Feeling Impressions: Aesthetic Form, Affective Economy, and Religious Sensibilities in Melodrama

“Im Kino gewesen, geweint.” (Been to the cinema, cried.) Franz Kafka’s concise diary entry (20 November 1913) of his experience at the cinema expresses in unparalleled simplicity and clarity the powerful affective impact of cinema: a film’s moving images move us, the viewers, in our bodies, minds and feelings, draw us out of ourselves and into the world of the film, and create a shared affectivity among viewers.

Following film theorist Tarja Laine’s (Feeling Cinema) observation that attending to affects in film analysis shifts the focus from what film is or means, to what a film does, and how it does it, this presentation will inquire in more detail about how cinema is able to move and affect us, focusing specifically on the genre of melodrama with its characteristic intense emotional expressivity and impact, reflected in its (usually dismissive) description as ‘tearjerker’. Through the formal analysis of specific scenes from a selection of non-typical melodramas – Shane (George Stevens 1957), Breaking the Waves (Lars von Trier 1996), Au hasard Balthazar (Robert Bresson 1966), 120 BPM (Robin Campillo 2017) – I will argue that the careful construction of images and scenes through aesthetic forms such as lighting, camera position and movement, framing, soundtrack and editing creates an affective economy that reflects and impacts religious sensibilities – focusing here on those formed in a Christian context – in several ways. At a first, basic level, sensing their own sensations of seeing, hearing (and even touching, tasting and smelling in the synaesthetic cinematic experience) and the emotions inspired by them, viewers are drawn into the depths of their beings and given to themselves as selves and more than themselves. At the same time, they reach beyond themselves into the world of the film and the community of other viewers who are connected through the affects circulating on the screen, between screen and audience, and among audience members. Second, the affective intensity of melodrama encourages empathy with the internal and external conflicts, innocent suffering, and hopes for different possibilities experienced by characters, thus creating the sense of shared creatureliness in viewers that may even go beyond an anthropocentric focus in a film like Au hasard Balthazar whose protagonist is a donkey. Third, with narratives centering around the basic struggle between good and evil, melodrama is ‘an evolving mode of storytelling crucial to the establishment of moral good’, as film theorist Linda Williams (“Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess”, 12) notes, whose attempts at affirming, creating or critiquing a moral order are both sustained and challenged by its affective intensity. And finally, melodrama holds open a space of possibility of healing and flourishing that may extend the affective intentionality of viewers beyond the reality of suffering and finitude towards an infinite hope for salvation.

As the theoretical framework for this analysis, I draw on Sara Ahmed’s (Collective Feelings) conceptualization of emotions (which I use, following Ahmed, synonymously with affect) as impressions, the pressing of bodies against each other, and the mark they leave, shaping bodies into objects to be feared or loved. This allows to understand emotions as both circulating among bodies and as something felt in a body as it is im-pressed by another. Ahmed’s understanding of emotions complements film theorist Vivian Sobchack’s (The Address of the Eye) theorization of the cinematic experience as the embodied encounter between the film’s body and the viewer’s body, in which the sensory perception of aesthetic forms plays a foundational role. Cinema’s capacity to ‘touch’ viewers through light and sound creates multiple affective flows within a film and between film and audience which press against and leave an impression on the materiality of the viewers’ (and the film’s) bodies, and thus change both in the process. Sobchack describes this experience as transcendent, paradoxically precisely in and through the material immanence of the film viewer’s embodied-affective exchange with the film, opening her phenomenological approach for a theological reflection. It is important not to restrict a film’s affective impact to the individually felt experience of it but to consider the social construction and impact of affects and their participation in power structures, as noted by Deidre Pribram who analyzes melodrama as ‘a means of exploring specific cultural conceptualizations and deployments of emotions’ (“Melodrama and the Aesthetics of Emotion”, 237) and notes that ‘because social relations never occur beyond or outside of social differences, structures of feeling are also a means by which power circulates, establishing and reestablishing its discrepancies’ (49).

While the impact of specific aesthetic forms or strategies, such as close-ups, soft lighting, fast editing or disorienting camera movements, should not be considered mechanical and predictive of a specific emotional reaction in an individual viewer in their given context, a film's aesthetic form is an important dimension to consider when reflecting on its capacity to integrate its viewers into the circulation of affects it sets into motion through its sounds, images, movements, and stories, and on the religious quality or resonance of these ‘strctures of feelings’ (Raymond Williams). Furthermore, the emotional intensity of melodrama, achieved through both the aesthetic form and narrative development of a film, is not unambiguous: while the affective effects of aesthetic forms highlighted here offer new ways to think about the affective dimensions of religious sensibilities, meaning making, practices, community and beliefs, they may also be considered as manipulative. Thus, while it will become clear that the films’ aesthetic form shapes reception through the affective immersion into the world of the film, I will also highlight ways in which the form of the film – e.g. the use of music incongruous with the affective tonality of a scene – may create a rupture in the affective economy which opens up for different affects that may challenge the film’s structure of feeling.