Affective atmosphere: embodiment and the film frame

The affective atmosphere approach to filmmaking emerged from a practice-as-research project entitled Affective Cinema, which seeks to explore the unique expressive potential of film by offsetting its function as a vehicle for coherent communication of narrative and drama. Affective atmosphere as a production approach is about the focused and present becoming with reality that is not interrupted by separation between periods of filming and not filming. The approach instead complicates the separation between actuality and profilmic reality, and it equally complicates the separation between the habitual effect of the self and the representation of a fictional character. Affective atmosphere is about the sustained embodied presence of performers within the atmospheric conditions of the film set, which form the atmosphere of the resulting moving image. The approach is informed by the philosophical concepts of atmosphere, Merleau-Ponty’s flesh and Deleuze’s affect. The underlying practice-as-research seeks to understand what atmosphere is and what audiovisual expression it can lead to on film; this understanding then informs practical exploration of and experimentation with film drama and aesthetics