| | | | | | the craft of the filmmakers, the payoff of the second is fully automatic in nature: one has no choice but to react. | | | | | | | | | Let us focus on this reflex action for a moment. What does it mean? How does it work? More than a hundred years ago, much research focused on what happened to a body in the grip of strong experiences like grief or fear. Darwin, among other scientists, carefully noted the physical results of fear: there was the widening of the mouth, the stretching of the eyes, and the raising of the eyebrows. The heartbeat would quicken and the skin could get pale. In addition, the individual would often perspire, muscles might shiver, etc. 47 The prevalent idea at the time was that the sight of something fearful was communicated to the mind, which responded accordingly by activating all kinds of responses in the body. William James, however, reordered the terms of this scenario. In his essay on psychology, he contended that "the bodily changes follow directly the perception of the exciting fact," that "our feeling of [these] . . . changes as they occur is the emotion."48 His conclusion was truly radical: | | | |  | | | | | We feel sorry because we cry, angry because we strike, afraid because we tremble. . . . Without the bodily states following on the perceptions, the latter would be purely cognitive in form, colorless, destitute of emotional warmth. We might then see the bear and judge it best to run, receive the insult and deem it right to strike, but we should not actually feel afraid or angry.49 | | | | | | | | | To go back to Darwin's example, one's experience of fear was now construed as a direct bodily reaction to specific stimuli, a sensation that does not immediately involve the mind. Insofar as film is concerned, this would mean that the spectator can in fact be agitated through bodily stimulation rather than mental apprehension. | | | | | | | | | Years later, James's ideas would find their application in the cinema thanks to Slavko Vorkapich. In a remarkable article published in 1972 in American Cinematographer, the famous montage specialist isolates "kinesthetic or implicit motor impulses" which are passed through joints, muscles, and tendons so that at the end we duplicate internally whatever it is we are watching. "To kinesthetically feel," he explains, is to somehow reproduce | | | | |
