Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- I Vertigo: Towards a Neurofilmology
- II Acrobatics: On the wires of empathy
- III Fall: Descent to equilibrium
- IV Impact: Experiencing the unrepresentable
- V Overturning: Upside-down dissimulations
- VI Drift: Ungraspable environments
- VII Flight: Towards an Ecofilmology
- Bibliography
- Filmography
- Index
II - Acrobatics: On the wires of empathy
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 October 2021
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- I Vertigo: Towards a Neurofilmology
- II Acrobatics: On the wires of empathy
- III Fall: Descent to equilibrium
- IV Impact: Experiencing the unrepresentable
- V Overturning: Upside-down dissimulations
- VI Drift: Ungraspable environments
- VII Flight: Towards an Ecofilmology
- Bibliography
- Filmography
- Index
Summary
Abstract
The chapter ‘Acrobatics. On the wires of empathy’ takes as a starting point Edith Stein's critique of psychologist Theodor Lipps’ notion of empathy (Einfühlung) and her original proposal for a phenomenology of intersubjectivity. Since this debate revolves around the example of an observer watching an acrobat walking on a wire in mid air, the chapter offers an analysis of acrobatic actions in contemporary cinema (such as in Zemeckis’ The Walk) and reflects on both disembodied and embodied accounts of empathy in film studies. Recovering the filmological meaning of this term (introduced into film studies by psychologist Albert Michotte) and developing a model of cinematic empathy along the lines of Stein's theory, the chapter illuminates the importance of the unbalancing/rebalancing dynamic in creating the spectator's proprioceptive experience of disequilibrium.
Keywords: Cinematic empathy, Einfuhlung, Edith Stein, Albert Michotte, Mirror Neurons, The Walk
Thus all of us may get vicariously the experience which we could not get or would not want in actual life.
—Victor O. Freeburg, The Art of Photoplay Making 1918 (16)The green abyss
In September 2015, at the press conference that followed the world premiere of Robert Zemeckis’ The Walk at the New York Film Festival, both film critics and audience members reported that they experienced unpleasant sensations while watching the film or got physically sick shortly after. Indeed, the 20-minute-long finale showing Philippe Petit (Joseph Gordon-Levitt)'s tightrope walk between the digitally restored Twin Towers offers a vertiginous view that caused nausea, anxiety, dizziness, tingling, and drowsiness. Newspapers reported excited testimonies: ‘It felt very real. I felt a knot in my stomach. It's like my head was reeling but I was not dizzy. The audience got a fear of him falling. It's like actually picturing in your mind him falling. You really get a sense of depth’; ‘The last 20 minutes of the film I had to look away a couple of times because of the sensation of the height. I felt a little bit queasy. I felt nervous. It was a tingling sensation and some anxiety’ (Child 2015) The director intentionally used computer-generated imagery and special 3D-effects to evoke such visceral responses from the audience: ‘[the goal] was to evoke the feeling of vertigo.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Neurofilmology of the Moving ImageGravity and Vertigo in Contemporary Cinema, pp. 59 - 90Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2021