Resonant perception: Cinema, phenomenology, and the illusion of bodily movement

Resonant Perception seeks to offer a significant reorientation of how we theorize the cinema. Cinema scholars have recently worried a great deal about the fact that most cinematic images today are produced digitally, without offering a satisfying account of "digital cinema." I argue that this is because many of these scholars inherit a modernist preoccupation with materiality and medium specificity. They assume that shifts in technological procedures require sophisticated aesthetic, theoretical, and philosophical accounting. In contrast, I develop a description of the cinema adequate to its contemporary situation as one site of encountering digital moving images among many. I contend that coming to terms with this situation requires a phenomenological study of our contemporary ways of encountering the cinema.;Resonant Perception proceeds by way of a multidisciplinary investigation of a perceptual phenomenon in the cinema which film theory has been largely unable to grasp: the illusion of bodily movement, or cinematic kinesthesis---the giddy feeling of flying through space the cinema can induce in its spectators. Working closely with examples of this illusion from the length of film history---from Marcel Duchamp's Anemic Cinema (1926), to Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), to Godfrey Reggio's Koyaanisqatsi (1982)---I let cinematic kinesthesis stand at the center of a broader redescription of the cinema. I argue that the forms of description commensurate to the illusion of bodily movement themselves entail a substantially different conception of what the cinema is and does than recent theories of the cinema which emphasize medium specificity or technological change. Drawing on and extending the recent emphasis on embodiment in accounts of cinema, I offer a theory of the cinema as a technology for the modulation of embodied perception.;To describe this perceptual manipulation, I work across a number of conceptual idioms in addition to film theory, most significantly phenomenology, ordinary language philosophy, queer theory and other revisionist psychoanalytic accounts of sexuality, and the ecological approach to perceptual psychology. All of these are both antiskeptical and nondualist in orientation. This is because, in my first chapter, in conversation with Stanley Cavell's account of modernism, I show that the modernist orientation of contemporary film theory is underwritten by unacknowledged skeptical positions. Moving past modernism will thus mean getting over skepticism. To do this, I then turn in my second chapter to phenomenological and ecological accounts of perception, drawn from the philosophy of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and the ecological approach to perceptual psychology of James Gibson, to describe the perceptual dynamics of the illusion of bodily movement. These accounts radically reject traditional, skeptical accounts of perception, illusion, and the cinematic image. I thus argue that this illusion, instead of leading to skepticism, exposes what Merleau-Ponty calls perceptual faith. Next, in my third chapter, I consider the undeniable pleasure of this effect, revisiting theories of visual pleasure in the cinema. In film theory, such pleasure has usually been construed as either sadism or masochism, on the side of the subject, and has been important to articulations of "cinematic subjectivity." Working with thinkers such as Jean Laplanche, Leo Bersani, and Daniel Heller-Roazen, I give an account of this pleasure which is neither subjective nor objective, but an impersonal constituent of the cinematic encounter itself. In a series of concluding moves, I argue that we must revisit the kind of problem the technology of the cinema can be for film theory; in place of a focus on digital "materiality" or on the cinema as an apparatus, we must attend to the cinema as embodied technics.