Voiding Cinema: Subjectivity Beside Itself, or Unbecoming Cinema inEnter the Void

Hap-Tech Narration and the Postphenomenological Film

“…According to Ihde [19] (pp. [53][54][55], building upon Heidegger's philosophy of technology, when the world of something is mediated through a technological means, the medium alters that which is experienced both outwardly of world and reflexively of self. Through this methodology, we can consider the world of the film through the technology of the camera, and how the viewer of the subjective POV shot seemingly embodies this technological device in order to feel as if they are present within the diegetic world of the film space.…”

“…The mise-en-scène then rises from our body, ghostlike, to become an incorporeal spirit that spends the remainder of the film drifting across the neon colours of the city and the people that inhabit it, like an apparitional vapour. In William Brown and David H. Fleming's paper [54], 'Voiding Cinema: Subjectivity Beside Itself or Unbecoming Cinema in Enter the Void', the authors consider this stylistic shift in the film as a significant factor in transporting the viewer into the void of death. They assert that the film "segues together in […] unbroken continuity three distinct and fluctuating modalities of cinematic narration, which [they] respectively describe as first-person, second-person and 'absent'" [54] (p. 127).…”

“…In William Brown and David H. Fleming's paper [54], 'Voiding Cinema: Subjectivity Beside Itself or Unbecoming Cinema in Enter the Void', the authors consider this stylistic shift in the film as a significant factor in transporting the viewer into the void of death. They assert that the film "segues together in […] unbroken continuity three distinct and fluctuating modalities of cinematic narration, which [they] respectively describe as first-person, second-person and 'absent'" [54] (p. 127). As they state, the early POV "takes up an embodied position synonymous with Oscar's eyes and brain, positioning the viewer behind his eyelids and within his subjective consciousness" [54] (p. 128).…”

Unbecoming Cinema : Unsettling Encounters With Ethical Event Films

“…This ability of films to affectively bring about new thoughts is one of the greatest values of digital cinema, then, and helps us to grasp the ways in which the creation of new realisms can help us 'to think' differently (Brown 2015: 6). A thinking film such as Gaspar Noè's Enter the Void (2009), to take an example we worked on together, employs an alternative form of digital realism to provoke viewers to perceive of ourselves as being radically enworlded rather than being solipsistic beings (Brown and Fleming 2015). In this example, the 'assemblage' of viewer and film 'can/ does take the viewer beyond the human, and as such it is profoundly "philosophical"' (Brown 2015: 8).…”

“…Elsewhere William Brown and I explore how recent scientific research conducted by neuroscientists such as Antonio Damasio (1994; and philosopher-linguists like George Lakoff and Mark Johnson (1999) bear out these Spinozian (and Deleuzian) models of a mind-body parallelism Fleming 2011, 2015). Damasio's studies, for instance, first dissipate the concept of a 'homunculus' directing human thought and action, and demand instead we view the brain as a truly 'embodied' organ in the Spinozian sense.…”