What Makes a Film Tick?: Cinematic Affect, Materiality and Mimetic Innervation (Film Cultures)

This book offers a close study of how film produces sensory-affective experience for the spectator. It argues that we must explore this affective dimension if we want to understand how cinema takes up cultural or thematic issues. Examining cinematic affect through close readings of how affective immersion in cinema works to engage viewers with history, memory and cultural specificity, it deals with both fiction film and documentary. Taking an international perspective, it includes case studies of Korean detective film, classical Japanese cinema, modern Greek cinema, independent American cinema, Indian documentary, Australian television documentary, Indonesian political docudrama, avantgarde French documentary and Australian Indigenous film. Rutherford draws on the analysis of embodied affect to revise many of the foundational concepts of film studies. Drawing on Miriam Hansen’s readings of Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer, the book explores the capacity of film to produce experiences in which the boundaries between the spectator and the film become porous and the viewer is transported in a heightened way into the film. Introduction: a paradigm shift in film studies. "A particular type of film experience" A paradigm shift in film studies Affect and the feature film Cinema and embodied affect Precarious boundaries: affect, mise en scène and the senses in Angelopoulos, Balkans epic Nowhere to hide: the tumultuous materialism of Lee Myung-Se Affect and documentary. But what does the man in the cowboy hat think? Intercultural dialogue: silence, taboo and masquerade Garin Nugroho: Didong, cinema and the embodiment of politics in cultural form The poetics of a potato: documentary that gets under the skin "Buddhas made of ice and butter": mimetic visuality, transience and the documentary image. Drawing on Miriam Hansen's readings of Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer, this book explores the capacity of film to produce experiences in which the boundaries between the spectator and the film become porous and the viewer is transported in a heightened way into the film. This study shows how film produces a sensory-affective experience for the spectator. It argues that we must explore this affective dimension if we want to understand how cinema takes up cultural or thematic issues