot shows. In a moment that is rare in Son of Saul, the camera closes in on two men that seem to be having an important discussion in a dark hallway (Figure 4). The shot appears to be a point of view (POV) shot from the perspective of Saul. As we know, he has made it his mission to find a rabbi. Therefore, he has walked away from his duty as Sonderkommando and wants to chance his luck with the two higher-up Sonderkommando24. The action potentiality of the camera is embodied by the POV shot, aligning the viewer with Saul’s movements and emotions (Gallese and Guerra 2012: 201). The first seconds of the shot essentially mimic the viewer’s own approach toward these men. However, in the end, Saul walks into the frame from the left and the shot turns out to have been a fake point of view (FPOV). The motor cortex will have been activated already and the viewer will have experienced the sensation of moving independently in the scene (Heimann et al. 2019: 15). As Saul approaches these men within the peri- personal space, this will likely result in a multisensory activation and, accordingly, the viewer is expected to have simulated Saul’s approach. At this point in the film, the combination of goals, obstacles and mirror mechanism works together to enable the spectator to embody the movements and emotions of Saul.

Figure 4.

24 There existed different ranks within the Sonderkommando. As we see represented in Son of Saul, the functions were divided in one oberkapo, different squad leaders and the working Sonderkommando like Saul. 24

In the current section, the mood-cue approach has been proven useful in analysing Son of Saul in terms of emotional configuration. I have come to the conclusion that the predominant orientating state in the film is one of emptiness. This mood brings along a sensation of ambivalence and futility, as we can recognize in the mission of Saul. The burial of his son feels like an ambivalent and empty gesture, because the sound design makes apparent that thousands of Jews are systematically exterminated in the background. This does not mean that the spectator is not able to embody the feelings of Saul. The hybrid approach has shown that the goal-orientation aligns the spectator to Saul’s intentions. This helps the activation of the mirror mechanism. Namely, through techniques such as sound design, hand-held camera movement and close-ups of Saul’s facial expressions, a variety of bodily reactions are evoked (e.g. immersion in the sound scape, moving independently in the scene and facial mimicking) that enable the spectator to embody character subjectivity. I will further elaborate on the historical relevance of Son of Saul’s approach of picturing the Holocaust in the third chapter, but I will first turn to Nemes’s second feature film Sunset to study a different use of mood and embodiment.

2.2 Sunset: The frustration of disembodiment Sunset failed to live up to the high standards that the audiences set for László Nemes after Son of Saul. The film did poorly in box office results and received mixed reviews. Many critics wrote it off as ‘disappointing’ (e.g. Variety.com) or ‘dispassionate’ (e.g. NPR.org). The mood-cue approach may provide an explanation for this. Namely, as Smith writes, some films “are counter to the basic structure of the emotion system as outlined here, making it less likely that audiences … will experience emotional responses” (2003: 108). Smith argues that one such film is Sergei Eisenstein’s Strike (1925). The film lacks a highly coordinated burst of redundant cues that is essential for the viewer’s emotional orientation (Smith 2003: 110). On the contrary, Eisenstein intentionally misguides the viewer by presenting them with narrative information that is later proven to be untrue (Smith 2003: 112). This creates a higher sense of awareness in the viewer and a more formal orientation toward the film’s structure. Smith argues that this formal orientation will come to replace the viewer’s emotional orientation (2003: 113). The opening shot in Sunset might be read along the same lines as the scene in Strike. The shot opens on a veil that blocks the view of a woman’s face. After some moments, the veil is slowly lifted up. It appears as if the woman, Írisz Leiter (Juli Jakab), is a customer in the millinery. The employees assist her with great care and show her the newest models in the store (Figure 5). After having played the role of customer, Írisz stands up and walks up to one of the employees that assisted her. She states that she has come for an application, to which the employee answers that she could have said that earlier. Not only the employee was misguided, but also the spectator. Without having received any prior information about this woman, the spectator will depend on the information that the shot provides. The spectator is expected to believe that Írisz is an upper-class customer, which is then quickly proven to be untrue. In this sense, Sunset makes use of the situation to reflect the defenceless state of the spectator. It prepares the spectator to respond in a more formal manner to the film. However, as Smith has argued,

25 these formal cues take the place of emotion cues. This will hinder the possibility of a well-organized emotional orientation and it is expected to leave the spectator with a vague sense of unease about the narrative and emotional progression.

Figure 5.

The above does not mean that there exist no emotion markers in Sunset. The film only fails to create an emotional orientation in the beginning of the film, but in later stages the film proves highly efficient. As I have described in the previous paragraph, the lack of emotional orientation creates a sense of unease. It is important to explicate that unease is not exactly an emotion or a mood25. It is a component of stress that occurs when something that we desire is absent or when something aversive is present (Arpaia and Andersen 4). Moreover, in accordance with the mood-cue approach, it can be argued that narrative clarity and goal-orientation are something that a spectator desires in the exposition of a film in order to experience emotion. In the case of Sunset, there is an absence of this. It is never made evident what brought Írisz to the millinery and her intentions remain vague. The film often feels as if the young woman is merely an observer of the events that take place around her, without exercising influence on the course of the events. Unease occurs when we become aware of a certain feeling or experience (Arpaia and Andersen 5). This shows that unease is a proper indicator of emotion. Hence, the sense of unease that is with the viewer in the opening shot in Sunset, may signal a range of emotions that develop in later stages in the film. I argue that the lack of emotion cues in the opening sequence in Sunset is principally related to the

25 Unease is a physical sensation that is experienced consciously; whereas emotions are, as we have seen in the previous chapter, part of nonconscious processes in the limbic system. 26 mood of frustration that is established in the following sequences. Apart from the absence of something that we desire, Arpaia and Andersen argue in the article “The Unease Modulation Model” that unease can also be the result of the inability to complete a task (6). This can eventually lead to the emotional experience of frustration. In the coming paragraphs, I will indicate how the sense of unease in the opening scene in Sunset has developed into the experience of frustration in the continuation of the film. The first scene that I will describe takes place around the one-hour mark in the film, so it is useful to take a step back and present the context of the scene. As we know, Írisz has applied for a job at the millinery. We learn that her parents were once the owners of the millinery (it also carries Írisz’s family name: the Leiter millinery), but that they passed away in a tragic accident. Nonetheless, the new owner, Oszkar Brill, rejects Írisz’s application and leaves her jobless in a city where she has no contacts. Brill proposes for Írisz to stay overnight at the house where the other employees live, before she can return to her home city. However, at night, Írisz is visited by a wild coachman who reveals that she has a brother. Írisz decides to stay in Budapest and seeks to find her brother. This brings me to the scene that I am concerned with, because it is the first time that Írisz believes that she knows the whereabouts of her sibling. In contrast to the opening sequence of Sunset, the scene that I am about to analyse provides dense emotion cuing that bolsters the general emotional orientation of the spectator toward the text (Smith 2003: 102). In the beginning of the scene, Írisz arrives at a luminous place at the end of a metro line. The first emotion cues stem from non-diegetic string music that creates a tense atmosphere for the scene. This tension is reinvigorated when Írisz recognizes the coachman that told her about the existence of her brother. He does not recognize Írisz and threatens her with a knife, another emotion cue. The young woman is saved just in time by an unknown man who prompts her to leave the dangerous place immediately. Despite the warning signals, the stubborn woman decides to continue her search while the tension in the background rises. In the continuing of the scene, even more emotion cues follow that frustrate Írisz and consequently frustrate the viewer; Írisz is denied the entrance for a door that seems to be able to give her answers, she is almost raped and, in the end, she is sent back to the metro she came with. Moreover, similar to Son of Saul, an important function is reserved for the sound design. Although the camera focuses on Írisz, the sound design provides a nearness to the men in the background that seem to be preparing for an important event. This dense emotion cuing through off-screen sounds and non-diegetic music prepares the viewer for a narrative resolution, but the viewer ends up emotionally frustrated in the same manner as Írisz. This feeling is reinforced by the fact that the viewer is not able to decipher the events in the background. It is unknown what the men are preparing for, so the viewer is left frustrated and defenceless to the narrative continuation that might follow. In the closing sequence, Írisz returns to the end of the metro line to find her brother. She dresses up like a man and enters the building where she was denied earlier. Inside the building, Írisz shouts the name ‘Leiter’ to a group of men because she seems to believe that her brother might be among them. The men depart hastily as a response. From here on, the emotion cues come in a dense configuration. In

27 the midst of the chaos that arises, a specially prepared coach brings Írisz to the Leiter millinery. The tense non-diegetic music and the scenes of fighting in the streets of Budapest prepare the viewer for the final resolution. Upon arrival at the millinery, a wild combination of sounds of fireworks, shooting and screaming, awaits. While the other employees of the millinery are being killed and raped in the background, Írisz searches the store for her brother. The soft look on Írisz’s face that we can see in Figure 5 has made way for a wild and barbarian one. The woman has turned into the centre of all the chaos that unfolds. After Oszkar Brill is also killed, the look on Írisz’s face turns into a gentle smile (Figure 6). Is this what she wanted all along? It is never made explicitly clear what Írisz’s intentions are, just as it is never made clear if Írisz’s brother really exists or if it is a projection of her imagination. The unease that arises from the chaotic situation is probably reinforced by the viewer’s inability to read Írisz’s intentions. If she really wanted to find her brother, it will provide frustration that she didn’t; and if Írisz wanted to bring down the millinery, the viewer might be frustrated by never becoming able to uncover the woman’s intentions. One way or another, the film does leave on a highly frustrated note.

Figure 6.

The frustration that arises from Sunset is not only the result of the film’s emotional configuration, but it is also the result of specific elements of the film’s style. I argue that this relates to the sensation of disembodiment that the film provides, which means that it is harder for the viewer to place themselves subjectively in the film and they are more aware of the artificial dimension. This brings me back to Gallese and Guerra’s ES Theory. The scholars discuss Michelangelo Antonioni’s Il Grido (1957) in terms of disembodiment. They indicate that the protagonist, Aldo, has no control over his environment, in the same manner as the viewer has no control over the fictitious world (Gallese and Guerra 2012:

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202). Antonioni uses a specific technique for the disembodied effect, a particular appropriation of the shot/reverse shot. Gallese and Guerra describe:

An extreme high angle shot shows us a worker calling Aldo, since Irma is looking for him. The worker stares at the camera and we interpret the shot as Aldo’s POV shot. Suddenly Aldo bursts into the shot from the left side and makes the viewer aware that it is a FPOV shot — now an over-the-shoulder shot — revealing that there is another gaze regulating the relationship between the characters. (203)

In other words, the viewer is presented with a sensation of embodiment that is later taken away. This highlights the artificiality of the camera and the presence of a narrator regulating the story. Sunset features a lot of the same FPOV shot/reverse shots from Il Grido. This is, for example, apparent in the series of shots represented in Figures 7 to 12. These shots initiate with a sense of embodiment, because it seems for a brief moment that the camera is looking at Oszkar Brill through Írisz’s eyes. The set-up for the effect is produced in Figures 7 and 8. The camera is placed inside of the conversation, highlighting the field of attention of Brill (which is focused on Írisz in front of him). As the shot reverses, in Figure 9, the viewer is expected to interpret it as a POV from Írisz. The camera is placed inside of the conversation again, but this time it is placed at the position where we expect Írisz’s eyes to be. Suddenly, Írisz bursts into the frame from the left, quite similarly to Aldo in Il Grido, making the viewer aware that it is a FPOV. The same stylistic technique is repeated several times in the film and even several times within this particular scene. As Gallese and Guerra have indicated, this technique disengages the camera from the character’s body and makes the viewer aware of the presence of a disembodied narrator (2012: 205). The sensation of disembodiment is, as we can see in figures 10 to 12, the result of the viewer’s exclusion from the diegetic world. It can lead to a frustrated relationship between viewer and camera. This is different from the role of the camera in Son of Saul, because in that film the camera serves the narrative and, for the most part, does not draw attention to itself. This is the main difference between embodiment and disembodiment, because in the former the viewer is made part of the story by sharing the experiences of the camera; whereas in the latter the viewer is made aware of the presence of a disembodied narrator by exclusion from the diegetic world. This sense of disembodiment in Sunset is reinforced with another technique: the jump cut. This particular cut does not adhere to the rules of continuity editing. In the jump cut, two consecutive shots in the same scene do not match temporally. There occurs a jump in time. While continuity editing can create a vision of a movie that is similar to our vision of reality, the illusory flow is broken by the jump cut. Namely, an average person blinks ten to fifteen times a minute and makes two to five rapid eye movements per second; this transforms real life into snapshots of the world and links well to the way

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Figures 7 – 12.

that scenes can be cut into shots (Gallese and Guerra 2019: 133-34). Accordingly, cutting on action26 often goes unnoticed because it simulates the perceptual competences that we use for the interaction with the world around us; whereas a discontinuous cut or a jump cut will arouse the spectator’s notice (Gallese and Guerra 2019: 136; 144). Therefore, as Gallese and Guerra have indicated, the jump cut leads to a temporary suspension of embodied simulation and thus creates a sense of disembodiment (2019: 136). In the first scene that Írisz travels to the end of the metro line, an interesting combination of continuity and discontinuity editing takes place. When the young woman is attacked by the coachman, we can observe how she looks down (Figures 13 and 14). On the action of looking down, a cut follows to an insert of the knife that the coachman presses on Írisz’s stomach (Figure 15). In the next shot, the woman looks up again as she faces the coachman (Figure 16). This is an example of perfect continuity editing. It is a means of losing ourselves in the narrative, because it is a literal cut toward the execution of an action. However, after Írisz is saved by the unknown man, something else occurs. The man tells her to go away (Figure 17), which is followed by a jump cut into the middle of a crowd. The camera finds the back of Írisz (Figure 18) as she continues the search for her brother. The first shots in this sequence were constructed to build the tension by means of embodiment, whereas the jump cut disturbs

26 With cutting on action, the editor creates continuity between two shots by using a character’s action to distract from the actual cut. 30 the illusory flow of the images. The latter will lead to disembodiment and frustration, as Írisz continues the unsuccessful search for her brother.

Figures 13 – 18.

The recurrent use of the FPOV shot/reverse shot and the jump cut does not mean that Sunset is thoroughly experienced as disembodying. The regular use of the hand-held camera and shallow focus is expected to produce an effect of subjectivity and identification. The movement of the hand-held shots produces the feeling of moving independently within the scene, whereas the shallow focus limits the viewer to the vision and hearing of Írisz. The latter separates the protagonist from the environment. It makes the viewer rely on their imagination to interpret the events that are presented out of focus. This is, for example, the case when Írisz is brought to the millinery at the end of Sunset. While she sits in the coach, the shots of people fighting in the streets of Budapest are presented out of focus. Probably Írisz is more worried about finding her brother or about what is going on in the millinery than these events on the streets, so the shallow focus aligns the viewer to her focus. Both techniques are also used in Son of Saul to create immersion and to separate the viewer from the horrid events in the extermination camp. However, in contrast to the emotion of emptiness in Son of Saul, these techniques are linked to the emotional experience of frustration in Sunset. The emotion cues that trick the viewer into anticipating narrative resolution create bursts of frustration that are reinforced by the stylistic use of FPOV shot/reverse shots and jump cuts. The combination of these cues and stylistic elements results in the intentional experience of frustration in Sunset.

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It must be said that the particular emotional configuration and spectator (dis)embodiment in Son of Saul and Sunset are in a logical alignment with the stories that both films tell. For example, an emotion like frustration would not make sense vis-à-vis the narrative of Son of Saul. However, the results from the hybrid cognitive model are also related to the historical dimension of both films. The next chapter deals with this dimension and shows that the particular emotional configuration and spectator (dis)embodiment are not only in service of the stories of Son of Saul and Sunset, but that they principally hold a historical relevance.

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Chapter 3. Cognitivism as an Empirical Basis for Prosthetic Memory

In the first chapter I have outlined a hybrid cognitive approach comprised of the mood-cue approach and Embodied Simulation (ES) Theory. I have applied this approach in the second chapter in studying László Nemes’ feature films Son of Saul and Sunset. This has led to the findings that the predominant mood in Son of Saul is one of emptiness and in Sunset one of frustration. In the former, the movement of the hand-held camera and the feeling for the character of Saul help the viewer to embody the actions of the protagonist; moreover, the many close-ups of the ‘empty’ facial expressions of Saul are expected to activate facial mimicking for the spectator and will thus set the emotional orientation of emptiness. In the case of Sunset, the mood-cue approach has pointed out that the film lacks redundant emotion cues in the opening sequences, which may lead to a frustrated spectator. This is further supported by an analysis of ES theory, which shows that the discontinuous use of several techniques will lead to disembodiment and frustration. With these different orientations, the films tell two particular stories of Europe’s past. This leads to the following question that will guide the current chapter: What is the historical relevance of the cognitive investment that Son of Saul and Sunset enable? To answer the above question, I have divided the chapter into the following three sections: In the first section, I research in what regards cognitive theory is of relevance in relation to prosthetic and historical memory; In the second section, the analyses of Son of Saul and Sunset will exemplify what roles film can play to activate this sort of memory; and in the concluding section of the chapter, I compare the films to two Hollywood counterparts; Schindler’s List and The Immigrant. The two additional case studies help affirm the functionality of the hybrid cognitive approach and are useful to establish what sort of films are (more) appropriate for the creation of prosthetic memory.

3.1 Prosthetic Memory As we have seen, Son of Saul takes place in 1944 and Sunset in 1913. The periodic gap that separates these historic moments from today makes that the living, communicational connection with the people that lived in these periods of time is fading out (Margitházi 84). Therefore, the events that take place in both films have stepped into a new temporal stage; the era of post memory. Margitházi argues in an article on sense memory27 that in order for the new generations to understand these events, they have to be recreated and re-experienced in mediated forms (84). The mediated products that rise from this recreation balance between different temporalities: the postmillennial moment of production, the represented historical period and possibly the temporality of source material (I elaborate on the source material in the second section). Elsaesser and other scholars have, therefore, argued that these sorts of cinematic representations should not be seen as reference material, but rather as sensual and affective

27 Sense memory belongs to the register of art. It is meant to produce affect in order to imprint the sensations of a particular event (Margitházi 85). 33 potential (e.g. Elsaesser 2001; Bondebjerg 2014; Landsberg 2004). In the current section, I argue that cognitive film theory presents empirical evidence for these theories. If we want to further elaborate on the sensual and affective potential of historical cinematic representations, it is necessary to turn to the notion of memory. This allows to talk more specifically about the dialogic relationship between the ‘now’ and the ‘then’; because, in the words of Paul Grainge, “it draws attention to the activations and eruptions of the past as they are experienced in and constituted by the present” (1). To start at the basis, in more recent years, scholars have come to agree that personal memory can be recognized as a cognitive process that allows us to recover information from the past through which we, among others, create personal identity. To make sense of the continuous stream of memory-recording (short-term memories, long-term memories, contextual memory, naming, recognition, etc.) we tend to organize our memories as a narrative structure. This results in, what Richard Heersmink terms, a self-narrative, wherein relations between memories are formed to create a subjective and personal story (1832). A second important factor in the recalling of memory is emotion; as Calabrese and Neugebauer have stated in their Memory and Cognition, Proceedings of the International School of Biocybernetics, “Information is more likely to be recalled from memory if it is congruent with the individual’s emotional experience” (114). The amygdala28 plays an essential role in this process, because it seems to ‘give permission’ for emotional inputs to “encompass the hippocampal circuitry29” (Calabrese and Neugebauer 122). In simple terms, memory is part of cognitive and emotional processes that function to construct a narrative about our past. Though we commonly think of memory as something personal and subjective, it is also created on a collective level. Memory may be socially constructed, but it can also be influenced by the media, by literature and by art. In the case of socially constructed memories, we speak of ‘collective memory’30; rather, for the purposes of this research, I will focus on memory that is influenced by mass cultural technologies (Zou 132). This is what Alison Landsberg has termed ‘prosthetic memory’. This form of memory is also socially constructed, but, the difference with collective memory is that prosthetic memory relies on mass media and technologies that connect and unify people who have nothing in common (Landsberg 2004: 28). Thus, prosthetic memories do not derive from a person’s lived experience, but from the public circulation of a memory that becomes “part of one’s personal archive of experience, informing one’s subjectivity as well as one’s relationship to the present and future tense” (Landsberg 2004: 25-26). These mediated representations of the past are useful, in the eyes of

28 The amygdala is part of the limbic system that I discussed in the previous chapters. Many call it the ‘emotional core’ of the emotion system. 29 The hippocampus is a major area of the brain. Advancements in neuroscientific studies have shown that the hippocampal circuit play an important role in the processing of the information flow, of which the storing and retrieval of memories is a part (Basu and Siegelbaum, “The Corticohippocampal Circuit, Synaptic Plasticity, and Memory”). 30 ‘Collective memory’ was termed by Maurice Halbwach in his 1925 Les cadres sociaux de la mémoire. Halbwach is commonly recognized as the founding father of memory studies. His theories of collective memory were later expanded on by scholars such as James E. Young and Jan Assmann. 34

Landsberg, because they are experienced as real memories and they can help people think about events in the world and about ethical relations between people (2004: 20). Moreover, Landsberg recognizes the historical film as an effective tool in the creation of prosthetic memory; she argues that cinema has the power to create immersive bodily encounters with historical events and foreign geopolitical logics in order to make the audience care for them (2015: 32). This idea of prosthetic memory works well in collaboration with cognitive film studies, because, as we have seen, this research field shows that the medium of film speaks to the same cognitive capacities as memory. It has already been demonstrated that both memory and film function on the basis of narrative and emotion, which already explains that film can indeed have a strong impact on the creation of prosthetic memory, but the parables stretch further. As discussed in the previous chapters, it is not only narrative and emotion that activate the viewer when watching film. ES Theory has shown that the inherent building blocks of cinema are also part of the viewer’s interaction with film and their experience thereof. This is not only a mental, but also a physical experience of the mind. Hustvedt has argued, in this regard, that memory and imagination are also embodied (188). She concludes that novel writing – but, as Gallese indicates, this can be applied to any form of artistic creativity (197) – depends on the same processes that transmute “experience into the narratives we remember explicitly, but which are formed unconsciously” (195). This means that fiction consists of a bridge between an unconscious sensorimotor affective self31 and a fully conscious, emotional self (Hustvedt 195). Thus, according to Hustvedt, the viewer’s physical experience of an imaginary world can be seen as the equivalent to remembering events that never happened (195). The above does not mean that the imaginary world cannot be based on actual events. Hustvedt rather argues that every event in the past is automatically imaginary. Even in autobiographical memories we become others to ourselves (Hustvedt 189). The images and experiences that we create in our minds may bear little resemblance to what actually was (Hustvedt 190). This is where Freud’s notion of ‘Nachträglichkeit’- or, as James Strachey has translated, ‘deferred action’ - comes into place. The notion is used in psychoanalysis to make sense of a patient’s memory. Hustvedt elaborates:

The adult patient may have memories from when he was 5 years old, but those memories have been reconfigured over time. The analyst would be alert to repetitive themes and defenses in his patient’s speech, but also voice cadences, hesitations, and, if his patient is looking at him, the motions and gestures of a body. What is created between analyst and patient is not necessarily a story that represents historical fact, but one that reconstructs a past into a narrative that makes sense of troubling emotions and neuroses.

31 Sensorimotor skills involve processes of receiving sensory data (from vision, hearing, etc.) and producing a response. The unconscious sensorimotor affective self in fiction resonates with our ‘unconscious’ bodily presence in day-to-day life. 35

For patient and doctor, as for the novelist, the narrative must also be felt; it must resonate bodily as emotionally true. (188)

This shows that there is no original ‘true’ memory, but that what counts is the way that we experience memory as an emotional and embodied narrative. Whether this stems from personal experiences or mediated stories does not matter. It all adds up to the personal identity that we create. Hence, film is able to create (prosthetic) memories that feel as real as memories from our own experiences.

3.2 The Imaginary Worlds of Son of Saul and Sunset The discussion about imaginary narratives as a form of memory becomes more delicate and complicated if we turn to Son of Saul. Namely, many believe that all fictional narratives of the Holocaust are misrepresentations. These believes are based on the idea that the Holocaust was horrifying beyond the extent of human imagination and that any representation will put presence where there can only be absence (Elsaesser 1996: 147). On the other side of the debate are those that believe that such a literal stance is itself merely a mode of representation, which results in powerlessness and it confines the events to ‘a fast receding point in time’ (Elsaesser 1996: 147). The term ‘trauma theory’ is important for this second group, because it enables to rethink the theoretical and political status of the ‘imaginary’ in relation to the Holocaust (Elsaesser 2001: 194). Elsaesser explains that ‘trauma theorists’ “want to articulate a theory of the subject not around desire and its constitutive lack (the Freud-Lacanian route), but around memory and its - politically enforced, patriarchally inflicted - gaps, absences and traceless traces. In its most general sense, this trauma theory is a theory of victimhood and a politics of blame …” (2001: 194). Accordingly, theorizing the Holocaust in terms of traumatic experience helps understand how film, that we now understand as the generator of prosthetic memory, may serve to (partly) fill the gaps and absences that have been created in the memory of the victims. The question then becomes: How can we do right by representing the Holocaust in cinema? There have been two groups in the cinematic representation of the Holocaust: Hollywood and European cinema. Of the former, Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List is the most well-known. One of the most popular American film directors transformed the Holocaust, in the words of Elsaesser, ‘into a dramatization of ghetto life’ (1996: 148). Schindler’s List received high popular acclaim, winning Best Picture and six other Academy Awards, but the film became highly debated in academia. Those that praise the film, like McMillen in “Dehumanization and the Achievement of Schindler’s List”, argue, among others, that the film is unique in showing the dehumanizing practices of the Nazis, and the “radical denial of human worth” (311-12). Namely, Schindler’s List follows Oskar Schindler, member of the Nazi party, through whose eyes we can observe the Nazis’ dehumanization of their victims. Those that criticize Schindler’s List often consider the film ‘sentimental kitsch’, because it has turned the Holocaust into a ‘feel good’ movie (Revesz 25), wherein cinema seems to be able to redeem the past (Elsaesser 1996: 164). Moreover, criticizers from the viewpoint of the European tradition, like French

36 filmmaker Claude Lanzmann, denounce the film for the fact that it shows the Holocaust in immediate and fastidious detail, literally representing the unrepresentable (Revesz 24-25). Lanzmann himself directed the 9-hour documentary Shoah (Lanzmann, 1985), which became something of a gold standard in European Holocaust representation (Revesz 24). In Shoah, Lanzmann interviews witnesses – perpetrators as well as victims – in order to recount the story of the Holocaust. The director refused to transform or mythologize the Holocaust and thus avoided dramatic recreations or archive footage. The camera solely focuses on the interviewed subjects, who Lanzmann separates sharply from each other, and empty landscapes that once housed the Nazi sites of mass murder. In presenting the Holocaust in this manner, Lanzmann insists on the impossibility of representing the unrepresentable. I will further discuss Schindler’s List and Holocaust representation in Hollywood in the third section, but in the current section I first explain how Son of Saul fits in the European tradition. Namely, similarly to Shoah, Son of Saul refuses to represent the Nazi practices of mass murder in immediate detail. As we have seen, Son of Saul addresses these practices in the out of focus and out of frame. Moreover, Son of Saul insists on a limited perspective of the events. The film appropriates various techniques (e.g. hand-held camera, shallow focus) to create an embodied experience that is not bound to the Holocaust at large, but rather to the perspective of Saul. The fact that Son of Saul presents this limited perspective does not entail that the narrative is taken from thin air. On the contrary. As I have already discussed, Nemes has a degree in History, and he has done vast research on the Holocaust and the Sonderkommando before he started on the screenplay of Son of Saul (Wollaston 9). Below, I discuss how the historical accuracy is related to the emotional and physical experience of Son of Saul, and why this is of relevance for the creation of our prosthetic memory of the past. One of the most important source materials for Son of Saul has undoubtedly been Georges Didi- Huberman’s Images in Spite of All (2003). The French philosopher and art historian argues that “We must attempt to imagine the hell that Auschwitz was in the summer of 1944” (3) and that we are obliged to contemplate and comprehend it, that is, to confront ourselves to images of horror. Thus, Images in Spite of All describes in great detail the unimaginable hell of Auschwitz as it was experienced through the eyes of the Sonderkommando. The book is a reconstruction on the basis of eyewitness reports, found scraps of writing in the soil of Auschwitz and, most importantly, four photographs that the Sonderkommando managed to take of the burning pits and the victims in Auschwitz. The fact that the Sonderkommando were able to document their practices was, according to Didi-Huberman, “impossible by default” (8). They had to continuously perform the most horrific work of handling the death of their fellows and they were locked out from all other existence. Writing was absolutely forbidden and being caught would result in immediate death. However, the Sonderkommando were aware of the historical value documenting their practices and took great risks in materializing the unimaginable moments of the Holocaust (Didi-Huberman 6). Upon seeing Son of Saul, Didi-Huberman responded with an open letter to László Nemes. A translation (by Chiri Larsson) reads: “Your film, Son of Saul, is a monster. A necessary, coherent,

37 beneficial, innocent monster … You have taken the risk of constructing a certain realism facing a historic reality often qualified as unimaginable” (7; 25). The latter is crucial, because in presenting the unimaginable, Son of Saul has honoured and extended the impossible work that the Sonderkommando have carried out. Thus, the film has, as Didi-Huberman advocated for, attempted to imagine the hell of Auschwitz in 1944. This is performed with, as I have analysed in detail in the previous chapter, a camera that is bound to the body of one of the Sonderkommando, Saul. His emotionally empty facial expressions cue the spectator into orientating toward the film with the mood of emptiness, which highlights the futility of the Sonderkommando’s work as we are able to aurally perceive the horrifying sounds of screaming victims. The automized and empty handling of Saul relates to one of the found scraps presented in Images in Spite of All: “Of course, I could throw myself onto the electrical wires, like so many of my friends, but I want to live … In our work, if you don't go mad the first day, you get used to it” (Langbein 202). This shows that the only thing that the Sonderkommando could do was surviving, without hope, “in the ignominy of the job” (Didi-Huberman 5). In presenting this sensation through the close-ups of the facial expressions of Saul, the viewer may mimic the expressions and emotions of a Sonderkommando. Moreover, some of the events that are recalled in Images in Spite of All are also recreated in Son of Saul. The film replicated the muting that occurred in October of 1944 and also recreates the practice of ‘four photographs that were snatched from hell’ (Didi-Huberman 6). In reality, the Sonderkommando managed to successfully photograph the practices of mass murder, as we can see in Figure 19. However, in the recreation in Son of Saul, the vision becomes obliterated by smoke when the Sonderkommando try to snatch the photograph. The Sonderkommando that smuggled a camera with him ends up taking a photograph of a cloud of smoke, symbolically indicating the limits of representing everything (Vincze 116). There is something else occurring during this scene. Namely, the film camera is positioned (in a recreated setting) at more or less the same place as the camera was in 1944 (Figure 20). With the embodying capacity of the hand-held images, the camera can immerse the viewer in this position with a sense of balance and gravity (Heimann et al. 2019: 2). In doing so, the film camera has symbolically taken over the perspective of the Sonderkommando that snatched the photograph. The many comparisons between Son of Saul and the book Images in Spite of All indicate that Son of Saul’s fictional narrative is rooted in historical sources and documentation. With the limited viewpoint, Son of Saul is an attempt to fill one of the many gaps in memory that have been formed in the Holocaust. The film uses narrative, emotion and physical orientation to inform the viewer’s subjectivity in orientating toward the Holocaust. This produces an experience that feels like something of a real memory of the Holocaust, which Landsberg thus has termed a prosthetic memory, that is coded with the emotion of emptiness. Although this matches with the words of a Sonderkommando that were written on a scrap of paper, it might seem uncanny that a spectator is prompted to orientate emptily to the horrors that are represented in the film. However, the emotional experience of emptiness matches with studies that have been conducted with second-generation survivors. As successors of the survivors, behind whom are “ruin and death and infinite emotional emptiness” (Wardi 30), it was expected of the

38

Figure 19. Figure 20.

second-generation to re-establish families and fill the enormous void left after the Holocaust. This often resulted in the second-generation members to show the same emotional suppression of emotions (Gottschalk 364). Thus, for survivors and second-generation members, emptiness is an emotion that is commonly associated with the Holocaust. The fact that the imaginary narrative of Son of Saul creates a similar emotional orientation may cause the viewer to remember traumatic events that did not happen in their own lives, with the same emotional coding of a (second-generation) survivor. This does not mean that we know what Holocaust victims and survivors went through, because the unimaginable will always remain unimaginable, but Son of Saul may fill the gap in the memory of the Holocaust in the minds of the viewers of the post memory era.

Whereas Son of Saul was inspired by historical ‘facts’ like the ones named in Images in Spite of All, Nemes has mostly mentioned literary writers as source material for Sunset. It is important to be critical on this topic. Namely, in the case of historical films, source material often has (and should have) a big influence on the final product. The source material can be considered part of the director’s own archive of experience; it can thus be considered part of the director’s prosthetic memory of the events that he or she is, in turn, translating to film. This means that the prosthetic memory that is created through the source material indirectly influences the prosthetic memory that can be created through the film. Therefore, it is crucial in the hybrid cognitive approach for embodying history in film to critically reflect upon the source material that directors have used as inspiration for their imaginary narratives of the past. Turning to Sunset, the fact that Nemes was inspired by literature instead of more academic and theoretical works does not necessarily make the film less fit in articulating a story of the past. In fact, many historians consider literature as part of the historical archive. Allan H. Pasco explains: “No well- trained historian or critic would today deny that creative works form a significant, well-integrated part of that tapestry created by a period's economic, social, and political beliefs and values. It is the way

39 individuals think and feel about a society that characterizes them and their times, marking their differences from people that preceded and followed them” (389). There are a couple of elements that make literature a well-suited medium to produce historical understanding. First of all, literature is less vulnerable than other types of historical sources to the influences of policy and ideology (Kelly 141); second of all, literature presents insights into the mental world of the people of a particular time (Pasco 378); and lastly, literature gives us an idea of the attitudes and customs of the ordinary life of the people (Pasco 382). To reiterate, literary works can uncover the conscious and unconscious reality of a specific period of time. In the case of Sunset, Nemes has named literary writer Franz Kafka as the most important inspiration. Kafka became famous (posthumously) for his bizarre depictions of bureaucracy, exploring themes such as alienation and hopelessness (Mlačnik, “The Relevance of Franz Kafka and Cultural Studies”). Nemes explains: “In Kafka, I really like how his character is always facing the walls of the labyrinths that they journey in. So there’s some question of hope and hopeless[ness] linked to Central Europe or Central European fate and history” (Goldmann, “In Laszlo Nemes’s ‘Sunset,’ A Labyrinth Of Hungary And Millinery”). Namely, Kafka writes about characters that are trapped in impossible situations that are linked to the corrupted bureaucratic system of Central Europe (Mlačnik, “The Relevance of Franz Kafka and Cultural Studies”). The same is true for the protagonist, Írisz Leiter, in Sunset, because the woman is – like the characters in Kafka – trapped in a world that hides its meaning from her (Jacobs, “The Future of Nostalgia”). Sunset takes, not coincidentally, place in the same period of time and place as Kafka’s writings and life. Max Brod32 explains that Kafka’s literature was filled with frustration and irony that were, according to Kafka, a component of the existence of that time (Ong 174). As a German and Czech speaking Jew in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Kafka was split between different cultures and languages (Mlačnik, “The Relevance of Franz Kafka and Cultural Studies”). He did not fully identify with the Jews, the Czechs or the Germans (Mlačnik, “The Relevance of Franz Kafka and Cultural Studies”). This results in two central characteristics in the literature of Kafka: a sense of non-belonging and a frustrated relationship with religion. Particularly the latter links well to the narrative of Sunset. As analysed in the previous chapter, Írisz Leiter arrives in Budapest without having friends, a family, or a job to rely on. The environment reacts hostile to Írisz’s presence as she is caught as the ‘other’ in a web of power relations. However, not only does Sunset tell the story of a character that does not belong, but the film also conveys the frustrated experience that Kafka has described as a result of it. The mood-cue approach has shown that Sunset is counter to the basic structure of the emotion system. The film intentionally misguides the viewer in the opening sequence and asks for a formal orientation as opposed to an emotional one. This creates a sense of unease, which transforms into the emotion of frustration as Írisz

32 Max Brod wrote an extensive biography (Franz Kafka: A Biography) about Kafka. Brod was a good friend and brought Kafka’s literature to the world after he had passed away. 40 is not able to complete the tasks that she sets for herself. The emotion of frustration is tied with disembodiment in Sunset. Techniques such as the fake point-of-view shot/reverse shot and the jump cut highlight the artificiality of the camera and exclude the viewer, in a literal reconstruction of non- belonging, from the diegetic world. Thus, Sunset is very effective in recreating the experiences that we read in Kafka. Kafka’s literature is often considered historically relevant because it makes apparent how the oppressive regime in Austro-Hungary curtailed historical and individual space (Cornis-Pope and Neubauer 385). As we know, Kafka’s characters were not unique in their alienation. The Austro- Hungarian Empire was comprised of a wide variety of different cultures and ethnicities. This caused a lot of protests and upheaval in the Dual Monarchy in the beginning of the twentieth century. Moreover, in 1908, Vienna (the capital of the empire) had announced the annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina (Hall 9). This sparked a crisis in Europe that damaged the relations between Austria-Hungary and many other European countries. Most notably, the stressed relationship between Austria-Hungary and Serbia led Serbian nationalists to assassinate the Austro-Hungarian heir, Archduke Franz Ferdinand. Many deem this the cause for the start of World War I. Both Kafka’s literature and Sunset (as an interpretation of Kafka) may be seen as imaginary worlds that have transformed the turbulent times in the early twentieth century of Central Europe into narrative. As Brod has analysed, Kafka articulated his troubling first-hand experiences into his narratives. Thus, in replicating the emotion of frustration and a physical sense of non-belonging that we read in Kafka, Nemes presents a historical recreation that does not necessarily take in mind historical ‘facts’ but rather a personal experience of that time. This is different than a history lesson, because Sunset speaks to the same cognitive capacities (narrative, emotion and physical experience) as memory- processing in our brain. As a result, Sunset comes to feel like the viewer’s own memory. This prosthetic memory becomes part of the viewer’s personal archive of experience, helping the viewer to think about the represented historic events with the same emotional and physical orientation of an individual, Kafka in this case, with a closeness to the events.

3.3 Embodying History in Hollywood? In the concluding section of this chapter, I would like to turn to two Hollywood counterparts of Son of Saul and Sunset. Until now, I hope that it has become clear what the cognitive and historical appeal of the two films is. In comparing the films to others, I like to prove the functionality of the hybrid cognitive approach; and, accordingly, I hope to indicate what makes a film fit in the creation of prosthetic memory. For this, I turn to Schindler’s List and The Immigrant. Both are often categorized as melodramas, because, as will be further discussed, they make use of a complex network of emotion scripts to elicit intense emotion. In Schindler’s List, these moments unfold around Oskar Schindler, an entrepreneur who profited from the Holocaust. In The Immigrant, we arrive in New York with Ewa, a Polish (Central European) immigrant who has come to seek a better life for herself and her sister.

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There are two rather famous scenes in Schindler’s List that would be interesting to analyse; the ‘shower scene’ and Schindler’s breakdown. Schindler had arranged for over a thousand Jews to be transported to his workcamp. This would save their lives. However, due to an error in paper work, the train with the Jewish women is transported to Auschwitz. This is where the ‘shower scene’ begins. The camera glides past the women as their hair is cut, and observes how all of them have to disrobe and enter the showers. This brings me back to the difference in ‘feeling for’ and ‘feeling with’ a character. We can expect that most viewers are, depending on their extratextual knowledge, aware of the routine that victims went through in the extermination camps. Therefore, the viewer will rely on their understanding of the situation to create an appropriate emotional reaction (Smith 2003: 90). This results in feeling for the Jewish women, because the viewer is expected to be concerned about their awaiting faith. As the women enter the ‘showers’, a hand-held camera is positioned inside the group. This makes possible, in a similar manner as the opening sequence in Son of Saul, an embodiment of the tension that victims must have felt. Then, as the door is shut, the camera takes an outside perspective and pushes in on a peephole that shows the women naked and humiliated. The spectator is again placed outside of the perspective of the victims and is able to observe them as they wait helplessly. In the remainder of the scene, Spielberg reinvigorates the physical tension as he intercuts between the frightened women and the shower heads. The combination of screaming, music and tension result in, as Aaron Kerner has put it, “a Hitchcockian sense of suspense” (42). This suspense is reinforced with the movement of the camera. In an essential shot in the scene, the camera mimics a subjective viewpoint, as the camera tilts up to one of the shower heads. This gives the viewer, according to ES theory, the possibility of simulating the suspense internally as they are able to mirror the movement. It is a moment of feeling with the women, because the spectator knows just as much as the women in this particular moment. In the end, a miracle occurs, as water comes from the showers. From a God-like angle we can observe how the women react to being safe. In shifting between an objective and subjective perspective, Spielberg plays with both the omniscience of the spectator and moments of individual embodiment. As a result, a complex network of emotion scripts is activated, ranging from sadness for the women, suspense with the women, and a sense of happiness that everything worked out. This is representative of the melodrama as an ‘emotional rollercoaster’. The second scene that I am concerned with is the second-last scene in Schindler’s List. In this scene, Schindler breaks down in front of the large group of Jews that he saved during the Holocaust. Schindler cries out that he could have saved more. The dramatic music in the background rises and the surrounding Jews walk up to Schindler and hug him. The emotion markers in this scene are presented to us both aurally, through the dramatic music, and visibly, through the harmonious coming together of the Jews and their ‘saviour’ (Figure 21). This indicates the narrative resolution of the film, wherein the war has finally come to an end and the Jews are free again. The manner wherein the emotion markers interact with the narrative is expected to create a nuanced emotional appeal, resulting in melodramatic relief. Moreover, the use of continuity editing leads to a high degree of activation of the mirror

42 mechanism (Gallese and Guerra 2019: 134). We see this, for example, when Schindler shakes the hand of his manager, Itzhak Stern, wherein a medium shot is followed by an insert of the hands shaking. The transition stimulates the perceptual competences similar to the viewer’s visual interaction with day-to- day life, but, additionally, the narrow focus of the close-up also triggers the activation of the motor and tactile systems (Gallese and Guerra 2019: 144; 151). Thus, the spectator is able to map the bodily experiences of Schindler through a maximum stimulation of tactile resonance (Gallese and Guerra 2019: 163). In contrast to the earlier described scene, the working together of emotion markers and mirror mechanism is expected to prompt the viewer to feel with Schindler. As Schindler breaks down, the viewer may also shed tears at this classically melodramatic moment of ‘being too late’.

Figure 21.

To understand the difference in the roles that Schindler’s List and Son of Saul play in the prosthetic memory of the Holocaust, I would like to turn to Jeremy Maron’s article, “Affective Historiography.” In the article, Maron argues that the melodramatic form is a productive solution to historical representation. He states that Schindler’s breakdown can be seen as “a response of raw, illogical emotional gesture at the expense of psychological causal explanation [which] becomes a means of enacting the muteness that is both characteristic of melodrama and disposed by historical events that challenge certain epistemological assumptions regarding historical representation” (86). The, in Maron’s words, visceral emotionality that Schindler’s List conveys is a means of creating an alternative mode of history. What Maron does not take into account is the fact that not only the melodrama, but every film elicits at least some sort of emotion. Thus, we should not evaluate films on whether they convey emotion or not, but we should rather turn to the sort of emotion that films convey and how they do it.

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The obvious difference between Schindler’s List and Son of Saul is the fact that in the former the spectator is prompted to feel for the 1100 Jews that were saved by Schindler, whereas in the latter the spectator will probably feel with Saul, one Sonderkommando in specific. This leads to a sad orientation toward the Holocaust’s victims in more general terms in Schindler’s List and an empty orientation toward Saul’s individual experiences. In line with this, some have argued that Schindler’s List presents the Holocaust like a dramatic spectacle wherein the perspective is magnified and suffering is turned into a fetishist desire33 (e.g. Elsaesser 1996; Kerner 2011). Yet that does not mean that the film is merely experienced as distant and disembodying. As we have seen, techniques such as the hand-held camera and continuity editing result in the activation of the mirror mechanism. This means that there is high probability that the spectator will embody the emotion cues of sadness. Interestingly, in a research that was conducted with visitors of Holocaust concentration camp memorials, the emotion of sadness was often experienced when visitors looked from the viewpoint of the offenders (Nawijn et al. 175). The emotion of sadness in Schindler’s List makes sense in comparison to these research results, because, if we were to feel with a character in the film, it would be with Schindler, who factually was an offender. In the end, Son of Saul and Schindler’s List can be compared as the following: Both films are effective in speaking to the cognitive capacities of the spectator. They have dense emotional configuration and activate the mirror neurons. This makes the films efficient in becoming part of the viewer’s personal archive of experience, thus creating the feeling of a real memory. However, both films do so with very different emotional coding. Son of Saul creates a prosthetic memory that is coded with the emotion of emptiness, bringing the viewer closer to Holocaust survivors and second-generation members; whereas Schindler’s List creates a prosthetic memory that is coded with the emotion of sadness that tends to relate to the viewpoint of the offenders, emotionally distancing the viewer from the victims and their families.

A film that makes an interesting comparison to Sunset is The Immigrant. Both films feature a young woman in the early twentieth century (Sunset in 1913 and The Immigrant in 1921) that arrives in a new city to seek better opportunities. As we have seen, in the case of Sunset it is the city of Budapest. In The Immigrant, the Polish Ewa (Marion Cotillard) arrives in the city of New York. Ewa is initially refused upon arrival in Ellis Island34, because she appears to be a ‘woman of low morals’. However, in the expulsion line, Ewa meets Bruno (Joaquin Phoenix) who manages to help her into the country and offers her a place to stay. There, Bruno turns out to be a pimp who houses women in return for exotic dances and sex work. Because of the desperate situation that Ewa is in (her sister was stopped at the border and needs to be freed, and Ewa herself has no money or housing), she ends up working for Bruno.

33 This is apparent in the shot of the peephole through which the viewer is able to observe the women standing naked and humiliated, awaiting their death. 34 Ellis Island was the busiest immigrant inspection station in the United States between 1892 and 1954. 44

It should be clear that the parables between Sunset and The Immigrant are not as clear as they were between Son of Saul and Schindler’s List. The films take place on different continents and in different cultures. Therefore, we should not compare Sunset and The Immigrant directly on the basis of emotional configuration and embodied simulation, but rather we should study how the two films, comparatively, provide entry points into the specific historical circumstances that they picture. I have already done this for Sunset, so I now turn to The Immigrant. Although The Immigrant can be categorized as an indie film, it follows the basic Hollywood rules of continuity editing. We see this in one of the key scenes, wherein Bruno makes Ewa feel embarrassed for stealing money and psychologically forces her into working for him. As the tension between the two rises, the over the shoulder shot/reverse shot technique immerses the spectator in the conversation. Moreover, there are two components that create dramatic tension in the scene. As Bruno confronts Ewa about stealing the money, dramatic music rises in the background. This goes accompanied with a push-in on the crying Ewa that results in a close-up of the woman (Figure 22). As we have seen in the previous chapter, close- ups act as a sensory field of attraction that enhance the emotive force of a movie (Gallese and Guerra 2019: 149). The combination of dramatic music and the close-ups of the sad facial expressions of Ewa can be recognized as emotion markers of sadness. The close-up of Ewa is expected to lead to facial mimicking, which causes a re-using of the same neural circuits for the spectator (Gallese and Guerra 2019: 34). Thus, the viewer will orientate with the emotion of sadness toward The Immigrant.

Figure 22.

As we have seen in the case of Sunset, the conveyed non-belonging and frustration ties into the subjective experiences of inhabitants of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, as we can read in Kafka’s

45 literature. In the case of The Immigrant, director Gray has not mentioned particular source material as inspiration for the film. Rather, he has based himself on stories from his grandparents that were themselves immigrants that went through Ellis Island (Holloway, “NYFF ‘13”). Since Gray’s grandparents have passed away, we should turn to alternative material to understand the individual experiences and emotions of immigrants in the early twentieth century. As we know from a variety of sources that are (partly) based on personal accounts of the ‘immigration experience’ (e.g. Brownstone et al. 2000; Rogoveanu 2014; Werner 2009; Yung 2004), the immigration procedural and the aftermath often led to physical, sexual and psychological trauma. The sea journey was harrowing as the boats were often packed with too many people and the lower classes were locked up in the steerage departments (Rogoveanu 99). Upon arrival, the medical inspections at Ellis Island led to anxiety (a negative judgement could lead to deportation) and embarrassment (as many immigrants had to strip of their clothes) (Irwin 84). Even when immigrants were allowed into the country, they often had to work up to eighty hours a week to be able to support themselves and their families (Irwin 85). Meryl J. Irwin’s article “Their Experience is the Immigrant Experience” gives interesting insights into how these immigrants look back upon the ‘immigrant experience’. In the article, Irwin analyses five ‘historical-compilation’ documentaries that are composed of, among others, “archive materials including audio and video recordings of oral histories collected from persons processed through Ellis Island; printed oral histories read by the main film narrator or voice actors; photographs and portraiture of immigrants before, during, and after processing at Ellis Island … [and] extant silent film footage taken of persons in process at Ellis Island” (Irwin 77). Irwin analyses the fact that many of the voices heard are of immigrants recalling the passing through Ellis Island (82). As they do this, their “voices “choke up,” “sniffle” and become unintelligible with emotion” (Irwin 82). Thus, for many of these immigrants, recalling the ‘immigrant experience’ brings up memories of suffering and trauma. This appears to link well to the emotional orientation that I have analysed in the scene of the The Immigrant. The continuity editing, the use of music and the close-ups create a sense of embodiment that draws the viewer both emotionally and physically into an immigrant experience of 1921 New York. The emotional configuration of sadness shows that the viewer is expected to experience the events similarly to how immigrants have experienced them or still experience in their memories, as analysed in a variety of sources. Thus, next to Sunset, the imaginary narrative of The Immigrant has proven to also be effective in creating a prosthetic memory of a particular period in time, with the same emotional coding of individuals with a closeness to the events. This shows that the hybrid cognitive model is useful to study a wide variety of films and genres.

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Conclusion

“In a way, the people tend to approach history in a very frozen manner and I wanted to offer an internal point of view to something that seems to be so well-known. History experienced from the inside doesn’t look like a postcard. It looks like reality” (Eng, “Son of Saul’s László Nemes and Géza Röhrig on Depicting History from the Inside”).

I began the thesis with a personal anecdote to show where my fascination for László Nemes and his films stems from. I hope that the above quote makes the thesis come full circle again. Namely, the quote shows, as I stated in the introduction, that Nemes is clear about the vision of his practice and that he is aware of the role that his films can play to create a dialogic relationship between the viewer and the past. This thesis has, for a large part, served as a sophistication of these ideas, for which I have turned to the field of cognitive film theory. The cognitive research tradition has provided me with two approaches (the mood-cue approach and Embodied Simulation (ES) theory) that have presented insights into the cognitive capacities that are employed by the viewer in their dialogic relationship with film. Consequently, I have connected these results to the field of memory studies to show that historical films are able to influence the spectator cognitively in the same manner as that we recall memories. Thus, as I have attempted to argue after Nemes, historical films are effective in creating a memory of the past. In the first chapter, I opened the discussion about the role of biology in spectatorship and film studies. I hope that, with this thesis, I have made a positive contribution to the discussion and that I have made a convincing case for the relevance of cognitive film studies. Namely, as the field shows, watching a film is no less part of biological processes as a growing tree is. Bordwell already wrote in 1985 that the spectator can be seen as an organism that constructs “perceptual judgement on the basis of nonconscious inferences” (31). In more recent years, it has become clear that the spectator is not only involved in perceptual judgement, but also in an emotional and a physical interaction with film that is regulated by brain areas like the limbic system and the amygdala. Cognitive studies relies, in this respect, on the ‘certainties’ of scientific deduction and empirical evidence, as opposed to the ‘vagaries’ of interpretation in fields like phenomenology (Vescio 384). In the case of my research, empirical evidence from the neurosciences has shown how cues and film techniques impact the spectator. For example, camera movement can provide a physical sensation of moving independently within a scene; close-ups of facial expressions can lead to facial mimicking; and redundant emotion cues can provide an emotional orientation that is similar to the orientation in our day-to-day lives. These theories do not suggest that film is not a social practice, or that race and gender do not matter in film studies; rather, cognitive theory shows that every spectator has been shaped by the same biological processes, and that in studying these processes we can make sense of the basis of our interaction with film.

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In the second chapter, I integrated the mood-cue approach and ES theory into a hybrid cognitive approach to analyse how Nemes’s Son of Saul and Sunset speak to the cognitive capacities of the spectator. Here, the mood-cue approach brought to light how the films are experienced as low-level emotional states, or, as we have termed them, a mood, that is occasionally supported by emotion markers that cue high level surges of emotion. The mood-cue approach revealed the mood of emptiness in Son of Saul that arises from the disconnectedness between sound and visuals. In contrast, Sunset lacks highly coordinated bursts of redundant cues in the opening sequences that lead to unease and the mood of frustration. ES theory has demonstrated that the viewer reacts physiologically to the films by the internal mirroring of the actions, emotions and sensations that are depicted on-screen. As the narrative progresses in Son of Saul, the hand-held camera movement increasingly serves the plot and is able to create an embodied spectator by kinaesthetic bodily cues that create the sensation of moving independently in the scene. This effect is enhanced by close-ups of facial expressions that lead to the activation of the same facial muscles (Gallese and Guerra 2019: 2). Embodiment is made more difficult in Sunset. In the film, the intentional use of techniques such as the fake point-of-view shot/reverse shot and the jump cut physically exclude the viewer from the diegetic world and highlight the presence of a disembodied narrator. This is expected to lead to disembodiment and the emotional experience of frustration. Although the field of cognitive film studies has definitely expanded since 1985, its relation to memory studies has relatively been left untouched. Therefore, in researching how Son of Saul and Sunset open a dialogic relationship with the past, it has been an ulterior goal in this thesis to demonstrate that memory studies and cognitive studies are inherently related. Namely, the storing and recalling of memories is also part of cognitive processes. We organize memories according to narrative structures, tend to recall memories earlier when they are coded with intense emotion and the experience of memory is embodied. This does not only suggest that memory is part of cognitive processes, but also that the involved cognitive processes are very similar to spectatorial experiences. Thus, the narrative, emotional and physical experience of watching a film can feel like experiencing a memory. This argument is even more compelling when we turn to the notion of prosthetic memory, which Landsberg has defined as memory that does not derive from a person’s lived experience, but from the public circulation of that memory through mass (and popular) media. In other words, evidence suggests that films can literally create memory in the minds of the audience. In bringing these notions of memory into cognitive theory I have attempted to open a new dimension for the field, but it asks for further studies from the side of the neurosciences to lay bare the underlying neurophysiological structures that are at work in the interaction between historical film and memory. Turning to Son of Saul and Sunset, the proposed ideas implicate that these films might be able to create a memory of the particular periods that they depict. As we have seen, both films picture events that were crucial in the transformation of Europe. In Son of Saul, the Holocaust is brought to screen through the viewpoint of the Sonderkommando. In Sunset, the turbulent times of Austria-Hungary just before World War I are recreated. In the third chapter, I have analysed to what degree the memories that

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Nemes has created with the films match with existing memories from these events in historical sources and other documentation. It became evident that the embodied mood of emptiness in Son of Saul matches with the described experiences of the Sonderkommando, as they are depicted in the book Images in Spite of All; in addition, emotion research with second-generation members of the Holocaust has proven that the portrayed mood of emptiness correlates with the emotions that survivors and second-generation members experience in association with the Holocaust. In Sunset, the many parables that can be drawn between the narrative and Kafka’s literature have proven insightful. Namely, the film takes place in the same period as Kafka’s literature and life, so in studying the links between the two we can start to uncover the conscious and unconscious reality of the portrayed period. For example, the main character in Sunset, Írisz Leiter, is – like the characters in Kafka – trapped in a world that hides its meaning from her (Jacobs, “The Future of Nostalgia”). This physical state is related to the mood of frustration and the physical sense of non-belonging that the film produces. Consequently, these experiences can be traced back to the reported alienation of varying ethnicities in 1910s Austria-Hungary, which, indirectly, led to the beginning of WW I. Thus, with Son of Saul and Sunset, Nemes has indeed proven successful in transforming history into a reality for the spectator. That is, the films create an adequate prosthetic memory of Europe’s history by activating cognitive capacities that relate to the memories that exist from these times. At the end of the third chapter, I have made the first steps in extending the framework for the hybrid approach that I have introduced in this thesis. As far as I am aware, the mood-cue approach and ES theory have never been functionally integrated together. In this respect, this thesis has been an experiment that, in my eyes, has shown promising results. The two approaches each present new insights into the spectator’s psychology and also function well in relation to each other. This has also been demonstrated in the case of the two melodramas that I have analysed: The Holocaust film Schindler’s List (Steven Spielberg, 1993) and The Immigrant (James Gray, 2013), a feature film about an immigrant in 1910s New York. The hybrid cognitive approach proved useful in analysing the complex network of emotion scripts that are activated in Schindler’s List in relation to the embodied role of the spectator. The corresponding embodied mood of sadness appeared to match with the emotional experience of visitors at concentration camp memorials that look from the from the viewpoint of the offenders (Nawijn et al. 175). This does not mean that the prosthetic memory that is created in the film is less effective, but rather that the film does not bring the viewer closer to the victims and second-generation members. The complex network of emotions scripts that are activated in The Immigrant proved more effective in connecting the viewer with individuals with a closeness to the events. The sadness that can be embodied through music, facials expressions and other elements, matches with the ‘immigration experience’ that we can read in personal accounts and documentations. I hope that with these additional case studies I have paved the way for more films and genres to be studied against the hybrid cognitive approach for embodying history in film.

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Filmography Antonioni, Michelangelo, director. Il Grido. CEIAD, 1957. Eisenstein, Sergei, director. Strike. Goskino Proletkult, 1925. Elliot, John, director. Fall of Eagles. BBC, 1974. Gray, James, director. The Immigrant. Worldview Entertainment, 2013. Koolhoven, Martin, director. Brimstone. Paradiso Entertainment, 2016. Koolhoven, Martin, director. Oorlogswinter. Benelux Film Distributors, 2008. Lanzmann, Claude, director. Shoah. New Yorker Films, 1985. Nelson, Time Blake, director. The Grey Zone. Bridge Entertainment Group, 2001. Nemes, László, director. Son of Saul. Laokoon Filmgroup, 2015. Nemes, László, director. Sunset. Laokoon Filmgroup, 2018. Nemes, László, director. The Counterpart. 2008.

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Nemes, László, director. With a Little Patience. 2007. Nicolaescu, Sergiu, director. Capcana Mercenarilor. 1981. Spielberg, Steven, director. Schindler's List. Universal Pictures, 1993. Szabó, István, director. Sunrise. Cinemien, 1999.

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