Film in Depth. Water and Immersivity in the Contemporary Film Experience

Abstract

Since its beginnings, cinema has recognised that water can visually give matter and meaning to human desires, dreams and secrets, eliciting suspense and fear.Using different aesthetical and technical strategies, contemporary cinema shows immersed and drowning bodies to represent and express intimacy and protection, suspense and fear, obsession and depression, state of shock, past or infancy trauma, hallucinations and nightmares, etc.The case of enwaterment (i.e."waterembodiment") is significant because of its relevance to the point where psychoanalysis and philosophy meet.In this essay, I attempt to investigate what is actually meant today by making a bodily and sensible experience of film by analysing the substance of water and the figures of the drowning and immersed body.Cinema embodies aquatic modalities of perception and expression, pulling the viewer into a liquid environment that is the confluence between the film-body and the filmgoer-body. The pupil is made of water.Aristotle, De Anima, IIIThe true eye of the earth is water.Gaston Bachelard, L'Eau et les rêves, 1942 A deep relationship binds water and cinema.Images and sounds stream on the screen like an inexhaustible flow of water, a 'mechanical fluidity' that perfectly expresses the spirit of modern times.In the beginning, cinema aimed both to provide a fluid rendering of reality and to astonish the spectators by shocking their senses.In Panorama of Gorge Railway (Thomas Edison, 1900), for example, the stream of an impetuous river is combined with the motion of the camera, placed on the front end of a train, in the opposite direction.The conflict between the movement of the water and that of the camera, and the

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 9 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.