13 - Delirious Enchantment
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 December 2020
Summary
Abstract
This essay from 2000 marks an early, pioneering contribution to the study of emotional affect in cinema, and how affects are triggered in viewers by films via the means of formal or stylistic effects and structures. The notions of aesthetic flow and modulation in cinema are proposed. Looking closely at moments from a highly diverse range of films including Michael Mann's The Insider, Mohsen Makhmalbaf's Gabbeh, Chantal Akerman’s Night and Day, and Martin Scorsese's The Age of Innocence, the essay studies elements of rhythm, colour, line and shape, music, noise and sound, and how their total interplay cues, creates and moulds emotional responses in the spectator. Theorists considered include Susanne Langer, Richard Dyer, Jean-André Fieschi, Gilberto Perez and Gilles Deleuze.
Keywords: Affect, form, style, aesthetics, Richard Dyer
The Red and the White
The film has just started. Liquid, twisting graphics are superimposed over shots of plastic bags and hospital dials. The proud words appear, declaring simply: “Un film de Almodóvar”. Credit sequences are always important in Pedro Almodóvar's work – not just for what they inaugurate and anticipate in the story and world of the film to come, but in themselves, as a gesture, a first sketch of the form, tone and style. His credits are a design object, a graphic event. The shape of the letters, their colour, the speed at which they fade in and out – all this is already expressive, even if we are not sure yet what exactly they are meant to express.
The brief opening scene plays itself out and a second scene immediately begins: a domestic glimpse of a mother, Manuela (Cecilia Roth), and her teenage son, Esteban (Eloy Azorín), whose birthday is approaching. It seems we are into the movie now, into its world, past the obligatory threshold of opening credits. This pair of characters starts to eat dinner on their sofa while discussing the classic black-and-white movie playing on TV: All About Eve (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1950), dubbed in Spanish. They discuss the title and its mistranslation. Esteban starts to write in his notepad; we see his hand inscribe todo: all. Then there is a very unusual image, which could be called a point-of-view shot from the notepad: the huge, rather fearsome close-up of a moving nib.
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- Information
- Mysteries of CinemaReflections on Film Theory, History and Culture 1982–2016, pp. 223 - 240Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2018