What precisely do we mean when we speak of atmosphere in cinema? By studying the fundamental elements that underlie its production, CATNEMI, the first large-scale research project devoted to the study of cinematic atmosphere, maintains that atmospheres have largely been marginalized in film studies due to their ontological indeterminate existence. Yet, it is precisely this ontological indeterminacy that makes atmosphere a powerful heuristic tool for carving out a conceptual plane between the film and its spectator, its text and its reception, and thereby for shifting our thinking of films from texts to environments.
From the early eighteenth century onwards, the notion of ‘atmosphere’ denoted a non-binary concurrence of the material and the immaterial, of subjects and objects, of medium and content, and of the collective and the individual. In contemporary theoretical discourses, atmosphere, as it is related to a feeling, mood, or Stimmung as expressed through a collective situation, environment, or an interpersonal relation challenges the long tradition of ascribing feeling states to the individual cognitive subject, emphasizes instead their collective, embodied, spatially extended, material, and culturally inflected nature. An atmosphere mediates between environmental qualia and the affective feeling states of human beings.
This project examines cinematic atmospheres as operational tools for prefiguring the audience’s perceptual, affective, and cognitive-epistemic evaluation of the filmic world. Their moral and ethical implications will be subject to sustained academic consideration, not least because the techniques and operations for creating cinematic atmosphere are currently migrating into new media environments as images are increasingly operationalized as regulators of perception, affect, and cognition. CATNEMI aims to provide a substantial theoretical and elaborate conceptual introduction of atmosphere into the study of cinema. From analysis of its paradigmatic operations, the project seeks to develop an approach both inside and outside the traditional cinematic dispositif in order to study the ubiquitous ‘cinema effect’, a principle that describes the internalization of cinema into our most basic perceptive, cognitive, and affective modes of embodied experience constituting modern societies.
Given that cinematic atmosphere production is thus no longer exclusive to the cinema proper but is engrained into audiovisual culture more generally it becomes possible to pose the working hypothesis that cinema—once the mass-producer of mediated atmospheres—has itself become the ‘atmosphere’ or ‘medium of perception’ through which we see, feel, think, act, and reflect. Operations that evolved mainly to regulate our perceptive, affective, and cognitive impression of the narrative-aesthetic world of the film have now filtered into society to perform a variety of functions managing our perception of the world. For instance, freeze frames, slow motions, and replays are used as evidence in the refereeing of modern football. Cinema’s ability to create presence where one is absent facilitates a radical new kind of warfare enabled by the video-technology of drones. Likewise, social media platforms afford the careful affective management of one’s self-image with techniques such as filtering, framing, color grading, and lighting.
Inspired by the recent transdisciplinary interest in the concept of atmosphere in fields such as aesthetic philosophy, musicology, human geography, architectural theory, and urban planning, CATNEMI covers three main research objectives:
1) Conceptual Clarification and Theoretical Elaboration
2) Outline Method for the Study of Atmospheric Operations in Cinema
3) Expand Method to Include Atmospheric Operations beyond the Cinematic Dispositif
How can the conceptual clarification of cinematic atmosphere advance our understanding of cinema’s ‘embodied’ forms of worldmaking in general and in specific instances across the history of analogue and digital cinema? How can it help us transition from an era dominated by the metaphor of the film as ‘text’ and representation to film as ‘environment’ that generates various experiential modalities? How can we use insights from the detailed analysis of the techniques of cinematic atmosphere production as a starting point for addressing the contemporary relocation of cinema into new environments and new devices? How might a conceptual clarification and a detailed study of cinematic atmosphere help elucidate the ubiquitous ‘cinema effect’? In answering these and related questions, this project therefore not only directs attention to cinematic atmospheres as a still largely uncharted, in some instances neglected, domain of cinema studies, but also provides new means of addressing the ubiquitous impact of the cinematic in an age in which the modi operandi of the screen-based audiovisual image have become integral to human sensory, affective, and cognitive experience.
