Film as a Medium of Seduction: Introduction to the Seduction-Theory of Film 3658438185, 9783658438180

The seduction-theory defines film in a broader sense as a medium of seduction, based on the French concept of séduction.

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Film as a Medium of Seduction: Introduction to the Seduction-Theory of Film
 3658438185, 9783658438180

Table of contents :
Foreword
Acknowledgment
Contents
1 Introduction
1.1 Prolegomena
1.2 Problem and Application of the Concept of Seduction
1.3 Gaze and Desire
1.4 The Taboo and Transgression as Seduction
1.5 Film as a Seduction Machine and Seductive Simulation
References
2 Film and Philosophy
2.1 The Seduction Theory in the Context of Philosophy
2.2 Postmodernism, Simulation and Seduction
2.3 The Action Image as Tactile Cinema
2.4 The Classic Western as Performative Seduction
References
3 Body, Cinema and Performance
3.1 Choreography and Seduction
3.2 Schizoanalysis
3.3 Body Construction and Performative Cinema
3.4 Choreography and Violence
References
4 Seduction and Ethics
4.1 The Sovereignty of the Senseless Act
4.2 Seductive Surface—Bourgeois Abyss
4.3 Ethical Challenge and Fictionalized History
4.4 Ethical Challenge in Interpersonal Dynamics
References
5 Seduction and Genre
5.1 Genre Bending
5.2 Ciphers of the Other and the Alien
5.3 Disturbance as a Strategy
5.4 Seduction Theory Genre Analysis
5.5 Ambiguity, Convention and Irritation
References
6 Seduction to Myth
6.1 Seduction to Mythical Thinking
6.2 Invitation to the Apocalypse
6.3 Mythical Body Cinema
References
7 Seduction, Performance and Pop Culture
7.1 Film as a Medium of Popular Culture
7.2 What is Performative Cinema?
7.3 Performative Body Cinema
7.4 Film as Meta-Pop
7.5 The Seduction Theory as a Method of Popular Culture Research
7.6 Comic Adaptations, Franchise Culture and ‘Realism’
References
8 Seduction and Exploration of Existence
8.1 Existence and Temporality
8.2 Filmic Conventions of Temporality
8.3 Ecstasies of Temporality
References
9 Perspectives of Seduction Theory
9.1 A Seduction Theory of Media?
9.2 Hyperreality and Ludology
9.3 Terrorism, Propaganda, Ideology and Seduction
9.4 Outlook
References

Citation preview

Film as a Medium of Seduction Introduction to the Seduction-Theory of Film Marcus Stiglegger

Film as a Medium of Seduction

Marcus Stiglegger

Film as a Medium of Seduction Introduction to the Seduction-Theory of Film Foreword by Lothar Mikos

Marcus Stiglegger Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz, Germany

Foreword by Lothar Mikos HS für Film und Fernsehen Potsdam-Babelsberg, Germany

ISBN 978-3-658-43817-3 ISBN 978-3-658-43818-0  (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-43818-0 This book is a translation of the original German edition “Film als Medium der Verführung” by Stiglegger, Marcus, published by Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH in 2023. The translation was done with the help of an artificial intelligence machine translation tool. A subsequent human revision was done primarily in terms of content, so that the book will read stylistically differently from a conventional translation. Springer Nature works continuously to further the development of tools for the production of books and on the related technologies to support the authors. Translation from the German language edition: “Film als Medium der Verführung” by Marcus Stiglegger and Lothar Mikos, © Der/die Herausgeber bzw. der/die Autor(en), exklusiv lizenziert an Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, ein Teil von Springer Nature 2023. Published by Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden. All Rights Reserved. © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2024 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature. The registered company address is: Abraham-Lincoln-Str. 46, 65189 Wiesbaden, Germany Paper in this product is recyclable.

Film is seduction. David Cronenberg, Interview, https://zeitung.faz.net/fas/ feuilleton/2022-11-06/ed0d0cb7e078687526528fcc3497 9769/?GEPC=s5&fbclid=IwAR1t5G2wcVEglzEuk8P_P %2D%2Dj3s3UiQTyAUj2UTnawXfKEYtbOf2gm5Wa1 mo (07.11.2022) The seduced self arises in the course of seduction, and since the seducer himself is and remains a seduced one, every seduction retains something of a seduction without a seducer. Bernhard Waldenfels, Idiome des Denkens, Frankfurt 2005, p. 250 The […] film aims to create a vision like a psychotic hallucination, in which the inside and outside blend together. It wants to immerse itself in the viewer, just as the viewer should immerse themselves in it. Andreas Jacke, Traumpassagen, Würzburg 2013, p. 131 Filmmaking is not about what we see – [that’s] a very misconceived notion, it’s about what we don’t see. Nicholas Winding Refn, Interview, http://blogs.indiewire. com/theplaylist/i-must-be-very-good-at-what-i-donicolas-winding-refn-on-the-critical-response-to-onlygod-forgives-and-more-20130529 (11.07.2022)

Foreword

What an introduction! “Film is seduction.” A first sentence that makes this book similar to film. It aims to seduce the readers, to read, to think, and not least to love film, which often enough is based on desire. Marcus Stiglegger develops from the opening sentence a theory that can also be applied as a heuristic methodology for the critical analysis of films and other popular media and arts. This film analysis, to be understood as hermeneutic, makes it possible to also reveal the deep structures of films, those structures that push themselves into the subconscious of the viewers due to their specific type of staging. These are the elements that sometimes leave us not only puzzled, but also shaken, disturbed, and insecure. They target our affects, which play a big role in cinema. The film, like television, is a medium that combines various types of signs and different symbol configurations. It is a complex medium, more complex than language. This is clearly illustrated by the popular saying, “A picture is worth a thousand words”. However, a film consists of moving or animated images, which makes it even more complex than individual images. In film and communication studies, it is known that only the combination and arrangement of individual images generate meaning and offer a sense to the audience. Marcus Stiglegger attempts to master this complexity of film with his analysis model of seduction theory. With the model, various layers can be peeled off in the analysis, from the analysis of the seduction of the films to watch them, through the concrete statements (not messages) of films on the second layer, to the third layer, the hidden objectives of the films at the meta-level. This is the layer, that affects us. “Here, subtle aspects such as specific structures of desire become apparent, which allow conclusions about ideological subtexts,” as it is called. Here, the actual goal of seduction becomes apparent: It wants to lead us astray by allowing us to leave

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Foreword

our established positions and paths while watching films, to lead us into a sea of possibilities, possible lives and subjectivizations, as well as to extreme affects such as fear, disgust, horror, and desire. Therefore, it is important to emphasize the physicality of films as well as their performance. In the hermeneutic analysis of cinematic seduction, it is not about an empirical study of the reception by the audience, but about the analysis of the ways films are staged, which challenge the audience and lead to reactions, sometimes with extreme affects. Marcus Stiglegger demonstrates the advantages of this analysis method using numerous examples, from Capote to Black Swan, Joker, Melancholia, Nocturnal Animals, Sombre, Stagecoach and Under the Skin to Valhalla Rising and Wild, to name just a few. The theory of seduction allows a different view of films than the classic analysis models do. Because here it is primarily about the second and third level of seduction. On the second level, ethical issues can be negotiated, as impressively shown in the chapter on seduction and ethics. With cinematic means of staging such as, for example, the dramaturgy of the gaze, we are drawn into ethical decision-making processes that can lead to experiences of ambivalence. Marcus Stiglegger does not shy away from examining IS propaganda videos, which pose a special ethical challenge to us as viewers. Movies can lead us to grapple with the fundamental questions of our existence, and in doing so, we must question our more or less fixed norms, values, and ideas. There are directors who repeatedly confront us with existential questions through their films. This includes, for example, Christopher Nolan, in whose films time and temporality are significant. In the analysis of the seduction of his films, Marcus Stiglegger comes to the conclusion: “In this sense, Christopher Nolan’s films are philosophical explorations of existence that use cinematic means to explore, intertwine, and at significant turning points, turn into an audiovisual ‘ecstasy of temporality’ in which the future affects the past, in which the levels do not cancel each other out in their overlay, but complement and mutually charge each other with meaning.” We must live with the ambivalence that we have to question our understanding of time and temporality. The films leave us with a feeling of uncertainty. The analysis of cinematic seduction can reveal the ways in which we are put into this position. In order to analyze the third level of seduction, it is important to deal with the aesthetic means that the film has at its disposal to seduce us into leaving the established paths. In addition to flashbacks, the conventional and unusual use of close-ups, the acceleration and deceleration of images also lead to corresponding reactions. For example, Marcus Stiglegger deals with the choreography of violence. With the slow motion or the deceleration of the images, an increase in the

Foreword

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intensity of what is shown goes hand in hand. Especially when acts of violence are shown in slow motion, this not only often presents us with ethical challenges, but primarily aims to affect us, to write affects of disgust, fear, fascination, and desire, up to pain, onto our faces, so to speak. The confrontation with one’s own existence, however, does not only take place through rational means, but also in physicality and in myth, which Marcus Stiglegger, following Ernst Cassirer and Claude Lévi-Strauss, understands as a thought figure, creating a possibility to understand the world. He finds this in the works of Nicolas Winding Refn, who celebrates a performative body cinema in his films. The film and the cinema itself become a myth here. The analysis of cinematic seduction opens the discourse on films also to mythical thinking. With his seduction theory of film, which also provides a heuristic for the analysis of films, Marcus Stiglegger embarks on a path that goes beyond classical film studies approaches. Because the analysis incorporates insights from a wide range of scientific disciplines, from cultural studies and cultural anthropology, through philosophy and psychology, to psychoanalysis and schizoanalysis. In this way, the seduction theory becomes connectable to the discourses of these disciplines, and it also locates the film at their center. Marcus Stiglegger shows with his theory and his analysis method how closely film is connected to our existence, our affects, and our central existential questions. The possibilities of filmic staging thus expand our view of the world and of ourselves, beyond the representation of the world and society, by pointing beyond them. The present book by Marcus Stiglegger also accomplishes this. It invites the readers to leave the well-trodden safe paths of discourse about films, and to let ourselves be affected. The reading opens up new perspectives not only on films, but also on ourselves. More cannot be expected from a book that deals theoretically and methodically with films. Berlin, Germany in October 2022

Lothar Mikos

Acknowledgment

The following individuals have inspired, discussed, or otherwise influenced the ideas presented here since 1995: Jean Baudrillard (†), Dirk Blothner, Rosemarie Brucher, Bettina Buchler, Susanne Burg, Martin Büsser (†), Lucas Curstädt, Nadine Demmler, Thomas Elsaesser (†), Barbara Emig-Roller, Anton Escher, Christian Fuchs, Reinhold Görling, Lars Christian Grabbe, Dominik Graf, Philippe Grandrieux, Andreas Hamburger, Stefan Jung, RP Kahl, Bernd Kiefer, Thomas Klein, Marcus S. Kleiner, Michal Kosakowski, Marvin Kren, Patricia MacCormack, Andreas Marschall, Lothar Mikos, Kai Naumann, Andreas Rauscher, Sarah Reininghaus, Jack Sargeant, Lioba Schlösser, Gerhard Schneider, Jens Schroeter, Barbara Schweizerhof, Sebastian Seidler, Sascha Seiler, Rüdiger Suchsland, Danilo Vogt, Christoph Wagner, Thomas Weber, Patrick Wellinski, Rainer Winter, Ralf Zwiebel.

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Contents

1 Introduction. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 1.1 Prolegomena. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 1.2 Problem and Application of the Concept of Seduction. . . . . . . . . . . 3 1.3 Gaze and Desire. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 1.4 The Taboo and Transgression as Seduction. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 1.5 Film as a Seduction Machine and Seductive Simulation. . . . . . . . . . 11 References. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15 2 Film and Philosophy. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17 2.1 The Seduction Theory in the Context of Philosophy. . . . . . . . . . . . . 17 2.2 Postmodernism, Simulation and Seduction. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20 2.3 The Action Image as Tactile Cinema. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24 2.4 The Classic Western as Performative Seduction. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27 References. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33 3 Body, Cinema and Performance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35 3.1 Choreography and Seduction. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35 3.2 Schizoanalysis. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38 3.3 Body Construction and Performative Cinema. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40 3.4 Choreography and Violence. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42 References. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49 4 Seduction and Ethics. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51 4.1 The Sovereignty of the Senseless Act . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51 4.2 Seductive Surface—Bourgeois Abyss. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53 4.3 Ethical Challenge and Fictionalized History. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58 4.4 Ethical Challenge in Interpersonal Dynamics. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65 References. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71 XIII

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5 Seduction and Genre. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73 5.1 Genre Bending. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73 5.2 Ciphers of the Other and the Alien . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75 5.3 Disturbance as a Strategy. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77 5.4 Seduction Theory Genre Analysis. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80 5.5 Ambiguity, Convention and Irritation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 82 References. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89 6 Seduction to Myth. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91 6.1 Seduction to Mythical Thinking . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91 6.2 Invitation to the Apocalypse. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95 6.3 Mythical Body Cinema . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 98 References. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107 7 Seduction, Performance and Pop Culture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 109 7.1 Film as a Medium of Popular Culture. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 109 7.2 What is Performative Cinema? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 110 7.3 Performative Body Cinema. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 114 7.4 Film as Meta-Pop. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 118 7.5 The Seduction Theory as a Method of Popular Culture Research. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 121 7.6 Comic Adaptations, Franchise Culture and ‘Realism’. . . . . . . . . . . . 123 References. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 128 8 Seduction and Exploration of Existence. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 131 8.1 Existence and Temporality. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 131 8.2 Filmic Conventions of Temporality. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 133 8.3 Ecstasies of Temporality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 138 References. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 141 9 Perspectives of Seduction Theory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 143 9.1 A Seduction Theory of Media?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 143 9.2 Hyperreality and Ludology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 146 9.3 Terrorism, Propaganda, Ideology and Seduction. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 150 9.4 Outlook . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 154 References. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 155

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Introduction

1.1 Prolegomena Film is seduction. I have always started from this premise as a film scholar—as one seduced by film, but also as one who seduces to film. Because film theory is also seduction in a certain sense. This book defines a theory and at the same time a methodological approach to film analysis. It builds on my habilitation, which was published under the title Ritual & Verführung (2006), and further develops its approaches with regard to recent developments. As a university teacher in film theoretical and film practical courses, I had the opportunity to extensively test and discuss the seduction theory of film. All these experiences and insights have been taken into account in this book. At the same time, the seduction theory has proven to be a fruitful approach in the analytical handling of narrative audiovisual stagings. More than the original volume, this book may also serve as a textbook for hermeneutically based film analysis. It is constructive for film theoretical engagement, as the seduction theory explicitly builds on classic models of film theory, which will be explained and contextualized using examples. And it is useful for students of film practice to gain insight into the conventions of filmic appropriation mechanisms. Seduction in this context is the sum of media strategies with which the filmic staging works to win us over as an audience, to surprise, to convince and possibly to divert us from our usual path. The performative power of film—as will be shown—enables that unique immersion associated with the filmic experience.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2024 M. Stiglegger, Film as a Medium of Seduction, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-43818-0_1

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1 Introduction

Before my studies in film and theater studies and ethnology, I was involved in film practice for some time and did not lose this insight even later when I taught film studies at different international universities in the USA, Austria, Poland, Colombia, and Germany since 1999. My practical experiences have constructively flowed into the considerations and explicitly take into account the feature film as a creative teamwork. The following theses and strategies can be demonstrated—as I will show—on the work itself, but from this, basic features of captivating and effective staging strategies can also be derived, which are useful for practice. It should be remembered that the feature film is by nature one of the most complex art forms ever, as it combines the most diverse disciplines: photography, acting, literature, music, architecture, performance and choreography, design, sculpture, etc. All these artistic forms of expression brought together for synergy merge into a new, holistic expression, which poses the greatest challenges for analysis. The intention of this synergy is immersion and manipulation, as well as identification and empathy on the part of the audience—all strategies and affect-related results of the staging that can be grasped with the concept of seduction. The key concept here is seduction, which I denote with the French or English term séduction or seduction to avoid the strongly sexually connoted reading of the German term, as it also becomes clear in Søren Kierkegaard’s philosophy of seduction in Diary of a Seducer ([1843] 2019). For him, the goal of seduction is achieved when the fulfillment of the desired goal of a seduction act becomes a certainty. The seduction theory goes far beyond this and includes all strategies of filmic manipulation and subtle assaults on the audience. The subject loses itself in this process, as the linear order is shaken and temporarily loses control of the situation. Since elements of the pre-rational are touched here—through stimulation, disgust, fear, physical affects—an element of uncertainty is part of the considerations. These moments of shock, uncertainty, and loss of control are reasons why film is repeatedly threatened by censorship. Active self-observation during reception and a dense description of filmic events and affect observation is a sensible approach before one can devote oneself to systematic processing and analysis. It is hardly surprising that the seduction theory, especially in psychoanalytically based film theory (Hamburger 2018; Schneider 2021), received intensive reception. But it also proved productive in genre research (Urschel in Stiglegger 2020, p. 146 f.; Schniz 2020)—right down to the analysis of interactive media (Beil et al. 2014, p. 14; von Brincken and Konietzny 2012, p. 173–188; Rauscher 2015, p. 28–37), because sub-areas such as media mythology and the performativity of audiovisual stagings are extensively discussed here.

1.2  Problem and Application of the Concept of Seduction

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This book systematizes the original considerations anew, creates clear definitions and a comprehensible and applicable method of seduction-theoretical analysis. Some parts of this book are further developments of already published older approaches and analyses, which I have consistently updated and rethought with regard to the theoretical approach. This approach corresponds to my processual and rhizomatic thinking cultivated for two decades, which sees intellectual thought movement in a permanent flow. In this sense, the seduction theory is indeed committed to the context of poststructuralist thinking, even if other influences are added.

1.2 Problem and Application of the Concept of Seduction The seduction theory defines the medium of film in a broader sense as a medium of seduction. The term ‘seduction’ in the context of film theory first appears in Patrick Fuery’s New Developments in Film Theory (2000). The seduction theory of film is based on two premises, which are understood as elementary properties of narrative cinema: • Firstly, film itself is seduction; to watch a film means to be seduced by it. • And secondly, film always remains a phantom medium, a temporary ‘light play’ on the screen or the screen, which eludes material access. The term seduction (French séduction), derived from the philosophical writings of Jean Baudrillard, refers to seduction in a fundamental sense as manipulation or suggestion experienced by the film audience. Baudrillard developed his model of ‘séduction’ in L’Èchange symbolique et la mort (1976) and De la séduction (1979), where he describes media communication processes as a seductive (seductive) game. It is surprising why Baudrillard in his idea of séduction only rarely and selectively turns to cinema, especially since this medium can illustrate a lot. In principle, Baudrillard (in a somewhat unfortunate choice of translation) distinguishes between “covert seduction” (= signs of seduction) and “lax seduction” (= seductive signs), with which he simply differentiates the obviousness of seduction (Baudrillard 1983, p. 128 ff.). The “lax seduction” refers to those clearly recognizable as tactical acts of seduction from advertising to political discourse. I suggest the term ‘weak seduction’ here. As in art in general, the banality and thus the clarity of the statement increases with the clarity of the attribution. If such a tactic can be reduced to clearly formulated and formulable statements,

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the end of seduction has already been reached—in this area (“seductive signs”) is incidentally the much-quoted ‘power or danger’ of the propaganda film. Now, with film, one is dealing with an extremely complicated mixture of all these seductive aspects: the film is in itself pure appearance, a phantom event that leaves fleeting, albeit arbitrarily often repeatable, signs. For the medium of film, seduction can be demonstrated on three levels: • In a first step, the film seduces itself in order to ultimately arouse the interest of the potential viewer. On this level, which also includes the trailer, promotion and aspects such as casting, budget and genre, the viewer’s expectation and desire are stimulated. • On the second level of seduction, the film can propagate a specific statement. This applies to both the explicit ideological propaganda film and films with easily transparent polar narrative patterns that exhaust themselves in clear assignment structures. Numerous commercial Hollywood productions work with the favoring of a specific statement that is suggested to the viewer. • The third level of seduction, which can only be determined through a seduction-theoretical analysis, illustrates how the film seduces to a hidden goal that lies in the meta-level. Here, subtle aspects such as specific desire structures become apparent, which allow conclusions about ideological subtexts. While the first two levels of seduction are quite easy to recognize, the third level poses the actual challenge to the viewer, as the goal of seduction—like seduction in general—is to divert this from his supposedly established position from the trusted path. Jean Baudrillard calls it the “covert seduction” (Baudrillard 1983, p. 128 ff.). The cinematic means and levels of seduction in film lie • on the level of performance: movement, body, sensuality, so sexuality, fight, choreography. • secondly, they are found in the area of narration, as epic storytelling or covert mythology. • And thirdly, they lie on the ethical level, for example by exposing the viewer to an experience of ambivalence. The means of this fine analysis is the dense description of the cinematic sign system, which is refined by hermeneutic reconsideration. The aim is to reveal the seductive structures that were laid out and concealed in the staging, and thus to make the film fruitful in discourse.

1.2  Problem and Application of the Concept of Seduction

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On which specific levels can evidence be found for seductive strategies of seduction? In Ritual & Verführung (Stiglegger 2006, p. 50), the following categories are differentiated: • • • • • •

the sensual-erotic seduction seduction through the fatal logic of Eros and Thanatos seduction through movement and sensation—the cinematic spectacle seduction to the pre-rational or to the myth seduction to immorality and to the abject (cf. Kristeva 1982) seduction to/through the Promethean impulse.

Numerous concepts and key terms of continental philosophy prove fruitful in this context and can find application in the theory of film seduction: desire and desire/désir (Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Gilles Deleuze), seduction and simulation (Jean Baudrillard), taboo and transgression (Sigmund Freud, Georges Bataille), the movement and time image (Deleuze), the mirror stage (Jacques Lacan), film as “Medusa’s mirror” (Siegfried Kracauer) as well as the virtual reconstruction of the body (Béla Balázs, Dziga Vertov)—these concepts will be discussed later. The advantage of the theory of seduction is that it favors a non-normative view of various films, maximizes the gain in knowledge, and thus works towards overcoming canon thinking. The national origin of the work, the era of its creation, or generic characteristics are noteworthy aspects, while the analysis is dedicated to the specific work and is oriented towards its self-imposed and demonstrable intentions. It is therefore a work-immanent critical analysis that avoids using cinematic works as ultimately interchangeable evidence for à priori set theoretical constructs—a phenomenon known primarily from media philosophy. Thus, the three-stage seduction model is also linked to a gain for the analysis of marginalized generic films (genre theory, porn studies, cinematic body theory). While the theory of seduction does not allow for universally valid conclusions in the sense of an (empirical) reception theory, it does allow for the exploration of difficult or non-intellectualizable cinematic phenomena: in the area of extreme affects such as pleasure, disgust, fear, and horror. The theory of seduction is also helpful in the study of a performative cinema, which has manifested itself in the last decade in two variants: as commercial event cinema (for example in the 3D area, in the Star Wars, Marvel and DC films) or on the other hand as a radical step towards a cinéma pur, as was already demanded in the 1930s and inspires films by Gaspar Noé, Nicolas Winding Refn, Philippe Grandrieux, Jonathan Glazer and others.

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1.3 Gaze and Desire To this day, the psychoanalytic analysis model according to Sigmund Freud or— later in a further development—according to Jacques Lacan has held up in the observation of art. Cinema appears here apparently as a ‘male’ constructed art, in which the image of the woman simultaneously represents a ‘castration threat’, a personified lack, which is to be fetishized. In the stage of fetishization, the image of the woman becomes a phallic object, which detaches itself from the original female identity and can be fixed (= banished) with voyeuristic or fetishistic mechanisms (Laura Mulvey, Jo Ann Kaplan, Annette Brauerhoch). Still important today are the concepts of the gaze theory—the cinematic staging of the directed, objectifying or subjectifying gaze—and scopophilia, that pleasure in seeing that draws us to moving image media. The gaze theory already hints at the mechanism of exclusion of the ‘other’, the division into subject and abject, which Julia Kristeva elaborated in her literary analysis Pouvoirs de l’horreur (1980). The psychoanalytic key terms of this analysis of film as a seductive construct are the gaze, the desire, the other, the mirror—and ultimately dream and taboo (Stiglegger 2006, 21ff.). In L’être et le néant (1943), Sartre summarizes the close connection between self-definition and the distribution of power relations by means of the gaze: “If we start from the first revelation of the other as gaze, we must acknowledge that we experience our unfathomable being-for-others in the form of a possession. I am possessed by the other; the gaze of the other shapes my body in its nakedness, makes it arise, sculpts it, produces it as it is, sees it as I will never see it.” (Sartre [1943] 1997, p. 638) Sartre describes here a process that is comparable to the cinematic act of seduction. Gazing exerts power, being gazed at means a loss of power. And yet, I become in the moment of being seen. While I watch the film on the screen, the film ‘looks’ back at me and confronts me, it challenges me. I want to see in order to be challenged. The gaze—according to Sartre—thus stands between the subject and the other, but at the same time it is the means to take possession of one’s counterpart. Fundamentally, film is a medium whose direction of gaze initially seems to run one-sidedly: from the eye of the viewer to the play of light that is reflected on the screen. The projected images give the viewer the illusion of power over the depicted objects. The depicted is ‘bound to the screen’. But at the same time, the cinematic image appears as ‘the other’, which throws a gaze back at the viewer. This can occur as a calculated part of the staging—quasi metafilmic— or fundamentally: by the film affirming or breaking the audience’s expectation.

1.3  Gaze and Desire

7

At the moment of becoming aware of such an affirmation/break, the cinematic image itself can be described as such an other. This cinematic image as the other thus reflects the viewer’s gaze, ‘throws’ it back, and in turn exerts a power on the viewer: If one pursues this thought further, the cinematic image creates familiarity and demarcation at the same time at the moment of becoming aware—it confirms the expectation, defines the subject, and it demarcates itself—eternally fleeting and elusive—from the viewer. The gaze thus proves to be power and subjugation at the same time. Sartre ([1943] 1997) defines the “attitude towards others” fundamentally through the auxiliary construction of masochism and sadism, of ritualized power constructions, a model that we will come to speak of later. The active, objectifying gaze wants to gain power over the object seen, to identify itself against it as a subject. The experience of being looked at, on the other hand, suddenly becomes subjugation under the gaze. On the third level of seduction, the film itself becomes a subject that confronts and challenges us (Fig. 1.1 and 1.2). A key concept in Freud’s classic model of psychoanalysis is desire: With it, he designates an involuntary, inner longing that draws from the existential needs of childhood. Jacques Lacan translated Sigmund Freud’s concept of desire with the French désir, which also means desire and is in many respects a more differentiated concept than desire. Desire appears very goal-oriented and singular, but desire also includes a continuous force, a motivation. In Lacan’s sense, desire always remains unconscious and becomes the motivation for action and movement of the body. Lacan locates desire between the striving for satisfaction and the longing for love: It is “the difference that arises when the former is subtracted from the latter.” (Biti 2001, p. 99) So it is not primarily about a biological instinct, but about an articulated desire that craves reciprocation. Desire wants to be recognized and reciprocated, it is ultimately “the desire for the desire of the other” (Lacan according to Biti 2001, p. 99). Here again, the reciprocal relationship between film and viewer, the desire to be seduced by the film, is reflected.

Fig. 1.1 and 1.2   Under the Skin (Universum, DVD Screenshot)—The experience of being looked at through the eyes of the alien. (Scarlett Johansson)

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As an audience, we not only desire the film and want to be desired by it, but a connection is also created between the audience and the screen, which produces a seductive ‘desire machine’. In this process, a subject-object split may be called into question. And it is precisely those moments that are perceived as particularly disturbing by the potential audience: when the film 1. inscenatorically denies the fulfillment of desire—and thus its recognition; and 2. the film throws a gaze back at the viewer—thus also seeming to demand something offensively from him. We encounter such gazes, among others, in the films of Stanley Kubrick: in 2001—A Space Odyssey (1968), A Clockwork Orange (1970) or The Shining (1980) (Fig. 1.3). In this gap between film and viewer, that complex process unfolds, which we understand as seduction: It encompasses far more than the purely suggestive of a staging, which Balázs and Kracauer already noted; seduction is the result of a mutual ‘work’ between medium and audience, whose desire sometimes becomes the playing field of the seductive strategies of filmic staging. And it cannot be denied that this is a risky game in which values, attitudes and taboos are exposed and negotiated.

Fig. 1.3   A Clockwork Orange (Warner Bros.)—Alex (Malcolm McDowell) in the first shot of the film looks at us challengingly

1.4  The Taboo and Transgression as Seduction

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1.4 The Taboo and Transgression as Seduction In the seductive game of cinematic staging, a special role is assigned to the desire for the forbidden. (Stiglegger 2006, p. 21 ff.) The game of fulfillment and denial of fulfillment of the (viewer’s) desire opens up a multitude of possibilities for cinematic staging. From this perspective, it is hardly surprising that numerous films secure viewer interest by thematizing or staging transgressions and taboo breaches. Often such a taboo breach is the key moment of the cinematic drama, often these films almost force the viewer to deal with a socially and culturally anchored taboo. However, the cultural relativity of taboos must be taken into account: Adultery as a key moment is probably perceived differently in Europe and America than in Asia, for example. The transfer of the ethnological term taboo to the “neuroses” of Western society goes back to Sigmund Freud, who in Totem und Tabu (1913) names four points of commonality: “1. In the unmotivatedness of the commands, 2. in their reinforcement by an inner compulsion, 3. in their shiftability and in the risk of contagion by the forbidden, 4. in the causing of ceremonial actions, commands that originate from the prohibitions.” (Freud [1913] 1956, p. 36)

This definition of taboo initially appears somewhat cumbersome, as it primarily describes the pathological compulsive character. The taboo has or needs no rational justification (“unmotivatedness”), it is thus somewhat arbitrary. If one looks at the taboos of Western industrial society, on the other hand, they usually have a certain rational explanation attached to them, which must serve as a justification for the “inner compulsion” to respect the taboo. Adultery, for example, is primarily a taboo in societies whose integrity is primarily based on the institution of a functioning marriage. The misconduct associated with adultery then undermines the power structure based on this integrity and calls it into question. The specific expression of this power structure can be traced back to a certain, rationally comprehensible basis, but is ultimately arbitrary. The power could just as well be based on another model. The appeal lies in the breaking of the taboo: to desire the transgression of the taboo boundary in order to obtain the forbidden ‘other’. With the change of societal values, the specific expression of taboos can “shift”: Today, adultery is probably perceived as a less severe taboo breach than in the 1950s, for example. In addition, there are internationally different cultural socializations. Hardly any German viewer would find the life-hungry protagonist (Sibel Kekilli) from Fatih Akin’s Head-On (2004) particularly scandalous, whereas the actress was openly

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Fig. 1.4   Head-On (Wüste Film)—Sibel Kekilli fails due to her lust for life and cultural boundaries

attacked by her conservative Turkish compatriots for, among other things, this role (Fig. 1.4). What is clear is the “contagion” by the taboo or the taboo breach: Whoever breaks the taboo becomes a taboo person themselves. Such mechanisms come into play in Western society primarily at the interface of politics and morality. Whoever breaks a contemporary taboo as a journalist or artist immediately becomes a taboo themselves, and there is a risk of becoming “infected” oneself in dealing with the tabooed person. Societal rituals and behaviors have been established (“commands”) on how to deal with a certain topic. The seductive aspect of the taboo model becomes clear in a later sentence by Freud: “The person who has transgressed a taboo becomes taboo himself because he has the dangerous ability to tempt others to follow his example. He arouses envy; why should he be allowed what is forbidden to others? He is therefore truly contagious, insofar as every example tempts to imitation, and therefore he himself must be avoided.” (Freud [1913] 1956, p. 40) This point is also very important for film, as it explains that film is perceived in a quite concrete way as an “example”, thus as a role model, and can thus act as a “temptation”. This simplifying assumption is the basis for, among other

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things, the theses of conservative violence effect research. However, what remains interesting about this aspect is that the taboo-breaking medium is explicitly granted seductive qualities: The taboo breach, in a broader sense the transgression (transgression) itself is seductive.

1.5 Film as a Seduction Machine and Seductive Simulation With Jean Baudrillard, the seduction machine cinema can also be understood as a simulation apparatus, whose moving image simulacra we perceive as reality at the moment of reception. And so, in a further step, it is close to consider the cinema apparatus not only as a “desire machine” in the sense of Delueze, but as a seduction machine in the sense of seduction theory. For this purpose, we return historically once again to the apparatus theory itself. Since the end of the sixties, the relationship between film or projection technology and the viewer has been understood as an apparatus (apparatus). In this context, the cinematographic apparatus is interpreted not only as a projection medium, but also as an ideological mediation mechanism. The prerequisite for this is the assumption that the viewer is continuously deprived of the knowledge about the artificiality and constructiveness of the cinematographic product. The camera can already be understood as an ‘ideological tool’. Especially after the explanations of Jean Baudry, the viewer himself becomes the subject of the film screening, as his gaze crosses with the vanishing point determined by the camera on the screen: “The viewer identifies less with what is seen than with the instance of seeing. This is supported by the position of the projector, which is located behind the viewer’s head and thus condemns the technology from his field of view. The viewer-subject is thus understood as a product of the cinematographic apparatus.” (Alexander Böhnke, in: Schanze 2002, p. 10) Here, the ego-constituting function of the mirror stage according to Lacan can be added, which wants to (and does) make the viewer perceive the events on the screen as ‘reality’. The mirror stage is interesting insofar as the infant, for the first time in front of his mirror image, considers his body parts as belonging together, thus establishing a new order of perception. The film achieves something similar through the selective presentation of a preconceived order. Cinema can be seen as a reconstruction of the Lacanian model. The audience—so the assumption—regresses so far in its passivity reduced purely to seeing that it forgets the difference between representation and reality for the moment of film reception. Christian Metz has pointed out a weakness in the comparison of the mirror stage and film reception in his further development of these

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theses, as the film reception leaves out the physical representation of the viewer’s body. However, it can be assumed that the filmically projected bodies could serve as a surrogate for the viewer’s body. It benefits the medium again that it has such a fragile materiality, it literally withdraws within the framework of its presence. Noel Carroll points out in his essay “Jean-Louis Baudry and ‘The Apparatus’” (1988) that Baudry himself made a difference between the assumed impression of reality of films (“impression of reality”) and the real everyday experience of the recipients: “[…] Baudry does not contend that the impression of reality caused by cinema is equivalent to our everyday encounters with the world; cinema is not a replication of our ordinary impressions of reality. Rather cinema is said to deliver an impression of reality that is more-than-real. That is, less paradoxically stated, Baudry wishes to deploy psychoanalysis to explain cinema’s intense effect on spectators; he wants to analyze the peculiarly charged relationship we have with the screen when we attend movies.” (Carroll in Baudry and Cohen 1999, p. 778) Of particular interest here is therefore less the question of whether in film reception there is actually a convergence of representation and reality in the perception of the viewer, but rather the assumption that the medium apparently has fundamental similarities with the human (un)conscious, which is also willing to understand “more-than-real representations” as ‘reality’. The film literally seduces us to experience the filmic simulacrum as momentary reality. According to Carroll, Baudry himself compares this hyperreal “impression of reality” with the dream: “[…] he notes that the film viewer and the dreamer share the property of having their movements inhibited, that both inhabit darkened rooms, and that both film and dream impart an impression of reality. Dream, in turn, is said to have this consequence insofar as it induces regression to an earlier psychosexual stage, that of primitive narcississm where the self is supposedly not differenciated from the other nor is perception differenciated from representation. On the basis of the similar conditions and effects, respectively, of film and dream, Baudry infers that the impression of reality in film is brought about by a regressive mechanism similar to that operative in dream.” (Carroll a. a. O., p. 779) Can the film thus be understood as a dream, as is repeatedly emphasized? Edgar Morin already argued this thesis in the 1950s: cinema is the imaginary mirror of human inner life and its desires (for example in Edgar Morin: Der Mensch und das Kino, Stuttgart 1958). By replicating the structure of the subconscious, the medium approaches the dream event at least, it becomes a dream play. Freud already described the dream as a condensation of experienced reality: “The work of condensation produces ‘hybrids’ by throwing together various elements—ideas, objects, persons—thus concealing and at the same time revealing

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the unconscious wish.” (Lohmann 1983, p. 23) In this context, Annette Brauerhoch links cinema, dream and desire, even subtly considering the concept of the seductive power of cinema (Brauerhoch 1996, e.g. 44, p. 61 ff.): “In the cinema, according to Baudry, a perception situation similar to a dream is created. The desire for cinema therefore corresponds to the desire not to have to see images for what they are, namely representations independent of the viewer, but to be able to forget the ‘disturbing’ factor of their constructedness in favor of a belief in their ‘reality’ and a related satisfaction of desire.” (Brauerhoch 1996, p. 38) The author, however, criticizes Baudry for his limited perspective, especially since he only uses part of Plato’s allegory of the cave. He shies away from the final consequence of the model—the addition of ‘recognition’ by the one leaving the cave—in order to maintain a perspective on the cinema viewer that characterizes his disposition as ‘regressive’ (ibid., p. 39 ff.). To include the justified criticism of the film psychoanalyst Andreas Hamburger in the discourse (2018, p. 35 ff.), I would also like to maintain the concept of the ‘dream play’ in the following, as it is not identical with the phenomenon of the dream, but refers to it. The narrative dream play thus evoked gives the impression of a daydream, without striving for the unconscious and unpredictable of actual sleep. More than clearly, dream-like structures are present in the clearly non-real worlds of Luis Bunuel’s surrealist film, which nonetheless strive for order in the supposed chaos of representation. Other films, such as Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919), create a framework around the dream play itself through real and unreal world. Ingmar Bergman often clearly marks the beginning and end of a dream sequence in his earlier films, but begins in the 1960s to classify the film event itself as a dream play, or blurs the boundaries between real and unreal events. Postmodern cinema precisely follows this model of blurred boundaries and creates a new quality through the strictly subjective narrative perspective: Nicolas Roeg’s films, David Lynch’s Lost Highway, Adrian Lyne’s Jacob’s Ladder (1990), and Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan (2011) are consistent narratives of the first person, in which the film no longer functions as a reflection of assumed social and psychological reality. At the same time, these films no longer work seamlessly in the context of their apparent genre affiliation: All three examples are staged in the mode of the horror film, but strictly speaking, they mainly show characteristics of the psychological thriller; in Black Swan, the backstage melodrama and the dance film are added, in Jacob’s Ladder, the Vietnam war film. All these films fascinate primarily as radical insights into the hermetic inner life of disturbed characters, which in turn are constructed through the staging of the films: Thus, Jacob’s Ladder is about the metaphorical death struggle of Jacob

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Singer (Tim Robbins) and in Lost Highway about the murderous jealousy of Fred Madison (Bill Pullman), which are brought close to us in intimate face close-ups (Fig. 1.5). These films have finally arrived at the stage of the dream play, hardly stand up to a comparison with objective reality and logic. Instead, they become a challenge for an audience that is looking for the mirror of itself and its life, they seduce to constant measurement against everyday parameters, sometimes exceed the imagination (for example through the splitting into two completely autonomous characters in Lost Highway and potentially in Black Swan). The dilemma of this ambivalent experience becomes a fascination for the inclined audience, which should check the experienced irritations in repeated viewings. This circumstance predestines these film examples to long-lived cult films, whose seductive potential lies precisely in the cyclical re-reception. A comparable dimension will also be able to be discussed in the cinema of Christopher Nolan, who can implement a similar strategy of irritation with hermetic film cosmos at the blockbuster level—after all, he was able to stage a “Mindgame-Movie” (Elsaesser 2009, p. 237 ff.) like Tenet (2020) with a gigantic budget, a film that tends to offer more questions than explanations and at the same time plays in an absolutely hermetic film cosmos that neither offers psychologically developed characters nor builds a reference to the profane world of everyday life outside of international arms deals and espionage affairs (Fig. 1.6). But it is precisely this hermetic separation of the filmic diegesis (the world established in the film, the filmic simulacrum of an overcoded ‘reality’) from the everyday world of experience that constitutes a genuine quality of the medium of film: The

Fig. 1.5   Lost Highway (Concorde, DVD Screenshot)—Through the face close-up into the subjective perception of the protagonist (Bill Pullman)

References

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Fig. 1.6   Tenet (Warner Bros., DVD Screenshot)—Robert Pattinson and John David Washington isolated in the hermetic diegesis of the film

film can offer the audience a new perspective on the world, which reveals existential problems from a slightly shifted perspective and at the same time makes them tangible. Film can thus become a medium of philosophy, not to say: a seduction to philosophy. The next chapter will deal with this context.

References Baudrillard, Jean. 1983. Lasst Euch nicht verführen!. Berlin: Merve. Baudrillard, Jean. 1991. Der symbolische Tausch und der Tod [1976]. München: Matthes & Seitz. Baudrillard, Jean. 1992. Von der Verführung [1979]. München: Matthes & Seitz. Beil, Benjamin, Marc Bonner, und Thomas Hensel, Eds. 2014. Computer|Spiel|Bilder. Glückstadt: Werner Hülsbusch. Biti, Vladimir. 2001. Literatur- und Kulturtheorie. Ein Handbuch gegenwärtiger Begriffe. Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt. Brauerhoch, Annette. 1996. Die gute und die böse Mutter. Kino zwischen Melodram und Horror. Marburg: Schüren. von Brincken, Jörg, und Horst Konietzny, Eds. 2012. Emotional gaming. München: epodium. Carroll, Noel. 1999. Jean-Louis Baudry and ‚The Apparatus‘ (1988). In Film theory and criticism, Eds. Leo Baudry und Marshall Cohen, 778–794. New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press. Elsaesser, Thomas. 2009. Hollywood heute. Geschichte, Gender und Nation im postklassischen Kino, 237–263. Berlin: Bertz + Fischer. Freud, Sigmund. 1956. Totem und Tabu [1913]. Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer Verlag.

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Fuery, Patrick. 2000. New developments in film theory. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Hamburger, Andreas. 2018. Filmpsychoanalyse. Das Unbewusste im Kino—das Kino im Unbewussten. Gießen: Psychosozial. Kierkegaard, Sören. 2019. Tagesbuch eines Verführers [1843]. Berlin: Henricus. Kristeva, Julia. 1982. Powers of horror. An essay on abjection. New York: Columbia University Press. Lohmann, Hans-Martin. 1983. Sigmund Freud. Zur Einführung. Hamburg: Junius. Morin, Edgar. 1958. Der Mensch und das Kino. Stuttgart: Klett. Rauscher, Andreas, Ed. 2015. Film und Games. Ein Wechselspiel. Berlin: Bertz + Fischer. Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1997. Das Sein und das Nichts [1943]. Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt. Schanze, Helmut, Ed. 2002. Medientheorie. Medienwissenschaft. Stuttgart/Weimar: Metzler. Schniz, Felix. 2020. Genre und Videospiel. Einführung in eine unmögliche Taxonomie. Wiesbaden: Springer VS. Schneider, Gerhard. 2021. Unbewusste Fantasie, Abwehr, Affekt. Eine psychoanalytische Perspektive auf die affektive Wirkung von Filmen. In Film | Bild | Emotion. Film und Kunstgeschichte im postkinematografischen Zeitalter. Eds. Marcus Stiglegger und Christoph Wagner. 97–107. Berlin: Gebr. Mann Verlag. Stiglegger, Marcus. 2006. Ritual & Verführung. Schaulust, Spektakel und Sinnlichkeit im Film. Berlin: Bertz + Fischer. Stiglegger, Marcus. Eds. 2020. Handbuch Filmgenre. Wiesbaden: Springer VS.

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Film and Philosophy

2.1 The Seduction Theory in the Context of Philosophy Film as a medium of seduction also plays a role in earlier engagements with film and philosophy, but the phenomenon is rarely explicitly named. The following chapter will show some ‘film philosophers’ where seduction-theoretical approaches are present, which need to be further developed. For this purpose, it is advisable to strive for a common denominator, as the American genre film of the classical era between 1930 and 1960 is often used as an example (Stiglegger 2015, p. 157–172). The American Western director John Ford, a consistent thinker of the North American myth founded on the frontier-theory (according to Frederick Jackson Turner [1893]), has received intensive and consistent reception in continental philosophy—namely in France and Germany (Waechter 1996). In his early film career, he must have appeared as an original professional, a director of generic studio productions, into which he repeatedly smuggled his personal worldview— especially his perspective on the American myth (Stiglegger 2000, p. 14). It was some authors of the Cahiers du cinéma (including Jean-Luc Godard), who recognized him as a veritable auteur in the 1960s, while he was still considered a genre prototype in the USA. With The Searchers (1958), it must have become apparent that this film could already be considered a self-reflexive meta-reflection on the genre. It discourses the American myth itself and dissolved it in an incomparably complex and iconic way into space and movement. John Ford was a smuggler, a maverick and—so the thesis goes—an artist who philosophized with the camera (Stiglegger 2000, p. 25).

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2024 M. Stiglegger, Film as a Medium of Seduction, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-43818-0_2

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This chapter will first recapitulate John Ford’s reception in the context of continental philosophy and in the main part show an analytical view of Ford’s Western Stagecoach (1939), how the seduction theory of film based on continental philosophical approaches allows a unique approach to understand film as a philosophizing medium (Seel 2013, p. 231) and to correspond with the presented perspectives. The interpretation of the medium of film as a medium of seduction appears repeatedly in early texts, but is often paraphrased and rarely at the center of consideration. For example, Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer mention the term seduction in their Dialektik der Aufklärung (1947) not explicitly in connection with the medium, but they see the—sometimes fatal—quality of the film instead in its ‘manipulative power’, with which the “culture industry” (in this case Classical Hollywood) affirms the societal status quo. The manipulative power makes the film an attractive socio-political steering and propaganda tool—a thesis that is confirmed by the latest developments in American mainstream cinema. In addition, the film primarily works with a mythical worldview that degrades historical events to over-historical and apolitical fables. The German philosopher Martin Seel examines the medium of film in relation and as a transformation of other arts in his book Die Künste des Films (2013). Seel is considered to be the third generation of the Frankfurt School and thus stands in the philosophical tradition of Hegel, Marx, and Freund. His own work has a strong aesthetic focus. Using John Ford’s The Searchers as an example, he explains how film can be understood as a form of architecture. In the exposition of the film—the view from the log cabin into the open landscape—Seel shows how Ford generates a complex spatial construction from just a few audiovisual building blocks: he paraphrases the log cabin as a family home and the hostile Indian land in this film as “threatened protective space, threatening event space” (Seel 2013, p. 17). He thus derives a specific model of cinematographic world construction from Ford’s film, without striving like Rancière to draw conclusions about Ford’s ideological program. But it is precisely in the “film architecture” of Ford’s films that this literal world-image can be found—and in the dissolution of space in the self-perpetuating movement, as the following explanations will show. Seel starts from three different approaches that define the relationship between film and philosophy (Seel 2013, p. 230–231): the film as an object of philosophical aesthetics, the film as a subject of philosophizing, and finally the film as a philosophizing medium. Thus, the film can not only “bring to language” themes of philosophy, it can also reflect its own mechanisms and thus contain “elements of a theory of film” (Seel 2013, p. 231). Here too, Seel sees a third stage: “In their

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sound-image composition, they [the films, ed.] vary the spectrum of both their medium and the world encounter of their audience.” (Seel 2013, p. 232) Josef Früchtl, like Seel, comes from the Frankfurt School and has early specialized in aesthetics and specifically the philosophy of film. He uses Kant’s theory of aesthetic experience as a basis, which he combines with philosophical pragmatism. From this perspective, film proves to be a contemporary evidence experience of existence. Früchtl’s interpretation of the modern hero image in Das unverschämte Ich (2004) develops more than a third of the thoughts based on the works of John Ford, Sam Peckinpah, and Howard Hawks, as the classic Hollywood Western is for him a prototype for the hero between myth and the bourgeois age (Fig. 2.1). Although a romantic disposition can undoubtedly be found in the struggles of the subject depicted here, it is about the confrontation of the (male) subject with and against itself, from which the male hero of modernity would emerge and be newly constructed, whether mythically, tragically, ironically, or hybrid. In detailed analyses of The Searchers and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), Früchtl reveals the mythical nature of the films, which

Fig. 2.1   Stagecoach (Warner Bros., DVD Screenshot)—Ringo (John Wayne), the “shameless self”

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is discoursed and deconstructed, resulting in an experience of ambivalence: “The relationship between individual and society in the film changes into that of the viewer to the film, into that of real lived and imagined life: The same ambivalence prevails on both levels.” (Früchtl 2004, p. 64) Here, too, the relationship between the mythical, individual hero and the bourgeois subject is based on their incompatibility: “The hero shoulders the burden of the general, the citizen, on the other hand, distributes it among his peers.” (Früchtl 2004, p. 71) This relationship culminates—as Früchtl demonstrates—in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, where a former Western hero (John Wayne) turns out to be a notorious alcoholic who never matches his own myth: “The film carries out its deconstructivist work, the dialectic of construction and destruction of a legend not only on the double foil of object and meta-level, but finally also on the meta-level alone, so to speak the third narrative level.” (Früchtl 2004, p. 174) Früchtl identifies in this film, in the sense of the following explanations, a seductive potential that only takes effect and unfolds on a third level of filmic seduction. The audience is supposed to accept the myth, even if it has nothing to do with reality anymore—even if the film already considers the deconstruction.

2.2 Postmodernism, Simulation and Seduction In the sense of Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, mythical thinking can be considered a counter-movement to the enlightenment they demand, a circumstance that, however, benefits the efforts of the culture industry to standardize. Why does the counter-movement benefit standardization? Because the film in the culture industry is made into a commodity that satisfies consciousness in fiction. However, this satisfaction is counterproductive, the artwork should rather be thought of as a warning. What Adorno and Horkheimer do not take into account is the constant presence of subversive currents in the mainstream, which leads to phenomena in which the manipulative power (and thus also the seductive energy) of the film is creatively directed against its own system. Such a strategy is also hinted at in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. It has always been the possibility and perhaps also the duty of film criticism and analytical film studies to work out these aspects in order to broaden the audience’s view. The classic film theorist Rudolf Arnheim, in his earlier work Film als Kunst (1934), does not yet use the term seduction, but in some passages he almost invokes that quality of the medium of film to appropriate the viewer’s gaze, “to force the viewer into the contemplation.” (Arnheim [1934] 1974, p. 64) He assumes that seeing has a trivialized meaning for humans: They use this sense

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merely as a “means of orientation” (Arnheim [1934] 1974, p. 63). One sees selectively, as if with blinkers, just enough to behave correctly in a pragmatic sense towards objects. Arnheim persistently points out the eminent importance of the camera perspective, the importance attributed to the image/object: “There are tricks to force the viewer into such a contemplation.” (Arnheim [1934] 1974, p. 64) He is thus made to look at something “old familiar as if it were new” and is only then receptive to the actual message of the film. As already hinted at in the first chapter, all these aspects can be brought together with the writings of Jean Baudrillard on simulation and seduction with regard to film. According to Baudrillard, the act of seduction always defines itself through a phantom-like illusion that eludes the seduced at the last moment and denies a complete fulfillment of the desired goal. The phantom-like medium of film, which sets an insurmountable boundary to ‘approach’ (the screen), appears in this context as a predestined medium of seduction. Within the framework of the filmic reproduction of life, its laws can be changed and suspended. The filmic representation of a certain action has to follow its own, different laws and directorial strategies than the real model, because the audiovisual reception of the same action does not necessarily produce the same effect. In order to still be able to stimulate the desired sensual effect in the recipient, to ‘seduce’ the audience, specifically filmic rituals have developed in the sense of standardized motifs and situations, which are supposed to provoke the desired emotional reaction in the viewer through strictly codified surrogate actions and simulations. The phenomenon of seduction thus appears primarily as a challenge for the audience. This is explained by the fact that in seduction a representation, a clear assignment of meaning, is not necessarily possible. Rather, in the most effective case, it stands for the confrontation with the diffuse other: the foreign, the repulsive/abject, the irritating. This concept becomes problematic when applied to the medium of film, especially since seduction contains a moment of unpredictability. Wanting to prove the moment of the seductive in the intention of the staging on a hermeneutic path means either constantly exposing oneself to this unpredictability, or—on the contrary—asking whether a calculation in seduction can be proven after all. In his Fatal Strategies, Baudrillard characterizes seduction as a work of manipulable illusion. “In seduction, it is as if the false shines in all the power of the true.” (Baudrillard 1991b, p. 62) The “false” here in the sense of the simulacrum also corresponds to the staging, which is to be experienced by the audience in the act of film reception as momentary “reality”. At the same time, the act of seduction plays with the mystery. It speculates on the urgent need of the recipient to be seduced, to experience an encounter with the ‘true’, the ‘authentic’, in uncovering this mystery. For the seductive act

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to succeed, a final closed moment must remain and finally elude: The ‘true’ can ultimately not reveal itself, for it exists only in the imagination of the seduced: “The strong position of the seductress or the seducer comes from the fact that she has no truth, no place, and no meaning,” Baudrillard formulates his thesis in its most radical form (Baudrillard 1983, p. 130). Seduction provokes this hope for the ‘authentic’ that seemingly hides behind it. To understand the seductive power of film, this thesis must be tested: The mystery appears as the desirable other, the central mystery of seduction. In this fleeting, hard-to-define quality, this other resembles Walter Benjamin’s concept of the aura, which he explains in his essay Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit.. Benjamin argues in this text that with the filmic reproduction of the play, the aura of the living actor is eliminated. However, within the framework of the star cult, it has been shown that this aura could apparently be saved onto the screen in another form. Proving the presence of the aura in the filmic staging, however, proves to be as difficult as locating the moment of seduction there. In contrast to Jean Baudrillard’s concept, one must assume that the act of seduction does not always take place in the realm of the unconscious. Only the most effective moment of seduction remains a mystery and initially eludes clear determination. However, it can be assumed that the act of seduction, in its function as a game, is subject to specific rules, but only from the moment when the recipient accepts the challenge of wanting to fathom the mystery, the other of a work. Only when the viewer submits to the matter does the concept begin to take hold. The audience becomes part of the mystery in the act of reception. From a subject-philosophical perspective, the seductive game also involves the mystery within oneself, the unavailability of one’s own identity. Seduction—according to Baudrillard—can be understood as a ceremonial that concentrates the “greatest possible fascination” (Baudrillard 1983, p. 18). The fact that this act is possible in film at all is explained by the distance to the audience necessary for seduction: what is meant is the projection that is already inherent in the medium’s dispositif. The fact that film is a simulation, moreover such a fleeting one, a chimera of light and shadow on a screen, predestines it for the act of seduction: there is a boundary between medium and recipients that cannot be crossed. The other remains different, no matter how much it is desired. This is where the elusive, yet endlessly recurring mythical quality of the medium of film lies: “Cinema is only powerful through its myth. Its stories, its realism or its imaginary, its psychology, its sensory effects, all this is secondary. Only the myth is powerful, and at the heart of the cinematic myth lies seduction […].” The aim of the seduction theory based on Baudrillard’s explanations, as emphasized in the preceding chapter, is to favor a non-normative view of various

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films, to maximize the gain in knowledge and to work towards overcoming the canon-thinking that still dominates German-speaking film studies. Such canonthinking is also largely the basis of the explanations by Seel and Früchtl, who work primarily with established and well-documented works by Ford, Hawks, Charles Chaplin, Michelangelo Antonioni etc. What is still plausible outside of film studies could, however, promote new insights within the discipline if the boundaries of canonical thinking were overcome. Otherwise, entire production contexts of cinema are lost, and parallel and alternative currents fall out of focus. The national origin of the work, the era of its creation, or generic characteristics are noteworthy aspects in the light of the seduction theory, while the analysis is dedicated to the specific work and is oriented towards its self-set intentions. Thus, the three-stage seduction model is also linked to a gain for the analysis of otherwise rather marginalized films. However, no universally valid conclusions can be drawn from the seduction theory in the sense of a reception theory, but certainly with regard to the exploration of difficult or non-intellectualizable filmic phenomena, which are consistently characterized by ambivalence: in the area of extreme affects such as pleasure, disgust, fear, and horror. The seduction theory is particularly helpful in the investigation of a performative cinema, as it has been present since the silent film era: in the cinema of the European avant-garde as well as in the action image of classical Hollywood film—in the musical, in the gangster film, and in the western. In this context, the medium should be understood as a symbiotic interplay of different arts (image design, sound design, music, montage, acting) that aims at a comprehensive appropriation—and thus seduction—of the audience. At this point, a revealing parallel should be pointed out: In 2013, Martin Seel embarked on a very similar search for a comprehensive perspective on the narrative feature film in Die Künste des Kinos. He finds it in the arts that shape the art of film, considers film as architecture, music, image, acting, and narration, illuminates aspects such as imagination and emotion, to finally open up film as philosophy. Using examples from Alfred Hitchcock, Michelangelo Antonioni, and of course John Ford, he analyzes the stubborn magic of the medium. He calls this phenomenon the “captivation” of the viewer (Seel 2013, p. 34). Seel emphasizes the transience of the medium (“they are always missing something that is no longer there”, Seel 2013, p. 39). He refers to the performativity of the action image (Stiglegger 2006, pp. 210–211) (“it takes a restless break from telling”, Seel 2013, p. 40), to the deictic of the image composition (“sequences that make the shown appear in a certain gesture”, Seel 2013, p. 45), to the evocation of physicality (Stiglegger 2006, p. 108 ff.) (“the attention for a film demands a permanent physical devotion from its audience”, Seel 2013, p. 46). Seel ­emphasizes

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the masochistic subordination of the audience to the ‘authority’ of the filmic staging (Stiglegger 2006, pp. 185–187) (“the film is able to impose its movement on its audience”, Seel 2013, p. 61). And this submission to the seductive power of the staging can dialectically contain a moment of freedom, a freedom of floating in time and images, which may explain the pleasure in this submission. In the performative eventfulness, Seel sees “the special formal attraction of the filmic moving image” (Seel 2013, p. 108). The audience willingly follows the film, even though it is aware of its illusory character (Seel 2013, p. 175)—a clear paraphrase of a seduction act (Stiglegger 2006, pp. 45–47). The body of the viewer becomes the reference location (Seel 2013, p. 205 f.). With Adorno, Seel describes the film experience as “active passivity” (Seel 2013, p. 238). This leads to the theory of cinema: “We do not understand the moving of its experience if we do not understand the movement of the film. From its composition, its imagination, its expressiveness, everything starts here. Only if, only because, and only as long as we respond responsively to a film can we resonate with its vibration.” (Seel 2013, p. 211) In its different facets, Martin Seel offers a perspective on the medium, which is named here with a multitude of metaphors, but ultimately represents those appropriation strategies that were defined in the seduction theory of film (Stiglegger 2006): the seduction of the viewer by the appeal to physicality, by the subjugation of the gaze under the dictate of the moving image—disguised as seduction by the medium.

2.3 The Action Image as Tactile Cinema The motion-focused action film of Classical Hollywood, the “action picture”— and in this historical film sense, the Western is already early on kinetic, tactile cinema par excellence. This means that in the consciously externalized, performative action cinema, whose elemental dramas become the occasion for physically fought conflicts, the seduction and enchantment of the viewer is based on a strictly kinetic level, conveyed through the staged physicality of the portrayed. I do not consider the action film here as a clearly definable genre, but rather as a specific cinematic form of expression that can be adapted to different genres (Western, adventure, crime film, historical film). It is hardly surprising that the action film is sometimes explicitly interpreted in conjunction with models of seduction. Two such interpretations can be found, for example, in the volume Film + Kritik: Action, Action (Rieser et al. 1999). In it, Thomas Morsch speaks of cinema as a “machinery of ‘thrills’ […], which is entirely focused on seducing the viewer through a visual spectacle” (Morsch in Rieser et al. 1999, p. 21) Sharon

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Willis goes even further in her consideration of Friedkin’s To Live and Die in L.A. (1985) and sees the film as “extremely fascinated by seduction and simulation” (Willis in Rieser et al. 1999, p. 107), referring to both the internal level of staging and the meta-level. This cinema of pure kinetics is also at the beginning of Gilles Deleuze’s considerations on the movement image. He assumes that the film does not depict the real world as such, but that a new world ‘comes into being’ within the complex framework of cinematographic machinery, which includes both technology and perception. “The film does not simply show us the world with different means and from a special perspective, but it creates a different world.” (Lorenz Engell and Oliver Fahle in: Felix (ed.) 2002a, p. 226. Deleuze formulates it comparatively more complicated: “With the film, the world becomes its own image and not an image that becomes the world.” (Deleuze [1983] 1989, p. 85). This cinematic world, which ‘illuminates’ itself in the movement image in the projection, can in a next step be understood as its own ‘consciousness space’, which allows a ‘questioning’ of the real world through design, perspective and image frame. If one assumes with Deleuze movement and time as the fundamental elements of cinematic design and perception, the difficulty arises that movement can only be understood as a fleeting process. One must move away from the idea of individual film images (e.g. 24) per second, because individual screenshots, which actually form an element of this movement projection, convey nothing of the movement itself. The cinematic image is thus only apparently closed by the image frame, in fact it opens once to the space that is not depicted, but is nevertheless implicit, and it opens fundamentally by being able to reproduce movement. But not only that: It can also reproduce movement through movement and dynamically relate to this movement: When a movement sequence is documented by means of a counter-moving camera movement. The movement of the camera adds to the movement of the filmed movement. All these possibilities can be used as seductive strategies of cinematic staging, as they focus and subjugate the viewer’s gaze in these moments, manipulate and captivate it. Added to this is the cinematic operation of montage: “Montage sets […] different orders of movement images […] in relation to each other, but remains an indirect image of time, because time is not directly experienced, but mediated through movement.” (Lorenz Engell and Oliver Fahle in: Felix (ed.) 2002a, p. 229) Time and duration of the movement segments become the plaything of cinematic staging in the classic Western with its chases, as well as later in the action fireworks of the Hollywood blockbuster of the 1980s and 1990s. Deleuze also captured this interplay under the umbrella term of the sensorimotor schema in three concepts:

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The perception image isolates a certain section from the fleeting flow of cinematic images; it enables the separate perception of a portrayed body by creating a framing. The action image results from the perception in a time-delayed reaction. “Just as perception relates movement to ‘bodies’ (nouns), i.e. to fixed objects that serve as carriers of movement or moved, action relates movement to ‘actions’ (verbs) that correspond to a predetermined goal or a presumed result.” (Deleuze [1983] 1989, pp. 95–96) The affect image creates a connection between the cinematic image and the body of the recipient, who, however, cannot react to it (Deleuze [1983] 1989, p. 96). Ultimately, Deleuze goes so far as to consider the self-image of man per se as “nothing more than an arrangement of these three images, a fusion of perception image, action image, and affect image” (Deleuze [1983] 1989, p. 97). “The power of images to act on bodies, Deleuze calls […] ‘sensation’ or ‘affect’. […] The sensation, according to Deleuze in his book on Bacon’s painting, is transmitted ‘avoiding […] a narratable story’; it ‘acts directly on the nervous system, which is flesh’, and moves from one image order to another […].” (Robnik in Felix (ed.) 2002a, p. 257) In the encounter with the affect image, the body of the viewer is affected—here lies the ‘tactile quality’ of the film. The viewer seems to be literally trapped in his passivity in front of the screen projection when watching a film that affects him—a basic assumption that appears in Siegfried Kracauer’s Theorie des Films (1964) as well as much later in Steven Shaviro’s The Cinematic Body (1993), where he defines the ‘masochistic’ film enjoyment of the viewer as a “passion for that very loss of control” (Shaviro 1993, p. 57). This is the seductive basic disposition, so to speak the ideal device of the film’s seduction theory. In the Western—and especially in those by John Ford—Deleuze sees the “great form” of the action image (Deleuze [1983] 1989, p. 193), which allows a certain exaggeration and excessiveness, but preserves a realism about the relationship between milieu and behavior. “The action image is the relationship between [milieu and behavior] in all their possible variations.” (Deleuze [1983] 1989, p. 193) In the action image of the great form, everything is resolved into action: “The action is a duel of forces, a series of duels: fight with the milieu, with others, with oneself. The new situation that arises from the action forms a pair with the initial situation.” (Deleuze [1983] 1989, p. 194) For the Western, which is firmly anchored in a milieu (Deleuze [1983] 1989, p. 199), the action space becomes particularly important here, because “in his capacity as representative of the society of the community, the hero is enabled to act in a way that makes him equal to the milieu and restores its order, which is questioned either randomly

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or periodically: the community and the land are necessary mediating moments for a leader figure to emerge and for an individual to become capable of such a significant action at all.” (Deleuze [1983] 1989, p. 199) Starting from these basic assumptions, Deleuze also discusses John Ford’s Stagecoach, which designs an interior space in the hostile exterior, which seems to find its limit—almost—in the sky: “The outside encompasses the inside, both communicate with each other; it moves forward by switching from one to the other in both directions: so the images of Stagecoach, where the interior view of the coach alternates with its exterior view.” (Deleuze [1983] 1989, p. 200; Sanders 2007, p. 213) In Stagecoach, the social internal community is thus contrasted with a comprehensive and at the same time mythical external space, a dynamized imaginary space with the characteristics of the frontier theses, through which the ‘inside’ is thought.

2.4 The Classic Western as Performative Seduction The Western in its original form is ‘motion cinema’. Stagecoach by John Ford, an early success of the Western icon John Wayne, presents the wonderfully simple model of a seduction through the action image and its conditions. The model that Ford uses in this film is archetypal for the genre in many ways: The ensemble of characters gathers a young cowboy (John Wayne), a rather tragic gambler from the Southern states (John Carradine), a whiskey representative (Donald Meek), a haughty Puritan (Louise Platt), an alcoholic doctor (Thomas Mitchell), a prostitute (Claire Trevor), the upright sheriff (George Bancroft), the corrupt banker (Berton Churchill) and the foul-mouthed, though good-natured coachman (Andy Devine)—a microcosm of early American society after the Civil War. Each of these characters is given the appropriate function at the given time, all of them— crammed together in a stagecoach—are put into the community-building emergency by the threat from outside, an Indian attack. In the sense of Früchtl, the mythical hero (Ringo) is indeed found here in a bourgeois experimental arrangement, which, however, at this early stage in Ford’s oeuvre, is not yet aimed at a deconstruction of the hero. With the interior of the stagecoach, Ford’s staging constitutes a specific interior space that moves within a bizarrely formed exterior space, the iconic Monument Valley with its impassable mesas—a space within a space that no longer offers the security of a classic interior in motion. Both Seel (2013, p. 17), and Früchtl (2004, p. 54), describe in this regard the beginning of Ford’s The Searchers, in which the door of the protective interior opens into the uncertain exterior. The film Stagecoach, shot in high-contrast black and white, maintains the unity of

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place and time over long stretches. As subjective as the portrayal of the Indians as a threat still appears here (John Ford himself later shot revisions of this theme), the staging dissolves more and more into a frenzy of tactile action and movement in the final chase. The spaces blur, everything becomes dynamic. The film unfolds the spectacle on all available cinematic and auditory levels and provokes—especially with the contemporary audience—an affect-induced loss of control, which one cannot escape even today in some moments (Fig. 2.2). The final Indian attack after just over an hour of running time is already announced when the stagecoach party passes the smoldering remains of a post station. A destroyed bridge also heralds the work of the Indians on the warpath. But Ford delays the appearance of the threat until the stagecoach is in open terrain—between the rock formations of Monument Valley. The camera pans in a panoramic total with the moving stagecoach until it suddenly rests on a group of armed Indians who are already targeting their goal from a hill. Two or three close-ups of their stony, furrowed faces demonstrate the wild determination of these warriors. A surprising brass fanfare underscores the formal ‘intrusion’

Fig. 2.2   Stagecoach (Warner Bros., DVD Screenshot)—Dynamization of space in the action image

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of this threat into the image frame. There was just a joke on the coach box— the driver is the somewhat naive sidekick. Ford repeats the panoramic total and the quick left pan, but this time most of the Indians are already riding off. Ford returns to the (almost) unsuspecting community in the stagecoach: The alcoholic doctor chats with those present, makes a ‘toast’ to the random community that will never see each other again, when the hissing and hitting of an arrow can be heard from offstage. The camera quickly pans to the left to just catch the wheezing and bleeding banker falling into the picture. An arrow protrudes from his chest. The hyperreal sound intensity makes the vulnerability of the body clear. The film here virtuosically demonstrates how the medium opens up space in the moving image. The film scholar Gertrud Koch refers to this fact—to the cinematic construction of space through movement: “Space is functionally generated by movement, the camera […] opens up space in movement and this movement generates movable, indefinite spaces,” she states, and concludes: “In this experience of a dynamic and flexibly opened space, the film corrects its own mechanical and apparatus A Prioris to reflexive world experiences of the newly opening space in movement.” (Koch 2009, p. 72) The space in Stagecoach, previously clearly divided into inside and outside, must be rethought and virtually constructed by the audience in the performative dynamization. Martin Seel emphasizes in this thematic context the primacy of the space of movement over the space of meaning in film: “The locations of their performance emerge from the spatial movement of films.” (Seel 2013, p. 26) Space constitution and moving image are—one could conclude from these observations—coupled in a conditional relationship. Ford’s staging opens up the cinematic space in the final action scene as a mythical space of meaning—and turns the moving image into a mythical image. The stagecoach as an iconic means of transportation moves in the hostilely connoted frontier landscape, which is transformed into a space of violence through the dynamization of the cinematic staging. This process can be described in terms of seduction theory as a form of seduction to mythical thinking (Stiglegger 2006, p. 156–162). The film anchors a specific media image of the American myth in this process. But back to the sequence: The attack is now also noticed on the coach box (Fig. 2.3). A shot rings out in the distance, Indians come riding over a hill. Ford’s staging now follows two principles: The shootout between the coach community and the pursuers is edited according to the principle of cause and effect—one person shoots, the one hit usually falls along with his horse; parallel to this, the enormous speed at which the vehicle and riders move across the plain is repeatedly referred to in rapid camera movements, especially when the coach has passed a small canyon and drives out onto a vast sandy area. The film shows this in a

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Fig. 2.3   Stagecoach (Warner Bros., DVD Screenshot)—Action space coach box

high total shot, which observes the black coach on the white plain, while Indian riders break into the picture frame from both sides. Only at this point does it become clear that the perspective was chosen from a hill. In a close-up of the racing coach, Ford now uses one of two dramatic subjective shots, which takes the coachman’s view of the running horses and involves the viewer directly and physically in the action. Stones fly into the picture, which the sheriff throws at the animals to drive them on. A quick reverse shot shows the approaching Indians, also here predominantly from the perspective of the pursued. Ford chooses another radically involving, albeit unreal perspective, when he lets an Indian and his horse rush towards the camera from the ground. For fractions of a second, the panicked expression of the hit person becomes visible, his pain palpable—a brief affective image that blurs the boundary between threat and victim as well as between image and body. Immediately in the next shot, the blonde Dallas, holding a baby in her arms, is almost hit by two arrows, which, however, ineffectively drill into the door frame. A conflict breaks out among the travelers. The narrowness of the interior proves fatal. An overhead total shot again provides an over-

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view of the still dangerous situation: The Indians have almost caught up with the coach. Again, the staging resorts to a radically artificial, albeit literally ‘crushing’ perspective: In a medium shot, we first see the coach, then some pursuers rush over the camera. Shots thunder incessantly. In a cutaway, we see the dark-haired Puritan woman covering her ears and almost resignedly looking into the void. In the total shot, the number of pursuers seems to multiply constantly—despite the fact that with almost every shot of the travelers that Ford stages here, an Indian falls to the ground. Suddenly, the film jumps again into the subjective view of the coachman with a view of the horses, this time initiating the next action: In the following total shot, we see an Indian jump from his horse onto the front draft horses, apparently to stop the coach. But he is immediately shot, can hold on briefly between the horses and then lies down, while the vehicle rushes over him; this situation of extreme drama, however, the film only shows from a distance. In close cutaways, the obvious joy that the gambler Hatfield feels when shooting and killing is conveyed. A triumphant smile appears on his face as he sees his pursuers tumble into the dust. But the travelers also have to make sacrifices: The coachman is hit and injured. To keep the horses going, the cowboy Ringo has to work his way forward on the pole to the front animals to drive them directly. This dangerous stunt sequence has become legendary, although this action is only shown here in a series of medium shots, probably to not reveal the switch of the actor Wayne to his stuntman. Meanwhile, the companions are running out of ammunition. The situation is approaching a hopeless stage. On the dramaturgical level, it is important that Ringo’s daring action could thus be almost in vain, because the Indians are gaining the upper hand. In the coach, a bullet hits the wood directly next to Dallas, who is clutching the baby. Fearfully, she uncovers the child, but in a close-up we see that it seems to be sleeping peacefully. Hatfield realizes that he only has one bullet left in his revolver. Faced with the hopeless situation, he decides to shoot the Puritan woman before she—so the nightmare of the settler women—falls into the ‘hands of the savages’. The woman continues to stare into the void, seems to have already come to terms with her fate. Hatfield’s revolver rises into the picture and aims at her head, the hammer is cocked. A shot sounds from off-screen and the gun sinks again. A trumpet sounds, and the woman’s face brightens: That must be the cavalry. This last long shot is a directorial masterpiece, strictly choreographed, complex in its density of information and at the same time incredibly tense—a seductive strategy that is supposed to completely captivate the viewer. The dynamic medium shots in which the camera then runs parallel to the intervening cavalry are merely a confirmation after the resolution of the tension network, Ford is no longer interested in the actual act of rescue.

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This sequence is emblematic for the tactile, physical quality of the affect-laden American genre cinema for many reasons: Carefully reduced to a polar model that is clearly transparent to the viewer (seduction on the second level), Ford’s staging emphasizes the contrasts of inside and outside, near and far, “civilized” and “wild”, daring and cowardly. This sequence, consistently staged towards sensation (in the sense of Deleuze), offers a basic model that is primarily reproduced in post-classical action cinema. To facilitate identification on the part of the heterogeneous audience, a whole series of types are introduced here, which can only function as an emergency community in the moment of crisis. This ranges from the heroic type (Ringo) to the motherly whore (Dallas) to the defenseless baby. Subtextual conflicts are integrated through these types (par pro toto class conflicts are acted out here), but in principle the external action building on the permanent movement of space within space dominates. Viewed in terms of seduction theory, Stagecoach can thus be considered on three levels. On the first level, those strategies can be seen that are intended to arouse the interest of the potential audience: The film was made in the context of a then popular genre, whose standard situations and motifs it serves. With John Wayne, it had an up-and-coming young genre star at its disposal, who fulfilled the image of the hero even in dangerous staging moments. The archetypically differentiated personnel of the radically limited setting creates a broad basis for identification offers of female and male identities. At its peak, the film becomes a spectacular action image conveyed on all available cinematic levels, dissolving a situation of permanent movement in sometimes daring stunts and thus guaranteeing a maximum of kinetic affect images. On the second level of seduction, clearly formulated statements and polarities are evoked. Thus, the protagonists each stand for certain milieus of the American founding society, who carry their class conflict into crisis situations. The programmatic nature of the staging clearly suggests that overcoming these societal boundaries is necessary if a truly effective community is to emerge that can withstand the external threat. This external threat bears the anonymous face of the attacking Indians—here the staging indulges in a stereotypical enemy image program. This polarly constructed image corresponds to the laws of the classic Western and at the same time lulls the targeted viewer into the security of a familiar world view, in which the cavalry literally and at the last moment reconstitutes the lost order. The meta-level of the film finally lies on the third level of seduction. With its multitude of perspectives and body-related affect moments, Stagecoach offers an impressive model of movement, spatial formation and sensation as a seductive strategy. With Martin Seel it can be stated: “The cinematic space is a movable space of perception, which puts the audience into a perceptive movement that points beyond itself precisely

References

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where it lets itself be captivated by the play of the appearances visible in it.” (Seel 2013, p. 34) While the interior space illustrates the societal microcosm of America shortly before the completion of the civilization process and the development of the country, this inner space is set in motion within a mythically defined outer space and must prove itself once again in a confrontation with the frontier-country. But overcoming class prejudices is not enough, only the intervention of the military from the outside can secure the order. Without the ordering force of the newly established state, which the army represents, the frontier-country cannot be secured. Stagecoach is therefore only at first glance an affirmative genre film with generic ingredients, upon closer examination it unfolds a multi-layered political fable about the myth of America and the emergence of community from the visualized conflict of two spatial concepts. The seduction-theoretical approach further develops concepts of continental philosophy—specifically Baudrillard’s concept of seduction and Deleuze’s movement or action image—to enable a specific access to metatextual dimensions of the staging that might otherwise remain unrecognized, but in this perspective become all the more clearly tangible in their dense interweaving with Ford’s seemingly outwardly directed space and movement staging. In the sense of film’s seduction theory, this is precisely where the ‘great art’ of Ford’s directing work lies.

References Arnheim, Rudolf. 1974. Film als Kunst [1934]. München: Karl Hanser. Baudrillard, Jean. 1983. Lasst euch nicht verführen! Berlin: Merve. Baudrillard, Jean. 1991. Die fatalen Strategien. München: Matthes und Seitz. Deleuze, Gilles. 1989. Das Bewegungsbild. Kino 1. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp. Felix, Jürgen, Ed. 2002a. Moderne Film-Theorie. Mainz: Bender. Felix, Jürgen, Ed. 2002b. Die Postmoderne im Kino. Ein Reader. Marburg: Schüren. Früchtl, Josef. 2004. Das unverschämte Ich. Eine Heldengeschichte der Moderne. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp. Koch, Gertrud. 2009. Zwischen Raubtier und Chamäleon. Zeitschrift für Medienwissenschaft 1:65–73. Rieser, Susanne, et al., Ed. 1999. Film + Kritik Heft 4, Oktober 1999: Action, action. Frankfurt: Stroemfeld. Sanders, Olaf. 2007. Filmbildung. Zur wissenschaftlichen Untersuchung von Bildungsprozessen am Beispiel von Broken Flowers und Don’t Come Knocking. In Bildungsprozesse und Fremdheitserfahrung. Eds. Hans-Christoph Koller et al. 199–218. Bielefeld: transcript. Seel, Martin. 2013. Die Künste des Kinos. Frankfurt: Fischer.

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Shaviro, Steven. 1993. The cinematic body. Minneapolis/London: University of Minnesota Press. Stiglegger, Marcus. 2006. Ritual & Verführung. Schaulust, Spektakel und Sinnlichkeit im Film. Berlin: Bertz + Fischer. Stiglegger, Marcus. 2015. Die Seduktionstheorie des Films: John Ford im Spiegel kontinentaler Philosophie. In Classical Hollywood und kontinentale Philosophie. Ed. Ivo Ritzer. 157–172. Wiesbaden: Springer. Stiglegger, Marcus, Ed. 2000. Splitter im Gewebe. Filmemacher zwischen Autorenfilm und Mainstreamkino. Mainz: Bender. Turner, Frederick Jackson. 1893. The frontier in American history. http://xroads.virginia. edu/~HYPER/TURNER/. Zugegriffen: 18. Mai 2021. Waechter, Matthias. 1996. Die Erfindung des amerikanischen Westens. Die Geschichte der Frontier-Debatte. Rombach/Freiburg: Rombach.

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Body, Cinema and Performance

3.1 Choreography and Seduction One of the media-specific qualities of the time-based moving image medium film is the aesthetic organization of the dynamization of space through a choreography of bodies (proxemics). The aesthetic patterns of this organization have a centuries-old tradition from dance theater, social dance in general, but also from martial arts. The sequences of movement in the choreography, which follow ritualized patterns, have always taken up the gesture of wooing, competing, but also of dueling. This ambivalence between desire and aggression is, for example, the basic aesthetic principle of tango dance, in which courtship, attraction, repulsion, love and hate, life and death are ritualized into sequences of movement. The physical expression of desire revolves around Venus and Mars at the same time, which is elaborated in all its ambivalence. Such choreographies appear in film stagings not only in a direct sense (in musicals, dance films, ballet films), but also indirectly as the basis for the design of fight and action scenes. The kata of Japanese martial arts, for example, precisely defines every step and movement, so that the combat actions between two or more opponents appear like a dance. This combat choreography serves as the staging basis for classic martial art cinema, as can be clearly seen in Akira Kurosawa’s Sanjuro (1962). This form of ritualized movement, given its often universalized aesthetic form and its associative comprehensibility across national borders, occupies an important place within the repertoire of seductive staging strategies. The following chapter will discuss this phenomenon using a film that combines the tradition of ballet film with the mode of psychothriller, resulting in an experience of ambivalence that can be very well demonstrated using formal means and at the same time leads to a complementary

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2024 M. Stiglegger, Film as a Medium of Seduction, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-43818-0_3

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analytical approach: the schizoanalysis of film. Choreography not only becomes a sensual experience of ambivalence for the audience, but also enables the visualization of a mental split, which can provide the audience with an intuitive access to the third level of seduction in this case. In the New York-based psychothriller Black Swan (2010) by Darren Aronofsky, the young, rising ballerina Nina (Natalie Portman) unexpectedly gets the double role of her life. In Swan Lake, she is to embody both the innocent white and the demonic black swan. While she apparently is the perfect casting for the white swan, she has to learn to let go of her identity and bring out the dark side in herself for the counterpart of the figure. Driven by the charismatic ballet director Thomas Leroy (Vincent Cassel), she desperately tries to overcome her blockages. Ironically, her new competitor Lily (Mila Kunis) has what Nina seems to lack. Plagued by her overambitious mother (Barbara Hershey), Nina’s desperation grows. She enters a self-destructive process in which the boundaries between delusion and reality increasingly blur. The premiere ultimately becomes a matter of life and death. Black Swan brings together elements that also appeared in the director’s work before: On the one hand, the neurotic personality plagued by visions and distorted perception, on the other hand, the dynamic handheld camera style, which risks extreme graininess in low light conditions (Stiglegger in: Bär and Schneider (eds) 2012, pp. 11–20). Black Swan is about a desperate search for happiness. The film shows a young woman whose passion is completely chaotically dispersed. While she resists the advances of her dance teacher and suffers under the dominance of her mother, she succumbs to the seduction of her competitor. Ultimately, she fails primarily due to her inability to love herself. The existential problems of the protagonist primarily arise from her uncompromising pursuit of perfectionism. In an interview with Kai Mihm, Aronofsky explains that he himself is a perfectionist: “I am interested in characters who strive for perfection. In The Wrestler (2009) and Black Swan it’s about people who achieve perfection through enormous physical effort. […] I definitely see relationships between these films.” (Mihm 2011, p. 33) However, this pursuit of perfection creates loneliness, the loneliness of the virtuoso. In The Wrestler, the physically severely battered athlete knowingly embarks on the path to death in order to experience the triumph on stage one last time. And in Black Swan, blind perfectionism leads to the mental breakdown of a young woman who, under its pressure, drifts into mental splitting and self-destruction (Fig. 3.1). In the sense of the seduction-theoretical approach, the film can be viewed on the aforementioned three levels. On the first level of seduction (the film’s seduction of itself), Black Swan has a lot to offer: the self-sacrificing portrayal of the main role by Natalie Portman, who specifically learned the Bolshoi style for the

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Fig. 3.1   Black Swan (Fox, DVD Screenshot)—Visualization of delusion: the face as a mirror of the soul

film; the intimate look behind the scenes of the Metropolitan Ballet in New York; the film-appropriate adaptation of the famous ballet Swan Lake; the attractive mix of elements of the psychological thriller and stage drama (backstage melodrama); the Academy Award nominations; even Darren Aronofsky’s position as a prototype of a New Hollywood filmmaker plays a role here—in short: all those aspects that brought the film into the discussion beforehand and created a hype, an aura, that made the film attractive to its target audience (such as intellectual film fans between 25 and 60). This calculation worked and made Black Swan an international success, which was further helped by the awarding of the Golden Globes and the Oscars to Natalie Portman. On a second level, the film seduces to a clearly formulated and identifiable statement, which is found in the diegesis of the film. On this level of analysis, we find: criticism of the protagonist’s obsession with physical perfection, who is ultimately willing to sacrifice everything for her role; the career obsession of the mother, who wants to see her own abandoned dreams realized in her daughter; a clarification of the career and success pressure that leads to self-denial, humiliation, and self-sacrifice; the unmasking of the stage world as an intriguing and sexist system that tolerates no weaknesses. These obvious elements led to criticism from the ballet world, for example, that the film paints a decidedly negative and clichéd image of this system.

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3.2 Schizoanalysis The third level of seduction is that of covert seduction, whose structures only become clear upon further consideration. On this level, the appeals of desire in the staging can also be worked out. In the case of Black Swan, the subjective mediation of the breaking personality is of particular interest, which can be grasped here with the film’s schizoanalysis (Stiglegger 2014, pp. 49–64). Although the term schizoanalysis of film, inspired by Gilles Deleuze, was only coined and defined in recent years by Olaf Sanders (2015), Ian Buchanan and Patricia MacCormack (2008), comparable approaches to analyzing the schizoid nature of the narrative film medium, which is per se structured according to a paranoid model, so that the staged elements are in a meaningful context, can already be found earlier. In his essay “Schizophrenic Narrative,” for example, Lee R. Edwards (1989, p. 25 ff.) works out the difference between “schizophrenia as an element of the narrative” and “schizophrenia as a narrative.” He distinguishes between the mere representation of schizophrenia in the media (“narrative marked schizophrenic”) and schizophrenia as a media narrative form (“schizophrenia’s linguistic incarnation”) (Edwards 1989, p. 25). The difference lies primarily in the staging of the mental illness: while the first term focuses on the disorder itself, works that use schizophrenia as a narrative stage the disease in an artistic way. They thus allow the recipient to participate in the mental deviation through a disturbing narrative structure. The subjectivity of the narrative perspective moves to the center. The medium “film” is particularly suitable as a stage for a staging of subjective schizophrenia due to its seductive character and the perspective-bound camera work. The seductive challenge of such schizophrenic narratives is to give the viewer only a few reliable references to an objective reality level, while the main part of the narrative takes up the schizophrenic perspective itself. What we as viewers get are radical inner images—reduced impressions of a mostly disturbed subjective perception. The key motif of schizophrenic narratives is the doppelganger, which consists at least in a clear splitting of the main character into divergent characters (Fig. 3.2). While the protagonist in Darren Aronofsky’s debut film Pi (1998) undergoes a disturbing personality transformation in the course of his increasing paranoia, which also manifests itself externally (such as in the shaving of the head), the protagonist in Black Swan quite literally encounters her doppelganger and is shaped in her entire perception of reality by a perception of her fellow human beings as potential doppelgangers. This doubling becomes most evident in the final dance, a double showdown, as the protagonist not only attacks the white

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Fig. 3.2   Black Swan (Fox, DVD Screenshot)—The dark doppelganger on stage

swan as the black swan, but also pierces her dark double with a shard of mirror in the dressing room during the intermission (sic!). She carries this fatal wound into the dance finale on stage, where she finally performs the climax as an existential moment with her last strength. It remains open whether she finally dies, or whether the film here suggests a coded rebirth. The cinematic depiction of the doubles in Black Swan is a direct expression of the pathological perception that is transferred to the viewer. Such doppelganger figures can be considered a reflection of the protagonist, who sees herself as not complete and whole, which has a clear connection to Edwards’ “schizophrenia as a narrative,” because “the schizophrenic narrative itself declares its own distress at this condition, cries out in terror, proclaims its own desire to see a human face mirrored in its shattered subjectivity” (Edwards 1989, p. 29). Similar to how Jacques Lacan’s “Other” in the mirror makes people aware of their own imperfection, “schizophrenia as a narrative” shows the recipient that he must necessarily deal with the confusing “Other,” the “deviating health condition” from the “norm,” in order to learn more about himself due to the limited perspective. In this way, Black Swan is suitable both for consciousness-expanding self-reflection of the viewer’s own perception of reality and as an essay on the mechanisms of cinematic world mediation, which a priori presupposes the acceptance of a “schizophrenic” perception in the sense of schizoanalysis—staged in the form of a permanent penetration of life and art, of movement and choreography as an act of the seductive game between the protagonists of the film and between the screen and the audience.

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3.3 Body Construction and Performative Cinema From the birth of the medium, the discourse on the body has been significant for a theoretical engagement with film. In early film recordings by the Lumière brothers or Georges Méliès, the human body is at the center of attention, stories are told with and about this body, whether in everyday moments as in the Lumière films or in the effect-oriented studies of “magician” Méliès. Cinema had qualified itself as ‘anthropomorphic’. All the more surprising is the sporadic thematization of the body image, which has only been subjected to scientific examination more intensively in recent years. In classical film theoretical considerations, it rarely appears (in Rudolf Arnheim [1974], Siegfried Kracauer and Walter Benjamin), only Béla Balázs’ Der sichtbare Mensch (2001) from 1924 is aware of the anthropocentric fixation of the medium. While numerous theoretical approaches to the topic have been established in the English-speaking research area, especially Linda Williams (1989), Barbara Creed (1993) or Vivian Sobchak (2004), German-speaking research is hesitant. Creed and Williams devote their considerations primarily to the depicted body, while Sobchak already develops ideas about the physicality of the staging itself. Steven Shaviro’s monograph The Cinematic Body (1993), inspired by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, is still of great influence today. For Shaviro, film reception occurs pre-reflectively and recedes behind the symbolic order. The cinematic image thus eludes the order of pure representation. Shaviro’s study is interested in what might happen between the screen and the viewer in the act of reception. Shaviro (1993, p. 38) views film experience in this context as a shock-like, contagious act that affects the body of the recipient before he becomes intellectually aware of it. The somatic effect precedes conscious perception. This appropriation of the involuntarily passive viewer resembles a masochistic disposition, as the viewer willingly submits to the cinematographic dominance and surrenders to it with pleasure (Shaviro 1993, p. 32). The medium can be understood as a medium of appropriation or seduction, with the aim of manipulating its audience. This seductive—appropriating—strategy of an intended subjugation of the viewer to the sensual (audiovisual) impressions appeals to a somatic, bodily sensation—not only through the depiction of the body, but also through visual textures, contrasts, movements and sounds. An unusual example of the seductive potential of a consciousness-expanding body cinema can be found in the film Wild (2016) by Nicolette Krebitz. Lilith Stangenberg plays the introverted IT specialist Ania, who lives alone in a highrise estate in Jena after her sister (Saskia Rosendahl) moves out. One morning on her way to work, she encounters a wolf. Ania is fascinated and recognizes a

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connection between the solitary animal and her own situation. She explores the animal, and soon, with the help of some cleaning women, she manages to catch, sedate, and bring the wolf into her apartment (Fig. 3.3). More and more, Ania neglects her human contacts, alienates herself from her colleagues, and builds a bizarre partnership with the animal. While she initially cushions and protects herself, she soon lets the wolf roam freely through the apartment. When she menstruates, there is an intimate approach, which the film stages as an erotic ecstasy and awakening experience. From then on, Ania acts instinctively and unpredictably. This animalistic unpredictability becomes the principle of Krebitz’s staging. Not only does she stay close to her protagonist with the restless camera, but she also constantly reflects the wolfish in human behavior. Not only does Ania act more lurking, instinctive, but also her boss (Georg Friedrich) appears in his sometimes toxic, sometimes helpless male dominance as animalistic. In a drunken state, he even growls. Completely free of moral judgments, the film confronts us with this mirror cabinet of animalistic regressions, in which we as an audience are largely left alone, Krebitz’s film is a challenge to an audience familiar with an anthropocentric worldview. The film shifts the perspective and introduces the wolf as an independent entity alongside the human protagonist. With Ania, we rediscover the world. In the process, taboos are crossed: sexual contacts between humans and

Fig. 3.3   Wild (NFP/Heimatfilm; DVD Screenshot)—Ania (Lilith Stangenberg) brings the wolf into her apartment

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animals, the situational killing of the intrusive colleague, and the change of habitat. In the end, Ania follows the wolf into the freedom of a steppe-like wilderness, where she adapts her behavior and diet to the animal, eating raw meat and drinking from a puddle (Fig. 3.4). This unusual satisfaction of everyday needs creates a physically based access for the audience to the disturbing shift that the film undertakes. The animalistic regression is never evaluated or questioned by Krebitz. It is nothing less than the overcoming of anthropocentric cinema with the means of body cinema. Sexuality and violence are not spared, but they take a back seat to the ‘new everyday life’ that the film unfolds.

3.4 Choreography and Violence In American cinema, the choreographed staging of brutal violence is the primary means of body cinema, with less reference to the reality of violence and more celebration of violent acts as a unique sensation of cinema, which has its own seductive quality. Since Sam Peckinaph’s late western The Wild Bunch (1969) at the latest, the term death ballet is used when it comes to elaborately choreographed spectacles of simulated violence in cinema. The connection between choreography and combat or violence is as old as these phenomena

Fig. 3.4   Wild (NFP/Heimatfilm; DVD Screenshot)—Lilith Stangenberg as Ania adapts to the wolf

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themselves. And the aestheticization of violent scenarios was already hinted at in epic poetry and was staged audiovisually at the latest with stage or arena performance. Neither in American nor in world cinema can this phenomenon be observed only from the late 1960s onwards, and even if it is reduced to Peckinpah’s very specific montage aesthetics of proximity and distance, speed and slowing down, there is a clear precursor in film history: the Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa. Not always, but in many examples, the cinema of Japanese director Akira Kurosawa is a cinema of violence and death, an “aesthetics of the long goodbye” (Stiglegger 2014). And this cinema of violence and death captivates its audience in a very special way by establishing violent actions as a full-fledged communication level and thus offering an ethical challenge that is not immediately recognizable. The form of the film itself becomes seductive here. One of his stylistic devices, especially in the portrayal of physical violence, which was established early on, is the slowing down of events, the slow motion. In English-speaking film studies, the cinematic stretching of time is simply called ‘slow motion’: the slowed movement as a banal result of time manipulation. The German term, Zeitlupe, appears more interesting. It combines the key concept of time, which is of elemental importance for the medium—film can also be defined as an event per time -, with the function of a magnifying glass. For film, not only the close-up is to be defined as a magnifying glass, but also the slowing down of time and events. To examine a movement closely not only requires seeing the object itself sharply and closely, but also viewing it in the luxury of extended time. In this respect, the medium of film simultaneously moves away from the naturalistic depiction of reality and indirectly approaches it again: In that the cinematic slow motion conjures up a certain intensity that can easily be lost in the phantom-like fleetingness of the cinematic projection. Initial experiments with the advantages of slow motion as a seductive cinematic form were already undertaken in the early serial photography of the late 19th century: Slow motion expands our sensory perception capabilities. We see things that escape human perception due to their speed. It is also noteworthy that a slowed original sound does not necessarily work in parallel with the slowed action. Usually, a dominant off-sound, such as soundtrack music, underscores the poetic moment of this cinematic ‘lingering’ at the moment. Or an asynchronous original sound is retained—the image becomes independent for a short time. Kurosawa prefers silence in such moments, giving these scenes something contemplative-sublime. Although in real human perception we often speak of moments of slowmotion perception, we must assume that the cinematic device of slow motion is

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not suitable for conveying objective impressions of reality. Rather, it has established itself for the depiction of the extraordinary, the affective, or even the surreal: for conveying inner images, visions, and dreams. Rudolf Arnheim states in Film as Art: “Slow motion has hardly been used for artistic purposes so far, and yet it is highly suitable for this, because it can firstly serve to show the grotesque slowing down of natural movements, but secondly it can also create new movements that do not appear as a slowing down of faster movements but as peculiarly gliding, floating, supernatural. Slow motion should be wonderfully usable for hallucinations and ghosts.” (Arnheim 1974, pp. 138–139) Slow-motion scenes glorify an event in a similar way to soft-focus images or overexposures. Although often destructive acts are depicted in this way, the film is created anew in the specific form of mediation. Destruction becomes a visual construction that brings us closer to the ambivalent nature of the medium. So, slowing down always equals an intensification of the external—and thus the conveyed ‘internal’—event. This applies equally to the sensation of pure movement in sports films as well as to the intensification of violent acts. In Shichinin no Samurai, Kurosawa is not interested in the act of violence itself, but in the fatal aftermath: for example, when after a duel the struck opponent slowly slumps to the side. Kurosawa is interested in the deadly consequence of violence, and in the slowing down of dying he intensifies it, without slipping into heroic pathos. Kurosawa often focuses entirely on the detailed observation of the results in later films, while the act itself is dealt with rather briefly, or takes place off screen. In American cinema, we usually encounter the opposite phenomenon: the actual suffering recedes into the background in favor of a cinematic unfolding of the destructive act itself. Jürgen Keiper (1999) calls his essay on slow motion published in Film + Kritik quite fundamentally “The Aesthetics of Pain, Destruction, and Death”. He therefore primarily sees the function of this stylistic device in the context of staging destructive actions—a cliché that has certainly established itself—especially in international action cinema. A famous example of the use of slow motion in violent scenes can be found in Sam Peckinpah’s Western The Wild Bunch, which in turn is influenced by Kurosawa in its fatalistic mood, its reduced spaces, and the ambivalent character drawing. The celebration of pure movement ended where it had to end: in absolute standstill—in death. And Peckinpah staged this death as a last mythical moment, as an eternal instant—at least that’s how David Weddle describes it in his Peckinpah monograph “If They Move, Kill’em!”: “He discovered the eternal moment. He was fascinated by how a traumatizing moment stretches, how every sensual detail is intensified and every movement is drawn out—how in the immediate encounter with death one felt life with the greatest intensity, how one entered an extraordinary elation.” (Weddle

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1996, p. 55) Such stagings affect the body of the viewer, creating a sense of the unfathomable. Kurosawa primarily uses slow motion to make palpable the moment after violence, the slow departure from life. In Shichinin no Samurai, we do not see how Shimura strikes down the kidnapper in the hut, instead the man stumbles out in slow motion, stops abruptly and in the reverse shot we see Shimura, disguised as a monk, emerge unharmed from the hut. He throws the blood-stained katana next to the man in the dust—and the dying man falls face down in the dust. The supposedly phallic power of violence proves to be a simple slackening of the formerly combat-ready warrior body. In contrast to the apparent weightlessness of the body, which in Sugata Sanshirō/Judo Story (1943) is still thrown meters through the air, Kurosawa denies this acrobatics to the body in the post-war period. Kurosawa went two steps further in later years: In his middle phase, he dramatized the destruction of the body in disturbing immediacy (in Yojimbo [1961], Sanjuro [1962] and Akahige/Red Beard [1965]), and in his old age work, he let the bright red blood flow in hectoliters (in Kagemusha and Ran), even though he sought a new level of stylization in color film. The Hidden Fortress undoubtedly tells its classic adventure story from an ironically broken distance—from the perspective of two fools—but right at the beginning the rules of the game are set: Together with the deserted rogues, we watch as a fleeing soldier is brutally pierced by several spears and blades and collapses blood-soaked. In the moment of death, he remains in lethal cramp, making him appear like one of those corpses that the young Kurosawa may have seen on his way through earthquakedestroyed Tokyo. Kurosawa’s cinema is seductive in the borderline experience that he invokes in an aesthetically heightened way. Yojimbo goes even further: As the wandering protagonist walks into the dustcovered town, a dog comes towards him, carrying a severed hand in its mouth. This brief shock moment anticipates a later scene in which the nameless Ronin cuts off an opponent’s half arm with an elegant cut. In a close-up, we see the arm with the sword falling to the ground, with a view of the lovingly designed cut surface from which a bone protrudes. This gruesome directness for 1962 returns in the final duel when Yojimbo (Mifune) throws a knife into the arm of his archenemy (Tatsuya Nakadai), who holds the actually superior firearm. The sequel Sanjuro initially appears more restrained, but increases the level of visible body destruction at the end when Sanjuro (Mifune) opens his opponent’s (Tatsuya Nakadai) artery with a lightning-fast abdominal cut, causing a veritable flood of blood to spurt out (Fig. 3.5,3.6 and 3.7). A sinister musical accent

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Fig. 3.5, 3.6 and 3.7   Sanjuro (NSM, DVD Screenshot)—Toshiro Mifune and Tatsuja Nakadai

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sounds, coupled with a hissing noise. Again, the faces of the observers reflect the horror at the drastic impact of violence. Takashi Miike, who has been considered the enfant terrible of Japanese genre cinema in the last two decades due to his chaotic and drastic directorial works, has repeatedly directed serious and focused jidai-geki after 2010 and paid tribute to his role model Akira Kurosawa. Instead of adapting to the acrobatic style of Chinese martial arts cinema, he returned to the historical roots of Japanese sword fighting and staged his historical film 13 Assassins (2011) authentically in the sense of the Iaido-katas: as a cautious approach until reaching the attack distance and then as a short and intense sequence of cuts with the curved Katana. As Kurosawa vividly and bloodily demonstrated in the finale of Sanjuro, usually only a quick cut into the right body part is necessary to end the fight definitively. Miike shows us a central duel in 13 Assassins first from an overhead view, a total top shot, which illustrates the battlefield and establishes the fighters still several meters away in the threatening position (kamae). Here, the two opponents direct their martial energy towards the enemy through the blade. There are intercuts to the spectators who admire the elegance of the fighters. The fighters move forward in the fluid mud. The faces are extremely tense. In the next cut, we are at eye level, still several meters away, diagonally behind one protagonist. The opponents have now cautiously approached and threaten with the sword, which they align in front of their lower abdomen (ki). As soon as the sword tips touch, the first cut and parrying occur. Usually, it is the reaction that defeats the attacker (Fig. 3.8, 3.9 and 3.10). But here follow several hissing cuts and collisions, which culminate in close combat. But again and again, the opponents retreat to a safe distance, because any touch by the blade can be fatal. It turns out that Hanbei is superior—he wants to break off, but his opponent launches a final attack. Hanbei trips him up and then humiliates the man lying in the mud. Here, Miike refrains from his otherwise typical drastic body destruction, because the humiliation in the fall height for the defeated seems to weigh heavier on the director. Like Kurosawa, Miike follows the traditional choreography of Japanese sword fighting and familiarizes the audience with its rules intuitively over the course of the film. He seduces us to become part of this choreography ourselves, to immerse ourselves in the fighting situation. Instead of elaborate proxemics and acrobatics, it’s about balance, grounding, and determination. The staging literally draws us into the focused conflict, evokes extreme tension that discharges explosively and can trigger an involuntary affect (such as a blink or an intentional movement). This evocation is entirely based on the performative tension of the moment and does not rely on an overwhelming spectacle, as can be observed a little later in the Marvel universe. Miike demands concentration and uncondi-

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Fig. 3.8, 3.9 and 3.10   13 Assassins (Sunfilm, DVD Screenshot)—Sword fight according to the principles of the Kata

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tional identification with the situation of the fight and resolves the situation consistently in its internal logic: the disgrace of the loser outweighs the triumph of a momentary cinematic excess.

References Arnheim, Rudolf. 1974. Film als Kunst [1934]. München: Hanser. Balázs, Béla. 2001. Der sichtbare Mensch. Oder die Kultur des Films [1924]. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp. Bär, Peter, und Gerhard Schneider, Eds. 2012. Darren Aronofsky. Gießen: Psychosozial. Buchanan, Ian, und Patricia MacCormack, Eds. 2008. The schizoanalysis of cinema. New York: Continuum. Creed, Barbara. 1993. The monstrous-feminine: Film, feminism, psychoanalysis. London/ New York: Routledge. Edwards, Lee R. 1989. Schizophrenic Narrative. In Journal of Narrative Technique. 19(1): 25–30. Keiper, Jürgen. 1999. Zeitlupe—Die Ästhetik des Schmerzes, der Zerstörung und des Todes. In Film und Kritik 4:83–89. Mihm, Kai. 2011. Der dunkle Romantiker Darren Aronofsky und sein neuer Film Black Swan. epd Film 1:31–34. Sanders, Olaf. 2015. Jarmuschs amerikanisches Rhizom. In Bewegungsbilder nach Deleuze, Eds. Olaf Sanders und Rainer Winter, 121–163. Köln: Herbert von Halem. Shaviro, Steven. 1993. The cinematic body. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Sobchak, Vivian. 2004. Carnal thoughts: Embodiment and moving image culture. Los Angeles: University of California Press. Stiglegger, Marcus. 2014. Kurosawa. Die Ästhetik des langen Abschieds. München: Edition Text + Kritik. Stiglegger, Marcus. 2014. Verführung—Wunsch—Begehren. Die Seduktionstheorie des Films. In Jahrbuch für Literatur und Psychoanalyse Band 33: Film und Filmtheorie. Eds. Astrid Lange-Kirchheim und Joachim Pfeiffer, 49–64. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann. Weddle, David. 1996. Sam Peckinpah. „If They Move… Kill’em“. London: Faber & Faber. Williams, Linda. 1989. Hard core: Power, pleasure and the frenzy of the visible. University of California Press.

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4.1 The Sovereignty of the Senseless Act While the cinematic construction of the body and the aestheticization of proxemics—as we have seen—can be used for a seductive mediation of inner crises, the question of an ethical classification of the presented events remains. And it is precisely in the ethical challenge that a great potential of cinematic attractiveness is found. Film can challenge us to take a position, to align the staged events with our own values and at the same time to question the universal ‘rightness’. Siegfried Kracauer states in his Theorie des Films (1960) that cinema, beyond its function as a mirror of society, is also capable of conveying phenomena that are hardly bearable in reality. The screen becomes “Medusa’s mirror”. Facing the unbearable becomes the greatest ethical challenge that narrative cinema has to offer. And only in this way can film as a medium change, expand and possibly also alter the perception of reality. In the following chapter, I would like to discuss this ethical challenge as a seductive strategy using three examples. The 1970s were hardly shaped by the seed of the liberation movements of the previous decade. In addition to the often idealized sexual revolution, this decade had already lost its supposed innocence with the murders at Altamont (during the Rolling Stones concert) and by the Manson Family in 1969. It was obvious that even a ‘counter culture’ subscribed to peace and ‘free love’ had a dark side that painfully expressed human dualism: Those who wanted the ‘good’ were sometimes capable of the absolute ‘evil’. This ‘evil’ would be defined here as the ultimately senseless act of destructive violence, which claimed, among others, the pregnant wife of Roman Polanski, Sharon Tate, as a victim.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2024 M. Stiglegger, Film as a Medium of Seduction, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-43818-0_4

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The 1970s were not only in Germany of the RAF terror a decade in which sexuality and violence were disturbingly linked, but also in Italy of the ‘Years of Lead’. In 1975, for example, the ‘Circeo Massacre’ took place there, in which two young working-class women were raped and abused by three young men in a coastal town south of Rome. Rosaria Lopez died on the spot, Donatella Colasanti survived severely injured. The “Massacre of Circeo” mobilized many feminist groups at the time, the first anti-violence centers emerged from the autonomous women’s movement, but this act of senseless, hedonistic and unrestrained sexualized violence became an iconic event that is still known today. Numerous thrillers of the 1970s picked up the theme in variations, leading in media reflection from Wes Craven’s earlier rape-revenge film Last House on the Left (1972) to Ruggero Deodato’s La casa spreduta nel parco/The House by the Edge of the Park (1980) and Michael Haneke’s Funny Games (1997). In the senseless act of violence lies a self-elevation for the perpetrator, a spontaneous ‘sovereignty’ that elevates him or her to the ruler of the world. So if it wasn’t the news, the cinematic treatments reminded us at the latest of the seed of evil that lurked not only in a neglected ‘underclass’ but especially in the safe settlements of the bourgeoisie. In Holland, the name Paul Verhoeven is particularly associated with this context of sexuality and escalating violence. In his sometimes quite explicit melodrama Turks Fruit/Turkish Delight (1973), the artist and bon vivant Erik (Rutger Hauer) processes an unhappy separation by indulging in promiscuous sexual activity. Verhoeven became more drastic in the coming-of-age drama Spetters (1980). Here too, the young protagonists let themselves go, but sometimes become victims of sexual violence themselves, as a much-discussed (homosexual) rape scene shows. In Verhoeven’s worldview and image of humanity, the shift from libertine sexuality to violence is always possible and naturally inherent. And the mild film censorship in Holland not only allowed him, but also his colleague Pim de la Parra for the company Scorpio to stage a series of explicit sex dramas, whose uninhibited handling of cinematic forms of expression shows on an artistically astonishing level how far one could go as a filmmaker. The ‘Dutch Sex Wave’ of the 1970s, which is slowly being rediscovered today, staged uninhibited sexuality for the big screen and thus created a tradition that still resonates today. Holland has been able to preserve its reputation as a country of drugs and sexuality in pop culture. In both traditions stands the film Wij (2018) by René Eller: It tells of the senseless escalating acts of a group of bourgeois teenagers who elevate themselves with their excesses, and thus ties in with the tradition of the boundary-crossing Dutch cinema of the 1970s.

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Paul Verhoeven was always able to rely on provocative literary templates for his scandalous films, such as those by Jan Wokers (Turks Fruit, 1969, filmed 1973), Neel Doff (Keetje Tippel, 1922, filmed 1975) or Gerard Reve (De vierde man/The Fourth Man, 1981, filmed 1983). WE is also not an original screenplay, but is based on the radical coming-of-age novel “The Summer We Lifted Our Skirts and Drove the World Against the Wall” by Elvis Peeters. This is the pseudonym of Jos Verlooy, a Flemish rock musician, performer and writer, who sometimes develops radical novels with a ‘punk spirit’ together with his wife Nicole Van Bael. With “The Summer We Lifted Our Skirts and Drove the World Against the Wall”, Peeters also sparked a discussion in the German-speaking world in 2014. However, the film adaptation titled Wij was altered in some points to be filmable at all. The director René Eller chose Elvis Peeters’ novel as the basis for his feature film debut. Previously, he had made a name for himself as a director of commercials and music videos. His skills acquired in pop culture unfold an aesthetic of beauty that gradually lets the terrible seep through.

4.2 Seductive Surface—Bourgeois Abyss Wij is a film of seductive beauty. In extreme widescreen format, in summerly shimmering colors, suggestive central perspectives and often weightless aerial shots, we accompany a group of exuberant teenagers. Not yet adults, but long escaped from childish innocence, they flee from the dreariness of the bourgeois suburbs to an improvised refuge on the edge of the forest, where they want to spend the summer with love, lust and drugs. Director Eller directly picks up on the mood evoked in the novel, while with Peeters it becomes clear quite early on that we are in the vortex of a downward spiral. The film takes a different course: In four chapters, it gradually approaches the horror. Also in the novel, we experience the events from a multitude of perspectives, but it is rarely directly clear who is involved. Eller, on the other hand, assigns each chapter to an off-narrator, often as a telephone voice, in the last case as court testimony. What works in literature through obfuscation, benefits in film from the clearly identified view. What is the inner stream of consciousness in the novel, becomes in the film the verbal confession that complements and puts the images into perspective. Nevertheless, there are gaps between word and image that we as an audience must fill ourselves, that force us to put ourselves in relation to the events.

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The film begins with “Simon”, the first chapter. Simon is an equally average and weak young man, whose perspective has numerous gaps—narrative ellipses, posing puzzles, provoking us to ask questions—and at most provide dark hints. The film repeatedly returns to that day in the summer when the girls “lifted their skirts and drove the world against the wall”. How literally this is meant becomes clear only in the course of the film—in all its consequence. While the off-commentary conveys a retrospective reflection, the images work directly: with shallow depth of field we stay close to the action, often there is a lot of empty space in the picture, which continues the elliptically open narrative on the image level. In a collage-like manner, the film conveys that “ennui” of the bourgeoisie and its children. As in the novel “Gli indifferenti” (1929) by Alberto Moravia, evil sprouts in the weary and deaf lap of a youth that has hardly any duties, whose life has been arranged for them. The lack of existence and intensity gradually gives birth to a drive for abuse and destruction, which is perceived with dullness and lack of empathy. In the novel, Simon philosophizes about the increasingly destructive deeds, in the film it is repeatedly hinted that the teenagers understand their deeds as action art: their amateur pornography, their prostitution, and finally their provoked accidents and the (accidental) killing of a friend. For Simon, all this still appears as a naughty game. Chap. 2 of the film is dedicated to “Ruth”, who shows early remorse, but at the same time describes herself as “evil”: Although she is ultimately portrayed as a confused but empathetic victim—essentially a characteristically weak follower— she consciously takes the blame for her failure, which seems to make her ‘grow’. From her perspective, it becomes clear for the first time that the undressing prank on the highway has caused a devastating accident (Fig. 4.1), that guilt from which

Fig. 4.1   Wij (Bavaria, DVD Screenshot)—Deadly prank on the highway bridge

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she can no longer escape. Ruth too is a confirmed bourgeois child who wants to break out of her golden cage for moments—but this escape into adulthood becomes part of the spiral into death and despair. Like Simon, she speaks warmly about Femke, who is envied by everyone, whose funeral we finally attend. And again and again the girls—like Ruth—emphasize that pornography, promiscuity, and prostitution give them a sense of control and power over their environment. They play with their bodies on the keyboard of desire until they have dragged an entire city into the vortex. Apparently without their parents wanting to acknowledge it. But the film also shows that beneath the bourgeois facade, this game of lust and power determines everything—the teenagers only tie into it in a more obvious way. They live openly what others hide. In the first half of the film, Eller uses yearning-melancholic pop music and collage-like montage sequences that transcend time to convey a feeling of pubertal dizziness that dominates the scenes. In the sex scenes, he uses pornographic inserts that show that the teenagers are serious, even if they practice the positions ‘dry’ beforehand. But the malice of the events also becomes clearer from Ruth’s perspective: When a pregnancy is to be collectively ‘aborted’, when a neighbor’s dog is kidnapped and dragged along between the scooters—all this remains true to the summery color palette and exudes an even more morbid touch. “Lisl” in Chap. 3 is dedicated to the perspective of “reality art”. In her view, we see people burning and dying for the first time—a collage of death that at the same time establishes her idea of “death art”. In the novel, there is a moment when the girls provoke a suicide to film death. They feel innocent because the man killed himself of his own free will: “a murder without murdering.” Lisl’s idea of “reality art” conjures up life in its media mediation as a “reality show”. Lisl is literally incapable of empathy with the suffering of others. She appears as a sociopath who uses the lives of others as material for her modest idea of art. After the forced abortion of one of the girls, she gets the idea to become pregnant herself and then use the embryo as an art object—and then to produce a whole series of embryos. She ultimately calls this “Fuck-Up Art”. In Lisl, evil unfolds as a self-referential destructiveness, a celebration of sovereign hubris in dominance over everything defenseless. She is also the one who enables the blackmail of the adult ‘clients’—and then blackmails the group to quit herself. In her, the film plays through a first variant of the truly ‘evil’, until Eller penetrates to the heart of darkness with the fourth chapter. In the character of “Thomas”, from whose perspective the fourth part is told, it becomes clear from which source hubris and lack of empathy are fed (Fig. 4.2): In his family, Thomas is the ‘useless’ son, whose older brother teases him for his

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Fig. 4.2   Wij (Bavaria, DVD Screenshot)—Egoism and hubris of youth

inactivity. The father also puts him under pressure. Only here do we hear the story of the icicle from Thomas’ childhood, which his mother keeps in the freezer. Anyway, this chapter provides those missing fragments that the film previously withholds, while we get them presented unmediated in the novel (here the narrative perspective sometimes remains unclear). In Thomas, the true evil of the group of friends manifests itself. Many of his actions are planned in the long term and treat the others in the group as henchmen or victims. With the two girls from the fairground, whom Thomas later prostitutes, the privileges of the upper bourgeoisie also come into play, who understand the lower classes as service providers and treat and expose them as such. Thomas not only organizes the group’s pornification and blackmail actions, but he also plans a fake chain of evidence that allows him to present a local politician as the actual perpetrator in court. However, it is precisely this essential part of the plot that does not appear in the novel. There, the destructive activities remain completely hedonistic and chaotic. It is rather the bourgeois parents who do not want to acknowledge the crimes of their children. In contrast, in the film, Thomas claims that he was sexually abused by the politician as a child, and later the clique had to prostitute themselves for the man. The accidental—but accepted—death of Femke becomes the key here. Thomas pushes an icicle, preserved since childhood (!), into her vagina as a substitute penis during an obscene prank, causing Femke to fall forward in shock and smash her skull. In the novel, the teenagers call the paramedics and conceal the cause. In the film, the teenagers celebrate the corpse in an almost pagan ritual and burn it in their summer resort like a ‘holocaustum’, a whole burnt offering. Since

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they can prove that the politician was a client of Femke’s, they can pin her death on him. The film makes the latent regression of the clique obvious in this scene. Instead of removing reassurance from the audience here, the film builds on a gradually unfolded backstory to psychologize the characters. Thomas gets more motivation in the film than anyone else: He has been kept down all his life, we learn, living in the shadow of his brother. Now he finally wants to be “Thomas the Boss”, to have power and women, to take revenge on society. His coming of age is literally a “Coming of Rage”. In front of the mirror, in an act of hubris and selfaggrandizement, he quotes Marlon Brando as The Godfather (1972). Thomas is the conductor of terror, the mastermind of the crimes, the stronghold of the actual evil: He even calculates that greatest lie that makes him the victim. It is never clear whether he was really abused as a child. The film fades to black. We also do not find this epilogue in the novel, where the male teenagers meet again and retrospectively enjoy that they really got away with their deadly intrigue. Bourgeois society is confronted with its own abyss in the form of its offspring and is in a way reborn. Ellers as an advertising director is a seducer. In the sense of the film’s seduction theory, he can win his audience on a first level through the promise of scandal: The film adapts a drastically excessive coming-of-age novel and thus raises the curious question of how it might depict the youthful antics without becoming entirely pornographic. He uses a largely fresh and unknown cast of actors to avoid presenting supposed identification offers. Wij works with a selected and often slow-motion widescreen composition that clearly targets the big screen (Fig. 4.3). This is accompanied by a contemporary pulsating score that becomes increasingly threatening as the film progresses. Why do we want to see Wij?

Fig. 4.3   Wij (Bavaria, DVD Screenshot)—Slow-motion image compositions

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On the second level of seduction, the film makes it almost literally clear what it is about. Wij is a sensual expression of exposed social criticism: the bourgeoisie itself is the womb in which evil germinates. The secure life of the teenagers produces ennui, i.e., boredom and disgust, from which the desire for sensation and extreme experiences sprouts. In the monologues, we get to know the inner life of the teenagers and gradually understand their—sometimes absurd—motivations. The film gradually familiarizes us with a world of beautiful appearance and evil core. The novel never becomes as clear as the film in its puzzle-like dramaturgy. Peeters leaves the reader alone with the hedonistic destructiveness, which makes the novel appear harder. On the third level of seduction, the initially encrypted and hidden level of seduction, the film finally confronts us with our own abysses—and this is the strength of the film. Wij is a creeping attack on our idea of the ‘right’, ethical action. It lures us with a promise of youthful lightness, freedom, and pleasure: images of the beauty of sun, movement, rhythm, and young bodies. Especially in the first quarter, the staging flirts with clichés of sex and porn films—and even delivers explicit images. Even the highway scene still appears like a high-spirited joke. Only in the course of the four episodes does the action become darker and in the last part we are presented with Thomas, an immoral violent offender who manipulates and agitates completely inhumanly and ruthlessly. His ‘coming of age’ becomes a ‘coming of rage’. In the course of the film, we thus become from the seduced to the ashamed. The promise of youthful disinhibition consistently leads to rape, humiliation, and manslaughter. We understand what Jean-Luc Godard has already conveyed to us half a century ago: Politics is always also a question of perspective in film. We learn to reevaluate the events in Wij from ever new angles—until the full extent of evil is revealed. But at this point, we as a willing (seduced) audience have already become complicit. Ellers’ film dirties us in an irritatingly charming way and thus crosses an ethical boundary that he marks for us—as an uncomfortable question: Wij—that’s also us!

4.3 Ethical Challenge and Fictionalized History The ethical challenge as a seductive strategy will now be discussed and expanded upon using another film example: It is about Capote (2005), an American biopic, a historically based film that focuses on a specific period in the life of a real personality (Stiglegger 2021, pp. 209–224). Since the protagonist is a writer, the example can also be classified as an artist film. The film stages the creation of

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Truman Capote’s most successful book, the reportage novel In Cold Blood (1966), and primarily illuminates his personal relationship with his editor and one of the two perpetrators in focus. In 2006, the film received numerous awards, including the Oscar for Best Actor (Philip Seymour Hoffman). It was nominated in the categories of Best Film, Best Director, Best Supporting Actress (Catherine Keener), and Best Adapted Screenplay. Since a seduction-theoretical analysis of the entire film is not feasible in this scope, I would like to limit myself to basic perspectives and then focus on a key sequence. On the first level of seduction, the aforementioned information is already relevant, as it should become clear at this level what makes the film fundamentally interesting for an audience. It is based on one of the most successful American novels (1966) and the authorized biography Capote: A Biography by Gerald Clarke (1988). However, the film can only be considered a biopic to a limited extent. Basically, the biographical signal emanating from the film title Capote is already a trap for the conventional expectations of the audience with regard to a biographical feature film. The renowned and tragically prematurely deceased actor Philip Seymour Hoffman can be seen here in an iconic role with a strong screen presence. The artistic virtuosity of his acting technique was already well established at this point, so the promotion could emphatically build on his prominence and star quality. The novel In Cold Blood and Capote’s real life serve as the basis for the film’s adaptation. Another aspect of virtuosity is the exquisite image design by Adam Kimmel, which creates a historical simulacrum of the early 1960s with an earthy color palette, from which this cinematic reinterpretation of a historical crime becomes attractive. The historical event—the threat and murder of an entire family by two violent offenders—is in turn an important trigger for public attention. Richard Brooks’ first adaptation of the material In Cold Blood from 1966, in which the case was reconstructed in high-contrast black and white images and the image of the perpetrator as a societal outlaw in a black motorcycle jacket was staged (Fig. 4.4). The film Capote thus stands in several contexts: the genre discourse (biopic, artist film), the star cult (Hoffman as a virtuoso performer), the adaptation (novel, biography, filmic template) and the aesthetics (the confident reconstruction of the past). Above all, the real historical background of the events is often used in American cinema for advertising (‘based on a true story’). It suggests to the audience that the film provides an insight into verified reality or creates a vivid image of a historically reconstructed era (the early 1960s).

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Fig. 4.4   In Cold Blood (DVD Screenshot)—The first adaptation of the material established the image of the perpetrator as a societal outlaw

All these aspects play an important role in the promotion of the film and its international placement in the program of arthouse cinemas, where it found its audience. The film poster also underlines this orientation in a pointed way. The title is set in old typewriter font, which points to the writing activity of the protagonist. In addition, we see Hoffman as Capote posing in a casual posture— with cigarette, suit, designer glasses and bow tie he looks at us with dandyish self-confidence. Behind him unfolds a cloudy sky in pastel yellow tones, bare tree skeletons and on the right side a lonely farmhouse. While Capote stands for the urban East Coast intellectual, the landscape behind him unfolds the melancholy of the rural Midwest. Capote’s figure appears as if posing in front of a photo wallpaper, which underlines the unbridgeable city-country conflict of the film. At the same time, the poster builds on the viewer’s prior knowledge that a shocking multiple murder has taken place in this house and Capote will act as an investigator. At the same time, the style of the poster thus reflects the content and aesthetic form of the actual film (Fig. 4.5). On the second level of seduction, the question arises as to what the film explicitly narrates: through character drawing, character constellation, plot, and dialogues. If one evaluates the assumption that Capote is a biopic, i.e., the cinematic retelling of a real life, another approach becomes clearer: Capote appears in its reduction to a short period in the life of the writer and the focus on his psychological distress more as a ‘male melodrama’ about a lonely and melancholic journalist who suffers under the suspicion of his homosexuality. The film already

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Fig. 4.5   Capote (Press material)—Film poster

plays with the expectations aroused by the broad title Capote without disappointing, as it literally takes a look into the troubled inner life of the artist. Another aspect is the contrapuntal settings of the film, which in the film illustrate a confrontation of the ‘two Americas’: New York and Kansas contrast urbanity and rurality or indignity (also motivated by the origin of the murderer Perry Smith). The urban writer increasingly identifies with the rural murderer Perry Smith and begins to sexually desire him. Analogous to Capote’s obviously awakened doubts, the film sows or discusses doubts about the death penalty. This

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topic is explicitly negotiated in the dialogue and manipulates the audience in a more or less obvious way (“weak seduction”). It remains quite obvious where the film wants to lead its audience. Again and again, it shows emotional turmoil also on the side of the murderer, who thus becomes emotionally accessible to us (Fig. 4.6). The aim of the seduction-theoretical analysis is again to decipher the third level of seduction, the “covert seduction”. What does the film really want from us? For this, we should especially look at the long dialogues in the prison cell between the writer and the perpetrator. We experience these increasingly intimate dialogues as a subtle approach between the two men and an impending betrayal. In this way, we are brought to establish an emotional-affective relationship with the murderer. In this context, the homosexuality of the writer and his latent sexual desire for one of the perpetrators is also addressed—an aspect that was undoubtedly taboo from the perspective of the 1960s. The key moment comes when Perry wants to know the title of the book from Capote (“In Cold Blood”), because he already suspects that the author sees him primarily as a bestial murderer (“in cold blood”), no matter how close he seems to him. At an earlier point, Capote still emphasizes the commonality: He and Perry are like brothers who left the house in different directions at a certain point: He through the front door and Perry through the back door. In the grueling confrontation, this mistake becomes clear, because the writer was always privileged and sublime. Capote seems to increasingly break under this insight into his own double standard. In prison, but also after the announcement of the death sentence, which he might have been able to prevent, Hoffman’s play clearly shows this

Fig. 4.6   Capote (DVD Screenshot)—Emotionalizing close-ups of the perpetrator

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growing despair in Capote’s facial expressions (Fig. 4.7). The film conveys this in long close-ups of the face, through which the emotional movements are brought as close to us as those of the protagonist. The film leaves Hoffman isolated in such moments, usually in a close-up. The appellative character of such settings is similar to the look into the camera, as it occurs with Stanley Kubrick or Michael Haneke. Capote suffers from his own vampiric mania, wanting to elevate the perpetrator to the protagonist of a possible bestseller, which ultimately extinguishes him. And in this despair, an appeal to the audience is reflected, to become aware of the exploitative basis of this work process. As a conclusion, the following insights can be drawn from the seduction-theoretical analysis: The film Capote questions established gender roles, especially the heteronormative male image established in Hollywood cinema, using the example of the reception of Capote’s appearance and his human relationships by the characters Harper Lee, the sheriff, Smith, and Capote’s audience in the film. Here, the film touches on taboos, because openly lived homosexuality hardly meets with approval, especially in rural America. Whether Perry suspects that he is desired by Capote, the film leaves open. In the analyzed moments, a complex gaze dramaturgy reveals how Capote exposes the presented ‘male bonding’ as a fragile exchange system in which knowledge and desire become commodities—especially in the relationship between Capote and Perry Smith. As an audience, we are actively maneuvered into an ethical decision-making position, without ultimately being able to influ-

Fig. 4.7   Capote (DVD Screenshot)—The inner turmoil of the writer becomes clear in the close-up

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ence the course of the film. Instead, we experience the ambivalence between friendly understanding, homoerotic desire, and purposeful betrayal projected onto us. Capote is, in the sense of seduction theory, a seduced seducer who confronts us as an audience with our own ambivalence—his and ours. His betrayal is also a betrayal of himself, as it marks the self-deception that Capote has always lived: As an author who is played with, as he plays with the perpetrator (Fig. 4.8). Moreover, Capote as the engine of the staging offers a subtle insight into the creative process and thus makes us accomplices in the misuse of knowledge, exploitation, lies, and betrayal—the film thus offers an experience of ambivalence by seducing us to share and accept Capote’s approach in order to finally gain knowledge of the final murder night. Like the protagonist Capote, we as viewers are forced to question the role of the messenger during the execution. This situation leaves the writer visibly depressed. On the third level of seduction, the established dichotomies are deconstructed, gender roles are questioned, and a seduction is established to question the capitalist market system with its exchange logic by means of the non-reciprocal death sacrifice in favor of the ‘truth’. The film ends with an existential, ethically based question: What remains of the search for truth, which was essentially the search for a final chapter of a book? While the main part of the film aims to win over the divided protagonist and his problems, the last quarter of the film focuses on the experience of ambivalence argued in the seduction-theoretical analysis, which culminates in the ethical challenge of the audience. Does art/literature stand above friendship or life? Could Capote have possibly exonerated Perry with a different strategy? The film

Fig. 4.8   Capote (DVD Screenshot)—The face as the countenance of depression

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Capote seduces the audience into identifying with a deeply divided protagonist, only to leave it in the end with grueling insights and tormenting questions. This is the final experience of ambivalence.

4.4 Ethical Challenge in Interpersonal Dynamics To confront the audience with a seductive ethical challenge, a spectacular theme like the problem of the death penalty is not necessarily required. In 2019, Noah Baumbach’s much-discussed marital drama A Marriage Story with Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson launched on the streaming platform Netflix, a film that centers on the failure of a marriage and the dirty divorce process. In this case, a closer look at the flow of the narration is worthwhile, as Noah Baumbach apparently strongly relies on the content comprehensibility of the psychological character development. In alternating perspectives, we get to know New York theater director Charlie Barber (Driver) and actress Nicole Barber (Johansson). It starts with Charlie’s view of his wife: “everything I love about her.” Only after an amusing collage does it become clear that this enumeration was prompted by a couple therapist who ultimately supports a constructive separation of the two. He invokes the positive aspects of the relationship. Nicole, on the other hand, not only refuses to listen, she also conceals her own list—a view that is only made up for at the end of the film when the separation has already been completed. It quickly becomes clear that the film establishes Charlie as the victim of the process, where our sympathies lie. But this clarity is deceptive and is repeatedly overturned by the film (Fig. 4.9). Nicole is offered a leading role in a television pilot in Los Angeles. She decides to leave the theater group and temporarily live with her mother in West Hollywood, taking the couple’s young son, Henry (Azhy Robertson), with her. Charlie decides to stay in New York for the time being, as the play is currently enjoying success on Broadway. Although the couple agrees to separate amicably and forego lawyers, Nicole hires the shrewd family lawyer Nora Fanshaw (Laura Dern). Nicole tells Nora the whole story of her relationship with Charlie, how she felt more and more neglected by him and how he rejected her ideas and wishes. Nicole also suspects that he slept with the stage manager—which she is right about, as we find out later. Charlie flies to Los Angeles to visit his family and announces that he has received a MacArthur Fellowship, but Nicole serves him with divorce papers. She forces him to find a lawyer himself, with Charlie noticing that Nora has met with numerous candidates in advance, severely limiting his

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Fig. 4.9   A Marriage Story (Netflix, Screenshot)—Marital ambivalence in the iconic bed scene

options. Here, Nora’s destructive influence becomes apparent for the first time. He meets with Jay Marotta (Ray Liotta), a brazen and expensive lawyer who immediately urges Charlie to fight dirty, but Charlie returns to New York without hiring him. He receives a call from Nora, who urges him to find a lawyer soon or risk losing custody of Henry, who is already living in Los Angeles. Charlie returns to Los Angeles and hires Bert Spitz (Alan Alda), an empathetic retired family lawyer who seeks a conciliatory settlement. On Bert’s advice, Charlie rents an apartment in Los Angeles to be closer to his family and strengthen his custody case. Charlie wants to avoid going to court, so Bert arranges a meeting with Nora and Nicole. This meeting is a key scene in the film and is visually staged in a unique way: We see the two protagonists each strongly framed from over the shoulder of their legal representation, thus symbolically confined, as the legal language represents a system of communication that seems inappropriate for a couple’s relationship. When food is ordered, Charlie is so upset that he can’t decide, so Nicole chooses for him. She disempowers him within a humiliating scenario. Nora argues that Charlie has refused to respect Nicole’s wish to return to Los Angeles, and that Henry would prefer to stay with his mother rather than fly back and forth between the coasts. Bert therefore privately advises Charlie to give up his New York residence entirely, but the frustrated Charlie refuses and fires him.

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Nicole and Nora have pushed him so far on the defensive that he would have to deny his own life on the East Coast. With the first payout of his MacArthur Fellowship, Charlie now hires Jay as his lawyer. The case is brought to court, where Nora and Jay argue aggressively on behalf of their clients, leading to a series of emotional injuries. Nora highlights Charlie’s infidelity and emotional distance, while Jay exaggerates Nicole’s drinking habits as alcoholism and accuses her of criminal actions because she hacked into Charlie’s emails to confirm suspicions of adultery. Meanwhile, Charlie and Nicole remain amicable outside of court and share time with Henry, who is increasingly frustrated with the back and forth. At this point, the film reaches a turning point that seems to clarify the emotional roller coaster to the audience in an unexpected way: Disillusioned by the legal proceedings, the couple decides to meet privately outside of the lawyers. However, an initially amicable discussion in Charlie’s apartment leads to an emotional and malicious argument. Nicole claims that Charlie is now completely dominated by his own selfishness, and Charlie reacts angrily: He impulsively punches a hole in the wall and wishes that Nicole would die. Then he breaks down in shame and apologizes; Nicole comforts him. A court-appointed evaluator now oversees a night with Charlie and Henry, during which Charlie accidentally cuts himself with a kitchen knife, but he manages to hide it with his last strength. Soon after, the couple agrees to loosen their demands and reach an equal settlement to finalize the divorce, with Nora negotiating better terms for Nicole against her will to triumph over Marotta. The proceedings are over here, but the film concludes with a coda: A year later, Charlie’s play is a big hit on Broadway, while Nicole has a new boyfriend and is nominated for an Emmy Award for directing an episode of her show. Charlie informs Nicole that he has taken a position at UCLA and will be living full-time in Los Angeles to be closer to Henry. Later, he discovers that Henry is reading Nicole’s list of things she likes about Charlie, which she initially kept secret. Henry asks Charlie to read it to him, and Charlie does so, tearing up as Nicole watches from the door. That evening, after Nicole has attended a Halloween party together, she offers to take Henry home, even though it’s technically her night. As Charlie walks to his car with a sleeping Henry, Nicole stops Charlie to tie his shoe for him. He thanks her and they part again, but this time obviously in affection and familiarity. Noah Baumbach’s direction may refer to Ingmar Bergman’s Scener ur ett äktenskap/Scenes from a Marriage (1973) and more generally to Woody Allen’s urban melancholy, but he is certainly in the tradition of American divorce melodramas like Kramer vs. Kramer (1979) by Robert Benton or Shoot the Moon

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(1982) by Alan Parker. And in accordance with the conventions of Hollywood melodrama, the film works intensively with the psychological backstories of its characters, with iconic star casting down to the supporting roles, and with a wall-to-wall soundtrack that is present in almost every scene and accentuates the intended effect. The mode of staging changes several times from tragic to romantic to situation-based comedy. This approach would probably be called tragicomic. On the first level of seduction, the film primarily functions as an author-typical variation of established melodrama genre patterns. Baumbach is not only known for his intimate relationship portraits and his empathetic humor, but has also previously dealt with the topic in films. In the discussion of the film, it was often emphasized that he wanted to process his own divorce from actress Jennifer Jason Leigh here, which may lend additional authenticity and credibility to the film. Although the film was able to place well at the Venice Film Festival, it was already clear that it would reach its audience via the popular streaming platform Netflix, where it can be seen as part of the subscription model. The main argument in the advertising was the cast: Adam Driver, Scarlett Johansson, and Laura Dern shine in A Marriage Story with intense and virtuoso performances, which especially in the scenes of intimate approach blur the boundaries between performance and represented reality. The two protagonists appear significantly less glamorous than one is at least used to from Johansson. The promise of the film was thus to offer a realistic separation drama. On the second level of seduction, A Marriage Story is clearly about the problematic dynamics of American divorce law, which essentially has no interest in a civil and peaceful settlement, but feeds an entire profession of lawyers. Here, Laura Dern is established as the seductress Nora (Fig. 4.10), who initially disguises her true goals with her friendly gesture towards Nicole, but gradually diverts her from her original plan of a ‘gentle separation’ by bringing more and more intimate details against Charlie. We thus become witnesses of a fatal seduction process on the plot level, which gradually brings ethical questions into play: Is Nicole still acting appropriately when she knowingly puts pressure on Charlie through custody and residence? And isn’t it ultimately about a competition between the lawyers Nora and Ray Marotta, who are fighting by proxy? Baumbach uses the two-hour running time of the film to play out these questions in exposed scenes in a model and concrete way, especially in the second half, so that we as an audience are forced to engage with the inner logic of this game. But what does A Marriage Story ultimately want from us? On the third level of seduction, a film that at first glance seems rather straightforward like A Marriage Story appears somewhat unwieldy. Isn’t it the described emotional roller

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Fig. 4.10   A Marriage Story (Netflix, Screenshot)—The lawyer as seductress

coaster that it plunges the audience into and the seductive game of the lawyer that makes its power? The worldwide astonishingly positive consensus that the film was able to achieve suggests that Baumbach’s film achieved exactly what it apparently aimed for. And yet there is a subtle subtext here that distracts from the exposed ethical challenge and pursues a parallel approach. Typical for the genre of melodrama, the film lures us into the emotion trap. We laugh and cry with the characters, whom we get to know and understand as characters. The framing of the film is essential: It begins and ends with the mutual confession of love: What I love about my partner. It is Nicole who does not want to expose herself in this way, so Charlie reads both versions to us. Nicole is triggered by Nora in her envy of Charlie’s success, recognizing him as the burden that seems to stand in the way of her own self-realization. The fact that this realization and her path to ruthless self-empowerment during the negotiations—which she herself questions at times—does not correlate with interpersonal emotions, the staging never tires of emphasizing. While Nicole sees herself as a marginalized artist, Charlie is repeatedly associated with images of disappearance and withering: for example, he notably wears the costume of the Invisible and a ghost under the sheet for Halloween, while Nicole appears as David Bowie and a Beatle. Charlie wants Henry to accompany him as Frankenstein’s monster, which may prove his view of their common child as a monstrous creation. Also, the scene in which Charlie

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injures himself with the knife but has to hide it, shows his brutal marginalization. Here, the child also acts completely indifferent. However, Baumbach seems to focus on other moments: when in the phase of the divorce both hand over the child and Charlie helps Nicole to close the broken driveway gate, this is shown as a revival of an emotional approach: As if they were freshly in love, they enjoy every moment until the gate is closed and separates them again (Fig. 4.11). Even the tender gesture with which Nicole ties Charlie’s shoes at the end is meant to show: Despite all the adversities, the true emotions of the original love cannot be completely blurred. The divorce process may have brought out the worst in originally sincere and well-meaning people, but in the end, the foundation remains. Baumbach’s staging is determined by a romantic belief in the constancy of feelings as a basis for the idealized nuclear family, despite all ambivalence. However, a bitter feeling remains: Isn’t Nicole, in her moment of self-empowerment, the real threat to Charlie, who clings to these very values? Isn’t she the one who willingly gives up the family to put herself at the center? Doesn’t she use Charlie’s undisputed affair as a justification, not only to hack his phone, but also to use this knowledge in a custody battle against him? Nicole is a seduced woman, attracted by Nora’s proto-feminist power from their first encounter, she allows herself to be corrupted in a game that knows no ethical boundaries, while Charlie remains largely passive and emotionally naive. The real ambiva-

Fig. 4.11   A Marriage Story (Netflix, Screenshot)—The garage door as a medium of ambivalent emotions

References

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lence of the film, therefore, lies not in the discrepancy between a relationship and a destructive legal system, but in the poisonous process of seduction and manipulation that Nicole willingly submits to, even though Baumbach repeatedly suggests that the emotional basis is fundamentally uncorruptible. With this conflict, the film leaves us alone and leaves behind a form of ethical dilemma and emotional disorientation that he may have intended—or not—but which makes the film an intense experience. Ultimately, the film asks what the language of a relationship is: The contexts change the gestures, the words and terms of the once lovers and leave them alone. Capote and A Marriage Story are film examples that prove particularly interesting for a seduction-theoretical analysis, because their ethical challenges reveal themselves far beyond the obvious theme in the details of the staging and this approach can help to explore and verbalize the ethical dilemma that the films leave behind. And especially A Marriage Story was much discussed, as its wide availability via the Netflix portal and especially its content proximity to the everyday life of the Western audience effectively conveyed the questions and problems addressed.

References Kracauer, Siegfried. 1985. Theorie des Kinos [1960]. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp. Marcus, Stiglegger Oliver, Dimbath Carsten, Heinze (2021) Methoden der Filmsoziologie Exemplarische Analysen am Beispiel des Films CAPOTE (2005) Verführerische Projektionen des Realen Das Biopic CAPOTE in seduktionstheoretischer Perspektive Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden Wiesbaden 209–224. Peeters, Elvis. 2014. Der Sommer, in dem wir die Röcke hoben und die Welt gegen die Wand fuhr. Berlin: Blumenbar.

5

Seduction and Genre

5.1 Genre Bending Clearly definable genres are considered a phenomenon of functioning film studio systems (see Altman 2000; Stiglegger 2020). Initially, the differentiation of film genres played a role in the early phase of the Hollywood studio system: films were made according to certain patterns, with certain stars and at the same locations. This approach satisfied the growing demand of the silent film audience and optimized the shooting process from an economic point of view. In this sense, the early genres partly arose out of logistical necessity, not only in the USA, but worldwide and especially in the cinema of the Weimar era (Hickethier in Felix (ed.) 2002, p. 63 ff.; Grant 2003, p. XV–XVI). Genre films are “ready-made cinema,” as Rudolf Arnheim writes (Arnheim 1975, p. 327): films that the audience desires, that are meant to seduce and satisfy them; films that use proven patterns and reproduce them with slight variations. In this logic, genre films help the audience to escape from a dreary reality into the dream sphere of the screen. In the USA, where a conventionalized studio system was established early on, primary genres were established around 1930—and thus the introduction of sound film—which accounted for social developments (gangster film), brought horror fantasy into cinema (Universal horror films) and made the most of the use of synchronous sound (musicals, revue films). Westerns and comedies were also firmly established. In Germany, home-oriented mountain films were made instead of Westerns, creating a distinct genre that retrospectively falls between adventure film, melodrama and home film—it can therefore be considered an early hybrid phenomenon. In those years around 1930, film journalists like Siegfried Kracauer or Rudolf Arnheim already made first attempts to reflect on this ready-made film

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2024 M. Stiglegger, Film as a Medium of Seduction, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-43818-0_5

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production, and ultimately they also sowed a long-held reservation against genre cinema: namely to be unoriginal and trivial. For a long time, the singular, genre-independent author film was considered the counter model and ‘king’s discipline’ of filmmaking. Only the authors of the Cahiers du cinéma discovered the American genre-auteur and confirmed the virtuosity of the so-called ‘professionals’, who in the best case became the ‘Maverick Director’, using the genre context to implement his personal signature and his vision du monde (from John Ford to Orson Welles to Alfred Hitchcock) (Stiglegger 2000, p. 11 ff.). With the growing genre awareness of the audience and the end of the studio system, one can speak of the end of the classic genres. Already in the 1970s, not only hybrid genre phenomena emerged, but filmmakers began emphatically to vary genre patterns in the sense of their signature. The era of the genre-benders begins (Stiglegger in: Flintrop, Jung and Nemitz (eds.) 2014, p. 22–24). GenreBending is a term quite common in literary studies, which describes the transfer of well-known genre patterns and elements into a new setting (Singer and Walker 2013). It is therefore about the creative and subversive variation of the aesthetic form under different conditions, including strategies such as hybridization and targeted convention breaks. The reliability of the representation and perception modes of classic cinema was comparably given up in favor of an unpredictable hybridity. Genre categories still functioned as orientation for the audience, but one could hardly speak of analytical usability anymore, as most popular examples no longer met those classic definitions: the classic adventure film presented itself at the latest with Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) by Steven Spielberg rather as a fantasy film, while the post-apocalyptic science fiction film showed traits of the Indian Western with its iconography of war paint, Mohawk hairstyles, archaic weapons and the desert landscape (Mad Max II—The Road Warrior, 1982, by George Miller) (Fig. 5.1). The following chapter will examine two current film examples to see how two ambitious author filmmakers—Jonathan Glazer from England and Tom Ford from the USA—make use of generic conventions, play with them and bring forth a very own vision of cinema in genre-bending: a subversive, disturbing cinema, far beyond the reliable models of genres such as science fiction, melodrama or thriller (Stiglegger 2019, p. 157–176).

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Fig. 5.1   Mad Max 2—The Road Warrior (Warner Bros., DVD Screenshot)—Hybrid between Science Fiction and Western

5.2 Ciphers of the Other and the Alien Generically speaking, Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin (2015) can be considered an experimental horror film with science fiction elements, as it ‘tells’ of a beautiful young woman drifting through the Scottish landscape to lure different men into the basement of a mysterious house. It has similarities to a vampire film. It soon becomes clear that this woman, portrayed by Scarlett Johansson, may be of extraterrestrial origin and consumes her victims in a certain way as food. This circumstance could be interpreted as a science fiction motif, for example in the tradition of the Species series (1995–2007). However, this external action is ultimately only the basic situation around which the consistently performative and decidedly non-psychological staging revolves. From the first puzzling images, it becomes clear that Glazer has something other than exciting genre entertainment in mind. Performative in the case of Under the Skin means that the eventfulness of the images and sounds becomes more important than the narratable narration. What happens provokes a psychophysiological (self)reflection of the recipient—selfobservation in relation to what is happening on the screen. The film literally wants to ‘get under the skin’. This staging is non-psychological in relation to character design, because not only do we receive far too little information about the actors to be able to infer their history or motivation, but the protagonist also completely eludes human psychologization, as she is simply not human. On this level, the film is ‘trans-human’. When the stranger actually begins to understand

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or assimilate human feeling, she immediately encounters an inhuman human who attacks her, also sexually, and finally burns her when he recognizes the alien in her (Fig. 5.2). Glazer shifts the psychology of the staging entirely into the images: the barren landscapes with which the stranger sometimes seems to merge, the gloomy weather, the cold ambient music sounds, the often puzzling objects and closeups, often only conveyed in fragments in the mirror. This begins with the circle of light at the beginning against an alien sound backdrop. We hear a voice practicing vowels. On the visual level, the exposition culminates in the detailed shot of a human iris against a white background: We witness the creation of a human simulation, including the learning of human language (Fig. 5.3). Under the Skin describes a process of humanization of a non-human being— and as an audience, we are forced to participate in this sometimes alien and painful process. One of the most disturbing and most quoted sequences of the film is the beach scene, in which the full extent of the protagonist’s non-humanity is expressed. Like the entire film before, this scene is also staged in an irritatingly indifferent way, works with a fragmentary internal dramaturgy, and focuses on unusual details. In this scene, it becomes clear that the protagonist is essentially a predator, viewing humans only from the cold perspective of the huntress.

Fig. 5.2   Under the Skin (Senator DVD, Screenshot)—Scarlett Johansson as the stranger in the mirror

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Fig. 5.3   Under the Skin—Close-Up of the Iris (Senator DVD, Screenshot)

5.3 Disturbance as a Strategy The beach sequence begins with a medium shot of the turbulent sea surf, into which a dog swims. A long shot then shows us a three-person family, the woman standing below watching the dog, while the man sits higher with a toddler in his arms on the slope. The warm clothing suggests a harsh climate. The woman shouts something after the dog. In the counter shot, we see the huntress, who just turns her gaze away. She is not interested in the family, as they do not fit into her prey scheme. As before, she is looking for single young men. Scarlett Johansson embodies this role as an attractive, but average Englishwoman in her mid-twenties: somewhat windblown dark curls, high-contrast makeup with a dark red lipstick, somewhat cheap-looking stonewashed jeans, and a faux fur jacket that strongly reminds of a wolf’s fur in its coloring (Fig. 5.4). She consciously chooses the jacket beforehand—it clearly signifies her identity as a huntress and predator. A slow pan to the sea shows what she is really interested in: In the long shot, we see a young man in a thermal suit emerging from the surf and walking towards her. A variation of this setting shows that the huntress is standing next to a towel that he is heading towards. The sky is cloudy, the sea leaden, and the grass pale green. Yet the whole scenario with the steep cliffs and the rear view of the young woman seems like a postmodern reflection on Caspar David Friedrich’s

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Fig. 5.4   Under the Skin (Senator DVD, Screenshot)—Huntress and Prey

dark romantic coastal images. Only the sound of the sea can be heard as the man addresses the young woman. She asks for a place to surf—but he is just a traveler from the Czech Republic, seeking the peace of solitude, he says. Unknowingly, he proves to be the perfect prey. As before, the stranger’s appearance is confident and direct. She asks clear questions that get him talking without revealing anything about herself. She smiles at him, tilts her head towards him, and establishes a basis of trust in a few seconds, which also suggests erotic interest. The man is as confused as he is drawn into the seductive game. However, this attention ends when he sees that the woman of the small family has plunged into the waves to save her aborting dog. The family father also runs screaming into the sea to save his wife, while the swimmer from the hill also runs to the couple. With this action, a subtle drone sound begins on the soundtrack, which has been associated with the threatening presence of the stranger from the beginning of the film. As if we were inside the huntress. From her perspective, we see the swimmer rushing to help in a series of long shots and medium shots. The wide shot sizes not only refer to the subjective view of the huntress, but impressively demonstrate how dangerous the situation is for the people here. In a cut, we see Scarlett Johansson half close from the side. She looks indifferently at the events. The color of her fur jacket makes her blend in with the background like a predator lurking in the thicket. In a medium shot, the swimmer pulls the father out of the waves, who however immediately falls back

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into the sea and wants to save his wife. The swimmer remains lying exhausted. In a long shot, the huntress approaches: overexposed by the sun, she walks purposefully through the surf, regardless of the wild surf that soaks her. This renewed sensual indifference makes her appear eerie: she deviates slightly from the expected human behavior, but in a hard-to-define way—it could still be that she is acting out of a desire to help, even if the preceding events suggest otherwise. On the other hand, the staging up to this point aimed to bring us closer to the alien subjective, so that we experience the events here anyway from the perspective of the huntress. What happens now is therefore absolutely logical in the logic of the staging—and yet remains disturbing, as we have been taught an anthropocentric and possibly humanistic view (Fig. 5.5). The huntress moves purposefully towards her prey, the incoming waves in the telescopic shot additionally dynamize the image space. When she arrives at the swimmer lying exhausted in the spray, she briefly looks around—the control glance before killing the prey. Then she calmly looks for a suitable stone. The backward manipulated string sounds on the soundtrack keep us entirely in the non-human subjective. With efficient pragmatism, she hits the man in the neck with the stone, whereupon he remains motionless. The medium-long distance from which we witness this event creates alienation. Sympathy for the victim can hardly arise, his body soon disappears in the white spray. The huntress turns the man and then begins a laborious process of dragging the limp body up the

Fig. 5.5   Under the Skin—The death of the swimmer. (Senator DVD, Screenshot)

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slope. A brief handheld camera shot also suggests identification with the huntress, whose effort is evident. In another disturbing medium shot, we see the abandoned toddler screaming in the background. But neither the huntress nor the staging pay attention to this ‘unfinished’ being. Her mission is accomplished as soon as she has loaded the body. It is precisely this intentional shift in the identification structure that makes this film appear so provocative and strong: Glazer consistently stays on the side of the stranger, letting us experience earthly events from her emotional indifference. The film literally seduces to a ‘trans-human’ perspective, which contradicts the anthropocentric dictum of film conventions, where the human and his feelings are at the center of interest.

5.4 Seduction Theory Genre Analysis Reflecting on the three levels of seduction theory, it must be noted that it was relatively early on that journalistic attention was generated for this rather unwieldy film. On the first level of seduction, it became important that a world star (Scarlett Johansson) would be seen naked—a promise that the film undoubtedly fulfills, albeit differently than one might expect. In the film, the protagonist’s nudity is only partially erotically connoted. Moreover, it was the adaptation of a novel by Michael Faber, which was not really a bestseller. The author also resisted an adaptation, which deviated far from the satirical-seeming novel concept. Then there is Jonathan Glazer, who enjoys a reputation as an innovative director of music videos (Massive Attack, Radiohead, among others) and feature films (Sexy Beast, 2000, Birth, 2004) in England. What helped the film most, however, was the lively discussion in cinephile social media networks. Among other things, the Facebook group “Under the Skin in German cinema now” with just over 1000 followers, ensured that the film actually received a small cinema release in Germany. On the second level of seduction, the perception of Under the Skin as a variant of genre cinema is interesting: From the external action, it would have to be classified as science fiction—as a story of a hostilely motivated alien invasion. From this perspective, the irritating sequences (the liquid, the impossible spaces) become acceptable. As with many invasion films (especially the Body Snatchers variant), the staging often crosses the line into horror—especially in the bodyrelated scenes at the end, when the black non-human body breaks through. However, since the film deals very minimally with dialogues and consistently chooses a ‘foreign’ perspective, it is not exhaustive or satisfying on the second level of

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seduction—too many questions are asked and remain unanswered. The point is precisely to directly target a hermetic level that literally demands a seduction-theoretical decryption. The film’s latent foreignness and open narrative style is the key here: The film demands from the audience to open up to this foreignness and temporarily give up their own perspective in order to view the world anew. This connects the film with the last quarter of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001—A Space Odyssey (1968)—from the flight through the star gate (represented here by the creation of the human eye at the beginning) over the human zoo to the birth of the star child. However, Under the Skin is an antithesis here, as it reverses the perspective: at the end stands the clearing and destruction of the non-human being. In its radical subjectification, Glazer forces us to experience the human world from the perspective of the ‘foreign’, to overcome the human view: ‘Trans-human’ is the film’s ambition to show the world from a literally foreign perspective, whereby the filmic form also appears unconventional, because the film’s closedness, which suggests the framing of arrival and ‘farewell’ of the foreign, only works at first glance and by no means in the sense of a genre narrative. Here, the film is also a hybrid between open and closed form, oscillating between human and alien, between horror, science fiction and bizarre eroticism. Under the Skin is an extension of perception by focusing on the strange and supposedly incidental—by producing “time-images” (Deleuze 1991) in irritating length and equally disturbing ellipses. Much remains in the dark here: Who are the motorcyclists? What happens to the men in the liquid (Fig. 5.6)? Where are the ‘open spaces’ that can be entered through decaying buildings? Under the Skin expands the perception of the world and philosophizes with images and sounds: about modes of perception, about the variance of the “sensation” (Deleuze 1995). Under the Skin is finally a “Cinematic Body” (Shaviro 1993) of performative power; a film demanding constant attention as an event; a nomadically meandering film that must remain foreign to itself and us, as if it had been accidentally cast into our world. Director Jonathan Glazer turns the genre rules of science fiction and horror upside down in Under the Skin by making the ‘monster’, the ‘alien’, the center and carrier of perspective. Identification is made difficult, however, as the foreign does not allow for a psychological-empathetic approach. We are helplessly at the mercy of the inner logic of the alien perspective. Glazer combines horror and science fiction (similar to Alien or Species before), removes the psychological dimension from this hybrid, shifts his attention to the performative dimension and twists the result in itself: Genre-Bending becomes almost visually comprehensible here.

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Fig. 5.6   Under the Skin (Senator, DVD Screenshot)—Dissolution in black liquid

5.5 Ambiguity, Convention and Irritation Let’s move on to a second example of genre distortions as a seductive strategy: Tom Ford’s Nocturnal Animals (2015) is the fashion designer’s second feature film after A Single Man (2009) and impressively demonstrates his confident handling of cinematic forms of expression. While his first film still functioned as a male melodrama, Ford now mixes elements of melodrama with the rape-revenge subgenre of thrillers. In its metamedial brokenness, the film can even be considered a critical-deconstructive reflection on this phenomenon, which has become highly topical again in recent years and reached a commercial peak with the I Spit on your Grave trilogy (2010–2015). Nocturnal Animals tells the story of a disappointed and abandoned man, Edward Sheffield (Jake Gyllenhaal), who sends his former wife (Amy Adams) a novel in which he metaphorically processes his experience of loss—in the form of a rape-revenge story, as it is firmly established in Hollywood. Ford establishes three levels of reality: a.) the everyday life of gallery owner Susan Morrow, who is cheated on by her husband and begins to read the novel sent to her at night and to imagine its plot; these parts are mainly staged in a cold color scheme and often feature symmetrical image compositions (Fig. 5.7);

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Fig. 5.7   Nocturnal Animals (Universal DVD, Screenshot)—Susan’s blue world

Fig. 5.8   Nocturnal Animals—the imagined world of the desert (Universal DVD, Screenshot)

b.) we see the plot of the novel as Susan’s thought images, where she imagines the protagonist in the form of her ex-husband, while the female characters at least resemble her and her daughter; this part is staged in the dimly warm colors of backwood thrillers like The Hills Have Eyes (2006) by Alexandre Aja or Leatherface (2017) by Julien Maury and Alexandre Bustillo (Fig. 5.8); and c.) we experience Edward and Susan’s past experiences as largely naturalistically staged flashbacks. In addition, there is the title sequence, much discussed

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in international film reviews, in which several overweight women dance in slow motion on a stage, naked or in bizarre costume elements—this sequence is later identifiable as a collage of video installations in Susan’s gallery in Los Angeles, where these film clips are projected while the women’s bodies are placed as lifesized sculptures in the room. The radical aesthetic of Ford thus challenges the California media world, which is fixated on external perfection, and confronts us as an audience with essential questions: How far does our acceptance of non-normative bodies go? Can we bear their aestheticization through light, slow motion, and music in a similar way as it would be established for normative body images? Ford’s concept here is radical—even in its apparent normativity, as he not only describes a privileged, predominantly white milieu that highly designs and manipulates itself and its living space, but also shows how the imagination itself (the film within the film) is aesthetically shaped by the rules of Hollywood cinema. The film can therefore be considered, among other things, as a metamedial reflection of genre cinema, whose rules Ford has obviously studied intensively. From a seduction theory perspective, Nocturnal Animals is particularly interesting due to its double-edged multiple coding, as it carefully works on masking its seductive strategies, which thus become all the more effective. On the first level, the film has been positioned as an event of American quality cinema: Implemented with a solid medium budget and popular character actors (Amy Adams, Jake Gyllenhaal, Michael Shannon, Isla Fisher), the film was able to be promoted primarily on the reputation of the fashion designer Ford, who was considered an unexpected directing hope after A Single Man. In the advertising, it appeared both as a sophisticated melodrama and as a stirring thriller. Both are accurate—and yet miss the point. On the second level, the film formulates in different ways the drama of a man who apparently has never coped with the loss of his first wife (and the child they had together, which she had aborted) and takes symbolic revenge on her: By dedicating a violent novel to her, which refers to the addressee in the title; and by actually leaving her waiting in vain in the restaurant at the end of the film. We consistently experience this transfer of the trauma of loss to the increasingly unsettled protagonist from her perspective. In this respect, the aesthetic and gender-related concepts often set traps, as they are subjectively imagined or remembered. Only the present level in L.A., which appears most distant, is given a kind of cinematic ‘objectivity’. This is also where the reflection of the commercial art scene in L.A. is located, whose efforts for conspicuousness and transgression the film already addresses at the beginning, but which increasingly fails as a key.

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Ford knows the scene, no doubt, but it is not the aim of the film to deconstruct this easy target. But what does the film actually tell? The hidden third level of seduction in Nocturnal Animals deals with a profound discomfort in post-capitalist culture and society. Through this consistently pursued subtext, the film unfolds an unsettling uncertainty from the beginning: it withdraws narrative reliability through the subjectivization and fragmentation of the narrative levels, prevents a clear basis for identification, because the character conceptions are imagined and (re)constructed. In this way, Nocturnal Animals is indeed a thriller, but not according to the mentioned and exhibited rape-revenge pattern, but a psychological thriller about the loss of self in a society without clear relations. Emotional insecurity, fears of loss, futile desires for domination, and not least the longing for an emotional and gender identity resonate permanently in the exposed experimental arrangement. The film manipulates us through mechanisms of uncertainty and thus seduces us into a confrontation with our own limits, weaknesses, and desires. It is precisely this work on the self, coupled with the withdrawal of the reliability taught in Hollywood cinema, that evokes a latent discomfort, because we know: The certainties of a closed (genre) dramaturgy are not to be expected here. At the center of the film is a sequence (from approx. min. 40) that may illustrate this seductive strategy of intentional uncertainty. It takes place on the inner level b.) and begins with an exterior shot: Detective Andes (Shannon), who is dealing with the case of the abducted wife and daughter of Tony Hastings (Gyllenhaal), stands in a widescreen medium shot in front of the Budget Motel where Hastings spent the night. The color palette even has a hint of orange in the blue of the cloudless sky. The atmosphere seems hot and dusty. Andes wears a white cowboy hat and stands in a casual westerner pose behind the service car, smoking casually— although, as we learn later, he is terminally ill with cancer (Fig. 5.9). The remote motel involuntarily reminds us of that Bates Motel, which in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) had already recoded the anonymous refuge into a danger zone. Also in the desert thriller Twentynine Palms (2002) by Bruno Dumont, this bright desert atmosphere is overshadowed by the possibility of extreme violence—as we ultimately experience in all three examples. This is the daylight version of American Gothic Fiction, Ford leaves no doubt about that. Hastings enters the frame from the left. While Andes authentically mimics the westerner, the intellectual city dweller with his athletic body, the rustic full beard, and the checked lumberjack shirt represents exactly that form of urban hipster who seems to long for a lost ideal of male identity: the hands-on worker, that other archetype of the American myth. Hipster lumberjack and terminally ill sher-

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Fig. 5.9   Nocturnal Animals (Universal, DVD Screenshot)—Stylized Western Iconography

iff—this pair of men, only outwardly connected, is driven by a silent cop who could be of Indian or Mexican descent, thus presenting another archetype of the American myth. The policemen drive Hastings to the house where he was initially able to take refuge at night. In the car, Andes observes the visibly collapsed Hastings and questions him in a fittingly unpleasant way, because he touches on those aspects that a man like Hastings can hardly fulfill, no matter how much he optimizes his body and wardrobe: He could not protect his family, because he is not a man of violence. In his world, sports and media have replaced the real violence that seems to be the order of the day in the hinterland controlled by Andes. Hastings may look like a man of strength and action, but that is the mere facade of a doubting city dweller. It will be Andes who later reminds Hastings of the archaic duty of blood revenge when he suggests executing the perpetrators. The law is as weak as the entire urban culture, suggests that man of the law who has nothing more to lose. He thus invokes another American myth: the “regeneration through violence” (Slotkin 1973)—the ‘bad man’ with the gun is judged by the ‘good man’. Hastings believes himself to be beyond this philosophy until he faces the impact of real violence that he could not prevent. Vigilantism has a seductive logic, especially in American genre cinema. But we remember: We are in a double imagination—because Susan is reading Edward’s novel. The conversation in the car is partly filmed indirectly via the mirror, and otherwise as shot-reverse-shot, which contrasts even more the worn-out despair that marks Hastings’ sweaty face, and the stoic calm with which Andes conducts the interrogation. The men were not armed, they had called Hastings—why didn’t he

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go to them? Questions that only arise after everything is already over, but which clearly occupy Hastings. Was it mainly his own fear that he ran away from, not the actual threat from the men? You reach the house by the roadside, which appears poor and dilapidated, as if it were a relic of the borderlands. From there, they want to retrace Hastings’ path backwards. In the middle of this backward journey, Ford cuts to a brief black screen (his production company is aptly named Fade to Black). This radical stylistic device could bridge the time, but it seems oddly out of place in this form, as if the image had briefly failed—it corresponds to the failure of the original sound earlier, when the two women are kidnapped. Failures and unreliabilities, that’s what he’s about—Ford seems to emphasize. The lumberjack, the sheriff, and the Indian thus approach that border backwards, which Hastings had to cross. As they pass through the gate and walk towards the ‘old cattle station’ (essentially the ‘label’ of a Western cliché), a mournful string music begins. The film cuts from the brooding orange of the desert to the visibly nervous reader on level a.): Susan sits in her apartment with a pale blue sweater, fiddles with her pendant, and stares at the manuscript. This is followed by a cut to the mythical land: In a perfect and classic widescreen composition, we see the Texan prairie with some mountains in the background. The horizon line corresponds to the golden ratio, the cloud layers form a virtual echo to the landscape. This is the land of pioneers and buffalo herds, the land of genocide, slavery, and civil war, which constantly reinvented itself out of violence. To mournful chords, Hastings stands in disbelief in front of an uprooted tree, he is pushed to the far left of the picture. He stares. In the counter shot, Susan recoils in fright from the reading, reaches for her glasses. A medium shot shows us the morbid tableau that we see with Hastings through Susan’s imagination: Two embracing, pale female bodies, nakedly draped on a brightly red sofa, which was oddly misplaced in a niche lined with wooden rubbish. A flawless female body from behind, evenly and ending in a copper-red mop of hair dominates the picture (Fig. 5.10). The two men approach in closeups. While Andes turns the head of the woman lying in front, Hastings kneels in a close-up. We recognize that both women with their red hair look strikingly similar. In a medium close-up, the men frame the tableau of the beautiful corpses. Susan is seen again, recoils further and realizes that she is witnessing her own symbolic death. “Is she alright?” Hastings asks weakly. Susan puts her glasses on the book and reaches for her iPhone. She calls her daughter, as a similarly tableau-like medium shot reveals. In the dim light of morning, the young woman lies naked, with her back to us, in the arms of her lover. She too has copper-red

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Fig. 5.10   Nocturnal Animal (Universal, DVD Screenshot)—Death tableau

hair. She accuses her mother of having woken her up, but the mother dismisses it. You sound strange, says the daughter, but the agitated Susan soon hangs up. The death image returns, it seems to have settled and also leads back to Hastings. Cut and counter cut show them on the respective other sides in the visual ‘dialogue’— as Edward speaks to Susan through his novel. At this moment, the film cuts to level c.): Susan remembers an unexpected reunion with Edward in New York. It’s snowing and storming, yet the colors are now strong and natural. And again a tormenting question is asked: Whether Edward is not already a famous writer. Nocturnal Animals takes place in a world of masks and mirror images. The light seems artificial, it dramatizes the bodies, while the people in it live the dream of a post-capitalist illusion. In contrast stands the eternal Frontier-Country, the ‘Old West’, the Borderlands of Texas, which seem to persist in their founding violence. Tom Ford has made less of a genre film, but a radically self-reflective film about the USA: About the twilight of a dream of rich untouchability and the return of brutal violence. About the impossibility of overcoming class boundaries and the failure of trust in love. And about the insecurity of an urban, intellectual man who senses that his time has passed, that he no longer has answers to the looming clouds of the future. The perfection of physical beauty is a departing afterimage, a fragile testimony of the passing, similar to the falling white cherry blossom, which is considered the epitome of beauty in Japan—because beauty exists only in passing (as in the death tableau). All this is over when we become aware of it. For the ‘nocturnal animals’ from Nocturnal Animals there is no more “regeneration through violence”—in the end there is only blood, dust and the tears of suddenly felt loneliness. Tom Ford has made a film about our time that is

References

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as morbid as it is disturbingly beautiful. And you can enjoy it equally as a melodrama, thriller or metaphorical metafilm. These two exemplary analyses of hybrid genre films clearly show how genre mechanisms and conventions have become the artistic material of ambitious filmmakers. Both films prove to be multiply coded and function superficially and for the most part as genre films, but in both cases there are emphasized breaking points where the expectations of the genre audience must run into the void or be transferred to another level, which then allows a reflection on these mechanisms or deconstructs them. Thus, Under the Skin is quite conventionally exciting in some scenes, but these moments either develop in unexpected ways (beach scene) or they are interrupted at an irritating point, so that a resolution is omitted (the ‘submersion’ of the victims in the nutrient fluid). Nocturnal Animals on the other hand, is several films at once, where the internal narrative (and staging) of the abduction and revenge can certainly be seen as a rape-revenge thriller. However, Tom Ford also explicitly builds disruptions into the genre conventions by repeatedly changing the narrative levels in the analyzed scene and constantly reminding us that it is an imagination and the actual film revolves around a melancholic gallery owner who suffers from a failed relationship, for which these genre patterns become a metaphor. Both films therefore play with genre conventions and tire into performative distortions: As a viewer, I must be willing to follow this path and recognize the distortions and disturbances as the actual path. In this way, we experience here a subversion of genre conventions that opens up genre cinema anew and makes its mechanisms clear from a new perspective. This has little to do with the original idea of a ready-made audience cinema, and yet benefits from the growing genre awareness and the associated willingness to allow genre patterns in the ‘auteur film’, as well as to appreciate the disturbances (or distortions) of the genre structures as the actual appeal. It becomes clear that the seductive strategies of genre cinema cannot consist in the fulfillment of expectations, but strive for the unexpected twist, transformation or break. It is precisely the genre bending that keeps genre cinema as a seductive construct emphatically alive.

References Altman, Rick. 2000. Film/Genre. London: BFI—British Film Institute. Arnheim, Rudolf. 1975. Film als Kunst [1932]. München: Hanser. Deleuze, Gilles. 1991. Kino 2. Das Zeit-Bild [1985]. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp.

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Deleuze, Gilles. 1995. Francis Bacon. Logik der Sensation, Bde. 1 [Texte] & 2 [Bildband]. Übers. aus d. Frz. von Joseph Vogl. München: Fink Grant, Barry Keith, Ed. 2003. Film Genre reader 3. Austin: University of Texas Press. Hickethier, Knut. 2002. Genretheorie und Genreanalyse. In Moderne Film Theorie, Ed. Jürgen Felix, 62–96. Mainz: Bender. Shaviro, Steven. 1993. The Cinematic Body. Minneapolis/London: University of Minnesota Press. Singer, Margot, und Nicole Walker, Eds. 2013. Bending Genre. Essays on creative nonfiction. New York: Bloomsbury. Slotkin, Richard. 1973. Regeneration through violence. Myth of the American frontier. 1600–1860. Middletown [erneut: Norman: University of Oklahoma Press 2000]. Stiglegger, Marcus, Ed. 2000. Splitter im Gewebe. Filmemacher zwischen Autorenfilm und Mainstream. Mainz: Bender. Stiglegger, Marcus. 2014. Joe Dante—Genre-Bender. Eine Einführung in Dantes OEuvre. In Joe Dante: Spielplatz der Anarchie, Eds. Michael Flintrop, Stefan Jung, und Heiko Nemitz, 15–24. Berlin: Bertz + Fischer. Stiglegger, Marcus. 2019. Performative Distorsionen. Zur ästhetischen Subversion von Genredramaturgien. In Genre-Störungen. Irritation als ästhetische Erfahrung im Film, Eds. Hans-Peter Preußer und Sabine Schlickers, 157–176. Stiglegger, Marcus, Ed. 2020. Handbuch Filmgenre. Wiesbaden: Springer VS.

6

Seduction to Myth

6.1 Seduction to Mythical Thinking Robert Walter Joseph Campbell has become one of the most quoted myth researchers, not least because of a film influenced by him (Star Wars, 1977, George Lucas), when it comes to the influence of archaic stories and thought structures on international cinema. It is therefore hardly surprising that Campbell himself uses the medium of film to publish his central statements: In the TV series Mythos (3 seasons, 1999–2011) he comments on and illustrates his central theses, which summarize classical myth theories and sharpen his own perspective. In The Shaping of Our Mythic Tradition (1999) he comments on the psychological impulse to mythical thinking, how the myth unfolded in early hunter-gatherer cultures, how the life-giving goddesses developed into warlike gods, and how the Western imagination was primarily fed by non-biblical myth traditions. In The Shaping of the Eastern Tradition (2000) Campbell devotes himself to Asian mythology, which has often influenced Western thinking: in the idea of enlightenment, transcendence through meditation techniques, and finally in the spiritual journey as a path to death. And in the concluding cycle The Shaping of the Western Tradition (2011) Campbell comments on the Arthurian myth, the Grail quest, the romantic philosophy with its return to the myth, and modern mythology. All these thematic complexes prove to be inspiring or connectable with regard to the analysis of narrative films of American and European cinema. Campbell often described the significance of mythology as a complex function within human society Campbell 1965). Thus, the mystery of life cannot be directly put into words, but demands symbols and condensed narratives, which we call myths. Myths and symbols find use and expression in ritual, in which

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2024 M. Stiglegger, Film as a Medium of Seduction, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-43818-0_6

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Campbell sees a universal aspect of human history: The ritual stages a part of the myth and is thus in turn a performative part of the mythical narrative. If one sees feature films as modern mythology, it is close to assume that these are determined by ritual actions and symbols that can be recognized and traced back (Stiglegger 2006, p. 26–29). According to Campbell, the myth has a cosmological function: In proto-scientific form, it explains the form and function of the universe. It also has a sociological function: It justifies and affirms the existing social order. Here lies the often-cited conservative function of the myth, which, however, can be questioned in the monomyth, as the hero often opposes the existing order to progress. The hero thus becomes a figure of revolt. Associated with this is the pedagogical function of the myth: The mythical narrative has an initiating function and guides the individual through the stages of life. At a superficial level, it is the monomythological narrative that connects the archaic myth with the modern medium of film, suggesting that the other functions of the myth according to Campbell also play an important role here (Hill 1992). The following contribution examines the relationship between myth and film against the background of modernity and postmodernity using the example of the films of Nicolas Winding Refn (QRT 1999, p. 52–66). In academic consensus, myth and modernity have established themselves as seemingly irreconcilable opposites. Yet, the key work of enlightened modernity, Theodor W. Adorno’s and Max Horkheimer’s Dialektik der Aufklärung (1944), cannot do without the concept of myth. Not only does it draw its elementary examples from classical mythology (such as Homer’s Odyssey), but the turning point from enlightenment to barbarism cannot be separated from mythical thinking, in which individualistic, linear, rational thinking turns into collective, cyclical, and indeed mythical thinking. The authors themselves condense their theses: “Even the myth is enlightenment, and: enlightenment reverts to mythology.” (Horkheimer and Adorno 2000, p. 6) Myth and modernity are therefore at least in a dialectical relationship, if not modernity itself has become a myth of enlightened philosophy. It is already evident in early media theoretical writings that the media of modernity, and above all cinema, literature, and theater, quickly became the myth reservoir of modernity. According to a fundamental assumption derived from ethnology, a myth is understood as a narrative with sacred content that is orally, written, or otherwise transmitted. Mircea Eliade listed various elements contained in the myth in Das Heilige und das Profane (1954): 1. The myth ultimately tells a ‘true’ story; this could possibly mean a so elementary, undeniable ‘truth’ such as birth or death. 2. The mythical fable is sacred, i.e., its content is removed from

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the profane area. 3. The myth is always assigned to the time of origin or creation; this origin does not have to belong to an earlier time, but can denote any form of new beginning. Consequently, the lived myth is a time in which ‘all times fall into one’. 4. The myth contains the justification and basis of the rituals; therefore, the myth has morally binding normative power. 5. The protagonists of the mythical fable are ‘superhuman’ beings. The myth thus denotes the intrusion of the sacred into the everyday—or conversely: the moment of the everyday in the sacred. Myth and life are closely linked and are particularly suitable for a structuralist analysis in the context of regional and social peculiarities (as Claude Levi-Strauss demonstrated in Strukturale Anthropologie, 1958). At the same time, a ‘statement’ is formulated and condensed in the myth—this corresponds to Roland Barthes’ myth definition from Mythologies. The focus of the myth can be the creation of the world, of man, or of culture, it is always about elementary truths that are condensed and experienced in the myth, even if it is about ‘modern myths’ “of everyday life” (Barthes) that often revolve around cultural (self-) images. So if, with Eliade, the myth is understood as a ‘key situation of man and culture’, it is also understandable how and why it can be transported from one work to another. Last but not least, the well-known collections of myths—such as Sir James Frazer’s The Golden Bough (1890)—provide a significant source of inspiration for the artist. Films like Apocalypse Now (1979), Gladiator (2000) or Conan the Barbarian (1982) would hardly be conceivable without this template—especially with regard to the latent subtext of regicide. Another step in myth theory becomes important here: Ernst Cassirer and Claude Lévi-Strauss understand in Sprache und Mythos (1925) and Das wilde Denken (1962) the myth as a figure of thought, as a possibility to understand the world. This again brings into play the ‘omnipresence’ of the mythical event; mythical thinking is cyclically designed, works towards a repetition of the key event through ritual structures. The medium of film also adopts this cyclical form: in Western cinema, television and computer games—but even more so in Asian cinema (e.g., Japanese)—the same fables are deliberately varied and reproduced, as if to grant the sacred myth permanent presence. This goes so far that an expectation of the audience can be stated that the familiar but always new moving cyclically recurs. The medium of film specifically works either with classical myths or with mythological motifs (Orpheus, Oedipus, the fall of man, etc.) or creates its own myths and cults—often through charismatic protagonists like James Dean, Bruce Lee, Marilyn Monroe, or Romy Schneider. Especially those stars who die early or under mysterious circumstances are suitable for myth formation, as only their image, the cinematic phantom remains and can be worshipped like a fetish ritu-

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ally—for example in the repeated viewing of the films: This is how cult film phenomena can be explained. Film thus generates its own myth and offers its own ‘superhuman’ protagonists. It is already suitable as a carrier of myths because it can always be experienced in a relative present: By ritually re-watching the film (think here especially of the phenomenon of the cult film), it becomes a genuine, present experience for the audience. At the same time, the cinematic myth revolves around elementary and existential motives: birth, life, death, sexuality, violence, fear, joy, hate, happiness, etc. It proves to be rather counterproductive to value the mythical content of the film as a ‘regression’, as Hartmut Heuermann does in his book Medienkultur und Mythen (1994), or even to consider the myth in general as a fear or enemy image of thinking, as can occasionally be observed in left theory after Adorno and Habermas. Film, popular culture, and myth are closely intertwined in any case. In fact, it is rather the question of whether a cinematic artifact wants to incapacitate and manipulate the viewer or even works productively with the myth. Especially the manipulative American mainstream cinema often builds its greatest appeal on its mythical quality, even replacing ideology and historical consciousness with more generally accessible mythical models. Derived from its Latin origin, the word “modernus” refers to the new, modern or simply contemporary, in turn related to “modo”, which means “new”. In Europe, this term developed differently in the languages, but it only gained a firm outline in the late nineteenth century, where in German it denotes the contrast between ancient and new, and in French (“moderne”), where it already had a slightly pejorative connotation in the sense of fashionable and thus transient. This perspective changes when one pursues modernity as a stylistic term. Modernity stands here for a fundamental overcoming of tradition in the different areas of social, political and creative life. This can be traced back to the Enlightenment of the seventeenth century in the humanities, but economically it only begins in the eighteenth century with industrialization, politically not until the French Revolution at the end of the eighteenth century, and as a style of art not until the late nineteenth century. At this time, classical modernity begins, which programmatically turned away from the mimesis of realism and naturalism. Today, the feature film, which first appeared at the end of the nineteenth century, is considered a prototypical medium of modernity. However, a definition of modernity in film history proves to be not without problems. Of course, one could argue that the popular medium of film per se is a medium of modernity, and therefore always remains connected with it. On the other hand, it took some time—also due to technical developments—until film as an art reached the complexity of contemporary modern literature. Pioneers of cinematic modernity were

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both the Russian montage theorists and the epic feature films of David Wark Griffith, who already worked with a consciousness-creating interweaving of time and consciousness levels in the era of silent film. Thus, cinematic modernity begins around 1920. The delay with which film reached the status of modernity from its ‘naive’ phase also had an impact on the end of this epochal designation. Thus, even in the late 1960s, people still spoke of prototypical works of modernity when it came to the pop art films of Andy Warhol and Paul Morrissey, or Nicolas Roeg’s and Donald Cammel’s gangster pop drama Performance (1969) with Mick Jagger. Only in the 1980s was the postmodern film diagnosed (Felix 2002, p. 153 ff.), which Thomas Elsässer alternatively refers to as “post-classical cinema”—indirectly suggesting that the preceding cinema is the classical one. Thomas Elsaesser uses the term in contrast to the Classical Hollywood of the studio era between 1930 and 1960 (Elsaesser 2006). While some artists cling with passionate despair to the sacred project of modernity and want to bundle the elemental energies through body art, myth and transcendence invocation, elsewhere there is a strange melancholy: the awareness of living in a world of farewell to these former values, rather having to trust in an art that is popular, ironic and purely deconstructivist. From the perspective of this melancholy, one could speak of a state ‘after modernity’—a Post-Modernity. Whatever one may call the phenomenon, the films of Luc Besson, Jean-Jacques Beineix, Peter Greenaway, David Lynch, Oliver Stone or Quentin Tarantino are inextricably linked with modernity.

6.2 Invitation to the Apocalypse The end-time film Melancholia (2011) provides an impressive cinematic proof of Lars von Trier’s knack for positioning a film exactly between the personal eccentricity of European auteur cinema and the exalted melodrama of Hollywood cinema, thus generating worldwide attention (Stiglegger 2014, p. 26–42). Melancholia is seductive—a seduction to downfall, a seduction to empathy in emotional states in the face of an actually grueling realization: That man has always been alone in the universe, and that no help is to be expected when the earth finally merges with the comparatively gigantic planet Melancholia and leaves no life behind. As dark as this prospect may seem, as quietly as the film sometimes approaches this end underscored by Richard Wagner’s “Tristan-chord”, so lustfully it seems to invite the viewer to this event (Fig. 6.1). Lars von Trier is fully aware of the properties of the medium as an apparatus, which is expressed in his previous oeuvre, for example, in the use of hypnosis

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Fig. 6.1   Melancholia (DVD Screenshot)—mythical tableau

within the staging (Element of Crime [1984], Epidemic [1987], Europa [1991]). He interpreted the medium directly as an apparatus of hypnosis, a—if you will— radical form of appropriation, suggestion, manipulation—and thus: seduction or seduction. In this way, he works not against, but primarily with the audience’s consciousness. On the internal level of the films, he is mostly concerned with a confrontation with the ostracized Other, be it in empathy with a serial killer (Element of Crime), with the werewolf commandos of the Nazis after the Second World War (Europa) or the self-sacrificing in Breaking the Waves (1996). Already in the discussion of the predecessor film Antichrist (2009), von Trier willingly provided information about his problems with depression, and his therapy, part and conclusion of which were the shooting of Antichrist. Melancholia already conjures up in its ambiguous title the state of melancholy, the profound sadness or melancholy, which, however, must not be confused with the clinical picture of depression. Already in the title, the director lays traces here that allow a multitude of approaches. Let’s now look at the film Melancholia in the light of seduction theory. In the sense of the seduction-theoretical approach, the film can be viewed on the aforementioned three levels. On the first level of seduction (seduction of the film to itself) it has a lot to offer: As before, the news spread even before the film started that von Trier confronted his renowned actor ensemble (Kirsten Dunst, Charlotte Gainsbourgh, Kiefer Sutherland, John Hurt, Charlotte Rampling, etc.) unreservedly with psychological borderline situations (depression, adultery, catastrophe). Also, the naked bath in the moonlight of Hollywood star Dunst guaranteed international attention. Not only did the film promise—like von Trier’s previ-

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ous works—taboos and transgressions, but the director also created a publicityeffective scandal in the press conference at the Cannes Film Festival when he briefly disqualified himself from the festival honors with a Nazi comparison. This did not harm the film, as it offered spectacular tableaus in extreme slow motion, fascinating special effects and elegiac Richard Wagner pathos with the famous Tristan chord as a leitmotif. On the plot level, this gloomy end-time film undoubtedly functions as an example of a specific subgenre of the science fiction film, to which other renowned works can also be attributed: Von Trier referred in the audio commentary of the film, for example, explicitly to Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stanislaw Lem adaptation Solaris (1972). Melancholia succeeds on the first level of seduction as a star-studded, generic arthouse cinema, which could be advertised and placed with great effort—and within its possibilities as a demanding niche film recorded an astonishing commercial success (which also continued in the home media sector). On a second level, Melancholia seduces to a clearly formulated and identifiable statement, which is found in the diegesis of the film: in its staging, its dialogues. This level is clearly interpretable for the inclined and media-competent viewer, because hints and references are deliberately scattered by the staging. Thus, Melancholia in its first quarter offers clear criticism of a hypocritical society of the rich and privileged, whose masks fall off one by one during the wedding party, among other things through the cynicism of the mother, portrayed by Charlotte Rampling. This serves to expose a superficiality of the privileged upper class, whose wealth does not protect from downfall. The powerlessness of the rationalistic, science-believing husband (Kiefer Sutherland), who nevertheless hoards supplies and ultimately escapes through suicide, stands for this fact. Against this is the primal trust of the child, who seems to overcome his fear at the last moment of the film—when the catastrophe sets in—and puts himself in the hands of the ‘magic aunt steel breaker’ (Dunst), while his mother (Gainsbourgh) breaks out of the ritual circle and, like her husband, resigns in the face of the inevitable. Melancholia also gives another clue with its title, which seems easy to follow: Von Trier’s film is considered a cinematic portrait of a mental illness, depression, which takes possession of Kirsten Dunst’s character and drives her into absolute lack of drive and inability to live. This basic disposition undoubtedly gives the actress the chance for an intense portrayal. The title-giving melancholy (actually a stage of world pain) becomes a synonym for this clearly pathological depression. And yet these simple approaches to Melancholia are ultimately seductive traps, dead ends, onto which the interested viewer is lured, but which are never led to a conventional conclusion—rather, the disease in this film is the key to a seduction on a higher level.

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The third level of seduction is that of covert seduction, whose structures only become clear upon further consideration. On this level, the appeals of desire in the staging can also be worked out. The film gradually arouses interest in other topics than initially appear in the process of seduction. Layer by layer is penetrated and moves away from social criticism, from the portrait of depression— from the socio-psychological component in general—and ultimately opens the view to an idea that triggered a defensive reflex in numerous reviewers: Melancholia offers the challenge to mythical thinking, to overcoming rational reliabilities that have established themselves as a constant of the Western world. Melancholia seduces to accept the idea of the final downfall. Like the child in the film, we learn to trust the depressed young woman and in the end we enter the magical hut (an improvised scaffold construction made of branches), which basically only conveys one thing: the worldless devotion to the downfall. And so the seduction to mythical thinking, which a obviously cyclically constructed mythical film like Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979) partially fulfilled, in Melancholia is also a dead end, at least if one considers the medium as an anthropocentric one: To the tragic-pathetic sounds of Richard Wagner, the earth merges with the much larger planet Melancholia and begins a new existence as part of this new world—but without humans. In this respect, Melancholia actually seduces to an unexpected conclusion: Von Trier’s work is one of the most radical posthuman films imaginable, as it makes us say goodbye to humanity itself, to forget the world as we know it. Because Melancholia (the planet) owns the future …

6.3 Mythical Body Cinema One might also understand the work of the other Danish author Nicolas Winding Refn as thoroughly postmodern, but it also carries within it the eternal dialectic of myth and modernity, a modernity that has not overcome tradition and mythical thinking, but builds its essential substance on these phenomena. The turning of enlightenment into barbarism shows this in a fatal conditional relationship, torn between tradition and modernity, between myth and enlightenment (Stiglegger 2019, p. 91–106). As in the archaic myth, the mythical body is of enormous importance in Refn: The body of the mythical hero—between god and man—is both sacred and profane, wandering through both worlds—connected by the act of transgression. In the profane world, the body remains the domain of bodily experience, in the sacred world it is the medium of transgression up to the sacrificial ritual. The vul-

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nerable body of man also remains as the last authentic refuge when perception has already merged into a world of simulation. And so it is not surprising that modern media in their search for authenticity repeatedly hold on to this refuge: the eternal body. While music and visual arts can retreat into the world of abstraction, the scenic media remain primarily anthropocentric: At the center of these media is the human body in all its facets. And nowhere is man more with himself than in pleasure and pain. The human body in audiovisual media is not a per se authentic body, but rather the idealized simulation of such, firmly integrated into the staged game and the montage of the film material—a mythical body between the media, between sacred and profane (Naumann in Ritzer and Stiglegger 2012, p. 283–295). The construction of the mythical body can be exemplarily traced in the work of Winding Refn. After his successful start with the dynamically filmed, still rather social-realist gangster film Pusher (1998), which was followed by two sequels, Refn dedicated himself to his own roots: In Bleeder (1999) he illuminated the myth of film itself—from the perspective of those who cultivate it daily, the cinephiles. The film follows the friends Leo (Kim Bodnia) and Lenny (Mads Mikkelsen), who live in Nørrebro, a working-class district in Copenhagen. Leo lives in a rundown apartment with his girlfriend Louise. Lenny is a shy and quiet film fan who works with his mutual friend Kitjo (Zlatko Buric) in a chaotic video store that rents art films as well as a huge collection of pornographic films. Lenny lives in the myth of the medium, he appears as a mirror of the filmmaker himself, who sees himself as a ‘cinéast’ in the sense of the French Nouvelle vague, the ‘loving filmmaker’. When Leo finds out that his girlfriend Louise (Rikke Louise Andersson) is pregnant and wants to keep the baby, he becomes increasingly aggressive. After being attacked in a club, he gets a gun. During a joint movie night, Leo points a gun at Lenny and Kitjo. Leo berates Lenny for his lifestyle and expresses his contempt for his own life. Later, Leo is threatened by Louise’s brother Louis (Levino Jensen). Because of Leo’s fault, Louise loses the baby. Louis takes a cruel revenge by injecting HIV-infected blood into Leo’s body … The mythologically relevant aspect is primarily associated with the character Lenny, who appears here as an alter ego of the equally cinephilic director. Lenny lives in the video store as if in a sanctuary, a sacred abaton, which protects him from the influence of the profane outside world. Each video cassette contains its own world with its own narrative, which becomes a virtual world. And consequently, the most harmonious moments at the beginning are the film evenings of the three men. Only when reality violently breaks into this sacred sanctuary, the boundaries are crossed (Leo brings the weapon), this mythical space is damaged. It corresponds to the cyclical logic of the film that Leo will judge himself. Lenny

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appears against Leo as a pure and fragile figure, a high priest of the film myth. What he still lacks is the body, which increasingly comes into focus in Refn’s later films. Lenny lives the film myth almost to the point of fading out his body, as if he wanted to approach the phantom-like nature of the cinematic light show. Refn’s career in the following years was anything but straightforward, and the Danish newcomer soon departed from the raw, dynamic style of his early films. His homage to David Lynch, Fear X (2002), already featured calm, central perspective and highly stylized image compositions. Refn quickly became familiar with the stylistic devices of film, as he could effectively refer to the film historical traditions he appreciated. But he did this in that phase without the postmodern irony of Quentin Taran tino—in his place comes a pathetic hubris, which culminated in 2008 in a historically based person to whom he dedicated his own feature film: Bronson. Charles Bronson, who serves as the namesake here, was initially a successful action star of the 1960s and 1970s. The actor Bronson is a cinema myth, a personification of silent virility from The Magnificent Seven (1960, D: John Sturges), C’era una volta il west/Once Upon a Time in the West (1968, D: Sergio Leone) and Death Wish (1974, D: Michael Winner). In Walter Hill’s Depression-era drama Hard Times (1977), he played a stoic fistfighter with a wiry body. The virile body becomes the last tradable commodity, the ultimate refuge of the real in a world of crisis and poverty. The symbolic exchange of free fistfighting always reckons with the last pawn: death. In Refn’s film, Tom Hardy plays the fistfighter Charles Arthur Salvador, also known as Charlie Peterson. Peterson was sentenced to seven years in prison in 1974 for armed robbery of a post office in Little Sutton, a district of Ellesmere Port. The film begins with short scenes from his already criminally shaped childhood, characterized by a dry humor that is also reflected in the stylized images. Refn confrontationally introduces us to Peterson as the bizarrely costumed confrancier of a vaudeville show. The imaginary audience laughs and claps as he unfolds his hubris with a diabolical grin. The story of the film is not told linearly, but unfolds as a surreal narrative of connected vignettes, interrupted by those vaudeville interludes (Fig. 6.2). His manager suggested the pseudonym, the ‘nom de guerre’, Charlie Bronson to Peterson in 1989. Even though Peterson denied the connection to the cult star Charles Bronson, Hard Times remains an insightful connection: As for Bronson in Hill’s film, only Peterson’s bare body remains to leave a mark in the world—to literally transform himself into a work of art. In this sense, he is the first hero with a self-determined mission, a quest, in Refn’s work. Peterson carries the dialectic of myth and modernity as an existential struggle in and on himself. John Turturro,

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Fig. 6.2   Bronson (DVD Screenshot)—Vaudeville Irritations

on the other hand, in Fear X, who is looking for his missing wife, still appears externally controlled and irritatingly passive in his search. Peterson, however, becomes Bronson, and we are allowed to witness his transformation. Bronson is at the same time a renewed journey through film history, through films by Lindsay Anderson, Stanley Kubrick, and Milos Forman. Youthful crimes, isolation, and early imprisonment, internment in a psychiatric institution—Refn develops Bronson’s life and search as a journey through well-known stations of film history, but filtered through the primary colors of the Italian aestheticists: Mario Bava and Dario Argento. It becomes increasingly clear that Refn sees in prisoner Bronson a reflection of his own creative quest: an artist in search of a style, but reduced to his materia prima—the battered body. Bronson spends only short periods of his life in freedom, the cyclical imprisonment, however, seems to inspire him—besides devastating fights with the guards, against whom he rubs himself with Vaseline to become ‘ungraspable’, he begins to paint and write poetry. Under the name Charlie Bronson, numerous books by him have actually been published. But even in his own studio, the beast breaks through and Bronson takes his drawing teacher hostage. To self-chosen music, he paints himself black and crafts a still life from his bound hostage. Violence and art, myth and identity permeate each other in a cannibalistic process in the stagings of Nicolas Winding Refn. After Bronson, he was ready for the next step—beyond virility, the corpo-

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reality of the warrior-man—he found the god himself descended to earth: Born from the myth, he becomes human in the face of death. With Valhalla Rising, Refn penetrates the heart of the classic myth. In the Scottish Highlands, a mysterious, mute slave with one eye (Mads Mikkelsen) is held captive by a Norwegian chieftain from Sutherland and forced to fight to the death against other slaves in bare-knuckle prize fights. Only a small boy can approach him without danger and becomes his voice. In the world of Valhalla Rising, One-Eye represents the world of the Old Gods, which is increasingly being changed by the preachers of the “white Christ”. In the second half of the film, after he has violently rid himself of his pagan ‘owners’, he joins a group of crusaders who set sail for Jerusalem and eventually land in the ‘New World’. As exemplary as this plot structure sounds, it is also designed: One-Eye and the boy become the hero in a monomyth about the change of times, between the world of Germanic myths and the dawn of the Christian age. “We have many gods, they have only one,” claims one of the pagans, but that will not help him survive. In the apocalyptic visions of One-Eye, in which he sees his reflection, bathed in blood-red water, the film suggests that the protagonist himself might be a god: the one-eyed Odin, who steps onto the earth with the twilight of the gods (Ragnaroek) and sets a brutal final sign by bringing death to all crusaders in the ‘New World’. Valhalla Rising is deliberately a ‘one-eyed film’, driven by archaic rituals, bloodthirsty excesses, and significantly murmured proclamations (Fig. 6.3). It is told in 6 chapters: Wrath, Silent Warrior, Men of God, The Holy Land, Hell, The Sacrifice. In all these essentialist inserts, the cyclical logic of the classic myth narrative is hidden. We accompany One-Eye as a representative of the path of the

Fig. 6.3   Valhalla Rising (DVD Screenshot)—a “one-eyed film”

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Old Gods and myths into eternity—intended with the title after Valhalla, where the fallen warriors enter. One-Eye conjures up the literal hell on earth, leads the crusaders into the heart of darkness, to become a voluntary sacrifice in the end. In this act, he becomes part of the sacred world from which he originates. In the act of sacrifice, the sacrifice itself becomes holy. The Old Gods may have withdrawn from humans, but their faith in the “white Christ” and the “holy land” will not help them here either. As the last representative of a utopia, the blond boy remains among the warriors masked with red clay. The mythical impulse here affects not only the characters but also the land itself, a barren land, the “Waste Land” of the later Arthurian legend. Women are seen in this land only once, captive and waiting for their execution, for with the Christians comes genocide. The unbelievers are to die. Again and again, fog covers this apocalyptic land, and especially at sea, a heavy fog sets in, taking away all orientation and claiming numerous victims. From the old world, one enters the ‘New World’, which, however, turns out to be just as hostile. Man seems to bring his abyss with him. As in Bronson, art in Valhalla Rising is staged as an act of violence: One-Eye first guts his tormentor and then plants his head on a stake at the ritual site. His art is still closely linked to the act of sacrifice. Refn was never as radical again as in this fascinatingly untimely film, which no one expected and which is still viewed with irritated mistrust today: Valhalla Rising sides with the myth using the most modern means of digital film technology. After the worldwide success of the gangster film Drive (2011), expectations for a follow-up film were not only high, but also specific: Refn was now considered a ‘genre-bender’, an auteur who aligns generic patterns with his personal style and produces a highly unique variant (Stiglegger in Flintrop, Jung and Nemitz 2014, p. 15–24). Ultimately, this designation applies to Refn, but differently than Drive suggests. Essentially, one could already consider Bronson as a variant of the prison film or Valhalla Rising as a minimalist adventure film, but for a large genre audience, these films may not have worked, because the director, in his mise en scène, reflexively referred to genre mythology, but did not develop an accessible narrative on this basis, but a metavision. Drive then surprised with a backlash towards his early Pusher trilogy, where the gangster milieu is enhanced by melodramatic elements. Bronson and Valhalla Rising never wanted to be more than mythical exegeses, whose genre elements had to remain unsatisfactory— measured against the expectations of a genre audience. So anyone who expected a conventionalization of Refn after Drive had to be equally disappointed by his successor Only God Forgives (2013).

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Ryan Gosling plays Julian, an American who runs a Muay Thai club (again: the fistfight) in Bangkok, Thailand, and is also involved in local drug trafficking with his brother. The similarities with Pusher end here, however, as Julian’s brother Billy is killed in an act of vigilante justice under the eyes of a mysterious policeman, Lieutenant Chang (Vithaya Pansringarm), after he has murdered a young prostitute. Julian does not intervene, for from the beginning his relationship with the policeman seems to be marked by an almost metaphysical respect. However, when his dominant mother Crystal (Kristin Scott Thomas) comes to Bangkok, she demands from Julian the head of Billy’s murderer. Julian, however, shares Chang’s radical idea of justice, admires him even. When Crystal has Billy’s murderer killed, events escalate, and Julian finds himself confronted with Chang. Both face each other in the boxing hall—in the logic of the martial arts action thriller, Julian must now prove in an epic fight that he can withstand the humiliations by his mother. But Chang defeats the helplessly gesticulating Julian with a few targeted blows: The montage parallels him with the statue of the fighting hall idol—Chang is the god of combat, driven by a superhumanly motivated idea of justice, to which he subordinates everything (Fig. 6.4). Chang is the absolutely self-determined sovereign, the proclaimer of a cosmic law, before which no one is safe. Since he recognizes Crystal as the guilty party, he cuts her throat. Julian finds the ‘evil mother’ and plunges his hand deep into her entrails, as if he wanted to reclaim the womb in death. In the end, he

Fig. 6.4   Only God Forgives—In the face of the myth: Statue and protagonist

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seems to finally submit to Chang’s justice and has both hands chopped off. Julian steps out of the cycle of mythical combat. Only God Forgives is a film of striking primary color beauty, underscored by the seductively pulsating techno music of Cliff Martinez. Refn does not allow any melodramatic narrative conventions this time: The Oedipal relationship to the mother is so model-like that it emphasizes the experimental arrangement, and Julian’s relationship to the prostitute Mai lacks any romantic emotions. The orange glowing nocturnal Moloch Bangkok is Refn’s laboratory. Nothing remains of the neorealism that still characterized the handheld camera sequences of Pusher. The world of Only God Forgives is a mythical place, the sum of all martial arts films from Hong Kong, and more: As in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Teorema (1968), Refn plays with the idea of what would happen if a just God mingled among people. Chang’s actor Vithaya Pansringarm is an action star in Asia and undoubtedly the hero of the film: He embodies the mythical, eternal fight against evil. Julian is weak and corrupt, he proves to be a (repentant) part of the evil in the logic of the film. Crystal, on the other hand, is the ‘mother of all evils’ here, her punishment is even sexually heightened by Julian’s violent penetration into the abdomen. As a martial art film, Only God Forgives violates all genre rules, but as a mythical morality play it is one of the most radical performative films of its decade (Stiglegger in Flintrop and Stiglegger 2013, p. 11–27). Within the framework of his ‘genre-bending’, Refn even makes the brutal logic of vigilante-based action cinema painfully perceptible. The film thus becomes a constant self-questioning for the audience in the form of an unexpected monomyth, staged from a slightly offset perspective. After the highly ambivalent response to Only God Forgives, Refn turned to the horror genre, which is hardly surprising, as he had repeatedly referred to films such as I tre volti della paura/The Three Faces of Fear (1963) by Mario Bava, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) by Tobe Hopper, Cannibal Holocaust (1979) by Ruggero Deodato and Suspiria (1977) by Dario Argento, and quoted these films directly or indirectly in his image compositions or within the diegesis. Until then, he had primarily dealt with masculinity, facilitated by masculine-based genre narratives (gangster, prison, Viking). However, the horror genre proves to be particularly receptive to feminine and queer gender concepts—the examples mentioned all feature a strong female lead role. But just as Refn’s image of men is a mythical one—virility is represented by violence as a form of communication—so too does the image of women in his horror film The Neon Demon (2016) correspond to a mythical idea. The young woman becomes the sign of eternal beauty. This beauty and its violation can be particularly well developed in those models described by Linda Williams as ‘body genres’: in

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the melodrama, in the porn film and finally in the horror film (Williams 1991, pp. 2–13). William defines genital fluids in the porn film, tears in the melodrama and blood in the horror film as visceral expressions of these genres. And each of these genres is based on a specific fantasy: sadism for porn, masochism for melodrama and sadomasochism for horror. This results in a body cinema that directly addresses the physicality of the audience. In a certain sense, these theses also apply to Refn’s preceding films, which he himself (and especially in the Making of of Only God Forgives) describes as a form of “pornography”. Refn’s performative cinema does not seek ways out of the aggressive physical gesture of a performative cinema, but makes this its principle: A mythically based initial situation is sufficient for him as a narrative, more important to him is the autonomy of the form, the images, sounds, textures and movements that penetrate the audience. The 16-year-old model Jesse (Elle Fanning) in The Neon Demon has just moved from the small town of Georgia to Los Angeles. She meets the photographer Dean (Karl Glusman), who makes her first shots as a stylized murder victim (Fig. 6.5), and the makeup artist Ruby (Jena Malone), who introduces her to the older models Sarah (Abbey Lee Kershaw) and Gigi (Bella Heathcote). The three women are fascinated by Jesse’s natural beauty and envy her at the same time. Through deception and adaptation, Jesse quickly becomes a sought-after model, setting a deadly intrigue in motion. In this context, youth, physical beauty and decay, as well as the contempt for humanity of the fashion system, are repeatedly discussed. Beneath this surface, Refn develops a transgressive quest in which Jesse believes herself to be the protagonist (“My mother used to call me dangerous”), while she has long been chosen as the ultimate victim of the triune witch

Fig. 6.5   The Neon Demon (Koch, DVD Screenshot)—Death tableau as artwork

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coven. Her spiritual journey becomes a ritually defined path to death (according to Campbell, see above). In the end, she lies dead in the form of a swastika—a symbol of the cycle of the sun—in an empty swimming pool. The content guidelines also appear generic in The Neon Demon, but this serves as a trap, because Refn’s real goal is the heart of the myth of cinema itself. His films are films about the art of film. “Great cinema is the ultimate triumph of picture making form,” he says in an interview (see above). The form is his substance, the film occurs performatively on the screen, as we otherwise only know from Dario Argento or Gaspar Noé. And so Refn’s mythical cinema is also characterized by a manic search for eternal and crystalline beauty (the model in the diamond-shaped spotlight is the iconic image of the film), which unfolds in immoral models, analogous to Nietzsche’s concept “beyond good and evil”. Refn does not condemn the actions of his protagonists, because they act within the internal logic of their own myth. Sarah, Gigi and Ruby also act as necrophilic cannibals in The Neon Demon according to their diegetic determination. So, in conclusion, one could go so far as to understand Nicolas Winding Refn’s cinema as a meta-mythological film art that allows us to experience the myth of cinema itself anew, spanning between myth and modernity. Born from the sea of film history, he aggressively works on reducing film to its actual substance: form and sound, texture and movement. We, as seduced viewers, willingly submit to his content premises. Or we deny this equally radical and contemporary approach to the myth of cinema from the outset …

References Campbell, Joseph. 1965. The masks of god, Vol. 4: Creative mythology. New York: Viking. Elsaesser, Thomas. 2006. Hollywood heute. Geschichte, Gender und Nation im postklassischen Kino. Berlin: Bertz + Fischer. Felix, Jürgen, Ed. 2002. Moderne Film Theorie. Mainz: Bender. Hill, Geoffrey. 1992. Illuminating the shadows: The mythic power of film. London: Shambhala. Horkheimer, Max, und Theordor W. Adorno 2000. Dialektik der Aufklärung [1969]. Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer. Naumann, Kai. 2012. Qual, Gewalt und Erlösung. In Global bodies. Mediale Repräsentationen des Körpers, Eds. Ivo Ritzer und Marcus Stiglegger, 283–295. Berlin: Bertz + Fischer. QRT. 1999. Schlachtfelder der elektronischen Wüste, 52–66. Berlin: Merve. Stiglegger, Marcus. 2006. Ritual & Verführung. Berlin: Bertz + Fischer.

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Stiglegger, Marcus. 2014. Verführung zum Untergang—Melancholia als seduktives Konstrukt. In „Melancholia“. Wege zur psychoanalytischen Interpretation des Films. Psychoanalytische Blätter 34, Eds. Ralf Zwiebel und Dirk Blothner, 26–42. Stiglegger, Marcus. 2019. Zwischen Mythos und Moderne. Mythische Strukturen in den Filmen von Nicolas Winding Refn. In Nicolas Winding-Refn. Film-Konzepte 54 (5/2019), Eds. Jörg von Brincken, 91–106. Stiglegger, Marcus. 2013. Der Meister des performativen Terrors. In Dario Argento. Anatomie der Angst, Eds. Michael Flintrop und Marcus Stiglegger, 11–27. Berlin: Bertz + Fischer. Stiglegger, Marcus. 2014. Joe Dante – Genre-Bender. In Joe Dante. Spielplatz der Anarchie, Eds. Michael Flintrop, Stefan Jung, und Heiko Nemitz, 15–24. Berlin: Bertz + Fischer. Williams, Linda. 1991. Film bodies. Gender, genre, and excess. Film Quarterly 44(4): 2–13.

7

Seduction, Performance and Pop Culture

7.1 Film as a Medium of Popular Culture The significance of the medium of film for popular culture is multifaceted and provides numerous points of connection for methods of specific popular culture research. According to the definition by Christoph Jacke, film is part of popular culture because it is part of the “commercialized, societal area” that “industrially produces themes, mediates them on a mass media level, and can be used and further processed by numerically predominant population groups with pleasure (as information and entertainment offers)” (Jacke 2004, p. 21). Film is thus a medium of mass entertainment that has generated its own media-specific forms of expression and iconographies since its introduction at the end of the 19th century. These include not only different genres (feature film, documentary film, animated film, etc.), but above all the different genres of narrative feature films and the establishment of a studio and star system. Genres and stars are popular mechanisms of the medium to this day and are closely related to a limitation of popular culture to the area of pop culture, which is defined according to Marcus S. Kleiner (2008, p. 14 f.) from the initially music-centered concept of pop music and its effects since the 1950s: Pop, pop culture and popular culture must not be used synonymously, just as popular culture cannot be equated with total culture. Pop and pop culture are components of popular culture. By pop, I essentially understand a broadly defined music-centered traditional concept that can be traced back to the early 1950s, starting with rock’n’roll. Programmatically formulated: When there was no pop and pop culture yet, there was already popular culture (Kleiner 2011).

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2024 M. Stiglegger, Film as a Medium of Seduction, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-43818-0_7

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Film, however, also became an expression of pop and rock music (as in the Elvis films of the 1950s), just as pop music has become an integral part of many soundtracks since the New Hollywood cinema (e.g., Easy Rider [1969] by Dennis Hopper). An analysis of popular or pop culture is therefore hardly possible without considering the medium of film. On the other hand, for film analysis, the view of pop culture is sometimes indispensable, so the development of a cross-media analysis method seems particularly important since the modernization of film in the late 1950s (Stiglegger 2012, pp. 85–114).

7.2 What is Performative Cinema? At first glance, the terms film and performance seem to exclude each other, because if one follows Erika Fischer-Lichte’s Ästhetik des Performativen (2004), a dispositif applies to the performance that differs markedly from that of the film. Important, for example, is the “bodily co-presence of actors and spectators”, which develops a form of physical intersubjectivity that could describe the relationship of the performance artist and an active, possibly interacting audience (Fischer-Lichte 2004, p. 63 f.). In this process, there is a performative production of materiality, whose central categories are corporeality, spatiality, sonority, and temporality (p. 129 f.). What emerges from this—in all its randomness and arbitrariness—she calls the “autopoietic feedback loop” (p. 66 f.), a term from the field of neurology. The artistic performance is understood as an experimental test arrangement: “Everyone determines it and is determined by it, without any single person having full control over it” (p. 268). This can lead to ‘emergence’, i.e., phenomena that the artist cannot plan or influence in advance: “By emergence, I mean unpredictable and unmotivated appearances that may seem plausible in retrospect” (p. 186). This aspect guarantees the non-repeatability of the performance in a certain form: it always produces “a different performance […], [so] that in this sense every performance is unique and non-repeatable” (p. 82). These aspects of the interactive and unpredictable form the aesthetics of the performative and lead, as Fischer-Lichte puts it, to a “reenchantment of the world” (p. 318 f.), because they re-auratize the act and reception of art with a radical goal: the “aesthetics of the performative aims at the art of transgression” (p. 356). The medium of film differs in several aspects from a performance art defined as here: The film screening is not unique, but repeatable. The projected film can be received anew unchanged. The reaction of the audience, unpredictable to a certain extent, has no direct influence on the screened film. An “autopoietic feedback loop” can hardly arise. Emergence is also hard to imagine, because it would pre-

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suppose the direct influence of the audience on the work or a reaction of the artist. Ergo: a “reenchantment of the world” by means of film remains absent. However, if one looks more closely at the dispositif of film reception, numerous imponderables become apparent that speak for the uniqueness of each film screening: the material can tire or tear, the newly glued film does not resemble its previous form; the audience can force the interruption of the screening or create shadows on the screen; distributors or filmmakers can circulate differently edited versions of their work; the screening can suffer from technical defects and disturbances; finally, the audience influences its possible reactions among each other, i.e., the feedback loop develops in the auditorium. From this, a media aesthetics of disturbance may emerge, but there is another approach to the performative quality of film. Elements such as movement, body, and sensuality, which are also intensively present in theatrical performance, have already been mentioned as the level of performance in film. These non-intellectualizable elements appeal to the affective memory (Stanislawski 2007) of the viewer and provoke intentional movements (e.g., protective impulses in case of surprising movements into the picture), spontaneous emotional outbursts (tears in melodramatic moments), and psychosomatic effects (disgust, fear). The specific reaction of the viewer is individual and shaped by their respective socialization. This is another element of unpredictability in film reception. Added to this is the individual media competence, because media-trained viewers can process considerably more stimuli and information per time than untrained ones. In any case, a distinction must be made between these performative sensual attacks of the film and its narrative flow, because although both do not exclude each other, the ‘sensation’ can become independent and achieve its own quality. Gilles Deleuze calls the artistic use of extremely sensual means in art ‘sensation’, and especially film could succeed in connecting to the concept of “sensation” formulated by Deleuze using the example of Cézanne’s images, with a consistent language of the body: “The figure is the sensual form related to sensation; it acts directly on the nervous system, which is flesh. While the abstract form addresses the brain, works through the brain, is more related to the bone structure. […] Sensation is the opposite of the light and traditional, of clichés, but also of the “sensational”, the spontaneous … etc. Sensation is turned towards the subject on one side (the nervous system, the vital movement, the ‘drive’, the ‘temperament’ […]), on the other towards the object (the ‘fact’, the scene, the event). Or better: It has no sides at all, it is both at the same time, it is being-in-the-world, as the phenomenologists say: I become in sensation, and at the same time something happens through sensation, one through the other, one in the other.” (Deleuze 1995, p. 27)

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What is said here about painting, which materializes the affect itself, which forces the act of viewing to have a psychosomatic effectiveness, already describes a performative and ultimately seductive strategy of visual art. This becomes even clearer in the images of Francis Bacon, which incorporate distortions and motion blurs and thus create or anticipate their own ‘body cinema’. “And positively, Bacon tirelessly repeats that sensation is what passes from one ‘order’ to another, from one ‘level’ to another, from one ‘area’ to another. That is why sensation is the master of deformation, the effective force of body deformation.” (Deleuze 1995, p. 28)

A key to analyzing the performative ‘sensation’ of film lies in its (symbolic) physicality and its appeal to the viewer’s physicality through affecting, haptic images and sounds. Since the 1970s, filmmakers have also been reflecting on these qualities of ‘sensation’ and are connecting with radical border forms of feature film to avantgarde strategies of modern visual art: David Lynch with Eraserhead (1979), E. Elias Merhige with The Begotten (1990) or Philippe Grandrieux with Sombre (1998). The strategy of these filmmakers is the staging of haptic images, which carry a performative quality of the film: “Haptic images can give the impression of seeing for the first time, gradually discovering what is in the image rather than coming to the image already knowing what it is. Several such works represent the point of view of a disoriented traveler unsure how to read the world in which he finds himself.” (Marks 2002, p. 178)

For the performative film, it is important that the viewer brings the willingness to surrender to the staging just as the fan at a rock concert, wedged between likeminded people, robbed of his breath by the pressure of the performance and the desiring push towards the stage. Film scholar Martine Beugnet emphasizes, “to open oneself to sensory awareness and let oneself be physically affected by an art work or a spectacle is to relinquish the will to gain full mastery over it, choosing intensity and chaos over rational detachment.” (Beugnet 2007, p. 3) This intensity arises when film is no longer understood only as a narrative medium, but crosses the boundary, bursts the safe membrane of the screen and pours over the viewer, confronting him like a performative act. Film then only exists in its immediacy, makes the original distance and the dimension of time forgotten. The performative film literally touches the viewer physically through the retina, it penetrates the optic nerve into the body and activates the affective memory without reservation. The seeing eye, the vibrating eardrum become organs of

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“CineSexuality” (MacCormack 2008), which not only generates its own form of ecstasy, but experiences the world “like a disoriented traveler” (Marks) anew. Robin Curtis rightly emphasizes in her essay “How Do We Do Things With Films?” (Curtis 2008, p. 75 ff.) that Australian film scholar Dana Polan already stressed in a 1986 (1987) essay that purely work-focused film theory reaches its limits: “Film theory can only move forward by ceasing to be a theory of film—of film as an object that is to be grasped in its essence, its specificity. While every summary risks being a reification of itself, I would say that the most interesting recent work in film studies is characterized by the deconstruction of essence and specificity” (Polan 1987. In: Curtis 2008, p. 75). Film should therefore no longer be understood as an object (work), but as an event: “Films perform, and every performance or presentation requires the presence of a series of supporting institutions” (Polan 1987. In: Curtis 2008, p. 75). However, this demanded ‘performative turn’ of film theory did not initially occur, but was only discussed more frequently after 2000, first by Patrick Fuery (2000) and Stiglegger (2003, p. 163 ff.; 2006, p. 201 ff.), later also within the framework of the special research area “Cultures of the Performative” at Humboldt University Berlin, especially in the works of Robin Curtis, who explicitly emphasizes the importance of the physical dimension for cinema as performance: With the philosopher Martin Seel one can say, we as individuals try “to determine what we would like to be moved by” […], and the body is the pivot of this process, both medium and material of this act of perception. The body is the place of manifestations caused by the cinematic event, the “institution” that makes this act of perception possible (Curtis 2008, p. 77). The performative cinema acts out a sometimes cruel spectacle on the cinematic body invoked in the cinematic performance, the “Cinematic Body” (Shaviro 1993). Prefilmic reality becomes the material of a film aesthetic performance, for which, similar to the theatrical performance, it applies: “The aim of this process is no longer the art object, but the process. In doing so, the boundaries of theoretically and aesthetically defined art genres as well as the artist’s role are questioned and exceeded,” says Johannes Lothar Schröder (in: Brauneck 1986, p. 675). It no longer matters what is told, because the narrative on the narrative level is unstable and interchangeable, but the momentary how. A cinematic illusion, the simple mimesis of social everyday life, is abandoned as well as the psychological dimension of the characters. It is hardly surprising in this respect that, for example, Marcus S. Kleiner chooses a very similar approach with a view to the cinematic miniature form of the music video clip (Kleiner 2011), because in the video clip the fusion of pop as performance and cinematic performance is programmatic per se.

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What is important first is what these films do to the viewer, and above all how they do it. An analytical close-reading, which explores this how, is therefore still the prerequisite for a convincing justification of the seductive and performative quality of a film. The following chapters illustrate these theses using the example of the feature film Sombre by Philippe Grandrieux, which seems particularly suitable for this purpose, as it does not simply reflect pop culture cinematically or wants to be understood as a pop culture event itself (as is known from the international blockbuster phenomenon). Rather, the visual artist Grandrieux stages an impressionistic metamedial game with elements of pop culture and film as a popular cultural phenomenon (as part of genre cinema) in his first feature film.

7.3 Performative Body Cinema Philippe Grandrieux’s four feature films to date stand for a performative cinema of haptic images: a cinema of the fragment and the ‘sensation’—for a radical innovation of film language, which at first glance uses popular structures (narrative in genre cinema, formal in pop music), only to then quickly move away from them. In this way, he creates a field of tension that becomes a stress test for both the audience and critics, and shows: Here is someone going all the way. Grandrieux’s cinema is the most grandiose experiment that the European cinema landscape currently has to offer. And by the way, he opens up a view of a longhidden simplicity and beauty of the world, as is unique to the medium of film in this form. Grandrieux, born in 1954, studied at the film school L’Institut National Superieur des Arts du Spectacle in Brussels and later graduated from the École des Hautes Études en Science Sociale. His beginnings as an artist lie between the areas of documentation and video installation. His installations Met (2005), Grenoble (2006) and Chambres d’effroi (2007) were among others seen in Marseille (2007) and Tokyo (2008). For French television—later mainly for the FrancoGerman channel Arte—he made contributions within the framework of L’Histoire parallèle by historian Marc Ferro. His documentaries about Berlin (1987), the Tour de France La Roue (1993) and about a visit to post-war Sarajevo Retour à Sarajevo (1996) became somewhat known. The latter two films can be considered as direct inspiration for his first two feature films. “Making documentaries was very important to me because it gave me a connection to the other, to other people. It gives you a secure feeling for the right distance, the focal length. The question of distance, of the relationship between two bodies, is something very important to me. Only through this does filming become possible. This quality of being present and unobtrusive at the same time

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is also what I look for in actors,” says Philippe Grandrieux in a conversation with Cahiers du cinéma (No. 532). Already these films are characterized by a radically reduced and subjective visual style: often strongly moving handheld camera, point of view, overly loud original sound, no commentary. The grainy texture of his images, the strong pixel noise and the loss of transparent filmic spatial relationships suggest a filmic impressionism. It seems almost amusing that Grandrieux was once an assistant director on Raoul Ruiz’s genre-typical adaptation of Treasure Island (1985). In addition to this style derived from technical minimalism, the sequence shot joins. In one-hour settings, Grandrieux observed the visual artists Robert Kramer, Garry Hill, and Robert Frank during their creative process under the title Live in 1990 (Pantenburg 2009). For Grandrieux, film art serves as a medium of meditation—about the creation of art, but also about human experience in general: about reaching the physical limit in La Roue, or about the losses of a society marked by war in Retour à Sarajevo. These almost painfully closely observed processes are always both testimony and poetry. The feature film was not at the beginning of Grandrieux’s work. In the beginning was the gaze. Then came the texture of the image. “My turn to cinema can be seen in pieces, but it’s never as if cinema is on one side and literature and philosophy on the other,” he tells film scholar Nicole Brenez. “Everything is part of the same question, the same attention, and the same enterprise” (Brenez 2009). Film and philosophy never exclude each other in Grandrieux’s work, but he philosophizes with the camera and distrusts the spoken word. To this day, his second feature film La Vie nouvelle is only available in a multilingual version without subtitles—and yet it is understandable. With the thriller Sombre (1998), Grandrieux returned to the world of professional cycling, which he had already explored with La Roue. But the Tour de France is only a structuring metaphor for a tour de force taking place in secret, following the stages of the bike race. At these stages, Jean (Marc Babé) appears as a puppeteer in front of children, whom he entertains as well as frightens with his performance. In an irritating montage of distorted close-ups of tense and sometimes hysterically screaming children’s faces, the film sends the effect ahead before we can guess the cause. If one wants to reduce Sombre to its narrative dimension, not much remains: Jean is actually a driven prostitute murderer, who only gets a hint of love and intimacy when he meets the innocent and disoriented Claire (Elina Löwensohn) and her vivacious sister Christine (Géraldine Voillat): Love kills the Demon—the Beauty and the Beast—so it seems. But even Claire cannot end Jean’s bloody raids.

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Aesthetically, Sombre is rich and provocative. Like a world under a permanent ‘black sun’, he turns the aperture so low that only black shadows remain of the protagonists in bright daylight. Sometimes the sun appears as a glaring white ball on a gray background, while below the endless peaks of the black trees pass by restlessly. ‘Sombre’ is everything about this film—the world it creates, the deeds of its protagonist, the impenetrable interiors. Jean and Claire—shadow and light. This polarity should guarantee a utopia, should signal a middle way that is everyday and livable, but the physics of this film exclude the opposites. So Claire is left behind, while the killing continues. A nihilistic thriller, by the way. But also a film about a view of the world as a haven of death, underscored by the mechanical pulsing of the cold electro beats of wave pioneer Alan Vega from the New York minimal electro band Suicide. Not much remains of the convention of the serial killer drama—only fragments, fragments of human bodies, over which the camera gaze trembles, already emphasizing their transience and perishability; naked bodies that merge with the shadow, that only testify to life through sounds—until violent death. Sombre completes the impressionistic chaos that Grandrieux had established in his documentaries. He consistently moves along the cracks of reality, offering impressions of a second reality that only ties to French everyday life through vague similarity: the children’s theater, the bike race, the spectators at the edge of the stage. Everything else: darkness. Only in the cinema does Sombre fully unfold: In grainy and often deliberately blurry widescreen photography (1:1.85), a flood of impressions pours over the viewer, often bordered by a rumbling drone that eats into the diaphragm. This is uncomfortable and in the stroboscopic driving shots sometimes resembles an experimental collage by Stan Brakhage. But this aesthetic is never arbitrary. The cinematographer Sabine Lancelin, who had previously worked with auteurs (Stiglegger 2000) like Chantal Akerman and Raul Ruiz, carefully maintains the balance between hiding and showing, to give the viewer just enough orientation in the chaos of events. The main visual stylistic device is the close-up, in addition to the low aperture. In conventional cinematography, the close-up is usually embedded in a montage of different shot sizes that provides meaning and overview, whereas in Grandrieux’s work, this shot size usually appears isolated and unusually long, so that this proximity rather creates confusion. “[…] the close-up is a key cinematic figure here, one that dramatically emphasises the ambiguous nature of the process at work in cinema’s haptic vision. In the way it orchestrates a passage or a rupture from optical vision into haptic visuality, the close-up epitomises how cinema’s incessant processes of metamorphosis ultimately entail a sense of radical desubjectivation.” (Beugnet 2007, p. 89)

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Therefore, the close-up does not have a narrative function, nor does it necessarily increase the sense of closeness and intimacy towards a certain character in the film. Rather, it is about the film itself creating a phantom-like materiality in the immediate perception of the viewer, where the real sensation, the performative quality of the medium, lies. Beugnet notes that even in a conventionally staged feature film, such close-up moments can halt or delay the narrative flow. However, in such moments, other tactile or haptic qualities, which could be described as performative cadence, take the place of the narrative. Cadence in musicology refers to the solo play of a certain instrument. Transferred to film, this would be a ‘solo play’ of the camera, which works out a certain texture, color, or form. However, Grandrieux’s style is not characterized by sporadic performative cadences, but elevates this stylistic device to the predominant principle of staging. The disorienting effect of these close-ups is underscored by a deep bass droneoriented soundtrack, as known from the films of David Lynch, among others. Bass drones, long-lasting, droning-vibrating soundscapes, affect the viewer’s diaphragm and create a latent restlessness and nervousness. So, the sensual effect of the sound design adds to the texture of the images. Beugnet emphasizes this in her analysis of Sombre: “few of the sequences […] are shot and edited with direct sound. Freed from its conventional function as accompaniment or narrative support, the sound-track is thus an intrinsic element of the film’s aesthetics of sensation.” (Beugnet 2007, p. 116) This style has often been compared to image sculptures that Grandrieux creates from sound and image: “Hence, the approach to filmmaking that founds Grandrieux’s work: e rediscovery of the cinematic image as visual and sound textures—a form of sculpting in movement.” (Beugnet 2007, p. 115) Sombre as a film was predictably never popular. No more than 21,000 people saw Sombre at its cinema release in France, it is almost surprising that the film was shown on German television (Arte) and on an American DVD (Fox Lorber). And yet Grandrieux makes clear references to pop culture. Not only the compositions by industrial legend Alan Vega for the soundtrack, the protagonist Elina Löwensohn from Hal Hartley’s cult film Amateur (1996) or the casting of a supporting role with alternative porn star Coralie Trinh Thi, testify to Grandrieux’s interest in pop phenomena, but also the radical use of the gothic rock song “Bela Lugosi’s Dead” (1979) by Bauhaus during a brutal orgy scene. This song became world-famous through the title sequence of the vampire film The Hunger (Desire, 1982) by Tony Scott with Catherine Deneuve and David Bowie, in which even a live performance of the band can be seen. But what in Scott mainly leads to the black-romantic aestheticization of a vampire orgy held in the style of an advertis-

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ing clip, turns in Grandrieux to the monotonously throbbing and ticking beat of the song into a metaphorical soundtrack to the predatory mentality of consumer society. As in Bret Easton Ellis’ legendary serial killer novel “American Psycho”, the human body consistently stands at the end of the consumption chain. The privileged class has always been allowed to dispose of the bodies of the delivered (i.e., the poor). Jean’s private vampirism is not coincidentally fixated on the purchasable body of the prostitute, which he completely appropriates in the act of murder. Sombre strives for a performative quality of cinema at the expense of binding narration in such sequences: What counts is the experience that unfolds between the screen and the viewer, an almost physically tangible spectacle beyond the beaten paths of mainstream cinema, a cinema of the irrational and only purely sensually comprehensible. The experience of this “cinema of sensation” can only be understood as “CineSexuality” (MacCormack 2008), as a transhuman erotic “cinema of the brain” (Buchanan and MacCormack 2008, p. 37): “For those who have welcomed the emergence of a cinema of sensation, films like Sombre […] may indeed be understood as a foray into the unconscious, an exploration of the kind of archetypal world of repressed drives incarnated in the monstrous creations of dream-like worlds and fairy tales.” (Beugnet 2007, p. 128)

7.4 Film as Meta-Pop Following the three-stage analysis model of the seduction theory, the first question would be: How does a film like Sombre, which is ultimately difficult to enjoy by conventional standards, attract the attention of the audience? As already mentioned, Grandrieux establishes a pronounced genre reference in his first feature film. The programmatic title not only describes the ‘dark’ lighting, but also metaphorically the ‘dark drives’ emphasized by the German television title. The rudimentary plot (psychologically unstable young woman falls in love with a violent serial killer), which revolves around the melodramatic standard constellation “Beauty and the Beast”, draws on the subgenre of the serial killer film, which functions as a hybrid between the genres of horror film and psychological thriller. The most popular prototype would be The Silence of the Lambs (1989) by Jonathan Demme, in which a young FBI trainee (Jodie Foster) becomes emotionally dependent on a charismatic psychopath (Anthony Hopkins). In this respect, Sombre fulfills some expectations that the genre audience associates with the serial killer film: a bizarre amour fou (the ‘crazy’, impossible love), brutal and sexualized murder scenes, suspense moments with observation situations, moments of

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threat and fear. In addition, only the character of Claire (the potential victim) is offered for identification. The killer, on the other hand, appears animalistic, wolfish, sometimes vampiric, from which an aggressive erotic aura develops. Thus, on the surface, he corresponds to the gothic villain, the fascinating evil seducer of classical horror romance. However, these popular approaches are systematically brushed against the grain and destroyed by Grandrieux’s staging. Only remnants of standard situations familiar from conventional thrillers remain. The actual tension in Sombre is generated from ellipses, from withholding information: in ‘too close’ settings, blurs and dark zones (Fig. 7.1). In terms of film music, Grandrieux, like his American colleague David Lynch, draws on the experimental underground music of the early 1980s. Alan Vega reduces his danceable minimal electronic style from the Suicide era to drones and cold ticking beats—he skeletonizes the already minimalist pop music that he himself had significantly influenced. The British band Bauhaus once founded Gothic Rock with their single “Bela Lugosi’s Dead”, which still enjoys international popularity today and made it into the charts through bands like HIM (Thompson 2004, p. 75). But this song is not used affirmatively by Grandrieux either, because if you look at the lyrics, it is already an ironic swan song to the classic gothic horror of the Universal films of the 1930s: “White on white translucent black capes/ Back on the rack/Bela Lugosi’s dead/The bats have left the bell tower/The victims

Fig. 7.1   Sombre (ARTE, Screenshot)—Terror of proximity in the haptic close-up

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have been bled/Red velvet lines the black box/Bela Lugosi’s dead/Undead undead undead/The virginal brides/file past his tomb/Strewn with time’s dead flowers/ Bereft in deathly bloom/Alone in a darkened room/The count/Bela Lugosi’s dead/ Undead undead undead.” (Bauhaus: Bela Lugosi’s dead, Single, 1979) In 1931, Universal made the world’s first official Dracula film, directed by Tod Browning, and starring Bela Lugosi. This film established the popular setting for numerous subsequent horror classics until the early 1940s. The song by Bauhaus describes the gothic clichés of the Universal horror films, from which the (still popular) iconography of the gothic rock scene of the 1980s, among other things, emerged. formed: black capes, bats, death knells, blood, velvet, dried flowers, cemetery romance, night (Thompson 2004, p. 12). None of these kitschy elements can be found in Sombre, because the song appears here—as already mentioned—for a different reason: as a quote from Tony Scott’s affirmative vampire film The Hunger, which juxtaposes a live performance by the band Bauhaus with the attack of the vampire couple ( Fig. 7.2)) shows two goth wavers who were lured into the apartment from a New York music club with the prospect of an orgy for four. Scott’s prominently cast, clipart-like assembled horror film soon developed into an international cult film and made the Bauhaus song widely known. Anyone who has once seen this title sequence of morbid beauty will probably never forget it. Grandrieux could therefore assume that the situation invoked in Sombre—four

Abb. 7.2   The Hunger (MGM, DVD Screenshot)—David Bowie and Catherine Deneuve watch the Bauhaus performance

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people in anticipation of an orgy, plus the Bauhaus song—is familiar to many viewers. In this case, he can build on media competence, which stirs up a specific tension, because we know that the scene in Scott’s film ends with two corpses. On the other hand, it is also clearly visible here how Grandrieux distinguishes himself from his template: Instead of indulging in picturesque light and stirring parallel montage, the scene in Sombre takes place in the naturalistically lit apartment of one of the two businessmen who want to sleep with Claire. None of the participants are characterized by insignia of the underground culture. The circumstances are initially reversed, because it is not the killer (vampire) who invites into his apartment, but the two men from the dance festival. The song is not played live in a club, but comes from a CD that is started on screen. The song is thus purely diegetic and can only be seen as a soundtrack of the scene to a limited extent, especially since Claire begins to dance to the piece and the camera elegantly choreographs in sync with her movements. Also, the relationships between potential perpetrator and victims are reversed here, because in the end it is Jean who is beaten up by the extremely aggressive men when it becomes apparent that Claire might not be the hoped-for female sex object. It remains to be noted that a viewer who does not know the template from The Hunger and is also not aware of the status of the gothic rock song, could at least draw conclusions from the English song lines about the vampiric subtext of the serial killer theme.

7.5 The Seduction Theory as a Method of Popular Culture Research Let’s return to the seduction-theoretical approach. On the first level of seduction, the experimental feature film Sombre sells itself as genre cinema: As a narrative of a serial killer’s death trip through France. This is accompanied by a melodramatic aspect when the protagonist knowingly falls in love with the killer. The second level of seduction in this film portrays a destructive werewolf who becomes a deadly danger to his fellow human beings, a social beast that the beauty falls in love with against convention and better knowledge. This clearly formulable and polar model of innocent beauty and the deadly beast, as staged, is however dissolved in such a way that it can only be considered a trap for the audience’s expectation. On the third level of seduction, the film becomes a challenge to the viewer: Sombre entices with the promise of a suspense-oriented tension staging, but Grandrieux deprives the viewer of essential information on the image level, which he replaces with other, rather strange details. Many details are lost in the

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darkness, the rapid movement, or the blur. A psychological approach to the characters is made difficult, as close-ups of the faces are rarely offered. In their place are textures that cannot always be immediately deciphered. The only anchor in this world of fractals and disinformation is the rhythmized but cold-electronic soundtrack, as well as the use of music in the festival sequence and the four-way orgy. Grandrieux’s refusal to adhere to generic film conventions, which he only hints at to then drop them, can be subtly reconnected through the music, provided the viewer has the competence to decode these sign systems. In Tony Scott’s staging of the vampire orgy, it was still absorbed in a decadent consumer and advertising aesthetic, while in Grandrieux this aesthetic and romantic aspect has disappeared: Here the bodies themselves have become commodities that are used and abused. Seduction no longer takes place on the propagandistic and aestheticizing level of advertising (seduction to spectacle, seduction to object: the second level of seduction), but already in a preliminary area: in the expectation control of the viewer, whose media competence becomes a trap. The overall picture that the film Sombre leaves behind in this way is the portrait of a shadow world, a world of permanent solar eclipse, which seems to have lost any form of enlightened humanity. People have regressed to the status of the creaturely. While Jean moves through the scenery like a hungry wolf, Claire sometimes freezes in pure terror. The orgy scene shows a choreography of destructive desire, mutual consumption, which can only end in an outbreak of violence. It fits with the unpredictable gesture of Grandrieux’s staging that the actual aggressor Jean is defeated in this case. On this level, Sombre completely exposes the viewer to the performative concept and confronts him unreservedly with his own animality and creatureliness, without marking the boundaries as might be the case in a horror film. Sombre is in its reflective gesture both Meta-Pop and Anti-Pop: Meta-Pop insofar as Grandrieux enables a reflection and reevaluation of the cited aspects through his variation of already established elements of popular culture (rock music, genre cinema, cult film, subculture); and Anti-Pop, in that Grandrieux in Sombre also clearly distinguishes himself from an appropriation by popular culture and directs the popular atavisms against an affirmative reading through the unconventional staging of events. It is an irony of pop culture that the successful gothic rocker Marilyn Manson hired Grandrieux because of Sombre and La vie nouvelle to direct a video clip in this style for his chart hit “Putting Holes in Happiness” (2007) (Fig. 7.3). As the preceding explanations have shown, the seduction theory is not only a fruitful approach to making various film works fruitful for analytical discourse, but also to re-explore the relationship between the film as a medium of popular

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Fig. 7.3   Putting Holes in Happiness (Vevo, Screenshot)—Video clip for Marilyn Manson with Grandrieux’s trademark style

culture on the one hand and pop culture on the other. Not only are the classic film analytical approaches (hermeneutics, semiotics, thick description) used, but also targeted insights from the psychoanalytic film analysis based on Jacques Lacan (Žižek 2004), the Cinesexuality inspired by Gilles Deleuze (MacCormack 2008) and the Schizoanalysis of film (Buchanan and MacCormack 2008) as well as postmodern approaches of media theory (Baudrillard 1991a) and popular culture research are combined into a comprehensive approach.

7.6 Comic Adaptations, Franchise Culture and ‘Realism’ A classic example of pop culture research has always been the analysis of comics. And although their significance has somewhat faded in recent decades—or shifted to the cult of Japanese manga—there has been a remarkable resurgence of comics on the big screen and in streaming formats in the cross-media sector. While filmic comic adaptations were very successful in earlier decades (e.g., Superman, 1978, by Richard Donner), they remained isolated. Only with the official relaunch of classic comic heroes on the screen—especially Christopher Nolan’s popular Batman trilogy (2006, 2008, 2012)—did the possibility of a

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comprehensive franchise evaluation of the DC and Marvel comic worlds with a new, fresh perspective open up. Instead of nerdy fantasy scenarios, the focus was now on a quasi-realistic reinterpretation of the known comic characters, giving them backstories, character psychology, and a private life. Few films have gone further in this effort than Todd Phillips in his interpretation of Joker (2018) with Joaquin Phoenix, which seamlessly fits into the current trends of realistic and psychologizing re-readings. Phillips as a director had previously only once dealt with a boundary-crossing psychopath, in his documentary Hated (1994), in which he portrayed the self-destructive punk musician G.G. Allin. This was followed mainly by male-bonding comedies. Joker appeared relatively unexpectedly and became an equally surprising festival success for the director, who received the Golden Lion in Venice for it. The content tells the ‘origin story’ of Batman’s eternal adversary, the sociopathic Joker Arthur Fleck, who lives in precarious conditions with his mother in the Bronx in the early 1980s and unsuccessfully pursues a career as a stand-up comedian. A mental disorder causes him to have involuntary and misplaced fits of laughter, with which he disturbs his surroundings. In addition, his mother (Frances Conroy) tells him that he is the illegitimate son of the press magnate Thomas Wayne (Brett Cullen). After a colleague has procured a firearm for him, the situation gets out of control: Fleck kills some bullies in the subway and afterwards becomes a cult figure as the killer with the clown mask (Fig. 7.4). The social dissatisfaction in Gotham City tips into a revolt of the

Fig. 7.4   Joker (Warner Bros.)—Joaquin Phoenix as Arthur Fleck, losing his nerve in the subway

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underprivileged, who put on the mask of the Joker and elevate him to the idol of the revolt. After the award in Venice, it was not difficult on a first level of seduction to interest the audience in the film. Joaquin Phoenix was praised in advance for his emphatically physical performance, which he directly oriented towards Conrad Veidt’s portrayal and an iconic gesture of the court jester from The Man Who Laughs (1928) (Fig. 7.5 and 7.6). He varied his role as a psychopath with war trauma in Lynne Ramsay’s You Were never Really Here/A Beautiful Day (2018). There he plays a depressed, heavily traumatized war veteran who lives with his mother and occasionally commits contract killings. The strictly subjectivized narrative, the reduced image frames, and the moldy color scheme were undoubtedly a guide for Phillips (Fig. 7.7 and Fig. 7.8). The staging goes to great lengths to reconstruct New York in 1981, a year in which, like in Gotham, the garbage collection was on strike for a time, rats plagued the streets, and a wave of crime was rampant. This gloomy city staging by Phillips not only quotes Martin Scorsese’s films Taxi Driver (1976) and King of Comedy (1983) in terms of motifs and imagery, but also casts their star Robert de Niro in a clear homage as a talk show host. Hildur Guðnadóttir received the Academy Award in the category of film music as the fourth woman for her elegiac and experimental soundtrack. The unusual marketing of Joker as an “arthouse blockbuster” was gratefully accepted by the audience, as this film also promised another realistic puzzle piece in the DC comic universe. On the second level of seduction, the film formulates quite explicit manifest approaches. In the scenes in the TV studio, Joker clearly ties in with the media

Fig. 7.5 and 7.6   Joker (Warner Bros., DVD Screenshot) and The Man Who Laughs (Universal/Wicked Vision, DVD Screenshot)—the forced smile

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Fig. 7.7   You Were Never Really Here (Senator)—Joaquin Phoenix as a traumatized hitman in the green-yellow color spectrum

Fig. 7.8   Joker (Warner Bros., DVD Screenshot)—radical subjectivity

criticism of Martin Scorsese’s film King of Comedy. It vividly shows how people’s weaknesses are exploited for entertainment, which justifies Fleck’s reaction to his former role model: the fan becomes the most dangerous enemy of his idol and eventually kills him on live cameras. On another level of action, Joker plays on the phenomenon of so-called Incels (”involuntary celibates“) in the form of the

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imagined love story with the desired neighbor, who cultivate hate and violence out of self-pity over their inability to find a partner. However, this approach leads nowhere in the film. Fleck’s life situation and that of his mother are also explicitly contrasted with the wealth of the Wayne empire, resulting in the image of a class conflict that Fleck wants to bridge in his psychotic way by seeing himself as the lost son of the magnate and at the same time luring his son at the gate of the property. The scene in which he distorts the corners of young Bruce Wayne’s (Dante Pereira-Olson) mouth into a Joker grin is one of the most memorable of the film and again directly refers to the fate of the protagonist in The Man Who Laughs, who as a child gets an eternal grin cut into his face through surgery. On the third level of seduction, Joker is very challenging, which also explains why the film was viewed skeptically in the face of Donald Trump’s right-wing politics in 2019. It was later even seen as a fictional precursor to the storming of the Capitol by disappointed Trump voters in 2021. The psychology of the Joker character within the diegesis is a trap that allows for easy entry: We are seduced into empathizing with the subjective perception of a highly psychotic person— right down to identification with an unpredictable violent offender. In the first outbreak of violence with fatalities, Fleck’s behavior is largely comprehensible, even if it appears irritating due to his behavioral disorder. The film refers to the historical Bernie Goetz incident from the 1980s, which also involved vigilante justice in the New York subway: Vigilantism had already been established in the discourse by the success of Death Wish (1974) by Michael Winner, and the perception of the perpetrator was at least ambivalent. Here too, the film demands our own stance, it functions as an ethical challenge. Overall, however, Joker must be considered a metafiction. The staging plays with our perception and retrospectively questions the status of reality within the diegesis. Identification with the subjective perception within the diegesis is provoked, but led ad absurdum, because at most the complementary color codes of the lighting (between warm orange and sickly green tones, very similar to Ramsay’s film You Were Never Really Here) offer a vague orientation as to when we can expect a supposedly ‘objective’ representation of filmic reality in image and sound at all. In most cases, however, we seem to be in Fleck’s subjective perception, experiencing the events from his point of view. Only in the last third do we get alternative versions of the scenes we have previously experienced, which show that Fleck mainly imagines wishful fantasies (Fig. 7.9). In essence, Joker primarily paints an apocalyptic portrait of American society, which is disintegrating from within and threatens to wear itself out at its ‘Inner Frontiers’. Not coincidentally, the street scenes remind us of a new civil war scenario: Race, class and gender are the lines of conflict where a smoldering vio-

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Fig. 7.9   Joker (Warner Bros., DVD Screenshot)—the bloody trail at the end

lent outbreak ignites, into which the film culminates. It is these ‘Inner Frontiers’ that mark that unbridgeable gap between poor and rich milieus, with which Joker painfully familiarizes us. And when we follow Fleck’s bloody footprints in the mental hospital at the end of the film, it becomes clear: Joker has no solution to offer for this dilemma. It remains an expression of a societal depression in the hypercapitalist end state.

References Braunek, Manfred, Hrsg. 1986. Theaterlexikon. Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt. Brenez, Nicole. 2009. The Body’s Night. An Interview with Philippe Grandrieux. In Rouge. http://www.rouge.com.au/1/grandrieux.html. Zugegriffen: 15. Apr. 2023. Buchanan, Ian, und Patricia MacCormack, Eds. 2008. Deleuze and the Schizoanalysis of Cinema. London/New York: Continuum. Baudrillard, Jean. 1991. De la séduction. Paris 1979; dt.: Von der Verführung. München: Matthes und Seitz. Beugnet, Martine. 2007. Cinema and sensation. French film and the art of transgression. Carbondale.: SIU Press. Curtis, Robin. 2008. How Do We Do Things with Films ? Die Verortung der Erfahrung zwischen Wort und Fleisch. In Wort und Fleisch. Kino zwischen Text und Körper. Eds. Sabine Nessel et al. 75–90. Berlin: Bertz + Fischer.

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Deleuze, Gilles. 1995. Francis Bacon—Logique de la sensation. Paris 1984; dt. Francis Bacon. Logik der Sensation, München. Fischer-Lichte, Erika. 2004. Ästhetik des Performativen. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp. Fuery, Patrick. 2000. New developments in film theory. New York: St. Martin‘s Press. MacCormack, Patricia. 2008. CineSexuality. London: Routledge. Marks, Laura U. 2002. Touch: Sensuous theory and multisensory media. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Jacke, Christoph. 2004. Medien(sub)kultur. Geschichten, Diskurse, Entwürfe. Bielefeld: transcript. Kleiner, Marcus S. 2008. Pop Fight Pop. Leben und Theorie im Widerstreit. In Pop in R(h) einkultur. Oberflächenästhetik und Alltagskultur in der Region. Eds. Dirk Matejovski et al. 11–42. Essen: Klartext Verlag. Kleiner, Marcus S. 2011. Musikkörper. Zur Inszenierung von Körperbildern in Musikvideos. In Global Bodies. Mediale Repräsentationen des Körpers. Eds. Ivo Ritzer und Marcus Stiglegger. 183–210. Berlin: Bertz + Fischer. Pantenburg, Volker. 2009. Nichts als ein Bild. Vorgeschichte eines radikalen Filmemachers: Philippe Grandrieux und das Institut National de l’Audiovisuel. In Cargo 02/2009. 44–47. Shaviro, Steven. 1993. The cinematic body. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Stanislawski, Konstantin S. 2007. Stanislawski-Reader. Die Arbeit des Schauspielers an sich selbst und der Rolle. Berlin: Henschel. Stiglegger, Marcus. Ed. 2000. Splitter im Gewebe. Filmemacher zwischen Autorenfilm und Mainstream. Mainz: Bender. Stiglegger, Marcus. 2003. Rituale der Verführung. Seduktive Strategien filmischer Inszenierung. In Perspektiven interdisziplinärer Medienphilosophie. Ed. Ernst, Christoph. 163–179. Stiglegger, Marcus. 2006. Ritual & Verführung. Schaulust, Spektakel und Sinnlichkeit im Film. Berlin: Bertz + Fischer. Stiglegger, Marcus. 2012. Die Seduktionstheorie des Films. In Methoden der Populärkulturforschung. Interdisziplinäre Perspektiven auf Film, Fernsehen, Musik, Internet und Computerspiele. Eds. Marcus S. Kleiner et al. 85–114. Münster: LIT Verlag. Thompson, Dave. 2004. Schattenwelt. Helden und Legenden des Gothic Rock. Höfen: Hannibal. Žižek, Slavoj. 2004: Was Sie schon immer über Lacan wissen wollten aber Hitchcock nie zu fragen wagten. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp.

8

Seduction and Exploration of Existence

8.1 Existence and Temporality What does cinema know about existence that we do not? What can we learn about our existence from cinema? What can we learn, for example, from Christopher Nolan’s films? Undoubtedly, how the mechanisms of cinema work. Also, how cinema can construct and question identity. But above all, we get a very unique sense of how time works—and what temporality means for our existence. Nolan’s cinema is an invitation to existential philosophical reflection through cinematic time constructions (Stiglegger 2021, pp. 14–25). The following will be about film as an exploration of existence. And while Nolan philosophizes with the image and sound level of his films according to his craft, he often and gladly only talks about that formalism that often makes his films appear so mathematical, formalistic, and cold. However, this coldness also connects him with that approach of a German existentialism that the controversial philosopher Martin Heidegger unfolded in his main work. In his philosophical opus magnum Sein und Zeit, the existentialist develops a theory of human “existence” in the world, which is determined by its death, is characterized by corresponding concern, and encompasses three levels of temporality that impact existence. He defines the levels of temporality in the context of concern as 1. Thrownness (“already-being-in-the-world”)—the past; 2. Falling (“being-with”)—the present; and 3. Projection (“being-ahead-of-oneself”)—the future. In the three moments of concern (thrownness, falling, and projection), all three “ecstasies” (“standing out”) always “temporalize” themselves, which means: There is no past without present and future etc. They do not start, do not

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2024 M. Stiglegger, Film as a Medium of Seduction, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-43818-0_8

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pass by or merge into each other, but are always intertwined and “temporalize” themselves exclusively in threes (Heidegger 2001, p. 328 f.). To explore this complex relation of existence, concern, and temporality in their relationship, Heidegger introduces the term “ecstasy,” specifically defined by him, with which he emphasizes the relativity and finiteness of existence, which means not only, but also its mortality, which sets a boundary to the future that is as indefinite as it is reliable. “Future, past, present show the phenomenal characters of the ‘towards-oneself’, the ‘back to’, the ‘letting encounter of’. The phenomena of to …, on …, at … reveal temporality as the ἐκστατικόν par excellence.” (Heidegger 2001, p. 328 f.) Ecstasy or ékstasis (ἔκστασις) originally comes from Ancient Greek and means: “outside of oneself.” In this original sense, it refers to the removal of the mind or body from its normal place of function. Ecstasy is therefore characteristic of an altered state of consciousness, which is characterized by a reduced awareness of other objects or the complete lack of consciousness for the environment and everything around it. Ecstasy can also more specifically denote unusual mental spaces that can be perceived as spiritual. The latter form of ecstasy would then be religious ecstasy (Fröhlich 2011, p. 154). Christopher Nolan’s productions consciously rely on a creative handling of time from the first film, especially through a fragmentation of linear narration (Kealey in: Furby and Joy 2015, p. 219 f.). As for Heidegger, for him “the significance of time […] is more fundamental than the calculation of time or the measurement of time.” (Inwood 1999, p. 125) He often tells from the end and decodes the time levels according to certain codes; he therefore thinks the filmic diegesis as seen from the point of metaphorical or concrete ‘death’: “And because the temporality of existence, which must take its time, is finite, its days are also already numbered.” (Inwood 1999, p. 127) In this way, Nolan’s cinema differs from the established conventions of US and world cinema of the classical era: David Lean’s monumental adventure film Lawrence of Arabia (1962), for example, begins with a fast-paced motorcycle ride. It will be the last ride of the protagonist T.E. Lawrence (Peter O’Toole). During a risky evasive maneuver, which we partly experience from a subjective point of view, he veers off the road and dies in a ditch. Afterwards, we witness some conversations at his funeral in London, where people argue about the ambivalent militarist who had already stylized himself as a war hero during his lifetime. The narrative then goes back in time by years: We see Lawrence at the British base in Arabia, shortly before he is given the task of making contact with the Bedouins. According to conventional narrative strategies, this flashback structure works excellently: Although we initially know very little about the accident

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victim, we are provided with this information immediately after the accident sequence. His ambivalence, fanaticism, and heroism are hinted at in the funeral dialogues. Only then does the film release us into a comprehensive exploration of the life of one of the most inscrutable warriors of the 20th century. His life is explored from the perspective of his death and viewed in its light. The flashback narrative, which quickly reveals itself as such, is however a convention of Hollywood cinema—and operates according to clear rules: The narrative frame is immediately recognizable as such. Dissolves—often associated with a musical theme or a voice-over, lead into a preceding time level. We are allowed to know that Lawrence died in this motorcycle accident, as it is a historical fact. The film therefore does not need to build up any final tension about his fate. Rather, Lean needs the funeral dialogues as a hook for his multifaceted portrait. The film always marks its diegetic present as a dimension of the already completed past. It always remains connected to the ‘pastness’.

8.2 Filmic Conventions of Temporality The cinematic flashback, as also established by David Lean, shows events that chronologically precede the present action. A flashback is therefore usually motivated by the subjective memory of a protagonist: With Lean, we clearly see in the montage how it can be formally marked. Such means can be slow dissolves, changes from color to black and white, voice-over etc. With Nolan, the levels can also be marked by color (Memento), but the boundaries can still be blurred. Flashbacks have an explanatory function, can clarify a course of action, and are thus a popular tool in detective films, especially since the classic film noir, or they can justify the psychological constitution of a character. The flashback already appears in silent film and developed increasingly complex forms. In classical cinema, the truthful status of the flashback is usually unquestioned— accordingly marked scenes show an authentic pastness. However, there were and are films whose flashbacks simply lie (Alfred Hitchcock’s Stage Fright, 1950) or whose reliability is emphatically questioned (Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon, 1950). More straightforward than in Stage Fright, Alfred Hitchcock’s psychological thriller Rebecca (1942) used a cyclical flashback structure: “Every night I return to Manderlay…” These are the words spoken off-screen by the protagonist (Joan Fontaine), as we enter the gloomy estate she refers to. Here too, it becomes clear in the frame: The protagonist is a survivor, she will accompany us into the past as a witness—not to emphasize the historical character of the narrative—like David Lean—but to give the narrative an epic breath, the black romance of the

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past and the fallen. We recognize these flashback structures, for they illuminate a past that interests us from the relative present of the film. At the same time, flashback narratives appear credible, as they work with the status of witness. Not coincidentally, numerous films about the Holocaust theme work with complex flashback structures, which film scholar Annette Insdorf refers to as “meaningful montage”. Present and past are put into an immediate—sometimes associative— relationship, which illuminates one level through the other. In this way, Sidney Lumet’s New York survivor drama The Pawnbroker (1966) works just as well as Liliana Cavani’s Il portiere di notte/The Night Porter (1973) and Alan J. Pakula’s melodrama Sophie’s Choice (1981). The psychological damage of the protagonists here is linked in the complex montage of cinematic present and past—parallels in the events of both worlds (gang warfare and rape in Pawnbroker, structures of oppression in Il portiere di notte) are clearly shown. The past events thus appear not only credible, but are also made timeless. Here too, we find the narrative strategy quite plausible, even though it proceeds far more complicated than in the flashback frame narrative from Lawrence of Arabia or Rebecca. But what happens when we can no longer clearly identify the events of the cinematic present as the narrative framework of a flashback story? What happens when we do not directly jump into the past after the beginning in the cinematic present and get the causal connections explained? Gaspar Noe’s feature film Irréversible (2001), which was screened in Cannes in 2001, dared this experiment in a hitherto unprecedented radical way. It begins with a reflective conversation between two older men in a dormitory, then transitions in a single shot to the action in a gay sex club, and concludes the supposed exposition with an infernal act of violence in this club. But instead of explaining how this bestial crime comes about, committed by two men identifiable as protagonists, the film only ever takes a small step back in time—connected by a kind of audio-visual time tunnel that allows all these temporally preceding sequences to be connected in a single camera ride. Irréversible has no recognizable cut, yet the film incessantly guides us back in time, showing the revenge campaign of an angry and an eventually confused man, showing how the two men previously discover the badly beaten, raped girlfriend, how they previously enjoyed themselves and argued at a party, fooled around in the subway, and finally how the central couple wakes up together in bed. In the end, we see the female protagonist lying in the sun on a meadow (Fig. 8.1). The film turns the conventions of suspense storytelling upside down, because it anticipates things that burden the viewer enormously, without providing the explanation. Only late does it become clear that one of the men is under the influence of drugs, while the other seems consumed by jealousy.

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Fig. 8.1   Irréversible (Studiocanal, DVD Screenshot)—End and beginning of the film at the same time

The radically achronological narrative, the supposedly reversible strategy, proves to be a comparatively more consistent means than the pure flashback narrative, because it does not lull the viewer too soon into the security of a stringent dramaturgy, but initially withdraws the causality of the events, delivers many facts according to common standards much too late. This activates a different form of concern in the audience. What is particularly irritating about Noé’s film is the ambivalence with which the characters are established, because both men appear inappropriately violent and aggressive. Only late do we get the reasons for their behavior. Until then, the exposition of the film is long over by conventional standards. Even here, one must attribute greater complexity to Nolan’s films, at least in some cases. Around the same time as Noé, Hollywood had dared a similar experiment with Christopher Nolan’s Memento (2001): At the beginning of the film, we see in reverse-running images how a man is practically executed. Then we wake up with the protagonist in a hotel room. If we look at this staging more closely, however, it becomes clear how much Nolan’s film—in contrast to Noé’s film—still seems committed to the conventions of witnessing and frame narrative: The first image is a Polaroid photo in the hand of a man. In the picture, we see a blood-soaked crime scene. Then the picture fades, literally pulls back into the camera, and a weapon appears in the man’s hand, with which he commits the murder. While Noé relies with all directorial coldness on the effectiveness of his disorienting experiment, Nolan immediately reflects and problematizes the reverse narrative in his film on the body of the protagonist: since the man, Shelby (Guy

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Pearce), has lost his short-term memory after a traumatic assault, he must constantly resort to tattoos, notes, and Polaroid photos, which are supposed to help remind him of the past and his insights about his own history. The title of the film primarily refers to this circumstance (“Remember!”), with the fragility and unreliability of memory becoming the theme. While Noé’s staging ultimately always directs towards the primary affect (thirst for revenge, greed, anger, lust), Nolan returns to the complexity of the classic (noir) crime story and constructs a very complicated narrative alibi for Shelby, who once lost his wife in a burglary and now—damaged by severe head injuries—is looking for the perpetrator. In this, he is exploited by the corrupt policeman Terry (Joe Pantoliano), who regularly presents him with drug dealers as the supposed murderers of his wife and has them executed by Shelby. If one were to tell both films in their chronological order, Noé’s Irréversible would appear at best as a banal revenge drama and Nolan’s Memento as an overdetermined thriller. However, both films derive their actual appeal and fascination from the fact that the achronological narration makes the intended exploration of existence possible. Both films set different goals: In Memento it is actually about the relativity of memory. What remains of our life and consciousness when no memory guarantees connections anymore? Memento shows how supposed memories lead to fatal misunderstandings and make the protagonist exploitable as a killer. The film lets the past and the present film narrative level run against each other, creating a parallelized, counter-running horseshoe form of dramaturgy. Irréversible, on the other hand, strives for an almost existential philosophical, but basically nihilistic thesis, which is pronounced at the beginning by one of the old men and appears at the end of the film as an insert: “Time destroys everything.” However, rarely has such consistent nihilism been demonstrated in cinema, which begins with destruction, reconstructs the existence of its characters retrospectively, only to question them in the final image (Liptay and Wolf 2005). The lead-up to death becomes a grueling awareness of transience, which culminates in nihilism in Noé. Nolan, on the other hand, makes it harder for us and himself: He is concerned with the mutual penetration of thrownness, having-been, and design—culminating in a protagonist who seems to have lost control over memory. Noé leads us to nihilism, Nolan confronts us with the existentialist dilemma and links the time levels in an ‘ecstatic’ way. Starting from Memento, it is worth taking a look at Nolan’s directorial debut Following (1998), a London noir thriller, shot in stylish, grainy black and white. The film edits several action levels in parallel manner, which at the same time correspond to different time levels. Oriented towards the classic film noir of Hollywood, one of these levels is the interrogation of a policeman (John Nolan), who has to decipher an intrigue. In doing so, he has a strange protagonist in front of him:

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An unemployed young writer (Jeremy Theobald, referred to as “The Young Man”) follows strangers through the streets of London, allegedly to find inspiration for his first novel. Initially, he sets strict rules for himself as to whom and how long he should follow, but he soon discards them as he focuses on a well-groomed, goodlooking man in a dark suit (Alex Haw) (Fig. 8.2). The man in the suit notices that he is being followed, confronts the young man, and introduces himself as Cobb. Cobb reveals that he is a serial burglar and invites the young man to accompany him on various burglaries. The loot from these crimes seems to be of secondary importance to Cobb. He rather enjoys rummaging through the personal items in the apartments of his target persons and drinking their wine. He explains that his true passion lies in using the shock of the robbery and the violation of property to make his victims rethink their lives. The young man is fascinated by Cobb’s lifestyle. He himself becomes a burglar, encouraged by Cobb. On Cobb’s suggestion, he changes his appearance, cuts his hair short, and wears a dark suit. He takes on the name ‘Daniel Lloyd’, based on the credit card that Cobb gives him, and starts a relationship with a blonde woman (Lucy Russell), a typical femme fatale, whose apartment he and Cobb have broken into. The blonde turns out to be the girlfriend of a gangster (Dick Bradsell, only known as ‘Baldy’), whom she left after he murdered a man in her apartment. Since then, the Baldy has been blackmailing her with intimate photos. The young man breaks into the

Fig. 8.2   Following (FlaxFilm/Alive, Screenshot from the DVD)

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Baldy’s safe, but is caught in the act by an unknown man, whom he can fend off with a hammer. However, the photos turn out to be harmless model shots. In his attempt to understand the mysterious events, the young man learns that the blonde wanted to make him a burglar together with Cobb, to serve as an alibi for Cobb. But here Nolan waits with another twist, showing Cobb in the service of the Baldy. While the writer thus becomes a double victim, the perpetrator simply disappears into the crowd. Following addresses the (lacking) identity of its protagonist, who wants to reconstruct himself from the knowledge he has gleaned about others. However, since he can no longer clearly assign relations, he becomes the seduced pawn of a deadly intrigue. The metaphor of the break-ins is similar to the intrusion into other people’s dreams in Inception (2010). These themes: construction of identity and the intrusion into the secrets of the inner life will remain leitmotifs for Nolan. And few things fascinate him more than the countless ways in which a particular story can be told cinematically. In Following, the idea of manipulated memory and perception also appears, which will become the main theme of The Prestige (2006), where the lives of the antagonists are explored in flashbacks, motivated by entries in their respective diaries, but turn out to be just as manipulative. The past is fragile. Following establishes the conversation with the policeman as a possible present, from which the past is associatively unfolded in four flashback levels. Significant is the changing appearance of the young man, with longer or shorter hair, with or without a wound on his face. In the gradually deciphered puzzle, we penetrate the existence of the protagonists with the film, like the characters from Inception into the unconscious of their victims. Even the idea of ‘implanting’ an infectious thought in the unconscious appears in Following. It is astonishing how comprehensive Nolan’s cinematic exploration of existence was already in this debut film.

8.3 Ecstasies of Temporality With his Batman trilogy, Nolan has significantly expanded the genre boundaries. So it is not surprising that he directed InterStellar (2014), a philosophical science fiction film that conveys the “ecstasies of temporality” even more clearly than his previous films, even though it seems to play mainly in the future as a science fiction. “The three forms of time—future, past and present—belong […] together: One cannot stay in any of them without also being referred to the others. However, the three forms of time strictly exclude each other, each of them is radically different from the other, and none of them transitions into the other. Heidegger wants to grasp this immediate coexistence of the forms of time by calling

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them ‘ecstasies’. […] Every immediate change (metabolé) […] has the character of an ‘ekstatikòn’ […].” (Figal 1992, p. 81) These levels of time exist in mutual dependence and can transform into each other under certain conditions. Nolan finds this condition in the theory of relativity, as well as in phenomena such as the wormhole and the black hole. At its peak, the film demonstrates the fusion of quantum physics and the theory of relativity by having the protagonist sucked into the black hole Gargantua, where he finds himself in a four-dimensional hypercube, a tesseract (Preußer 2019, p. 77). In this construct, space and time dimensions overlap and are staged in a geometrically appearing way (Fig. 8.3). Protagonist Cooper (Matthew McConnaughey) literally moves between his own present and the past, thereby indirectly managing to make contact with his then daughter (Mackenzie Foy/Jessica Chastain) (through Morse code) and initiate the original journey that he then undertakes himself. In the logic of the film, he virtually outwits time by crossing several different time zones and returning hardly aged, while his fellow human beings have aged or died. Temporality as the dominating condition of existence is thus literally the theme of the film InterStellar, which could also be called InterChronos. Although the theme of time was often addressed in the war film Dunkirk (2017), Nolan takes a less complex approach here, but almost pragmatically constructs the ever-increasing tension curve analogous to the cyclically

Fig. 8.3   InterStellar (Warner Bros., DVD Screenshot)—Space and time dimensions in the tesseract

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swelling Shepard tone on the soundtrack, by layering three different linear time sequences into each other, which only becomes clear gradually: 1. The Mole in Dunkirk, where the 300,000 soldiers wait for their evacuation (one week); 2. the sea between England and France, where civilian boats spontaneously set off for Dunkirk (one day); and 3. the air, where we accompany a squadron of Spitfires that are supposed to attack German bombers; two of their planes are separated and have to fight their way through alone (one hour). Compared to the radical construction of the preceding films, which touch on existentialist-Heideggerian aspects, the intertwining of the three linear times in Dunkirk, all of which have the character of the present while they are presented, serves more to increase a performanceoriented tension staging, a constantly rising tension curve, which only loses its emphasis with the landing of the Spitfire. Formally, this is a remarkable experiment and quite new in this consistent form—but in terms of content and philosophy, the film remains strangely empty. What previously appeared overdetermined, here suffices in its evoked excessive presentness (of the directorial performance) itself. Christopher Nolan may be a conceptual formalist as a director, who also subordinates the chaotic and wild individual sequences to a radical will for form. He may be a meta-director who makes his own methodology the subject of his films (especially in The Prestige and Inception), and yet he is a seducer who leads his audience with a sure hand into uncharted areas, sometimes into multi-layered dreams and directly into a black hole. His films themselves appear as whirlpoollike ‘black holes’, whose pull guides the emotions and thoughts and makes them circle ever tighter, to release us in the end with an elemental reflection of existential decisions and insights. It is precisely the reversal of linearity, the deliberate disruption of order, that helps Nolan manipulate his audience and lead them astray—whether subtly in Insomnia (2002), where we do not see the sought-after murderer (Robin Williams) at the beginning, but the corrupt policeman (Al Pacino) who falsifies evidence, or blatantly, when in InterStellar the father has to traverse time in two directions to finally find his way back to his daughter, whom he leaves as a child. What appears ‘wrong’ is usually only the key to the initially hidden problem that needs to be solved. In this aspect, too, Following is a key to understanding the subsequent films, as it tests all later strategies in approach: the advance to the end, the nesting of times, the achronology, the causal penetration of time levels, the deception, the emptiness—and ultimately the loss of an identity that would like to reconstitute itself. “Both aspects of temporality—its concluding and its opening, being towards death and the possibility of being—are a serious challenge for existence,” as Rüdiger Safranski states with Heidegger (Safranski 2001, p. 175). Christopher

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Nolan’s films are in this sense philosophical explorations of existence, which explore, intertwine and turn the levels of temporality into significant turning points, creating an audiovisual ‘ecstasy of temporality’ with cinematic means, in which the future affects the past, in which the levels do not cancel each other out in their overlay, but complement and mutually charge each other with meaning.

References Figal, Günther. 1992. Martin Heidegger zur Einführung. Hamburg: Junius. Fröhlich, Werner D., Ed. 2011. Wörterbuch Psychologie, überarbeitete und aktualisierte Auflage. München: dtv. Heidegger, Martin. 2001. Sein und Zeit. Tübingen: Vittorio Klostermann. Inwood, Michael. 1999. Heidegger. Freiburg: Herder Spectrum. Kealey, Erin. 2015. No end in sight. The existential temorality of following. In Imagining the impossible. The Cinema of Christopher Nolan, Eds. Jacqueline Furby und Stuart Joy, 219–232. New York: Wallflower Press. Liptay, Fabienne, und Yvonne Wolf, Eds. 2005. Was stimmt denn jetzt? Unzuverlässiges Erzählen in Literatur und Film. München: Edition Text+ Kritik. Preußer, Heinz Peter. 2019. Der philosophische Diskurs der Zukunft. In Genre-Störungen. Irritation als ästhetische Erfahrung im Film, Eds. Heinz Peter Preußer und Sabine Schlickers. Marburg: Schüren. Safranski, Rüdiger. 2001. Ein Meister aus Deutschland. Heidegger und seine Zeit. Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer. Stiglegger, Marcus. 2021. Ekstasen der Zeitlichkeit. Achronologische Montage und Existenzerkundung in Filmen von Christopher Nolan. In Christopher Nolan. Film-Konzepte 62 (September 2021). Ed. Jörg Helbig. 14–25. München: Edition Text + Kritik.

9

Perspectives of Seduction Theory

9.1 A Seduction Theory of Media? This volume defines the film-theoretical approach of the seduction theory of film, which fundamentally understands the medium of the narrative feature film as a complex system of seduction strategies. This approach refers to key concepts of continental philosophy, as well as tendencies of classical film theory. The method derived from the seduction theory combines strategies of classical, aesthetically based, hermeneutic film analysis with the terminology of psychoanalytic film theory and a sociological contextualization of the film. In a three-stage analysis model, various levels of seduction in the film are identified and argued in a building block manner. This approach has been tested on numerous film examples throughout film history. Cinematic seduction is a complex web of challenges that plunges us as an audience into an ethical and emotional roller coaster, but in analysis can lead to a consciousness-enhancing experience of ambivalence. The seduction theory of film offers a methodological approach to capture this reception experience in analytical terms. Since this approach draws from different disciplines, especially art aesthetics and social sciences, the seduction theory can be seen in the context of a film culture analysis. However, this does not mean that the transfer of seduction-theoretical approaches to other media would not be possible, especially those with a strong performative imprint. Hartmut Winkler (2004, p. 13) fundamentally defines the essence of media in six keywords. In addition to media as “communication”, “technology”, “form and content”, “overcomer of space and time” and “invisibility of media”, he emphasizes: “The most plausible definition of media is that they allow symbolic trial action. Media establish within society a space that has the peculiarity of being

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2024 M. Stiglegger, Film as a Medium of Seduction, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-43818-0_9

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largely decoupled from actual consequences. Actions in this space are—in contrast to actual actions—reversible; if a murder happens on stage, the murdered person gets up afterwards and bows. This applies, mediated, to symbolic processes in general.” This symbolic presence with simultaneous reversibility makes media appear as the ultimate playgrounds of seduction. In the seductive game, they allow the audience to engage with action models and temptations, transgressions and behavior models that would be unacceptable in everyday context and would indeed have irreversible consequences. Media content sometimes challenges us to a game, which applies equally to the film as a fantasizing symbol system as well as to the interactive, ludic media: such as the computer game. One of the seductive strategies mentioned at the beginning is based on the Promethean impulse, i.e., the human desire to create their own worlds as a demiurge: Worldbuilding has therefore unsurprisingly become an important term in the design of media immersion spaces in serial narratives and games. The feature film can only marginally correspond to this impulse, because the filmic work must be considered largely closed in form, even if it invites the audience to speculate. The possibility of intervening in the film viewing apparatus mainly refers to its disruption (such as the interruption of the performance, the change of projection conditions). Only in the home media sector were experiments made with alternation possibilities: for example, if you can choose between different versions at the beginning of a DVD; or if the same film is shown on television from different perspectives and you can switch between the perspectives. And of course, today you can create audiovisual content yourself with standard technology, which culminates in fan films, among other things, that enable media participation in the revered content. The virtual world of computer games offers even more possibilities. ‘World-Building’ according to one’s own wishes—this thought based on the mythical Prometheus—who created humans ‘in his image’—has accompanied the production of audiovisual media from the beginning. Initially, it was merely the moving image itself, which as a ‘deceptive image’ of pre-film reality seemed to convey its own world, but with computer technology and interactive media, unimaginable possibilities of influence opened up. The dream of immersing oneself as a recipient into the imaginary world of the film resulted in simple video games that quoted film scenarios as early as the beginning of the 1980s (such as E.T. or Raiders of the Lost Ark)—but ‘playing’ a given scenario in the simplest form is only a first step towards shaping and influencing the action. By the beginning of the 1990s at the latest, the technology was mature enough to integrate at least some filmic elements (cutscenes) into the course of a video game. Feature film and video game thus stood in an increasingly close exchange relation-

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ship (Fig. 9.1). However, one wish remained unfulfilled in view of the qualitative discrepancy between cutscenes and interactive scenario: As a player, one was not really part of the still filmic scenario yet. With the expansion of technical capacities in computer and console games, this also became possible. In games like Silent Hill (Konami; 1999) or the film noir modeled Heavy Rain (Quantic Dream; 2010), one could feel part of the given scenario. Staged game sequences and game levels seamlessly merged and fulfilled the desire to influence the events according to one’s own ideas and abilities—the Promethean impulse of the media recipient seemed to have been taken into account. The most seductive strategy of audiovisual media—the interactive control over the staging—had been fulfilled. How this Promethean impulse is actually served by the games—especially in the form of ‘interactive films’ and what theoretical implications play a role here, will be the subject of the following investigation (Stiglegger 2016, pp. 28–37).

Fig. 9.1   Heavy Rain (Quantic Dream, Screenshot)—Naturalistic Simulation in Film Noir Stylization

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9.2 Hyperreality and Ludology Jean Baudrillard never explicitly wrote about video games, but he was fascinated by the influence that mass media have on capitalist consumer society. He went so far as to diagnose the triumph of simulation over physical life reality. According to him, hyperreality replaces real life: computer games, TV series, music videos, and Web 2.0 would replace real interaction—so he assumed. In politics, even the media simulation of events would replace real action, as he testified using the greenish night vision images of Baghdad in the first Iraq war. It should be noted here that these images were undoubtedly surreal-looking, trivializing depictions of real bombings. A society that confuses such distorted “illusions” with reality would sooner or later end up in a “desert of the real”. Such a world of simulation is dominated by the Promethean impulse: the idea of being able to create and control worlds, even if they are pure simulations. The term simulacrum, as used by Baudrillard, is derived from the Latin term ‘simulacrum’, which refers to phenomena of similarity. The term combines the ambivalence of deceptive appearance and the creative reproduction of imaginations. In media theory, the model of the simulacrum has established itself primarily in the description of virtual worlds and is therefore of particular value for the analysis of audiovisual and also interactive media. Baudrillard also characterized the increasingly virtualized world of media society with simulacrum, in which a (deceptive) image of the real has replaced the real. In this world, the distinction between original and copy has become impossible. The interactive participation in the game of media simulacra would be an endpoint in this thinking. Baudrillard already opposes the world of simulacra with a concept of challenge, which he refers to as seduction. Seduction here is an almost archaic strategy that resists the virtual, as it itself calls out a game. The seducer and the seduced are in a dialectical relationship of playful self-empowerment. Baudrillard could not yet foresee the extent to which seduction itself became a mechanism of the new media as soon as their phantom-like volatility and interactivity came into the focus of experience. The fact that the video game itself is a simulation, moreover such a fleeting one, namely the (only partially influenceable) light play on the interface, predestines it (like the narrative feature film) for the act of seduction: There is a boundary between medium and recipients that can never be crossed. This is perse the last secret in the computer game: No matter how much one gets involved, one will never be able to penetrate it completely (i.e., physically). The interaction with the virtual world suggests a closeness that is always distance, a sovereignty

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of the player that obscures the fact that the player will always remain subject to the rules of this world, even if he believes he is shaping parts of it. The possibility of interaction is always subject to algorithms, it is always one that has been programmed beforehand. Before the interactive film, as one of the apparently least flexible video game formats, is examined, it should be differentiated from the seemingly most versatile interactive format: the Massively Multiple Online Role-playing Game (MMORPG), in which the player moves with his largely self-designed avatar in a vast virtual world (online), populated by programmed and player-controlled ‘entities’, with which one has to interact. First of all, it should be noted that the different mediality and phenomenology of the game generates different seductive strategies than the feature film. Similarities exist in the reference to the elementary themes from mythological contexts (especially in the fantasy context) or the mythicization of history (especially in the context of war games). The ritual structure of game play and dramaturgy also resembles the filmic standard situation, especially the duel or battle situation. The fundamental difference, however, is that while the feature film is capable of reflecting the Promethean impulse, it cannot support it itself. Manipulation is the essential seductive moment of the video game: On the surface, especially the online game fully accounts for the Promethean impulse by allowing the recipient to leave their own everyday world and virtually enter a new world (immersion), to influence this according to their own decisions and in a radical step also to modify it according to their own ideas (modding). However, these possibilities are clearly limited, insofar as the Promethean impulse is already considered in the design of the respective game and thus moves within strictly set boundaries of cultural influence. This realization brings the game closer to the film than expected: The Promethean space for play, the expected freedom of the player, is itself part of the game and obeys its laws. The media-specific Promethean impulse as a seductive quality of video games is thus addressed primarily on three levels: The primary level is the design of one’s own avatar, the “char” (character). The secondary level is modding, the modification of the virtual world according to one’s own needs and ideas. Depending on the given conditions, this can go so far as to generate another game from a game (a virtual world within the virtual world). Modding is only possible if the programming of the game allows it. The tertiary level of Promethean seduction is the ability to create short film recordings from one’s own moves and sequences, which can be enjoyed as animated short films, so-called machinimas, and sometimes find wide distribution on the Internet. Thus, a maximum expansion of the markets is achieved, and a seductive moment of the games leads to the

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provisional satisfaction of the filmically induced Promethean impulse: to become a director and filmmaker in the montage of a machinima film—and at the same time to remain the hero in one’s own work. However, this also means completely succumbing to the virtual illusion and becoming part of it. In contrast to the completely playable MMORPG, interactive films promise the fulfillment of the dream of a self-influenced feature film. In this respect, they represent a genre of computer games that consists to a considerable extent of fully animated cutscenes and only switches to game mode at key points. The passive reception of a feature film alternates with punctual intervention according to programmed parameters in the action. The possibilities of avatar creation and modding are usually not given here. Although there were early attempts in the history of video games to combine film elements and interactive game scenarios, this concept became more attractive the higher resolution and more detailed the game optics were designed and thus could be fundamentally approximated to film aesthetics. In early variants, the quality of the film-like cutscenes is significantly better than that of the interactive game sequences. Only in the last ten years have these elements seamlessly merged. At the same time, the audiovisual stylistic devices of the games (perspectives, shot sizes, music, sound, and so on) are approaching film. The aim is to give players the feeling of continuing the game scenes on their own. They thus become, as it were, the scriptwriter and director, who are responsible for influencing the course of the action. The music is of great importance, as it influences the basic mood given by the game, creates stress through atonality and rhythm in existential borderline situations or peace and concentration through ambient music. What is to be forgotten is the fact that both character traits and basic situations are predetermined by the game. The backgrounds of the action and the motivation of the characters often remain initially hidden or must first be explored. The difference between feature film and interactive film is primarily to be found in the predetermined view dramaturgy: The film largely dictates perspectives and montage through the camera work, in the interactive film numerous elements and perspectives can be influenced. Again, the player becomes the director, who outside the cutscenes makes the decisions and defines less the world (as in the MMORPG) than the view of the world. Game designer David Cage has developed an influential oeuvre of interactive films: Fahrenheit (Quantic Dream; 2005), Heavy Rain and Beyond: Two Souls (Quantic Dream; 2013) are video games heavily influenced by cinematic aesthetics, references to star personae (Fig. 9.2) and genre typology with extensive cutscenes and only occasional interactive decisions. The games always start from a crisis situation, which has strong references to film noir, the dark crime film

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Fig. 9.2   Beyond Two Souls (Quantic Dreams, Screenshot)—Elliot Page and Willem Dafoe as star personae and avatars

of Hollywood in the 1940s. Often, as a player, you are put in a highly ambivalent and inscrutable situation that demands existential decisions without providing transparent contexts. In Fahrenheit, you start the game as a character holding a bloody knife in his hand and standing next to a corpse. To get the game started, the first thing to do is to dispose of the corpse. Only then can the connections be figured out. The empathy with the initially unfamiliar and ambivalent protagonist is just as important as the directing of the direction of view and perspective. You are both actor and director—at least within the given framework. In the neo-noir game Heavy Rain, you identify with the desperate father of a kidnapped child who has to decide at a central point whether to amputate a finger to move on. Here, decision options mix with predetermined perspectives and stirring sound design to create a scenario reminiscent of the auto-destruction orgies of the Saw film series (2004–2010) from the context of terror cinema. As a player who identifies with this borderline situation, one is inclined to forget that, despite the interactive moments, one is still moving within a tight corset of predetermined possibilities. A ‘world-building’ as in the MMORPG does not take place here. The game only allows variants within a certain framework. This can be traced in the different film-like recordings and montages of game moves that circulate on the Internet. Unlike in open game formats, it is also not possible in the interactive

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film to return to already completed stations or places. However, the essential decisions can influence the outcome of the game. The world of games is far from over, but is just beginning to bring its seductive potential to fruition: In the video game, the mythical tradition of epic storytelling, generic standard situations, cinema aesthetics, and the (apparent) fulfillment of the Promethean impulse combine to form a strikingly contemporary mixture that elevates Baudrillard’s simulacrum theses to a level of virtual world building. The world of virtual simulacra is rarely more clearly observable than in the interactive medium, which has been working on perfecting its own simulation mechanisms in recent years. There is no question whether the phenomenon of worlds completely created by the computer and modified by the recipient, or the temporary creation of one’s own film productions, have a future-oriented chance. In the interactive film, the boundary between the art forms has long since been abolished—the Promethean impulse must largely run into the void here, at least in the last instance. It is a ‘McGuffin’, an empty promise to the audience—and therefore all the more seductive. Even in the game, we cannot form worlds, even if we are promised to do so. But the challenge itself is the impulse to try. It is noteworthy that the aesthetics of commercial US cinema are increasingly aligning with the digital world of computer games: through CGI technology (computer generated images), point of view action scenes and multiple levels of probation. In this alignment, cinema seems to be targeting a gamer audience, without being able to satisfy the Promethean impulse at the same time.

9.3 Terrorism, Propaganda, Ideology and Seduction When thinking about media and seduction, political propaganda often comes to mind first: Media content is used to affirm ideologically radical positions. And indeed, we find ideological propaganda not only in the moving phases of history—especially around the two world wars of the twentieth century—but also in current totalitarian systems (Russia, China, North Korea, Turkey). But not only in extreme contexts is media used to falsify and reinterpret the present and history, propagandistic subtexts that propagate societal values, sometimes openly, sometimes covertly, can also be found in Western media. Due to the spread via the Internet, however, one can now assume a globally oriented production. One of the most extreme examples of media propaganda of the last decade, spread in this way, can be found around the emergence and reign of terror of the so-called “Islamic State”. This internationally active terrorist organization disseminated, among other things, inhuman snuff videos, in which the real torture and murder

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of “regime enemies” was aesthetically prepared for social media. Some of these videos, which mostly circulated in heavily censored form in Western media, were among the most successful Internet contributions during their distribution era (Stiglegger 2015). The violence shown and implied must therefore be considered part of the seductive process—the films work not despite, but also because of this real violence and the real death of people classified as “enemy”. They are thus a fundamental ethical challenge for the ideologically non-affirmative viewer. The propaganda of the IS crosses the last taboos of the liberal West with great international resonance and challenges it in the most cynical way. It must be assumed that the still circulating propaganda videos with drastic violence have a clear effect, are intended to confirm and satisfy an already convinced audience and above all serve as a deterrent to enemies. Due to the use of real violence, these video clips are related to the commercial violence-pornographic snuff film, the existence of which, however, remains disputed (Stiglegger 2007, p. 653). If one reduces the definition of snuff film to the media staging by means of real violence, then the IS videos can indeed be considered in this context. This undoubtedly most extreme form of media image production of the last decades poses an extreme challenge to film studies. If one were to think through the three stages of seduction in this context, one would first ask oneself, how do these films seduce the viewer into wanting to see them at all? Here it seems important that they stand in a concrete political and ideological context and can successfully authenticate the events. The IS videos promise the sensation of real death, coupled with a spectacular setting—an ultimate taboo break according to human rights and the societal rules of Western industrial nations. They are thus an inhumane form of media protest. In addition, they appeal to the sensationalism and curiosity of the ideologically indifferent or even critical Internet user. They offer the taboo break of the media-reproduced, real act of violence. On the first stage of seduction, these videos thus appeal to the curiosity about the systemic act of violence and the demonstration of real death, which are outlawed in Western society. What a film like Faces of Death (1978) by Conan le Cilaire largely reenacted and sold as “real” is now made accessible to anyone interested worldwide in Internet clips. Accordingly high are the download numbers. It can be assumed that the aura of authenticity exerts a further attraction here, as does the dialectic of disgust. The IS clips give an ideologically inclined audience a chance to leave the order of the social, to witness a border experience—to see real death and yet to be protected in the virtual space. On the second level, it is about the clearly identifiable message—as in a commercial. Now, the IS clips are ideological commercials that advertise the Islam-

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ist worldview in the most drastic (and cynical) way, in which people of different faiths are automatically doomed to death. Each of the clips is clearly trying to provide rationally comprehensible reasons for this enemy image: In contrastive montages, in which we get to see the preceding acts of war against the IS. Statements by US politicians are also presented here as ideological enemy material. At the same time, these clips are ideologically directed as a warning to the opponents of this statement: They provide an impression of what threatens the ideological enemies: beheading, burning alive. On a second level, these terror clips function as advertisements for the system of the “Islamic State” and against the critical or hostile position. They are a demonstration of power for the followers and an audiovisual act of terror against the enemies. In this context, the ‘counter narrative’ is also anchored, in which these films are directed as a response to the messages of stylistically similar Hollywood cinema (like Oliver Stone’s montage cinema). What is truly disturbing in this case is the consideration of what the level of covert seduction could offer here. The third level of seduction as enticement to ‘something else’ that is initially not recognizable. This ‘other’ is hidden, among other things, in the aesthetics of the clips. They stage the IS executioners as superhuman and fundamentally de-individualized heroes through their masking, who can kill and torture without scruples and hesitation, as they stand on the “right side” in the sense of their ideology, and act in the “name of God”. They are thus in the symbol system of these clips the holy sword of divine execution, their actions are directly linked to a “divine will”. Ritualized staging, radicality of action, and pathetic exaggeration of violence (especially in the burning video) are intended to give friends and enemies a sense of the “sacred primal force” of IS. This is a direct appeal to a mythical primal narrative that has an identity-forming function for IS. Indirectly, these stagings are thus intended to trigger the same feelings of a longing for superiority in the ideologically inclined audience. But this again corresponds to the “counter narrative” that IS seems to intend. The settings of the clips from the desert and the seashore are as universal as they are mythically charged. Both the desert and the sea—the water desert—function in religious writings as transit places. And as “passage places” they are the settings of passage rites, where spiritual transformations take place. Thus, both Moses in the Old and Jesus in the New Testament have key experiences in the desert. It therefore does not seem arbitrary that such picturesque settings were chosen in the current clips. The clips thus indirectly address the followers with the request to become part of the myth themselves—and thus to have a share in the realm of the sacred—the “state of God” (Wiktorowicz 2004).

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In their completely immoral, inhuman acts of violence, the executioners of IS also represent a radical detachment from the values of modernity and enlightenment—including a rejection of human rights. Although they see themselves as the executive of a higher mission according to their own statements, they thus resemble the dark sovereigns from Western media narratives: They remind us of proto-fascist ruler figures like Darth Vader, mysterious serial killers and other arbitrary perpetrators who set their own laws against a world of rules and sublimated drives. The events of the clips could thus be misunderstood as a symbolic disinhibition and wildness fantasy—a covert appeal to those viewers who experience themselves as powerless and dream of this unleashing in the tyrannical act of violence in order to elevate themselves. Similar to the de Sadean tyrants in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s film adaptation Salò (1975) they repeatedly emphasize that in this arbitrary exercise of power they are “the true anarchists”—a fatal misinterpretation of self-elevation. But fundamentally, the ruthless exercise of violence is part of the targeted fascination. This also applies to other propaganda videos of IS, such as the highly successful “image film” Clashing Swords (2014), in which iPhone-filmed shootouts from the shooter’s perspective specifically address the viewing habits of an ego-shooter gamer audience. However, blood and corpses here are real. If one accepts Boris Groys’ thesis from “Under Suspicion. A Phenomenology of the Media” (2000, p. 156, 201, 207) that ideological terror clips can also be analyzed as works of art, it becomes strikingly clear how purposefully seductive these stagings proceed. And instead of mainly provoking shock and disgust, it is to be feared, on the contrary, that these clips achieve their goal and become a fascination for a sympathizing or uncertain audience that is uncritically exposed to their strategies. They want to constitute an Islamist radical subject. It is striking that in the mentioned videos no religious contexts are conveyed in an understandable way. Such elements are present in text overlays or ritual music, but are not translated or embedded in a comprehensible context. The seductionanalytical view has rather shown that the propagandists are excellently familiar with the forms of expression of Western media and mainly use such media-established elements that are easily understandable for a young audience. Thus, they appeal to media competence and quote at least in form from Hollywood films, computer games, music videos, and trailers. What they convey with this is rather a distorted image of Western media content, which is literally violently bent to fit the ideological messages. The international resonance with a young, easily manipulable audience proves the propagandists right to a certain extent, because with the recitation of their

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beliefs and brutal acts of violence—as was the case in earlier terror videos—they would hardly inspire or fascinate such a clientele. With the technically high-quality staged propaganda videos, IS has set in motion an effective seduction machinery that not only generates the desired terror, but also mobilizes further fanatics to dedicate (and sacrifice) themselves to the fight for a rule under Sharia law. Insofar as these videos can record an effect that is comprehensible in reality, it can be assumed that their seductive strategies work on several levels, especially because they make use of established pop-cultural codes. The IS propaganda videos can be understood in the sense of the film’s seduction theory as a media seduction to evil: as a call to and glorification of violence against ideological enemies, as an excessive and fatal degradation of dissenters in the name of a dogmatic and, in the sense of enlightenment, irrational message.

9.4 Outlook These preceding remarks are less final comments than an approach for the future expansion of the seduction theory to the analysis of other media, be it in ludological or ideological terms. The present introductory volume provides the basis for a further perspective on time-based and performative media and may also bring their seductive strategies into the light of analytical knowledge. The theory of seduction seems all the more meaningful in the moralizing discourse about media content, as it specifically aims to consciously accept the risky challenges of media content and to productively refer to them. The idea of considering media as a ‘safe space’ that avoids the hurtful provocation of the audience is countered by an active acceptance of the challenge to explore areas of existence in a playful and ultimately reversible way (Winkler 2004) that would otherwise remain largely closed to us. Films, games, series, internet clips, etc. must be understood as artistic ‘educational media’ that intensely influence our thinking and feeling with their seductive strategies, to confront us with existential challenges: In the confrontation with death, transgression, illness, loss, sexuality, violence, etc. we experience symbolic border situations, we are confronted with elementary questions that can always open up our experience anew. The seduction theory of film and media offers a theoretical approach to finding possible answers to find out what the media knows that we do not know. Let us accept this challenge in the best sense and continue to explore this inexhaustible creative cosmos of media creativity. In any case, the fundamental insight remains: Deep in the heart of cinema lies the power of seduction.

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References Groys, Boris. 2000. Unter Verdacht. Eine Phänomenologie der Medien. München: Carl Hanser. Stiglegger, Marcus. 2007. Snuff. In Reclams Sachlexikon des Films. aktualisierte und erweiterte Auflage, Ed. Thomas Koebner, Vol. 2, 653. Stuttgart: Reclam. Stiglegger, Marcus. 2016. The Promethean Impulse in the Interactive Feature Film. In Films and Games: Interactions, Ed. Andreas Rauscher. 28–37. Berlin: Bertz + Fischer. Stiglegger, Marcus. 2015. Real virtuality. Eine neue Ära der islamistischen Propaganda. Telepolis, 20. Dezember 2015. https://www.heise.de/tp/features/Real-Virtuality-3377203.html. Zugegriffen: 6. Sept. 2022. Wiktorowicz, Quintan. 2004. Framing Jihad: Intramovement framing contests and alQaeda’s struggle for sacred authority. International Review of Social History 49(S12): 159–177. Winkler, Hartmut. 2004. Mediendefinition. Medienwissenschaft – Rezensionen 4(1): 9–27.