Enacting the Worlds of Cinema

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).