Mathias Cinema-A Medium of The Sublime

Amsterdam University Press
Chapter Title: Cinema – A Medium of the Sublime?
Book Title: Disaster Cinema in Historical Perspective

Book Subtitle: Mediations of the Sublime
Book Author(s): Nikita Mathias
Published by: Amsterdam University Press. (2020)
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5. Cinema – A Medium of the Sublime?
Abstract
I set out to explore cinema in terms of its potential function as a medium
of the sublime. Burke and Kant’s accounts of the sublime are employed
to examine their correlation with cinema’s technological, formal, and
receptive repertoire. This encompasses intrinsic features such as cin-
ematography’s innovation of putting in motion photographic images,
aspects of the montage, the aesthetic potential of the camera as cinema’s
central organ of expression and perception, sound effects, and multimedia
interplay as well as external features of cinema which constitute the
medium as a concrete space for cinematic experiences. To what extent
do these various features provoke, facilitate, mediate, or participate in a
sensory and affective overpowering of the viewer?
Keywords: Vivian Sobchack, Thomas Morsch, Somatic Film Theory,

Technological History of Cinema, Immersion, Media History
After having traced the sublime’s iconography up until the decline of the
Panorama and the Diorama, I will investigate in this chapter the medium
of cinema, particularly in terms of its potential function as a medium of the
sublime. The chapter represents a connecting link between the previous
historical enquiry and the subsequent film analysis of the disaster genre.
An analysis of the technological and receptive fundament of the medium
of cinema allows for comparative references to earlier visual media of
the sublime. Note, however, that this enquiry will be limited to cinema’s
technological and general receptive dimensions; thematic aspects and
experiences of specific films will be dealt with later in the film analysis.
As for the description of cinema’s technological features, one must consider
the transformations that cinema has been going through over the years. There
is not just one cinematic medium to be described but a variety of devices and
modes of presentation and performance. Thus, it is crucial to reflect on the
technological history of cinema and discuss different concepts associated with
Mathias, N., Disaster Cinema in Historical Perspective: Mediations of the Sublime. Amsterdam:
Amsterdam University Press, 2020
doi 10.5117/9789463720120_ch05
142 Disaster Cinema in Historical Perspec tive
its historical stages, such as the distinction between the cinema of attractions
and narrative cinema. To a certain degree, a historical investigation of cinema
must further include social and economic factors as well as public discourses
which have informed contemporary practices of cinematic production and
reception. The goal is to outline the most essential stages and models of
the cinematic experience in order to provide contextual orientation for the
subsequent discussion of disaster films from all ages of cinema.
Once again, I will employ the aesthetic framework of the sublime (accord-
ing to Burke and Kant), this time, as a means to examine its correlation with
cinema’s technological, formal, and receptive repertoire. This encompasses:
first, intrinsic features such as cinematography’s putting in motion of pho-
tographic images, aspects of the montage, the aesthetic potential of the
camera as cinema’s central organ of expression and perception, as well as
sound effects and multimedia interplay; second, external features of cinema
which constitute the medium as a concrete space for cinematic experiences,
including relations of screen-space and viewer-space, the location of the
viewer’s body, and different modes of reception as part of the cinematic
performance. To what extent do these various features provoke, facilitate,
mediate, or participate in a sensory and affective overpowering of the
viewer, as described by the Burkean and Kantian accounts of the sublime?
In addition, emphasis will be laid on somatic facets of the cinematic
experience, as they are theoretically explored by Vivian Sobchack and
Thomas Morsch (see also p. 25). Extending their somatic models of the
cinematic experience, I will also attempt to establish intersections and points
of contact between these models and Burke and Kant’s theoretical accounts
of the sublime. The aim is to show that compatibility between both theoreti-
cal branches can be reached in preparation for the film analysis, in which
cinematic experiences of the sublime will be considered as predominantly
somatic phenomena. Moreover, Sobchack’s model is valuable because it
involves a nuanced phenomenological investigation of the relations between
cinema’s technological apparatus and the particularities of human percep-
tion – a topic that relates to and, at the same time, problematizes my previous
discussion of the pictorial receptive effects of illusionistic immersion and
media reflexivity.
Photographic Images in Motion
First and foremost, the technology of cinematography must be discussed

as well as the novelties it comprised. What cinematography achieved in the
Cinema – A Medium of the Sublime? 143
most striking manner was to transform photographic images into a seamless

and continuous motion. As noted in the case of Daguerre and Bouton’s
Diorama, the realization of movement appearing on one homogenous
screen plane had not been new to the viewers of visual spectacles when
cinematography was invented in the late nineteenth century.1 Also, the
dissolving views of the laterna magica provided effects of motion and blend-
ing (see also Footnote 36). The medium of photography, as it was invented
and developed during the first half of the nineteenth century, promised an
immaculate pictorial recording of reality. Despite its potential to stage, fake,
or to be manipulated, photography’s immediate realistic appeal, its recording
function, and its resemblance to human perception have been established as
widely-acknowledged topoi from the medium’s invention up until today.2
Yet, like traditional easel paintings and Panoramas, photographs merely
present immobile and frozen moments of reality. Therefore, they deviate
from the human experience of reality as a constant stream of events – a
problem (insofar as it was perceived as one) that was most successfully
solved by cinematography.
As it allied with the photographic image and set it in motion, cinematog-
raphy, from early on, gained the status as a recording device of life itself. For
example, the Lumière brothers (Auguste and Louis) invented their Cinemato-
graph initially as a machine for the scientific analysis of real movement.3
On the one hand, this claimed realism seems to limit the medium’s range of
expression to the given objects, events, and physical laws of the real world,
making it far more dependent on things and actions that factually exist
or took place – a set of restrictions that hardly concerned visual artists in
pre-cinematic times. On the other hand, one does not even need to jump as
far ahead as to the digital visual effects of 1990s-blockbuster cinema to find
a high degree of imaginative manipulation of reality’s recordings. Already
in cinema’s early years, the filmmaker Georges Méliès realized cinematic vi-
sions of fantasy and magic through special effects, forming an antithesis and
parallel strand to the realism of the Lumières. More generally, the fantastical
1 It is impossible to pinpoint cinematography’s invention to one single individual, event,

or place, hence the rather indistinct date given above. For the complex and diverse history of
cinematography’s emergence, see: Wyver; Elsaesser 2002, 47-68. – Moreover, Thomas Elsaesser
names a number of additional inventors which quickly were forgotten (Elsaesser 2002, 36f.).
2 This topical branch ranges from André Bazin’s realist ontology of the photographic image to
Roland Barthes’ Reflections on Photography as a mechanical repetition of passed moments to
Klaus Sachs-Hombach’s characterization of photography as a both indexical and iconic medium
(Bazin; Barthes; Sachs-Hombach, 217-222).
3 Elsaesser 2002, 47-68.
and imaginary side of cinema also shows in the entire genre of animated
film. Thus, the repeatedly expressed criticism against digital cinema and its
abandonment of the medium’s indexicality (resulting from its photographic
essence) is built on thin ice, for cinema – as demonstrated by Stephen Prince
and Noëll Carroll – never was an exclusively photographic medium in the
first place but has always been an amalgam of various media and production
practices such as painting, animation, or sculpting.4 Moreover, the cinematic
experience is almost never fully realistic and indexical, since its ‘various
physical continuities’ are synthetically arranged and composited.5 In turn,
the perception of cinema’s indexicality based on photographic images in
motion prevails even in the case of highly manipulated or entirely artificial
presentations of digital film production. This is because indexicality is also
an aesthetic and social value and, therefore, not exclusively dependent on
the factual existence of an object. Prince speaks in this regard of ‘indexical
properties’ and ‘indexical claims’, which not only have significance for the
reception of digital cinema but for cinematic reception in general.6 As for
the origins of cinema’s close association with realism and indexicality (as
a primarily social, not technological conditioned occurrence), James Lastra
locates this phenomenon in broader (and much older) discourses concerning
norms of picturing and aesthetics; especially significant in this regard is
the distinction between image (a recording of a contingent fragment of the
world executed by an amateur) and picture/art (purposeful and creative
representation).7
How exactly does cinematography achieve the perceived effect of move-
ment? The photographic images captured on film, as they are projected in a
frequency of at least sixteen frames per second, are experienced as motion,
because of the viewer’s physiological and cognitive response to them. One
condition is the high enough frequency of the sequential images (triggering
the physiological response). Electric velocity accelerates film sequences from
the perception of their mechanical succession to the perceived simultaneity of
the moving picture. The second condition – the cognitive one – is the interplay
of similarity and difference in terms of the sequenced images, prompting the
spectator’s cognition to dissolve them into one continuous flow of motion.8
4 Prince, 155; Carroll, 6f., 261-263. – An overview of the leading voices in the discussion of
cinema’s loss of indexicality (Barbara Savedoff, Steven Shaviro, Keith Griff iths, Berys Gaut,
Philip Rosen, Lev Manovich) is given in: Prince, 149.
5 Prince, 53.
6 Prince, 150.
7 Lastra.
8 Paech, 98f.
Only when these two conditions are met is film no longer perceived as
images in motion, but rather as one cinematographic moving picture. As
for the current phase of digitally produced film, cinematography’s effect
of movement has gained independence from its mechanical performance,
in that it has become a fully electronic phenomenon. At the same time, the
receptive dimension of digital cinema still operates on the realistic premise
of cinema’s dynamization of (what appears to be) photographic images.
To gain a clearer understanding of cinematographic movement, let me
bring in some of the older moving picture devices that were discussed earlier.
De Loutherbourg’s Eidophusikon employed various technologies and media
(painting, miniature figures, faux terrain, card boards, etc.) to construct a
unified and illusionistic image-space presenting different phenomena in
motion. The interplay of these components facilitated their synthesis in
the experience of the viewer. The Eidophusikon’s (implicit) successor, the
Diorama, presented movement on a seemingly unified and homogenous
image plane; yet, it remained limited to the movements of a few objects
within the otherwise immobile image. In opposition to immobile pictorial
media like the Panorama, Martin’s monumental disaster paintings and the
American Great Pictures, whose images were put in motion by the viewer’s
imagination, both the Eidophusikon and the Diorama relocated larger
elements of these subjective movements into the technological performance
of their devices. This is also what Jonathan Crary describes as being part of
the development of the modern subject-observer, whose body and perception
become disciplined and agitated on a physiological level (see also p. 21).
In continuation of this development, cinematography achieved the ability
to present movements that resembled and latched on to subjective processes
of perception and imagination. With this ‘outsourcing’ of subjective motion
into the cinematographic (and cinematic) apparatus, the sublime’s tension
field of freedom and violence is brought into focus once again. According to
Kant, the experience of the sublime presupposes the absence of existential
affects triggered by real physical danger, but he also states that the sublime
unfolds its strongest aesthetic impact when severe violence is let loose
upon the subject’s sensibility.9 As Jean-François Lyotard correctly points
out, the Kantian sublime is an economic venture in which the experience
of sensory violence is invested for the gain of a surplus of freedom.10 Hence,
when cinematography – instead of setting the viewer’s imagination in
9 Kant, 144, 148. – Unlike in the German original though, the word ‘violence’ (Gewalt) is not
to be found within the English translations of the passages in question.
10 Lyotard, 129f.
motion – presents movement as a physiologically forced and cognitively

trained phenomenon, and, further, when this media technological force is
applied to the depiction of the iconography of the sublime (as it occurs within
the disaster genre), it is indeed the Kantian exchange of violence (pain) for
freedom (pleasure) that organizes the film experience from the ground up.
Let me briefly recall what Burke and Kant had to say about the importance
of movement within their models of the sublime: Burke conceives (natural)
power to be expressed through movement, which in turn causes tension
within and sets in motion the physiologic-psychological apparatus of the
spectator. Kant regards movement as the essential phenomenal structure
for the manifestation of dynamically sublime forces of nature such as thun-
derstorms, volcano eruptions, waterfalls, storms at sea, and hurricanes.
In juxtaposition with these two notions of sublime movement, I will now
present Vivian Sobchack’s position on the matter from a somatic f ilm
theoretical perspective. In her phenomenology of the cinematic experience,
movement plays a crucial role. Film, due to its ontology that is its ability
to perceive and express ‘the very movement of [embodied] existence’, is a
truly ‘privileged form of communication’.11 ‘Unlike the still photograph, the
film exists for us as always in the act of becoming’.12 The moments captured
in photographic images become ‘original and real movement’ in the act of
cinematic reception.13 Film’s movements present and represent all facets
of subjectivity and embodied existence (such as seeing, hearing, feeling,
physical and reflective movement).14 Thus, there is more to cinematographic
movement than the illusionistic representation of the dynamics and fluc-
tuations of reality, as claimed by Rudolf Arnheim; for cinema also makes
sensible the inner motions of subjectivity such as dreaming, fantasizing,
fighting, running, dying, contemplating, reflecting, desiring, evaluating,
being shocked, surprised, exhausted, angry, or in love.15
According to Sobchack, viewers can relate to cinema’s movements because
their bodies resemble the bodies of film and filmmaker.16 All three bodily
entities share the same general structures of embodied existence. All of
11 Sobchack, 12.
12 Sobchack, 60.
13 Sobchack, 208.
14 Sobchack, 3f.
15 With the film technological enhancements of color and sound, Arnheim sees man’s ancient
dream of a perfect illusionistic representation in the arts finally fulfilled (Arnheim, 154-160).
16 For Sobchack, the body of the filmmaker does not refer to one specific individual (e.g. the
auteur director) but to a multiplicity of individuals in their ‘concrete, situated, and synoptic
presence’ (Sobchack, 9, Footnote 11), which are involved in the process of film production.
them are both perceiving and expressing subjects as well as perceived and
expressed objects. Always already situated in and intertwined with the world
as bodily beings, the bodies of spectator, film, and filmmaker are constantly
in a dynamic dialogue with each other. This is the somatic foundation from
which each and every cinematic experience must emerge. By emphasizing
the resemblance between cinema’s three embodied subject-objects, Sobchack
carefully distinguishes her model from apparatus theories that focus either
on cinema’s readability and allowance of media reflexivity or on its ability
to completely take over and control the viewer’s subjective perception.
Throughout her book, she reminds the reader that while the bodies of film,
filmmaker, and spectator share the same perception, they never become
identical. ‘The viewer is always at some level aware of the double and revers-
ible nature of cinematic perception’.17 Due to this recognition of bodily
difference, there is a certain degree of media awareness inscribed to the
cinematic experience.
While I generally agree with this notion, I would argue that cinema
is also able to confront the spectator with sensations of such affective
intensity that even the last residue of media awareness can be temporarily
suspended. These intense moments of affective immersion are merely
framed by the experience of difference of embodied vision, as described by
Sobchack. Based on the interplay between immersion and media reflexivity
as well as cinema’s general ability to present and represent the dynamic
procedures of subjectivity, the medium cinema can swiftly shift between
facilitating intense experiences of the sublime and enabling reflections
on these experiences. Cinema both presents the sublime and represents
it as an act of experience. However, these two sides are hardly ever clearly
distinguished; rather, one should envision their shared border areas as
generally permeable and malleable, with a sheer endless range of possible
nuances. The subjectivity machine cinema can make sensible the two sides
of the sublime – sensual crisis and reason’s interference – as a dynamic
process of mediation between different aggregates. With its key feature of
presenting (and representing) processuality and succession, cinema also
brings into focus questions of the sublime’s temporality, whether it unfolds
gradually, appears instantly, or dialectically builds up in a back and forth
structure. Quite literally, cinema creates time to make sensible, present and
represent the temporalities of the sublime event for the viewer.
Before investigating specific accounts of cinematic movement in their
relation to the receptive functioning of the sublime, cinema’s temporality
17 Sobchack, 10.
needs to be addressed more broadly. It was Walter Benjamin who famously

attributed the experience of shock to cinema. In ‘On Some Motifs in Baude-
laire’, he explores shock experiences – in the sense of impulses, energies,
affects, and stimuli – as a distinctly modern that is urban, industrial, and
technologically accelerated occurrence. Set in contrast to Henri Bergson’s
concept of duration, which Benjamin associates with experiences that are
meaningful, lasting, and enriched by memory and tradition, the shock
experience, just like modern labor, transportation, media, and leisure,
turns out to be fragmented, sensational, and mechanically trained. As for
cinema, Benjamin argues that in ‘a film, perception conditioned by shock
was established as a formal principle’.18 Accordingly, experiences of a work’s
aura, successively embracing the viewer and allowing for the (involuntary)
involvement of distant memories, associations, and the imagination, are
restricted in the cinema space.
The two-fold and border structure of the sublime, when applied to
cinematic experiences, potentially arrives at a different verdict than
Benjamin. Whereas Benjamin’s shocks always entail a foreshortening and
depletion of experience and a loss of aura, the sublime’s shocks, affects, and
overpowering of the senses can be seen as a leap toward imagination. The
sublime’s sensory crisis is nothing but a potential opening toward durable
and profound experiences of spirituality, moral insight and reflection. As
the cinematic sublime seems to eclipse the gap between the visual regimes
of the eighteenth century and the experiential scope of the industrial age,
it establishes a much more fluid and continuous relation between the two
sides of modernity’s borderline than Benjamin, who argues for a fundamental
historical caesura. However, as promising as the sublime’s revaluation of
modern aesthetic experiences may sound, if its promise of meaningful
experiences within the regime of cinematic shocks and affects really holds
up remains to be seen in the film analysis.
With his concepts of somatische Empathie (‘somatic empathy’) and
Ästhetik der Geschwindigkeit (‘aesthetics of speed’), Thomas Morsch views
cinematography’s movements from a particularly aesthetic perspective and
thoroughly explores cinema’s somatic potential. Generally, the ‘presentation
of object worlds being drawn on the screen in expressive gestures and
mediated through a camera, which itself is carried by a movement impulse,
makes film a medium that continuously demands a motoric resonance’.19 He
then describes somatic empathy ‘as a bodily-mimetic relation to the filmic
18 Benjamin, 175.
19 Translated from German by the author; orig.: Morsch, 203.
object worlds and to the filmic movement to which it clings in a re-enacting

manner. Somatic empathy represents a continuous but widely latent layer
of filmic reception, which, in particular moments, moves to the foreground
and unfolds as a rich bodily experience’.20 Unlike former concepts of somatic
empathy, which Morsch seeks to expand, his concept is not limited to filmic
depictions of human bodies, with which the spectator engages; moreover,
it also encompasses filmic movements, forces, and phenomena of all kinds.
As for his aesthetics of speed, Morsch primarily employs filmic examples
and conventions of the action genre, thereby addressing some of the most
essential somatic features that cinematographic movement potentially
has to offer:
The kinetic spectacle leads the spectator beyond the borders of common
perception. Through swift shot changes, light and flicker effects, oblique
and tilted framing and swish pans, rapid tracking shots and accelerated
diegetic movements, through time manipulations and transformations
of images into energetic impulses, the identifying view of the spectator
is undermined. The cognitive perception of objects and the possibility
of sensing a visual and spatial order are suspended in the most intense
moments of action cinema. In these moments, the film becomes a ver-
tiginous rush of images, which is far more somatic-mimetically felt than
visual-cognitively comprehended.21
How is all this relevant for the investigation of the receptive characteristics of
the cinematic sublime? Morsch describes cinema’s use of dynamic movement
as a receptive means to overwhelm the sensual capacity of the viewer, right
in coherence with the sublime’s crisis of sensibility (as described by Burke
and Kant). Cinematography’s ‘dynamization of space and […] spatialization
of time’ (see Chapter 1, Footnote 35) is intensified to such a high degree in
the action and disaster genres that an aesthetics of speed, shock, thrill,
and terror gets to dominate the cinematic experience. Intensifications as
such are accomplished, first, by the delicately orchestrated intertwining
of filmed dynamic objects and the dynamic movements of the camera,
second, by dynamic montage patterns, and third, by overwhelming visual
effects. The precondition for why these movements trigger such extensive
affects is the spectator’s embodied existence. Through his/her somatic
perception, the spectator empathetically engages with other phenomena.

Only because the spectator knows what it means to occupy a lived-body,

which is always already entangled with the world, s/he can mimetically
engage with cinema’s movements and its dynamic expressions of bodies,
objects, and forces.
In terms of the aesthetic category of the sublime, I have not yet systemati-
cally explored its somatic dimensions. Thus, before I proceed to investigate
other cinematic features, a clarification of the role of the bodily within
the aesthetic framework of the sublime is called for. More specifically, the
question is: how does the sublime relate to Sobchack and Morsch’s somatic
theories of the cinematic experience?
Is the Sublime a Somatic Experience?
Given Burke’s role as a British sensualist of the eighteenth century, his

theoretical model of the sublime is likely to offer intersections with somatic
theories of cinema. He describes in detail the impact of sublime objects
on the physiologic-psychological apparatus of the perceiving subject. His
mechanistic image of the human body and its connectivity with the mind
widely coincides with what was believed to be common sense among
other British sensualist and empiricist thinkers. At the beginning of his
Philosophical Enquiry, Burke bases his aesthetic model of the sublime on a
couple of central physiological premises: due to the universality and identity
of the human organs, external objects are perceived in the same manner
by everybody. Since ‘bodies present similar images to the whole species, it
must necessarily be allowed, that the pleasures and the pains which every
object excites in one man, it must raise in all mankind’.22 Further, Burke
assumes a broad variety of direct causal relationships between body and
mind. Without being able to determine the ‘ultimate cause’ in the ‘great
chain of causes’, he investigates the sublime’s reception as ‘certain affections
of the mind, that cause certain changes in the body’.23
The three most essential passions in Burke’s Enquiry are pain, pleasure,
and terror. As for the sublime, he understands its receptive impact in close
22 Burke, 13.
23 Burke, 118. – It should be added that Burke’s detailed descriptions of sublime objects as they
are perceived seem to reverse this causality. Accordingly, sublime objects primarily affect the
organs of perception (esp. the eyes). However, this reversal makes more sense if one considers
that for Burke perception is not merely a physical process but also a cognitive procedure of
the mind. Since both mind and body are the location of constant reciprocal interactions and
exchanges, it apparently becomes difficult maintaining a clear structure of causality.
relation to the experience of physical pain. Objects of terror (perceived

under specific receptive circumstances) are per definition sublime objects,
while terror itself is described as an ‘apprehension of pain or death’.24
This connectedness between sublimity, terror, and pain is also rooted in a
concrete physical resemblance:
The only difference between pain and terror, is, that things which cause
pain operate on the mind, by the intervention of the body; whereas things
that cause terror generally affect the bodily organs by the operation of
the mind suggesting the danger; but both agreeing, either primarily, or
secondarily, in producing a tension, contraction, or violent emotion of
the nerves, they agree likewise in every thing [sic] else.25
However, terror alone is hardly going to cause the sublime, for pleasure is
also needed here as a necessary ingredient. Again, Burke draws a comparison
with a physical sensation to describe the mixed emotion of the sublime. The
sublime’s interplay of terror and pleasure is comprehended as an analogue
to the experience of delight, which is ‘the removal or moderation of pain’
(resp. positive pain or negative pleasure).26
Finally, how does Burke describe the perception of sublime objects? He
creates a strong somatic bond between the body and mind of the perceiv-
ing subject and the particularities of the perceived object. Some of these
objective features are: scale, surface, structure, force, brightness, darkness,
loudness, and silence. They all trigger equivalent reactions in the subject’s
body, that is to say, the sensory appearance of the object is translated into
the tension of nerves and the motion of organs. Particularly illustrative in
this respect is Burke’s section on ‘visual objects of great dimensions’. He
describes how an overpowering visual sensation (caused by the vastness
of an object) affects the retina and forces ‘the whole capacity of the eye’
to vibrate ‘near to the nature of what causes pain’.27 Ultimately, it is this
bodily tension resulting from the object’s sensory agitation of the subject
that prompts the ‘idea of the sublime’.
In summary, Burke bases the experience and the aesthetic value of the
sublime on the physical existence of the recipient. The heightened status
of the bodily in Burke’s account, which is not limited to physical agency
24 Burke, 119.
25 Burke, 120.
26 Burke, 33.
27 Burke, 124.
but also involves the body’s interwovenness with the procedures of the
mind, shows some similarities with Sobchack’s somatic constitution of
the cinematic experience. Additionally, there is a distinct resemblance
between Burke’s experience of the sublime, which – by means of its excessive
appearance – overwhelms the recipient’s physical organs of perception, and
Morsch’s aesthetics of speed. In turn, Morsch’s concept of somatic empathy
approximates Burke’s somatic foundation of his aesthetics, according to
which body and mind are connected through numerous causal relations: the
sensation of objective features is translated into physical (and ultimately into
psychological) motion. The same kind of transfer, even though described in
less mechanistic terms, takes place in cases of cinematic somatic empathy,
which Morsch conceives of as a mimetic re-enacting of a cinematic object,
performed by the embodied perception of the viewer.
In comparison with Burke’s account of the sublime, which clearly rests
on a somatic fundament, Kant’s project of a critical re-localization of the
sublime appears to deny the involvement of the subject’s bodily existence
at first sight. Even though Kant locates the sublime entirely in the perceiv-
ing subject, it is not exactly his/her body where one expects to find this
experience. Rather, Kant makes clear that the sublime is very much a matter
of the mind (with sensibility, reason, and imagination involved) and not
of the body. In the following, I will put Kant’s model of the sublime under
scrutiny, with the goal to uncover intersections with the somatic side of
aesthetic and cinematic experiences.
The biggest obstacle when searching for points of contact between the
Kantian sublime and somatic film theory is Kant’s neglect of the body, which
mediates between subject and world. In the ‘Analytic of the Sublime’, the
body of the subject is nonetheless present, although one must take a closer
look to locate it. Most obviously, a somatic notion of the sublime is put forth
in Kant’s description of different affects which are suited to be perceived
as sublime objects (see p. 87). However, these affects do not constitute the
experience of the sublime itself. As sublime objects, they merely represent
external sources of this experience.
On the last pages of his ‘Analytic of the Sublime’, Kant evaluates Burke’s
Philosophical Enquiry. It is in this peripheral juxtaposition with Burke’s
sensualist notion of the sublime that Kant explicitly concedes the somatic
and affective involvement in every aesthetic sensation:
[I]t cannot be denied that all representations in us, whether they are
objectively merely sensible or else entirely intellectual, can nevertheless
subjectively be associated with gratification or pain, however unnoticeable
either might be (because they all affect the feeling of life, and none of
them, insofar as it is a modification of the subject, can be indifferent),
or even that, as Epicurus maintained, gratification and pain are always
ultimately corporeal, whether they originate from the imagination or
even from representations of the understanding: because life without the
feeling of the corporeal organ is merely consciousness of one’s existence,
but not a feeling of well- or ill-being, i.e., the promotion or inhibition of
the powers of life; because the mind for itself is entirely life (the principle
of life itself), and hindrances or promotions must be sought outside it,
though in the human being himself, hence in combination with his body.28
Later, in his ‘Deduction of pure aesthetic judgements’, Kant continues to

explore the link between aesthetic judgement and ‘corporeal organ’ (in
relation to the ‘feeling of life’). Since he does not seem to trust the uncanny
drives and primordial intelligence of a lived-body, he makes the attempt
to exclude it from higher aesthetic judgements, or at least to contain it, an
undertaking which does not succeed completely. This becomes obvious
when Kant draws a distinction between ‘that which pleases merely in the
judging and that which gratifies’.29 Gratification, as the result of bodily
sensation, is involved in lower activities such as different games (play of
chance, play of tones, play of thought) or laughter.30 But even here, he feels
obliged to admit that
all of our thoughts are at the same time harmoniously combined with
some kind of movement in the organs of the body […]. One can thus […]
grant to Epicurus that all gratification, even if it is caused by concepts that
arouse aesthetic ideas, is animal, i.e., bodily sensation, without thereby
doing the least damage to the spiritual feeling of respect for moral ideas,
which is not gratification but self-esteem (of the humanity within us) that
elevates us above the need for gratification, without indeed any damage
even to the less noble feeling of taste.31
In this passage, Kant reveals the resemblance and permeability between

gratification and higher aesthetic judgments (the beautiful and the sublime),
for he states that bodily sensation and the agency of reason (involved in the
28 Kant, 158f.
29 Kant, 207.
30 Kant, 207-212.
31 Kant, 210f.
experience of the sublime) are not necessarily mutually exclusive. This is

particularly interesting, because the bodily agitation of the subject generally
threatens to destabilize the foundation of Kant’s aesthetics, which is built
upon the disinterestedness of the subject.32
Kant’s inability to contain the body of the subject also shows in the more
central parts of the ‘Analytic of the Sublime’, particularly in his descriptions
and numerous examples of sublime objects and their experience, which
highlight the essentially violent character of the sublime. The perceiving
subject is violently pressured from two directions: by the inconceivable scale
or force of the sublime object and by the faculty of reason, which welcomes
and exploits sensibility’s breakdown.33 With this, Kant establishes a subject
that itself becomes an object affected by inner and outer sources. The violent
overpowering of the faculties of sensibility caused by the perception of an
object with excessive features, makes me feel my bodily existence, my bodily
connectedness with the world and my mortality. Even the intervention of
reason is not able to fully and permanently transcend the crisis of sensibility,
since the experience of the sublime, as described by Kant, unfolds as an
alternation of being attracted to and repelled by the object.34
Considering the outcome of my analysis, I would now generally disagree
with Thomas Morsch, who criticizes the Kantian sublime for constituting
reason’s primacy over sensual and bodily experiences.35 Indeed, there are
somatic elements and traces of embodied aesthetic experiences to be found
in the ‘Analytic of the Sublime’, even though its author had good reasons to
hide, downplay and contain them.
Montage
Whenever Daguerre and Bouton’s Diorama switched from the first to the
second picture during a show, this did not imply any structural, causal, or
narrative relation between the two images (apart from alternating between
interior and exterior views). The dissolving views of the laterna magica
already employed a simple montage-like organization of time, space, and
32 The term disinterestedness signif ies the absence of epistemic and/or physical interests
in the act of aesthetic contemplation. Then again, this disinterestedness is already heavily
contested by reason’s involvement in the sublime; and it takes a major effort for Kant to defend
his foundation by introducing the paradox of a disinterested interestedness.
33 For further information on the sublime’s twofold violence, see: Till.
34 Kant, 141.
35 Morsch, 104f.
narrative – a set of conventions that cinema slowly re-discovered and

elaborated further in its early years.36 The process of establishing and
standardizing montage techniques – to become the so-called continuity
system – began in c. 1902 (when films started to feature more than one shot)
and ended roughly around 1917, after the filmmaker David Wark Griffith
had produced and released his first major works.37
According to Tom Gunning, in cinema’s early years the editing technique
of cutting was not dominantly employed to create patterns of temporal
succession and narrative flow.38 Instead, cutting was used to create dis-
continuous sequences of tableaux, which were presented to the spectator
as visual attractions.39 This is the historical period of cinema designated
by Gunning as the cinema of attractions. The subsequent shift from the
cinema of attractions to narrative cinema (or Classical Hollywood cinema)
also implies a transformation of montage techniques: from a discontinu-
ous sequencing of cinematic attractions to a systematized mediation of
narrative and spatio-temporal coherence. On the other hand, Gunning’s
cinema of attractions model does not represent a singular and enclosed
chapter of film history but a specific constellation of cinematic production
36 The dissolving view technology of laterna magica devices enabled the presentation of smooth
blendings and transitions between images. While the medium’s presentation of movement
within one and the same image plane was perceived as less convincing than the double-effect
Diorama, its attraction of dissolving its views led to far more sophisticated practices of image
sequencing. This also concerned the depiction of sublime subjects. For example, Ulrike Hick
mentions a show where the 1755 earthquake of Lisbon was narrated in three lantern slides,
representing three successive stages: the first image displayed the city in its intact state; the
second one showed Lisbon’s destruction (accompanied by effects of darkness and lightning); and
the third revealed what is left of the city, a field of ruins (Hick, 167). As for the relation between
the laterna magica and cinema, Hick notes that both media were occasionally presented together.
Due to this proximity, cinema adapted certain conventions regarding subject matter, pictorial
programs, and presentation patterns. Even cases of magic lantern artists changing profession
and becoming filmmakers are documented (Hick, 212-214). However, the laterna magica’s overall
influence on the cinematographic montage was rather little. Thomas Elsaesser demonstrates that
other factors (esp. economic ones) had a far greater impact on the emergence of what is called
classical cinema today. Also, Kristin Thompson explains the formation of cinematic montage
techniques with the plain phenomenon that longer films were getting more profitable during
the nickelodeon boom; in turn, the longer formats challenged filmmakers to organize time,
space, and narrative in more elaborate ways (Elsaesser 2002, 69-93; Thompson 162).
37 Elsaesser 2002, 190-223; Thompson; Berliner. – However, this is not to say that this develop-
ment was based on the efforts of one individual filmmaker, even though Griffith surely represents
one of the key figures of this formative period (Salt).
38 Gunning repeatedly uses the term dominance to dismiss any puristic reading of his film
historical distinction.
39 Gunning 1990.
and reception that can potentially resurface. Gunning himself proposed

the consideration of the ‘Spielberg-Lucas-Coppola cinema of effects’ as
well as certain branches of avant-garde film as revivals of the cinema of
attractions. 40 Moreover, the post-classical period of action and blockbuster
cinema, whose spectacular events push narrative elements to the periphery
of receptive attention, have repeatedly been associated and labeled with
Gunning’s term by film scholars.
Apart from Gunning’s dichotomy of attraction and narration, the estab-
lishment of the American montage also plays an important role within the
concepts of suture and Gilles Deleuze’s movement image, as well as within
the textual notion of cinema’s development of a lexical order. 41 What these
concepts share is the idea that the cut, which otherwise would disturb
experiences of illusion, immersion, and narrative continuity (as seen most
clearly in the Diorama), is turned into a productive agent for establishing
continuity. Within the context of suture theory, the montage becomes a
tool for stitching together the disparate elements of a film and its narrative.
Ideally, these elaborate procedures convince the spectator to perceive a
film as an organic and self-contained world, or, more in accordance with
the ideology-critical undertones of suture theory: the spectator is deceived
by a film’s suture, which seeks to constantly re-establish symbolic orders,
subjectivity, and otherness. 42
In terms of relating to the concept of cinematic suture, Sobchack’s
phenomenology of cinema shows some inconsistencies. On the one hand,
Sobchack agrees with Kaja Silverman and other theorists on the suture’s
function ‘to appropriate the representational function of the film’s percep-
tive body for the narrative and thus to deny the narrative its dependent
status as the expression of perception by a perceptual embodied authority
outside the narrative’. 43 On the other hand, the same invisibility of the
film’s ‘visual body’ (its apparatus) is described by Sobchack in resemblance
to human perception as part of ‘ordinary experience’. 44 It is clear that this
second, naturalized view of continuity editing is far less problematic from
an ethical point of view than the first one. If one chooses to follow this
less conflict-burdened notion of cinema’s performance of continuities, the
montage becomes a set of means to present and represent certain subjective
40 Gunning 1990, 61; Gunning 1983. – See also the sections on avant-garde film in: Strauven.
41 Deleuze.
42 Silverman, 194-236; Heath, 76-112.
43 Sobchack, 228.
44 Sobchack, 138.
procedures of the embodied mind, such as associating, imagining, narrating,

or making sense. Furthermore, it enables the exploration, experience, and
reflection of physical and psychological proximity and distance, empathy
and difference.
Let me return for a moment to Gunning’s binary distinction between the
cinema of attractions and narrative cinema. Where within this polarity is the
aesthetic concept of the sublime to be located? Generally, the sublime causes
a disruption of the flow of narrative. Narration, as a receptive phenomenon
of making sense, is suspended in the overwhelming moment of viewing the
sublime object. Hence, due to its affective and disruptive agency, one would
intuitively tend to associate the sublime with the aesthetic framework and
montage principles of the cinema of attractions. However, since sensibility’s
crisis represents only one side of the (esp. Kantian) sublime, it would be
premature to regard the cinematic sublime as a merely spectacular and
attraction-based experience. This would mean to neglect the sublime’s
receptive intertwining of sensibility and reason, attraction and narration,
affect and making sense.
Regarding the aesthetic effects of the cinematic montage, one im-
mediately realizes their potential to present Burke’s phenomenology of
the sublime to the spectator. Viewed in this light, the montage becomes
more than a narrative tool for creating epic continuity; far beyond that,
it can be employed to overwhelm the sensory faculties of the viewer.
This is achieved through fast frequencies of cutting (which dynamize or
confuse the spatio-temporal coordinates of a film), quick alternations of
light and darkness, stark contrasts of color, rhythmic arrangements of
fragmented views of an object, montaged impressions of visual multitude
and disorder, as well as through unsettling temporalities such as simul-
taneities, anachronisms, or ellipses. The montage shockingly synthesizes
incommensurable elements, suddenly reveals something unseen and
throws together disparate objects, times, and spaces, thereby creating a
vertiginous maelstrom for the senses.
In terms of the disaster movie genre, the montage organizes the moving
tableaux of the catastrophic event. Its structural control over cinematic
timespaces is employed for the staging of cinematic attractions, which
can bring a halt to the flow of narration. Looking back at my Warburgian
montage of volcano paintings, it is clear now that the cinematic montage
offers solutions to a number of pictorial problems, most of all, to the problem
of how to relate the destructive totality of the sublime object to detailed and
intimate views of its affective impact on individual human beings. Between
Kant’s ‘magnitude of a world’ and ‘the infinitely small’, the montage can
go through an infinite range of nuances, perspectives, and proximities and

mediates between them by bringing them into a successive and spatio-
temporal order. 45
Camera
The technological component of the camera represents a crucial element

of the cinematic experience. The camera is the visual organ of film (even
though less so in today’s age of digital postproduction). Essentially, the film
camera has the ability to not only record moving phenomena but also to put
itself and its images into motion, thereby giving a most dynamic expression
of the world. Interestingly, during the early years of cinema this potential
(manifesting itself as panning or tracking shots) was mostly applied to and
associated with scenics and topicals, in other words, non-fictional genres that
displayed landscapes, topographies, and events of public interest. According
to Kristin Thompson, early cinema also made use of camera movements to
distinguish itself from the (partly) moving images of the laterna magica.46
If the implementation of panning and tracking shots was motivated by
the prospect of economic profit, the aesthetic potential of this dynamization
of time and space was likely to be regarded as a profitable visual attraction
for the viewers. Imagine a vast object being successively visualized in a pro-
cedure of camera movement. Both Burke and Kant reckoned with this type
of visual perception in their theories of the sublime: while the spectator’s
vision attempts to capture the sublime object in a procedure of movement
along its visual parts, s/he reaches a point where – in Kant’s terminology –
the mechanism of apprehension and comprehension finally breaks down,
leading to the impression of infinity. 47 Thus, in the early landscape genres
of film history, this distinct feature of the sublime was potentially applied
for the first time. Later, as lengthier films with more elaborate narratives
and larger set designs were produced, camera movements became more
conventional, also within fictional works.
As for the cinematic presentation of sublime objects, the camera controls
and frames the viewer’s subjective encounter of these objects, whether they
45 Kant, 134.
46 Thompson, 227.
47 Kant, 135. – Burke describes the idea of infinity as an outcome of successively perceiving
the singular parts of an object, which are ‘continued [in the mind] to any indefinite number’
(Burke, 67).
are viewed from a distance or in close proximity, in an act of reflexivity

or affective immediacy. More specifically, the camera’s ability to adjust
its focal length can be used as a tool to mediate between foreground and
background, to emphasize specific objects of interest, and to obscure the
spectator’s vision altogether. Its framing function decides what is important
and establishes visual hierarchies. Thereby, the camera channels and draws
attention toward elements inside or outside the frame. But it can also become
an immediate cause for experiences of the sublime by overpowering the
spectator’s sensibility through (and through the combination of) swish
pans, swift tracking shots, and obscuring focal length effects.
The fact that the camera can achieve such moments of sensory crisis
sheds light on a question of importance: whether the camera essentially
resembles human perception or differs from it. For Sobchack, the camera
and the projector constitute the film’s body.48 Since the bodies of spectator
and film share the same embodied view, there must be a fundamental
resemblance regarding their bodily existence and their ability to perceive,
express, and interact with the world. On the other hand, she persists on the
non-identity of both bodies, thereby upholding a certain degree of media
awareness and distance (a ‘perception of perception’) as part of the cinematic
experience.49 When cinema fully reveals itself as the machine that it is, this
generally entails a distinct experience of media reflexivity.50
Sobchack’s model does not consider cinematic experiences in which the
body of the film appears entirely alien to human perception, yet without
diminishing its somatic connection to the spectator’s body. In opposition
to Sobchack, Morsch sees this combination of cinematic estrangement
and somatic bond very clearly. He acknowledges experiences of affective
intensity caused by a cinematic body that appears entirely ahuman and
mechanical.51 Perhaps, the receptive force of such shatterings of the specta-
tor’s identification with the film’s embodied perception derives precisely
from the fact that this bond, at any other time, forms the aisthetic fundament
of the cinematic experience.
Within the current age of digital cinema, in which digital effects, anima-
tion, and editing have become ubiquitous, the film’s body – consisting of
perceiving camera and expressing projector – has lost its central status
48 Sobchack, 164-259.
49 Consequently, she rejects the term ‘point-of-view shot’ and, instead, speaks of shots in which
bodily perception is shared.
50 Sobchack, 288f.
51 Morsch, 128f.
and validity. ‘In this aesthetic, the significance of the original recording
vanishes in favor of the manipulative postproduction of the image, which
is not rooted in any implicit body anymore but solely in the material
manipulation of the image’.52 The aesthetic, techniques and practices of
digital, which Morsch refers to, have indeed become a decisive factor in
the production and reception of disaster movies and blockbuster films
in general.53 Except for cases of fully animated films, digital provides the
means to manipulate what still appears to be filmed photographic images in
a hitherto unparalleled degree. Digital technologies, such as CGI (Computer
Generated Imagery), DI (Digital Intermediate), digital animation, motion
capturing, digital compositing, virtual camera, and blue and greenscreen
technologies, essentially contribute now to a film’s final appeal.
These new tools for the creation of cinematic images led Lev Manovich to
compare the digital age of cinema with certain proto-cinematic devices (the
laterna magica, the Phenakistiscope, the Zootrope), whose moving images
were still handcrafted and not photographically recorded.54 On the other
hand, cinema had never been a purely photographic recording medium, for
it has always involved practices of crafting, painting, and sculpting in its
various sectors of production. Especially in terms of genres such as action
and disaster movie, crafted and edited visual effects have always played a
key role, even in the pre-digital age of cinema. The special effects of disaster
films encompass explosions, light effects, time manipulations (time lapse,
slow motion), optical compositing (using optical printers), stunts, miniature
models, dummies, robotic machines, matte paintings, and photographs for
background illusions.
Sound and Multimedia
‘Excessive loudness’, the powerful sounds of ‘raging storms, thunder, or

artillery’, total silence, unexpected and intermitting sounds as signs of
danger (the striking of a clock, a drum stroke, cannon fire), ‘angry tones
of wild beasts’, the succession and repetition of similar sounds echoing in
the mind until their tension reaches a climax – this is the greater part of
the auditory phenomena that Burke considers as causes for the experience

53 For an overview of digital entering film production and the most common techniques, see:
McClean. – More detailed information is given in: Prince.
54 Manovich.
of the sublime.55 Cinema, which incorporated acoustic sensations from

early on, is basically able to present all of them. More generally, cinematic
sound creates atmospheres, channels emotions, and raises expectations.
Applied to the cinematic encounter of a natural disaster, the soundscape
of a film crucially shapes the spectator’s experience in that it sets the tone
for this encounter.
Even though sounds, music, and voices were not an intrinsic part of the
filmic material during the silent film era, cinematic performances were
hardly ever completely silent. Quite the opposite, silent films featured a
broad diversity of sounds, which were produced externally during their
performance. They employed:
barkers and ballyphoos, pianists and “traps” or “effect” players, effects

machines and sync-sound apparatuses, lecturers and actors speaking
beside or behind the screen, illustrated song performers, and small or
large orchestras. Whether instrumental, vocal, or mechanical, sound
ranged from the improvised to the preplanned – as in scripts, scores, and
cue sheets. And the practice of combining sounds with images differed
widely depending on the exhibition venue (the nickelodeon in Chicago
versus the summer Chautauqua in rural Iowa, the music hall in London
or Paris versus the newest cinema “palace” in New York City) as well as
the historical moment (a single venue might change radically from, say,
1906 to 1910.56
With the establishment of sound film during the second half of the 1920s,
sound was relocated from its external performance into the film medium
itself.57 The broad application of this technological innovation meant
a significant step within the film industry’s efforts to standardize and
monopolize their business and gain control over their products. But it also
increased filmmakers’ artistic agency and control in terms of the aesthetic
coordination of sound and the visual. With this, the aspect of multimedia
interplay gained an even bigger importance for the cinema medium. Once
established, cinema sound technologies were further improved over the
years: from single-channel optical soundtracks, which ‘produced very
poor sound, with a limited frequency response that turned loud effects,
like gunshots or high-volume passages in a film score, into noise’, to the
55 Burke, 65, 75-78, 126f.

56 Abel, xiii.
57 This development is described in detail in: Bordwell 1999.
‘introduction of Dolby Stereo in the mid-1970s[, which] brought four-channel

sound to the movies’, and Dolby SR (1986) to the arrival of digital sound in
1991, whose enhanced performance (multiple channels, noise reduction,
complex sound mixes, improved frequency response, plasticity) allows for
more realistic and immersive experiences of cinematic worlds.58
In Sobchack’s opinion, cinema’s multimediality almost naturally harmo-
nizes with human perception. Cinematic experiences are, therefore, ‘always
synaesthetic and synoptic. That is, perception is not constituted as a sum of
discrete senses (sight, touch, etc.), nor is it experienced as fragmented and
decentered.’ This ‘cooperation among and commutation of our senses’ is
the reason why our bodily perception responds so well to the expressions
and perceptions of the body of the film, whose sensual organs are widely
compatible to ours.59 However, with Morsch, I once again call into question
the human-like character of cinema’s multimedia agitations. The possibility
of intense cinematic moments of multimedia interplay that seem to entirely
break with the conventions of everyday perception is worth at least noting here.
Cinema
To reach a conclusion of this chapter, I will now turn toward cinema as a

concrete space for cinematic experiences. The most decisive transformation
that cinema has undergone occurred in its early decades. As a device for com-
mercial entertainment, early cinema often presented its films in combination
with other media such as the laterna magica, Vaudeville, and other forms of
theatrical entertainment like Music Hall or Varieté.60 During the so-called
nickelodeon boom (c. 1905/6-1907), cinema emancipated itself from other
forms of entertainment and underwent first processes of standardization by
introducing a darkened and clearly structured viewer-space, which was di-
rected and aligned toward the screen.61 This was followed by the widespread
application of sound film in the second half of the 1920s, making any external
source of auditory sensation redundant.62 Then, the next step would be the
58 Prince, 191.
59 Sobchack, 76.
60 Elsaesser, 94-124.
61 The term ‘nickelodeon’ referred to the cinemas’ low entrance fee of one nickel, which also
lower social classes could afford. For a more detailed view of the nickelodeon boom, see: Musser,
325-329, 372-376.
62 For the technological development and aesthetics of sound in film history, see the first part
of: Chion.
standardized implementation of bigscreen and widescreen technologies,

a process that lasted nearly a decade, from around the mid-1920s to 1932.63
Yet, even after that, it was not ‘until the 1950s, with the introduction of
[…] CinemaScope, VistaVision, and other widescreen formats that wide
f ilm emerged as a commercially viable solution to technical problems
introduced by the new popular demand for large-screen motion picture
entertainment’.64 Others experimented with multiprojection technologies
to achieve overwhelming screen scales (Cinéorama, Vitarama, Cinerama,
et al.), yet without lasting success.65 Colors could be seen in cinemas long
before the Technicolor three-color system provided the technology for the
spectacular presentation of some major color films in the late 1930s.66 There
was a diversity of manual, additive, and subtractive coloring technolo-
gies such as hand coloring, tinting, toning, stenciling, Kinemacolor, and
Prizmacolor.67 However, color film did not become the widely adapted
standard for film productions before the 1960s.68 Since then, the essential
components of cinematic spaces and experiences have remained relatively
stable. Further technological developments to be mentioned are enhanced
sound technologies which were applied from the 1970s onward, further
enlarged screen sizes (as in multiplex and IMAX cinemas), digital projection,
and, most recently, digital 3D (or stereoscopic) cinema.
The fact that these new technologies were often not widely adapted right
after their invention but years or even decades later calls into question
certain accounts of cinema history as a telos-driven and organic development
toward classical cinema, illusionistic perfection, the cinematic apparatus
(with its effects of subjectivity and ideological manipulation), or the refine-
ment of cinema’s narrative and linguistic repertoire. Stereoscopic cinema,
for example, has existed since the 1910s and has seen various heydays before
its new recent breakthrough in the new millennium. Thus, cinema’s history
63 The experimenting with bigger and wider screens resulted from the construction of larger
cinemas with big auditoriums. One of the most tenacious problems in this development process
was to fit the enlarged images and the soundtrack onto film without any reductions (Hall, 69-76,
145-150).
64 Belton, 159.
65 Uroskie, 19-26. – On the other hand, it was Cinerama’s impressive success and profit that
triggered the technological development and application of more practical widescreen technolo-
gies such as CinemaScope and Panavision (Hall, 144f.).
66 Films such as The Wizard of Oz (1939), Gone With the Wind (1939), The Adventures of Robin
Hood (1938), A Star is Born (1937), or The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1938) presented their loud
colors as attractions in themselves and thereby emphasized their value as cinematic spectacles.
67 Hall, 62-68.
68 Wyver, 75f.; Hall, 140.
also presents itself through its gaps, repetitions, dead ends, and forgotten
heroes. Its technological development cannot be reduced to any notion of
the medium’s drive for aesthetic self-fulfillment and maturing. Instead, one
must consider a wide range of economic, political, juridical, and cultural
factors in order to make sense of cinema’s technological and aesthetic
transformations.
Cinema’s development from its so-called primitive state (the cinema of
attractions) to its classical state (narrative cinema) is revisited by Kristin
Thompson, as she addresses the sociocultural and economic complexities
of this history. In terms of exchange processes between cinema and other
media, she stresses the relevance of literary forms like novel, short story, and
drama, which she finds have had a strong impact on cinema’s development of
more elaborate fictional plots.69 While I generally do not disagree with this
assessment, I would like to extend Thompson’s historical account by paying
closer attention to the technological transformation that occurred during
the first couple of decades of cinema (from the late nineteenth century to
c. 1917). Accordingly, the shift from attraction cinema to narrative cinema
can also be described as a shifting from being a performative medium to
becoming a pictorial medium. Underlining this transformation are two
trade press responses to letters sent by cinema owners, both asking about
the correct size of the screen plane:
The first, from 1908, says the screen and lenses should be such as to ensure
that the characters are life size on the screen; the second, from 1915, says
that the size of the screen should vary in proportion to the size of the
auditorium. Thus the earlier position has a literal, theatrical conception
of the represented space, where the screen is a window immediately
behind which the principal characters stand a measurable distance away
from the spectators; while for the later one, the film image is treated as
scalarly relative, so the distance of spectators from characters is entirely
imaginary.70
With this indicated shift, cinema is no longer perceived as a performa-

tive space, in which the screen functions as a life size actor; instead, it
begins to tap into its illusionistic and immersive potential by relocating
itself within the tradition of certain pictorial media, such as the ones
discussed in the previous main chapter. Thus, cinema not only moves
69 Thompson, 163-173.
70 Elsaesser 1990, 28 (Endnote 24). – This aspect is investigated more extensively in: Brewster.
toward narrative complexity but also toward pictorial visuality, thereby

attracting a full set of aesthetic discourses and receptive concepts grouped
around visual phenomena of illusionistic immersion. Paradoxically,
cinema, as it moves away from its state of attraction and toward its nar-
rative state, inscribes itself into the media technological history of the
sublime, which I earlier associated with receptive phenomena of spectacle
and attraction. What does this say about the historical period of the
cinema of attractions? If I juxtapose the pre-cinematic visual history of
the sublime with the two historical models of cinema – attraction and
narrative – where do I find greater kinship? In a bar-like environment in
which film presentations alternate with theatrical performances, loosely
accompanied by a pianist, watched by viewers sitting in chairs around
tables? Or rather within cinema’s classical technological setup, which
is still in use today? Consider earlier pictorial media’s efforts to create
illusionistic, immersive, multisensory, and affectively intense experiences,
to suspend the spectator’s awareness of his/her mediated perception,
and to discipline and immobilize his/her body. Taking these efforts into
account, one realizes that it is primarily cinema’s narrative (or classical)
model where the receptive framework of the sublime is re-encountered.
When cinema adapted a monumental screen, a darkened viewer-space,
an immobilized spectator seated in close range to the screen, the medium
reconnected most distinctly with the visual history of the sublime and
its technological efforts to overwhelm, agitate, discipline, enchant, and
transform its spectators.
To make out how the cinema of attractions appealed to its audience, I
will briefly discuss cinema’s most renowned founding myth: the screenings
of the Lumière brothers’ film L’arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat in c.
1896-1897.71 According to this myth, the film caused a panic among the
spectators, because they mistook the approaching train on the screen for
a real one. There have been several attempts since the 1990s to deconstruct
this event and reveal its fictional status. As film scholars like Tom Gunning,
Martin Loiperdinger, or Stephen Bottomore convincingly demonstrate, a real
panic at one of the film screenings seems rather unlikely; but if it was not
sheer fear that made people flee the scene, how can the audience’s cinematic
experience of this early film be described?72 Loiperdinger argues against the
71 As Martin Loiperdinger’s research on this issue reveals, the film of which three versions
existed was not shown at the first commercial screening by the Lumière brothers in 1895 but
in the following year (Loiperdinger, 102f.).
72 Loiperdinger; Gunning 1999; Bottomore, 177-216.
panic legend by pointing out the anti-illusionistic features of the Lumière

screenings.73 He notes that the film was shown on a rather small screen in
black and white with flickering images and without sound. On top of that,
the train does not rush straight toward the camera but passes it sideways.
The camera captures the event from the place where passengers are waiting,
and thus, the audience was most likely familiar with this perspective.74
What speaks against Loiperdinger’s plausible argument is the fact that
there are documented voices that describe the screening of the film as
thrilling and exciting. But what caused this excitement if it was not the
fear of being hit by a real train? A hint is given by Maxim Gorky when he
describes his experience of the Lumière film in an article:
[A] train appears on the screen. It speeds right at you – watch out! It seems
as though it will plunge into the darkness in which you sit, turning you
into a ripped sack full of lacerated flesh and splintered bones, and crushing
into dust and into broken fragments this hall and this building, so full
of women, wine, music and vice. But this, too, is but a train of shadows.
Noiselessly, the locomotive disappears beyond the edge of the screen.
The train comes to a stop, and grey figures silently emerge from the cars,
soundlessly greet their friends, laugh, walk, run, bustle, and … are gone.75
The first affective reaction of the narrator is gradually undermined by his

increasing awareness of the film’s mediality. Existential fear is turned into
a media reflexive encounter with an estranged ‘kingdom of shadows’, whose
inhabitants appear and disappear in silence.76 An English critic cited by
Loiperdinger finds similar words for his cinematic experience:
It is the frightening impact of life ‒ but of a very different life. This life is
deprived of sound and colors. Although you can notice the sunlight, the
image is dominated by a drab and unfathomable gray. And although the
waves, as one may assume, crash against the coast, they do so in a silence
that makes you shiver all the more.77
73 Loiperdinger.
74 A nuanced analysis of various accounts of early cinematic realism, not understood as an
actual pattern of cinematic reception but as a visual regime with broader social implications,
is given in: Lastra.
75 Gorky, 408.
76 Gorky, 407.
77 Loiperdinger, 100.
In this case, the aesthetic appeal of the viewed film is increased due to
the partial loss of the illusion. In terms of the Lumière film, one can also
reverse the perspective and ask how viewing an everyday life situation
like a train arrival can be exciting in the first place. It is exciting precisely
because the film and its cinematic performance do not simulate this experi-
ence in a purely illusionistic manner. Rather, as the cinematic experience
oscillates between immersive appeal and media reflexivity, the spectator
re-encounters a technologically enchanted world, a world which reveals
itself as an estranged shadow of reality.
Apart from this aesthetic surplus derived from the cinematic experience
of difference, early cinematography also enchanted the spectator by staging
its technology as a magical device to set lifeless photographic imagery in
motion. It is known that the screenings of the Lumière films began with
the presentation of a static photograph, and only after a short while, the
image, as if under a magic spell, started to move.78
Generally, it turned out that Gunning’s conception of the shift from
attraction to narrative cinema as a shift from presentation to representation
is not entirely correct. Even though in early cinemas screen-space and
viewer-space were shared as one theatrical performance space, the artificial-
ity of the projected images was much more obvious than in later cinematic
devices which aimed at overcoming the recognition of representation by
negating their viewer-spaces and by making the spectators immerse into
their screen-spaces.
Technological particularities as such, together with their receptive im-
plications, must be considered when dealing with early disaster films. Also,
in terms of a premature linking between the cinema of attractions and its
postclassical or postnarrative descendants (roughly the action and adventure
cinema from the 1970s onward), these crucial media technological deviations
ought to be kept in mind.79 Technologically and aesthetically speaking, the
disaster movies from the 1970s onward are not just resurrections of cinema’s
lost period of attraction but also cinematic spectacles in continuation of
the classical or narrative model of cinema.80
A teleologic history of cinema’s technological development is offered by
Sobchack in The Address of the Eye. She describes the transformations of the
78 Elsaesser 2002, 56.

79 Two representative texts proclaiming such a resurrection of the cinema of attractions are:
Hansen; Ndalianis. – As for the disaster film genre, Jihae Chung locates the film 2012 (2009)
within the tradition of Gunning’s cinema of attractions (Chung, 305f.).
80 A resolute stand against the proponents of cinema’s postnarrative age and its reuniting
with its early years of attraction is taken by David Bordwell in: Bordwell 2002.
medium by analogy with the maturing of the human body: from ‘consciously
recognizing the possibilities of its “body” for action […to] refining its initially
crude and clumsy activities, adapting its “body” to contingent situations and
broadening its repertoire of possible responses to the world that it inhabits
and expresses’.81 Cinema’s technological development is presented as a
gradual self-discovery of its body and its potential to perceive and express in
interaction with the world. With what appears to be quite an old-fashioned
perspective on the history of cinema, Sobchack positions her model of
cinema against certain theoretical and historical accounts which portray
cinema’s development as heading toward the establishment of its dispositif.
According to these apparatus theories and psychoanalytical and semiotic
models, the cinematic dispositif is a machine that deceives the viewer by
gaining control over his/her subjective agency and symbolic recognition.
Thus, it is against this strong paradigm of the cinematic apparatus that
Sobchack places her counter-narrative of cinema moving toward greater
freedom of perception and expression.
On the other hand, Sobchack does not notice that cinema, as it radically
changed its technological and receptive premises during its first decades,
not only widened its repertoire of expression and perception but also
increased its potential to trigger forceful, affectively intense, and even
violent experiences. Apparatus theory’s common claim, namely that the
cinematic dispositif tranquilizes the spectator and his/her entanglement
with the world, putting him/her into a state of half-sleep, might miss the
point; but then again, the ways in which cinema is able to frame and control
the viewer’s body and his/her sensory faculties does not lead to the as-
sumption of a surplus of receptive freedom either. Instead, it seems more
plausible assuming that the body of the cinematic spectator can principally
(in particular moments) become a target, not for capitalist and reactionary
discourses but for affective and sensorily excessive agitations – the Kantian
trade of freedom for freedom (perceived as aesthetic pleasure).
As the film ends and the lights in the cinema go back on, the medium’s
receptive forces lose their grip on its spectators, and people realize again
who they shared their cinematic experience with. Let me use this moment
of social awareness to briefly reflect on cinema’s factual audiences. The
previously discussed pictorial devices of the nineteenth century turned
visual experiences of sublime events into leisure activities for middle class
audiences. Such tendencies of popularization were further reinforced by the
producers of cinema. From early on, cinema attracted and aimed at broad
81 Sobchack, 251.
parts of society. The nickelodeon boom made cinematic entertainments

affordable for the working classes. At the same time, these early years also
witnessed the erection of cinema palaces in better neighborhoods, which
were particularly aiming at middle or even upper class customers.82 As will
be shown in the next chapter, the film industry’s practices of advertisement,
distribution, production, and exhibition have often been coordinated with
the aim to appeal to specif ic groups or to raise the cultural status of a
product. However, with its continuous inclusion of mass audiences, Western
cinema has become a conventional emblem of popular entertainment and
mass consumption. Sublime disaster events, with their primarily affec-
tive, emotional, and sensory aesthetic of reception, are to be regarded as
important participants in cinema’s project of providing universal aesthetic
experiences, which – for the goal of maximum profit – ideally ought to
transcend aspects of class, education, age, or gender.
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Amsterdam University Press

Chapter Title: Cinema – A Medium of the Sublime?

Book Title: Disaster Cinema in Historical Perspective

Keywords: Vivian Sobchack, Thomas Morsch, Somatic Film Theory,

Photographic Images in Motion

First and foremost, the technology of cinematography must be discussed

most striking manner was to transform photographic images into a seamless

1 It is impossible to pinpoint cinematography’s invention to one single individual, event,

motion – presents movement as a physiologically forced and cognitively

needs to be addressed more broadly. It was Walter Benjamin who famously

object worlds and to the filmic movement to which it clings in a re-enacting

20 Translated from German by the author; orig.: Morsch, 204.

Only because the spectator knows what it means to occupy a lived-body,

Is the Sublime a Somatic Experience?

Given Burke’s role as a British sensualist of the eighteenth century, his

relation to the experience of physical pain. Objects of terror (perceived

Later, in his ‘Deduction of pure aesthetic judgements’, Kant continues to

In this passage, Kant reveals the resemblance and permeability between

experience of the sublime) are not necessarily mutually exclusive. This is

narrative – a set of conventions that cinema slowly re-discovered and

and reception that can potentially resurface. Gunning himself proposed

procedures of the embodied mind, such as associating, imagining, narrating,

go through an infinite range of nuances, perspectives, and proximities and

The technological component of the camera represents a crucial element

are viewed from a distance or in close proximity, in an act of reflexivity

Sound and Multimedia

‘Excessive loudness’, the powerful sounds of ‘raging storms, thunder, or

52 Translated from German by the author; orig.: Morsch, 181.

of the sublime.55 Cinema, which incorporated acoustic sensations from

barkers and ballyphoos, pianists and “traps” or “effect” players, effects

55 Burke, 65, 75-78, 126f.

‘introduction of Dolby Stereo in the mid-1970s[, which] brought four-channel

To reach a conclusion of this chapter, I will now turn toward cinema as a

standardized implementation of bigscreen and widescreen technologies,

With this indicated shift, cinema is no longer perceived as a performa-

toward narrative complexity but also toward pictorial visuality, thereby

panic legend by pointing out the anti-illusionistic features of the Lumière

The first affective reaction of the narrator is gradually undermined by his

78 Elsaesser 2002, 56.

parts of society. The nickelodeon boom made cinematic entertainments

82 Elsaesser 2002, 106f.

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