Enacting the Worlds of Cinema

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by Steffen Hven

Type: Essays
Subject: Theory
Keywords: narrative analysis, theory, perception
Publishing date: 2022
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Language: English

Relative size

Physical desc.

Hardcover • 216 pages
6 x 9 inches (15.5 x 23 cm)

ISBN

978-0-19-755510-1

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Book Presentation:
Enacting the Worlds of Cinema offers a substantial reconfiguration of the textual roots of modern film narratology. By giving sustained attention to cinema's material-affective modes of communicating its stories and embedding its audience in atmospheric, kinetic, and multisensorial worlds, this book maintains that film narratives are less representations than they are enactments; brought forth through the interactions of the felt body and the film material. The book defends this enactive and media-anthropological thesis by reworking a series of established film narratological key concepts including the diegesis, mood/atmosphere, and the distinction between diegetic and non-diegetic sound. In the process, this book draws on a wide range of contemporary theoretical resources such as affective neuroscience, media-philosophy, philosophy of mind, atmosphere research, multisensory perception theory as well as a broad selection of films including Berlin: Symphony of a Great City (Ruttmann, 1927), The Cranes are Flying (Kalatozov, 1957) and Happy as Lazzaro (Rohrwacher, 2018).

About the Author:
Steffen Hven currently lectures in Film Studies at the Freie University of Berlin. He has previously been a Visiting Fellow at the Cinepoetics and the University of Chicago and an Associate Postdoc at the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, where he also obtained his PhD in Film Studies in 2015. He is the author of Cinema and Narrative Complexity: Embodying the Fabula (2017) and his work has been published in journals such as NECSUS, 16:9, and Fata Morgana. He has been awarded research grants from foundations such as the German Research Foundation, the Fritz Thyssen Foundation, and the Bauhaus Research School.

Press Reviews:
"Moving within and between disciplines, traditions and paradigms with impressive erudition – and challenging overly simplistic cognitive and affective oppositions at every turn – this study establishes Hven as an original and powerful voice in the expanding theory of cinematic worlds, environments and atmospheres." -- Daniel Yacavone, University of Edinburgh

See the publisher website: Oxford University Press

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