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<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1">
<style>
body {
font-family: "Lato", sans-serif;
}
.sidebar {
height: 100%;
width: 0;
position: fixed;
z-index: 1;
top: 0;
left: 0;
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<body>
<div id="mySidebar" class="sidebar">
<a href="javascript:void(0)" class="closebtn" onclick="closeNav()"> X </a>
<a href="index.html">Home</a>
<a href="issues.html">Issues</a>
<a href="about.html">About Us</a>
</div>
<div id="main">
<button class="openbtn" onclick="openNav()"> MENU</button>
</div>
<script>
function openNav() {
document.getElementById("mySidebar").style.width = "250px";
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<div align="center">
<h1>Who Is the Spectator ?</h1>
<br>
<h3>Devdan Dey</h3>
<br>
<br>
<h2><b>(I)</b></h2>
<p>Two people - crippled - one physically, the other mentally. They meet at work, in one of
the slaughterhouses where a daily blood bath takes place. One day they discovered,
strangely, that they have the same dream every day. A male deer and a female deer in
a snow-white wilderness, turning over wet soil and stones, looking for grass and juicy
leaves, and drinking cold spring water. Two cast shadows in the transparent water.
Their nose touched others' noses, lips on the lips. Sometimes the doe sees the old stag
across a small brook, took a step closer, and then again moves away, in dreams, in
reality, in a desperate effort to overcome impediments.
Ildikó Enyedi's On Body and Soul (2017), the title itself invites us to take a closer look
at cognition and identity through the lens of cinema's body and soul.</p>
<br>
<h2><b>(II)</b></h2>
<p>
We can define the slaughterhouse as the treacherous ruthlessness of reality. We can
analyze crippledness as the symbol of marginalization, incomprehensible gaps of
inadaptability with society. But then the movie will lose its pristine, impenetrable,
sensual immediacy. The ineffable mystery sparked by the contrast between the
unfathomable, violent, awful butchery of the slaughterhouse and the silent, white,
gentle, yet desolate snow-filled dreamscape will be obliterated.
It is not like I am the proponent of the mainstream formulaic criticism that resonates:
"Cinema's genteel refinement is lost in the theories' twists and turns." On the contrary, if
poetical aesthetics abandon theory, it will become nothing more than egotistic vanity.
Cinema is not reducible to Jungian cognitive function, nor the symbolic manipulation of
signifier/ signified. It is not the assimilation of "leftovers of other discourse". Rather,
cinema incorporates doubts and distrust, and forces other disciplines to self-criticize and
engage in re-investigation.
We cannot tauten an ideological or psychological interpretation over Cinema.
As Susan Sontag writes, in place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.
</p>
<br>
<h2><b>(III)</b></h2>
<p>
Before close examination, if we try to define the overall theme of the movie in broader
strokes, we can say that the protagonists' seemingly insurmountable physical limitations
in the eyes of the general public are called into question. The movie eventually attempts
to persuade us (by outgrowing empathy) using various tools like close up, long shots,
deep long shots, etc., that we were mistaken.
In other words, the content itself invites the viewer to focus on the techniques of form
rather than the story, which is too dull and rudimentary to consider.
</p>
<p>
Again, even after experiencing the inherent fear, loneliness, and doubts of the female
character (by encroaching on her privacy), when the loafer annoys her and imitates her
helpless mechanical stride, we laugh, as do the other inexperienced workers nearby.
But it was not meant to happen.
</p>
<p>How can an aching heart by seeing the toothbrush mustached Trump's plight burst into
wild unrequited laughter, a few moments later, watching his instant of humiliation?
If this instant mood swing, the volatile temper of the spectator, does not preexist, the
conditions of its possibility to become the film, just as it was supposed to be, may not be
possible.</p>
<br>
<h2><b>(IV)</b></h2>
<p>
Let's take a closer look at one of the strategies used to create cinematic affection—
camera movement, especially close-up and long-shot.
A close-up shot in the movie discloses the hidden life of the little things. It joins the
phenomenology of pure appearance, as Balasz writes, with the necessity to render
legible both a multiplicity and a latency of meanings. It removes the flatness of the
character by raising multiple-dimensional, even contradictory, emotional traits.
Long-shot, instead, by introducing spatial distance produces a tension between ego and
other. The long shot identifies the subject as an autonomous, coherent self by
differentiating him/herself from others and his/her external environment.
Again, whenever a character is perceived from behind a distance window-pane, the
shot obfuscates the cinematic signified by a barrier from getting the real character, as it
is - hence developing a space to project the spectator's perspective.
If close-up discloses, long-shot obfuscates. If close-up harmonizes self-reflexivity, long-
shot is more imaginative. But it is creating less of a binary opposition or simple dialectic
relationship between the shots and more of a 'differance' (in Derrida's sense of a
combination of difference and mutual deferral).
</p>
<p>If a close-up resembles the recognition of a human subject through another, a long shot
resembles the recognition (or mis-cognition) of another as oneself, consider oneself in
and as another.
In this way, by recognizing the variations between close-up and long-shot, an affective
cinematic experience is enunciated.</p>
<br>
<h2><b>(V)</b></h2>
<p>
Another crucial question emerges regarding the process of identification.
Even after practicing a lot overnight, when she failed to communicate properly with the
man, and even after we learned all the secret rehearsals of the girl intrusively, we
couldn't help but chuckle out loud at the comical effect of that failed communication. The
sad look of the girl after the incomplete conversation makes us slightly depressed but
the whole thing eventually turns perverted into taking pleasure in the pain of a close
friend. But it was not supposed to happen.
</p>
<p>
Why do we empathize with a character sometimes, sympathize another time with the
same person, and even feel partially alienated from time to time? Why do we identify
with some characters and not others? A close-up of a monster could scare the crap out
of me, but the creature might be afraid of me as well, which I don't take into account.
If the technology of camera movement (close-up, long-shots, and so on) exhibits spatial
variation, the process of identification and volatile temperament (and therefore the
technology of cutting and composition of the frame) demonstrates temporal variation.
Is it conceivable to create a film if the audience cannot connect with these shared
passions and the constant temporal variation? (It could be some avant-garde movie that
challenges the basic notions of "understanding", but it cannot be a narrative film, for
sure.)
</p>
<p>We may say, borrowing Kant's terms, the ground for the possibility of experience is
founded on certain transcendental principles by means of which human subjects have
perceptual, cognitive, and aesthetic access to the (cinematic) world.</p>
<p>And these tensions between the spatio-temporal variations yield affection, which
modern analysts take for granted. Now is the high time to "[r]ecover our senses. We
must learn to see more, to hear more, to feel more."</p>
</div>
</body>
</html>