Tarja Laine

Shame on us: Shame, national identity and the Finnish doping scandal

This article deals with the media coverage of the Finnish doping scandal in the Nordic World Ski Championships in Lahti, Finland (2001) and the World Ski Championships in Val di Fiemme, Italy (2003). The focus of the article lies on the emotional underpinnings of national identities and particularly on the feeling of shame that is, as argued, deeply rooted in Finnish cultural and social life. The media debates about the doping scandal seemed to be related not only to the state on Finnish sports in the context of globalisation, but also to the Finnish national identity. Therefore, the media coverage of Finnish doping scandal exemplifies the way in which the discourses on national identity are profoundly embedded in collective emotions.

CINEMA AS SECOND SKIN

The concept of skin touches upon the growing interest in the senses among cultural theorists, an interest that is driven by a reaction against what is felt to be an unjustified privileging of some senses. It is customarily said that whereas sight and hearing are public senses, more assimilated to reason, smell, taste and touch are more related to subjective and personal perception, because of their proximity to the body. In the contemporary attention for the senses in cultural theory, the emphasis lies not in the separation, but in the meaningful relation between sense‐making and our sensate bodies. In cinema studies, too, there seems to be a tendency to re‐think spectatorship in terms of the sensual and the mimetic. This paper seeks to find the essence of affective engagement in the cinematic experience by introducing the notion of skin as a medium of intersubjective connection, a perceptual surface that travels through the senses, and between the self and the world. I shall show how skin structures our perception, and that cinema is able to touch us by means of emotion because the affect is situated in the skin, with examples from films such as Ringu, Halloween and The Silence of the Lambs.

Affective telepathy, or the intuition of the heart: Persona with Mulholland Drive

This paper investigates the affective dynamism of the cinematic experience in terms of the so-called intuition of the heart. Inspired by the writings of Jean-Luc Nancy, it shows how the affective circulation between the film and the spectator can be a matter of sharing rather than a consequence of character identification or the satisfaction of narrative desire. The (in)operative similarity in the heart of Ingmar Bergmans Persona (1966) and David Lynchs Mulholland Drive (2001) stands central in the discussion. But the concept of heart touches not merely on our affective intelligence, but also on matters of coexistence, vulnerability, and the securing of personal boundaries; in other words, the crisis of affect. This paper argues that these films teach us broken mode of being as a precondition for ‘filmic ethics’ to emerge.

Lars von Trier, Dogville and the hodological space of cinema

Abstract In an interview on his film Dogville (Denmark, 2003) Lars von Trier said that the absence of setting forces the spectators to invent the town for themselves. As a result, the ‘cinematic’ emerges from a kind of ‘in-between’ space. In this essay, I shall argue that Kurt Lewins notion of ‘hodological’ space is particularly appropriate in understanding this kind of in-between or ‘contact’ space. Hodological space relates to the human experience as a complex social energy field, and, applied to cinema, it can show that the cinematic experience is much more immediate, much more dependent on the existence of others, and much more socially conditioned than assumed in theories that heavily epitomize the concept of look only. Generally speaking, one could claim that cinema is the art of social space, bringing before the spectators the intersubjective ‘life-spaces’ of the characters in the film. Cinema is not some kind of objectified external universe cut off from the spectator by an impassable barrier that separates the corporeal from the intellectual or the private self from the public space. Rather, cinema is a matter of senses that emerges from a place between the inside of the self and the outside of the world. This essay shows how the luminousness of design in Dogville lends itself to Lewins psychological view of space. By removing the setting in Dogville, von Trier leaves the ordinary Euclidean space behind and creates a hodological field of force instead. In doing so, von Trier places the focus on the intersubjective relations instead of on the fixed set of coordinates independent of subjects.

Negative Feelings as Emotional Enhancement in Cinema: The Case of Ulrich Seidl's Paradise Trilogy

A debate has emerged in posthumanist discourse about pharmaceutical mood enhancers such as Prozac to modify human nature. One side in the debate views such modification as the permanent enhancement of our human emotional makeup, aiming at the elimination of undesirable feelings by the unrestrained use of biotechnology that would take us further from our animal nature. This side of the debate is based on a technological concept of posthumanism, or ‘transhumanism’. It is a discourse which is dedicated to the enhancement of our human capacities, physical, cognitive and emotional, by means of advanced biotechnology and cybernetics. According to this school of thought, the transhuman is achieved by searching for escape from the physical entrapment of our material body by means of technological modifications of human biological constraints. In his ‘Cyborg 1.0’. Kevin Warwick writes, for instance, that his plan is ‘to become one with his computer’ and to evolve via chip implants into a superintelligent machine (Warwick 2000). In this mindset transhumanism is associated ‘with a kind of triumphant disembodiment’ as Cary Wolfe puts it (Wolfe 2010, xv).

[Review of: L. McMahon (2012) Cinema and contact: the withdrawal of touch in Nancy, Bresson, Duras, and Denis]

Laura McMahon, Oxford, Legenda, 2012 188 pp, £40 (hardback), ISBN 978-1907975035 It is welcome news that the French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy gains more and more importance in the field of film st...

Generosity and Hospitality in Christmas Story

This short subject discusses what might be understood as Santa Claus’ essence, which is the logic of and limits to his overarching generosity, as depicted in the film Christmas Story (Wuolijoki, 2007). The plot centres on the orphan Nikolas, who grew up to be Santa Claus. Young Nikolas moves to a new home every Christmas Day, and every Christmas he crafts presents for the children of the family he has left. Thus, at the core of the film lies an interesting vision of the relationship between hospitality and generosity, which is the film’s greatest merit. For many theorists hospitality and generosity are self-contradictory notions, which is why they need to be rethought every time they are put into practice. The article examines the relationship between the two concepts as it emerges from close analysis of Christmas Story.

The synaesthetic turn

Over the last decade, synaesthesia has become the new catchword in various fields of scientific research and artistic practice. The concept made its noteworthy entrance from psychology and neuroscience into the realm of the arts, computer graphics, and (new) media and cinema studies. For instance, in 2004, the 31st International Conference of the Association for Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on Graphics and Interactive Techniques (SIGGRAPH) dedicated its Art Gallery at the Los Angeles Convention Center entirely to ‘digital art that stimulates the senses’ (Gollifer 2005, 99). The conference website specifies that the exhibition displayed ‘[o]riginal digital art that emerges from the conjunction of cybernetics and human vision to help us re-experience, re-examine, and make sense of our bodies, our technologies, and our culture’. In the design industry, the synaesthetic ‘fever’ is glowing as well, as one can deduce from ‘The Detour Party, Synaesthesia: An Evening of Sound and Vision’ that the Business of Design Week (BODW) threw in December 2007 at the Hong Kong Convention Centre. The concept has also been adopted, very effectively, as advertising gimmick by the Unilever company for their Magnum ‘5 Senses’ ice cream (2005), especially in its sensual ad directed by Bruno Aveillan, which made its way to YouTube in both short and long version. In the more strictly academic world, several international conferences have been (and still are being) held on this ‘hot’ topic: besides the annual conferences of the American Synaesthesia Association (ASA) and the UK Synaesthesia Association (UKSA), there has been the ‘Synaesthesia’ symposium, organized by the Department of Architecture of the Pennsylvania State University in fall 2003, ‘The Five Senses of Cinema’ conference in Udine, Italy, in March 2004, ‘The Realm of the Senses: Synaesthetic Aspects of Perception’ conference in Berlin, Germany, in April 2007 – not to mention the panel ‘Close Encounters of the Synaesthetic Kind’ that we co-chaired at the Society of Cinema and Media Studies conference in Chicago in March 2007, which is the origin of this special issue of the New Review of Film and Television Studies.