Cinematic Atmospheres: Towards a New Ecology of the Moving Image

Introduction

Cinema is not just a representational but also an operational medium. Its global success is indisputably tied to its ability to embed its audience in affectively charged, atmospheric worlds. Filmmakers carefully design their narrative worlds through various elements, including:

• Ambient soundscapes
• Music
• Colorations
• Filters
• Camera movements
• Production design
• Mise en scène
• Rhythmical editing
• Countless other features

These elements arrange the emotional and affective experiences of the audience.

Cinematic Atmospheres

Marginalized in film studies due to their ontologically indeterminate nature, cinematic atmospheres operate affectively and prior to cognitive, critical, and analytical reflection. This project examines cinematic atmosphere production in all its experiential, aesthetic, and ethical implications as an attractive but also problematic, even harmful, and ideologically loaded enterprise.

Critical Awareness

It raises critical awareness of the basic atmospheric operations of cinema in a time when the medium is relocated into new media environments. Its techniques are reused within ecologies that are not cinematic per se, such as:

1. News broadcasting
2. Videoconferencing
3. Sports refereeing
4. Even terrorist recruitment

Project Goals

This project aims to:

i) Develop a broad conceptual understanding of cinematic atmospheres as a way of organizing the perceptive, affective, and cognitive epistemic access to the world of the film.

ii) Mobilize this understanding to develop a method for the study of the operations and techniques that constitute cinematic atmosphere production.

iii) Expand this method to address how these cinematic operations and techniques for atmosphere production are no longer the property of cinema alone but are increasingly employed outside of the narrative-aesthetic domain. This includes their use in larger socio-cultural, economic, and political forms of organizing perception, cognition, and affect, from art installations to social media.