Introduction:”The Most Fascinating Medium”

Mikko Tuhkanen, Guest Editor (bio)

Their enchantment is disenchantment.- Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (297)

Fascination is our sensation.- Mel & Kim, “Respectable”

Speaking to students at the American Film Institute in Los Angeles in 1975, Ingmar Bergman evokes familiar tropes when he enthuses about cinema’s ability to prompt a cognition closer to dream logic than to rational thought. “To me, the cinematography, the real cinematography, is very, very close to our dreams,” he asserts.

You can’t find in any other art, you can’t create a situation that is [as] close to the dreams as [in] cinematography when it’s at its best. Think [of] the time gap: you can make things as long as you want, exactly as in a dream; you can make things as short as you want, exactly as in a dream. You are—as a director, as a creator of the picture—you are like a dreamer. … That is one of the most fascinating things that exist.

Appropriately for the date (he is speaking on Hallowe’en), Bergman suggests that the medium’s uncanny effects extend also to the viewer:

The reception, for the audience, of a picture … is hypnotic. You sit there in a completely dark room, very anonymous … and you look on a lighted spot in front of you, and you don’t move; you sit and you don’t move, and your eyes are concentrated on that white spot on the wall. I think that’s exactly what some hypnotists do: they light a spot on the wall and they ask you to follow it with your eyes, and then they talk to you and hypnotize you. (“Conversation”)¹

Bergman not only leans on the longstanding association of cinema with dreams—the “oneiric metaphor” in film theory (Levine; Rascaroli)—but also echoes the tradition that, beginning with the earliest commentary, confers on film a hypnotic potential. At the end of the nineteenth century, the conception of cinema as an offshoot of the mesmeric arts was arguably strengthened by the screening of early films alongside various vaudeville acts, including spectacles of stage magic and hypnotism. What Stefan Andriopoulos calls the “structural affinities … [that] connected hypnotism with the newly emerging medium of cinema” (92) are evident in numerous early films that thematize the dangers of mesmerism, including Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) and Fritz Lang’s Dr. Mabuse films of the 1920s and 1930s.² Weimar commentators express concern about cinema’s “powerful hypnotic influence” (Killen 41); Jean Cocteau in 1946 suggests film’s potential for inducing “collective hypnosis” (qtd. in Andriopoulos 116); and Siegfried Kracauer, writing in 1960, alludes to the “compulsive attractiveness” of the cinematic image (Theory 158). Crowds, compulsion, loss of control: these themes are rife in discussions of industrial modernity, which frequently figure the disorientation and unfamiliarity of modern life as the undoing of the wakeful clarity of Enlightenment reason. The dangerous effects of this undoing are outlined by Gustave Le Bon and Sigmund Freud in their analyses of crowd psychology. In this way, cinema is thought to encapsulate what Mary Ann Doane calls “the fascinations and anxieties of modernity” (205).

Even as he evokes this long history in his address to students, Bergman also holds the line against a later offshoot of such conceptualizations of cinema. In the mid-1970s, when he visited Los Angeles, this tradition was being continued in the film theorizing that emerged in England and France after 1968 under the names “apparatus theory” and “Screen theory.”³ The scholars connected with these theories maintained the connection between film and hypnosis; Raymond Bellour, for example, asserts in 1979 that there is “a fundamental relationship between the cinematographic apparatus and the hypnotic apparatus” (“Alternation” 101). Yet cinema’s influence was now theorized under a term borrowed from Marxism via Bertolt Brecht and Louis Althusser: ideology. Brechtian theater’s effort to break the thrall of ideology by developing various strategies of “alienation” (Verfremdung), in conjunction with Viktor Shklovsky’s method of “defamiliarization” (ostranenie) from the Russian formalist tradition, filtered into film theorizing together with Althusser’s account of the forces of subjectivation typical to “ideological state apparatuses.” The task of ideology critique was to render the subject conscious of the manipulative strategies through which he had been called into existence. If cinema did not lay bare the constructedness of its illusion—if it did not expose “the ideological systems of recognition, specularity, truth-to-lifeness” (Comolli 133), render film “‘readable’ in its inscription” (Baudry, “Ideological” 41)—then it was likely to function as one of the state apparatuses that guaranteed the viewer’s compliance with instituted identity positions, covering over the sleight-of-hand of their production.

Cinema was considered “an instrument particularly well suited to exert ideological influence” (Baudry, “Apparatus” 119) because of its presumed ability to reactivate the processes of subjectivation. According to the Lacanian schematization adopted by many scholars—among them Christian Metz, Jean-Louis Baudry, Jean-Louis Comolli, and Laura Mulvey—the screen was a mirror that induced the spectator to reexperience the miscognition that had given birth to the imaginary ego. The imaginary relation is marked by the malevolent glamor that Jacques Lacan frequently calls “fascination.” “Fascination,” as he puts it in an early seminar, “is absolutely essential to the phenomenon of the constitution of the ego” (Seminar II 50), which coalesces as the infant is gripped by a “dyadic fascination” with its mirror image (Lacan, “On” 56). The idea, if not always the exact term, can be found in other sources of post-1968 film theorizing, too. When Brecht speaks of the work of Verfremdung as the undoing of the “magic” and “hypnosis” that traditional art weaves over the spectator (75), he evokes the function of the “evil eye” that capitalism extends into modernity in order to guarantee its dominance. Althusser continues this tradition by figuring “interpellation” as a process whereby the subject is constituted as a response to the other’s commanding call. Through his “deluded ego” (Metz 55), the spectator is bound to an “ideological, i.e., imaginary, representation of the real world” (Althusser, “Ideological” 164), powerlessly embedded in what Theodor Adorno calls the capitalist culture industry’s “bewitched reality” (Aesthetic 227).

For Lacan and (more implicitly) Althusser, “fascination” names the organizing principle of the process of subjectivation, the coming-into-being of the entity designated by the double entendre of “subject(ion)”: that is, the process of “men’s subjection [l’assujettissement des hommes]: their constitution as subjects in both senses of the word” as agents of and subordinates to power (Foucault, History of Sexuality 60; Histoire 81). According to the post-1968 tradition of film theory, cinema captures the viewer with the lethal passivity that makes the bird easy prey for the snake. As Colin MacCabe writes, in cinematic representation “subject and object [are] caught in an eternal paralysed fixity” (“Realism” 19). The capture is particularly deadly insofar as it produces the illusion of the spectator’s self-determination; MacCabe speaks of “this petrification of the spectator in a position of pseudo-dominance” (“Realism” 24). “Fascination” designates this posture: the attitude of an autonomous subject unaware of his subjection to a foreign will, a purported master devoured by his presumed servants. Post-1968 film theorizing takes on the task of awakening the enthralled spectator to the lethality of his capture. If “cinema is a technique of the imaginary” (Metz 15), the work of ideology-critical film theorists is to jam its machines, to “[break] the imaginary relation between text and viewer” (MacCabe, “Theory” 21). Like avant-garde art itself, film theory was to undo this imaginary spell, to achieve disenchantment.

The term “fascination” circulates in commentaries from cinema’s earliest days, often without being defined or placed in its long conceptual history. As scholars who have begun to excavate this history in various contexts have indicated, the concept suggests the uncanny underside of modern life insofar as it evokes the enchantments that Enlightenment modernity, for better or worse, is supposed to have defused. Derived from the Latin fascināre, the term’s semantic range moves from “irresistibly attractive influence” and “enchantment” to the obsolete meanings of “witchcraft” and “sorcery” (OED). In its older denotation, it refers particularly to the kind of deadly, arresting magic that folklore ascribes to the “evil eye.” Serpents are said to wield this magic in hypnotically immobilizing their prey; under this spell, the victim surrenders to being eaten alive. In this way, fascination names a capture—most often a specular one—by a malevolent other. While modern rationality is often figured as the eradication of the superstitions that informed (ancient or medieval) discourses about “fascinating” influences, we are by now used to observing the ways in which various “irrationalities” persist in the modern mind. Although the Enlightenment is presumed to have woken us up from the spell of ancient beliefs and forced us to observe the world rationally, fascination remains a “key concept [Schlüsselphänomen] in modernity” (Hahnemann and Weyand 26).⁴

Post-1968 film theorizing is representative of the various commentaries on cinema that have contributed to what Hans Ulrich Seeber calls the concept’s “sensational career” from Shakespeare to the twenty-first century (“Funktionen” 92). In its entanglement with mesmerism and then as an exemplar of ideology’s functioning, cinema has always been a part of “fascination culture” (Baumbach 1). In this context, the term largely retains its negative connotations, its suggestion of the influences of malevolent witchcraft, the “binding” of one’s will by insidious means (Weingart, “Faszinieren” 210). If the task of political cinema was to de-fascinate the spectator, to unravel ideological illusions by rendering the film viewer an active part of signification, the post-1968 generation of scholars was driven by what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, addressing 1990s queer theory, would call “the paranoid imperative”: the critic’s determination to decode the ingeniously obscured mechanisms by which power infiltrates—becomes constitutive of—the most intimate regions of our being. This imperative produced a generation of scholars who were, in Martin Jay’s hyperbole, “cinephobe[s]” (479). Writing in the early 1990s in reference to the conceptualizations of cinema that emerged after 1968, Steven Shaviro similarly observes that this mode of film theorizing is marked by “an almost reflex movement of suspicion, disavowal, and phobic rejection. It seems as if theorists of the past twenty years can scarcely begin their discussions without ritualistically promising to resist the insidious seductions of film” (11). Shaviro’s project in “Film Theory and Visual Fascination” is to nudge academic film theory—”largely a phobic construct” (16)—off the groove in which it has been stuck since 1968. He does this by reevaluating the very term that for his immediate predecessors indicated cinema’s functioning as an ideological state apparatus. He proposes that cinematic fascination be reconsidered beyond the assumption of the dire consequences—the imaginary/ideological capture—of its presumed passivity (42-50).

Shaviro is not the only scholar who—on the heels of Metz, Baudry, Comolli and others—seeks to push beyond the “paranoid imperative” that culminated in post-1968 film theory. Even if “the eye is always evil” (MacCabe, “Theory” 15), there are ways to dance with danger. A partial list of other scholars who have reorganized our understanding of cinematic fascination includes Steven Connor, who offers a condensed account of the concept’s circulation from ancient philosophy to film theory in “Fascination, skin and the screen” (1998); Oliver Harris, whose reading of film noir (2003) should be considered in the context of his study on William Burroughs (2003); and, most recently, Pansy Duncan and Calum Watt, who return to the concept to explore, respectively, the “flat” aesthetics of postmodern film and Maurice Blanchot’s overlooked contribution to film theory. The concept’s implicit theorizations by Julia Kristeva, D. A. Miller, Eric Santner, and Leo Bersani in the context of cinema have yet to be engaged by scholars of Fascination Studies.⁵

Neither Althusser nor Lacan offers an ethics of de-fascination in any simple sense. Rather, their projects can be described as efforts to think re-fascination, ways of being otherwise enthralled, without assuming what Jacques Rancière calls “the Pauline transition from the indistinct perception in the mirror to direct perception” (2). Contrary to some versions of classical Marxism, there is no passage through the mirror, no ascent into “incorruptibility” or a realm free of mediation and misrecognition, but only various ways of yielding to one’s alienated capture (Althusser, “Marxism” 232-33). Similarly, the mechanism of “fascination” persists in Lacan’s work beyond his early descriptions of the infant’s ego-constituting méconnaissance. Most notably, the word figures centrally in his reading of Antigone in Seminar VII, where it at once names the inability of Sophocles’s heroine to avert her gaze from her brother’s rotting corpse, her refusal to relinquish the filial duty to bury his remains—a stubbornness that leads to her own living burial—and signals the spectator’s capture by “the fascinating image of Antigone herself”:

it is Antigone herself who fascinates us, Antigone in her unbearable splendor [c’est elle qui nous fascine, dans son éclat insupportable]. She has a quality that both attracts and startles us, in the sense of intimidates us; this terrible, self-willed victim disturbs us. (Seminar VII 247; 290)

Apart from “the fascinations of the imaginary” (199), Lacan thus proposes that the real “shines” (or “explodes”) through the symbolic in ways that arrest the subject in postures of terrified attention. Rather than the jubilant assumption of one’s image in which film theorists see an allegory of cinematic identification, the fascinated paralysis now carries an ethical charge as it indicates the impossible ground, the aporia, of the symbolic order. We encounter, in Slavoj Žižek’s words, “the deadly fascination of the Real as it threatens to draw us into its vortex of jouissance” (32).

His comments to students suggest that Bergman too should be counted among the thinkers who encourage a more nuanced understanding of—or rather, who remind us of an alternative tradition of conceptualizing—cinematic enthrallment. While not in direct dialogue with post-1968 film theorists, he anticipates Shaviro and others not only in his insistence on thinking film otherwise than as an insidious possession of the spectator’s will—his imaginary/ideological interpellation—but also in his repeated deployment of the very term that indicated the culture industry’s wiles for apparatus and Screen theorists. “Isn’t that fascinating?” he banters, speaking of film’s ability to conjure up the illusion of movement from still images. “I think that must be magic.” Oddly—and to his own amusement—he reaches for a German word to characterize what amounts to the antithesis of cinematic thought: “We can be how[ever] intellectual we want, we can be vernünftig.” While the audience members suggest “sensible” as a translation, we may want to insist on “reasonable” or “rational,” which retain the German word’s relation to the Vernunft of Kant’s usage. Given that the German that intrudes on him is etymologically allied with förnuft (as in the Swedish rendering of the First Critique, Kritik av det rena förnuftet), Bergman may indeed have the Kantian convention in mind. But above all the reference evokes the tradition of film commentary that affirms the medium’s ability to bypass the circuits of rational thought. Sergei Eisenstein locates in film the potential for “sensual, pre-logical thinking” (131); according to Rudolf Arnheim, cinema can “lead the spectator beyond the sphere of ordinary human conceptions” (42). Apart from frequently tackling the presumed disenchantment that flattens modern times in his work, Bergman echoes such ideas—which Ian Aitken suggests comprise the “intuitionist paradigm” of film theory—when he argues that cinematic thinking exceeds the parameters of “reason.” Like Shaviro some fifteen years later, Bergman refuses “[t]he imperialistic movement of scientific rationality” (Shaviro 11) that informs the apparatus theorists’ enlightened convictions.

“Fascination” is the name for the work that film does as a foreign body, the ability of this modern technology par excellence to unground modernity at its constitutive site. “The cinema from its earliest days,” Laura Mulvey writes, “has fascinated its audiences as a spectacle, and one that engages belief in the face of rational knowledge” (Fetishism 7). Many commentators saw in cinema the ability of culture industry to solicit what Adorno calls “will-less fascination,” to protract people’s “fascinated eagerness to consume the latest process of the day” (Minima §150 [238], §76 [118]). Bergman further identifies the antinomy of belief and reason with that of “feeling” and “intellect.” Cinema’s ability to scramble their dialectic constitutes its singularity: “We are in the position to work with the most fascinating medium that exists in the world,” Bergman tells his audience. “Because we always, like music, we go straight to the feeling, not intellect, as in music. Afterwards, we can start to work with our intellects.” The filmmaker distances himself from the ideology-critical view that political cinema must work to “disenchant” us (Adorno, Aesthetic 227). Anticipating the emergence of affect theory in post-1980s film scholarship, he instead suggests that “fascination” is that which “keeps (us) feeling,” as The Human League, too, tells us. Bergman similarly shares the wisdom of Mel and Kim, who hold that the culture industry knows not what it does in constructing the subject as a “sensational” being, open to the affective dimension that cognitivism and Deleuzean-influenced scholarship promote as a corrective to the perceived failures of apparatus theory. Cinematic fascination, Bergman proposes, is to be embraced for its misunderstood and relatively untapped potential.

In this special issue of Postmodern Culture we explore this potential, presenting new directions for the traditions—culminating in post-1968 film theory—in which cinema has been theorized under the heading of “fascination.” We begin with Eugenie Brinkema’s account of the fascination of horror in Pascal Laugier’s Martyrs (2008). If her earlier work in The Forms of the Affects (2014) can be considered “a formalist rejoinder to affect theory” (Brinkema, “We Never” 68), this essay offers a similar supplement to theorizations of fascination. With a detailed attention to the aesthetics of the film, Brinkema argues for a formal reading of fascination: we must move away from theorizing a fascination with violence to conceptualizing “a fascination with form as itself constituting a mode of violence.” Beyond Martyrs, as Brinkema shows, such “formal violence” can be theorized with the help of Jacques Derrida’s and Jean-Luc Nancy’s work.

E. L. McCallum argues for the necessity of disambiguating modes of fascination, suggesting that the concept is in fact misnamed in apparatus theory. To theorize fascination proper, we must relinquish the idea of the spectator’s identification with the image, on which apparatus theorists largely premise their understanding of the work cinema does. Instead, McCallum turns to Michael Snow’s experimental film Wavelength (1967) to search for more apposite delineations. Rather than psychoanalysis and ideology critique, a new theory of fascination can be developed through reading Wavelength in the context of Karen Barad’s studies of quantum physics. If the account of “fascination” in post-1968 film theory assumes the subject/object distinction typical of Western modernity (and exemplified, for many, in Renaissance art), McCallum suggests that, when inflected through Snow and Barad, fascination in fact “reveals to us our entanglement with the material world that undoes the boundaries of the subject/object relation and/or the perspectival relations of quattrocento habits of seeing.”

Calum Watt unfolds the relatively unexplored potential of Maurice Blanchot’s philosophy for film theory, a task that he had already begun in Blanchot and the Moving Image: Fascination and Spectatorship (2017). He proposes that we read filmmaker Philippe Grandrieux and film theorist Raymond Bellour as Blanchot’s “heirs” insofar as each thinks cinema in terms of the contemplative capture that “fascination” names. In the shooting diary for his film Malgré la nuit, Grandrieux deploys Blanchotian fascination to describe the dreamlike state that he associates with artistic inspiration, a state of suspension that in Blanchot’s work often goes under the name of “other night.” Watt also shows that, of all apparatus theorists, Bellour—who has engaged extensively with Grandrieux—has spent the most time explicating the role of fascination in the cinematic experience across his extensive oeuvre, much of it untranslated into English.

My essay takes as its starting point Watt’s recent book-length study of Blanchot as a thinker of cinema. I propose that Leo Bersani, in his work on film and beyond, formulates a philosophy—an onto-ethics/aesthetics—that is closely related to Blanchot’s theorization of the “fundamental passivity” experienced in one’s “fascination” with “the image” (Blanchot, “Essential” 25). While for McCallum we must move beyond apparatus theory if we are to think fascination proper, I propose, with Bersani, that we pluralize the concept in order to think about the entanglement of various forms of fascination. Across the decades—and with the help of Proust, Sade, Caravaggio, and Pasolini, among others—Bersani sketches an onto-ethics/aesthetics of fascination where the concept is split between the spectator’s active exploration and evisceration of an enigmatic world (which we find in Proust and Sade) and his passive receptiveness to the world’s nonsignifying forms (exemplified in later Caravaggio and in Bruno Dumont’s film Humanité [1999]).

In his essay, Kwasu Tembo takes up the psychoanalytic account of sadomasochism by situating its development in Lacan, feminist theory, and the film Secretary (2002). He proposes that what he calls the “radical psycho-sexual fascination” of S/M operates on the “bi-directionality” of libidinal affects between “the dom” and “the sub.” This “bi-directionality” alludes to a concern that emerges as central in a number of our other essays, too: we find it in McCallum’s effort to conceptualize “fascination as a reconfiguration of the subject/object relation” (a proposal in which we recognize a version of the argument she has made in her previous work regarding fetishism);⁶ we can similarly recognize it in Bersani’s decades-long deconstruction of Cartesian dualisms, whose film-theoretical aspects I explore in my contribution.

It is not unusual to hear that at stake in the shift to modernity is the destiny of our “fascination”: the enthrallment or disenchantment that characterizes our constitutive relationship to the world. Michel Foucault adopts this language early on when, in History of Madness (1961), he proposes that the modern era begins with René Descartes’s banishment of madness as an unthinkable option for the cogito. At this moment, he writes, “Descartes [breaks] with all fascination” (244). Such de-fascination is repeated in the subsequent moment of modernity’s double birth (a gesture that Lynne Huffer identifies as typical in Foucault’s thinking about epistemic shifts [209-10]). Coinciding with the end of the great confinement and the emergence of positivist psychiatry in the late eighteenth century, the second delivery similarly marks something like the dissipation of a mystified and compulsive—again, “fascinated”—relationship to the world:

Here was madness offered up to the gaze. This had also been its position in classical confinement, when it presented the spectacle of its own animality; but the gaze that had then been cast upon it was one of fascination, in that man contemplated in that figure so foreign an animality that was his own, which he recognised in a confused manner as being indefinably close yet indefinably distant; this existence that a delirious monstrosity made inhuman and placed as far from the world as possible, he secretly felt it inside him.(Foucault, History of Madness 442)

Both moments of modernity’s birth are marked by the end of a mode of being in which the subject had been “indefinably” imbricated in and yet detached from the “outside,” figured in the curious wretches on the Ship of Fools. Either way, the enthrallment that modernity’s cool gaze was supposed to exclude hardly disappears. Our essays suggest that one of the technologies of its continued insinuation is cinema. Whether with enthusiastic praise or as paranoid critique, the history of film theory has been a history of fascination.

Footnotes

1. In addition to the recording on YouTube, parts of this dialogue can be found in the supplemental material on the Criterion Collection’s DVD edition of The Virgin Spring. The lines quoted here are not included in the print version of the discussion that appears in Bergman, “Dialogue.”

2. On early comments on suggestibility, hypnosis, and cinema, see Andriopoulos, especially 116-23; and Curtis 135-40, 162ff. On debates concerning cinema’s “evil” nature, many referencing the dangerous suggestibility of audiences, see Gunning.

3. Richard Lapsley and Michael Westlake’s introduction remains a helpful account of this strand of film theorizing. See also Jay 456ff. and Harvey.

4. For recent texts that have inaugurated what we might call “Fascination Studies,” see Baumbach; Baumbach, Henningsen, and Oschema; Degen; Hahnemann and Weyand; Seeber; Thys; and Weingart. Earlier explorations, particularly in the context of cinema, include Abbas, Connor, Harris, and Shaviro. See also the variously-slanted encyclopedia articles by Beth, Desprats-Péquignot, Lotter, and Türcke.

5. An account of cinematic fascination in Kristeva would begin by situating her commentary on spectatorship in “Ellipsis on Dread and the Specular Seduction” (1975) in relation to the affective ambivalence she often calls “fascination” in her psychoanalytic accounts such as Powers of Horror, Strangers to Ourselves, and Black Sun. Miller evokes fascination across his studies on cinema and literature. For his work on film, see 8 ½; “Anal Rope“; and Hidden Hitchcock. Of particular interest in Santner’s work is the concluding chapter of Stranded Objects on Hans-Jürgen Syberberg. My contribution to this issue of Postmodern Culture addresses Bersani’s theorization of cinematic fascination.

6. In Object Lessons: How to Do Things with Fetishism (1999), McCallum writes: “fetishism is a form of subject-object relation that informs us about basic strategies of defining, desiring, and knowing subjects and objects in Western culture. More importantly, in the way that it brings together peculiarly modern anxieties—especially those about sexuality, gender, belief, and knowledge—fetishism reveals how our basic categories for interpreting the world have been reduced to binary and mutually exclusive terms. … [F]etishism is a subject-object relation that violates the modern, Western assumption that subjects and objects are mutually independent” (xi-xii, xxi; for elaboration, see 151-68).

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