Film-Philosophy
Journal | Salon | Portal (ISSN 1466-4615)
Vol. 7 No. 44, November 2003
Marcia Landy
Traveling in Film Theory:
Giuliana Bruno's _Atlas of Emotion_
Giuliana Bruno _Atlas
of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture, and
Film_ London: Verso,
2002 ISBN 1859848028 484 pp. Bruno's selection of the
concept of an 'atlas' for the title of her book is more than
a clever attention-getter: it is a guide to the core of her
theoretical and critical objectives. Her book is infused
with the cartographic impulse in the interest of mapping
connections between figurations of space and emotion. In her
hands, the work of mapping is ubiquitous, applicable to
architecture, fashion, travel, and film. In her earlier
_Streetwalking
on a Ruined Map: Cultural Theory and the City Films of
Elvira Notari_
(1993), Bruno had mapped the urban world of Naples by
tracking connections between its landscape and the 'silent'
films of Elvira Notari. According to Bruno _Streetwalking on
a Ruined Map_ is 'a gesture toward the reappropriation of
geography in history, the redrawing of a cultural map as a
metonymy of fragmentations, the exploration of a territory
of subjugated popular knowledge, the mapping out of a scene
of cultural microhistories in the terrain of cultural
knowledge and through the lens of cultural history'.
[1] _Atlas of Emotion_ extends
this investigation into cultural micro-history. It is also
interdisciplinary and intermedial. While it always has in
mind the history and practices of cinema, it arrives at its
reflections on film through a journey via a number of other
disciplines, forms, and practices: architecture, painting,
photography, travel writings, diaries, novels, city and
country maps, fashion, food, and experimental films.
Simultaneously, the 'journey' to which she alludes in the
title, and invokes in her analysis of cartography, is also a
personal journey that seeks to redirect the current
practices of film scholars. As Bruno writes in the last
chapter, her intellectual preference in writing the _Atlas_
is different from most prevailing models of film and
cultural theory: 'Much has been written
about spectatorial identification with the filmic text. We
also know something about the phantasmatic structure that
links the filmmaker to her text. I have done my share of
thinking about these issues. But what of the *theorist's*
relationship to a set of texts? What drives the analyst to
an object choice? What navigates it? In what ways is the
film an object of desire, a site of the bonds of love or
domination, an emotional fabrication? What 'architexture'
does this relationship dwell upon? How does one's own
position as subject, and the change it undergoes, affect the
reading of a film? Is there a historicity in this
trajectory? What is the geography of this critical history?
Does it have a place in writing? In short, what should or
can we say about a critical journey? . . . Film theory
generally has backed away from analyzing this subject,
especially at the point when, in order to reach out and
grasp the sense of the lived subject, one would have to
plunge in the subjective realm.' (407 and 409). It is evident from these
comments that Bruno has more than an antiquarian interest in
tracking down the antecedents of film. If this book is
indeed engaged in historicizing, it is animated by
cartographic and historical rather than traditional
narrative concerns. While students of melodrama have sought
to locate a language of affect, Bruno's book would suggest
that the quest is doomed if it cannot map the realm of
emotion (or, as she terms it, 'e-motion'). In her effort to
provide a language and method to identify the various maps
that comprise subjectivity, she introduces and redefines
current usages of terms and their concepts as they open up
different areas of thinking about relations among travel,
architecture, subjectivity, and gender. Beyond the
importance assigned to mapping, the most familiar term to
the reader by the end of the book is 'haptic'. As she
defines it, in contrast to other critics, the haptic serves
the function of shifting from the exclusive emphasis on
vision, and includes other senses and their relations to
space. It is an 'emotional space' that is located in
'sites', not merely 'sights'. Her union of
film/body/architecture is: 'a haptic dynamics, a
phantasmatic structure of lived space and lived narrative; a
narrativized space that is intersubjective, for it is a
complex of socio-sexual mobilities. Unraveling a sequence of
views, the architectural-filmic ensemble writes concrete
maps. The scope of the view -- the horizon of site-seeing --
is the mapping of tangible sites.' (65) Her 'site-seeing' is
reminiscent of Gilles Deleuze's emphasis on the
sensori-motor dimensions of film. Bruno's study of site
seeing is not an inert and isolated study of landscapes and
of buildings. The 'tangible sites' that she identifies are
complicated by being places of 'inhabitation', of consuming
space: one 'lives a film as one lives the space one
inhabits: as an everyday passage, tangibly' (65). And, in
its focus on the female traveler (the *voyageuse*), _Atlas
of Emotion_ 'traverses a haptic, emotive terrain' (16) to
complicate our understanding of the dynamics of mobility,
the 'sites of transit' that contributed to the 'perceptual
field' of modernity: 'On the eve of cinema's
invention, a network of architectural forms produced a new
spatiovisuality. Such venues as arcades, railways,
department stores, the pavilions of exhibition halls, glass
houses and winter gardens incarnated the new geography of
modernity. They were all sites of transit. Mobility -- a
form of cinematics -- was the essence of these new
architectures. By changing the relation between spatial
perception and bodily motion, the new architectures of
transit and travel culture prepared the ground for the
invention of the moving image, the very epitome of
modernity' (17). Bruno's impressive
erudition drawn from art history, cultural theory,
philosophy, and such filmmakers as Dziga Vertov, Sergei
Eisenstein, Jean Luc Godard, Roberto Rossellini, Alain
Resnais, and Peter Greenaway, is hardly a matter of
citationality. In her panoramic tour through various
filmmakers' works, the momentum of her argument relies on
her ability to emphasize the dynamic character of writers'
and artists' treatments of space, that work contrary to
classic forms of perspective and conceptions of the human
body in its encounter with space. For Bruno, 'Film space is not quite
the homogeneous space of classical unified central
perspective, which has been pictures as if, existing in
front of the body, it could be seen 'with a single and
immobile eye' . . . As a heterogeneous space comprised of
constantly moving centers, the moving image 'embraces' the
shifting trajectories of psychophysiological space, where
the spectator-passenger is mapped within the landscape'
(178). These statements are
earned generalizations. Bruno has done her research
carefully, beginning with a fascinating discussion of the
'The Cine City', where she engages in a discussion of
earlier cinematic texts -- _The Man with the Movie Camera_,
_Paris qui dort_, _L'Inhumaine_, and _Sunrise_ -- eschewing
static textbook and generic descriptions of these films as
'city films'. Rather, these films conjoin the science of
radiography to film. While the x-ray is only alluded to in
Rene Clair's film, it is made explicit in her discussion of
Vertov's, where the 'x-ray that scans the human body shows
that the cinema moves (and moves with the city)' (23). The
Vertov film becomes 'a fascinating work of 'radiographic'
condensation which maps the history of the film's genealogy
and locates it within the body of the city' (23), becoming
'a grand spectacle of kinesthetics, fabricating its own
moving elegy to the laboratory of the city, the body, and
film' (25). In her discussion of
Pasolini's _Mamma Roma_, Bruno further situates the dynamics
of streetwalking within her discussion of the urban milieu,
architecture, public and private space, and their integral
relation to the architectonics of film. In Bruno's
assessment, _Mamma Roma_ is 'a film about architecture as a
framework for life-style' (31). Through Mamma Roma's literal
walks through the Roman streets, and her viewpoint on the
urban landscape from her window, the 'borders between home
and world become disorientingly confused' (32). These
perspectives on the landscape carry 'the marks of history
and the dream of its potential changes' (33). So as to
further complicate the various manifestations of the
'architexture' of cinema (her term for the anastomosis of
cinema, architecture and emotion), Bruno discusses a range
of films -- urban diaries, homescapes, and 'amorous city
maps' in such films as Moretti's _Caro diario_, Jarmusch's
_Night on Earth_, Godard's _Le Mepris_, Resnais's
_Hiroshima, mon amour_ -- to explore the interpenetration of
inner and outer landscapes. Bruno's cartography
includes an examination of the geography of movie houses
from early cinema to the present as further sites of
exploration of filmic space and a way of examining film
spectatorship and its modes of 'cultural transport' (40).
Through Bruno's treatment of travel and perspective the
reader becomes familiar with the architectonics of scenic
space that are most often taken for granted rather than
realized for their power of cultural transport where the
body and milieu interpenetrate. _Atlas of Emotion_ makes
evident how travel as mobility, understood as living space,
is integrally tied to a reconfiguration of domestic space.
As she reminds the reader, 'the voyage of modernity, of
which cinema is an agent, is not only a matter of traveling
to exterior locales; it also includes interiors . . . To
understand the space of the moving image, we must therefore
once more turn to architecture and return to the house (of
gender)' (92). Too often, 'contemporary
spatial theory tends to erase both the female subject and
the subject of feminism' (84). _Atlas of Emotion_ seeks to
demonstrate that a 'look with geographical eyes at feminist
film theory . . . could expose how travel in (film) space
could advance earlier notions of gender identity, based on
psychoanalytically oriented feminist theory, by
incorporating the diversity of cultural landscapes' (85).
For Bruno, 'dislocation has always marked the terrain of the
female traveler' (86), and it is this dislocation she
explores through an examination of the 'relations among
home, house, and voyage' (100). For her, 'houses, like
films, can be a private museum. They can tell stories of
journeys and of travels within' (105). The journey entails
encounters with the interior space of the house and with the
movie house. Bruno invites the reader to think critically
and differently about travel as the sole measure of
mobility. By contrast, she regards dwellings as exemplifying
another notion of travel through 'a montage of living
signs', a 'psychogeography' of memory, subjectivity, and
affect (103). Bruno's observations on this form of 'gender
nomadism' are derived from an examination of commercial
texts such as _Craig's Wife_, and of more experimental texts
by such filmmakers as Chantal Ackerman that involve
geographic transit and establish the dynamic (rather than
conventional static) quality of domestic space. An important figure in
Bruno's narrative of refashioning space is Esther Lyons, a
travel lecturer. Lyons is a link between the phenomenon of
the nineteenth-century travel lecture, its relations to
early cinema, and connections between these cultural forms
and feminist self-fashioning: 'The portrait of Esther Lyons,
an explorer who chose to picture herself in an interior,
speaks of inner explorations as it points to the expansion
of female horizons' (114). Bruno by no means confines her
investigations of travel to the 19th century. She introduces
the reader to Madeleine de Scudery's _Carte de tendre_, a
seventeenth century map of the body and of its affections,
associated with gardens as 'a landscape of emotions to be
experienced as a series of sensational movements' (219).
Conceptions of geography expand as the reader is introduced
to a cornucopia of cartographic works and their expression
in terms of gardens, urban settings, museums, houses, and
paintings (e.g. Longhi's eighteenth-century _The Geography
Lesson_) and, moreover, connected to the art of memory and
connections between the body and landscape. As one might expect, the
role of memory plays a commanding role in _Atlas of
Emotion_, as Bruno invokes Bazin's linking of cinema, the
technology of death, and mummification. Sensitive to the
various cultural forms that preceded cinema -- museum
collections, scientific apparatuses, curiosity cabinets,
automata such as mechanical Dolls, optical machines,
physiognomic studies, waxworks, and magic lanterns -- she is
particularly concerned to explore connections between
cinema, spectacle, and the body. She writes: 'Cinema -- like the
cemetery -- is a space that is home to residual body images.
Film and the cemetery share this special, corporeal
geography. They are sites without a geography, or rather
without a fixed, univocal, geometric notion of geography.
They inhabit multiple points in time and collapse multiple
places into a single place' (147). In her desire to explore
psychogeography, Bruno contends with the camera 'as a
machine of death', one that is 'capable of not only of
multiplying time and space but of extending time with
prolonged mechanical movement, as well as freezing frames
and slowing or accelerating movement, the language of film
inhabits a boundless desire to capture life' (146). Cinema
becomes a Promethean enterprise in its traversing of space
and time, death and immortality. Bruno's fascinating journey
through the pre-history of cinema is thus another form of
exploring travel and geography as a means of establishing a
language to talk about an architecture of interiority and
emotion, the creation of a 'a modern traveling spectator'
(194) as a prolegomenon to map filmic emotion. _Atlas of Emotion_ draws
on the theoretical work of Walter Benjamin as providing an
'inspiration for thinking haptically' (257). Similarly,
Bruno invokes the writings of Gilles Deleuze, focusing
particularly on his discussions of the 'movement-image' in
_Cinema 1_. In discussing postwar Italian neorealism, she
identifies _Ladri di biciclette_ (_Bicycle Thieves_, 1948)
and _Paisa_ (_Paisan_, 1946) as belonging to a 'movement
that developed street life filmically, exposing the living
component of the production of space' (30). These 'city
walks', she writes, are characteristic of the movement-image
that 'called attention to the 'dispersive and lacunary
identity of the aesthetic' (30). Later in the book, she
again refers to Deleuze's work on cinema, finding his
discussion of the affection-image in relation to 'the play
of the haptic' to be 'inadequate and unsatisfactorily
literal' (272), preferring Deleuze and Guattari's conception
of geo-philosophy and its relation to nomadology
(273). Bruno's reliance on
Deleuze's work validates the dynamic and deterritorializng
character of the neorealist treatment of space. What I find
problematic is her conception of the movement-image, that
she treats in the context of Deleuze's explorations of
affection and perception, whereas the 'dispersive and
lacunary' character of neorealism is rather exemplary of a
'crisis of the movement-image' that implies a different
relation to the expression of emotion. According to Deleuze,
'the optical and sound situations of neo-realism contrast
with the strong sensory-motor situations of traditional
realism' that rely on distinctions between subjective and
objective perception and action within a milieu. [2]
Neorealism was characterized by a crisis of the
movement-image, with 'its slackening of the sensory-motor
connections'. [3] In this changed regime 'the
character has become a kind of viewer. He shifts, runs and
becomes animated in vain, the situation he is in outstrips
his motor capacities on all sides . . . He records rather
than reacts'. [4] The characters in this
cinematic regime, if not children, are somnambulists,
visionaries, and counterfeiters. The narratives blur lines
between the everyday and the exceptional, the real and the
imaginary, the physical and the mental, and the films are
replete with empty spaces and idle periods of time. The
'limit situations' in which the characters find themselves
extend into 'dehumanized landscapes' where the spectator
comes face to face with time. The work of the Neorealists
signals the regime of the time-image and with it a different
historical and philosophic relation to perception, belief,
and thought. In other words, by favoring Deleuze's
discussion of the movement-image over his exploration of the
time-image, Bruno slights important differences in our
understanding of the relation between affect and
thought. Though not acknowledging
important distinctions between the two cinematic regimes
proposed by Deleuze, Bruno's subtle discussion of the films
of Peter Greenaway does indeed suggest and invite further
nuanced distinctions in relation to forms of affect and
knowledge that differentiate cinematic responses to space
and time over the course of modernity, distinctions that are
critical to contemplate and rethink. Her brilliant
discussion of Rossellini's _Viaggio in Italia_ (_Voyage in
Italy_, 1953) is a coming together of many of the motifs of
the book: relations between affect and place, the diary, the
woman traveler, the city (Naples in particular), tourism,
museums, urban mapping, the re-mapping of cultural travel,
and the relation of all these to the critic's personal
history and to the history of film. The discussion of the
ruins of the past, the bodies at Pompei, the catacombs of
Fontanelle, evoke Bruno's earlier discussions of death and
mummification and their relation to cinema and nod to
Deleuze's discussion of the regime of the time-image that
assumes qualitatively different affective responses in
relation to the world of the senses. While Bruno draws on
Deleuze's concept of the movement-image to convey the
importance of a sensori-motor understanding of affect, she
does not address significant historical and cultural
differences that have altered affective responses to
perceptions of space and time. The time-image 'disrupts
chronological space defined by exteriority, extension, and
continuity links . . . a whole cannot be restored to the
image, nor can an idea of self-identity be restored in the
image of a unique identity to which voice and body belong'.
[5] In other words, in its treatment of space,
history, and memory, Bruno's book suggests but stops short
of exploring different relations 'to both subjectivity and
thought'. [6] Bruno's _Atlas of Emotion_
is a vast erudite text that orchestrates many aspects of
cultural studies by way of cinema. It is a rewriting of the
history of cinema, a theoretical work that challenges
dominant aspects of film theory including psychoanalysis and
feminism, an exploration of the landscape of modernity, and
an intermedial text that conjoins architecture, literature,
painting, the domestic arts, and cinema. Bruno has also
charted a different route for the reader by introducing a
self-critical and reflexive method that reveals the
importance of situating the critic's voice in producing
knowledge. The book moves gracefully through different
critical discourses, forms of theory, and critical
practices, constantly shocking the reader into an awareness
of taken-for-granted images and forms of thought. _Atlas of
Emotion_ is a brilliant intervention in media study, for the
ways that it invites its readers to rethink concepts and
methods in cultural and cinema studies. It is a rare and
welcome book that will generate important debates and shape
new directions in the study of cinema and
culture. Notes 1. Bruno, _Streetwalking
on a Ruined Map: Cultural Theory and the City Films of
Elvira Notari_ (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University
Press, 1993), p. 4. 2. Gilles Deleuze, _Cinema
2: The Time-Image_, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), p.
5. 3. Ibid., p. 3. 4. Ibid. 5. D. N. Rodowick, _Gilles
Deleuze's Time Machine_ (Durham and London: Duke University
Press, 1997), pp. 186-187. 6. Ibid., p. 209.
Copyright ©
Film-Philosophy 2003 Marcia Landy, 'Traveling
in Film Theory: Giuliana Bruno's _Atlas of Emotion_',
_Film-Philosophy_, vol. 7 no. 44, November 2003
<http://www.film-philosophy.com/vol7-2003/n44landy>. Join the _Film-Philosophy_
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