Feeling Film: Time,Space,and the Third Image

Introduction

The first two words of this article’s title take us to the heart of the phenomenology of the cinematic experience. When writing about “feeling film,” there is an ambiguity in what is meant, and this lack of certainty around meaning itself will prove to be central to the argument as it unfolds. The sticky question of meaning and where it resides along with its role and function in the cinema, and indeed in the consulting room too, adheres to this argument as indeed it does to much of this book as a whole. Does “feeling film” mean to engage and apprehend the physical stuff itself in a tactile manner, as a substance in our hands, as though we were editing the traditional celluloid material? Or perhaps it is that we have an intensified experience of the surface textures of the cinema. We notice its screen, seats, décor, and lighting as we experience the contrast between foyer and auditorium. We become aware of the tactility of ticket booths, the food concessions, and how the smell of musty popcorn contrasts with the subdued lighting and the racked comfortable seating of the theatre itself. The implicit movement from one psychological space to another imprints on our bodies that we have entered an area that is different from the quotidian geography of the everyday world. We feel differently, even as we enter the cinema.

Or does “feeling film” mean that we have an emotional reaction to the films we watch? Certainly, there are films that cause us to feel, to have emotional reactions to their images and sounds. Certainly, films set out with all the artifice of the seductive look, the sly eye, or the visceral thump in the gut to engage us. Looked for or not, the emotional is always present in the cinema. Yet cinema is not always so overly flirtatious. Oftentimes, feelings sneak up on us unexpectedly. Before we know it, we are happily, sadly, and yet inevitably in love with a film. Such seduction is what brings us back to the cinema repeatedly, evening after evening. We hope that in someway we will learn and gain insight from this relationship as we find ourselves not just “looking for the heart of a Saturday night” (Waits, 1989) but for some heartfelt insight into how we are in the world.

Finally, does the film itself feel? It seems unlikely. Yet with Sobchack’s (1992, 2004), Marks’s (2000), and Shaviro’s (1993) works in mind, is there a sense in which the film body “feels,” that in some way the film itself responds emotionally as a reaction to our own emotions? Is it possible the film body when in relationship with the body of its viewers reacts, almost as a lover? Psychological therapists know that one of the ways by which it is possible to build empathy with clients is through what is referred to as “therapeutic attunement”—the aligning and adjustment of oneself, psychologically and physically with the other person. Perhaps too the interplay between the feelings in the body of the film and the feelings of its viewers are in a state of flux, and the complex matrix of that relationship is much more unpredictable, intimate, and unstable than is often assumed.

So here we have it. The question is whether this chapter is concerned with the tactility of the filmic experience, the emotional reaction to the films we watch, or the relationship between our bodies and the body of the films themselves? The answer is that feeling is significant because it is simultaneously all these individual elements and also a composite of them—this what I term the third image—not the image on the screen, not the images in our interpretative imagination, but a third image that somehow comes to occupy the space between viewer and screen as we enter into a relationship with the film itself. This is the cinematic psychological corpus, the body of meaning, that this chapter will explore. To do so, we start not with a phenomenological encounter, though it is in part that, but with the writings of Henri Bergson and in particular the section in his 1911 work Creative Evolution headed The Cinematographic Mechanism of Thought and the Mechanistic Illusion. We will return to more obviously phenomenological concerns, and some structural matters later.

To set the scene, in 1899, Sigmund Freud published The Interpretation of Dreams, where he famously set out the mechanisms of dream work and the need of the psyche to disguise the true sexual meanings of its nocturnal fantasies. The mechanism of repression and the emphasis on childhood and its oedipal drama meant that while a dynamic psychology, the optic orientation of Freud’s thinking work was backward. It was by looking through and into dreams, and indeed other somatic activities, that it was possible to see their origins in the early years of life. Meanwhile, Carl Jung had met with Freud in 1907 while he was working on The Psychology of Dementia Praecox, and in 1910, he published The Symbols of Transformation, just 3 years before his split with Freud. In contrast to Freud, Jung’s psychological look was to the future. While acknowledging the importance of one’s life experiences, he came to regard the psyche as fundamentally teleological. Thus, a symbol was only a symbol so long as it contained the psychological germ of some future insight. At the moment of understanding, the flower blooms while the symbol itself withers.

If Freud had one eye on the past, and Jung on the future, then Bergson was clearly focused on the present. His concern was with what it means to “be” in the moment. Here it is possible to discern a hint of what will later morph into the rather different viewpoints of existentialism and phenomenology. That said, Bergson chooses not to write about “being” (as both existentialism and phenomenology would) and instead opts for the term duration (or in the original French, durée). It follows for Bergson what he is interested in is the combination of consciousness and time as it is the conscious experience of time and awareness that is encapsulated by durée. As we will see, Bergson argues that duration makes itself known through a series of images, each of which offers only a part of the whole. The entire picture itself, as it were, cannot be grasped by consciousness, or the rational mind alone. A complete sense of the present moment requires intuition and creativity. Even so, the complexity and changing nature of duration means that it can never be fully understood or comprehended.

It might already be apparent that there are some points of contact here with Freud and Jung’s psychoanalytic formulations of the self and consciousness. Freud regarded the events of an individual’s life as a series of pictures, if you will, that built sequentially to form a composite of an entire life in the present moment. For neurotic patients, this expressed itself in a particular image or symbolic mode of behavior (a perversion), the meaning of which was unavailable to the patient’s conscious mind. Understanding its meaning required the creative engagement of the analyst in disassembling the composite into its individual life events. By contrast, Jung regarded the symbolic image as the best possible encapsulation of the present. Like Bergson, he thought that its meaning could not be grasped by the conscious mind. Unlike Bergson, Jung looked beyond the present as for him everything psychological is part of a lifelong psychological parabolic trajectory under whose penumbra life is lived. Bergson’s conception of image is somewhat different. Understanding it is important to see what it can add to and differentiate from Jung’s ideas about image and also because the ideas provide two of the pillars for Deleuze’s writing on cinema, namely, the movement-image and the time-image.

The first part of Bergson’s argument is concerned with “nothing”—a state that he reasons cannot exist (Bergson, 1911, p. 294). He postulates that it cannot exist because the body is always engaged in the act of perception as it registers the existence of external events in the world. If such stimulation is removed, then the perception shifts to the internal world and its thought processes. It follows for Bergson that there is always something, either from without or within the body. This constant state of perception is perceived by the body as a dynamic condition in which it is constantly coming into being. As Bergson observes, “Matter or mind, reality has appeared to us as a perpetual becoming. It makes itself or it unmakes itself, but it is never something made” (1911, p. 287).

For Bergson, this understanding is central to his larger project, which is the search for a “philosophy more nearly approaching intuition” (1911, p. 293). Intuition here is important as it is only by and through intuition that the flux of coming into being in the present moment (durée) can be apprehended. Even then, such apprehension will only be partial for when the conscious mind freeze frames the present moment the image is jolted out of the flux of durée and looses it rich unknowable sense of being in the present.

Bergson seeks to illustrate this idea through the metaphor of the cinematic apparatus. It is unfortunate that this has frequently led to a mistaken view of Bergson’s opinion of cinema as a mechanistic and psychologically impoverished medium. Notwithstanding, Bergson argues that cinema is a good example of a failed attempt to achieve durée. He observes that films are composed from a series of still images, which when one follows the other provides the illusion of movement. The frames never interpenetrate one with the other and instead offer only the illusion of coming together. In so doing, they create a sense of meaning in the present moment. For Bergson, this illustrates how the rational and conscious mind attempts to understand the world. It appears to have a full and good understanding of the conditions of being; actually, it is an impoverished understanding because it fails to comprehend the flux of durée and its essential unknowableness as past interpenetrates the present from second to second. Cinema offers only a partial view of the world because it is a composite of still images that have been extracted from the flow of durée. As Bergson puts it, cinema fails to acknowledge the imminence of the past in the present.

This point is going to be important as it will show how this idea of constantly coming into being in the present moment can help understand one aspect of the “cinematic condition” that we enter into when we engage in the activity of watching a film. I will be arguing that this is akin to the “psychotherapeutic condition” in which therapist and patient are likewise engaged in a fluid process of coming into being and in which both enter into an unconscious yet transformative flux. For Bergson, this fluid state is durée and it demands the active engagement of our creativity. In a somewhat similar vein, Jung sees the lifelong process of psychological development that he termed individuation as something that likewise cannot be grasped by just the intellect. As with Bergson, Jung too asserts that to be fully the people we are and to fully realise our potential to “be,” we need to deploy our intuition. Where Jung parts company with Bergson is in the role that the unconscious plays in the process of being: For Bergson, the idea of a structuring core in the psyche is superfluous, while for Jung it is crucial.

When it comes to the key concepts that we have just encountered, “intellect” and “intuition,” Jung and Bergson have somewhat different views. We will start with Bergson who sets up an epistemological dualism between the two ideas. He uses the term intellect to refer to the way in which we understand the state of inert objects as immobile and static, from which it follows that their state of being is no less fixed. Significantly for Bergson, the cinema falls into that category of being, as the appearance of movement (of flux or fluidity) is created by the passage of what are a series of still images. By contrast, “intuition” is the true flux of reality as it is the coming into being that arises from movement and change—this is the state of durée. Unlike the intellect, it does not require conscious awareness. For example, objects in nature such as plants or trees are in a state of flux, change, and growth. As such, they are in durée, but clearly, they are not consciously aware of themselves.

Similarly, for Bergson, “Real Time” is equivalent to durée as it flows. Significantly, such real time is different to objective or scientific time. Such mechanical time (e.g., as measured by clocks) is not part of durée as the seconds proceed one after the other and, crucially, they do not interpenetrate each other. Scientific time marches on, but it does not flow as it cannot merge the past with the present. Durée, on the other hand, is subjective. It requires the diminution of the intellect and immersion in intuition. As Bergson (1911) notes, “It is no use trying approach duration: we must install ourselves within it straight away. This is what the intellect generally refuses to do” (p. 315). The idea is reminiscent of Jung’s (1929) assertion that

We must be able to let things happen in the psyche. For us, this is an act of which most people know nothing. Consciousness is forever interfering, helping, correcting, and negating, never leaving the psychic processes to grow in peace. It would be simple enough, if only simplicity were not the most difficult of things. (§20)

The Image in Bergson

To recap, Bergson uses the metaphor of the cinematagraphic apparatus to provide an illustration of how the intellect apprehends reality, namely, one frame at time, as it were. Had Bergson undertaken a different project, namely, to examine watching films in light of his arguments about images and their flow in durée, then he would have presented a rather different commentary on the cinema. However, he did not, and for him, film is a good example of what constitutes “intelligence,” conscious apprehension, and, more generally, the rational mind making sense of the world. Essential, certainly, but, equally, it is insufficient, as it serves to reconstruct reality rather than to enter into it. As Bergson (1911) puts it,

Instead of attaching ourselves to the inner becoming of things, we place ourselves outside them in order to recompose their becoming artificially . . . the mechanism of our ordinary knowledge is of a cinematographical kind. (pp. 322-323) [emphasis as in original]

It is worth pointing out that for Bergson the same problem exists with other artistic media—for example, music. In Bergson’s terms, music is not in flow but, in fact, is composed from a series of individual notes—horizontally in melody and vertically for harmony. The two structures are combined in various ways and in so doing give the illusion of progression or flow. Crucially, they do not constitute durée. It follows that music, like film, fails to interpenetrate consciousness and requires the engagement of rationality. In this sense, it follows that film music is a willing accomplice with the cinematic screen in keeping us out of durée. One concern with Bergson’s argument is it fails to adequately account for the emotional experiences we undoubtedly experience when watching films or indeed when listening to music. Quite clearly, such feelings are not fully explained by deploying rational consciousness, even in Bergson’s particular definition. Here, Jung’s conception of the image will be of great help in articulating the ways in which emotions and images can be bound together. As will become clear, the third image offers a particular somatic example of how durée can be experienced in both the cinema and in therapy, and while listening to music for that matter.

Deleuze and Image

Interestingly, Deleuze in Cinema 1 and Cinema 2 (2005) takes his cue from Bergson but argues against Bergson’s assertion that cinema should not be understood as a series of still images. It is important to notice what has happened here. Deluze, on the one hand, takes Bergson’s commentary as in part passing judgement on cinema, while, on the other, he offers up a taxonomy that can be applied to cinema. Both are problematic as rendered by Deluze, although there remains another way Bergson can be of use in providing a fresh perspective on space and time, both in therapy and for an understanding of the cinema. As we have seen, Bergson used one of the mechanisms of cinema (its physical existence as series of separate images on a strip of celluloid) to illustrate his concept of what was in durée and what remained outside that state. That is significantly different from asserting something about the nature of cinema. Deleuze is aware of this distinction and uses it to assist in his formulation of the movement-image. This idea suggests that it is the continuity of movement that defines the whole. (The concept as applied to cinema in itself marks a new 20th-century rendering of Zeno’s arrow.) As illustrated by Deleuze, cinema offers specific and numerous examples of the movement-image. To be clear, Deleuze acknowledges that Bergson was not studying cinema itself, and so he has to work hard to connect up his own ideas about the status of the image in cinema with Bergson’s formulations. However, as we will argue, Deleuze would have been well advised to bypass the cinematic image as used by Bergson and to move more directly to his more potent concept of durée. In other words, unlike Deleuze, we will avoid the illustration and instead focus on the process.

That said, what Deleuze does take successfully from Bergson is his taxonomy of image: the perception-image, the affection-image, and the action-image. In Bergson’s formulation, it is perceptions that cause affects, which in turn lead to actions. For Deleuze, this illuminates the movement-image of the cinema. In practice, what intervenes between affect and action is memory, and it is this that Bergson refers to as a series of “conditions” that provide automatic connections to the present. For example, I know how to play the piano and I remember it. However, another less automatic response concerns memory that is evoked by the act of remembering. Clearly at any one time, we do not remember all the events of our life, as the present intervenes in the act of selection and editing. The closest we get to a sense of a total set of life memories is when we are dreaming. Here, anticipated or not, consciously remembered or not, events from our past emerge once more in our dreams. So too in the cinema, our consciousness fades as we find ourselves entering the cinematic condition that enables seemingly forgotten memories to be experienced. I want to suggest that to experience such acts of unlooked for recall is actually to enter the state of durée. Furthermore, that being in durée is a precondition for the creation of the third image—in this way, when watching a film, the present is indeed pregnant with the past.

Deleuze goes on to argue in Cinema 2 that movement is subordinate to time. While cinema does of course move, both the material of the film itself and the resultant images on screen, these are subsumed by the flow of time. (In the digital age, we might wish to think of the movement of pixels as they alternate between their on and off states.) The movement-image is the ability to sense the world as it changes, while the time-image is concerned with subjectivity, reflection, and questioning. For Deleuze, the movement-image characterizes cinema before the Second World War, while the time-image typifies the cinema that followed. Deleuze was interested in how film puts first movement into our mind and, secondly, how the time-image comes to alter our perceptions of ourselves and by extension the world. In distinction to Bergson’s image of cinema as a series of still images, Deleuze sees our perception as fused into the film itself, as encapsulated in time. If Bergson uses a cinematic metaphor to explain durée, Deleuze sees cinema as a reality that alters our perception. It follows for him in our minds, even when a film has finished or is paused, we complete the act of movement, as it is, though we need to stick with it and in so doing we continue the forward propulsion of the “movement-image.”

At this point, it seems right to reposition Bergson and bring him back into the fold of cinematic thinking. As argued above, Bergson was not writing about cinema itself and was instead using the mechanics of cinema to illustrate a philosophical point. If cinema had been his interest, he would surely have dwelt more fully on the act of perception rather than the materiality of the cinematic apparatus. Had he switched track to focus on the viewer, then he would have seen that the state one enters into while watching a film (the cinematic condition) has numerous points of similarity with the fluid state of durée. To develop this point, it is interesting to note how films often blur the difference between reality and dream, or hallucination. Christian Metz (1977) went so far as to characterize cinema as more powerful than dreams as it manages to delude its viewers while they are still awake. A slightly different take is offered by Deleuze who explores the ways in which cinema blurs reality through both the movement and time images, or as Bergson might have said, though he did not, through durée.

It would be misleading to suggest that all films at all times allow for, or facilitate entry into, durée. Though I am toward the end of the article going to suggest that the entry into durée while sometimes facilitated by the formal properties of cinema is also a result of the interaction between personal unconscious complexes with the images and sounds of films. Here it is helpful to draw on Deleuze’s reformulation of some Bergsonian derived ideas—in particular, the movement-image and the time-image. Deleuze is intrigued by the way in which certain sequences in films slip between different types of time: between scientific time and real time, as Bergson might have it. Many of the examples he uses are taken from European “Art house” cinema, which indeed is replete with such examples.

However, mainstream films also offer slipways into durée. Furthermore, it is worth noting that contrary to the suggestion made by Bergson about the qualities of the static image, actually still images do encapsulate both time and movement. While in one sense these are indeed frozen, there is another more meaningful way in which still images also contain the implication of past movement (what has happened leading up to the moment the image was taken) and future movement—what might happen after the moment depicted in the image. Such movements, into which the image intervenes, apply to both the moment that is recorded and also to the subjectivity of the photographer, the moments before and after the press of the shutter or the start and the end of cinematographic take. In this way, the creative act is the result of the interaction between form and subjectivity.

Deleuze extends this to examine the formal properties of the images themselves and how such devices as deep focus cinematography constitute elements of the time-image. He observes how the cinematic technique in which some characters at the back of the image are kept in sharp focus along with those are in its foreground indicates a certain sense of temporality in space. This echoes Bergson’s image of the inverted cone, whose tip is in the present moment and whose gradually thickening base forms the layers of memories that come from the past. It is also richly suggestive of the ways in which our previous cinema-going experiences come to inform any given viewing of a film. As Bergson might put it, the past is always there in the present, and the present image also contains its past. In other words, the present is always splitting. So too in the cinema, we both need our previous experiences of films, our expectations, and we also need to let them go. A genre film is in part comprehensible because we have learnt its syntax and structure, and this type of literacy once acquired over years makes the viewing experience meaningful. But it also enables us to let it go, and to allow our own psyche to interact with the film and in so doing to enter into a nonrational but meaningful relationship with the film. As viewers, we bring our experiences to bear on the current film, locating it within a broad discourse of similar films. In other words, we create a type of family of films, a genus or genre, which requires a systemic set of relationships to create a field within which to generate a hermeneutic set of meanings (cf. Izod & Dovalis, 2015).

So too in therapy, we need to understand the ways in which our life patterns repeat themselves. This becomes embodied in the therapeutic relationship, and once experienced and understood it becomes possible to let that relationship go as we enter into a state of “being” who we are, less confined by past behaviors. Such breaks are not without their pain, and as changes happen in therapy, they also manifest themselves in relationships outside the consulting room. While in therapy, erratic behavior and nonrational feelings are part and parcel of the daily work; when they affect on actual relationships, they can be destructive, bizarre, and frightening. So too in the cinema, the emotional relationship we have with films can be perplexing to others, appearing as it is to be irrational. However, in therapy, cinema, and personal life, all is not lost if the ego-strength of all involved is strong enough; such dark and frightening events in life offer the potential to transform unconscious material into conscious insight, though often at some cost.

The emotional effect of entering into durée as it is experienced in the cinema is certainly not confined to rarefied films and is actually more pervasive than is often assumed. Indeed, its ubiquity is one of the reasons why popular cinema continues to be an enduring and psychologically rich medium. As examined by Deleuze (Cinema 2), a good example of this is offered by the film genre of the musical. Take a moment to consider those points in a film when a character leaves the “real world” of the film and enters a state of reverie. It is significant that the exact point of such a transition (from the world of the intellect in the film to durée) is often unclear. Delueze analyzes the well-known scene in Singin’ in the Rain, 1952, when after giving Kathy (Debbie Reynolds) a goodnight kiss, Don Lockwood (Gene Kelly) performs the famous song and dance sequence from which the film takes its title. Of interest here is the problem of exactly when it is that Don leaves the world of the rain-drenched sidewalk and enters into the fantasy of singing and dancing in the rain. Of course, it is not clear, as the one slips into the other. To make this transition is to make the transition from walking to dancing, it is to move from intellect to intuition, and it is to shift from mind to body—this is the blurred sense of entering durée.

To elaborate, the point here is surely that cinema is both in and outside durée and can be so at the same time. The image that Bergson offers for this duality is of a crystal in supersaturated solution. The “past” liquid is in a condition of coming into being in the present, in the form of its crystal state. This is durée. Liquid and solid, durée is a crystalline image. In the cinema too, the past is in the processes of crystallizing in the present moment, both the past of the film (other films that have gone before it) and the past within the film, which exists in the narrative life of its characters. So too as viewers, our past life experiences, including our film viewing history, are both liquid and crystal as we are psychologically suspended in the unconscious fluidity of the present moment.

There are then several different types of past at play here. The first concerns the life of the characters off screen—what happens to them in their fictional worlds while not on the screen? What too of their lives before the narrative start of the film and after its ending. These phantasmal thoughts open a way for the spectoral images of cinema to have at least an implied existence outside the frame of the film. However, and crucially, to do so, they need the viewer or spectator, for it is the act of looking into the film that gives its characters spirit—it brings them together as the spectator and the film are brought to life. This again is to enter into a type of durée, and it does not matter if we are conscious of it or not. Indeed, Bergson might suggest that it would be advantageous if we were unaware of what it is we are doing.

So too in therapy, the past of the client in the presence of the therapist crystallizes into something new—something that enables the client to trust in their unconscious processes sufficiently in order to live in an independent manner. Indeed quite possibly one of the central aims of therapy is for the patient to develop a robust set of internal resources within which to live in an authentic and fulfilling manner. Here then the ego takes the form of the crystalline structure in the fluid state of durèe. As it forms, it requires the liquid of the unconscious to surround it, being partly in both the conscious and the unconscious and totally in a state of coming into being. It follows that past, present, and future are all elusive concepts, for what matters here is the precondition of durèe as a state within which to facilitate the process of fully being.

Conclusion: Feeling Film

The idea of an elusive present is as much Jungian, or at least post-Jungian, as it is Bergsonian. For Jung, the collective aspects of our psyche exist in a transhistorical and transrational realm. In this regard, the archetypal patterns that Jung postulates are central to our psychological health, growth, and maturity remain unknowable and incomprehensible to consciousness, at least fully. It is reasonable to regard the experience of archetypes, their affect, and somatic as existing within the realm of durée—at least they can be seen as offering one way of stepping outside the realm of rational consciousness and into the flow of being that is durée. Jung draws on images from Heraclitus to illuminate the psychic flow of the process of individuation (the lifelong mission to live in the manner that is right for us) that is the province of the archetypes themselves—in particular, the image of the river into which we can never step into twice (a result of its flow, and changes in ourselves from moment to moment). The same image also seemingly acts a precursor to some of Bergson’s thinking around durée. Jung took the image and found in it a confirmation of his idea that the psyche is always in a state of change and/or transition. He also interpolates from Heraclitus’s river that the psyche is flowing somewhere, namely, down the ancient archetypal riverbeds of individuation.

The movement of the river is significant in our consideration of cinema, which after all is largely a medium of movement (tracks, pans, zooms, edits, crane shots, images from drones, shifts in camera position, and so forth.) As we have argued, it is these formal properties of cinema films that in part facilitate our entry as viewers into durée. Further understanding the points at which we enter durée in life show that like the experience of watching a film these too are moments of affect invasion. Therapy partly helps us understand that periods of being under the influence of an affective image are not necessarily deleterious (even though they might seem that way at the time) as for the conscious mind to no longer prove sufficient, and to enter into a bodily relationship is to slip into the healing flow of durée. But of course, being dipped into the river Styx is both protective and also renders oneself vulnerable to the cluster of feelings that surround the complex: Shame, fear, regret, and so forth are commonly attached to the dissolution of such complex material. This builds on the ideas discussed earlier, namely, that the cinema enables us to enter a state of durée by suggesting that the movements in the image reflect (as in our glassy reflections) movements in the psyche. Or put in a more Bergsonian manner, the apparatus of cinema enables us to enter durée by suspending the crystalline logicality of conscious mind by replacing it within the grasp of intuition.

That both therapy and the cinema allow us to slip into the stream of durée, that both elicit in us a “will to dream” suggests the therapeutic qualities of films. The sense of temporality, and its lack of fixedness, are often missed in the analysis of the so called “look” of cinema where it is frequently conceived of as type of mirror. On the one hand, this is seen rather like an actual mirror that offers a doubled image—an actual doubling of the world. While the image is tempting, it is actually rather difficult to see how the technologically constructed world of a film in any meaningful way mirrors the physical world. An alternative view is offered by viewing film as a type of Lacanian mirror, which, as imagined by cinema theory, fragments the body, offering tantalising glimpses of the potential for an idealised sense of wholeness. This too is for numerous reasons unsatisfactory, failing as it does to recognize that none has ever reported being fragmented by watching in film. Nor does it capture the psychological insights that clients frequently report from watching films that are surely true more generally for film audiences.

This article opened with a brief consideration of what “feeling film” might mean. As it has unfolded, we have argued that feeling is polyvalent, working as it does in agency with both the unconscious and the conscious. Both nocturnal and diurnal, feeling is our conscious awareness of the unconscious in the present moment. To facilitate its expression and containment, our bodies encode these deeply experienced moments of affect. Sometimes, these offer moments of pleasurable insight, while at other times, the invasion of the unconscious threatens to overwhelm us, resulting in distressing feelings, thoughts, and behaviors. The process of reflection allows for the integration of such material by and into the ego.

What happens when we watch a film is that forgotten personal complexes become activated. They do so if the formal properties of film have slipped us into the state of durée. This is somewhat unpredictable, as it requires the meeting of unconscious personal material with a film, in an unplanned and unlooked for manner. It is not possible to “prescribe” a film in order to allow for psychological healing, any more than it is possible to prescribe a dream. That said, it is possible to change our orientation and our approach to our inner life with a spirit of enquiry and openness. If we see film in only materialist and historical terms, then the opportunity for such insight is closed down. By contrast, if, when we watch a film, we do so as part of a psychological orientation that assumes that life experiences can be psychologically informative, then we are more likely to have filmic encounters that offer us moments of personal illumination. It is worth underscoring that such “third-image” moments are often not pleasurable, and it seems that the older and deeper the complex that gets encapsulated in the third image, the greater the affect. Films can cause considerable personal distress when they activate old unconscious material, and this can in turn have a considerable effect on those around us as well as ourselves.

Feeling film requires us to establish a personal relationship with a film. It means to suspend the scientific logic of everyday life and instead to enter into an intuitive relationship with images and sounds that are not predicated on their representational qualities and meaning. It is to lose the plot, and to slip into durée, as we are drawn into the cinematic flow of a film. In one of the imaginative dialogues in C. G. Jung’s (2009) Red Book, a fantasy figure named “He” comments,

You can go to the cinema in the evenings. That’s great and it’s cheap. You get to see everything that happens in the world. [Jung muses] I have to think of Hell, where there are also cinemas for those who despised this institution and earth and did not go there because everyone else found it to their taste. (p. 233)

Fortunately, we do not have to share Jung’s struggle with his attraction to what he saw as the meretricious appeal of cinema. We can avoid his fantasy of a hell full of cinemas to punish the snobbish. Instead, we can choose to regard cinema as both seductive and yet still meritorious. We noted in the opening paragraphs how to enter a cinema is to make a transition into another realm, it is to enter the underworld of the unconscious in which our collective fantasies and fears are bought to life. So too the act of ordering a movie online or playing it on a DVD or Blu-Ray disk has its ritualistic qualities. As well as being a collective experience, such activities facilitate our readiness to enter into the psychological flow state of durée. It is there that our personal anxieties and complexes find expression. Hopefully in due course, the ego is able to integrate such experiences, and in so doing, “feeling film” becomes a way of finding ourselves. In so doing, we allow ourselves to experience what happens in the world, be that the world of the film, or more potently the personal inner world of our psyche.