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Toward a Phenomenology of Film Production Kartik Nair (bio) He's a world leader in the field of optics, and he's figured out how to do this. He's not dead. I just can't see him. —Cecilia Kass, in The Invisible Man (2020) The horror film The Invisible Man (Leigh Wannell, 2020) is about a psychopathic tech entrepreneur, Adrian Griffin (Oliver Jackson-Cohen), who stalks his wife Cecilia Kass (Elisabeth Moss) even after his alleged suicide. Wearing a cutting-edge suit that makes him invisible to her (and us), his unseeable body still leaves footprints on carpet, exhales a jet of warm breath in cold air, and makes a knife seemingly levitate. The invisible man is repeatedly placed in onscreen space by the look our sympathetic heroine casts at an empty corner, which we are also asked to look at carefully (figure 1). It's an effective stylistic strategy. When Cecilia cries "He's right there," we believe her. Indeed, because of its "suggestively filmed empty spaces," Invisible Man's blank vistas are suffused with the dread of unseen presence.1 Yet rather than understanding the film as merely simulating presence out of nothing—indeed, by resisting its presentation of space as empty—what if we considered the possibility that something really is "there" onscreen, something we feel but cannot see? [End Page 158] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Empty space in The Invisible Man. Like a number of recent films, including Midsommar (Ari Aster, 2019), The Invitation (Karyn Kusama, 2015), and Get Out (Jordan Peele, 2017), The Invisible Man uses narrative and stylistic conventions of cinematic horror to stage the emotional and physical manipulation of an innocent protagonist.2 Invisible Man is admittedly more literal than the other films, offering a predator who turns invisible to amplify his campaign of psychological gaslighting; the film has us spend a lot of time with Cecilia alone, wondering if she is alone. "This is what he does," Cecilia says. "He makes me feel like I'm the crazy one." In order to vanquish him, Cecilia has to force Adrian into view. She uses a can of white paint, a fire extinguisher, and even an ink pen to prick the cloak of invisibility that lets him hide in plain sight. Our paranoid heroine in turn invites my paranoid style of reading, one committed to revealing what I know the film cannot: that its empty spaces are full of bodies. Insisting like its heroine on a physically existent but optically invisible presence, I discover that Invisible Man's "empty spaces" are densely inhabited, with production practices, personnel, and performances that were visually erased to generate the spectral storyworld of the film. Answering a question posed in the title of Karl Schoonover's recent essay in this journal "What Do We Do with Vacant Space in Horror Films?,"3 I explore how the corporeality of stunt performers, camera operators, and robotic motion-control cameras is embedded in minatory vacancy onscreen. This is a phenomenology of film production. Phenomenologies of film viewing have accounted for how affective "body genres" such as the horror film corporealize disembodied spectators.4 In the "corporeal model of viewership," spectators are intensified, multisensory arrangements of skin and viscera, clammy hands and nervous excitement.5 An underdeveloped strain in phenomenological [End Page 159] film theory, it seems to me, is the capacity for experientially attuned film scholarship to open out a phenomenology of film production. Film phenomenology—which has principally centered on the experiential bond between the projected image and my viewing body—can also cultivate a feeling for the embodied world of filmmaking, for how performers, machines, and their environments may have mutually interacted and materialized in the process of generating moving images.6 It can help us conceive of filmmaking corporeally as a series of tactile encounters in which humans, machines, and environments are incipiently instantiated as embodied presences (and then disembodied as they recede from those encounters). As I use the term here, "corporeality" names the relational experience of becoming body. Recently, Usha Iyer has explored the potential of a "corporeal history" of film bodies, one that makes visible bodies that are embedded...
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