Enacting the Worlds of Cinema

by Steffen Hven

Overview

Enacting the Worlds of Cinema offers a substantial reconfiguration of the textual roots of modern film narratology. By giving sustained attention to cinema's material-affective modes of communicating its stories and embedding its audience in atmospheric, kinetic, and multisensorial worlds, this book maintains that film narratives are less representations than they are enactments; brought forth through the interactions of the felt body and the film material. The book defends this enactive and media-anthropological thesis by reworking a series of established film narratological key concepts including the diegesis, mood/atmosphere, and the distinction between diegetic and non-diegetic sound. In the process, this book draws on a wide range of contemporary theoretical resources such as affective neuroscience, media-philosophy, philosophy of mind, atmosphere research, multisensory perception theory as well as a broad selection of films including Berlin: Symphony of a Great City (Ruttmann, 1927), The Cranes are Flying (Kalatozov, 1957) and Happy as Lazzaro (Rohrwacher, 2018).

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780197555101
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	05/06/2022
Pages:	216
Product dimensions:	9.00(w) x 6.20(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Steffen Hven currently lectures in Film Studies at the Freie University of Berlin. He has previously been a Visiting Fellow at the Cinepoetics and the University of Chicago and an Associate Postdoc at the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, where he also obtained his PhD in Film Studies in 2015. He is the author of Cinema and Narrative Complexity: Embodying the Fabula (2017) and his work has been published in journals such as NECSUS, 16:9, and Fata Morgana. He has been awarded research grants from foundations such as the German Research Foundation, the Fritz Thyssen Foundation, and the Bauhaus Research School.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements
Introduction
Chapter 1: The Diegesis as Environment: A New Theory of Film Worlds
Chapter 2: The Atmospheric Worlds of Cinema
Chapter 3: Narrative Experientiality and Affect
Chapter 4: The Moving Camera and the Motor-Affective Arrangement of Films
Chapter 5: Narratives Spaces and Sonic Environments
Afterword
Index

Editorial Reviews

"Moving within and between disciplines, traditions and paradigms with impressive erudition – and challenging overly simplistic cognitive and affective oppositions at every turn – this study establishes Hven as an original and powerful voice in the expanding theory of cinematic worlds, environments and atmospheres." — Daniel Yacavone, University of Edinburgh

From the Publisher