“From Painting to Film: Abstract Cinema and Synaesthesia Marie Rebecchi To cite this version: Marie Rebecchi. “From Painting to Film: Abstract Cinema and Synaesthesia. From Sensation to Synaesthesia in Film and New Media, pp.205-215, 2019. hal-03226469 HAL Id: hal-03226469 https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-03226469 Submitted on 14 May 2021 HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci- destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents entific research documents, whether they are pub- scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, lished or not. The documents may come from émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de teaching and research institutions in France or recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires abroad, or from public or private research centers. publics ou privés. From Sensation to Synaesthesia in Film and New Media From Sensation to Synaesthesia in Film and New Media Edited by Rossella Catanese, Francesca Scotto Lavina and Valentina Valente From Sensation to Synaesthesia in Film and New Media Edited by Rossella Catanese, Francesca Scotto Lavina and Valentina Valente This book first published 2019 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2019 by Rossella Catanese, Francesca Scotto Lavina, Valentina Valente and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-5275-1924-4 ISBN (13): 978-1-5275-1924-4 TABLE OF CONTENTS List of Figures.......................................................................................... viii Acknowledgements .................................................................................... x Introduction ................................................................................................ 1 Rossella Catanese, Francesca Scotto Lavina, Valentina Valente First Section: Perception Chapter One .............................................................................................. 16 Affect in Perception: Cinematic Fascination and Enactive Emotions Enrico Carocci Chapter Two ............................................................................................. 32 The Magic of Cinema: Perception, Cognition and Empathy in the Cinematic Vision Chiara Castelli Chapter Three ........................................................................................... 44 Color Outside the Lines: Animating a Model of Synaesthesia Jennifer M. Barker Chapter Four ............................................................................................. 58 The Sublime Spittle of the Opera Singer André Gaudreault, Philippe Marion Chapter Five ............................................................................................. 72 The Theatricality of Alain Resnais’ Films: ‘Mèlo’ and ‘Smoking/ No Smoking’ Valentina Valente vi Table of Contents Second Section: Movement Chapter Six ............................................................................................... 86 Mechanical Sensations: Étienne-Jules Marey, Charles Frémont and the Issue of Automatism Linda Bertelli Chapter Seven ......................................................................................... 102 ‘The Underlying Gesture’: Towards the Notion of Gesture in Jean d’Udine and Sergei Eisenstein Irina Schulzki Chapter Eight .......................................................................................... 116 Film as Synaesthetic Object: The Affective Sensorimotor Coupling of Cinematic Image Francesca Scotto Lavina Third Section: Senses Chapter Nine ........................................................................................... 132 Olfactory Experience and the Exploration of Space in Cinema: Alexander Sokurov’s ‘Alexandra’ and Jan Jakub Kolski’s ‘Jasminum’ Malgorzata Bugaj Chapter Ten ............................................................................................ 143 Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin: Cinematic Clash of Affection and Surface Laura Jacob Chapter Eleven ....................................................................................... 151 The Electricity of Blue Roses: Shorting the Senses and Sensing Film Mood in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me Saige Walton Chapter Twelve ...................................................................................... 167 Dust Gets in Your Eyes: Representations of Dust and Debris in Documentary Film and Video from Mainland China Mariagrazia Costantino From Sensation to Synaesthesia in Film and New Media vii Fourth Section: Abstractions Chapter Thirteen ..................................................................................... 182 “The Murmur of Existence”: Siegfried Kracauer between Aural and Visual Noise Tommaso Isabella Chapter Fourteen .................................................................................... 193 The Poly-expressive Symphony: Futurism and the Moving Image Rossella Catanese Chapter Fifteen ....................................................................................... 205 From Painting to Film: Abstract Cinema and Synaesthesia Marie Rebecchi Fifth Section: New Media and Media Art Chapter Sixteen ...................................................................................... 218 A Return to the Techniques of the Body: On the Reenactments of Zoe Beloff Christa Blümlinger Chapter Seventeen .................................................................................. 229 Inventing the Senses: Polish New Media Art and Synaesthesia in ’60s-’80s Karol Jóźwiak Chapter Eighteen .................................................................................... 238 The Sensory Experience of Drone Piloting in Omer Fast’s ‘Five Thousand Feet is the Best’ Calvin Fagan About the Authors .................................................................................. 249 CHAPTER FIFTEEN FROM PAINTING TO FILM: ABSTRACT CINEMA AND SYNAESTHESIA MARIE REBECCHI From Painting to Cinema This chapter addresses the concept of synaesthesia––a simultaneous mix of sensations, usually experienced in separate ways––which is at the roots of the genealogy of abstract cinema. Abstract film, especially its early developments in the 1920s, offers a significant chance to develop a new, deeper understanding of the status of the work of art and its reproducibility, and of the various experimentations in synaesthetic abstract art made possible by the technical potential of the cinematic medium. Abstract films blended painting, music, movement, images, sounds, forms, and colors in order to create a unique audiovisual work of art, which was no longer aiming to a single perceptual level (vision), but rather pointed towards a fusion of vision and hearing. In this sense, the experimental and technologically innovative role of the abstract film can be made clear through a comparison of cinema’s original properties and the new synaesthetic work of art. The products of experimental abstract cinema can be seen as aspirations to a decisive reorientation of models of perception in a technical sense, contributing in this way to redefine the role of cinematographic experience within the framework of a broader cultural, aesthetic, and technological transformation brought about by the new optical media. From this point of view, the pioneering technical tricks upon which abstract films were based, constituted the construction material for a new language and an unprecedented form of expression founded on the specific technical properties of the cinematic medium: a universal language (Universelle Sprache)––as it was ambitiously defined by Hans Richter and Viking Eggeling in a writing of 1920 that has been lost (Richter and 206 Chapter Fifteen Eggeling 1920; Foster 1998, 185-239)1––where sound, image, rhythm, color, and movement would be condensed in a single work. The abstract cinema fulfilled the experiences of the early avant-garde theorists, painters, sculptors and poets, and tried to set in motion a significant process of aesthetic upgrading and expansion of the expressive possibilities of the language of film. In order to show the importance of abstract cinema from an aesthetical and technological point of view, my paper shows a vast array of images (paintings, drawings, scrolls), which are at the origins of the very first abstract films of the 1920s. Within this theoretical framework, according to László Moholy-Nagy, the most convincing examples from the technical and expressive point of view were definitely to be sought in the works of Walter Ruttmann, Viking Eggeling and Hans Richter: “The efforts of Walter Ruttmann (Germany), who early enlisted the aid of the film camera in his experiments, represented an important advance in this direction. The forms he drew for animated cartoons marked the beginning of a cinematic composition with still unforeseeable possibilities of kinetic development. Most important, however, were the works of Viking Eggeling (Sweden), who died prematurely. Eggeling – the first after the Futurists to do so –further developed the importance of the time problem, which revolutionised the whole existing aesthetic and formulated a scientifically