IM AGE [&] N A R R A T I V E Vol. 15, No. 1 (2014) 71
Subjective Cameras Locked-In and Out-of-Body
Christian Quendler
Abstract
In this essay, I examine conceptual metaphors of the camera eye as figurations of the cinematic dispositif that reflect on sensory and symbolic aspects of cinema. Since camera-eye metaphors often hypothesize between medial, formal and experiential dimensions of film, they are particularly insightful for studying embodied conceptualizations of cinema. Drawing on insights from phenomenology and cognitive semiotics, I will investigate how filmic camera-eye metaphors blend
sensory knowing with conceptual knowledge structures. My case studies are two recent
explorations of camera-eye vision that offer a self-reflexive commentary on the history of cinema: Julian Schnabel’s Le Scaphandre et le papillon (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, 2007) and Gaspar Noé’s Enter the Void (2009). Both films celebrate the deep-seated metaphorical base of cinema as a form of vicarious experience and its constructive power to create alternative and abstract models of reality. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly presents the experience of locked-in syndrome through a pastiche of historical film styles. Enter the Void renders the psychedelic state of the protagonist’s near death experience through a series of camera loops that draw on new imaging technologies. I will discuss these films as critical responses to traditional notions of filmic storytelling that extend the narrative scope by including sub-personal dimensions of experience.
Résumé
Le présent article examine les métaphores conceptuelles de l'œil-caméra en tant que figurations du dispositif cinématographique qui réfléchissent au sujet des aspects sensorielles et symboliques du cinéma. Puisque les métaphores relatives à l'œil-caméra formulent souvent des hypothèses concernant le médium, la forme ou l'expérience du film, elles sont particulièrement intéressantes pour étudier des conceptualisations incarnés du cinéma. En s'appuyant sur la phénoménologie et la sémiotique cognitive, l'auteur analyse comment les métaphores relatives à l'œil-caméra combinent le savoir sensoriel avec des structures conceptuelles de connaissance. Deux études de cas concernant des explorations récentes de la vision relative à l'œil-caméra offrent une analyse réflexive concernant l'histoire du cinéma : Le Scaphandre et le papillon (Julian Schnabel, 2007) et Enter the Void (Gaspar Noé, 2009). Les deux films glorifient la base profondément métaphorique du
IM AGE [&] N A R R A T I V E Vol. 15, No. 1 (2014) 72 cinéma comme forme d'expérience déléguée et son pouvoir constructif pour créer des modèles de la réalité alternatives et abstraites. Le Scaphandre et le papillon présente l'expérience du « locked-in syndrome » au travers d'une pastiche de styles cinématographiques historiques. Enter the Void concrétise l'état psychédélique de l'expérience « near death » du protagoniste au travers une série de mouvements de caméra basée sur de nouvelles technologies d'image. L'auteur analyse ces films comme des réponses critiques aux notions classiques de narration filmique qui augmentent la portée narrative en incluant des dimensions sous-personnelles de l'expérience.
Keywords
Camera eye, conceptual metaphor, embodied mind, phenomenology, cognitive semiotics, (Julian) Schnabel, (Gaspar) Noé
From their very beginnings, theories of film have been highly invested in questions of embodiment that explore the vexed relationship between the body and the mind. Film theoreticians of different generations and varied disciplinary backgrounds have set out to study correlations between formal features of film, on the one hand, and aspects of human physiology and psychology, on the other. To illustrate this ongoing interest in film studies, one may single out two historical trends in film theory. At the beginning of the twentieth century, experimental psychologists discovered film as an attractive object to examine physiological responses to art. At the end of the twentieth century, cinema advanced to a philosophical model that conceived of thought in terms of moving images
(Deleuze Mouvement; Temps).1
The idea that there is an underlying sense of ‘movement’ that connects moving images with our thoughts and emotions features prominently in film theories. It points to a question fundamental to any theory of film: How can we comprehend film as a sensory record of experience within
1. In coming to terms with the medium film, critics and filmmakers have variously combined theories of art and literature with psychological and linguistic theories. While early theorists such as Vachel Lindsay and Rudolf von Arnheim focused largely on art-historical and literary frames of reference, other pioneers in film theory like Hugo von Münsterberg and Victor Freeburg combined aesthetic theories with insights from late-nineteenth century experimental psychology. Rejecting interart analogies, constructivist Soviet film theories of the 1920s blended more abstract linguistic frames with insights from behavioral psychology. There is also a strong tradition of theorizing aesthetic experience in relation to history of technology that includes critics and philosophers such as Béla Balázs, Siegfried Kracauer and Walter Benjamin. Or, to give a more recent, structuralist example, the French critic Christian Metz later supplemented his semiotic theory of film with a psychoanalytical framework. In contemporary film theory, comprehensive phenomenological and cognitive approaches towards an embodied study of film have been put forth by Vivian Sobchack and Torben Grodal.
IM AGE [&] N A R R A T I V E Vol. 15, No. 1 (2014) 73
general and abstract models of meaning?2 This article approaches this question by examining how
conceptual metaphor embodies cinema and figure as its media dispositif. In film theory and media philosophy, the term dispositif was introduced to conceptualize relations that cut across different domains and interdependent structures such as the sensory and the conceptual, the body and the
mind as well as the form and the medium.3 Here, the term dispositif is used to refer to the
arrangement of media that defines relations between the object and the subject. Like the aperture of a camera, it can be thought of as a filter or threshold that outlines those aspects of the world that become visible and, subsequently, inform our discursive world. A media dispositif administers between the experiential regime of the senses and the regime of symbolic articulation. It circumscribes what can be seen and said.
Heuristically, the notion of the dispositif comes close to what George Lakoff and Mark Johnson refer to as conceptual metaphors, i.e. metaphors that set the terms for understanding basic ideas (e.g., understanding the mind in terms of a machine). In this essay, I propose reading conceptual metaphors of cinema as figurations of a dispositif that reflect on the sensory and symbolic aspects of cinema, the dimensions of film as a technological medium and as a means of expression. Such metaphors are particularly insightful for studying embodied conceptualizations of cinema. They hypothesize interrelations between medial, discursive and experiential orders by integrating aspects of the filmic text, film technology and the viewing experience within a conceptual framework.
Drawing on insights from phenomenology and cognitive semiotics, I will investigate how conceptual metaphors of film blend “embodied or immanent meaning” (Johnson 11) that is based on sensory knowing with larger frames of references and conceptual models. I will focus on the most prominent conceptual metaphor of cinema in its most canonical manifestation: the notion of the camera eye rendered through what is commonly described as ‘subjective camera’ or ‘point-of-view shots.’ My argument will center on the dynamic interplay between conceptual and perceptual frames that inform the interpretation of extensive uses of subjective camera. While conceptual frames draw on formal systems and abstract mental frames such as “film as language” or “cinematography as a form of writing,” perceptual frames resort to our experiential sensibilities by exploiting and combining synesthetic and psychological effects.
2. Even though the singularity of the filmic experience looms large in early and classical theorizing of film, Sobchack (Carnal 54-61) has criticized the formal bias and lack of corporeal spectatorship theories of film. 3. On different senses of the term dispositif (as used by Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Jean-Louis Baudry, Giorgio Agamben and others) and their bearings on the notion of a ‘subjective’ camera see my essay “Rethinking the Camera Eye”.
IM AGE [&] N A R R A T I V E Vol. 15, No. 1 (2014) 74 Camera-eye metaphors address central issues of aesthetics in that they reflect on conditions
of human perception and meaning.4 They have served as poetological metaphors of virtually every
aesthetic movement and film-historical period. Early, classical, psychoanalytical and cognitive
theories of film have variously invested in camera-eye notions, developing a great variety of structures of implications. Similarly, early and classical Hollywood cinema as well as auteur and avant-garde films have projected a great variety of camera-eye visions: e.g. the defamiliarizing gaze of Grandma’s Reading Glass (George Albert Smith, 1900), the extended subjective cameras in Rouben Mamoulian’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931), Delmer Daves’s Dark Passage (1947) or Robert Montgomery’s Lady in the Lake (1947), the remembered vision in Robert Bresson’s The Diary of a Country Priest (1951), or the retinal ‘closed-eye’ vision in Stan Brakhage’s avant-garde films that imagine the world as it must appear to the optic nerve.
My case studies are two recent explorations of camera-eye vision that offer a self-reflexive commentary on the history of cinema: Julian Schnabel’s Le Scaphandre et le papillon (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, 2007) and Gaspar Noé’s Enter the Void (2009). Both films celebrate the deep-seated metaphorical base of cinema as a form of vicarious experience and its constructive power to create alternative and abstract models of reality. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly presents the experience of locked-in syndrome through a pastiche of historical film styles. Enter the Void renders the psychedelic state of the protagonist’s near death experience through a series of camera loops that draw on new imaging technologies. The first part of this essay reviews phenomenological and semiotic approaches towards an embodied theory of film. In the second and third parts, I will discuss The Diving Bell and the Butterfly and Enter the Void as critical responses to traditional notions of filmic storytelling that are based on personhood. Instead of situating the narrative experience on a personal level of explanation, both films suggest to extend the narrative scope by including sub-personal dimensions of a narrative experience. Moreover, I will show how the interrelations between personal, medial and generic or stylistic identities are shaped on a pre-conceptual level by blending perceptual and psychological processes.
1. The Camera’s Sensory and Conceptual Knowing
In Philosophy in the Flesh, Lakoff and Johnson highlight the role of conceptual metaphors as powerful tools of thought that make up core elements in theories and philosophies. They describe conceptual metaphors as orienting metaphors that prime us for a specific way of thinking or a
4. It is also this modern conception of aesthetic theory with which Johnson associates his study on The Meaning of the Body, which he subtitled Aesthetics of Human Understanding.
IM AGE [&] N A R R A T I V E Vol. 15, No. 1 (2014) 75 figural style of discourse. Conceptual metaphors such as the camera-eye overtly draw on the body
as an explicatory frame.5 They prompt correlations between organic and non-organic as well as
somatic and non-somatic domains that are associated with the camera and the eye, respectively. Analogies between these domains help us to comprehend formal acts of composition and mechanical engineering in terms of natural processes of perception understanding, which on a neurological level has been described as embodied simulation (cf. Damasio 280-84; Johnson 163). While conceptual metaphors can be thought of as building blocks that project important premises from which models and theories evolve, they do not themselves outline necessary or sufficient rules. Rather, they come with a hermeneutic imperative of accommodating them in logically consistent frameworks (cf. Johnson 200ff).
Conceptual metaphors derive their persuasive and heuristic power from the interplay
between immanent and conceptual meanings. The dynamic and co-operative relation between
sensory and conceptual knowing is particularly crucial to (aesthetic) experiences that involve unfamiliar experiential parameters or alternative forms of reasoning. For instance, it seems paradoxical, if not futile, to present a cinematic vision of a blind man. Yet, filmmakers from all periods and aesthetic traditions have been drawn to this and similar challenges.6 This paradox points to the synesthetic and constructivist nature of cinema. When ‘blind vision’ is understood as a kind of seeing that – lacking light perception – is informed by senses other than sight, it can serve as a programmatic description of cinema that contests the idea that cinema simply simulates a perceptual experience. By blending perceptual patterns and psychological effects, film projects ‘metaphorical’ experiences that fuel both our sensory and conceptual knowledge.7 Thus, cinematic experiments in ‘envisioning blindness’ not only explore new sensory patterns, they also bring out new conceptualizations of cinema (e.g., by appropriating the ‘blind seer,’ a popular figure of romantic imagination for cinema).
In phenomenological terms, the interplay between immanent and conceptual meanings can be described as the successful integration of the metaphor’s intuitive dimension or “embodiment
5. As a bi-directional metaphor, camera-eye notions can also illustrate principles of human perception and comprehension in terms of an optical apparatus.
6. See e.g. Douglas Sirk’s Magnificent Obsession (1954) Stan Brakhage’s Reflections on Black (1955),
Terence Young’s Wait until Dark (1967), Bertrand Tavernier’s La mort en direct (1980), Takeshi Kitano’s
Zatôichi (2003), Pedro Almódovar’s Los abrazos rotos (2009).
7. Drawing on Gibson’s notion of affordance, Adriano D’Aloia describes the filmic experience as a specific, defamiliarizing “combination of perceptual dynamics (synaesthesia) and psychological processes (affordance).”
IM AGE [&] N A R R A T I V E Vol. 15, No. 1 (2014) 76 relation” and its “hermeneutic relation” to models of logical or scientific explanation (Sobchack Eye 181-191). Vivian Sobchack (Eye 181) describes such functionally synthetic or symbiotic relations of embodiment as genuine extensions of intentionality. Extension implies a transformation that “can both reduce and/or amplify perceptual engagement with the intended object” (Sobchack Eye 182). ‘Genuinely’ in this context means that our transformed perceptual engagement integrates different levels of making meaning in a coherent way. Immanent meaning derived from percepts or sensory forms appears congruent with the conceptual meaning encoded in symbolic forms.
Sobchack’s phenomenological account can be complemented from a perspective of
cognitive semiotics.8 Thomas A. Sebeok and Marcel Danesi’s (8-13) present their modeling systems
theory within an ecological framework that traces developmental stages from an infant to a maturing child. Following Charles Peirce’s notions of firstness, secondness, and thirdness, Sebeok and Danesi (10) distinguish between three kinds of modeling systems that draw on (a) sense-based forms, (b) extensional and indexical forms, (c) and symbol-based forms. Applying this framework to cinema, we can say that at the most basic level cinema affords us with (a) filmic percepts or sensory forms. To be fully absorbed in perception brings about an experience of non-differentiation. At this level, the distinction between perceiving self and perceived object as well as between image
and referent appears to be most tenuous.9 (b) Comprehending and using images as indexical and
extensional forms presupposes such distinctions. At this level, the act of perception unfolds into a scene of self and image. In directing our attention, moving images become a means of pointing and showing. Finally, (c) when acts of pointing and showing are recognized in their specific cultural contexts, they lend themselves to all kinds of symbolical investments. For instance, the represented gaze can serve as a symbolic form that represents what cannot be shown (e.g., an act of desire) or refer to an abstract concept (e.g., power).
In providing percepts, means of pointing and showing as well as symbolic representations, film can effectively re-construct different developmental stages of making sense. Herein lies also a key difference to written and other symbol-based texts, where perceptual and indexical forms of meaning are created on the basis of symbolic forms. In addition to this developmental or bottom-up approach of engaging the viewer with increasingly more complex forms of meaning, camera and human vision can be linked, top-down, on a global level by introducing interpretative (or
8. See also Warren Buckland’s Cognitive Semiotics of Film.
9. Gadamer (134) described this aspect as “picture magic.” For him this “non-differentiation remains essential to all experience of picture.” For Sobchack (Carnal 59), “cinematic intelligibility” begins at this level: “to understand movies figurally, we first must make literal sense of them.”
IM AGE [&] N A R R A T I V E Vol. 15, No. 1 (2014) 77 hermeneutic) frames of approximation. Filmmakers have developed a wide array of such approximating devices ranging from prosthetic ‘physical’ frames (such as masking shots as gazes through keyholes, glass frames, etc.) to psychological or mental frames (such as framing sequences as dreams, psychotropic delusions, or remembered visions that transpose a subjective ‘I’ into an objective ‘me’).
Robert Montgomery’s infamous film noir Lady in the Lake (1947), which – except for its framing narrative – tells the story exclusively from the protagonist’s point of view, has become the canonical film example where the global, interpretive frame is at odds with the perceptual experience afforded by the film. In this film, the sensory form of the subjective camera fails to
support, in a satisfactory manner, the symbolic meaning of a first-person attributed to the camera.10
Despite the claims of the framing narrative and the movie’s tag line that “You and Robert Montgomery solve a mystery crime together,” the viewing experience does not create such a pronominal blending. Nor are there sufficiently plausible frames of approximations that negotiate the disparities between the filmic percept and the human visual experience. Interestingly, film scholars have described this incongruence in bodily and psychological metaphors. For Sobchack (Eye 229), the camera creates the sense of a “false body.” Conversely, for Julio Moreno (353), the camera acts like a “phantom-protagonist.” Both phrases express failed embodiment. The person the camera is meant to evoke is not fleshed out. Or, the vicarious experience afforded by the film only amounts to a phantasm. In short, the idea of personhood is imposed onto narrative and perceptual
levels rather than being constructed by them.11
Schnabel’s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly and Noé’s Enter the Void can be viewed as recent responses to Montgomery’s failed experiment. Schnabel’s film reworks the literary framing of Lady in the Lake. Noé, who has contemplated making a tribute to the Lady in the Lake since a mushroom-infused screening as a film student, frames his subjective camera vision as a psychedelic
10. Even though critics have unanimously decried the film as a failed experiment in telling a story from the protagonist’s point of view, the film prevails as a test case for all kinds of film theoretical approaches. See esp. Branigan (142-157) and Sobchack (Eye 230-248) for surveys of the film’s critical reception.
11. For Sobchack, Lady in the Lake fails because the impersonating camera does not claim its identity as human experience on a narrative level but on an existential plane. Moreover, as existential claims are made through representing a continuity of time and space, “it is precisely over time and in space that the disparity between the nature of the film’s lived body and the nature of the human lived-body emerges” (238). Delmer Daves’s Dark Passage (1947), which features Humphrey Bogart as a convict, who after his escape from prison undergoes cosmetic surgery, provides an interesting intermediary case. In the first third of the movie, Bogart’s character is only represented ‘subjectively’ through point-of-view shots. While this unusual form of focalization is recuperated hermeneutically, it is in part motivated by the narrative: e.g. the idea to conceal the convicts ‘real’ face.
IM AGE [&] N A R R A T I V E Vol. 15, No. 1 (2014) 78 state near death.12 Both The Diving Bell and the Butterfly and Enter the Void present unusual mental and bodily states, which provide effective frames of approximation that link embodied stationary as well as disembodied free-floating filmic percepts to a frame of human subjectivity. At the outset, the protagonists’ extreme physical and psychological situations can explain why the subjective camera in Diving Bell and Enter the Void succeeds where it fails in Lady in the Lake. My analyses of the two films will delve beneath this global answer. I will examine how these global interpretative frames are supported on local, immanent levels of meaning and how the protagonists’ extraordinary states are exploited for projecting new cinematic visions and models of storytelling.
2. Locked up in a Camera
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is an adaptation of Jean-Dominique Bauby’s memoir. Bauby, who was a journalist and the editor of the fashion magazine Elle, dictated his memoir while suffering from locked-in syndrome, a pseudo-comatose state in which patients are fully conscious and awake but find all their voluntary muscles except the eye paralyzed. Bauby ‘wrote’ his memoir by blinking in response to a series of letters that were dictated to him. As blinking can be both a voluntary and an involuntary act, it lends itself well to addressing both immanent and conceptual dimensions of meaning in film. Gestures of blinking lie at the core of Schnabel’s camera-eye
conception.13 In the film, the briefly interrupting black frames achieve a double meaning in that
they are at once realistic and symbolic. They enhance the reality effect of depicting Jean-Do’s vision and establish an aesthetic alliance between Jean-Do’s mode of communication and cinematography.
Notably, blinking was simulated in different ways emphasizing the involvement of both the director of photography Janusz Kaminski, who would occasionally scissor his finger in front of the camera, and the editor Juliette Welfling inserting fade-ins and outs. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly also includes expressive and embodied gestures often found in auteurist cinema such as the close-ups of Robert Bresson’s writing hand in Diary of a Country Priest (1951) or Ingmar Bergman’s voice-over in Persona (1957). Julian Schnabel provided his own pair of glasses and a hat as requisites that frame Jean-Do’s vision. Finally, as a masking device, blinking creates a frame of approximation that can be aligned with a rationale of editing that aims at synchronizing the
12. Philippe Harel’s La Femme défendue (1997) is another recent tribute to Montgomery, which affirms the shortcomings of Lady in the Lake in a quasi-Brechtian manner highlighting both the technological mediation and the viewer’s compromising voyeuristic position.
IM AGE [&] N A R R A T I V E Vol. 15, No. 1 (2014) 79 viewer’s, actor’s and editor’s blinking. In In the Blink of an Eye (1995), the renowned editor Walter Murch not only proposes such a theory of editing, he even regards ‘filmic montage’ as an actual, real-life model of how the mind creates meaning: “I would go so far as to say that these juxtapositions are not accidental mental artifacts but part of the method we use to make sense: We must render visual reality discontinuous, otherwise perceived reality would resemble an almost incomprehensible string of letters without word separation or punctuation” (63).
In contrast to Lady in the Lake, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly does not begin with an expositional framing narrative that explains the symbolic meaning and the subjective use of the camera. Instead, the film’s opening dramaturgy re-enacts the different developmental stages of making meaning outlined above. Jean-Do’s (Mathieu Amalric) awakening from a coma is presented in a way that succinctly shifts the emphasis from sensory to indexical and symbolic forms. These formal shifts in the opening scene recall different cinematic styles ranging from avant-garde to mainstream cinema. Simulating Jean-Do’s sensations as he regains consciousness, the film begins in a way that is reminiscent of Stan Brakhage’s experiments of creating a filmic vision that sees without recognizing and identifying. Blurry and overexposed images fade in and out, signaling his attempts to open his eyes. He soon receives the nurses’ attention and by the time the doctor arrives, the diffused and distorted images gradually develop focal points that slowly adapt to objects near and far, thus entering an indexical and extensional regime of sense making. Later his field of vision even begins to shift a bit as he tries to follow the doctor’s finger. Early on, this impressionist rendering of Jean-Do’s clouded vision is interspersed with mental images and memories filmed in a more conventional style. When the doctor tells him that his entire body is paralyzed and Jean-Do realizes that all he can do is move his right eye, he closes his eyes and the symbolic image of a diving bell floating in the deep sea comes up.
The contrast between interiority and exteriority is emphasized by extensive use of interior monologue, which allows the audience to hear the thoughts he cannot communicate to other characters in the film. Jean-Do’s voice-over guides the viewer through the visually demanding opening sequence and it connects the point-of-view segments with the enactments of his memories. The recurring images of the diving bell and his memories mark distractions and diversions from
Jean-Do’s strain and they provide a visual relief to the viewer.They also reflect the overall structure
of the film, which alternates between point-of-view shots and sequences of remembered vision until – about two thirds into the movie – objective shots of Jean-Do are gradually introduced. This increasing expansion of perspective turns out to be a highly effective strategy for creating a strong emphatic link between the viewer and the protagonist. A reason for this may be found in the fact
IM AGE [&] N A R R A T I V E Vol. 15, No. 1 (2014) 80 that the distribution of information synchronizes the viewing process with Jean-Do’s developing sense of a peri-personal space. As his social and communicative activities increase, Jean-Do begins
to perceive himself from a quasi-objective point of view.14
The flashback of Jean-Do’s stroke that led to his paralysis comes towards the end of the film, at a progressive stage of his communication skills. As the stroke scene takes us back to the traumatic and unfathomable experience, we can observe corresponding shifts in register from objective to symbolic and expressive uses of the camera. Shortly after Jean-Do left his wife’s country house, where he has picked up his son for the weekend, he feels a wave of heat rushing through his body. He stops the car in front of a crossroad. A distant shot from the opposite side of the crossroad shows his son getting out of the car to run for help. The camera then pans slowly to the right surveying an empty country road, then pans in the other direction showing no one in sight. The camera movement mimics the bodily gesture of someone looking for help. As there is no one else present in the scene and the camera position is incompatible with Jean-Do’s perspective and mobility, we can interpret the camera movement as expressing his call (symbol), search (action), or desire (emotion) for help. When framed as Jean-Do’s remembered vision, the camera pan not only illustrates the experiential assimilation of emotion (Jean-Do’s panic), action (a searching gaze) and its symbolic representation (directed camera movement) but also the re-configuration of self into a remembering I and an experiencing me.
The subsequent shots and the erratic camera movements are in stark contrast to the panning shot. They capture the confusion and panic of the scene after Jean-Do’s wife and son have arrived at the scene. This disembodied camera appears to be directed by the emotions that make up the atmosphere of the scene; it can be compared to Jean-Do’s mental vision. The third type of camera shot frames Jean-Do’s limited point of view. The camera switches from an extreme low angle-view of the treetops to a reverse shot on Jean-Do’s anguished face. Closing in and out on his face and alternating with point of-view shots, the camera also shows Jean-Do’s liminal state.
By changing its registers between embodied gestures, disembodied or emanating emotions and stationary arrestment, the camera creates a bridge between Bauby’s paralyzed state and the people surrounding him. Oscillating between stationary confinement and free-floating disembodiment, the camera becomes an agent of emotion itself or, as the final sequence of the film suggests, an expression of the desire to outlive life through art and memory. It articulates what is experientially unavailable to us. By exploring new sensory and symbolic patterns, the film attempts
IM AGE [&] N A R R A T I V E Vol. 15, No. 1 (2014) 81 to approximate unfamiliar mental and physical states. Since the motor-pathways of patients with locked-in syndrome are damaged and proprioception is largely unavailable to them, the lack of embodied simulation has severe consequences for their emotional spectrum. As Antonio Damasio (292) observes, locked-in patients
do not experience the anguish and turmoil that their horrifying situation would lead observers to expect. They have a considerable range of feelings, from sadness to, yes, joy. And yet, from accounts now published in book form [i.e., Bauby; Mozersky], the patients may even experience a strange tranquility that is new to their lives. They are fully aware of the tragedy of their situation, and they can report an intellectual sense of sadness or frustration with their virtual imprisonment. But they do not report the terror that one imagines would arise in their horrible circumstances.
Notably, Damasio’s hypothesis on the emotional capacities of locked-in patients is itself informed by Bauby’s memoir, its plain style as well as its calm and reflective tone, which stands in a stark contrast to the tragedy recounted. Schnabel’s film addresses this discrepancy through a rhetoric of contrasts that intensifies the film’s emotional appeal. His contrapuntal style reaches a peak in the stroke scene when limited point-view-shots contrast with disembodied, free-floating camera movements and Charles Trenet’s song “La Mer” is accompanied by the squealing noise of a high-revving engine.
As if to signal the difference in emotional sensibilities between locked-in patients and healthy people, the film concludes with two endings that contrast Jean-Do’s intellectual and aesthetic sensibilities with the social world of shared feelings and emotions. The final shot of the film shows the collapse of ice-shelves in reversed and slow motion, an enigmatic image that may be read as symbolizing Jean-Do’s desire to defy death and seek redemption by returning to a complete state. The other ending, which immediately precedes this shot, shows Jean-Do’s speech therapist Celine sitting by his bed and reading his published memoirs to him. This final reference to the book provides a narrative closure for the film and it invokes the literary genre of the memoir as a means to outlive death. Death also becomes the ultimate delimiter of the filmic medium – figuratively framed by the medium itself. This scene ends with a close-up of Jean-Do’s friends and family bowing into the camera. These shots are recorded with a hand-cranked camera that varies the recording speed, over- and double-exposing several frames. By having the visual stream of the medium parallel Jean-Do’s experiential stream of life, cinema turns into a simulacrum of being (present) in (a present tense) time. The ending of the filming and the screening become synonymous with Jean-Do’s experiencing and remembering.
IM AGE [&] N A R R A T I V E Vol. 15, No. 1 (2014) 82 3. A Camera Re-Incarnated
Schnabel’s adaptation of Bauby’s memoirs approaches death in narrative circles nearing both the account of his seizure and his death. In Noé’s film, death is approached in three visual loops that are modeled on the Buddhist notion of Bardo and its pop-cultural re-contextualization as a drug-induced psychedelic experience. The film alludes to Timothy Leary’s psychedelic re-reading of The Tibetan Book of the Dead, avant-garde trance films by Brakhage and Kenneth Anger and popular treatments of LSD by independent filmmakers such Roger Corman or Richard Rush. Enter the Void also seems to embrace more recent scientific research that speculates about the role of DMT as a neurotransmitter that administers our perception of reality (cf. Strassman). The film projects a vision of digital cinema that grounds (voyeuristic) desire on a neuronal level of electric excitement.
Enter the Void tells the story of the eighteen-year-old Tokyo-based DJ Oscar (Nathaniel Brown) and his sister Linda (Paz de la Huerta), who lost their parents in a car accident and grew up in different foster homes. Having saved some money by dealing drugs, Oscar sends his sister a plane ticket so she could finally come to live with him in Tokyo. Yet, the family reunion is terminated abruptly when Oscar gets shot in a drug raid. The film begins on the evening of the raid and for about the first half hour, up until the moment he gets shot, we see everything through Oscar’s eyes. We see him talk with his sister, meet up with his friend Alex (Cyril Roy), who introduces him to both DMT and The Book of the Dead. We see him smoke DMT and we hear the muffled sound of his thoughts as if they were voices resonating in his head. Although the subjective camera is rendered in a convincing and realistic manner, Noé – like Schnabel – can rely on his protagonist’s extreme psychological situation as a frame of approximation. As in The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, point-of-view shots are soon interrupted when the drug sets in and Oscar encounters out-of-body experiences and invisible or hallucinated worlds represented through intravascular and intergalactic tracking shots.
Following Rick Strassman’s typology of DMT-induced experiences, these visions can be described as personal, invisible and transpersonal. Personal DMT experiences involve new “avenues to his or her personal psychology and relationship to the body” (Strassman 154). On this level DMT users experience a transformation of their sense of personhood through feelings of disembodiment that are often described as having an outside view on one’s body and feeling a strong emotional attachment to the surrounding. An invisible experience refers to “an encounter with seemingly solid and freestanding realities coexisting with this one” (Strassman 155). The third
IM AGE [&] N A R R A T I V E Vol. 15, No. 1 (2014) 83 type of experience includes mystical near-death experiences where DMT users have experiences that transcend personal consciousness.
When Oscar is shot by the police in a club called The Void, the subjective rendering of his death experience expands on the elements introduced during his previous DMT use. The camera zooms out and assumes an aerial perspective; it swiftly changes between settings to keep track of the parallel actions involving Linda and Alex, respectively. Trespassing physical and mental barriers, the camera moves along associative paths driven by electric energy and desire: Digital tracking shots into Oscar’s gunshot wound take us through a series of his childhood memories. Vases, holes, ashtrays, burners, lamps and all kinds of light sources become external attractors and gateways in the network of an internally motivated, free-floating camera.
The events that lead up to Oscar’s death and his childhood memories of his sister are recounted in a series of loops that keep circling back to his dead body in the club and at the mortuary. The modes of representation alternate between a disembodied free-floating camera capturing his postmortem perceptions and near point-of-view shots that re-enact his memory and show Oscar’s silhouette from behind. The loops connect Oscar’s childhood memories with his recent past in Tokyo and they document how Linda and Oscar’s friend Alex finally find one another. Oscar’s hovering disembodied existence represents something of a limbo. He seems condemned to circle back to his body and reiterate his memories until the fortune of his sister and his friend is resolved.
In Enter the Void, DMT emerges as a filmic figure of narration, a conceptual metaphor that blends scientific models (DMT as a biochemical key to consciousness) with religious views of reincarnation and redemption. Another important frame, activated in particular by the many libidinous triangular relations among the characters, is psychoanalytic theory. As a theory concerned with relations between physiology and psychology, psychoanalysis helps to understand how DMT operates as a conceptual key on different level of the film. In Sigmund Freud’s metapsychology, the psyche is a secondary model derived from a neurophysiological constitution. For Freud pleasure and pain are sensuous signifiers of somatic drives that are geared towards energy homeostasis. On a narrative level, homeostasis describes the film’s drive towards a resolution, which is to understand Oscar’s death as the contingent effect in an intricate web of desires. Symbolically, this libidinous web is held together by DMT. Everything revolves around this drug. After his first use of DMT, Oscar starts to deal drugs, which is also motivated by his desire to see his sister again. His contact with DMT also leads to an affair with the mother of his friend Victor, who taking revenge on Oscar, sets him up in the drug raid. On the visual level, DMT is invoked as a cinematic trope. Like an
IM AGE [&] N A R R A T I V E Vol. 15, No. 1 (2014) 84 endogenous hallucinogen, the camera controls the sensory perception administering vivid associations of varied visual patterns and dislocated scenes of the present and the past. Together, plot patterns and visual patterns project a notion of personal identity on a spectrum that ranges from non-intentional to intentional and the non-conscious to the conscious.
In a final sex scene, the camera slowly approaches Alex and Linda making love. It seems to enter Alex’s head assuming his point of view. Images of Oscar’s earliest memories are intercut with close-ups of Alex and Linda before the camera re-enters their bodies following sperms through an ovarian tract. At the moment of conception, a bright light cross-fades directly to Linda giving birth and the baby’s first sight of her mother. With this reincarnation of the camera eye, the film comes full circle. It completes the transition from a disembodied to an embodied perspective. It transforms the intimate relation between the brother and the sister into one of lovers and finally into one between a mother and her child.
By blending a wide range of subjective and objective registers and by organizing them in a looping or spiraling structure, Noé’s camera-eye vision effectively deconstructs the distinctions between interiority and exteriority, which in The Diving Bell and the Butterfly organized the differences between actual and remembered vision. Schnabel’s film reviews the notion of filmic writing through a nostalgic reappraisal of cinematography as a language that gradually evolves from perceptual and emotional encounters with the world. Even though the film undermines a rigorous distinction between subjective and objective registers, the idea of a manually operated camera prevails as a figure that ultimately frames Jean-Do’s memoir. The final hand-cranked and overexposed images mark the limits of his discourse, just like the erratic images in the stroke scene signal the disappearance of language and consciousness.
Enter the Void does not suggest such an intermedial figure of writing to describe its camera-eye vision. The film begins, where The Diving Bell and the Butterfly ends, with a post-mortem limbo. Whereas in The Diving Bell and the Butterfly the limits of consciousness are presented through fragmented and erratic motion, in Enter the Void pre- and post-conscious states are explored in fluid camera movements. In The Diving Bell and the Butterfly the domain of what can be seen and said is circumscribed by the idea of cinematography as a form of writing. In Enter the Void, however, the camera seems to register experiences beyond the intentional realm and personhood. Stylistically, the representation of altered and transcendental states of consciousness draws on digital imaging technology in biomedicine, architectural visualization and video gaming. When looking for a generic frame that could capture the film’s stylistic heterogeneity, one could think of the cinematic city symphonies of the 1920 such as Walther Ruttmann’s Berlin: Die Sinfonie
IM AGE [&] N A R R A T I V E Vol. 15, No. 1 (2014) 85 der Großstadt (1927) and Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera (1929). The opening title sequence foreshadows the film’s visceral density in an eye-numbing manner, which Chris Norris (2010: 26) has described as “a 94-second font overdose that distills Tokyo, Times Square, and Las Vegas signage into one non-stop retina blast” (see also Poynor).
Enter the Void presents Tokyo as a diverse, prolific and constantly changing media and soundscape, emblematically captured in the Tokyo Tower as an architectonic symbol of information technology. There is a note of irony and nostalgia in the film’s recurrent reference to this famous site, which in the transition from analog to digital TV the Tower has reached its limits as a reliable broadcasting antenna. Viewed against this technological change, Enter the Void takes us back to the genre of the city symphony that, exploring a new medium, re-investigates the city as a dynamic compound of material, technological, social and biological energies. As a meta-cinematic metaphor, the city undermines the boundaries between physical and mental realms as it seamlessly navigates between the real city and its synthetic crystal mode. In fact, the idea of DMT as a psychedelic compound that administers (different models of) reality finds a literal representation in the miniature model of Tokyo, which Alex’s friend Mario (Masato Tanno) has laced with acid. The miniature city is an actual (physical) model and – to the extent that it contains DMT – a virtual model that can induce psychotropic visions of navigating the city. Not unlike the blinking in The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, the miniature city serves a double function: It helps to facilitate the many tracking shots (real or technical function) and introduces the theme of crisscrossing between real and virtual realities (symbolic function).
Conclusion
The meta-cinematic invocation of models of reality in Enter the Void and the self-reflexive gestures of perception and expression in The Diving Bell and the Butterfly underscore the sub-personal dimension of narrative experience and its bodily resources. In a neo-expressionist manner that combines elements of auteur and avant-garde aesthetics, Schnabel celebrates cinema as a form of physical manipulation and embodied expression. In his film, the idea of cinema as a site where embodied and conceptual meanings interface finds a mesmerizing expression in the intentional ambiguity of blinking, which relates both to the formal and symbolic levels as well as to the physiological and technical levels of human and filmic communication.
In Enter the Void, this negotiation between bodily and mental realms as well as material and symbolic dimensions extends its scope from physiology to neurology and biochemistry. This extension can be linked to the respective body images projected by the two films. While The Diving
IM AGE [&] N A R R A T I V E Vol. 15, No. 1 (2014) 86 Bell and the Butterfly recalls the image of a ghost in a shell, a central homunculus operating a machine, Enter the Void embraces the idea of an extended mind that undermines distinctions between interiority and exteriority as well as mental and physical realms. This difference between the two films is also manifest in their uses of fluidity as a body-imagistic effect. In The Diving Bell and the Butterfly fluidity outlines Jean-Do’s conscious experience. In Enter the Void, a fluid camera transcends consciousness in a paradoxical vision that oscillates between embodied gazes and a cosmological view. As I tried to show, comparing the two films not only brings out the ecological build of conceptual metaphors and their bodily and perceptual bases, it also points to the dynamic interplay between image schemas and medial forms. While Schnabel aligns literary frames with classical cinematography, Noé returns to the (genre of the) city (film) for a heterotopic description of digital media culture.
References
Arnheim, Rudolf. Film als Kunst. Berlin: Ernst Rowohlt, 2000 [1932]. Print.
Balázs, Béla. Theory of the Film: Character and Growth of a New Art. New York: Dover, 1970 [1950]. Print.
Bauby, Jean-Dominique. Le Scaphandre et le papillion. Paris: Editions Robert Laffont, 1997. Print. Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility.” Walter
Benjamin: Selected Writings. Eds. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000 [1936]. 101-133. Print.
Buckland, Warren. Cognitive Semiotics of Film. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Print.
Branigan, Edward. Narrative Comprehension and Film. London: Routledge, 1992. Print.
Corne, Jonah. “In the Blink of a Speaking Eye: On Vision and Language in The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.” Literature Film Quarterly 38.3 (2010): 217-229. Print.
D’Aloia, Adriano. “The Intangible Ground: A Neurophenomenology of the Film Experience.” NECSUS: European Journal of Media Studies 2.3 (2012). Web.
Damasio, Antonio. The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotions in the Making of Consciousness. New York: Harcourt & Brace, 1999. Print.
Deleuze, Gilles. L'Image-mouvement. Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1983. Print. Deleuze, Gilles. L'Image-temps. Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1985. Print.
IM AGE [&] N A R R A T I V E Vol. 15, No. 1 (2014) 87 Gadamer, Hans-Georg, and Joel Weinsheimer. Truth and Method. London: Continuum, 2006
[1960]. Print.
Gibson, James J. The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. London: Erlbaum, 1979. Print. Grodal, Torben. Moving Pictures: A New Theory of Film Genres, Feelings and Cognition. Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1997. Print.
Grodal, Torben. Embodied Visions: Evolution, Emotion, Culture, and Film. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Print.
Johnson, Mark. The Meaning of the Body: Aesthetics of Human Understanding. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. Print.
Johnson, Mark. The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990. Print.
Kracauer, Siegfried. Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality. New York: Oxford University Press, 1960. Print.
Laine, Tarja. “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly as an Emotional Event.” Midwest Studies in Philosophy 34.1 (2010): 295-305. Print.
Lakoff, George and Mark Johnson. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1980. Print.
Lakoff, George and Mark Johnson. Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought. New York: Basic Books, 1999. Print.
Lindsay, Vachel. The Art of the Moving Picture. New York: Modern Library, 2000 [1915/1922], Print.
Metz, Christian. Le Signifiant imaginaire: Psychanalyse et Cinéma. Paris: Union générale d'éditions, 1977. Print.
Moreno, Julio L. “Subjective Cinema: And the Problem of Film in the First Person.” The Quarterly of Film Radio and Television 7.4 (1953): 341-58. Print.
Mozersky, Judy. Locked In: A Young Woman’s Battle with Stroke. Toronto: The Golden Dog Press, 1996. Print.
Münsterberg, Hugo. The Photoplay: A Psychological Study. New York: D. Appleton, 1916. Print. Murch, Walter. In the Blink of an Eye: A Perspective on Film Editing. Beverly Hills: Silman-James
Press, 2001. Print.
Norris, Chris. “The Origin of the World: The Dangerous Sex, Bad Drugs, and Eternal Bliss of Enter the Void.” Film Comment 46.5 (2010): 26-30. Print.
IM AGE [&] N A R R A T I V E Vol. 15, No. 1 (2014) 88 Quendler, Christian. “Rethinking the Camera Eye: Dispositif and Subjectivity.” New Review of Film
and Television Studies 9.4 (2011): 395-414. Print.
Sobchack, Vivian. The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992. Print.
Sobchack, Vivian. Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. Print.
Sebeok, Thomas A., and Marcel Danesi. The Forms of Meaning: Modeling Systems Theory and Semiotic Analysis. Approaches to Applied Semiotics. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2000. Print. Strassman, Rick. J. DMT The Spirit Molecule: A Doctor’s Revolutionary Research into the Biology
of Near-Death and Mystical Experiences. Rochester: Park Street Press, 2001. Print.
Christian Quendler is an Associate Professor in the Department of American Studies at the University of Innsbruck. He is the author of two books (From Romantic Irony to Postmodernist Metafiction and Interfaces of Fiction) and numerous articles in literature and film studies.
