Motion Pictures: Politics of Perception Marta Zarzycka and Bettina Papenburg Movement, Stillness, Affect, and Emotion This special issue examines the capacity of images—be they still or mobile—to move us as viewers. We wish to foreground the capacity of motion to induce affect and to spark emotional response. In this we tarry with recent scholarship on affect that insists upon sharply differentiating affect from emotion. Brian Massumi and Steven Shaviro, for example, both see emotion as contained by the subject and affect as existing in excess of the subject. Massumi insists that affect is presubjective and unqualiied sensation, whereas emotion is situated perception: subjectivized, formed, and qualiied intensity.1 He stresses the “irreducibly bodily and autonomic nature of affect” while asserting that an “emotion is a subjective content, the sociolinguistic ixing of the quality of an experience which is from that point onward deined as personal.”2 In the same vein, Shaviro afirms that “[e]motion is affect captured by a subject, or tamed and reduced to the extent that it becomes commensurate with that subject.”3 While affect is a force or intensity lowing through subjects, an emotion becomes property of the subject, or as Shaviro puts it, “Subjects are overwhelmed and traversed by affect, but they have or possess their own emotions.”4 Yet as both Massumi and Shaviro admit, affect and emotion are closely related: while emotion Discourse, 35.2, Spring 2013, pp. 163–176. Copyright © 2014 Wayne State University Press, Detroit, Michigan 48201-1309. ISSN 1522-5321. 164 Marta Zarzycka and Bettina Papenburg conines affect, it does not exhaust affect. Shaviro emphasizes that “emotion can never entirely separate itself from the affect from which it is derived.”5 Similarly, the inner movement that we experience and articulate as emotion contains the various types of physical movement that are involved in the process of production and reception of images ranging from camera motion to the lickering of our eyelids. We therefore propose the term “movement” as encompassing both affect and emotion. If motion links to emotion, our second term—“stillness,” or “inner stillness”—signiies neither simply the reverse nor the lack of inner movement, nor does it signify passivity. Rather, the emotional state of becoming still, which may be facilitated through both still and moving images, is the state of retreat, rest, and contemplation and of subtly connecting to the outside world while being in touch with one’s sense of interiority. Stillness and movement are vital components of the rendering of both still and moving images as well as of their perception and their projection. Camera motion and the movement of bodies and objects in front of the camera lens shape the process of production of footage. The movement and stillness of our bodies—when sitting in the dark room of the movie theater or when holding a photograph—reign over the perception of images. Movement is also a key constituent of projection in the form of a celluloid strip moving through a projector or when it comes to the projector emitting light waves and particles. Motion pictures draw us in by way of their movement, facilitating identiication with ilm characters as well as bringing about immersion into a projected setting and evoking empathy with characters, objects, rooms, and landscapes in addition to forms and shapes onscreen. Both moving and still images have the power to move us but also to still us with their capacity to invite a state of contemplation and arrest—particularly infrequent in current times that value movement as a sign of activity, vitality, and advancement. The threshold between still and moving images—both the dialectical tension between these terms and the indeterminate space where one becomes another—is particularly enticing.6 Contemporary attempts to engage this threshold are numerous: digital images that unfold in time across electronic screens, YouTube clips that can be paused and reanimated at any moment, still images inserted into a sequence of a ilm, and slow-motion and stop-motion techniques employed in ilm editing. Via remote control and keystroke, viewers encountering digital images can control the progression of stilled moments, disrupting temporal linearity. This may lead to what Laura Mulvey calls a “delayed cinema,” a cinema resisting the rush toward the future and reaching back to the past.7 Mobile Motion Pictures: Politics of Perception 165 devices using free apps and sharing images via social media networks further confound the lines between stasis and motion and between frozen moment and duration in time: although still, the photographs stored in our phones and tablets are on the move with us. Online platforms such as Magnum in Motion and Media Storm, showing documentary footage of war, conlict, and poverty, present photographs animated by music and soundscapes as well as by the so-called Ken Burns effect: the slow zooming in and out on certain elements of a photograph, panning rotations in a horizontal plane of an image, and fading transitions between frames. These “moving stills” incorporate discontinuity of static images into continuous low of time.8 The threshold of movement and stillness in contemporary visual practices cannot be conceptualized purely as a result of special effects or solely as a theme to be represented. They must be thought of as kinesthetic and affective forces shaping the engagement between images and their viewers. Giuliana Bruno aptly emphasizes the capacity of images to move their spectators when she stresses the haptic roots of affect, asserting that “motion, indeed, produces emotion and that, correlatively, emotion contains movement.”9 Bruno alludes to the complex entanglement of physical movement and inner movement. We follow the etymology of motion that Bruno provides in Atlas of Emotion, where she convincingly shows the close intermingling of physical exchange and emotional movement. Bruno alerts us to the Latin root emovere, which comprises movere (“to move”) and e (“out”) that is at the heart of the words “movement” and “emotion,” signaling the expression of feelings toward the outside, our gestures sparking communal experience. The Greek word for cinema, kinema, likewise encompasses “motion” and “emotion.” The etymological meaning appositely hints at cinema’s capacity to carry us away. Our capacity to be carried away largely depends on the motion and stasis that happens within and around images; the effect that images have on us is propelled by their capacity to transmit affect. The transmission of affect is itself the low, vibration, frequency, and circulation that creates resonances. To feel, it is often said, is to feel moved—through encounters, relationships, reciprocations, resonances, intervals, and harmonies.10 Affect refers to a palpable intensity that effectively mediates between embodied conditions and culturally shaped meanings and also connects either arrested spectators and moving images or moving viewers and still images. An image that vividly exempliies this in one of the essays is the disabled protagonist of James Cameron’s Avatar, directing an “avatar” body, an arrested body initiating movement. This image is 166 Marta Zarzycka and Bettina Papenburg emblematic of the need to animate, enliven, set into motion as an expression of our desire for (inter)human connection or for “feeling alive.” Following Gilles Deleuze and Brian Massumi, Steven Shaviro points to the interweaving of this desire and media proit in the late capitalist era. In his deinition of affect’s relationship to moving image media, Shaviro emphasizes this entanglement: “Films and music videos like other media works are machines for generating affect, and for capitalizing upon, or extracting value from this affect.”11 While this critical stance on the exploitation of affect resonates well with the contributions to this issue, our authors also attend to the more positive, critical, and generative potentials of mediated affect. Politics of Perception We take inspiration from the most recent feminist investment in the political potentials of affect, emotion, and feeling. In Depression: A Public Feeling, Ann Cvetkovich underlines the political power of a condition, which, in medical and public contexts, is generally understood as private and closely linked to withdrawal and isolation of the subject affected by it. Instead, Cvetkovich convincingly argues that sharing that feeling—brought about by the fact of being a citizen of a nation at war, by the current attack on the humanities, or by the quotidian pressures of academic life—can lead to collective political action targeting those circumstances that are experienced as depressing.12 One method for doing this is by way of artistic practice. From the context of trauma and memory studies, Jill Bennett, drawing on the work of French poet and Holocaust survivor Charlotte Delbo, compellingly shows how artistic practice can transform individual “sense memory” or “deep memory” into shared “common memory” or “ordinary memory” rendering communicable traumatic experience.13 In a similar vein, Jacques Rancière advances a notion of spectatorship that cuts across psychological, physical, and social registers when he calls for a conception of spectators as actively constituting agents.14 For Rancière, this idea of aesthetic experience implies a utopian vision of a “community of narrators and translators.”15 This dynamics of feeling and witnessing feeling is what we are after when we speak about “politics of perception”: the private and the personal becoming the pivot of communal experience and engendering change on a public scale. We approach the problem of perceiving movement with the conceptual tools developed in Carnal Aesthetics: Transgressive Imagery Motion Pictures: Politics of Perception 167 and Feminist Politics, where we have mapped out a shift in the ongoing discussion on aesthetics and visual culture in ields such as gender studies, media studies, and ilm studies.16 There, we have given a different spin to the politics of representation—modes of visual and verbal production reinforcing and subverting the cultural perception of social groups—by approaching artworks through the lens of (multi)sensory perception (aisthesis), or our intimate, embodied, and sustainable relationship with images. Challenging the historically grounded primacy of vision, our approach has been inspired by the anthropology of the senses17 and by recent scholarship in ilm studies engaging the phenomenology of aesthetic experience.18 This special issue ties in with our enduring focus on the multisensorial engagement with images and seeks to strengthen our speciic approach to visual culture by foregrounding the politics of perception whereby the viewer is no longer only a viewer but is also the subject of an embodied, mobile encounter and is thus directly implicated in and by the act of perception. While the politics of representation seeks to uncover the representational strategies employed to reproduce stereotypical depictions, ixing subjects in power differentials, and to spark alternatives to clichéd representations, our speciic intervention is to bring to the fore the full sensorium and hence draw attention to the embodiment of the perceiver. From this perspective, movement becomes a speciic quality of images and, more important, a particular way of our engaging with them. Situating the bodies of viewers and subjects and objects in relation to one another, this approach to movement theorizes the tactile, kinesthetic, and proprioceptive engagement with images. All of these dimensions are addressed by the cover photograph, showing the magniied close-up of an eye projected on the screen of a grand old movie theater. The theater is empty. We, viewers of the photograph, begin to imagine spectators watching the huge eye move and the eye blinking and watching them arrested in their seats. The photograph is a stilled detail from the installation The Paradise Institute by Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, originally created for the Canadian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2001. Visitors were invited to take a seat on the balcony overlooking the model of a miniature movie theater in which emblematic scenes from various movie genres were projected. Via headphones, visitors heard both the sounds emanating from the projected ilm and the sounds produced by a ictive cinema audience. In doing so, the installation staged a communal, multisensory experience encompassing vision, sound, and proprioception. The work vividly 168 Marta Zarzycka and Bettina Papenburg embraced the politics of perception: arrested spectators encountering moving images and mobile viewers animating still images challenge the boundary we are accustomed to drawing between stillness and movement. Politics of perception highlights the implications of our affective and emotional response to images at the intersection of movement and stillness. What is called for is a language of the “both . . . and . . . ,” allowing us to come to terms with experience exceeding binary categories, such as the capacity of images to both move and still us. Drawing on approaches from a variety of ields such as studies of sentimentalism, emotion and affect studies, cultural studies, spatial art practices, and ilm theory, each essay that follows shows how movement and stillness affectively engage bodies in particular relations. Where other recent studies on movement and stillness have predominantly focused on the differences of photography and cinema,19 the essays assembled here emphasize the ethical and political dimensions of the expanded, multisensory concept of representation by including the questions of motion and stasis and how they affect viewers and their relationship to the represented subjects. Attention is given to formal strategies, including 3-D effects, soundtrack, digital navigation tools, spatial involvement, and randomness of camera movement, that transform viewers’ affective multisensory capacities, engendering questions of immersion, intensity, and vulnerability.20 Movement and stillness are understood as modes of relating to contemporary visual culture at large. Movement and Power The question of who moves and by what means is ethically charged.21 In the visual realm of the twenty-irst century, mobility has become not only “the uppermost among coveted values” but also an obligation.22 There is a generalized imperative to move images, to move with images, and to be moved by them—to copy or paste them, to share them, to “like” them (or hate them?), to tweet them. Images gain new meanings in the processes in which users, spectators, viewers, and perceivers use (and misuse) them, opening up pressing questions of their accountability toward the subjects represented and our ownership of them (or lack thereof). Movement intervenes at every stage of making and perceiving images, including the recording, processing, circulation, display, and experience of images. The process of transmitting visually rendered data between servers worldwide creates movement. “Copies in Motion Pictures: Politics of Perception 169 motion,” as Hito Steyerl calls contemporary low resolution iles,23 circulate globally as the digital connection accelerates and slows down; compressed, reproduced, fractured, and previewed images endlessly travel through digital archives, shifting resolution, format, speed, and media. At the same time, power differentials govern the capacities of individuals to move and determine the restriction of movement of social groups. In the context of the colonial era, movement through space signiied travel and exploration in addition to the privilege of exploring “nature,” “unknown territories,” and “uncivilized peoples,” shaping the relations of power and subjugation. Since the Enlightenment the right to move has been an inalienable right of the citizen, although immobility, stasis, and exclusion from geopolitical spaces are the destiny of ethnic groups today. Consequently, restriction of movement is a practice of penalization and of social exclusion, coming to bear in practices ranging from the lawful imprisonment at sites such as Guantánamo Bay and the entry regulations of countries and economic areas enjoying relative prosperity (referred to by the term “Alien Law”) to the laws curbing the freedom of movement of immigrants and speciically of asylum seekers. One can also note, however, in cases such as with Aboriginal populations or Palestine, that both mobility and stillness are, contextually, rights: the refusal of occupied people to leave a territory is as much a right as the will to mobility. Movement offers the illusion of universal progress, change, and aliveneness.24 However, contemporary (virtual) tourism and job mobility make us acutely aware that subjects are positioned differently when it comes to their capacities and resources to move at will. The widespread practice of commuting and the breakdown of movement in space that we witness in the standstill of trafic in ubiquitous urban gridlock presents one of the challenges that societies are facing nowadays. Modes of transportation, ranging from cycling to supersonic transport, and modes of communication, from snail mail to e-mail, signify economic progress and social change yet incite a host of social and ecological issues. Moreover, while transportation may raise a fantasy of freedom from the limitations of the body, access to the means of transportation at cyber speed remains a privilege for particular subjects only. “[T]he freedom to move through space has been and is still prized in an era of digital media.”25 All of our contributors speciically attend to the situatedness of both images and their viewers in particular sociocultural contexts of mobility and immobility. Adopting an approach that is sensitive to the particularities of social differentiation and examining 170 Marta Zarzycka and Bettina Papenburg concepts of ethnicity, race, gender, class, geopolitical location, and disability, the essays demonstrate that movement cannot be understood outside of the complex cultural dynamics that shape subjects and objects.26 Contributions Each of the assembled essays addresses the politics and ethics of the interplay between static and moving images from a distinct perspective. The essays aim to mobilize critical interventions into the study of movement, stillness, multisensoriality, affect, and gender in visual media through linking diverse lines of the relationship between movement and stimulating interconnections between distinct theoretical and methodological traditions. This collection of essays encompasses the heterogeneous array of corporeal, material, and social mobilities that we encounter in our multisensory experiencing of the visual. The essays are also attentive to how motion and stasis—both of subjects represented onscreen and of audiences in front of the screen—shape our sensorial, affective, and ethical engagement with images. Kyla Schuller’s “Avatar and the Movements of Neocolonial Sentimental Cinema” takes Avatar, a Hollywood production that gained millions of fans worldwide, partly due to its larger-than-life renditions of movement, as an example of a new kind of twenty-irst century sentimentalism, an Enlightenment epistemology and aesthetic mode that forges deep affective connections between the work of iction and its audiences. In this iteration of the sentimental mode, adapted to late capitalist conditions and neoliberal ideals, diverse movements link the onscreen characters and their viewers through emotional shifts, sensory stimulations, and affective responses. Continuing a long-standing colonialist and evolutionary trope of the life-changing encounter between the overcivilized subject and the savage, Avatar associates movement with vitality and progress (and, consequently, the lack of movement with degeneration and decay). At the same time, the ilm’s imaging technology, particularly striking in its 3-D versions, enacts the dynamic in which the viewers experience sensory movements that are similar to those of the protagonists, therefore adopting an avatar body themselves. Ultimately, this immersive spectacle of computer-generated images sparks affective movements among responsive, sympathetic bodies of the viewers, often at the cost of the “savage” characters, which are represented as racially, bodily, and evolutionarily different. Movement, seen widely as an uncorrupted, promising resource Motion Pictures: Politics of Perception 171 in ilmmaking, is exposed in Schuller’s essay as compromised and colonizing, a strategic commodiication of sensory and emotional operations. The dynamics of visual representation, “racial differences,” and movement is also at the center of Jennifer M. Barker’s contribution “Be-hold: Touch, Temporality, and the Cinematic Thumbnail Image,” albeit in regard to movement’s opposite: stillness. Barker argues that the cinematic trope of thumbnail images—that is, images of photographs inserted in a ilm sequence in which we see the hands of a ilm character holding a photograph—incites us to reassess the widespread distinction between still images (photography) and moving images (ilm). The copresence of photograph and human hands complicates the relationship between the character who is physically holding an image, the character who is represented in the image, the one who captured the image, and us, spectators who are looking at someone else looking. Barker, in her close reading of the single thumbnail image in the 1959 ilm Imitation of Life, initiates relection about the racial dynamics at work both in the ilm and in postwar U.S. society. In this image we see the ingers of a black mother holding and looking at a snapshot of her teenage daughter who could pass as white. Barker proposes conceiving the act of the handling of this photographic image of another as a “be-holding,” as at once a moving with the Other and a moving away from the Other. While the tactile encounter differentiates between self and Other, more important it opens up possibilities of connecting, of “being with” the Other. Extending Raymond Bellour’s idea of “the pensive spectator,”27 Barker argues that the thumbnail image exhibits “not only a pensive gaze but also a pensive grasp.” Barker’s lucid relections on the complex interplay of looking and holding in the staging of critical relections on racial identity resonate well with Christine Ross’s essay “Movement That Matters Historically: Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller’s 2012 Alter Bahnhof Video Walk” in which she discusses how the audiences’ sensorimotor involvement with a speciic place opens up an ethical horizon. While Barker is interested in the thumbnail image’s capacity to make spectators pause and think about the space between the binary racial categories of “black” and “white,” Ross points out how “the participant’s capacity to be affectively moved through movement” remains crucial in creating historical awareness and intensity. Ross examines the Alter Bahnhof Video Walk by Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, an art installation made for the 2012 dOCUMENTA (13) in Kassel. This work explores movement and mobility as an undertaking by which a speciic 172 Marta Zarzycka and Bettina Papenburg place (the Hauptbahnhof train station in Kassel, from which Jews were deported by freight trains to extermination camps during World War II) is affectively historicized. Visitors are invited to circulate in the space, equipped with a screen that broadcasts a video of the station as it once was and a headset that transmits prerecorded sounds of trains and people rushing through the station as well as the artist’s voice. The manifold occurrences of movement—the movement of the walker in space, the mobility of media devices, the movement of the image and sound, the participant’s capacity to be affectively moved when walking—makes the participant receptive to the otherwise imperceptible complexity of the historical and contemporary space. Combining an autobiographical narrative with the elements of ilm noir and the historical signiicance of the artwork’s context, the video walk densely merges the audible and the visible, the ictional and the real, and the past and the present as Ross guides us through the experience of a walker, “moving in space has been transformed into being moved by space.” While Schuller, Barker, and Ross pinpoint the ethical implications of our moving with images, Jon Inge Faldalen contributes to a “natural history” of creation and perception of still and moving images. He approaches the key theme of this special issue in “Still Einstellung: Stillmoving Imagenesis”—that is, movement by refocusing the question of how images move and still us. Faldalen asks how we are “stilling (with) images.” The author discusses two case studies: Werner Herzog’s Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2010), an example of 3-D cinema featuring prehistoric rock paintings in the Chauvet cave in the Ardèche Valley of Southern France, and Richard Wilson’s 20:50, a room-illing sculpture made of steel and recycled engine oil that creates an expansive and indeinable virtual space that clinically absorbs and mirrors the gallery architecture. Faldalen reads the depictions of igures on solid rock surfaces in the cave, which are animated by both reverberations of ire and camera movements, and the relections of still architecture and moving visitors on the oil illing in the gallery space as instances of what he calls “imagenesis.” Taking his cue from the Latin word imago and from the Greek term genesis, Faldalen explores the question of image creation on rock surfaces as well as on oil and water surfaces. Focusing on relections and shadows, he proposes to collapse the analytical distinction between still and moving images and instead suggests investigating “stillmoving imageability,” that is, a material’s ability to produce an image. Faldalen borrows from Gertrud Koch the provocative concept of Einstellung, a German term referring to both the positioning of bodies and objects in front of a movie Motion Pictures: Politics of Perception 173 camera and the real-life, value-laden attitude assumed by social actors vis-à-vis social groups.28 The double meaning of the German term, which Koch wittily highlights, suggests that the ilm shot conveys a social attitude. Faldalen proposes the concept of Einstellung to articulate the capacity of materials such as rock and oil to both move and still us. While Faldalen considers the emergence or nascency of images at the threshold between movement and stillness, Anu Koivunen in her essay “Uncanny Motions: Facing Death, Morphing Life” ponders the representation of aging as movement toward death. Koivunen studies the short video loop titled Metamorphosis, an animated rendition of thirteen self-portraits of the Finnish artist Helene Schjerfbeck, that she encountered in the context of the artist’s postmortem show in 2012. The experience of watching a series of subsequent images seamlessly morphing into each other, spanning the life cycle from youth to old age, allows viewers to bring questions of body, selfhood, and spirit to the fore and throws into sharp relief the movement that the self and its uttermost form of expression, the face, perform throughout the life cycle. While animating the still images and bringing them back from the past, the loop shows movement as effacement and de-individuation. In all of the essays assembled in this special issue, both aesthetics and ethics of movement are connected, at least partly, to ilmmakers’ and visual artists’ intentionality and their (creative) choices or strategies. Contrarily, Florian Leitner’s “On Robots and Turtles: A Posthuman Perspective on Camera and Image Movement after Michael Snow’s La région centrale” focuses on two cases of nonhuman camera movements: an underwater ilm made by a sea turtle when the animal hit the release button on a lost (and later retrieved) digital camera and Michael Snow’s 1971 experimental ilm shot by a 16mm camera mounted on a robotic arm rotating on a number of different axes at various speeds and set up on a Canadian mountaintop. Leitner points to striking similarities between both kinds of footage made by the nonhuman actors, particularly in respect to camera movement; both the turtle and the robotic arm put the camera into a seemingly chaotic, endless rotation around itself. Leitner’s essay takes these similarities as a point of departure to stress how the two ilms break out of cinematic conventions by divorcing the camera’s gaze from human gestures and arguing for a nonhuman motion-gaze: a dynamics in which looking and moving become inseparable. By challenging the traditional idea that subjectivity and the gaze are located at a single point, Leitner transfers agency from a human creator subject to a luid, mobile, dispersed actor-network. 174 Marta Zarzycka and Bettina Papenburg Collectively these essays argue that movement—a kinesthetic process; an organized or spontaneous action; a phenomenological, historical, or cultural occurrence; an imaginative or material/ corporeal affective phenomenon evoked through images, sounds, or narratives; a continuous, repetitive, or random intensity, aiming at proximity or distance—is happening all the time in our minds and in our bodies. Even stillness (and how it extends to silence) in this volume becomes a product of movement to the extent that we associate it with “becoming still” or “slowing down.” Two and a half millennia after Heraclitus and a century after the theory of relativity, our knowledge of movement and stasis and the threshold between them is far from exhausted. It is the challenge of this issue to insist that we not take these terms for granted and that we theorize them locally and across registers for the manner in which they produce continuities while remaining dynamic. We believe that the current interest in mobile media studies and the renewed attention to art history and ilm theory will continue to reconnect movement and stillness with the politics of perception, ethics, and social relations. An aesthetic conception of motion pictures, which entails the spatial, the temporal, the affective, and the political, provokes us to rethink the sociocultural practices of movement in media and art and invites us to see it as a pivotal factor in the production of contemporary notions of subjectivity and political agency. Notes We wish to warmly thank the editors of Discourse, James Leo Cahill and Genevieve Yue, for their expert guidance and for their invaluable editorial feedback with regard to both this introduction and this special issue as a whole. 1. Brian Massumi, “The Autonomy of Affect,” in Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 23–45. 2. Ibid., 28. 3. Steven Shaviro, Post-Cinematic Affect (Hants: Zero Books, 2010), 3, emphasis in original. 4. 5. Ibid., 3. Ibid., 4, emphasis in original. In an earlier book publication where he engages Alfred North Whitehead’s theory of feelings, Shaviro to some extent disengages from differentiating between affect and emotion. Steven Shaviro, “Pulses of Emotion,” in Without Criteria: Kant, Whitehead, Deleuze, and Aesthetics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009), 47–70; see especially 47n1. Motion Pictures: Politics of Perception 175 6. Speciically, we are indebted to Karen Beckman and Jean Ma, eds., Still Moving: Between Cinema and Photography (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008). 7. Laura Mulvey, Death 24X a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image (London: Reaction Books, 2006). 8. Ingrid Hoelzl, “Moving Stills: Images That Are No Longer Immobile,” Photographies 3, no. 1 (2010): 99–108. 9. Giuliana Bruno, Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture, and Film (New York: Verso, 2007), 6. 10. These contributions have most signiicantly informed our understanding of the concept of affect in contemporary cultural theory: Teresa Brennan, The Transmission of Affect (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004); Patricia T. Clough and Jean Halley, eds., The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007); and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002). 11. Shaviro, Post-Cinematic Affect, 2–3, emphasis in original. 12. Ann Cvetkovich, Depression: A Public Feeling (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), 1–3. 13. Jill Bennett, “Insides, Outsides: Trauma, Affect, and Art,” in Empathic Vision: Affect, Trauma, and Contemporary Art (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), 25–26. 14. Jacques Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, translated by Gregory Elliot (London: Verso, 2009), 13. 15. Ibid., 22. 16. Bettina Papenburg and Marta Zarzycka, eds., Carnal Aesthetics: Transgressive Imagery and Feminist Politics (London: I. B. Tauris, 2013). 17. Constance Classen, Worlds of Sense: Exploring the Senses in History and across Cultures (London: Routledge, 1993); Constance Classen, “Foundations for an Anthropology of the Senses,” International Social Science Journal, September, no. 153 (1997): 401–12; Constance Classen, The Book of Touch (Oxford, UK: Berg, 2005); Constance Classen, David Howes, and Anthony Synnott, Aroma: The Cultural History of Smell (New York: Routledge, 1994); Paul Stoller, The Taste of Ethnographic Things: The Senses in Anthropology (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989); Paul Stoller, Sensuous Scholarship (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997); and Michael Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses (New York: Routledge, 1993). 18. Vivian Sobchack, “What My Fingers Knew: The Cinesthetic Subject, or Vision in the Flesh,” in Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 67–72; Jennifer Barker, The Tactile Eye: Touch and the Cinematic Experience (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010); Martine Beugnet, Cinema and Sensation: French Film and the Art of Transgression (Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh University Press, 2007); Elena del Río, “The Body as Foundation of the Screen: Allegories of Technology in Atom Egoyan’s Speaking Parts,” Camera Obscura 38 (1996): 92–115; and Bruce Elder, A Body of Vision: Representations of the Body in Recent Film and Poetry (Waterloo, Canada: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1998). 19. Sigrid Leyssen and Pirkko Rathgeber, eds., Bilder animierter Bewegung [Images of Animate Movement] (Paderborn: Fink, 2013); Laurent Guido and Olivier Lugon, 176 Marta Zarzycka and Bettina Papenburg Between Still and Moving Images: Photography and Cinema in the 20th Century (London: John Libbey, 2012); Eivind Røssaak, ed., Between Stillness and Motion: Film, Photography, Algorithms (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2012); and Karen Beckman, Crash: Cinema and the Politics of Speed and Stasis (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010). 20. Among the works that have inspired our engagement with these questions are Jennifer Barker, The Tactile Eye: Touch and the Cinematic Experience (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010); Erin Manning, Politics of Touch: Sense, Movement, Sovereignty (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007); and Laura U. Marks, The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000). 21. Lisa Nakamura, “Where Do You Want to Go Today? Cybernetic Tourism, the Internet, and Transnationality,” in Race in Cyberspace, edited by Beth E. Kolko, Lisa Nakamura, and Gilbert Rodman (New York: Routledge, 2000), 15–26. 22. Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity (London: Wiley, 2000), 2. 23. Hito Steyerl, “In Defense of the Poor Image,” E-Flux, no. 10 (2009), www.e-lux. com/journal/in-defense-of-the-poor-image/. 24. See Vivian Sobchack, ed., Meta Morphing: Visual Transformation and the Culture of Quick-Change (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000); Vivian Sobchack, Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004); and Sally Banes and Andre Lepecki, eds., The Senses in Performance (New York: Routledge, 2007). 25. Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), 244. 26. For further research along these lines, see Bettina Papenburg and Marta Zarzycka, eds., Carnal Aesthetics: Transgressive Imagery and Feminist Politics (London: I. B. Tauris, 2013), and Davide Panagia, The Political Life of Sensation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009). 27. Raymond Bellour, “The Pensive Spectator,” Wide Angle 9, no. 1 (1987): 6–10. 28. Gertrud Koch, Die Einstellung ist die Einstellung: Visuelle Konstruktionen des Judentums (Berlin: Edition Suhrkamp, 1992). Avatar and the Movements of Neocolonial Sentimental Cinema Kyla Schuller Modes of literature, art, and ilm animate the body and acculturate its movements. Sentimentalism, an Enlightenment epistemology and aesthetic mode that remains a viable form in commercial cinema, makes the audience’s embodied connection with the characters onscreen central to the pleasure of viewing. In the present moment, something is often dismissively called “sentimental” when its lagrant and seemingly feminized indulgence in emotion appears rather more cliché than heartfelt. Sentimental approaches to knowledge production position self-relective feelings as the individual’s most reliable indicator of truth. As an aesthetic mode, sentimental texts seek to elicit emotional and physiological feelings in audiences that mirror those of the characters, most famously in the form of melodrama’s shared tears.1 Yet while sentimentality in cinema serves as a particularly useful resource for thinking about how images move the viewer’s body, all modes create patterns of sensory and motor response. Building on Kara Keeling’s notion of cinematic “common sense,” a set of habituated sensorimotor movements and collective images shared by contemporary consumers of ilm, I suggest that modes function as a political organization of the senses.2 Modes train sensorimotor responses in the context of speciic social relations such that they function as a political organization of affective response. Discourse, 35.2, Spring 2013, pp. 177–193. Copyright © 2014 Wayne State University Press, Detroit, Michigan 48201-1309. ISSN 1522-5321.