When I went to Jewish day school as a kid, we read one chapter of the Torah a month. It wasn’t as dogmatic as you might think. Genesis doesn’t contain much religious law that I can remember, so outside of an obvious political slant (there’s that Promised Land that comes up quite often), the practice seemed mainly an effort to sate a group of children with a story for an hour.

For the most part, the first two books of the Torah play out steeped in melodrama and driven on the heartbeat of narrative. And if having an hour a day for biblical study was, in actuality, an effort to build piety in the youngest generation of Jews, then it was the exhilaration of narrative that built that power of God in my eyes, not love for the image of Him in all living things. I grew up terrified of a vengeful Old Testament God, an ever-watching, ever-judging eye that grew more powerful as the chapters whipped by, with tales of stairways to heaven or national ethnic plagues and of holidays past, each with their own narratives. (On the ones without narratives, Jews built their own;  a Yom Kippur doesn’t go by without at least a passing evocation of Sandy Koufax and the 1965 World Series).

I was a pious God-fearing chosen person alright, and it wasn’t through proof of His love and power. It was through experiencing story.

If we look at the Bible in the most cynical of ways, as a propagandistic tool to relax the masses in the favour of progressing a state, it’s no coincidence that it was given the form of the greatest story ever told. And that’s not limited to the Old or New Testaments, the most pervasive of these stories. The Koran, the Bhagavad Gita, the Buddhacarita. All doctrine falls toward myth, all myth looks toward epic, all epic blushes toward its narrative. And that narrative tempers the masses with their own prophetic experience, tempering them to bow in the face of power. Narrative gives form to power.

As I’ve noticed, a lot of Jews sometimes qualify our people as having more of an emphasis on history rather than doctrine, and why wouldn’t that be true? When our history is full of such potency, of such Homeric power and tragedy? So as I grew older, as the value of this specific religious story waned, and as the importance of this God faded behind the clouds, it wasn’t a surprising revelation that Narrative itself emerged as the new god of my life, as the power that could grant the greatest miracle: engaging my mind in the traumatic viscerality of deific strength. And so, my creative struggle became clear: using narrative, the Bible’s most powerful tool, to recreate those prophetic religious experiences, to enrapture minds like mine was enraptured. How else can humanity ascend when godly visions are so rare these days? Artists have to create those experiences for mankind.

But I use the word ‘experiences’ specifically, not just ‘narratives.’ Because it is, of course, the process of experiencing the narrative that renders it so intoxicating, that gives it any power whatsoever. A narrative not packaged in the right form or, to put it crudely, not well-told is flaccid and lame. A narrative summed up in bullet points, sped through, focusing on the wrong details (whatever that means) is weak. A good storyteller is a good storyteller for their ability to craft a vehicle for a narrative to accelerate. In other words, it is the effectiveness of the form of said narrative which grants that narrative power. The power to be godly. The power to create God. The power to create something beyond God. Form is that which dictates how the audience experiences the narrative and, in turn, how effective and affective that experience is.

Those experiences amount to a greater good as they, by mirroring and adopting the manner in which we perceive reality, manufacture new ones, allowing the human consciousness to break free of the restrictions of history and contemporary society into imagined realities. While not necessarily always creating a peaceful experience, the narrative act is ultimately altruistic, if not by offering an ‘escape’ from an unkind existence, then by offering a compounding of life. You are able to experience more than the restrictions of your given time, culture, or situation with the power of narrative. You are able to experience a multiplicity of perspectives, learning, growing, and, eventually, transcending into a spiritual space. The most powerful art then is art that deliberately seeks to be Experiential, by using the force of narrative to purposefully form experiences and, in turn, memories.

So, I’d quibble with Camus on that quote. It’s not one or two images, it’s experiences that we search for, again and again. Images are significant because they live in the context of experiences. They can be aesthetically immaculate and sublime, but their power is accelerated through narrative experiences. But Camus is right in that they are those “in which our heart first opened,” since it is only through comparing the impressions of reality in art to the way our bodies reacted to those initial experiences that creative impressions have any emotional, philosophical, intellectual or, most importantly, spiritual reverence. Singular experiences are the most powerful dictators of human mind, body, and spirit, be they driven by unconscious or conscious power. Carl Jung would certainly define this as an unconscious drive: the personal unconscious as fuelled by the buildup of experiences in childhood. And as those experiences build and as those memories form, they charge the ego with energy that can dictate it in the form of a complex. Jung said that “…complexes can have us. The existence of complexes throws serious doubt on the naive assumption of the unity of consciousness…and on the supremacy of the will.” In other words, experiences can have an omnipotent hold on our lives.

Some definitions are probably in order before we go any further. This piece is going to refer to Experiential as the quality which affects the manner in which a person perceives reality. This can include interactions with other people, psychological states, and emotions, and then recalling those perceptions through memories and dreams. Experiential narratives fall into the realm of empiricism. Narratives that have the greatest effect on the audience are ones that are able to illicit sensorial and physiological responses by tapping into the sectors of the human body that recognize and log experiential knowledge, knowledge acquired via experience and observation. Film is an interesting example of this since it doesn’t have any actual physicality with which to interact with the viewer. It must then rely on psychologically manipulative techniques in its form in order to create an ‘experience.’

Experiential Cinema describes films that emphasize a visceral audience response, a response that is usually restricted to lived experiences or the recollection of lived experiences in the form of memories which unearth the physiological reactions to those experiences when they were originally lived. Watching an Experiential film, for reasons outlined in this piece, is akin to experiencing something you would never otherwise experience. Or remembering something that never happened to you. For a narrative to be an experience,  it would have to illicit qualities of the Visceral, that which speaks to uncontrollable bodily reactions to external influences. And, through various means, which we’ll get into in just a few sentences, it does just that.

So experiential narrative is funny.

Because narratives aren’t real.

But still, they formulate in the human mind and we interact with them. They become active. They become memories. A unique subjective reality enters our brain and becomes objective.

The word we can give to reality’s form in the human body is ‘experience.’ The word we can give to experience’s form is ‘cinema.’

Let’s start with a foundational narrative experience. Before cinema. Before the Bible. Before a God that we know. We’ll get to all those in a moment.

When Homer invokes the Muse at the beginning of The Odyssey, he asks for her to sing of “the man of twists and turns driven time and again off course” and the Muse fulfils us with a song that travels back and forth on the chaos of lived experience. Homer calls for the base fulfilment of a narrative and a pure narrative experience is what follows.

The crux of The Odyssey, as we know it, is told largely as a recollection to the Phaeacians within the confines of quotation marks. Because of this, throughout the course of the poem, we are witness not only to Odysseus’s journey to the island of the Phaeacians and eventually back home to Ithaca, but to the manner in which he relives his experience and how those Phaeacians inherit it. It’s an unadulterated catalogue of the exchanging of experiences and of levying emotions from one’s own ‘twists and turns’ onto one’s audience. Odysseus, for one, cries often throughout his retelling, and Homer indulges us in a refrain describing his audience as falling “silent, hushed, his story holding them spellbound down the shadowed halls.”

Here we see rhetorical narrative utilizing Experiential qualities to become an equalizer. As Odysseus processes his narrative, he, in turns, grips his audience by the same physiological reactions and emotions. The same. It’s not fair to judge whether they’re lesser and greater for him or for his audience just because they correspond to his lived reality. In the moment of oral storytelling, they are everyone’s experiences. Andrei Tarkovsky wrote that “experience is conveyed to the audience graphically and immediately, with photographic precision, so that the audience’s emotions becomes akin to those of a witness, if not actually of an author.” It’s an exchange of power, an exchange of will. Odysseus, who in fact knows the end of his story, could, in fact, be argued to be in less emotional turmoil than his audience, who are, in this moment, participating in the experience for the first time. In the role of storyteller and audience, narrative experience renders the listener as physically involved as the orator, and in that equity of emotional force comes a unified experience.

Aristotle noted the singular power of The Odyssey, citing its unity as key in his musings on poetics:

Aristotle is specifically decrying the tendency for Greek poets to include the entirety of their subject’s lives in their Heracleids or Thesieds or what have you. The Odyssey distinctively tells a single movement, of Odysseus’s journey home. By cutting the superfluous elements of his life, Homer pioneered an Experiential manner of narrative that operates with a unity of action. It is a fell swoop. “Since the plot is an imitation of an action, the latter ought to be both unified and complete, and the component events ought to be so firmly compacted that, if any one of them is shifted to another place or removed, the whole is loosened up and dislocated.”7 In the manner of classical unities, Narrative as an action aligns with a human understanding of memory and experience. Witnessing a narrative that adheres to the unity of action is akin to reliving one’s own experience. It is a chronicle of memory and affects the viewer as if they were recalling their own.

Cinematic narrative that adheres to a unity of action is the most powerful medium in enacting the emotional and physical byproducts of experience and recollection in a viewer, a quality I’ll be calling ‘Experiential’ from here on out. This is achieved through film narrative’s relationship with film form. If narrative engages humanity’s ability to enact godly power by engaging others in singular experiences, then filmic form is the vehicle in which narrative is amplified to the point that it recreates living experiences in a manner in which our consciousness and our bodies are used to experiencing them: as memories and as the present moment as played out in our reality. This phenomenon is unique to cinema. While other arts use their materials to create impressions of life and reality, no other narrative art is crafted from reality and time itself, something Tarkovsky would famously call ‘sculpting in time.’ Film, to Tarkovsky has an “impact on [the viewer’s] consciousness… namely the opportunity to live through what is happening on screen as if it were his own life”, doing so by “taking an impression of time…once seen and recorded, time could now be preserved in metal boxes over a long period (theoretically forever).” And so, in utilizing reality to manufacture an impression of reality, cinema is exceptional in its ability to create a living experience to stimulate audiences. Narrative propels this reality through a context that we are familiar with (via the unity of action), and cinematic form molds this context into an Experiential vessel.

Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman is notorious for her vessels of experience and is a good baseline to begin with as they command the viewer to experience true mundanity; the lifeblood of post-capitalist reality. Take Je, tu, il, elle (1974) for example. The film’s plot is effectively structured into three sections:

1. Our protagonist and narrator Julie (played by the director) and her self-imposed isolation, living off a diet of granulated sugar

2. Her hitchhiking trip and tepid sexual encounter with a truck driver

3. Her spending the night at her lover’s apartment featuring an infamous 15-minute long sex scene.

Je, tu, il, elle is dominated by a powerful minimalism, within the set design and the form as well. The opening section’s narration plays out literally and chronologically. Akerman tells us what she did on each day, going so far as to declare them in a neo-biblical rhetoric as ‘the first  day, the second, the eighth’ until she has written scores of letters, eaten straight sugar, and rearranged her mattress to the point that her apartment resembles nothing so much as oblivion. But Akerman the director does not skip representing anything. If this isolated and alienated character is starved of human connection to the point that these actions are all the stimulus that her days have, then it is all the stimulus that we have too. The film has been interpreted as a chronicle of life after heartbreak, the pain of which leads us to inaction  and isolation. And so we are starved of images, of direction, and of imagistic and narrative causality in general to the point that we latch on to several minute long shots of a woman eating sugar with a spoon out of a paper bag, spilling it, then cleaning it back up. It’s all that we have. We are painstaking witness to literal singular actions like this as well as the overarching singular action of trying to sate tedium. The film’s form imitates the action in turn imitating the soul of the philosophy of the film.

The film acts as a living and recallable memory of times that we often don’t revisit, lonely days of little to no engagement. It then becomes an experience of boredom, a quality that we don’t necessarily search for in film but something we nevertheless experience profoundly in Je, tu, il, elle all the same, an experience Akerman would go on to amplify in her magnum opus Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975), a 3 and a half hour long epic depiction of domesticity, the quotidian, all its habits and routines and the catastrophe of routine desynchronicity.

The third act of Je, tu, il, elle likewise absorbs the viewer in a hollow action, the act of sex devoid of eroticism. Though not necessarily tedious like the first act of the film, the sex scene passes beyond titillation to the point of bemusement until finally elicits confusion and concern. It resembles wrestling more than lustful passion and, in its presentation, as three five-minute long static shots, it demands our focus while denying the distracting inherent erotic excitement of cutting. This gives us the space to question it, as well as to participate in it. It elicits the experience of a regretful sexual encounter, the dichotomy of physical action and psychological bewilderment.

These long minimalist shots are important in Akerman’s entire oeuvre. In speaking on Jeanne Dielman, Akerman said that shooting mundane actions in real time “was the only way to shoot the film - to avoid cutting the action in a hundred places, to look carefully and to be respectful. The framing was meant to respect her space, her, and her gestures within it.” There’s a tacit respect to uninterrupted recollection in its ability to revive the emotional quality of an action and to conjure said emotions within the viewer. Paul Schrader wrote in Transcendental Style in Film:“Film techniques are about ‘getting there’— telling a story, explaining an action, evoking an emotion — whereas the long take is about ‘being there.’”

Regardless of tedium however, Je, tu, il, elle doesn’t lack narrative. It’s a small film but there is forward momentum, change, and arcs. A narrative about tedium and isolation runs the risk of completely losing engagement in its audience, but Akerman cleverly amplifies the narrative through formal experimentation, allowing for an all-encompassing viewing experience in which the protagonist and the viewer are subject to the same Experiential tides, waxing and waning within the actions of the film. It just so happens that those Experiential tides are the experience of loneliness and boredom.

Formal novelty and experimentation serve experience by enacting visceral engagement, a kind of hypnosis, turning cinema into a corporeal entertainment like a drug. Writing on Jeanne Dielman, film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum said it specifically "trains one to recognize and respond to fluctuations and nuances. If a radical cinema is something that goes to the roots of experience, this is, at the very least, a film that shows where and how some of these roots are buried.”9

Filmic chronicle doesn’t need to be so experimental, esoteric, and abrasive in order to be Experiential. Alfonso Cuaron’s enormously successful Roma (2018) operates as a living memory of his childhood live-in housekeeper Cleo. It’s told in the context of an immediately accessible narrative soaked in the melodrama of unrequited love, death, and belonging on the back of a traditional arc featuring climactic scenes of violence and suspense. In filming this memory, though, Cuaron cleverly does not succumb to the normal pitfalls of biographical cinema, that being: forcing a memory through the narrative restrictions that film drama demands while utilizing techniques in order to serve, to quote Schrader again, “getting there.” Like Akerman, Cuaron shoots his film as a serious of long takes. While these are far more dynamic takes than those in Je, tu, il, elle, they aren’t the elaborate and labyrinthine ones of his earlier films like Children of Men (2006). Nevertheless, they enforce a pervasive experience that the film would lack if it were filled with rapid cuts in moments of narrative turmoil.

Let’s look at two scenes in Roma to see how, while narrative ultimately dictates the experience, form amplifies the narrative into a bodily chronicle — in other words, how narrative and form work together to create an illusory memory in the viewer. The scenes come as dual climaxes in the film, the Corpus Christi Massacre and when Cleo saves two of her charges from drowning. Both contain a cinematic narrative tendency that rarely exists in reality or memory, shot in such a way as to subvert the cliché and subsume it into Experiential cinema: a reveal.

In the former scene, Cleo is shopping for cribs with her employer’s mother Teresa when the riot breaks out. A shot and wounded protester limps into the department store, followed by members of a government sponsored paramilitary group. They shoot the protester and run out the department store, but before they do, we see who one of the gunmen is: Férmin, Cleo’s ex-lover and the father of the child for whom she’s buying a crib.

A lesser film would highlight the colon I put into that last sentence and use it as a break for a cut, an unveiling, and therein lies drama. But this film is marked by the dichotomy between dynamism within the frame and the action of the frame. The streets erupt in violence, Cleo and Teresa witness it, react, a man runs into the department store, is shot, and Férmin is revealed over the course of two slowly panning shots (a movement that is found throughout the film). From the beginning of the first shot to the end of the second, over the course of a minute and a half, everything changes. That slow movement is especially important in letting in the spectacle of the world around the characters while mimicking the viewpoint of a bystander. Frenetic, anxious cutting would certainly provide a psychological perspective and may heighten the energy of the given moment, but it wouldn’t provide an impression of specific visual perception. An actual image of the present. This reveal is dramatic but, perhaps more importantly, it is a moment of tragedy that deserves reflection and stillness in order to feel the profundity of the betrayal. The way Cuaron shoots and edits this scene, then, amounts to a recreation of the experience of living within the present of the scene and is evidence of the immense trust that he has in the viewer and of his confidence in his narrative and its characters; that we are able to feel and understand what the reality of the film gives us to feel and understand. And in that sense, we experience (and can recall the experience of) the moment as it  happened in history.

The beach sequence in Roma doubles this effect. Over the course of a six minute long shot, the stakes of the children drowning are established, they are threatened, and Cleo comes to their salvation, falling into a hug with the family as she finally externalizes  her anxieties about motherhood. The shot travels along a single axis, moving from the shoreline to the family’s beach chairs, out beyond the waves, and then back to the beach again. The camera isn’t lost below the surface and struggling for air, it doesn’t punch in to a sensitive close up as Cleo admits she never wanted her child. It moves as participant and as witness, into the fray but distant enough to leave us hopeless to help. In other words, it follows the position we would have were we there with Cleo: experiencing the emotional turmoil of narrative but safe from physical ramifications. It’s a duality of corporeal reactions. We watch with gritted teeth, yet we are safe on land. We witness in mind, we experience in body.

The illusory memories found in Roma and Je, tu, il, elle can be read through Gilles Deleuze’s thoughts on cinematic ‘Crystal-Images’ and the ‘circuits’ between virtual images (reflections, photos, film) and actual images (the source of the virtual image in reality). Following in the footsteps of Henri Bergson’s theories on time and perception Deleuze spoke on a new understanding of past and present:

The present duplicates itself into “perception and recollection” at once, constantly appearing and diverging. This is what Experential Filmic chronicle does as well, serving us a present from a specific vantage point (in the crib store, on the floor of Akerman’s apartment) that becomes recollect-able by all our senses through experiment’s with the narrative’s form. Watching Roma or Je, tu, il, elle feels like both a present experience (as it is actually happening in the moment when we watch them) as well as our own recollection of the events. “Time has split itself in two,” Deleuze says “at each moment as present and past, which differ from each other in nature…it has split the present in two heterogenous directions, one of which is launched towards the future while the other falls into the past.”11 This films’ placid paces and deemphasized drama allow us to interact with the images as ‘virtual’ even moreso, while their visceral experiential qualities creates an illusion of them being ‘actual.’ “This is the powerful, non-organic Life which grips the world. The visionary, the seer, is the one who sees in the crystal, and what he sees is the gushing of time as dividing in two, as splitting.”11 We can think of filmmakers like Cuaron and Akerman as Deleuze’s ‘Seers’ who are able to bring the past (memory) to the present as a current actual experience for their viewers.

Memory is an important part of Experiential cinema since its the manner in which our brain catalogues experience in a form that we can recall succinctly. It’s key to a subcategory of Experiential cinema that isn’t dominated by formal experimentation. Cinematic narrative without a deliberate Experiential form can still, nevertheless, affect the way the human mind experiences perception and memory. Films that invoke the epic mode of narrative, for example, often mimic the spatial and temporal causality that the human memory relies on in order to record experiences. This narrative mode often features ‘stations’ of sorts along a defined geographical path on the way to a goal. Think of the French plantation and the Playboy Bunny outpost and the Do Lung Bridge along the Nùng River in Apocalypse Now (1979) or the corn field and the apple orchard and the forest along the yellow brick road in The Wizard of Oz (1939). Even if the film’s form isn’t intentionally Experiential like in prior examples, the way that we are able to note duration, as characters physically journey across a changing landscape, especially if the spatial and temporal causality adhere to a unity of action as outlined by Aristotle, nevertheless forms an experience in the viewer via the literal direction of the narrative, what transpires on that physical journey, and how our memories log those events.

The naturalistic road movie is perhaps where this phenomenon is most obviously seen, since it requires honouring realism in time and geography in order to tell its narrative. Cuaron’s Y Tu Mama Tambien (2001)or Wim Wenders’ Road Trilogy (1974-1976), but especially his greatest work Paris, Texas (1984), all exemplify the power of geographical logic in forming memory and experiences. Paris, Texas and Y Tu Mama Tambien almost operate as the inverse of each other. Paris, Texas is a journey along an unknown path in order to reclaim a lost memory, Y Tu Mama Tambien is a journey along a road known to the protagonists as they form a foundational memory. Paris, Texas’ climactic scene features an uncanny moment of memory recollection and Y Tu Mama Tambien’s final scene is an immaculate dialogue on the awkwardness that forms between those who share foundational experiences when those experiences are recalled.

Road movies speak to the ultimate definition of ‘physical’ experience as occurring when an object or an environment changes. They are a literal example of change, a key principle in the progression of narrative. The concept of a ‘character or narrative arc’ relies on the change of  circumstance over time within a film. In a road film, or, in a broader sense, in an epic film, that change occurs in tandem with environmental changes, manifesting experiences not only in their characters, who ultimately learn the lessons of the narrative and are subject to the physical trials of the journey, but in the viewer, whose recall of the film-watching experience requires them to assimilate a  physical journey and a forward narrative movement through time and space into their own memory, ultimately forming an experience.

The spatial and temporal causality of films like these are a powerful literal indicator of narrative transpiring. It’s no wonder that they mimic some of the earliest narratives like The Iliad, The Odyssey, The Epic of Gilgamesh, or Joseph Campbell’s writings on the ‘monomyth’ in general. Until the advent of film, however, these indicators of causality had yet to be represented by human reality. The act of recollecting the events of a film whose narrative adheres to spatial and temporal causality, especially one that mimics the epic in its ‘stations,’ feels similar to recalling one’s own experiences or adventures. Each space moves into the next, it’s impossible to recall a single part isolated from the rest of the goings-on of the film. It is a holistic narrative memory that formulates and lives in the viewer’s mind as cohesively as their own.

And so narrative memory becomes visceral, which is to say that it renders our bodily reactions involuntary and instinctive. It controls our perceptions of reality, of morality, of human behaviour, and stimulates the parts of the human brain that necessitate empathy. It is not merely a representation of human actions, it is an illusory memory of our perceiving of human actions. It doesn’t take a huge jump to integrate the characters in the imagined reality of the film into our own reality and into the recollections thereof. By mimicking human perception and memory, Experiential narratives force us to empathize with the imaginary, force us to care passionately about inconsequential representations. As Susan Sontag writes in her essay On Style:

Her final point clarifies how all narrative is, by definition, experiential, in that it offers a vicarious existence for the viewer to participate in interesting human affairs without sacrificing repercussions. But it’s narrative that specifically seeks to mimic the manner in which humans perceive reality that creates the most powerful empathetic experiences, since it seeks to truly convince us that the reality, the human beings, and the consequences represented within the narrative has a direct influence on us.

But reality is not always honoured in Experiential film. In fact, some of the most powerfully Experiential films and filmmakers notably feature the distention and obliteration of time and space within their narrative. Even still, this isn’t in discordance with the human mind. In actuality, it’s perhaps more synchronous with man’s subconscious than films that do not wrestle with the logic of reality.

What is more surreal, after all, than surrendering your time to a movie?

As cinema transitioned from its origins ostensibly as a scientific effort to reproduce reality mechanically into a personal act of creative expression, the emergence of a cinematic surrealism was inevitable. As an act of expression, filmmaking cannot only recreate the manner in which the rational mind perceives and recalls reality, since the mind does not always perceive it and reality is rarely rational. Many of our most powerful and foundational experiences come during moments when we are deprived of rationality and logic, during times when our perceptions of reality are distended and obfuscated. Film is therefore innately sur-real; it is a small impression of reality atop the reality of waking life, dictated by the unstoppable happenings of the unconscious mind and its relationship to that which it perceives. In André Bréton’s Manifesto of Surrealism, he defines the movement as “Psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express…the actual functioning of thought. Dictated by thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason…”. Surrealism seeks, as its medium, the base functioning of human thought, regardless of intent or direction. Surrealism seeks to emerge from the subconscious into reality without the conduit of logic, emphasizing imagination over reality, or what Breton referred to as the “Marvellous,” the part of the self that reason cannot touch. This is the achievement sought by hypnotherapists and psychoanalysts. To achieve the same authority, Surrealist cinema enacts particular experiential qualities that create a hypnotic effect, becoming both the proverbial pocket-watch swaying back and forth and the archetypal doctor informing you that you are getting very sleepy. Through these qualities these films are rendered a waking subconscious state, a reality that operates through the logic of dreams and nightmares that we not only witness with lucid minds but experience with them. These hypnotic qualities induce audience participation with a type of narrative usually so bizarre as to be abrasive. A film operates independent of the viewer’s body, there is nothing literally physical about a trip to the movies. Hypnosis, in turn, strives to have complete control of a subject’s body in order to elucidate the unconscious mind or to induce action while bypassing the rationality of conscious thought.

Luis Buñuel, one of the great early explorers of the cinematic surreal, and colleague of Brétonul, is a good place to look for the roots of cinematic hypnosis. Beginning his career with perhaps the most famous Surrealist short film (or short film of any kind) Un Chien Andalou (1929), Buñuel noted a deliberate rejection of the rational: “no idea or image that might lend itself to a rational explanation of any kind would be accepted. We had to open all doors to the irrational and keep only those images that surprised us, without trying to explain why.” Depicting dreams that he and Salvador Dalí had the night before writing the screenplay, Buñuel worked to build walls around logic and the pictorial-language of dreams. Over the course of his filmography, Buñuel projected this thesis outside of the pure surrealism of the dreaming mind into narratives that appear superficially as social realism but live with the thrumming pulse of a surrealism and hypnosis. Un Chien Andalou is pure formal and narrative abrasion, an act of caustic bristling against comfort and understanding. In his later work Buñuel would soften the rampant surrealistic energy into a quieter kind while expanding hypnotic techniques to make his films far more subtly experiential but fully involving nevertheless.

30 or so years later in his feature film The Exterminating Angel (1962), Buñuel aims his Surrealistic cannon at bourgeois sensibilities, depicting a slow breakdown of logic and cognition in a gradual descent from executive functioning to irrationality. The film documents a group of aristocrats in Mexico sojourning at one of their mansions after a trip to the opera. In the morning, they find that none of them, for reasons that remains unexplained throughout the film, can leave the room. As soon as they approach the threshold of the room their urgency fizzles away. They become trapped in this room despite there being no physical barriers of escape.

Buñuel uses his attention to the Surreal to affect not just the content of the film, but the time that runs through that content, thereby denying the viewer the conventional tools used to understand cinematic narrative. Through these denials and contortions of rationality and time, The Exterminating Angel shatters established markers of mythologyand duration, starving us of the logical methods that audiences use to digest a film, rendering the experience of viewing the film an experience of irrationality, an experience of a denial of reality, and an experience of “trance.”

When we lack the distraction of trying to figure out the plot of a film or even of time passing, we surrender to it. In his subtle act of narrative surreality, Buñuel restricts elaborations upon the film’s peculiar mythology. Though The Exterminating Angel shares many superficial similarities with a traditional “haunting” movie, namely depicting a supernatural omnipotence over a space and a group of people, it oddly enough does not focus on said omnipotence. The force that keeps the characters stuck is never explained, what’s more it’s never explored. While the Hollywood horror film often elevates the search to diagnose supernatural entities as tantamount to defeating them, The Exterminating Angel instead shows its characters resignedly  accepting their fate. They struggle to survive, some make running attempts at the boundary of the room, but none postulate on ghosts or monsters. Some even kill themselves, assuming that they are forever damned, abandoning themselves to the supernatural power.

Classic haunt films make use of the hunt for mythology as a method to acclimate the viewers to the hauntings by a sort of psychoeducation of a  fiction. At first, the bursts of irrationality are terrifying but, as characters enlist seances and mediums in order to diagnose their homes and learn more about the mythology behind the supernatural goings-on, our heroes become more powerful, the haunting less terrifying, until it is defeated by demystification. Inversely, the mystification can elaborate and grow denser, filling the film with incomprehensible jargon and multiplying the mythology until it inexplicability defeats our heroes. Regardless of the outcome, it is an exploration of the mythology that marks these films, be it a mythology that grows benign and comprehensible, or one that grows malignant and incomprehensible. The Exterminating Angel lacks an examination of mythology in general, leaving us alienated from the logic that drives the film. There is an experiential satisfaction in learning the mythology of a horror film, akin to the satisfaction of a mystery unwinding in a detective film. Regardless of whether there is a violent climax, the act of demystification renders supernatural omnipotence impotent and provides the audience with a range of arcs to consider that characters may follow in order to defeat their foes. Without the logic of a mythology, and therefore without methods of inquiry into defeating a central antagonist, Buñuel denies the catharsis of audience speculation of the film’s plot, forcing us into an experiential participation with the listlessness of the film’s incomprehensibility. The narrative operates much like Bréton’s summation of the human unconscious: with an automatism and an absence of reason, “exempt from aesthetic or moral concern.”

As a narrative of catharsis-denial, this non-mythology, goes on to inform the very time of this time-based medium. Anecdotes of hypnosis or trances note an odd time dilation, wherein a hypnosis that lasts an hour feels like just a few minutes. The Exterminating Angel elicits a similar effect via another denial of catharsis: the denial of duration. The narrative of the film takes place over an indefinite period of time; we’re never exactly sure how long these characters are trapped and left to their own devices. The vignettes we see, these pieces of time, are thrown together a deliberate disregard for chronology (including actual “glitches” or repetition of moments back to back). We are not witnesses to sunsets, nor do we see anyone carving days into the wall. A character says it’s been over a month, another tells him that’s impossible. A viewer has the same dialogue with themselves while watching the movie. Without an understanding of duration or mythology, the logic of the film’s runtime disappears. What could transpire in a film that deprives us of any tool we could use to understand it? By depriving the audiences of conventional cinematic signifiers of duration and the physical and metaphysical laws of the diegesis, we reach an altered state of cinematic perception wherein we ‘lose track of time.’ Through a distension of our conception of chronology and duration, we enter a state of near timelessness, completely thrown off a traditional, linear extrapolation of causes and their effects, of events and their consequences. We are now part of an experiment taking place almost beyond time, while watching a medium that is inherently entangled with time. Surely, it’s been 90 minutes, you think, this is a 90-minute movie, yet the experience of those 90 minutes has been twisted and confused.

Deleuze’s Crystal-Image is helpful again here:  “the crystal-image is, then, the point of indiscernability of the two distinct images, the actual and the virtual [perception and recollection or present and past] while what we see in the crystal is time itself, a bit of time in the pure state, the very distinction between the two images which keeps on reconstituting itself.” Buñuel’s efforts illuminate what really happens to us in this space devoid of time. It’s through these techniques that a film is able to depart from the naturalistic narrative’s ability to evoke logical memory and take aim at the body directly, bypassing the rational mind and targeting the subconscious, the unexplored and relatively unexplained part of the human body that dictates our intentions and desires, the colours of our experience. We have lost touch with logical time and space, with duration, the signifiers of reality and the universe. When we lose track of time, our unconscious is exposed and susceptible to prodding, analysis, and radical shifts in logic. And so, we are propelled below the surface to the depths of our id. We’ve hit a primordial state of learning and experience. “For a film to be a success,” Tarkovsky says, “the texture of the scenery and the landscapes must fill me with definite memories and poetic associations.” Experiential cinema like this not only affects the visual manner in which humans recall memories and experiences as outlined in the previous chapter, it also affects the part of the brain that stores deep and hidden memory and brings forth its anxieties and traumas with a surrealistic automatism that we have yet to understand.

The present duplicates itself into “perception and recollection” at once, constantly appearing and diverging. This confusion of chronology results in almost a hypertext that halts the experience of duration. Repeating a Deleuze quote used in the previous section:“Time has split itself in two, at each moment as present and past, which differ from each other in nature…it has split the present in two heterogenous directions, one of which is launched towards the future while the other falls into the past.”3 The Exterminating Angel’s haunted narrative happenings allow us to interact with the film as a visceral experience as we initially seek to complete the film’s mystery for the characters, in this viscerality we see the illusion of it being an “actual” image. The film will then holds us at a surrealistic arm’s length with its denial of mythology, leading us to meet it as a “virtual” image. Buñuel’s film is a “crystal-image” as defined by Deleuze, scrambling our conceptions of linear time akin to a déja-vu constantly repeating itself, to use Deleuze’s example. It is “a point of indiscernibility of the two distinct images, the actual and the virtual, while what we see in the crystal is time itself, a bit of time in the pure state, the very distinction between the two images which keeps on reconstituting itself.”3 The experience of this time-crystal makes this indiscernibility discernible; The Exterminating Angel is a tactile microcosm of the time crystal confined to its respective runtime.

Film is reliant on time in its mechanical recreation of reality, that is, what separates it from the photograph. It is the organization and repetition of several photographs over time that creates the perception of living reality. Denying the viewer an understanding of its most important component ignites this hypnotic experience. Looking at early hypnosis practitioner James Braid’s definition of the act is helpful in explaining this phenomenon “The essence of the hypnotic condition is the induction of a habit of abstraction or mental concentration, in which, as in reverie or spontaneous abstraction, the powers of the mind are so much engrossed with a single idea or train of thought as…to render the individual unconscious of, or indifferently conscious to, all other ideas, impressions or trains of thought.” This does not sound too dissimilar from the cinema-going experience. When at the theatre, we are, in effect, putting ‘blinders’ on ourselves. We’re locked in a dark room, a single illuminated wall presents ideas, images, sometimes banal, sometimes flashy, but it is the only source of stimulus. A single direction. A single activity. Look. Watch. Focus. Experience. The Exterminating Angel compounds this distraction-less state with its denial of mythology and duration, exacerbating the hypnotic sensation of timelessness.

Film inherently practices the two main tenets of hypnosis, paraphrased from Braid: Induction and suggestion. Induction in hypnotic film is easy. In fact, any film doesn’t really have to work hard in order to induce audience members into a trance within which we are susceptible to conditioning and altered consciousness. Audiences have already willingly inducted themselves to fall into a distraction-less state by turning on airplane mode, remaining silent, and taking a bathroom break during the trailers. They are ready to watch a film and watch a film only, hyper-focused on the spectacle of the screen. Braid’s instructions to make sure that “the patient must be made to understand that he is to keep the eyes steadily fixed on the object, and the mind riveted on the idea of that one object”4 could easily be transposed after a cell phone advertisement that doubles as a request to turn off your phones.

We voluntarily induce ourselves into hyper focus with a trip to any movie, however there is a state of more intense focus that hypnotic films enact in their viewers, one that finally bypasses the obstructions of conscious thought into a state where the film can externalize and interact with a viewer. An effective method of getting to that point can be filling a film with various forms of sensorial repetition. The monotony of indirectly focusing conscious energy on repetition has, in the context of clinical hypnosis, “the effect of checking certain distributions of mental energy which would interfere with the course of events in the unconscious”, to quote Sigmund Freud.  To have a physical effect, a film can utilize sound and visuals for non-narrative purposes to check the human stimulus drive, enrapturing it in banality. This can take the form of repetitive sounds via a twist of conventional sound design or repeated visuals, be it shots or actions. The film then operates on an almost musical level, it has a beat, an obvious rhythm which lulls the mind into a trance-like state, not unlike listening to a catchy tune or a song so familiar to the listener that the aesthetic and philosophical qualities can be ignored while focus is placed only on the rhythm. Instead of piano chords or a bass line, these repetitive sounds are often incidental diegetic noises of quotidian origins, the beat of the film’s own universe lulls us into trance.

Take the sound design in the films of Béla Tarr as an example, most notably his first feature Damnation (1987). Each scene in this remarkably monotonous film carries behind it the slowly throbbing thrum of various aspects of the film’s environment: the falling of rain, the squeaking of shoes of a character dancing in a circle, the slow churn of an expansive machine carrying coal or lumber to far off mills, the laser pops of a struck cable, the creaking of stairs, a baby crying. Sometimes this might be the dialogue itself, often delivered in low grumbling, barely expressive, long monologues. The experience of  watching this film as someone who doesn’t speak Hungarian magnifies this effect; language becomes a sound that does not register intense conscious focus, as the lack of known vocabulary blends the actual sound of the dialogue with the environment. Damnation culminates in the frustrated psychological ruin of its protagonist who, aptly, loses control of his human body in the final scene, mimicking a dog as if subjected to hypnotic suggestion himself, barking at and fighting with a pack of mangy strays. Perhaps the best example of hypnotic repetition in Tarr’s work is the central scene of his  monstrous Satantago (1994). In a ten-and-a-half-minute shot (interrupted only briefly by an insert of a child at a window), a group of drunks tango back and forth in a shabby pub to a cyclic accordion tune. The camera moves in and out, over and over. The patrons spin in a circle, the bartender taps on the bar, one of the drunks is hitting a table with a stick, one of them is walking from wall to wall with a baguette balancing on his head. Over and over and over, dialogue-less, contentless, rationality-less but filled with action and sound to seize our attention and stimulate it with inexplicability “checking distributions of conscious mental energy” while exposing the slowly beating automatism of the unconscious. Tarr’s work is trancelike, rendering viewers as mesmerized by the evening as those in it, we feel as if we are dancing unstoppably in Satan’s Tango with the characters.

The length of Tarr’s shots are equally effective in this cinematic hypnotic induction. The Turin Horse (2011), which he co-directed with Ágnes Hranitzky, is notable not only for the length of its shots (averaging around 500 seconds each) but what is depicted within them. Tarr and Hranitzky film singular actions; a character rises from bed, opens the front door, walks to a well, draws water into two buckets, and walks back into the house in a single roving tracking shot back and forth. Tarr spoke on his intent with this attention to whole actions with The Turin Horse in particular, but we can see similar shots throughout his entire career: “We just wanted to see how difficult and terrible it is when every day you have to go to the well and bring the water, in summer, in winter... All the time. The daily repetition of the same routine makes it possible to show that something is wrong with their world. It's very simple and pure.” Maybe more than showing what is wrong with the world, it effectively shows the world as it exists outside of stylized cinematic time. Tarr harkens back to Aristotle’s Poetics with this method. Tarr and Hranitzky create an illusion of manual labour, our empathic minds follow suit, and time flies by as it does when it one engages with repetitive activities. We become entranced in banality and repetition and are therefore benignly hypnotized. In Paul Schrader’s essay “Rethinking Transcendental Style,” he explains “Film techniques are about ‘getting there’ — telling a story, explaining an action, evoking an emotion — whereas the long take is about ‘being there…’ Time becomes the story — or at least its central component, slow cinema, examines how time effects images. It’s experiential not expositional.” The act of watching a scene of a Tarr film, wherein a character boils potatoes, becomes the experience of waiting for your food to be ready. As the famous maxim goes: a watched pot never boils. Tarr’s filmography asks you to sit in that state of boilessness and feel the weight of reality around it. It is uniquely effective in inducing the viewer into the illusion of the film’s reality.

Despite the power that his films are able to hold over viewers, Tarr is restrained after he induces hypnosis. His movies seem to operate as hypnosis for hypnosis’ sake, a plodding exemplar of the power of film while not exercising influence on its audience beyond a trance. He doesn’t try to convince us of the surreal or the irrational. Other than the sometimes bizarre behaviours of his characters, Tarr’s cinema represents a powerful realism, he tries to convince us of the physicality of reality in order to elucidate the “heaviness of human existence.”

Early hypnosis conversely sought to create this state and exploit it to suggest behavioural shifts in its subjects: famously, the fear of something one was not scared of before. Hypnotic states can increase its subjects susceptibility to suggestion in which your thoughts, emotions, and behaviours can be influenced by the hypnotist. Early studies in hypnosis would eventually evolve into behavioural psychology via the influence of work on classical and operant conditioning by psychologists like Ivan Pavlov, John B. Watson, and B.F Skinner. They would define behaviour as the way in which one reacts in response to a stimulus, not necessarily the manner in which you act or conduct yourself in response to the laws of a given situation. Though more pseudoscientific hypnotists attempted to wholly change behaviour by suggesting that their subjects commit actions that they wouldn’t normally commit, it was really just reactions that could be suggested; a change in thought processes as it relates to your perception of your environment. In looking at the work of behaviourists like Pavlov and Watson, to simplify, we can see historical examples of behaviour being conditioned via positive (Pavlov/Classical conditioning) or negative stimuli (Watson/Operant conditioning) to the point where subjects associate neutral stimuli with rewards or punishments and react to them as if they were so.

A hypnotic filmmaker has an opportunity to suggest that their film’s surreality can have a direct effect on its viewer’s body, creating an even more powerfully experiential artifact. Film can be incredibly subtle in its approach to suggestion. Since it is an imagined reality, it can also construct how that reality is presented to us, what shots and angles are used for what subjects, what camera movements indicate what action to follow. David Lynch, the most prominent American surrealist filmmaker, operates within this sphere of hypnotic filmmaking. His work is heir to the experiments of John B. Watson and the school of operant conditioning as Lynch too, in effect, seeks to condition viewers stimulus response in the surreal worlds of his filmography.

Consider the Winkie’s Diner sequence in Mulholland Drive (2001). It’s a sequence that takes place almost completely outside of the film’s narrative. Two characters that we’ve never seen before in the film and will never see again sit down at a diner (wherein Lynch follows the induction methods of Buñuel, a denial of conventional film construction. The scene contains no ambient sound design. We hear only the dialogue in crisp impossible quality. There is something ‘off’ about the scene that isn’t initially identifiable, and our mental energy is checked by this denial). In the diner, one of the characters discusses a dream that he had in which he walked to the back lot of this exact diner, saw a terrifying man, and woke up. Following this, the characters walk to the back, see the man, the dreamer collapses in terror, and the scene ends. Lynch presents an interesting contract with the audience with this scene: he tells them something will happen that will scare us and then he scares us exactly as he promised he would. He amplifies the terror of the scene as much as possible: cutting all ambient sound, showing us characters drenched in sweat, with bulging, horrified eyes, and, most importantly, walks the viewer toward the man in a roaming, dreamy, handheld camera shot, pushing slowly past a wall, falling out of frame until the only thing that fills the screen is the dark space of the alley. And then a man springs forth, covered in muck and gore.  

Lynch presenting a sensory promise and fulfilling it is equivalent to making a suggestion and realizing it. Because of the fulfilled suggestion, we are presented with the illusion that Lynch is not only being honest with the universe he is presenting, he is presenting a universe that has tactile physical repercussions. We experience this illusory landscape with surrealist sensibilities in the truest sense of the word “experience”:  We jumped. We were scared. A  non-physical object (the movie) and a fiction (the diegesis) had a physical effect on our bodies within actual reality. The “Jump Scare”, as an institution, is sometimes frowned upon in film as a cheap effect to install audience participation, but Lynch is clever in his usage. He seems to understand that it is the most violent experience an audience member can have in a theatre and utilizes that power, following the induction of a trancelike state, to suggest that the dream world he has crafted has the ability to be violent, to have a transgressive effect on our bodies.

This sequence is key to the movie, as it permanently shapes our perception of the film. For the remainder of Mulholland Drive, we are presented with similar shots as the final Winkie’s Diner shot: a wandering camera pushing right next to a wall. Several times, it results in something frightening, several times it culminates in nothing. Regardless, we have been conditioned to expect violent catharsis. We have been conditioned to understand the surreality of the hypnotic film as reality in which we are taking part.

Watson, like Lynch, infamously (and inhumanely) sought to condition fear in an infant by making a loud and frightening noise every time the baby tried to play with a furry animal, in an effort to cause a fear of furry things. In effect, Lynch utilizes a form of stimulus conditioning with Mulholland Drive, establishing a phobia of dolly shots and walling in the viewer. In the suggestion of fear and danger with a perfectly neutral shot choice, Lynch establishes a universe operating under dream logic that has corporeal ramifications. He externalizes the dream logic, enacting it as conscious logic (it’s probably no coincidence that the above scene depicts someone literally seeing a moment from their dreams in waking life).

Arguably in all his films, Lynch is able to establish a world of dreams that escape the  confines of the subconscious. Lynch’s filmography is filled with scenes that teeter between our reality and the film’s, that live on the brink of being both an animated spectacle and a physical force, akin to a slap in the face or a vigorous shake. Think of the immediate burst of shock of the sick child in Eraserhead (1977), Laura Dern’s distorted face in Inland Empire (2006), sustained overwhelming anxiety inducing sequences like the Pink Room in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992), or Dennis Hopper’s midnight joyride in Blue Velvet (1986). The latter two utilize a deluge of repetitive droning noise to effectively shake the audience into a stupor of unease, effectively inducing a trance and suggesting physical harm in the same act, a magnification of Tarr’s style of sound design, this time with a penchant for trauma. Lynch likes to subject audiences to cruelty and horror. Via methods of hypnosis, surreal cinema can present a world where subconscious anxieties and horrors are made tactile. This shocks us out of rational thought into survival mode, pushing our brain stem to take command of our comprehension of our environment and our behaviour. By utilizing the visceral qualities of nightmares and dreams, Lynch’s highly surrealistic cinema becomes realistic.

Narrative cinema is innately an altered state of consciousness. It asks viewers to both bring their unique experiences of reality and to check what they believe they know of its laws, altering the tools we normally use to codify reality and living experiences. From commercial to art house film, all narrative cinema is a created on a spectrum of stylized reality that asks viewers to believe, for however long, in the rules of its unique impression of reality. Hypnotic cinema is simply an elaboration on the inherent goal of all cinema, to be accepted within the unique experience of its audiences as some shade of the truth, aestheticized by the expression of its author. Hypnotic cinema seeks to extrapolate audience engagement and creates an illusion of an experience of this imagined reality. From its origins in Surrealism, hypnotic cinema probes into avenues of human thought and experience that traditional filmmaking cannot. Utilizing hypnotic techniques, filmmakers can delve deeply into the dream-work of the human subconscious and elaborate on the innate surreality within the human brain. Through these efforts, surreality becomes a reality that can be perceived, irrationality becomes rational.

Experience, in whatever capacity, seems to be linked by some mode of involuntariness. Memory flashbacks, disassociation, dreams, hypnosis. None of these can be truly triggered in oneself by conscious effort, and if they are, then conscious thought is turned off when we are experiencing them. They rely on reflexes, the physiological unconscious. In other words, the Visceral, the inevitable. The Visceral has a symbiotic relationship with trauma, the melding of psychological and physiological distress. Freud would suggest that “the explanation of hysterical phenomena… assume[s] the presence of a dissociation, a splitting of the content of consciousness. [T]he regular and essential content of a hysterical attack is the recurrence of a physical state which the patient has experienced earlier.” The body holds on to memories of extreme stress and, in the event of a trigger, ‘splits’ the consciousness temporally and rationally. The body is confused: is it ten years ago, the moment of the inception of this trauma, or is it the present day? Are we at threat? What is happening? It is a trap, poised to spring and attack danger, while causing a danger to ourselves, in a sense a body’s natural learning mechanism to protect us from unkind experiences by refusing to let go of those previous violations. But in so many cases, this results in less of a deterrent and more of a deeply uncomfortable existence. The undying nature of experiencing so much distress, distress that transcends one’s ability to adequately process it, curses that person to live with it. A duality of experience. Trauma is a corporeal synthesis of past and present. It is Experience made violent and explosive, a simultaneous process of reliving the foundations of our present reality and distorting thereof. In that way, trauma is almost the combination of all that we have discussed. Rational human memory and the unstoppable clockwork of the unconscious mind, the reality of the external and internal universe, both bolstering the strength of and turning against its host.

So, to begin talking about trauma’s relationship with film, we should start at the through-line of this entire piece: the Visceral.

We’ve previously defined the Visceral as that which speaks to the body’s involuntary reaction to external stimulus, so it’s no wonder that attention to it is so key in Experiential cinema, a type of film that tries to mimic the way that we perceive our existence. Perception is the oil we use to paint our universes; our existence and experience is dependent on the way in which we perceive it. Depending on certain visceral reactions, the world can be peaceful or vicious. Filmmakers therefore use Visceral techniques to modulate audience perception (the way they relate to the universe), thereby manipulating audience experience (the way they empirically know the universe).

In a cinematic pursuit of entertainment, this isn’t dissimilar to amusement parks. Seeing a film that we already know to be a challenging visceral experience requires of us to have the same dialogue with our bodies that we have before entering Six Flags. “We are going to subject our bodies to distress, but we will sleep safely tonight. We are going to test the limits of our body’s capacity to integrate dangerous stimuli with the promise that we will survive it.” It’s no wonder there’s a genre of film dubbed the ‘thriller.’ Filmmakers have used film as a tool to excite the body into submission just like a loop de loop. We don’t need to get into fringe and abstract films to see this; hundreds of horror films ranging in quality and effectiveness are made each year with the goal of convincing your body it’s in danger. Almost all of these horror movies use the threat of bodily transgression as its main tool of suggestion and excitement. Regardless of our empathy with the characters, regardless of how believable the performance, regardless of how creative the form or the narrative, the representation of corporal violation results in a mirrored response from the audience. A wince, a squirm, shutting the eyes. The human body, the initial source of empathy and humanity, witnessing its violation, is disturbed and the film transcends traditional markers of quality. We feel something, whether the movie deserves the credit of reaching out and affecting us or not.

And so, in the context of Experiential film, the depiction of acts of cruelty and suffering is enormously widespread, as it’s an age-old biological shortcut for taking over a body and its responses to external stimuli.  I’ll refer to this level of Experiential film as “Cruel cinema”, to paraphrase François Truffaut’s compilation of his mentor Andre Bazin’s writings. Bazin noted a growing tendency for wickedness and horror in filmmakers of his day, but didn’t see it as a morally reprehensible exercise. “The taste for the horrible,” he said, “the sense of cruelty, the seeking out of the extreme aspects of life…their cruelty too was no more than the measure of their trust in mankind…”. Bazin sees transgressive representation as a way of addressing mankind. It’s a way of addressing humanity at its most human: in the human body, in the annals of the brain and the logic that governs our muscles.

Film that is able to induce the illusion of a threat to a body can be especially traumatizing, as the threat is represented by reality but we are unable to manipulate or affect it if it truly were our reality. We are prisoners to the narrative and its experiential vehicle. Our inability to not only overcome the threat to our bodies but have any tangible interaction serves to amplify the trauma we go through. One of the first studies in civilian trauma (as opposed to the trauma of veterans) was conducted by Howard J. Parad and Gerald Caplan after the 1942 Cocoanut Grove Fire. They surmised that the seriousness of trauma could be calculated alongside the sufferer’s inability to overcome the obstacle. Trauma is only as serious as its solution is illusive. Caplan wrote of obstacles that are “insurmountable by the use of customary methods of problem solving. A period of disorganization ensues, a period of upset, during which many abortive attempts at a solution are made.” Parad further wrote on the “psychological resources” that “overtaxes…traditional problem-solving methods.” Cruel cinema’s traumatic effects may be muted by the audience contract that the spectacle will end and have zero tactile implications for the rest of their lives, but it is amplified by our passive role as a spectator, as a witness. We can only sit and regard the pain on the screen, we have no “psychological resources” or “methods of problem solving” with which to stymie the horror of the reality of the film. In other words, we are defenceless to its cruelty.  

The representation of bodily harm could be a trigger for what’s known as an “amygdala hijack.” The amygdala, the “irrational” brain, features behavioural reactions leftover from caveman sensibilities. It’s the amygdala which dictates our fight, flight, freeze, or fold response, an unconscious response that is controlled primarily by an unconscious nervous system, the same nervous system that regulates digestion, blinking, and heart rate. Through depicting bodily threat via facets of our reality, a film communicates directly to the amygdala and, like the Hypnotic film in the previous section, bypasses rational and logical thought and effectively hijacks our body. But in watching a movie, especially in a theatre, our body is not as free to succumb to the whims of the amygdala, we can close our eyes and, in some cases, abort the experience altogether by leaving the theatre. But to those who sit and absorb the entire spectacle of the film, we aren’t offered the choice to ‘fight’ or ‘fly’, ‘freeze’ or ‘fold’. We can only ‘witness’ or ‘not witness.’ Cruelty in film is not a survivalist activity, it is an empathetic one. How much trauma can we put our bodies through before it shuts it out?

The work of the Safdie Brothers is possibly the most successful recent example of efforts to induce an amygdala hijack. Their film Good Time (2017) is the most unabashed example of this “Six Flags” approach to filmmaking, a brand of cinema that dares the viewer to undergo extreme bodily distress without necessarily the payoff of philosophical profundity. The Safdies use ‘frustration’ as a tool in all of their films, in both overarching narrative efforts and in minute sequences. There’s an extremely affecting moment in Heaven Knows What (2014), in which we zoom in slowly on a homeless woman trying and failing to thread a needle as a bombastic synth booms in the score. Not to mention that the actual plot of the film, though aimless, always leading its protagonist to dead ends and aborted plans.

Good Time is a marvellous expansion in the Safdies’ cinematic pursuit of frustration if, for no other reason, it subtracts their previous film Heaven Knows What’s focus on addiction, homelessness, abusive relationships, and urban malaise. It sees thematic exploration as a distraction and so, narratologically, it’s far more linear and direct than Heaven Knows What. On the whole, it works exclusively in the effort of inducing panic, trauma, and unease. Good Time begins with a botched bank robbery attempted by two brothers. One of them, a developmentally delayed man, is arrested after crashing through a glass window, and is locked up in a hospital. The film follows the damage control attempted by the other brother, Connie, astoundingly well-played by Robert Pattinson. The film is essentially structured like the epic tragedy/monomyth as discussed in the first chapter. Connie moves from station to station, making increasingly convoluted decisions, which succeed only to the extent that he is not arrested for another hour. But as the film continues, he makes or is complicit in increasingly disastrous and unethical decisions: he forces his girlfriend to steal money from her mother, seduces a minor, allows someone to force feed an unconscious man copious amounts of pure LSD, turns the minor over to the police to save himself, blackmails a violent drug dealer, and eventually runs away while his reluctant partner falls to his death, getting arrested by the police in the process. The last time we see Connie is through the grates of a police car, staring wide eyed at the uncertain future ahead.  

“Good Time” is an apt title, perhaps a cheeky wink at the audience in the explicit attempts the screenplay makes to overwhelm the audience. Cruel cinema constantly challenges us to remain a spectator, daring us to try to have influence over the events of the films (“Don’t go into the basement!” we yell at the first victim in a slasher movie). This film plunges our empathetic desires into moral oblivion as the stakes become increasingly more difficult to  overcome. As Connie moves from set piece to set piece, his way out of the mess that he’s created steadily becomes impossible. And still, we exercise the logical sectors of our brain for solutions: what if he went back to the hospital and broke the right person out this time? He could always turn himself into the police without hurting anyone else, explaining that he coerced his brother into the crime, that his brother wasn’t capable of  making a decision to rob the bank or not. But eventually too much transpires, too many horrific decisions are made. The problem-solving sectors of our own brain become overwhelmed, our psychological resources are taxed to the point of bankruptcy. We become panicked, traumatized. We have, to put it bluntly, anything but a good time.

What was the point of this? Why hurt your audience? Why deliberately craft a painful experience that doesn’t promote any philosophical insight or political polemic or emotional sincerity? And furthermore, why would a viewer willingly subject themselves to such trauma?

Aristotle would describe experiencing the trauma within a work of art, specifically a tragedy, as “catharsis,” a word he reattributes from the medical terminology referring to purging of bodily fluids. The original word refers to the sense of relief after ridding waste from the body, the gratification of the abject. Dramatic catharsis is no less of a physiological relief of the audience. In experiencing the “terror and pity” of a tragedy, we are able to purge our own anxieties, be they already realized in the traumas our personal histories or a burgeoning and innate self-destructive byproduct of our ego’s death drive. From a psychoanalytic perspective, this would be represented by “abreaction,” the act of bringing a traumatic experience to conscious attention in order to purge oneself of the emotional excess that our body does not have the “psychological resources” to combat. Theoretically reliving it in a controlled situation, like a therapist’s office or a movie theatre, could cure one of its detrimental effect. Susan Sontag, in her excellent book Regarding the Pain of Others, looks at the human drive to both represent and experience horrors in art (though mostly she discusses war photography). She calls torment a “canonical subject in art” and marks that the “appetite for pictures showing bodies in pain is as keen, almost, as the desire for ones that show bodies naked….no moral charge attaches to the representation of these cruelties. Just the provocation: can you look at this? There is the satisfaction of being able to look at the image without flinching. There is the pleasure of flinching.” There exists both delight in not having to find a solution to Connie’s problems in Good Time and delight in the panic caused by them in the first place. It’s an exercise in both schadenfreude and masochism, and ultimately a boundary expanding and cleansing endeavour.

Alternatively, it could intensify the trauma, inducing a traumatic episode without purging anything. Herein lies the moral conundrum with Cruel cinema. For viewers with lived experiences, it can be an incredibly dangerous activity if taken lightly, an experience that can re-trigger trauma that may be laying benign and impotent, since film can very easily, and very often, induce post-traumatic stress responses. As outlined in this piece, Experiential Cinema in effect recreates (an illusory version of) the bodily and psychological circumstances of a visceral episode. Post Traumatic Stress Disorder itself is theorized to be triggered by the release of stress hormones via the brain’s misinterpreting present events as the same cataclysmic circumstances in which one’s trauma originated, not dissimilar to what Experiential film seeks to do. And yet we cannot demand of art that it only express peace and compassion, lest the audience be unable to incorporate narratives of evil and cruelty; the former are not the only expressions and byproducts of human experience. Art cannot censor itself in want of a strictly peaceful experience. This may be the dividing line between art and entertainment, one challenges, the other comforts. Neither are superfluous exercises in anyone’s life, at the whims of various slings and arrows, who doesn’t want to seek refuge in entertainment? Inversely, who doesn’t want to challenge their notions of what life and reality are capable of? With Cruel Cinema, a similar line may be drawn regarding exactly what can be expressed, morally speaking. There can be considered to be two branches: a cinema that seeks to boldly recreate the inception of trauma, the experience of cruelty and of malevolence that trusts the viewer to differentiate between illusion and reality. And a cinema that acknowledges that the “traumatic” byproduct of said inception cannot be truly experienced and instead seeks to express it instead. The former is the Six Flags cinema as discussed above, the latter could be called Expressional. Both seek to deliberately enact audience unease, but the latter has a more sympathetic understanding of its audience, that not all of us are capable of consistently subjecting our bodies to what Experiential cinema can induce. It instead seeks to viscerally enact the experience of the void of trauma, to make an experience of the inexpressible and express the inexperiencable.

Let’s look at two films that both contain scenes of (if not entirely made up of) experiential trauma as it pertains to sexual abuse and rape. Gaspar Noé’s Irréversible (2002) and Gregg Araki’s Mysterious Skin (2004).

Irréversible depicts, in reverse chronological order, a couple’s (Monica Bellucci and Vincent Cassel) night out, the brutal rape of Bellucci’s character, and Cassel’s revenge. Noé makes explicit efforts to simulate the experience of violence and horror. The first 30 minutes of the film have a low frequency (28 hz) rumble in the mix, which supposedly creates nausea and vertigo in people; already Noé declares clearly that his film’s intention is to unpleasantly affect the viewer’s body. We can catalogue Irréversible’s experiential intentions by the dichotomy in which the camera shoots the film’s opening act of violence (Cassel’s revenge murder of his girlfriend’s rapist) and the infamous rape scene itself. Irréversible consists of 12 unbroken (or cut to look unbroken) shots featuring a roving dreamy camera, a staple of Noé’s filmography.  The murder at the beginning of the film is especially frenetic. A man is bashed in the head repeatedly with a fire extinguisher, each slam the camera tilts a little more until we are practically viewing the act upside down. The camerawork almost anticipates the viewer’s response, obfuscating the violence, in effect allowing us to see it between parted fingers. The rest of the film follows suit, the camera constantly moves in and around the action in uncanny patterns and dimensions. It’s enough to beg the camera to stay still, a demand Noé perhaps wants the viewer to have. The rape scene by contrast begins with us actually seeing the jostling of the camera being placed on the ground. The shot is unmoving for the entire 9 minutes of the rape. Suddenly we wish we had the muddling quality of the prior camerawork; we want to flinch and turn away from the horrific violation on screen. But Noé keeps it immaculately in frame, stable, and plain. In a film of abundant gratuitous violence, this is the most difficult scene to watch by virtue of it being so easy to watch.

In Mysterious Skin, two young boys are coerced into perverse sexual acts with their baseball coach. The majority of the film follows them in their teen years, depicting the fallout of this abuse. One (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) falls victim to self-destructive tendencies, finding it impossible to forget the trauma. The other (Brady Corbet) becomes an introverted shell who struggles to remember the incident whatsoever, instead blaming his body and mind’s traumatic response on possible alien abductions. The opening section of the film features the baseball coach’s initial violation of Gordon-Levitt’s character, going so far as to shoot the child’s point of view as the coach leans in to kiss him and focusing on the young actor’s face as the coach performs oral sex. The final scene of the film is the first meeting of the two boys, a beautiful moment of connection over shared trauma. They break into the coach’s former home, the scene of their abuse, and Gordon-Levitt relays the exact details of the instance. These details are interspersed with flashbacks, scored with a droning piano that reaches a high-pitched sting when it returns to present time and the memory vanishes. The flashbacks recall the early scenes in the film, Gordon-Levitt’s abuse. There are brief snapshots of the abuse, with explicit details angled out, but still enough explicitness to cause the viewer to wince. Gordon-Levitt’s commentary over them is explicit, he spares no detail in relaying exactly what happened that night. The film ends with Corbet sobbing into Gordon-Levitt’s lap and, as the camera cranes away, they are no longer in the coach’s living room, but instead in a black void as they fade to black.

In order to appropriately mark the different approaches these two films take to how a traumatic incident is experienced, we need to look at an abstract psychoanalytic examination of trauma, Jacques Lacan’s writings on “the Real.” The Real is one of Lacan’s three ‘Orders,’ the others being the Imaginary and the Symbolic. To simplify, the Imaginary Order is the method in which we define our own ego, our perceptions of ourselves. The Symbolic Order is the method in which we codify others, society, friends, family; the way in which we present ourselves and the way in which we interpret their actions. The Real is a void beyond the two, a ‘nothing’ state beyond how we perceive and understand reality. It can only really be seen and interacted with as a “rupture,” a break in our understanding of reality made up by our personal definitions of self and other. These ruptures (in a negative sphere) can be represented in traumatic events. Lacan uses the analogy of a natural disaster as a major rupture of the Real, our environment senselessly destroying the signifiers of normal mundane life and revealing a horror that is unrecognizable and unexplainable, demolishing your symbols of self (a home, a family) and society (a neighbourhood, your neighbours). Your life would be structured around these orders, they are a fulcrum balancing your concepts of self and society. As a whole, we can call this device ‘reality.' With your family killed in a tornado, your house destroyed, your neighbourhood razed to the ground with your friends underneath, you are left with an abyss of meaning. This is the Real, puncturing through reality.  A rape would be an individualized version of this disaster, localized entirely within yourself and your body. It’s not a communal trauma, it’s a single definition of reality that is destroyed. A rape violates your understanding of your self as a person with agency, rights, choices, and dignity. An event that violates this leaves the victim with a chasm of understanding.

Irréversible sidesteps representing actual ‘trauma’ with its depiction of the ‘event.’ In Noé’s decision to film the event as objectively as possible (placing a camera on the ground and backing away) he chose instead to inflict a rupture himself. Irréversible as a whole is an experiential vessel of the Imaginary and the Symbolic when looking at it from a Lacanian perspective. It simulates the visceral qualities of the event itself, leaving the audience to fend with the traumatic byproducts on their own. This is, in and of itself, not an immoral filmmaking decision as a whole. Irréversible is an incredibly successful film in its ability to illicit profound discomfort and horror. But it exists as almost an endurance test: are you able to withstand a microcosm of the horrors of this event? To those whose endurance (or finite “psychological resources”) is used up on a lived experience, the answer is not only ‘no’, it is ‘no and I already know that.’ The film is so successful in its ability to illicit profound discomfort that it can instead trigger a rupture of the Real, initiating dissociation, harmful behaviours, intrusive thought patterns. A post-traumatic stress event.  

On the other hand, Mysterious Skin’s efforts to be experiential is in trying to enact the Viscerality of the void of the Real itself. The final scene provides flashes of the traumatic event that tear at the fabric of the frame and are whipped away. The actual “depiction” of the event is left to language, which can rouse discomfort but is wholly incapable of representing the event. It’s no wonder that the final shot of the film shows Gordon-Levitt and Corbet being whisked away into a black void. It’s  like the two are tumbling into a chasm of the Real together. This is a far more compassionate take on trauma, since it tries to simulate the viscerality of living with trauma, not the event itself. It still makes deliberate experiential movements in order to stimulate discomfort, but also delves into expressionistic modes of filmmaking to depict that trauma, as a byproduct of the Real, is not depict-able. Lacan states that “the Real is what resists symbolization absolutely.” The objective event can be filmed (brutally and immaculately so in the case of Irréversible) but the Real, the trauma itself, cannot. Mysterious Skin acknowledges this, and the result is a film about that void, about the nothingness, the inexpressible unreality of trauma.

For a long time, my greatest marker of quality in a film was if it genuinely made me “feel something.” I think this is a common course of thought for young filmmakers. At a certain point, the conscious analytic nature of film viewership apprehends any of the emotional or spiritual possibilities of film in favour of a calculated deconstruction of form and ontological and epistemological content. The result is a dichotomous understanding of “profundity.” What is a more important enterprise? The discussion, dissection and elucidation of themes and philosophies, be it in favour of pushing the medium, or otherwise? Or utilizing film as a purely visceral praxis, an all-encompassing, bodily entertainment shutting off the sectors of the brain that perform conscious logical thought in favour of transcending to a meditative state of thoughtless empathy, spirituality, or horror. The right answer, obviously, is a mixture of the two. It’s a combination of our unique human perception and a universal physicality in which we can begin to approach what Tarkovsky called the infinite. “The idea of infinity cannot be expressed in words or even described, but it can be apprehended through art, which makes infinity tangible.” It’s the tangibility that piques my interest. And it’s the tangibility that is the focus of the Experiential filmmaker.

Experiential film is a type of film that desires, via psychologically affective techniques that spur physiological responses akin one’s encounters with reality, to compound experiences alien to the viewer’s life or impossible to access in the viewer’s lifetime on top of that viewer’s own experience. The very act of gaining an experience explodes one’s notions of what is possible in reality; it breaks apart the finite and for a moment makes infinity tangible.

This isn’t a thought unique to Tarkovsky nor restricted to film or even art. I’ve made repeated references to “spirituality” in this piece and it’s probably about time I give this a definition. Spirituality to me is any method with which to transcend the finite and experience the infinite. The infinity of perspectives, the infinity of histories, the infinity of experiences. And so, in a final quibbling with a quote, I think mankind always seeks the infinite. Not just the artist. It’s sought after in athletics, in monetary pursuits, in human connection, travel, substance use. Spirituality is the hole in the soul that humans are constantly striving to fill.

The through-line of all those endeavours listed is a narrative tacked on to those activities. The narrative of two teams that meet for a hockey game, the narrative of entrepreneurial rising to the top of an industry, the narrative of romance, the narrative of globetrotting, and the narrative of psychedelic adventures. And most ubiquitously, the narrative of all religions.

But all spiritual endeavours come with their pitfalls and their dangers. Look at religions, all of which are rife with restrictions and politicking, with laws and negations of identity. The narrative of religion, with which we began this piece, is the deepest culturally engrained mainlining of spirituality, and yet it is barbed with qualifiers for who exactly can approach its brand of spirituality, grab hold of it, and make it tangible.

No spiritual endeavours, really, come without their dangers. Except art. Except fiction.

What is fiction but a narrative that does not adhere to a dogma? It is humanity’s safest way of accessing the infinite, of demolishing the walls that keep human experience separated and ghettoized. It is a space outside of reality, a crafted and formed reality for you. For all of us.

And so now we’ve arrived at a purpose. The Experiential filmmaker is one with the tools of accessing the most remote recesses of the human brain and the human body, of consciousness and unconsciousness itself, and sucking us outside of the limitations of our own experiences, sending us spiralling in first person into a treasure trove of tangible possibilities. Possibilities that you can grab out and touch. Possibilities that you can feel in your bones.

Possibilities. Possibilities.