Mimesis Through Violent Movement

Abstract

Documentary and fictional presentations of reality, or reality as we make sense of it, express great potential for film scholars and theorists to consider how horror facilitates dialogue regarding commentary on social change and the bodily experience of the spectator. Horror encourages the viewer to be moved when observing violent motion on screen. Engaging in film studies, this paper speculates on the ways in which a viewer is moved by the horror genre. While film scholar Jane Gaines offers commentary on documentaries, I suggest that we apply the framework of “political mimesis” to speculative fiction such as science fiction or horror. In interpreting filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein’s language, devices, and cinematic techniques, I draw from Gaines’ coinage of “political mimesis” to suggest that, by witnessing and engaging with violence depicted in film, – not only through the lens of documentary – spectators choose to react and thus, to act, moved on a physical and emotional level. Political mimesis reveals how the body might become “politicized.” In this feat, the body marks the beginning of such politicization as documentary provokes the viewer to engage with the content or overall message (Gaines 1999, 90). What of the message disseminated in horror with its cult classics?
 First, I interpret Sergei Eisenstein’s sense of movement through the scholarship of Luka Arsenjuk in Movement, Action, Image, Montage: Sergei Eisenstein and the Cinema in Crisis; thereafter, I draw from Gaines’ “political mimesis” to suggest that the violence depicted within horror films moves viewers to think, to reflect, and to act in some way that sometimes results in a political hindsight. Pairing Gaines with Eisenstein allows for engagement with other film genres beyond the constraint of historical narratives and the documentary. Upon conducting a close reading of these works, I analyze and assess the parallels between the two to segue into a discussion on the criticism and reception of horror by integrating the work of Linda Williams in “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess” to discuss what follows in the aftermath of spectatorial engagement and response. This paper incorporates qualitative research on a theoretical scale, by examining Eisenstein’s October: Ten Days That Shook the World (1928) and later involving the horror film, Daybreakers (2009) as a case study to claim that the viewer's body experiences movement in a myriad of ways when witnessing the grotesque, violent scenes in a fictional capacity. On the notion of bodily experience, the Eisensteinian ‘figure-in-crisis’ now manifests as the spectator in crisis. Such a film moves the viewer, either physically or emotionally, to engage – a mimesis occurs wherein the viewer mimics the bodies on screen, compelled to react. Movement is not only seen but felt in the experience of witnessing horror. In political mimesis, the body-in-film inspires audience reception as the viewer experiences an emotional response, no longer situated in the once passive role of witness when a documentary concludes. Similarly, horror objectifies the body to mobilize pain in the experience of watching.