"I really don't have anything to say. Is that ok[ay]? Wait do it with an aye why."
June 10th 2025, 11:19pm, 62 degrees partly cloudy.
Defamiliarization, Emotion, and Affect in Sara Driver’s Sleepwalk
Sara Driver’s 1986 film Sleepwalk follows protagonist and copy-shop employee Nicole and her obnoxious roommate Isabelle throughout one night in Lower Manhattan. Nicole is hired to translate an ancient Chinese manuscript, which she soon finds out has the ability to alter her life. As women go bald, people mysteriously die, xerox machines take on minds of their own, and children are accidentally kidnapped, Driver exploits cinematic forms to create a strange world between reality and surreality. Driver deploys a cinematic style—most apparently present in actor direction, editing and narrative flow, and mise en scene—that flattens the film’s representative abilities (character depth, spatial depth, etc) and places spectators at a critical distance from the story and images. Reading this configuration of form through Victor Shklovsky’s notion of estrangement and defamiliarization in “Art as Device,” and through Fredric Jameson’s idea of affect and its relationship to realism, it becomes clear that Driver’s use of contrast serves a dialectical flatness, allowing spectators to realize their own alienated existences.
Shklovsky writes that “after being perceived several times, objects acquire the status of ‘recognition.’” Sleepwalk must contend with this in its internal objects (characters, settings, motifs, narrative) as well as in its grander structure of a film. “Art as Device” begins with the well known and commonly accepted assertion that “art is thinking in images.” He goes on to contend that the purpose of art is “to return sensation to our limbs, to make us feel objects,[...] to lead us to a knowledge of a thing through the organ of sight instead of recognition.”
Cinema is thinking in images, literally. By the time of the release of Sleepwalk in 1986, cinema was no longer a new medium but a pictographic and narrative form that audiences were familiar with; though the medium’s pictorial form inherently promoted artistic and creative engagement with the object world outside of the cinema, repeated encounters with the form naturalized the medium’s ability of enstranging relations between people and things. Furthermore, the proliferation and fetishization of cinema as a capitalistic or intellectual commodity rendered the narrative film into a film object. Thus, art cinema in the 1980s is in a double bind; in order to be good art, art that deals with real objects, Sleepwalk must enstrage both the objects and motifs within the film, as well as the form and narrative of the film itself.
One of the most notable ways in which Driver invokes the style/form and intents of defamiliarization is her direction of actors. Virtually every character in Sleepwalk, besides Isabelle, moves monotonously, emotionally alienated from the actions of the film’s plot. For example, the manuscript Nicole is translating begins to wreak havoc on her life but she barely reacts: when Isabelle’s hair falls out, Nicole calmly suggests that she take her son Jimmy to Atlantic City for the weekend. However, on the way to Atlantic City Isabelle decides to take a pitstop in Chinatown to try to reverse her luck, and Nicole’s son, asleep in the back of the car, gets kidnapped. As Isabelle weeps, telling Nicole what has happened to Jimmy, Nicole looks back at Isabelle with not much change of emotion besides a slight look of panic in her eyes.
This emotional suppression invokes Jameson’s definition of affect as the “registration of bodily event” distinct from emotion; he notes that affect is sensation that supposedly exists beyond language, resists nominalization; it thinks of itself as the asymbolic residue that occurs when representation fails to fully mediate experience. In Sleepwalk this manifests as characters who seem to gesture toward feeling but cannot fully inhabit it: Nicole barely reacts, and Isabelle overreacts. Both responses are empty, alienated. Driver mocks both of her characters through her direction of quality of their actions; in postmodern Manhattan neither emotion or bodily presence seems to be an apt response to absurdity in the real. Nicole’s blankness and Isabella’s melodrama is affect stripped to its barest trace, the ghost of a reaction. This performance mode both heightens and enstranges sensation for the film’s audience: a spectator recognizes that something significant is happening and also is denied a conventional script of emotional identification with a character to process the narrative or form.
As an example of successful art, proper defamiliarization, Shklovsky pays special attention to the Leo Tolstoy’s rendering of naturalized constructions or experiences through unfamiliar frames, through shifts in perspective: In Tolstoy’s story Kholstomer, the horse narrator notes,
“It is not known why this man, and not another, owns a particular field, [...] They love not so much the opportunity of doing (or not doing) something as the chance to talk about a host of things in the possessive language so customary among them: my book, my house, my land. [...] I am now convinced that what distinguishes us from humans and gives us the right to claim a higher place on the ladder of living creatures is simply this: that the human species is guided, above all, by words, while ours is guided by deeds.”
The familiar social structure of property becomes unrecognizable through this alternative perception. Similarly, Sleepwalk presents social institutions—motherhood, work, cities—through a surreal rhythm and distant emotional grammar. Nicole’s failure to respond conventionally to events estranges the work of being a mother, the copy-shop, filled with autonomous Xerox machines both reifies and becomes unmoored from the goals and methods of capitalist efficiency. These sites of social meaning do not collapse but are evacuated of familiarity.
Jameson’s account of realism as a form split between the cognitive mapping of social totality and the immediacy of bodily sensation helps make sense of this. He asserts that realism is always attempting to grasp a totality it can never achieve; it is driven by the simultaneous desire and failure to map the world. Surrealism, then, is a further attempt to represent totality, in that it does not only want to make a coherent language of the real and of the imaginary as well. Sleepwalk knows this dialectic failure: the film performs it. The characters don’t learn, the plot does not cohere, the city does not function.
Jameson notes that “any proposition about affect [...] is a historical one,” in that the sensation has been historically separated from the construction of language and modes of representation. Driver’s cinematic style, its use of high contrast lighting, obscures the particularities of her film’s landscapes. This stylistic trait frequently colors Sleepwalk’s visual language almost as if to say “the history of these spaces is irrelevant to your experience of or relationship to the film and its narrative.” But the question remains, does affect live in the bodies of the characters, and emotional and/or critical thought in that of audiences? Or is it vice-versa? Does Sleepwalk enstrange or aestheticize affect?
Perhaps the scene after Nicole first begins working on the manuscript can mediate this question: Nicole walks home from work. She first encounters a young boy who commands assistance saying: “cross me.” Nicole walks him across the street, but he immediately turns around, running to his initial position. She next encounters a young girl who throws glitter in the air, and then a business man who barks at her like a dog. All of the shots in this sequence are framed somewhere between profile and frontal; Nicole moves through the world diagonally, as do the spectators of the film. The actions do not appear to drive or serve the plot. However, the style, the framing of the narrative, is symbolic, prescriptive, even, of a critical distance. Shklovsky insists that defamiliarization’s purpose, and art’s purpose is “complicating form, the device of art makes perception long and laborious.” Driver here slows perception, arrests narrative momentum, and refuses symbolic resolution. Perceptual resistance nurtured by its flatness, juxtaposed with its diagonality, that creates this effect. Here, affect, or unaffectedness, seems to live in the body of Nicole. She is not confused, she does not interpret. She is unaware and thus accepting of all that is strange. As viewers we try to make sense of this, in that we are void of emotion, cohesion, anything that is conventional given to us in an entertainment film. In fewer words, affect as character response to plot seems to create a critical (emotional?) mode of spectatorship, primed for the realization of strangeness in mundanities.
Driver’s style is organized not around clarity, progression, or coherence. Scenes stall rather than resolve. Dialogue drops into voids. The script trades exposition for recursion, cycling variations on estranged actions: walking down hallways, entering dim shops, brushing hands over paper. Such repetitions become not narrative beats but rhythmic insistences—a chromaticism of plot. Jameson’s invocation of Wagner’s chromaticism is useful here. Wagner’s use of chromaticism—which produces unresolved tensions in the body—only appears to be significant and indicative of a specific temporal or cultural period when placed in relation to older Italian Arias which looked to emotionally engage and effect audiences. It is the same in Sleepwalk. Its style works because it is interpreted as different from and more demanding/commanding of attention from audiences whose emotionally or affectively coded expectations of form and narrative belong to conventional entertainment film, or even traditional, historical art films.
Driver’s Sleepwalk offers a polemic against immediacy, a refusal of the seamless flow between image, language, and emotion that moves and defines realism. The film foregrounds the opacity of experience and its structures of mediation by placing its viewers at critical distance. Its refusal to gratify the viewer’s desire for affect or catharsis stages a confrontation with what spectators have come to expect from narrative cinema: identification, progress, resonance. Sleepwalk is then an aesthetic of deferral, of structural obstruction.
Here, form is the site of resistance. Sleepwalk is not inert nor empty; it is inhabited by distance. The film’s flatness is active, its silence is dense, coded by the absence or inversions of codes. What seems like disaffection is, in fact, a calculated ideological position. Sleepwalk contorts the tools of narrative cinema: the result is a negation of narrativity-as-commodity. In other words, the failure to progress is the point. Driver is not anti-narrative so much as she is anti-resolution. Such a politics of obstruction places the spectator within the film’s machinery, forced to reckon with the conditions of seeing. It is in this refusal of the emotional contract that the film asserts its radicalism. Though we cannot emotionally identify with the character of Nicole, we understand her condition as alienated. This is an ethics of form, one that insists on the discontinuity between image and meaning, character and subjectivity, event and effect. Nicole’s estrangement is both a theme and an operation in which we are its site. This all seems to parallel Shklovsky’s belief that “Art is a means of experiencing the process of creativity. The artifact itself is quite unimportant.”
Perhaps Sleepwalk exists outside of the (false) dialectic of affect and emotion as defined by Jameson, a binary which Jameson himself says is not an accurate representation of the possibilities of responses to media. Sleepwalk is an example of form conditioning critical thought, rather than emotion or sensation, that is much needed in the age of the entertaining arts. In a visual regime that demands our bodies and desires, Driver stages a form of cinema that disorients and holds us at arm’s length in a different kind of proximity: a proximity to truth through that of art and thinking. To valorize disaffection in this way is not to valorize detachment or retreat. Rather, it is to argue that art’s capacity to enstrange is more vital now than ever. Defamiliarization against forms that emotion and/or affect remind us that we are alienated, but that we perform and exploit alienation in ways that resist commodification. Here, refusal becomes the precondition for thought.
Bibliography:
Driver, Sara. Sleepwalk. First Run Features, 1986.
Jameson, Fredric. “The Twin Sources of Realism, Affect, or, the Body’s Present.” In Antinomies of Realism. Verso, 2013.
Shklovsky, Victor. “Art as Device.” In Theory Of Prose. Translated by Benjamin Sher. Kalkey. Archive Press, 1991.
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Movie for class (CIME 475)
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⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠉⠛⠶⣄⠶⠋ ⠀⠀⠀+. * Movie made for and partially by Marco These are things I needed on March 1st; Thinking on Sweet Times
Hot dog
Pickle
Peanut
Peas
Strawberry
Chocolate cake
Mirror
Mug
Trash can
Skirt: Wool, mini
Coat?
Shoes?
Shirt?
Shower caddy
Scissors (hair)
Alcohol: beer
Love
Memory
Awake
Healing
Love
Ee cumming!
Notebook
"The Pleasure of the Film-Text"
The Text of Bliss: (Post)Structuralism as Liberation in Roland Barthes’ The Pleasure of the Text (2)
Form and Affect as Theory in Roland Barthes’ The Pleasure of the Text (3)
The Film as a Text: The Film-Text: The Moving Image (h)as Language (or, Alexandre Astruc Predicted the Future) (4)
The Pleasure of the Film-Text (5)
Theory of a Cinema of Bliss/Jouissance in Cinema (6)
“The [Concept] Pleasure of the Film Text [Cinematic Excess]” (6)
Style as a seam: style as a roughening: style/affect (6)
Hal Hartley: Purveyor of The Film of Pleasure (8)
Hal Hartley: Purveyor of Jouissance (8)
Transcendental Film Style (8)
Centers (9)
Oedipal Slow Cinema (9)
CINE 372 Final
December 17th, 2024
I have adhered to the honor code in this assignment.
“The whole history of the concept of structure… must be thought of as a series of substitutions of center for center... Successively, and in a regulated fashion, the center receives different forms or names.”
Cinema has become synonymous with the historical novel; cinematic devices have become synonymous with the historical letter, word, paragraph: we are being deceived by Cinema’s images, structures, and language: because we can, we must apply The Pleasure of the Text to cinema, we must find cinematic jouissance. If the text was once the material center of the structure of representation of life and thought in media, today, the motion picture has become the substituted center.
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Central to the argument of The Pleasure of the Text is a distinction Roland Barthes makes between the text of pleasure (of plaisir) and the text of bliss (of jouissance, a paradoxical physical and/or intellectual pleasure in which, in oversimplified terms, bliss is paradoxically found within suffering, and suffering is a pleasure). Barthes proposes that the text of pleasure is a pacifying text: it hides the constructed nature of language, narrativity, and textuality by entertaining the reader. The text of pleasure is an easy pleasure, its relationship between itself and the reader is a gesture of “ungratified sucking”. The text of pleasure employs an “unweaned language: imperative, automatic, unaffectionate, a minor disaster of static”. The text of pleasure abides by the systemic rigidity of language, and pacifies its readers through satisfying the codes and expectations of gratifying entertainment. Familiarity with the Text of pleasure pacifies vital emotional or intellectual energy that might otherwise ignite a transformative or liberatory reading/derivation of meaning. The pleasure that emanates from a reader’s comfortability and confrontation with repeated readings of the tools/language of hegemony can often be used to hide dominant ideology. “This prattling text is then a frigid text, as any demand is frigid until desire, until neurosis forms in it.”
The Text of bliss, the ‘writerly’ text, creates an active participant out of its reader through destabilizing the structures of literature and language. In reading the Text of bliss, the reader is made to expose, reframe, and develop conceptions of the construction of self and society, and the ways in such sites interact with the site of the text. Given that the text of bliss and the text of pleasure are both textual, linguistic, literary, the two are largely the same; “the text of bliss is merely the logical, organic, historical development of the text of pleasure; the avant-garde is never anything but the progressive, emancipated form of past culture: today emerges from yesterday”. The jouissance that is found in reading the text of bliss creates an inherently destabilizing experience, as it confuses normative pleasure. There is still an ultimate satisfaction in jouissance, but it is found in a perversion of suffering: suffering as a joy. When challenged by a text that breaks from convention, the reader can experience bliss through a double edged pleasure; the reader finds pleasure in the entertaining capacity of language, narrative, and medium of the text, and additionally in the experience of working, suffering through the breaks in “sucking”, in pacified ideology, to reveal the constructed and deceptive nature of the mediums of language and literature. A reader who returns to pleasure from jouissance can now engage with form and pleasure through play, understanding the arbitrary yet fabricated nature of expression, representation, experience, and existential-structural ordering.
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Roland Barthes’ The Pleasure of the Text makes a distinction between reader experience of the text of bliss and of the text of pleasure. The text of bliss is not a text but rather a moment, a sensation; it is a sensation that is not sensationalized, however, as it is the perversion of sense for the sake of itself. Jouissance, the affect of the text of bliss, occurs within the text of pleasure; through the perversion of pleasure, the celebration of the realization of the fallacy of the truth of the mimetic structures of language and literature, bliss transpires.
“Neither culture nor its destruction is erotic; it is the seam between them, the fault, the flaw, which becomes so”; the text of pleasure, whether it is ideologically in support of or in opposition to dominant ideology, will always support dominant structures insofar that it negotiates its theoretical terms, its meaning, its message, what it aims to capture or represent, in the language, the rules, the linguistic and narrative tools of power. “We are all caught up in the truth of languages… For each jargon (each fiction) fights for hegemony; if power is on its side, it spreads everywhere in the general and daily occurrences of social life.” Anything, sensation or idea, that we can (logically, rationally, illogically, etc.) understand is a text of pleasure, is the perpetuation of hegemony; hermeneutics only exists in relationship to the text of pleasure. We can only interpret a text through the linguistic and narrative structures of dominant ideology because power has permitted the repetition of these tools, has funded their social memorization; we understand interpretation as a function of the head: Barthes speaks of “the old myth of heart against head, sensation against reasoning, (warm) “life” against (cold) “abstraction.” Because the text of bliss operates within the text of pleasure, these binaries are not rejected but complicated and collapsed. “What if knowledge itself were delicious?” What if epistemologies were erotic? What if truth cannot be understood by reading the word truth, or by reading a piece of literature that discusses a notion or theory of truth, but by feeling truth through perverting the acceptance of fiction? “Drawn from psychoanalysis… Pleasure can be expressed in words, bliss cannot. Bliss is unspeakable, inter-dicted. I refer to Lacan… and to Leclaire (“...Whoever speaks, by speaking denies bliss, or correlatively, whoever experiences bliss causes the letter – and all possible speech – to collapse in the absolute degree of the annihilation he is celebrating.”) The writer of pleasure (and his reader) accepts the letter.” In order to express Barthes’ theory of jouissance, Barthes must forgo a logical, counterlogical, illogical, narrative, anarrative, or counternarrative organization of text, language, and argument/reasoning: in order to develop and communicate a theory of jouissance, Barthes must textually condition joussiance as an affect of his work; The Pleasure of the Text accepts that narrative organization is arbitrary, and that any idea predicated upon significance being inherent to coherent or incoherent linguistics or narratives is a fallacy. The Pleasure of the Text, then, works through arbitrary narrative organization to create seams, sensation, and express a theory of textual affect through textual affects conditioned by textuality. Traditional theory is, too, a lie. Theory cannot express reality through language: however, there is no politic to jouissance, to blissful eroticism, there is only truth and form.
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From Alexandre Astruc’s “The Birth of a New Avant-Garde: La Camera-Stylo” emerged a principle which could help spectators and film-makers organize and understand film: Astruc’s essay pioneered the notion that cinema could function as literature did/does: cinema can be a medium, like literature, that’s language is not merely in reference to, symbolic of, or a representation of natural content and/or orality. Cinema works to express thought through and with formal reference to itself, to its own codes, structures, histories, and the affects of such qualities. “The cinema will gradually break free from the tyranny of what is visual, from the image for its own sake, from the immediate and concrete demands of the narrative, to become a means of writing just as flexible and subtle as written language”. Astruc’s “La Camera-Stylo” became a widely accepted text by filmmakers and critics alike, and became foundational to the development and codification of auteur theory as a way of critically receiving, interpreting, reading, and watching cinematic works.
Authorship can be a lens and method to read a text pleasurably. Authorship as a reading method locates meaning in the choices of the writer, creating a pleasurable reading experience in which one who engages with a work of literature can focus on what is being narrated and represented, and less on how and why they have been impacted by configurations of medium, narrative, and language. Astruc’s as well as cinematic and critical film history’s acceptance of the auteur theory counterintuitively reveals the artifice of cinematic language; if the fallacy of authorship can be found in cinema, as it is in written literature, then the language and form of cinema can be read, analyzed, experienced, constructed, and deconstructed as it has been in literature: yet, like the literature discussed by Barthes, like all literature, this cinematic language and form is arbitrary. Cinema is a language: cinematic forms are a fiction of fact.
Barthes notes that because literary jouissance is often found when a reader breaks from the reading experience conditioned by conventional formal organization, bliss can occur with simple distraction from text, such as looking up or closing a book. “What I enjoy in a narrative is not directly its content or even its structure, but the abrasions I impose upon the fine surface: I read on, I skip, I look up, I dip in again. Which has nothing to do with the deep laceration the text of class inflicts upon language itself, and not upon the simple temporality of its reading”. The rise of home-bound engagement with cinema, streaming, dvd players, etc., allows for readerly lacerations of the film-text, similar to the literary textual lacerations illustrated by Barthes. Even in 1948, Astruc notes what this technology, a technology that creates a more personal relationship to cinema and its formal exploitation of time, could do for the medium. He wrote that “it must be understood that up to now the cinema has been nothing more than a show. This is due to the basic fact that all films are projected in an auditorium. But with the development of 16mm and television, the day is not far off when everyone will possess a projector...There will be several cinemas just as today there are several literatures.”
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The Pleasure of the Text elucidates the arbitrary nature and feigned legitimacy of the representational capacities of language, literature, and narrative through affecting jouissance; The Pleasure of the Text realizes, expresses, makes a theoretical argument about jouissance by utilizing the affects of literary aesthetics, literary form, and text(uality) to impose jouissance upon its readers. The Pleasure of the Text formally and affectively theorizes about written literature, so it is written literature. Affect generates knowledge. Experience of thingness is the knowledge and realization of thingness; of the arbitrary; of the artifice of structure and form and the meaning or significance attributed to or derived from the arbitrary; of structure’s bastardized, repeated contortions of structure at the hands of the historically empowered.
Cinema is literature: cinema is language; cinema is narrative. Cinematic jouissance does exist and must be realized by filmmaker-spectator-critcs. However, these words become moving images, this text that you currently read will never be “the pleasure of the film-text,” and its readers may never understand cinematic jouissance.
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Mass culture relies on “humiliated repetition”, where the superficial, pleasurable forms of media may appear as novel, while the intended affects and underlying ideological schema remain unchanged. This repetition pacifies audiences by concealing its own constructedness, ensuring ideological continuity through the unobtrusive presentation of narrative structures. Thompson’s theorization of cinematic excess offers a parallel critique of this dynamic in cinema. While the conventions of classical narrative cinema rely on an “unobtrusive style” to smooth over the material aspects of the medium, excess disrupts this pacification by foregrounding the film’s stylistic devices. She explains that “the minute a viewer begins to notice style for its own sake or watch works which do not provide such thorough motivation, excess comes forward and must affect narrative meaning”. Excess, then, destabilizes the ideological authority of narrative cohesion by rendering visible the material and constructed nature of the cinematic text. While excess may “exceed” a text’s signification, it does not “deny or blur” its meaning. Instead, excess, like bliss, creates a fissure within the normative experience of narrative, forcing the spectator to contend with the materiality rather than the ideological structures of cinematic language. The dialectic between humiliated repetition and cinematic excess mirrors the texts of pleasure and bliss, as the latter emerges through the rupture of ideological and formal stability.
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Hartley’s style gives equal space to these tangential characters/stories and to silence/stillness as he does to his protagonists, to the more conventional plot, and to action. The construction of Simple Men seems to be predicated upon inverted cinematic conventions/linguistic codes of presence and absence. Protagonists central to an active and cohesive plot are the expectation for a work of cinema, yet Hartley limits viewers access to these codes and instead heightens the access to what is more traditionally absent in cinema. Hartley, through Excessive representation of the exterior contexts of characters–the individuals, systems, structures, materiality, and rules present in experienced reality but not in film, and vice versa–forces active viewership with this divergence from traditional film form and style, allowing for jouissance in reading/watching the film-text to flourish, creating a consideration of the coded, arbitrary constructed-ness of the language the cinematic as well as the social within his viewers.
Simple Men’s plot, what occurs and how it happens, functions in accordance with Thompson’s notion of the function of cinematic Excess as “not only counternarrative [but] also counter-unity”. Through its deliberate deviation from traditional narrative and formal structures, Simple Men reading. Excess operates not simply as a challenge to narrative form but also to the social and cultural notion of unity coded within conventional filmic language. Simple Men’s style draws attention to the materiality of film and the way such material is disposed of in the structure of filmic language and narrative. The logical flow expected of narrative cinema. The excess of these elements encourages viewers to linger in this ambiguity, creating a field where pleasure is generated not from discovering a definitive meaning but from engaging with the film’s roughness—its refusal to cohere. This “roughness” speaks to Viktor Shklovski’s notion that the language of poetry, much like cinema, is not a comprehensible language but rather a “semi-comprehensible” one, one that invites complex and open-ended engagement, that affects the bliss of an audience member. This blissful engagement, in Barthes’ terms, is not “caught in the rivalry of names,” not concerned with constructing meaning within the confines of the “jargon” of dominant ideology; rather, jouissance as a method of watching a film is concerned with the “perceptual play” of the language that fails to fully communicate the world it seeks to represent.
Thompson defines style as “the use of repeated techniques which become characteristic of the work”, which is vague enough so as not to contradict Schrader’s definition of style as the devices which express “similar ideas in similar forms by divergent culture [... and] is concerned with what is universal rather than particular in the various means of expression, and therefore is ideally suited to describe a style which seeks to express the Wholly Other through divergent cultures and personalities.” Both Schrader and Thompson identify style as being present in film works and being codified by (critic-)spectators; both understand style as a formal discussion of form, structure, materiality, representation (not of what is visually-narratively being “represented”, but of how something can or cannot be represented, yet is still felt/understood) and its relationship to understanding, meaning, and affect. “The keys to the artist’s kingdom lie in the application of style over content. It’s the form of things that makes you free.”
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;.,,.
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Transcendental film style is a set of, interchangeable yet limited, cinematic devices that operate as structural and formal filmic means to an afilmic ends of transcendence. “The style is not intrinsically transcendental or religious, but it represents a way (a tao, in the broadest sense of the term) to approach the Transcendent. The matter being transcended is different in each case, but the goal and the method are, at their purest, the same… the result of two universal contingencies: the desire to express the Transcendent in art and the nature of the film medium…camera angles, dialogue, editing… The Transcendent is beyond normal sense experience…Human works, accordingly, cannot inform one about the Transcendent; they can only be expressive of the transcendent. This essay will concentrate on transcendental art, art which expresses the Transcendent in the human mirror…Transcendental style seeks to maximize the mystery of existence; it eschews all conventional interpretations of reality: realism, naturalism, psychologism, romanticism, expressionism, impressionism, and, finally, rationalism.”
In The Pleasure of the Text, Roland Barthes proposes that the text of bliss (of jouissance) can liberate the reader. In Paul Schrader’s Transcendental Style in Film, Schrader discusses how film form can be manipulated through the implementation of certain stylistic devices to create the affect of spiritual transcendence in a viewer. In Kirtstin Thompson’s “The Concept of Cinematic Excess”, Thompson analyzes film form that emphasizes style and draws attention to materiality and structure, as opposed to narrative, meaning, and representation. Integrating the film theories of Schrader and Thompson, I propose that Barthes’ jouissance, or the film of bliss, can be actualized through the devices of transcendental film style by reorienting the means of affect towards social, linguistic, (post)structural rather than spiritual transcendence.
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The Transcendent is the center of the structure of the spiritually organized world: transcendence of materiality is the realization of structures as organized by the spiritual, the Transcendent; Man/Dominant Ideology is the center of the structure of a rationally/narratively/linguistically organized representational-material world: transcendence of signification in narrative and linguistics is the realization of the man-made, arbitrary existence of such materials.
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“No object is in a constant relationship with pleasure (Lacan, apropos of Sade). For the writer, however, this object exists: it is not the language, it is the mother tongue. The writer is someone who plays with his mother's body (I refer to Pleynet on Lautreamont and Matisse): in order to glorify it, to embellish it, or in order to dismember it, to take it to the limit of what can be known about the body: I would go so far as to take bliss in a disfiguration of the language.”
Style’s relationship to narrative’s relationship to temporality composes the language of cinema: slow cinema is an oedipal project. “Slow cinema works against the grain of cinema itself. It turns its back on what movies do best. It replaces action with stillness, empathy with distance.” Slow cinema is an outgrowth of transcendental style; it uses, exploits, emphasizes, expands upon much of the style that affects transcendence from film, however, unlike like transcendental style and its fixed affect, “not all directors use ‘slow’ cinema for the same purposes.”
All slow cinema understands temporality as the mother tongue, and it uses style to distort its mother’s body. Normal cutting, splices made ‘on action,’ mimetic dialogue, variety in shot types, mimetic narratives, depth of field, etc. are exchanged for wide angles, visual flatness, doubling or excessively presenting narrative information, offset edits, non-acting, and, most notably, the long take. With the long take, “the viewer makes time felt in a shot. The viewer is operative; the viewer acts upon the image.” The long shot conveys time, and this conveys materiality; “Duration can peel back the social veneer of an activity. Duration can invoke the Wholly Other.”
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“Just as the pleasure of the text supposes a whole indirect production, so boredom cannot presume it is entitled to any spontaneity: there is no sincere boredom: if the prattle-text bores me personally, it is because in reality I do not like the demand. But what if I did like (if I had some maternal appetite)? Boredom is not far from bliss: it is bliss seen from the shores of pleasure.”
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