The haecceity effect: on the aesthetics of cinephiliac moments

Humphrey Bogart pauses to look up at a sign while walking across the street in The Big Sleep (Howard Hawks, 1946); Lauren Bacall clutches and unclutches her chair in the background of a scene in Key Largo (John Huston, 1948); Jeffrey Hunter attempts to leap onto John Wayne’s horse, then seemingly levitates for an instant in The Searchers (John Ford, 1956); a bowling pin twirls, pauses, then falls – as if to its death – in Scarface (Howard Hawks, 1932).¹ Singled out by cinephiles for the inexplicable pleasure they produce, each of these moments typifies what many critics and theorists have identified as a ‘cinephiliac moment’, a brief fragment from a film that compels rapturous and loving description, and resists systematic analysis. As Christian Keathley explains, ‘Whether it is the gesture of a hand, the odd rhythm of a horse’s gait, or the sudden change in expression on a face’, cinephiliac moments involve ‘the fetishizing of fragments of a film, either individual shots or marginal (often unintentional) details […] that appear only for a moment’.²

While ‘cinephilia’ has described everything from a general cultish obsession with films, to a fetishization of celluloid, to a mode of film criticism, the discourse on cinephiliac moments has received a cogent treatment from scholars such as Keathley, Paul Willemen, Laura Mulvey, Mary Ann Doane, Robert Ray, Murray Pomerance, Rashna Richards and Raymond Bellour.³ Across this body of work, what most centrally characterizes cinephiliac moments is their wilful resistance to theorization; they are those moments in films that ‘evoke a sense of [their] own “beyond”’.⁴ Against intellectual paradigms that attempt to organize film experience into semantic units and large-scale systems of meaning – most paradigmatically the structural-linguistic film theory of the 1970s⁵ – the cinephile seizes upon those fragments or details that remain unaccounted for in these systems, brief and often ‘unintentional’ moments that resist systematization by dint of their apparent contingency, not unlike Jean Epstein’s notion of photogenie,⁶ Roland Barthes’s punctum and ‘third meaning’, Walter Benjamin’s ‘optical unconscious’ and Siegfried Kracauer’s arguments about the non-signifying materiality of photography and film.⁷ As Keathley elaborates, the cinephiliac moment ‘resists co-optation by meaning’, seeming to ‘draw its intensity partly from the fact that it cannot be reduced or tamed by interpretation’.⁸ Simply put, cinephiliac moments privilege the fragment at the expense of the whole, materiality at the expense of meaning, the contingent at the expense of the planned, excess at the expense of signification. Indeed, as Doane observes, ‘cinephilia may be definable only negatively – as that which resists systematicity, rationalization, programming, and standardization’.⁹

But what would it look like to define cinephiliac moments not in terms of what they resist but in terms of how they are experienced? As with a host of other perceived omissions in aesthetic discourse – ‘affect’, ‘embodiment’, ‘experience’, ‘materiality’ – concepts that were initially defined negatively as structuring absences ultimately found positive terms for their expression and explanation. Following a similar line of thinking, the aim of this essay is to provide a positive account of cinephiliac moments as a fundamental mode of experiencing the moving image.

What this account will entail is a critical revision of precisely those aspects of the cinematic image that capture the attention of the cinephile: the excess, the detail and especially the contingency of the cinematic image.¹⁰ Too often explained as corollaries of the photographic index – the very kernel of cinema’s potential for ‘antisystematicity’ in Doane’s view¹¹ – these aspects of the moving image are reduced to signifiers of the cinematic image’s status as a historical document, its indexically guaranteed connection to the material world. Against such claims, I argue that the manifold pleasures of cinephiliac moments – an obsession with fragments, excesses, details – often have little to do with the truth claims bound up with the photographic process. While the cinephiliac moment by definition may indeed be tied to the specificity of cinema, that specificity has been too quickly located in the theory of the photographic index without paying commensurate attention to other aspects of the cinematic image, such as its perceptual plenitude and the uniqueness of cinematic motion.¹² Moving away from theories grounded in the index, I provide an account of cinematic contingency grounded in what I call haecceity effects – the particularity or thisness of phenomena as they move in unrepeatable ways – which I argue better capture the kind of attention and pleasure that is manifest in cinephiliac moments. In this account the particularity of movement is not treated as a function of the indexical encounter with a past material reality, but is itself a primary aspect of the cinematic image given special attention by the cinephile.

By locating cinephiliac moments in haecceity effects rather than index effects (where the latter is traditionally the source of what resists aestheticization in fiction film), I show how cinephilia is not, as has been previously understood, an anti-intellectual, anti-systematic and anti-theoretical mode of viewing, but is rather a fundamentally aesthetic mode of relating to the specificity of the moving image. That is, cinephiliac moments are not wilfully idiosyncratic and private pleasures but intersubjectively shareable aesthetic judgements, and thus can be understood as contributing to the domain of meaning and significance. In making such claims, I revise and rethink major assumptions about early and classical film theory in which the explanatory power of the index has exerted a stifling influence, entrenching habits of thought that have made it difficult to think of cinematic specificity beyond photography’s chemical bond with the world.¹³

Questioning the primacy of the photographic index is certainly not a new gesture in the age of digital cinema, and a range of scholars have attempted to account for the ways in which cinephilia has persisted with digital technologies of exhibition and production. Mulvey, for example, has shown how DVD technologies intensify a cinephilic fetishization of the filmstrip;¹⁴ Girish Shambu has discussed how social media has transformed and even enhanced the exchange of cinephilic microcriticism;¹⁵ and Jason Sperb has testified to the persistence of cinephiliac moments in computer-generated imagery.¹⁶ My aim, however, is not to show how cinephilia has changed with contemporary technology, or even how it has persisted despite such developments, but rather to shift the ways in which cinephiliac moments have been fundamentally understood. Reconsidering cinephiliac moments as aesthetic experiences illuminates a central aspect of cinematic spectatorship that has been persistently intuited across the history of film theory but rarely investigated. While cinephiliac moments are indeed grounded in a sensitivity to the ontology of the cinematic image, what that ontology entails is less often a question of technological substrates – of photographic processes, algorithms or digital codes – than it is a far more elusive object: the moving image as it appears to the senses, in all its perceptual plenitude and detail.

Let me return to the falling bowling pin in Scarface, Humphrey Bogart inexplicably pausing to look up at a sign in The Big Sleep, Keathley’s catalogue of cinephiliac moments (‘the gesture of a hand, the odd rhythm of a horse’s gait’) or, to add one of the most cited historical precursors of cinephiliac moments, Jean Epstein’s description of Sessue Hayakawa entering a room: ‘[his] body at a certain angle, in a particular position, opening the door, entering with a particular body language’.¹⁷ As Doane relates in ‘The object of theory’, cinephiliac moments such as these testify to the camera’s ability to capture innumerable events that unfold independently of authorial control, a feature that is exclusively a function of the photographic properties of cinema as understood within C. S. Peirce’s account of indexical signs. According to this explanation, because of the light-sensitive properties of photographic emulsion, cinematic images pick up or ‘index’ visible traces of the material world that inevitably exceed the choices of filmmakers. As a result, Doane writes, the cinephilic fixation on such ‘contingent’ moments is grounded on the ‘indexical guarantee’ of cinema’s photographic base and, by extension, presupposes the spectator’s ‘knowledge of indexicality’s potential’.¹⁸ Echoing Doane, Richards makes this connection between cinephiliac moments and the photographic index even more explicit: ‘That “something beyond” is the cinephile’s belief that, because of cinema’s indexicality, even in the most controlled circumstances, something of the real can appear on the screen inadvertently’.¹⁹

What remains unquestioned in these explanations, however, is precisely how such moments are contingent and in what sense they are unplanned by their filmmakers. Intuitively speaking, such moments indeed reside outside of authorial control, but they do so in a way that is not deeply connected to the indexical capture of the photographic moving image. This is because these cinephiliac moments are not accidents that bespeak their own past profilmic reality shining through a fictional world, and as such they do not rely on the truth-claims of their profilmic referents nor on the spectator’s knowledge of the camera’s indexical relation to what it captured. Rather, as I will explain, such moments highlight the perceivable materiality of cinematic movement, specifically the thisness and particularity of movement as it unfolds with a sense of perceptual plenitude and detail.²⁰

To begin to understand this distinction, we must conceive of such moments not simply as contingencies but as belonging to the particular class of contingency²¹ known as haecceity. In metaphysics, the term haecceity denotes the discrete properties that make an entity particular rather than simply a kind or type.²² Etymologically translatable as thisness, haecceity is traditionally opposed to quiddity, or whatness, the qualities that make something what (what kind of thing) it is. Haecceity thus names those properties that make, for example, Humphrey Bogart distinct from other humans, or men, or white men, or classical Hollywood actors, or his family members, or any conceivable kind of identity to which Bogart himself might belong. But it also, more provocatively, helps to give expression to the singularity of Bogart’s temporal existence, the metaphysical fact that no moment he occupies is exactly like another, that no single gesture of his can be precisely repeated, that his idiosyncratic ways of speaking and ways of walking cannot be exactly reproduced.²³ In cinema, then, haecceity names that which is seemingly impossible to design in its absolute specificity, such as the unpredictable trajectories of dust particles, or the particular way an actor moves his body at a particular moment.

As a class of contingency, haecceity is distinct from what we might ordinarily call an accident in a film: the kind of event that exceeds authorial control but that nevertheless could have been designed – a dog that spontaneously walks in front of the camera, or the unintended shadow of a crew member momentarily visible on screen. Simply put, accidents are the kinds of contingencies that are understood as unplanned or chance events, while haecceities are moments that strike a viewer as impossible to reproduce in just this way. Accidents and haecceities thus do not so much name two distinct kinds of things as they name two distinct ways of apprehending and conceiving of perceivable phenomena. The notion of an accident describes events (in the way that a car accident is an event),²⁴ while haecceity helps to describe something else entirely: the materiality of inscribed movement in overwhelming detail.²⁵ In terms more familiar to film analysis, an accident is a matter of content while haecceity is a matter of form. To take an example familiar to early cinema, an uninvited dog that walks in front of the camera is at once the site of accident and of haecceity. The fact of the dog’s unexpected presence is an accident, but the dog can also be seen as a collection of haecceities – it wags its tail just so, its upper lip curls up as if to smile in just this way, its fur ruffles in the wind at just this moment.

In other words, while accidents reside in the domain of actions or events – the categories we typically use to organize temporal phenomena – haecceities emerge from the materiality of movement that always underlies these actions and events. This distinction helps to make sense of Keathley’s apt observation that ‘the cinephile most often locates [his privileged moments] in motion’.²⁶ More than simply ‘motion’, however, the cinephile’s fixation on haecceities bespeaks a sensitivity to the cinematic property of inscribed motion, or the way that a lifelike world unfolding in all its unrepeatable contingency is made perfectly repeatable, pinned down and pictured. Inscribed motion is not synonymous with recorded or indexed motion, for the inscription of motion is distinct from the transcription of motion.²⁷ Inscribed motion simply refers to the way in which the movements of a moving image are fixed and repeatable, importantly lacking the qualities of spontaneity and unpredictability that Henri Bergson attributed to lived time as duration.²⁸ Because cinema inscribes the perceptually rich and detailed movements of a material world resembling our own, the unrepeatability of life’s many haecceities – ephemeral, chaotic, infinitely particular – is made available for aesthetic fixation and fetishization.

When film scholars explain the contingency of cinephiliac moments as a function of the index, they are mistakenly attributing a quality of accidents to haecceities. Accidents in fiction films (unplanned events), such as visible shadows of crew members or visible contrails in an outdoor shot of a Western, are indeed accurately described as encounters with the indexical real ‘shining through what has been aestheticized’.²⁹ The shadow of a crew member, for instance, testifies to the profilmic reality of that crew member at a particular place and time, just as the contrail testifies to the profilmic reality of the jet at a particular place and time. Both accidents bespeak the historical circumstances of production indiscriminately captured by the documentary power of the camera. This is the case because accidents, as emblems of the unintentional, make manifest the opposition between the documentary power of the camera and the artifice of fiction. A belief about the indexical properties of photographic capture is a condition of the accident’s truth claims. For these reasons, a pleasurable fascination with accidents on screen is not unlike a detective’s or historian’s engagement with a film, mining its vast visual archive for clues of what took place at a certain moment in history.³⁰ And this is precisely why Keathley, Richards and Doane claim that cinephiliac moments promise an alternative method of doing film history. Overlooking the crucial difference between accident and haecceity, they yoke the aesthetic pleasures of haecceity on screen to the accident’s aura of historical authenticity.

While the distinctions between haecceity and accident are not invoked in discussions of cinephilia, the logic of these distinctions is illuminated in a passage from Stanley Cavell’s The World Viewed, in which accident and haecceity respectively map onto his distinction between what he calls ‘accidents’ in theatre and ‘accidents’ in film:

In a theater, the actors appear in person; it is part of the latent anxiety of theater that anything can happen to break the spell – a cue missed, a line blown, a technical hitch. The abyss between actor and audience is not bottomless, unless convention is bottomless. In a movie house, the actors are not present in person and the screen is metaphysically unbreachable; the abyss between actor and audience is as bottomless as time. This does not mean that accidents are out of the question. One can say, as I have implied, that everything caught by film is accident, contingency. Then one must equally say that every accident on film becomes permanent (like the existence of the one world, in the midst of all possible worlds).³¹

In theatre, what counts as an ‘accident’ for Cavell – ‘a cue missed, a line blown, a technical hitch’ – is clearly experienced in terms of what I am calling an accident, or an unplanned event. As events, such accidents ‘break the spell’ of diegetic absorption because the only thing upholding the boundary between the real world and the fictional one in theatre is in fact the plannedness of the performance: the convention that the performance will go off without a hitch, that the spectator will sit quietly in her seat and suspend her disbelief, that things will go as planned. What Cavell describes as ‘accidents’ on film, however, are of a different order, where ‘everything caught by film is accident’ because inscribed time and movement make perceivable the haecceity – that is, the absolute particularity, singularity and unrepeatability – of lived experience itself, of the materiality of moving bodies and the sounds of uttered phrases. The meaning of ‘accident’ in this passage has thus changed from the ordinary to the metaphysical as it moves from theatre to film, from accident to haecceity.³² It has shifted from something we might call an ‘accident’ or a ‘mistake’ to something closer to Aristotle’s definition of ‘accidental’ properties: those properties that an object happens to have but are not necessary to it, or, to borrow Niklas Luhmann’s Aristotelian definition of contingency, ‘[that which] is neither necessary nor impossible’.³³

Of course discourses of cinephilia and classical film theory have long drawn attention to the phenomenon of haecceity by invoking the language of detail, excess, singularity, particularity and materiality, but the conceptual specificity of haecceity has for the most part been problematically subsumed under theories of the index. This tendency derives from a conflation of haecceity effects with index effects, for both bear a special relation to thisness. After all, indexical aspects of signs have been described as precisely those aspects that point to spatiotemporal particularities. In Doane’s words, ‘indices are characterized by a certain singularity and uniqueness; they always refer to individuals, single units, single collections of units, or single continua’.³⁴ But this notion of singularity deals with pointing to the existence of particular things – positing an epistemological relation to those particular objects or beings – rather than anything resembling an aesthetic encounter with that particularity. As Philip Rosen explains, ‘indexicality implies nothing necessary about the form of the signifier, even in relation to the referent, nothing, for example, about whether the signifier “looks like” the referent’.³⁵ The index tells me that Humphrey Bogart, a singular human being unlike any other, indeed existed in front of the camera in that position at that time. But this hardly gets at the sense of what it feels like to encounter Bogart’s – and equally Philip Marlowe’s – singular ways of moving made perfectly repeatable in a moving image. While indexicality implies ‘nothing about the form of the signifier’, cinephiliac moments are nothing but the form of the signifier.

This, I take it, is Manny Farber’s precise fixation when viewing Bogart walk across the street after pausing to ‘look up at a sign’ in The Big Sleep – what Farber famously called ‘one of the fine moments in 1940s film’.³⁶ There is surely something that attracts Farber not only in the narrative inexplicability of the pause but in the idiosyncrasy of its manner.³⁷ Bogart does not simply pause, look up and walk, but does so in his own way and also in this way. The gesture’s lack of narrative significance allows Farber to dwell on the haecceity of Bogart’s movement here made visible, however momentarily. This haecceity effect may be compared with what is clearly an index effect. In Roger Cardinal’s essay ‘Pausing over peripheral detail’, he describes a moment from The French Lieutenant’s Woman (Karel Reisz, 1981) in which Meryl Streep ‘flashes a quick grin’ that, because ‘inconsistent with the tragic tension at that point in the story’, he reads as ‘an involuntary, private grin, the grin of the actress rather than of the character’.³⁸ Clearly experienced as an unplanned accident, the moment is privileged only for its index effect. Unlike most cinephiliac moments (even most of the other examples Cardinal describes in his essay), in this particular case Cardinal is not interested in the haecceity of motion that emerges through Streep’s smile – something that Farber might have treasured – but only in the smile as an event that shatters the artifice of the film’s fictional world. An attention to index effects such as this one may indeed be understood as a kind of cinephilia, but the logic of pleasure exhibited here is markedly different from the attention to detail and movement that is most often invoked in the discourse on cinephiliac moments. Tellingly, in fact, in concluding his account of Streep’s smile, Cardinal will admit ‘I could be mistaken, simply blind to the artistic point of the expression, which Reisz may have asked Streep to produce for a purpose’.³⁹ It is symptomatic of the very nature of index effects and haecceity effects as distinct ways of seeing that the very same moment can be experienced in one mode or the other.

With the concept of haecceity offering a positive account of what precisely the cinephile fixates on, the intellectual history of cinephilia becomes more concrete. Theories of cinephilia tend to draw quite liberally from reception cultures and film theorists in formulating the logic of the cinephiliac moment, often guided by a vague collection of key concerns – ‘contingency’, ‘fragment’, ‘moment’, ‘realism’, ‘index’, ‘affect’ – that have been identified in everything from early spectators’ fixation on the wind in the trees⁴⁰ to the Cahiers critics’ fetishization of fragments, from André Bazin’s realism to Walter Benjamin’s optical unconscious, from Roland Barthes’s theory of photography to Vivian Sobchack’s phenomenology of film experience. But the haecceity effect, as I formulate it here, has a more restricted lineage. The haecceity effect does not underlie Barthes’s encounter with the punctum in the photograph of his mother, which is wholly saturated by the imagined presence of its referent; this kind of experience is closer to, if not wholly explained by, an index effect.⁴¹ But the haecceity effect does inform Barthes’s remarkably cinephilic description of fetishizing the ‘subtle, evanescent trivialities’ of his lover’s body – ‘The way a nail is cut […] a way of spreading the fingers while smoking’.⁴² Similarly, the haecceity effect does not underlie Siegfried Kracauer’s claims about how film and photography, in their automatic registration of visual detail, offered a particular challenge to dominant historiographical practice because they captured the contingencies overlooked by the conventions of historiography and capitalist rationalization.⁴³ But it does inform Kracauer’s phenomenological observation that ‘undulating waves, moving clouds, and changing facial expressions […] conveyed the longing for an instrument which could capture the slightest incidents of the world about us’.⁴⁴ Perhaps most obviously, the haecceity effect does not underlie the major arguments that have come out of André Bazin’s ‘Ontology of the photographic image’, for those claims are firmly grounded in the photographic nature of cinema and the realist aesthetics of index effects.⁴⁵ But present throughout Bazin’s writing is a persistent critical interest in the sensuousness of cinematic detail and the inscription of movement, obsessions not with the transcription of the real but with the way that ‘cinema can repeat any one of these [unrepeatable] moments indefinitely before my eyes’.⁴⁶

Restricting the scope of intellectual influence on cinephilia in this way also intensifies and clarifies the influence of other figures in film theory. Jean Epstein, for example, who is cited as a prominent influence on cinephilia by Keathley, Willeman, Richards and Doane, takes on a more singular influence on cinephilia in light of the notion of haecceity. Though Epstein’s theoretical writings are far from systematic, especially in his use of the ever-elusive term photogenie, we can trace a fairly persistent interest in cinematic haecceity across his writing. This is especially evident in Epstein’s claims that cinema distils what he calls the ‘personality’ of objects and beings, which should be understood not as a complex assemblage of behavioural attributes but rather as the particularity, uniqueness or thisness of a particular object or person in the world.⁴⁷ Epstein makes this definition of personality explicit in an anecdote:

I was greatly interested by a competition recently organized by one of the film magazines. The point was to identify some forty more or less famous screen actors whose portraits reproduced in the magazine had been cropped to leave only their eyes. So what one had to do was to recognize the personality in each of forty gazes. Here we have a curious unconscious attempt to get spectators into the habit of studying and recognizing the distinctive personality to be seen in the eye alone.⁴⁸

Personality thus names the property that individualizes a thing or person – a definition almost indistinct from that of haecceity – and, as Epstein will argue, photogenie is able to render personality more present to us. It is only in light of this notion that Epstein’s diverse theoretical preoccupations take on a new kind of coherence. Take, for instance, Epstein’s obsession with the close-up. When Epstein writes that ‘An eye in close-up is no longer the eye, it is AN eye’, he suggests that the close-up is able to distinguish the particularity of this human body from a general representation of one.⁴⁹ In doing so, the close-up pushes against the cognitive habits of generality endemic to language: ‘we say “red”, “soprano”, “sweet”, “cypress”, when there are only velocities, movements, vibrations’.⁵⁰ And in Epstein’s predilection for exhaustive description – made famous by his paragraph on a single facial movement that opens his essay ‘Magnification’ – we can detect an obsession with the haecceity of movement: ‘Muscular preambles ripple beneath the skin. Shadows shift, tremble, hesitate […] Seismic shocks begin. Capillary wrinkles try to split the fault.’⁵¹ In light of these consistent articulations of the haecceity effect, we can begin to understand the significance of the repeated adjectives of particularity in Epstein’s often cited ‘cinephiliac moment’: Hayakawa’s ‘body at a certain angle, in a particular position, opening the door, entering with a particular body language’.

Only by liberating a conception of haecceity effects from the index can we begin to understand the specificity of cinephilic experience shared across early spectators’ fascination with the wind in the trees, Epstein’s love for the particularity of Hayakawa’s way of moving, or Farber’s enthusiasm for Bogart’s inexplicable pause. When the movement of the world is reproduced with such perceptual detail, every tiny shift or action can be seen to happen just this way: an errant trajectory of a single water droplet, the flicker of a face as it erupts into a smile, a way of moving the hand, the cadence of a dog’s wagging tail. Neither logically necessary nor constitutively impossible – that is, accidental only in the Aristotelian sense – such unplannable movements bespeak their haecceity and cinema’s capacity to contain that haecceity in an image. In this context, encounters with cinephiliac moments can be understood as a spectatorial inclination not to see ‘reality’ shining through aestheticization, but more precisely to encounter the singularity of motion in a repeatable image.

Considering the primacy of haecceity requires that we revise the conventional understanding of cinephiliac moments in a number of ways. Most immediately, relinquishing the primacy of the index opens up cinephiliac moments to non-photographic images, thereby corroborating and clarifying a number of recent accounts that have attempted to bring cinephilia into the digital age. For instance, if haecceity effects indeed have more to do with cinema’s inscribed motion than its photographic base, we can hypothesize that the movements of computer-generated images, which are indeed inscriptions of motion but not transcriptions of material reality, may indeed yield cinephiliac moments. That is, the cinephile may encounter cinephiliac moments in a Pixar film as long as a sense of unrepeatable particularity, an attachment to thisness, strikes the viewer. In fact, as computer-generated images have continued to reach awe-inspiring levels of verisimilitude, their likelihood of provoking cinephiliac moments has also seemed to increase. As a number of scholars have observed, contemporary spectators of computer-animated cartoons have become astonished by the movements of rustling leaves, rippling water, and waving hair – all images of detailed particularity – in a manner quite similar to the ways in which early spectators marveled at such onscreen phenomena.⁵² On this very line of thinking, for example, Sperb has reflected on what he identifies as his distinctly cinephilic pleasure at the movements of ‘tiny particles’ of just-collided CGI spaceships in Star Trek: Nemesis (Stuart Baird, 2002).⁵³

More importantly for my concerns here, however, rethinking cinephiliac moments challenges the fundamental assumptions surrounding the relationship between cinephilia and film analysis. It should be remembered that theorists of the cinephiliac moment mobilize discourses of the index and contingency in order to bolster the intuition that cinephiliac moments resist systems of meaning. As Doane argues in The Emergence of Cinematic Time, the ‘lure’ of contingency is its ‘resistance to system, to structure, to meaning’, and it is precisely this resistance that the cinephile is said to embody in her fetishization of contingent moments.⁵⁴ The consequences of this logic for cinephiliac moments are perhaps made clearest when Keathley explains that

Encounters with these unprogrammed elements – what we are calling cinephiliac moments – are psychological, not aesthetic experiences […] That is, these experiences are not aesthetic in the fine arts-appreciation sense of the term; but […] they are aesthetic in the bodily sense of the term.⁵⁵

In positing a strict distinction between the seen and the shown – between the contingent and the choreographed, the raw recorded material and the authorial choices that shape it – scholars of cinephilia adhere to intuitive assumptions about the place of form in the moving image. Because cinematic form is generally attributed to those elements of a film that are discernibly shaped by authorial agents (cuts, camera movements, lines of dialogue, plot events, scripted gestures) then everything that does not fit into these categories is deemed to lie beyond the domain of meaning and significance.

But because cinephiles tend to fixate not on accidents but on the haecceity of movement inscribed on screen, cinephiliac moments can be understood as inextricable from cinematic form and, by extension, aesthetic signification.⁵⁶ In other words, if any flicker of movement – the micro-movements of a face, a body’s gestural idiosyncrasies, the fluttering of leaves – can take on aspects of contingency (in the sense of haecceity), then we need not conceive of the appreciation of such moments as necessarily resisting a film’s structures of signification, even if those moments are ‘beyond’ authorial control. Moments of haecceity simply constitute the stuff that the moving image is made of. They comprise every bit of the moving image, from the meaningless ‘accidents’ of crew members, to the unnoticeable details that may populate the background, to the strikingly affecting and meaningful facial twitches embedded beneath an actor’s ‘choices’ and between her scripted words. Haecceity is not opposed to form but inextricably embedded within it.⁵⁷ Seizing upon the detail or the moment need not be figured as a ‘resistance’ to narrative analysis or the machine-like control of the classical Hollywood system, but as part of the very fabric of a cinematic text.

In this sense, an ephemeral moment on screen can simultaneously provoke a reflection on its contingent particularity and yet matter crucially to the organic wholeness of a film’s narrative world. The following passage from Cavell expresses an aesthetic conviction about the narrative unity of The Lady Eve (Preston Sturges, 1941), which in fact derives from his pleasure in a set of contingent moments:

The poetry of the final appeals of forgiveness in The Lady Eve is accordingly a function of the way just this man and this woman half walk, half run down a path of gangways, catching themselves in an embrace on each landing, and how just this sequence of framings and attractions of the camera follow these bodies as they inflect themselves to a halt before a closed door […] These moments are no more repeatable than a lifetime is.⁵⁸

What grounds this passage is indeed a familiar cinephilic fixation on the absolute particularity – the unrepeatability – of Barbara Stanwyck’s and Henry Fonda’s bodily movements: the particular way in which they ‘half walk, half run’ and cinema’s unique capacity to reproduce that particularity. In using the language of particularity (‘just this’), and in characterizing their movement as between walking and running, Cavell acknowledges the inadequacy of available concepts for describing the form of these movements, and hence emphasizes their haecceity.⁵⁹ But what really matters for Cavell is how the absolute particularity of these movements perfectly express the characters’ ‘final appeals of forgiveness’, a function of the film’s fictional world. The actors move ‘just this’ way in service of, rather than in opposition to, the film’s narrative construction, thus revealing how the contingent and the choreographed are in harmony – and, in a deeper sense, are indistinguishable.⁶⁰ Though cinephilic discourse posits that classical Hollywood cinema is opposed to excess, the medium-specific materiality of bodily movement on-screen is necessary to the film’s aesthetic construction.

This more well-known passage by Francois Truffaut, on a moment in Howard Hawks’s Scarface, is often cited as an exemplum of the Cahiers critics’ trademark cinephilic criticism:⁶¹

The most striking scene in the movie is unquestionably Boris Karloff’s death. He squats down to throw a ball in a game of ninepins and doesn’t get up; a rifle shot prostrates him. The camera follows the ball he’s thrown as it knocks down all the pins except one that keeps spinning until it finally falls over, the exact symbol of Karloff himself, the last survivor of a rival gang that’s been wiped out by [Paul] Muni. This isn’t literature. It may be dance or poetry. It is certainly cinema.⁶²

Unlike Cavell, Truffaut does not use the language of contingency or haecceity to account for his interest in the bowling pin’s fall. In fact he uses the language of symbolism, a mode of structured cinematic signification that would seem to oppose the cinephile’s way of seeing. But if this moment is examined and read carefully in light of its place within the film as a whole, we discover that Truffaut’s unexplained judgement that such a moment is ‘certainly cinema’ is grounded in a sensitivity to the haecceity of movement. Upon examination, what is striking about this moment is the remarkable particularity of the pin’s fall, the precise way that it moves. In this case, because the pin’s fall is charged with an anthropomorphized pathos as it spins, exhibiting an almost histrionic suspension of its fatal plummet, the form of movement is remarkably apt as an objective correlative of Karloff’s death. But more importantly this movement is remarkably singular, or contingent, in its aptness: no human agent could have planned such a perfect movement in just this way. Its haecceity, and hence its beauty, is quite clearly a function of gravity and chance; to fall is law but to fall like this is luck. Displaying a precision of movement, it is indeed the stuff of ‘cinema’, even ‘dance’, rather than ‘literature’. What I take to be Truffaut’s cinephilic pleasure in this movement – a hypothesis irrevocably linked to my own pleasure in it – derives from its contingent singularity, but that contingency does not wrest it from its role in the film’s narrative world. The opposite is in fact the case; the singularity of the fall is perfectly placed within its narrative context.

Obviously not all cinephiliac moments lend themselves to narrative signification in this way, but in most cases, such moments bespeak a kind of shareable logic, even if that logic has little to do with narrative or theme. The cinephiliac moment that Keathley recounts in the beginning of Cinephilia and History is a compelling case study in this regard. The moment occurs during the climax of The Searchers when Martin (Jeffrey Hunter) leaps up in an attempt to stop Ethan (John Wayne) from riding away on his horse. Keathley describes his pleasure in this moment as follows:

Every time I see this film, this is the moment I wait for. As the dust kicked up by Ethan’s horse swirls around him, Martin’s leap seems to transform his motion. In contrast to the jerking and pulling of the horse, Martin’s body seems to float. While the rest of the action remains at regular speed, Martin’s action seems momentarily to slow down. This moment – this action – is, for me, the most beautiful in the entire film. What can the methods of analysis ordinarily practiced in the discipline of film studies tell us about this moment, or about my response to it? Unfortunately, not much.⁶³

Despite Keathley’s protestation that analytical methods can do little to illuminate his interest in this moment, a logical explanation for his pleasure is already embedded in his description. As Keathley explains, Martin’s leap exhibits the perceptual pleasure of a physical anomaly – his body seems to float in an unnatural, almost supernatural, way. But what makes such pleasure in this momentary weightlessness properly cinephilic is precisely this quality of only seeming to float. Martin’s body, Keathley’s description suggests, is singularly situated on the cusp of weightedness and weightlessness. Had the anomaly been more obviously spectacular, more event-like in its anomalousness, it would be less cinephilic. The moment would cease to be experienced as the discovery of a haecceity – an irreducibly particular way of moving. Strictly speaking, haecceities are not events and they do not announce themselves as such; this is why discovering them feels private, and why Keathley concedes that nothing more can be said about his love for Martin’s leap. But that feeling of privacy does not imply a purely subjective impressionism, as there is indeed a shareable logic to Keathley’s pleasure. For while the significance of Martin’s leap may have little to do with the film’s themes or narrative developments, as was the case with the bowling pin in Scarface or the moments of performance in The Lady Eve, it conforms to a distinct logic of perceptual pleasure.

Each of these cinephiliac moments not only shares a phenomenological structure – an attunement to the haecceity of movement – but also exhibits a shareable logic of pleasure, regardless of whether that logic is based on narrative, thematic or perceptual significance. By insisting that such a logic exists, I mean to argue against the insistence that cinephiliac moments are private, idiosyncratic experiences that forgo the intersubjectivity of analytical methodologies.

When we acknowledge that cinephiliac moments bear the weight of aesthetic convictions, they become not just spaces for subjective reverie but objects of aesthetic judgement that is not merely subjective but intersubjective.⁶⁴ After all, it is essential to the very uniqueness of cinema’s brief moments of movement that despite their evocation of private perception – the sense that this moment is just for me, too small and fleeting to share – cinematic details are nonetheless objectively available for all to see, and indeed to see in the same exact way.⁶⁵ This dichotomy, in fact, is constitutive of cinephilic experience as an engagement with motion that is astonishingly imaged. Watching Karloff’s death scene in Scarface, we do not simply see the bowling pin fall as we would in the real world, limited to our own singular points of view; instead we see the seeing of that bowling pin as if through the same set of eyes.⁶⁶ When such a compellingly precise movement is imaged on screen – when we can share it, point to it, relive it again and again, almost hold it with our eyes – the shareability of cinematic motion becomes a thing of wonder.⁶⁷ As Rei Terada reminds us, locating the photographic moving image within the philosophical crisis of intersubjective perception, cinema might be seen as a ‘splendidly staged fantasy of exceptional illusion for everybody’.⁶⁸ Seeing the bowling pin’s fall or Martin’s leap not simply as an ephemeral moment consigned to subjective memory but as a singular motion etched in a shareable image, we can begin to see how cinephilia lies just on the cusp of phenomenological description and aesthetic criticism, modes of writing about the experience of art that privilege subjective experience but that nonetheless are driven by the pursuit of intersubjective agreement (even while acknowledging that such agreement is never guaranteed).⁶⁹

Paradoxically, the desire to share one’s experience is a cornerstone of the very theories of cinephilia that insist on the irreducible unshareability of cinephiliac moments. Willemen, for example, explains how the cinephile’s subjective revelation ‘may be different from the person sitting next to you, in which case you may have to dig him or her in the ribs with your elbow to alert them’.⁷⁰ He then adds, quite tellingly, that ‘there is a theory of the cinema implicit in the dig of the elbow into the ribs just as much as there is in Metz’s work’.⁷¹ The implication here is that the impulse to share a cinephilic experience implies something theoretically valid about cinematic experience without using the pseudo-objective language of film theory. And indeed it does, for the ‘theory of cinema implicit in the dig of the elbow’ is none other than Immanuel Kant’s theory of aesthetic judgement, which posits that judgements of beauty are tantamount to the normative demand upon others to agree.⁷² Though a dig of the elbow may not be normative in the way that Kantian judgements of beauty are, it enacts a similar impulse to share one’s experience of pleasure by externalizing it. This impulse to share is also embedded in Willemen’s claim that the cinephile feels compelled ‘to write, to find formulations to convey something about the intensity of that spark’.⁷³ In this, Willemen articulates Cavell’s claim that criticism, in the form of writing or conversation, tends to follow from one’s aesthetic judgement as a way of making oneself and others available to the logic of their judgement.⁷⁴ Moreover, the cinephile’s fixation on haecceity, on the particularity of cinematic detail at its smallest scale, is a testament to the Kantian principle that a properly beautiful object must please the beholder solely through its form – the spatiotemporal arrangement of its parts, the way it appears to the senses. Opposed to the immaterial, imperceptible realm of concepts and ideas, the haecceity of inscribed movement is precisely what is in front of you, in front of everyone; its ephemerality is a testament to the inexhaustibility of cinematic form, to just how much is objectively available for the spectator’s attention. This attention to form is the very condition for the possibility of an aesthetic judgement’s shareability. So despite Keathley’s protestations that cinephiliac moments are ‘psychological, not aesthetic experiences’, there is no better name for these compulsions – these drives to point out and dwell on and share a pleasure in what is seen – than aesthetic judgements. At their core, all aesthetic judgements aim to make one’s experiences shareable, to make what is most ephemeral and private a thing to be comprehended and grasped.

While sharing cinephiliac moments as aesthetic judgements may not guarantee the production of knowledge, it does forge a pathway for its emergence. After all, aesthetic criticism names the act of providing reasons for one’s aesthetic judgement even if those reasons, as Cavell reminds us, do not adhere to an objective ‘logic’ or ever ‘prove’ the judgement’s validity.⁷⁵ Nevertheless, Cavell explains,

those of us who keep finding ourselves wanting to call such [reasons] ‘logical’ are […] responding to a sense of necessity we feel in them, together with a sense that necessity is, partly, a matter of the ways a judgment is supported, the ways in which conviction in it is produced.⁷⁶

The reasons why the cinephile finds pleasure in particular moments are indeed not logical in the way that theoretical explanations or even works of classical criticism purport to be, but they can, and often do, exhibit a sense of reasoning that is driven by the power of conviction.⁷⁷ Cinephiliac moments make manifest fine-grained aesthetic features of their filmic objects as well as articulate phenomenological aspects of moving-image perception – that is, they bear insights into particular films and film in general. So when Keathley, Richards and Pomerance advocate a mode of writing about cinephiliac moments that involves launching from their initial descriptions into personal memories and associative leaps of logic,⁷⁸ or when they argue for cinephiliac moments as an alternative form of film historiography, they are suppressing the epistemological value of aesthetic judgements by converting them into mere idiosyncrasies of taste or empirical observations. And they are, furthermore, suppressing a central tenet of aesthetic philosophy that cinephiliac moments so elegantly embody: how merely ‘subjective’ aspects of knowing, such as sensing and feeling, are in fact not merely subjective but are also the very ingredients of ‘objective’ judgements and meanings.

In revealing the unacknowledged compatibility between aesthetic theory and the discourse of cinephilia, my aim has been to find a positive form of expression for a feeling that has previously been so thoroughly defined in a negative way. Cinephiliac moments have almost exclusively been defined against systematization, meaning and theory as a means of celebrating the liberatory possibilities of pleasure against the stifling academicization of cinematic experience. In defining them this way, the discourse of cinephilia has rightly shown how a serious consideration of cinephilia – a love of cinema – was unsurprisingly exiled from a discipline that often revolved around the suspicion of spectatorial pleasure. But in creating a dichotomy between the apparently groundless and idiosyncratic choices of the cinephile and the ‘objective’ but overdetermined systems of film theory, cinephilia discourse has suppressed the notion that aesthetic pleasure can itself produce, or at least open a path toward, signification. The discourse’s redemption of cinephilic pleasure has ended up underestimating that very pleasure by confirming the dichotomies that exiled it in the first place – dichotomies between ‘subjective’ judgements and ‘objective’ ones, theory and criticism, pleasure and signification. Invoking the photographic index – that which resists the text, resists aestheticization, resists form – has thus far done the work of providing a convenient theoretical justification for this separation, and more specifically for sublimating cinephilic pleasure into historiography. What I have shown, however, is that cinephilic writing itself is often marked not by a love for historical reality ‘shining through aestheticization’ but rather a love for the image itself; it is a love not for what the image delivers or mediates but for the encounter with the screen. And it is saturated not with the curiosity of historical investigation but with aesthetic conviction, a conviction that this moment, in its absolute particularity and unrepeatability, must be attended to and repeated because it can be repeated.

It is in this light that I consider Keathley’s additional remarks relaying his encounter with Martin’s leap in The Searchers, which he had ‘replayed […] over and over for several of [his] close friends, who didn’t exactly see what [he] saw, but understood the experience [he] was having’.⁷⁹ While posited as evidence for the privacy and idiosyncrasy of cinephiliac moments, their inevitable unshareability, the anecdote also confirms the opposite. For in simply insisting on returning to and sharing privileged moments with others, the cinephile already reveals that his pleasure bears a sense of aesthetic conviction that lies just on the cusp of producing knowledge – a new way of seeing a film, a new way of understanding it. That others may not, in a particular instance of aesthetic exchange, share the judgement is in fact not a denial of the moment’s significance but rather a reminder of the gap between argument and agreement that is inherent to all judgements, aesthetic or otherwise. Cinephiliac moments are not the opposite of theoretical readings or ‘valid’ methods of criticism; rather they are concrete reminders of how such methods of knowledge production always begin with the experience of sensuous particulars and, quite often, the pleasures they afford. That others will see those sensuous particulars as you see them is not guaranteed by rules or standards, but is nonetheless driven by the conviction that others ought to see it as such. In Cavell’s words, ‘Reasons […] come to an end’, and ‘At some point, the critic’ – and the cinephile – ‘will have to say: This is what I see’.⁸⁰

Footnotes