'What makes a film tick?' : cinematic affect, materiality and mimetic innervation

This PhD explores questions of cinematic affect and its relationship to mimetic experience. Through an examination of cinematic materiality, it argues that film must be inscribed across the sensorium if it is to arouse affective experience for the spectator. Drawing on Miriam Hansen’s readings of Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer, the thesis argues that cinematic affect can most productively be understood in film as a process of mimetic innervation. The thesis is comprised of seven published essays and an overarching chapter. The introductory chapter, ‘A Paradigm Shift in Film Studies’, situates the published essays in the context of recent debates about embodied spectatorship and affect, arguing the need for a revision of key paradigms of film theory. The first series of essays argues the centrality of embodied affect to cinema spectatorship, and proposes a nexus between mimetic visuality, affect and mise-en- scène, linking the analysis of mise-en-scène to Kracauer’s discussions of cinematic materiality. The essays extend this nexus to rethink genre through the lens of affective mimetic experience, arguing that both genre and visual style work mimetically. The arguments are explored through studies of the work of Mizoguchi Kenji, Theodorus Angelopoulos and Lee Myung-Se. The second series examines spectatorship in documentary cinema, raising questions about historiography, embodied knowledge, inter-cultural dialogue, and the affective elements of cultural specificity. The essays interrogate the universalist claims of conventional documentary form, and its assumptions of a disembodied spectator. They contest the assumed opposition in documentary theory between affect and signification and draw affect and mimetic experience into the core conceptualisation of documentary film. The studies explore an Australian television documentary series, an Indonesian political docudrama and three hybrid documentaries—two Indian and one French. Through these studies, the thesis argues that affective embodied mimetic experience is at the core of cinema spectatorship