Dr Francesco Sticchi

Since the emergence of embodied cognitive theories, there has been an ever-growing interest in the application of these theories to media studies, generating a large number of analyses focusing on the affective and intellectual features of viewers’ participation. The body of the viewer has become the central object of study for film and media scholars, who examine the conceptual physicality of the viewing experience by associating body states with parallel intellectual and moral constructions. In this article, I contribute to the study of embodied cognition and cinema by drawing upon Baruch Spinoza's philosophy, especially from his process-based notion of the body. I will put this ecological and dynamic concept of the body in connection with recent studies on enactive cognition, and define a radical enactivist approach to be applied in the discussion of the experiential dynamics of Lynne Ramsay's You Were Never Really Here.

This essay addresses Personal Shopper as an essential case study to examine the radical transformation of subjectivity taking place through the relation with digital technology and screens in our everyday life. The discussion will be mainly directed on how the film describes the psychological and emotional conflict embodied by the main character, Maureen, as the result of a complex entanglement with spaces, technological, and material surfaces. The decentring of Maureen on the physical context surrounding her, reveals her identity as an ecological notion, an immanent and enworlded process of continuous remediation with the environment. Employing Giuliana Bruno’s work and Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of the Chronotope, I will demonstrate how Personal Shopper, far from describing technological developments as the accomplishment of a humanist ideal, allows us to tackle, without conciliating answers, the radical crisis of the human characterising our age.

Pour bon nombre de linguistes contemporains, le film L’Arrivée (Arrival — Denis Villeneuve, 2016) met au premier plan les coordonnées interactives de la communication. L’auteur s’inspire de Baruch Spinoza et George Lakoff pour analyser cette dynamique et démontrer que L’Arrivée pose un défi éthique et linguistique, fonction de la capacité des spectateurs à reformuler leur propre façon de percevoir le monde. Les théories de Spinoza et de Lakoff sont fondamentales à la démonstration de la corrélation entre l’empathie et la simulation incarnée d’une part, et l’interaction linguistique-conceptuelle d’autre part. Cette approche expérimentale repose sur l’hypothèse selon laquelle le film est un phénomène incarné et dialogique auquel les spectateurs, comme le démontre l’interprétation de Hesselberth du chronotope de Bakhtin, participent également en réélaborant constamment les notions de temps et d’espace. L’auteur examine donc comment, dans L’Arrivée, la participation des spectateurs amalgame de manière constructive l’association empathique avec les personnages et la compréhension du récit, et en quoi cela suppose un effort éthique spinoziste pour utiliser les images filmiques de la façon la plus productive. =

For many contemporary linguists, the film Arrival (Denis Villeneuve, 2016) foregrounds the interactive coordinates of communication. This article draws upon Baruch Spinoza and George Lakoff to analyze these dynamics and to demonstrate that Arrival presents an ethical and linguistic challenge based on the viewers’ capacity to reframe their own ways of perceiving the world. Spinoza’s and Lakoff’s theories are fundamental to show the correlation between empathy and embodied simulation on one side, and linguistic/conceptual interaction on the other. This experiential approach implies that film is an embodied and dialogical phenomenon, in which viewers, as Hesselberth’s interpretation of Bakhtin’s chronotope demonstrates, participate also by continuously re-elaborating ideas of time and space. Therefore, we will see how, in Arrival, viewers’ participation constructively integrates the empathic alignment with the characters with the comprehension of the narrative, and involves a Spinozistic ethical effort to use filmic images in the most productive way.

In this article, I analyze Park Chan-wook’s The Handmaiden (Ah-gassi, 2016) by addressing its puzzle narrative and complex interactive dynamics as embodied and affective categories. In particular, I employ Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of the chronotope together with Giuliana Bruno’s work on media theory and Steffen Hven’s notion of the embodied fabula to show how the film, in all its aesthetic complexity, enacts a creative and transformative experience based on the continuous subversion of the power dynamics I describe. Furthermore, I demonstrate how this semantic and experiential reconstruction couples viewers’ alignment with the two main characters in their rebellion against patriarchal power and obsessive male fantasies. Ultimately, then, in this article I aim to connect the experiential and affective engagement of the film with a critical reading of power dynamics as ecologically situated structures to be challenged and revolutionized through a creative process of becoming.

In this essay I analyse Matteo Garrone’s Tale of Tales (2015) within the perspective of embodied cognition. I consider film experience as an affective-conceptual phenomenon based on the viewer’s embodiment of the visual structures. Baruch Spinoza stands at the foundation of my analytical approach since his thought was based on the absolute parallelism between the body and the mind. This paradigm redefines anthropocentrism and rejects dualism; however, the criticism of the rationalist ideal is also one of the main characteristics of the film Tale of Tales: by staging baroque and excessive characters, it allows the viewer to embody a notion of subjectivity that is performative and relational. Therefore, by combining the cognitive analysis of the film with my theoretical framework I will present a radical criticism of abstract rationality and present an ecological idea of the human.

The aim of this article is to outline a Spinozian-Deleuzian analysis of audio-visual experience and to combine this account with an embodied cognitive perspective on cinema. Thus, film experience integrates affection and intellection and is not a passive and contemplative phenomenon, but a constructive interaction that involves a creative encounter between the screen and the viewer. Furthermore, I will address the role of sad passions and the problematic relation between creation and resistance, also by drawing upon Primo Levi’s work on memory and on the shame of being human. Consequently, I will argue that my Spinozian-Deleuzian perspective involves an idea of cinema and art as ethically productive events since they allow a creative opposition against all those forces that mortify and enclose existence. Andrei Tarkovsky’s masterpiece Andrei Rublev offers the possibility to develop this discussion; in this biopic, the life of the famous Russian painter is pervaded by problematic questions upon the nature of God, the necessity of Evil, the role of art within a world of violence and misery and, at the same time, the tension and the marvel in the discovery of the real. Following the ideas on spectatorship outlined by Deleuze and combined with Spinoza’s thought, we can say that the film makes us perceive these issues through the embodiment and the engagement of the relations it describes. At the same time, the movie gives us the possibility to re-discuss these terrible questions revealing the active and productive nature of art, as different sequences (like the enigmatic prologue) demonstrate. A further aim of this article is, then, to show how this assemblage of different concepts is possible through the vivid and interactive dimension of film experience.