DOI: https://doi.org/10.15664/fcj.v22.i0.2979

Introduction

In 1945, following the defeat of the German military, Germany’s cities, including its capital, Berlin, were left in ruins. The German fiction films made in the four years after the end of World War II are largely set in the country’s devastated cities. They became known as “rubble films” (Trümmerfilme), a label that focuses attention on the presence of the ravaged urban landscape within the films. [1]

Scholars have understood rubble films as artefacts of national reckoning. For instance, Robert Shandley defines them as “films that take the mise-en-scѐne of destroyed Germany as a background and metaphor of the destruction of Germans’ own sense of themselves”. However, this definition, in which place is either “background” or “metaphor”, risks overlooking the power of specific locations captured by the films, even as it asserts the broader significance of Germany’s ruined spaces within the cinema of the period. [2]

Some attention has been paid to the ways the characteristic portrayal of destruction in these films shapes – or obscures – the meanings and perceived causes of the ruins they show. Under the title, “Rubble without a Cause”, Wilfried Wilms argues that the air war that was responsible for most of the damage is rarely acknowledged on screen. Eric Rentschler writes that “the rubble film stylizes and transfigures” reality [3] and that the rubble itself “assumes a mythic status within a vanquished nation’s fantasy of reconstruction” [4]– leaving little room for careful reflection on its causation. Ruins are complex structures, carrying the traces of times past without making those times easily legible. This is why the inclusion of archival footage of pre-war, undamaged Berlin in two of the period’s films is so striking: it reveals a moment in the ruins’ past lives… although, I will argue when discussing what the archival footage shows, there are issues of legibility here too.

This article brings together two of the period’s films – And the Heavens above Us (…und über uns der Himmel, 1947) and Marriage in the Shadows (Ehe im Schatten, 1948) – to explore their use of archival footage of a single recognisable location. I use a particular understanding of the function and legibility of archival images of place in fiction films, drawing on the work of Jaimie Baron and Priya Jaikumar. Specifically, I argue that archival images carry no clear fixed meaning, even as they appear to offer direct access to the past. When inserted into fiction films, their meaning emerges from the interplay between what they show, the ways they are contextualised within the narrative, and the prior knowledge the audience brings to them. These three elements will be discussed throughout the article. Through their combination, archival images of place can be found to construct competing – and politically charged – narratives about the country’s past, present, and future.

And the Heavens above Us and Marriage in the Shadows feature archival footage of the same Berlin location – Breitscheidplatz (until 1947 named Auguste-Viktoria-Platz), home to the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church – but do so in strikingly different ways. In both films, archival images are used not simply to evoke a lost past, but to shape how the city’s destruction, and the history behind it, is to be interpreted. In each case, the footage serves a distinct ideological function: either to obscure the history of persecution that preceded the city’s destruction, or to bring it into view. And so, in this article, I explore how archival footage of a single location can be used to tell different stories about the past. This illuminates how the richness of images of real places enables them to serve both as records of the past and as sites where political and historical questions are contested.

 

Archival Footage and the Cinematic Representation of Place

As Elena Gorfinkel and John David Rhodes argue, “the particularizing lens of place” offers a heuristic that can produce both “new readings of individual moving image artifacts” and “a new understanding of how the moving image […] constitutes itself in and through emplacement”. [5] It should also be acknowledged – as Gorfinkel and Rhodes do – that an image of a particular place is also an image of that place at a particular time: they write, “we are interested in how films – whether they are fictional or documentary – can act as archives of specific places”. [6] But when a fiction film incorporates archival footage, the idea of films as “archives of specific places” becomes less straightforward: this footage is both a record of a place in the past and becomes part of a newly constructed narrative.

Jaimie Baron offers a way of thinking about the power of archival footage and what happens when archival footage is used in a new cinematic context. Although she focuses on films that make extensive use of archival material, her ideas are also applicable to brief yet significant uses of archival footage in the two films this article discusses. Baron writes about film’s “unruly indexical excess” [7]: compared to written documents, archival filmic images “seem ‘closer’ to the past they represent and are potentially seductive in their seeming transparent textuality” while also being “especially resistant to full comprehension or interpretation”. [8]

Baron does not dismantle the indexical relationship between these images and the reality they record. However, in her shift away from the images themselves and towards their reception when they are reused in a new cinematic context, she recognises that their power lies not in any inherent authenticity but in the appearance of authenticity: “archival documents exist as ‘archival” only insofar as the viewer of a given film perceives certain documents within that film as coming from another, previous – and primary – context of use or intended use”. [9] The perceived archival status of these images, then, bestows on them a rhetorical power shaped as much by context as by content. It is this experience of reception that she terms “the archive effect”.

A key mechanism for producing the archive effect is disparity. “Temporal disparity” arises from the juxtaposition of footage from visibly different time periods [10]; the contrast may be the result of gradual transformation over a long period of time, or of abrupt change. [11] “Intentional disparity” stems from the recognition that the footage incorporated into the new context was made for a different purpose, with different intentions. [12] Baron characterises “the archive affect” – as produced by the viewer’s recognition of these disparities – as a kind of nostalgia. [13] Drawing on Svetlana Boym’s taxonomy of nostalgia, Baron distinguishes between two feelings archival footage might promote: “restorative” nostalgia [14], a reactionary longing for a return to an idealised past, and “reflective” nostalgia, which might value the traces of the past that the footage makes visible, while recognising that the past is ultimately “irretrievable”. [15]

While this categorisation of nostalgia has a political dimension, the opening gambit of Baron’s book is to sidestep questions of power by redefining the archive as “an experience of reception” rather than the holdings of an institution. [16] But the footage that is captured, preserved, and reused is often shaped by hegemonic forces. Priya Jaikumar is precisely concerned with questions of power and visibility when she writes about the ways cinema frames the meanings attached to a particular place. Writing about the depiction of India on film, she states that although “histories reside everywhere, […] institutional and visual regimes ensure that we only look at that which we are conditioned to see, or see in particular ways”. [17] Jaikumar also highlights what escapes, or is excluded from, the frame. There is an “unverifiable substratum of the cinematic image” that she suggests film historians should seek to uncover, even if “we can never know” it: “the passersby who scoffed, inhabitants who watched, farmers who laughed, or children who cried”. [18] This uncovering would have a double effect: it would open up the possibility of recovering suppressed histories, while also “undermining the image’s exclusive claim to the real” [19] – a claim that, in many cinematic contexts, serves to legitimise the politics of a dominant regime.

Taken together, these theorists suggest that archival footage of place – particularly of an ideologically charged location such as Breitscheidplatz – should not be accepted as a direct record of the past. Rather, its meaning is shaped both by the conditions under which it was originally captured and by the ways it is recontextualised when it is reused. Therefore, to understand how And the Heavens above Us and Marriage in the Shadows make use of archival footage of Breitscheidplatz, we must first consider the meanings this particular location already carried.

 

Breitscheidplatz

The makers of And the Heavens above Us and Marriage in the Shadows chose to feature the same iconic location within their films, no doubt aware that early postwar German audiences would bring their own knowledge of this place with them into the cinema – knowledge the films could either activate or challenge. This section outlines the historical and ideological significance of Breitscheidplatz, of the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church, and of the Kurfürstendamm. By situating these locations within Berlin’s history, we can better understand the narrative weight they carry in both films and the ways the archival images used interact with audiences’ prior knowledge.

The Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church was built in the 1890s as a monumental assertion of the centrality of the German nation and of religion in the face of accelerating modernisation. Commissioned by Kaiser Wilhelm II to honour unified Germany’s first sovereign, Wilhelm I (Kaiser from 1871 to 1888), the church was designed by Franz Heinrich Schwechten. Its architecture invokes the buildings, and so the authority, of the medieval Holy Roman Empire, creating a vision of German power grounded in – and continuous with – this distant past.

The church sits in Breitscheidplatz, a square at the end of the Kurfürstendamm, a broad avenue lined with shops, cafés, and entertainment venues. While the church stood for the veneration of tradition – if not for tradition itself – nearby structures were at the centre of the modern urban culture that the church stood against. Its immediate neighbours were the Ufa Palast am Zoo and the Gloria Palast, housed in buildings constructed at about the same time as the church in a similar architectural style. However, in the interwar period, these structures were remodelled as lavish cinemas, joining the Capitol am Zoo and the Marmorhaus to form a district of picture palaces. In reference to these venues, and to the contrast between them and the nearby church, Siegfried Kracauer would write that cinema’s “community of worshipers […] can be content, for its gathering places are a worthy abode”. [20]

In early 1928, Josef Goebbels, already a prominent member of the Nazi Party and, from 1933, its minister for propaganda, published an article in which he characterises the Memorial Church as an “anachronism” and as an “alien” presence among the “corruption and decay” that surrounds it, which he associates with the Jews. [21] He ends his article by imagining (or threatening) a “day of judgment” that “will demolish the abodes of corruption all around the [Memorial Church]”. [22] This rhetoric and focus on the area as a particular location in need of cleansing led to action. The district’s Jewish population experienced periodic outbreaks of violence throughout the 1930s: significant anti-Jewish riots, orchestrated by the Nazi Party, took place in 1931 and 1935, and again in 1938 during the country-wide pogrom known as Kristallnacht. These events were part of the increasing persecution of Jews, which would lead to genocidal violence by the state.

The area around Breitscheidplatz was marked and quietened by these actions. And World War II would bring further changes. The bright city lights were extinguished as blackout regulations were enforced [23], and in 1943, many local buildings were struck in Allied bombing raids: the Memorial Church, the Ufa Palast am Zoo, the Gloria Palast, and the Capitol am Zoo were all severely damaged. By the end of the war, the cityscape was one of ruins.

In 1946, German-Jewish philosopher Günther Anders encountered a photograph of the ruined church and wrote in his diary: “We should not erect monuments, but rather adopt things as monuments. For example, the ruins of this church. As a monument to Hitler. Every inch a falsehood […]. What monument could be more fitting for an emperor? […] Preserve it! Leave it intact! Conserve its damage!” [24] The Memorial Church was, from the beginning, a nationalist intervention in the urban landscape that attempted to assert a vision of Germanness defined in opposition to modernity. For Anders, this particular history made it a fitting memorial that not only pointed to the catastrophe that had occurred but also suggested a cause. Yet by 1953, he had changed his mind. The meaning of the ruin had shifted: rather than provoking reflection on the roots or ideology of Nazism, it was being absorbed into a general narrative of loss and resilience that obscured its political specificity – if the ruin was even looked at any more. [25]

In fact, both of Anders’ reflections were prescient. In the late 1950s, in response to public pressure, a decision was made to preserve the church’s tower. [26] It now serves as a religious memorial to the war, as well as to the Kaiser, supporting Anders’ later reservations about it as a symbol. [27] The doubts Anders developed about the church’s symbolic weight inform my discussion of the way the church is presented in And the Heavens above Us – a film that preceded his doubts by some years.

 

And the Heavens above Us

Like many other German films of its era, And the Heavens above Us features shots of the ruins of Berlin. However, it is extremely unusual in contrasting this destruction with archival images of the city as it was before the war. In this section, I will explore how the film’s juxtaposition of the intact and damaged Memorial Church creates an argument about how to understand the country’s recent history.

The film tells the story of Hans, a soldier returning to Berlin after the end of the war, Edith, his widowed neighbour, and Hans’s son Werner, also a returned soldier, who has an eye injury that has rendered him blind. In a pivotal scene, Hans drives Edith and Werner to a medical appointment. The trio travels in a small van through the quiet streets of the ruined city, past large, crumbling buildings and towering piles of rubble. Werner, in an effort to orient himself, asks, “Where are we now?”. The reply given – “in the Potsdamer Straße” – prompts a dramatic shift in the style and content of the images on screen as a montage of archival footage, showing a bustling and undamaged Berlin, unfolds. It culminates in a shot of Breitscheidplatz as it was before its destruction.

The image shows the square in daytime. The Memorial Church sits beside the Gloria Palast. In front of the cinema is the entrance to the U-Bahn, with an advertising pillar. Cars and trams pass by the church and move away from it, towards the bottom of the frame. The pavement to the left of the shot is crowded with people. The camera pans down to follow the path of one of the cars, and the montage ends.

This downward camera movement, following a car, creates a visual bridge to the next shots, which are of the van still travelling through Berlin, and of its passengers. The vehicle rounds the corner, and the area we had seen in the archival footage reappears – but as it is in the present. The Memorial Church is the only recognisable building: it sits at the centre of the shot, and the damage it has suffered is clearly visible. To its left are other ruined buildings, and the road is almost empty of cars. There are few pedestrians too – and those who are present walk along the road because large heaps of rubble have made the pavements impassable. It is with this 13-second shot of the ruined church that the scene ends.

Here we have a clear example of Baron’s archive effect at work: the audience easily recognises the inserted footage as originating from another time and context. This recognition is produced both through the contrast in content – images of a vibrant, crowded city replace those of a quiet, devastated one – and the contrast in style – the subdued, long shots of the present give way to a fast-paced montage. Together, these differences cue the audience to read the footage as archival, offering (or seeming to offer) direct access to the “real” Berlin before its destruction. Yet, as Baron emphasises, this appearance of transparency is not neutral. Indeed, it is a rhetorical effect produced by the way the footage is recontextualised within the film: its persuasive force depends not on its actual historical origin, but on the audience’s recognition that it originates from another era.

If, as Baron suggests, archival footage can function as a rhetorical device – creating the impression of historical transparency – then the question becomes: what kind of past is being constructed through it here? Or, as Jaikumar might frame it, what “perspectival and political regimes” shape how this place is “produced as a visual environment”? [28] In the previous section, I outlined how Breitscheidplatz and its surroundings embodied ideological oppositions – between sacred and secular, tradition and modernity – that became the grounds upon which state violence was pursued. Yet none of this history is activated in the archival footage. The framing does not monumentalise the church or sharply contrast it with the activities going on around it. The shot’s composition gives almost equal weight to church and picture palace, and their architectural similarities make them a compatible pair. While the area is busy, the bustling pavement is confined to the bottom left-hand corner of the frame: the viewer is not overwhelmed. The presence of scaffolding along the front of the church lessens its symbolic weight, rendering it not an untouchable monument, but a somewhat vulnerable building among others, requiring maintenance and care. Indeed, the neighbourhood is shown as a calm and pleasant place in which two emblematic buildings (church and picture palace) coexist in harmony.

There are no Nazi symbols in the image or in any of the footage contained within the montage. This leads Wilms to suggest that it dates from the Weimar era. [29] But while the footage lacks visible traces of the Nazi regime, it seems unlikely that the images that make up the montage are meant to recall the Weimar era specifically. Wilms’ surprise at the absence of Nazi iconography suggests an expectation that every part of Berlin underwent a highly visible transformation in the 1930s and that the city ceased to resemble a vibrant urban metropolis. But this assumption may not align with the reality of Berlin’s gradual and less overt shifts during the course of the decade. Indeed, in a draft screenplay, the scene is prefaced with the note, “the shots are based on the material that is still available of the undamaged Berlin” [30] – placing the emphasis on showing the city before it was bombed, rather than before the Nazis came to power. It is likely, then, that some or all of the footage originates from the Nazi era, even if no explicit signs of the regime were allowed to appear onscreen. In this sense, the footage exemplifies what Jaikumar describes: a cinematic image in which certain aspects of place are put on display while others are excluded. The “unverifiable substratum of the cinematic image” [31] in this case would seem to be the city’s political reality, and the persecution of some of its residents. The result is a version of the past emptied of its political specificity.

In the film, then, the Breitscheidplatz of the past conforms to the postwar “perspectival and political regime” [32] in which visible markers of Nazism are unacceptable, and in which examining the political reality of the recent past would disrupt and endanger the emerging narrative of German suffering. [33] This neutralising of the history of the place thus enables a particular framing of the postwar present. In the images of the postwar period, the church has increased in significance, sitting in isolation at the centre of the shot as the van drives towards it. This compositional shift makes it the focal point of a devastated cityscape, and so of the devastated city. The camera lingers on it, inviting contemplation. If the church is a national symbol, then here it is a symbol of survival in the face of warfare and attack, rather than in a battle against urban modernity – as it once was. In this way, the film plays a part in the emptying of historical and political meaning that Anders observed. The church here is framed as a site of endurance, but its place in Germany’s previous ideological battles is not captured: the conflict between urban modernity and the veneration of tradition that it once symbolised has disappeared. Just as the building has been hollowed out, so has its meaning.

The two images of the area around Breitscheidplatz presented in And the Heavens above Us thus work together to shape the meaning the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church holds. The archival footage strips it of the ideological tensions it once embodied. This erasure allows the subsequent image – in which it appears as a solitary ruin – to take on its own particular symbolic weight. It can stand as an emblem of resilience, unburdened by the conflicts the church once represented.

So far, I have looked at how the contrasting images of Breitscheidplatz carry meaning. But the juxtaposition between the place in the past and in the present also constructs a narrative about change – and it is impossible to read that change as anything other than negative. The archival image shows Berlin as a flourishing, modern city, full of life and movement; in the postwar image, by contrast, loss and devastation are everywhere evident. This framing creates a kind of nostalgia, which Baron labels, following Boym, restorative: the film seems to exploit the absences of Nazi imagery in its footage to uncritically create a longing for a return to the Nazi period. The understandable wish that the city had not been destroyed leaves no room for an examination or rejection of Nazism.

And there is a further layer to the way the film exploits its archival footage. Audiences are supposed to take in the striking contrast between past and present, but within the story, the footage of the past is not meant simply to represent Werner’s memories. Rather, because he is not able to see present-day Berlin, he uses his memories to imagine what the city might look like now. In this way, the montage represents an alternative Berlin in the present, rather than just its past. This double temporality is made more explicit in the draft screenplay. In lines of dialogue that were cut, Werner says to Edith (in this early version of the script, a newcomer to Berlin), “You’ll like Berlin. It is a city!”, to which Hans exclaims, “It will be one again!”. [34] For Werner, the image of a lively and undamaged Breitscheidplatz is a vision of the present. For Hans – and the audience – it is a vision of a lost past that can be restored, implying the desire to return to – or bring about the restoration of – a politically unexamined past.

In the images of pre-war Germany used in And the Heavens above Us, we can see the ways archival footage is no more than a fragment of a much larger history. A second film that uses old footage of the same area of Berlin – Marriage in the Shadows – grapples more explicitly with this issue. As will be explored, the film contextualises the images of pre-1945 Breitscheidplatz in order to show how urban life in Berlin was transformed not only by the Allied bombing raids but by the rise to power of the Nazis. It uses this archival footage first to grant audiences the pleasure of looking at images of Berlin’s formerly intact streets and squares. However, it then withholds these images, as the central Jewish character is refused access to the urban life she had previously led.

 

Marriage in the Shadows

Unlike And the Heavens above Us, Marriage in the Shadows is set entirely before the end of World War Two. The film follows a Jewish actress, Elisabeth, alongside her non-Jewish husband, Hans, from 1933 to their suicides during the war. The bombing of Berlin in 1943 is depicted, but it appears near the end of a long period of worsening conditions for Elisabeth and other Jewish protagonists. While the film has been written about in the context of its depiction of Jewish characters [35] – a focus that was rare even within the Soviet Zone in which it was made, and was rarer still in postwar German cinema more broadly – its use of archival footage of Breitscheidplatz has not been examined. Here, I will read the film in a way that centres on these recovered images, which appear at three points, and examine how restorative nostalgia is avoided.

In Marriage in the Shadows, the archive effect operates in a slightly different way than in And the Heavens above Us. Unlike in the latter, Marriage in the Shadows does not offer an image of the present to contrast with its footage of the past. Rather, the audiences recognise the footage as archival because they recognise the temporal disparity between the time when the film was made and the origins of the footage, which shows a Berlin that no longer exists. This temporal disparity might also lead to a recognition of an intentional disparity: the documentary-style footage captures a positive image of the area in the Nazi period, while the film asks its audience to sympathise with a fictional visitor to the area who is being persecuted by the regime because she is Jewish.

The first and second appearances of archival footage of Breitscheidplatz occur shortly after the Nazis have come to power. Elisabeth and Hans are accompanying their Jewish friend, Kurt, to the train station – he is leaving Germany because of the political situation. After a shot of the three characters inside a taxi, we see a long exterior shot of the city at night, as if filmed from a moving vehicle. The camera is part of the flow of traffic passing along the Kurfürstendamm and around the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church, barely visible in the darkness. It is rainy and the pavements are not very busy, though there is a steady flow of people. What stands out clearly are the many brightly lit signs advertising cars, Meissen porcelain, hairdressers, a café, and, most prominently, the Capitol am Zoo cinema, where a film called Hotel Sacher is playing. Unlike in And the Heavens above Us, the focus is not on the Memorial Church, but rather on the cinema and shops.

Even though Wilms’s comments on the archival footage used in And the Heavens above Us – that “the images provide no indication of Nazi rule [and could date] back to the years of the Weimar Republic” [36] – might also apply here, the cinema facade allows us to date the footage precisely: Hotel Sacher had its premiere at the Capitol am Zoo on 21 March 1939, a temporal disparity some members of the audience might notice. The contrast between the sombre trio sitting inside the cab and the vibrant nightlife around them is striking, and the film seems to ask how everyday life can persist alongside the persecution that is taking place. The context in which the footage appears thus transforms the apparent normality it shows into something unsettling, highlighting the incongruity and contrast rather than allowing the images to pass as ordinary.

At the train station, Kurt begs Elisabeth to leave Germany with him, but she and Hans refuse. She expresses concern about Hans’s career if they were to go, while Hans says that it is wrong to give up so quickly and to abandon “our Berlin”. After bidding Kurt farewell, the couple are shown walking along the Kurfürstendamm. Once more, archival footage is used. The scene opens with a shot of the Gloria Palast. This time, however, the footage functions as a backdrop to the action unfolding in front of it, where a man hands out copies of Der Angriff, a Nazi newspaper. Within the film, the insertion of the Nazi newspaper seller is a rebuttal of Hans’s optimistic view of Berlin – the film is insisting that the Nazi influence on the city is already visible. But I am interested in the reasons for and effects of this insertion, in which the film superimposes the presence of Nazism on footage of Berlin’s streets. The filmmakers have had to add to the available images in an attempt to make visible the “unverifiable substratum” [37] of the footage they have used. They thus seem to be grappling with how to convey aspects of the political reality of the Nazi period that were absent from the footage available to them.

A few years pass in the film’s narrative before Berlin at night appears for the third time. The structure of the scene may be similar to the previous appearances of archival footage, but the context is different. It is now November 1938. Hans has become a film star and wants Elisabeth to attend his premiere, a suggestion she refuses – understanding, as she does throughout the film, the threat he fails to see until the very end. He is therefore alone when he travels to the premiere and in a cab to an afterparty – a near repetition of the scene from 1933, but without the two Jewish characters who had previously accompanied him. Once again, we cut from the interior of the cab to archival footage in which the camera is part of the flow of traffic, sweeping along the Kurfürstendamm. Once again, the area’s many streetlights, cinema frontages, and advertisements shine through the darkness and are reflected in the puddles on the road (it seems plausible that the footage representing 1933 and this footage were captured at the same time).

This is the last time archival footage of the area appears. And the date is significant: it is Kristallnacht, and the footage is followed by a recreation of the event, filmed on a studio set. So once again, the film contextualises the normalcy of the archival footage by placing it within a story about the persecution of Berlin’s Jewish residents – a narrative intervention that works against the apparent truthfulness of the archival image.

Marriage in the Shadows thus explores the ways cinema actively created Berlin’s image. The archival sequences present a city that seems modern and lively by placing the camera within the flow of traffic and choosing to film at night, making the many illuminated signs particularly prominent. As Jaikumar argues, such images of place are shaped by “perspectival and political regimes” [38] – in this case, by the Nazi regime in power when the footage was captured. As I have suggested, the apparent normality of the footage is unsettled in its reuse in Marriage in the Shadows, as it is made part of a story about Elisabeth’s exclusion from public life and – more specifically – from the screen, a point the film makes by showing her husband becoming a film star while Elisabeth is forbidden to act. In this way, the absences in archival images and Elisabeth’s absence from Nazi-era cinema within the narrative mirror each other. And so the reuse of Nazi-era footage in the film tells a story about place, but more specifically about cinema’s role in the Nazi period – supporting the regime and sustaining an image of Berlin and its normality – while, in Marriage in the Shadows, the reuse also exposes the politics that shaped its capture.

In And the Heavens above Us, the lack of any Nazi presence in the archive footage – and the resulting absence of any visual distinction between the Weimar- and Nazi-era city – makes possible a troubling restorative nostalgia for 1930s Berlin. In Marriage in the Shadows, by contrast, the seemingly benign archival footage is transformed through the context in which it is placed. Over the course of the film, we watch Elisabeth’s access to the world diminish as she is excluded from the public sphere and the life of the city: at the film’s start, she travels around Berlin and visits the countryside, but as the narrative progresses, she is confined first to the city and then, largely, to her apartment. So as the film unfolds, Elisabeth loses access to the attractions and pleasures of the modern city that she enjoyed and, as a successful actress, helped to create. After the Kristallnacht sequence, which occurs halfway through the film, Berlin’s lively streets are shown neither through archival footage nor through studio recreations. So the audience, too, is denied the pleasure of the vibrant, possibly nostalgic, images of city streets that featured in the film’s first half.

In this way, the film suggests that the loss of modern urban life that we witness in wartime Berlin – and that the audiences themselves are experiencing in the ruined postwar city – was not caused solely by the war and the Allied bombing campaigns. Instead, it results from the coming to power of the Nazis and the actions they are shown to have taken against some of the city’s residents. The film thus suggests that the destruction of urban experience was caused by the violent segregation and exclusion practised by the Nazis – and Elisabeth’s isolation from a city in which she had once played a central role becomes emblematic.

Furthermore, Marriage in the Shadows implies the impossibility of any future in postwar Germany for some of those who were at the heart of urban life before the Nazis came to power. Through its depiction of Elisabeth’s isolation and death, and the persecution of her Jewish friends and family – emphasised by the striking inclusion and then absence of archival footage – it shows the irreparable loss of a vibrant urban culture and the key role Jewish residents had played in shaping it: the nostalgia produced by the archival footage is therefore reflective. As in And the Heavens above Us, this footage shows us that Berlin was once a city – but here we are not offered the reassurance that it will be a city once more. The inclusion of the archival footage of Breitscheidplatz and the Kurfürstendamm is central in conveying the film’s message.

 

Conclusion

In this article, I have examined how two early postwar German films engage with a particular Berlin location. Both films use archival footage of the significant structures in and around Breitscheidplatz to recall the site, but they treat this footage in very different ways. And the Heavens above Us offers a nostalgic vision of the city before its wartime destruction, and offers the hope of a return to Berlin as it once was. By contrast, Marriage in the Shadows confronts its audience with the persecution that was taking place leading up to the time when its archival footage was captured, making it clear that a return to this past is neither possible nor desirable. Through these two examples, I have explored how archival footage serves both as a powerful and a partial record of a place – and the different ways filmmakers can react to the dual properties of the medium. By focusing on the films’ depiction of a single location, I have examined how cinematic representations of place are shaped by histories and ideology, and how cinema, in turn, contributes to shaping these histories.

The use of archival footage in the two films restores specific aspects of Breitscheidplatz’s former life before its ruination. Yet the question of what Germany’s World War Two ruins signify remains contentious. How should the death and suffering they imply be understood alongside other deaths and sufferings – above all in the genocide carried out by Nazi Germany? While each of the two German states established in 1949 had different and complex answers to this – including narratives of victimhood and periods of evasion – reunification in 1990 brought it firmly back to the fore. The Nazi period was, after all, “the last moment of shared history between the two partial German states” and thus provided (a not unproblematic) common reference point for negotiating and constructing a unified state identity in the late 20^th and early 21^st centuries. [39] In the early postwar era, however, German cinema was already grappling with these questions, using images of place to explore how the country’s recent past might be understood – debates that would go on to shape its future.

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Notes

[1] The term was in use by 1947, as a label used to denigrate early postwar German filmmaking (see, for instance, “‘Arche Nora’ läuft vom Stapel’, Der Spiegel, 18 July 1947), and is now used to refer to early postwar German films that to describe films whose subject matter and setting reflect contemporary issues at the time of their making.

[2] Robert R. Shandley, Rubble Films: German Cinema in the Shadow of the Third Reich. (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001), 2.

[3] Eric Rentschler, “The Place of Rubble in the Trümmerfilm.” In Ruins of Modernity, ed. Julia Hell and Andreas Schönle (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 428.

[4] Ibid, 435.

[5] Elena Gorfinkel, and John David Rhodes, eds., “Introduction: The Matter of Places.” In Taking Place: Location and the Moving Image (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), ix.

[6] Ibid., xi.

[7] Jaimie Baron, The Archive Effect: Found Footage and the Audiovisual Experience of History (Abingdon: Routledge, 2014), 4.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Ibid., 7.

[10] Ibid., 18.

[11] Ibid, 20.

[12] Ibid., 23.

[13] Ibid, 123.

[14] Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001).

[15] Baron, The Archive Effect, 130.

[16] Ibid, 7.

[17] Priya Jaikumar, Where Histories Reside: India as Filmed Space (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019), 402.

[18] Ibid, 384.

[19] Ibid.

[20] Siegfried Kracauer, “Cult of Distraction: On Berlin’s Picture Palaces.” In The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, trans. Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 323.

[21] Josef Goebbels, “Around the Gedächtniskirche.” In The Weimar Republic Sourcebook, ed. Anton Kaes, Martin Jay, and Edward Dimendberg (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 561.

[22] Ibid, 562.

[23] Jennifer V. Evans, Life among the Ruins: Cityscape and Sexuality in Cold War Berlin. (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 54.

[24] Günther Anders, Die Schrift an der Wand: Tagebücher 1941–1966. (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1967), 238. Unless stated otherwise, translations are my own.

[25] Ibid.

[26] Rüdiger Zill, “‘A True Witness of Transience’: Berlin’s Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gedächtniskirche and the Symbolic Use of Architectural Fragments in Modernity.” European Review of History 18, no. 5–6 (2011): 819.

[27] A plaque attached to the ruin dedicates it to the memory of Kaiser Wilhelm I, and states that “the old church’s tower should remind us of the judgement of God, which befell our people during the war years”. A later plaque, from 1987, states that “it is a place that warns against war and destruction and calls for reconciliation in Jesus Christ”.

[28] Jaikumar, Where Histories Reside,  384.

[29] Wilfried Wilms, “Rubble without a Cause: The Air War in Postwar Film.” In German Postwar Films: Life and Love in the Ruins, ed. Wilfried Wilms and William Rasch (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 33–34.

[30] “‘Und über uns der Himmel’ [Film script].” n.d., 133, DFF Archive, Frankfurt.

[31] Jaikumar, Where Histories Reside,  384.

[32] Ibid.

[33] For analysis of discourses around German suffering see Helmut Schmitz, ed. A Nation of Victims? Representations of German Wartime Suffering from 1945 to the Present (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007).

[34] Ibid, 135.

[35] See, for instance, Elizabeth Ward, East German Film and the Holocaust (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2021), 23–46; Kobi Kabalek, “Commemorating Failure: Unsuccessful Rescue of Jews in German Film and Literature, 1945–1960,” German History 38, no. 1 (2020): 96–112; and Shandley, Rubble Films, 81–90.

[36] Wilms, “Rubble without a Cause,” 33–34.

[37] Jaikumar, Where Histories Reside, 384.

[38] Ibid.

[39] Schmitz, A Nation of Victims?, 3. This identity is one shapes how Germanness in understood and how Germany positions itself in the present, as shown in its response to Israel’s war in Gaza (see Stefani Engelstein, “German ‘Erinnerungskultur’ and the Gaza War.” Interjekte 15 [2025]: 9–27).

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References

And the Heavens above Us […und über uns der Himmel]. Directed by Josef von Baky. US occupation zone: Objektiv-Film, 1947.

Anders, Günther. Die Schrift an der Wand: Tagebücher 1941–1966. Munich: C. H. Beck, 1967.

Baron, Jaimie. The Archive Effect: Found Footage and the Audiovisual Experience of History. Abingdon: Routledge, 2014.

Boym, Svetlana. The Future of Nostalgia. New York: Basic Books, 2001.

Engelstein, Stefani. “German ‘Erinnerungskultur’ and the Gaza War.” Interjekte 15 (2025): 9–27.

Evans, Jennifer V. Life among the Ruins: Cityscape and Sexuality in Cold War Berlin. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.

Goebbels, Josef. “Around the Gedächtniskirche.” In The Weimar Republic Sourcebook, edited by Anton Kaes, Martin Jay, and Edward Dimendberg, 560–562. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994.

Gorfinkel, Elena, and John David Rhodes, eds. “Introduction: The Matter of Places.” In Taking Place: Location and the Moving Image, vii–xxix. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011.

Jaikumar, Priya. Where Histories Reside: India as Filmed Space. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019.

Kabalek, Kobi. “Commemorating Failure: Unsuccessful Rescue of Jews in German Film and Literature, 1945–1960.” German History 38, no. 1 (March 2020): 96–112.

Kracauer, Siegfried. “Cult of Distraction: On Berlin’s Picture Palaces.” In The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, translated by Thomas Y. Levin, 323–330. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995.

Marriage in the Shadows (Ehe im Schatten). Directed by Kurt Maetzig. 1948. Soviet occupation zone: DEFA .

Rentschler, Eric. “The Place of Rubble in the Trümmerfilm.” In Ruins of Modernity, edited by Julia Hell and Andreas Schönle, 418–438. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010.

Schmitz, Helmut, ed. A Nation of Victims? Representations of German Wartime Suffering from 1945 to the Present. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007.

Shandley, Robert R. Rubble Films: German Cinema in the Shadow of the Third Reich. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001.

Spiegel. “‘Arche Nora’ läuft vom Stapel.” July 18, 1947.

“Und über uns der Himmel [Film script].” n.d. DFF Archive, Frankfurt.

Ward, Elizabeth. East German Film and the Holocaust. New York: Berghahn Books, 2021.

Wilms, Wilfried. “Rubble without a Cause: The Air War in Postwar Film.” In German Postwar Films: Life and Love in the Ruins, edited by Wilfried Wilms and William Rasch, 27–44. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.

Zill, Rüdiger. “‘A True Witness of Transience’: Berlin’s Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gedächtniskirche and the Symbolic Use of Architectural Fragments in Modernity.” European Review of History 18, no. 5–6 (2011): 811–827.

 

Biography
Nancy Wilson recently completed her AHRC-funded PhD at Queen Mary’s University of
London. Her thesis, titled ‘How Will We Live?: The Spaces of Postwar German Cinema’,
examines the presentation and significance of filmic spaces from an interdisciplinary
perspective rooted in film studies.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.15664/fcj.v22.i0.2963

Introduction

In one of his public talks dedicated to his latest work, the Catalan film director Albert Serra claimed: “In the future, people will go to the cinema to suffer,” adding: “Without suffering, one does not feel he is alive.” [1] There is no doubt that a film devoted to a subject such as bullfighting inevitably engages with the moving image of suffering – but what kind of suffering is at stake, and how is this cinematographic suffering rendered through space?

In Serra’s filmography, space – both literal and metaphorical – occupies a central place, and Afternoons of Solitude (Tardes de soledad [2024]), his first venture into documentary and winner of the San Sebastián Golden Shell in 2024, continues this exploration. Situated far from traditional narration, the film raises questions rather than offering conclusions; it obscures rather than clarifies, and its treatment of space destabilises the very boundary between the tangible and the imaginary. In the context of documentary cinema, Afternoons of Solitude bears a certain resemblance to the work of Gianfranco Rosi – Serra’s own acknowledged reference point. What does, for instance, Sacro GRA (2013), inspired by Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities (Le città invisibili [1972]), explain about Rome’s outer beltway and its inhabitants? Not much – if anything. Like Serra, Rosi, captivated by the confusing image and an atmosphere of estrangement, portrays without describing, constantly “blurring the line between fiction and non-fiction, or producing a hybrid of them.” [2] For these directors, the aim is not to support an initial argument but “to do the opposite: dismantle, link by link, the chain of cause and effect.” [3]

To navigate the repetitive and multilayered structure of Serra’s work, I propose a three-tiered framework for identifying filmic space. The first level, concerned with the physical logistics of the set, can be defined as real space — the actual locations in Spain and France. The second level is more ambiguous: imaginary space, which encompasses several conceptual threads such as the mythological and heroic dimensions of the film. The third level, which both absorbs and synthesises the previous two, is pictorial, and draws primarily on Gilles Deleuze’s study, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation (Francis Bacon: Logique de la sensation [1981]).

Summary

Structured around the figure of the young Peruvian star torero Andrés Roca Rey, Afternoons of Solitude adopts the six-part format of a traditional bullfight, translating it into a cinematic architecture that moves – apart from the opening sequence – between three central locations: the bullring, the van, and the hotel room, punctuated by fleeting areas such as corridor and lift. Nothing in these spaces feels stable or personal; they mirror the perpetual motion of the cuadrilla (the small team of assistants accompanying the bullfighter), as they drift from one arena to the next. A comparable loop-like effect – without linear progression from point A to point B – appears in Serra’s earlier works, especially Liberté (2019) and Pacifiction (2022), where the viewer, whether in a forest or on an island, is plunged into a disorienting temporal and spatial experience that unfolds without clear advancement. The documentary deliberately excludes the audience’s image, transforming the bullring into a near-abstract space whose contours and dimensions resist clear definition. Occasionally, a few faces emerge in the background, or the faint hum of the crowd can be heard, but this presence is never emphasized; on the contrary, it is systematically avoided. No explanatory dialogues are offered, nor are there insights into the protagonist’s daily life or motivations – the entire filmic composition is built around the corrida itself. Even the interaction between the bullfighter and the animal in the emptied arena is rendered mostly through a sequence of close-ups, emphasizing not their confrontation, but their symmetrical isolation.

In Bill Nichols’s typology, Afternoons of Solitude most likely oscillates between the Poetic and Observational documentary forms. While the former “emphasizes visual associations, tonal or rhythmic qualities, descriptive passages, and formal organization,” the latter focuses on “direct engagement with the everyday life of subjects as observed by an unobtrusive camera.” [4] Through his attention to formal organisation and spatial rhythm – without relying on description – Serra draws on the Poetic, although his film can also be aligned with the Observational approach for its seemingly neutral stance, allowing meaning to emerge through repetition, duration, and frame composition. This is also reflected in Richard Brody’s review, as he states: “Once Roca is in the ring, Serra’s method turns rigorously and prudently observational.” [5]

Literature Review

The primary literary source for this analysis is, naturally, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, which serves as a theoretical framework for the analysis that follows. This approach does not imply a direct influence of Deleuze on Serra but rather draws out resonances between Deleuze’s reading of Bacon’s paintings and the conceptual logic underlying Afternoons of Solitude. Numerous notions and concepts developed across the book’s seventeen chapters directly resonate with Serra’s strategies, although some will receive more focused attention than others. Additional consulted sources include audience and media reviews, along with scholarly works on film atmosphere and sound, such as those by Julian Hanich and Michel Chion. The director’s own commentary and earlier texts are also examined.

Methodology

This study adopts a multidisciplinary approach, combining close visual and spatial analysis with a theoretical perspective grounded in the Deleuzian conceptual apparatus. The analysis unfolds through a progression from the most immediate and material aspects of the film to its more abstract dimensions. Key elements under examination include composition, framing, colour, specific sequences, and sound. To support a more rigorous understanding of the film’s subtler aesthetic layers, these elements are situated within a broader context encompassing cinematic theory and the visual arts.

Analysis

Real Space

Stemming from a research initiative at Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona, the documentary was filmed over several years in various arenas across Spain and France. However, the final cut includes footage from only four locations: Madrid, Seville, Bilbao, and Santander. [6] Although it was shot over an extended period – a detail known primarily through external commentary and barely perceptible in the viewing experience – the film generates a perplexing sense of time. Even among critics, viewers, and online commentators, perceptions vary: does it span a week, a day, or a year in the bullfighter’s life? The temporal frame remains deliberately elusive, sculpted – borrowing a term from Andrei Tarkovsky – in a singular and subjective way.

All the spaces in the film are both transitory and isolated. The van, for instance, is a recurring setting in which the group of characters is filmed before and after the bullfights – although this sequence is often ambiguous, and the viewer can discern its temporal placement only by observing the protagonists’ physical state (Figure 1). The dark, enclosed space of the moving vehicle becomes a kind of frame for a collective portrait, with the surrounding obscurity functioning as a painterly background that evokes the tradition of Dutch Golden Age guild portraits, such as those by Frans Hals or Thomas de Keyser (Figures 2–3). Serra himself confirms this connection, drawing a parallel between the image of the cuadrilla in the film and “the choral group paintings […] which comprise relatively homogeneous groups, organised by guilds.” [7] The van is never shown from the outside; we only see its interior, and even the fact that it is moving can only be inferred through intuition and generic glimpses of the urban environment beyond the dark-tinted glass, with just a few recognisable elements such as a passing bus or a metro station. This may reflect Serra’s intention to emphasise the atemporal nature of the film’s actions and to shift the viewer’s attention away from the questions of where and when, toward who. It is also significant that the figures inside the van seem highly choreographed: in each scene, they appear fixed in the same seats, as if posing repeatedly for a painter or photographer, which reinforces the impression of a protocolised and static (albeit moving) image. The irreplaceable protagonist is always positioned in the foreground, contributing to a visual structure that evokes compositional hierarchies not only from the Baroque, but also from earlier strata of art history – particularly Egyptian and Sumerian visual traditions – where the most important figure is depicted as physically larger than others, in accordance with symbolic rather than naturalistic logic.

The film also includes sequences set in two hotel rooms, treated in a similar manner as sealed capsules: no windows are shown, nor any clear geographical indication, even though the actual locations are known – the Mandarin Oriental Ritz in Madrid and L’Imperator in Nîmes. As in the van, the hotel episodes occur either before or after the bullfight – moments of dressing or undressing – and each presents two figures: the torero and his assistant, shown in slow interactions and rarely accompanied by more than a few fragmented lines from the protagonist. One of the most striking visual features of these sequences is the consistent presence of a mirror: much of the action is filmed through it, and at times it becomes difficult – or altogether impossible – to discern whether we are seeing a direct image or its reflection (Figure 4). The mirror not only frames Roca Rey in interaction with his own image but also participates in a more complex compositional dialogue: in particular, the insistent presence of the Virgin Mary’s image on the bedside table introduces a second, competing portrait. At times, the ornamental mantle on the Virgin’s head visually resonates with the bullfighter’s costume, creating a remarkable visual parallel in which the sacred and the spectacular, the feminine and the masculine, the still and the moving to slip into one another (Figure 5).

There is one singular scene in the middle of the film where the protagonist and his assistant, referred to as the mozo de espadas (sword handler), are filmed near and inside the lift – the only sequence that reveals the hotel beyond the confines of the rooms. Filmed from a low angle, this sequence emphasises the monumental presence of the torero, who appears graceful and sculptural despite the limited space of the lift. Filled with multiple mirrors and golden surfaces typical of luxury interiors, the space becomes almost blinding, with light bouncing off the ornate costume of the protagonist, who seems to be slowly rehearsing gestures, physiognomy, and posture – turning the lift into a performative area. Like the van, the lift’s movement is ambiguous: though the image is static, one can intuitively sense vertical, from up to down motion. Yet, with the repeated reflections multiplying the image horizontally across mirrors, this movement extends beyond a simple vertical descent, suggesting a complex, ambiguous spatiality. The emphasised presence of the mirrors in the film logically evokes a variety of cinematic references – particularly their use in the work of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, whose influence resonates throughout Serra’s aesthetic choices. [8] It also speaks to the very structure of filmic perception itself, especially when approached through a Lacanian lens, where the mirror stage becomes foundational in shaping subjectivity and the gaze. [9] For the purposes of this analysis, however, two aspects are of particular interest: the mirror’s conceptual and compositional function within the choreography of bullfighting, and further its role in Deleuze’s reading of Bacon, especially in relation to the concept of becoming, which may offer a point of convergence between these two frameworks.

While the slightly claustrophobic sensation of the van and hotel sequences is palpable – not only due to their enclosed geometry but also to the near-total absence of contextual or geographical information – Serra’s treatment of the bullring is perhaps even more subversive. The representation of the arena is radically fragmented: it is often unclear whether we are witnessing the same setting or have already shifted to another. Only sparse and peripheral cues – such as a sign at the edge of the frame, a sudden change in weather, or a shift in the colour of the sand – suggest that we may have transitioned from Bilbao to Madrid or elsewhere. Even so, the predominance of close-ups and the absence of clear establishing shots prevent the viewer from constructing a coherent spatial map of these environments.

To illustrate the complex filmic relationship (in terms of spatiality and proportions) between the protagonist figure and the bullring, I will take a small liberty and focus on the film’s conclusion – since it is only in the final sequence that the viewer is granted a full sense of the arena’s vast scale. The camera follows Roca Rey as, bidding farewell to the (invisible) audience, he crosses the enormous space from right to left, moving, in a sense, against the classical Western narrative direction, which typically unfolds from left to right. This impression of foreboding is constructed not only through the unexpectedly prolonged duration of the shot, which for the first time reveals the arena as truly vast, exposed, and threatening, but also through the acoustic design – specifically, the musical transition in which The Swan by Camille Saint-Saëns, accompanying the scene’s beginning, gradually dissolves into a much darker, contemporary soundscape. [10] Although this metamorphosis occurs through sound rather than image, it generates a perceptible shift, leading the viewer into the space of the unknown, of uneasiness. As Serra explains, “At the end of the movie I use an ominous music cue when he leaves the coliseum to underline the idea that something can always happen.” [11]

Generally, the film’s sound design reinforces the sense of encapsulation: as is typical of Serra’s practice, wireless microphones are employed to eliminate ambient noise and capture sounds imperceptible to the human ear. For instance, during the vehicle episodes, we hear neither the city outside the window nor the vehicle itself; and in the hotel, the silence between lines is similarly profound – one might even say opaque – an acoustic ascesis that intensifies the sensation of enclosure and isolation. According to the typology proposed by Julian Hanich, this silence could be defined as foreboding, the kind associated with non-presence, and “experienced as an ominous void: an absence of reassuring sounds.” [12] However, in my reading, the farewell sequence is intimately connected to the film’s opening shot, which may be considered one of its central conceptual pivots.

Imagined Space

The documentary opens with a shot of a solitary bull, its figure barely discernible in the darkness – almost ghostlike – immersed in the opacity of the night in a rural or forested landscape. As Guy Lodge from Variety puts it, Serra’s film “begins not taking the bull by the horns but looking it in the eye.” [13] The animal gazes directly into the camera’s lens, and we hear its heavy breathing – a breath that will mark the rhythm of the entire film, migrating from bull to torero and his group, and back again, as if forming a synchronized respiration, a collective breath shared by all participants, including the audience. Growing heavier, this noise resembles a strange sonic mechanism – gradually filling the filmic space while simultaneously drawing us intimately close to the characters. Michael Chion reminds us that, unlike the image, cinematic sound lacks rigid limits: “there is no auditory container for sounds analogous to the visual container for images that is the frame.” [14] Deprived of such boundaries, sound is free to drift and to collapse the distance between film and viewer. Moreover, breath in cinema goes further in exceeding the status of the merely audible and moving toward the broader register of filmic atmosphere. It becomes spatial, phenomenological – even reciprocal: as Robert Spadoni observes, “films and their audiences breathe each other.” [15] Though neither this taurine figure nor the nocturnal rural setting reappears later, this singular opening image – set apart from the rest – and the hypnotic sound that accompanies it may nonetheless orient the viewer toward a more rarefied mode of perception, one marked by doubt, estrangement and shared filmic respiration.

Seen through a conceptual lens, this shot opens onto a mythological space – meaning a cyclical one, emptied of causality and linear progression – and introduces a realm of solitude already evoked by the film’s title. [16] Before the title appears, the introductory sequence unfolds in three portrayals: the nocturnal figure of the bull, looking directly at the viewer; the van, with a frontal view of the torero, who also gazes at us; and the room, presenting a series of confusing images multiplied by giant hotel mirrors. This outline can be read on a metaphorical level: the bull, the man, and the mirror – each echoing and reflecting one another, isolated by the camera and montage, yet inseparable within the myth. Although the mythological dimension of tauromaquia is not the central focus of this study, this perspective remains important – not only because bullfighting is the film’s core motif, but also due to the nature of the filmic space Serra constructs. In Afternoons of Solitude, this space is not only encapsulated and slightly claustrophobic – composed of a series of bubble-like enclosures – its temporal dynamics are also cyclical and repetitive, echoing the general logic of myth, and more specifically, that of the heroic myth. This perspective, in my reading, aligns closely with that proposed by Roland Barthes, whose concept of the myth intriguingly resonates with his own vision of the text – both sharing a temporality that is constantly unfolding here and now, as Barthes famously states when he writes that “myth transforms history into nature.” [17] Serra himself echoes this viewpoint, clarifying that his interest – and the reason behind the deliberate erasure of the public and everyday life – was to portray the protagonist “only when he is already a hero, […] embodying his mission, his duty.” [18]

Belonging to a broader Mediterranean tradition, tauromaquia can be read as one of the binary mythological configurations – such as anthropo-zoomorphic hybrids or specular myths. At its core lies the canonical hero–beast bond, which – even within an ancient Greek context – can be understood as an internal dichotomy: a tension between high and low in the sense explored by Mikhail Bakhtin, spiritual and corporeal, Dionysian and Apollonian, or a conflict between the tangible and the imaginary. The mythological perspective offers two interrelated contributions: the conception of time as perpetual recurrence, and a preoccupation with the ambivalence – and potential danger – of the gaze. In terms of mirroring and binary oppositions, we might recall figures such as Perseus and Medusa, David and Goliath, Narcissus, and inevitably the Minotaur – the contradictory hybrid par excellence – who was reimagined and reborn in twentieth century thought, particularly in the writings of Julio Cortázar, André Gide, and the works of Pablo Picasso. [19] In these modern reinterpretations, the Minotaur is not merely converted from antagonist to protagonist; he becomes a stand-in for the avant-garde artist himself. [20] And yet, what remains notably – and perhaps strangely – absent from these formulations, and from Serra’s film, is the erotic charge of tauromaquia that Georges Bataille associated with the contemplation of death in the bullring – particularly the feminine dimension that forms the conceptual core of The Story of the Eye (Histoire de l’œil [1928]). [21] In Afternoons of Solitude, the only woman appears briefly, in a fleeting scene in which she poses for a photograph with the protagonist, devoid of any detectable sensual implication.

Amos Vogel famously claimed that avant-garde cinema is defined by its unpredictability, yet Afternoons of Solitude, with its circular structure, seems to challenge that assumption. [22] As one displeased viewer writes in a Google review, “In half an hour of documentary, you’ve seen everything”; while another remarks, “I left the room after more than one hour of the same thing.” [23] Although the film bears many traits associated with the avant-garde – such as moments of anticlimax and the absence of storytelling – it confronts the viewer with a persistent sense of repetition. This raises a paradox: how can a work defined by repetition still claim unpredictability? One possible answer to this contradiction lies in the film’s disorienting treatment: on the one hand, it follows a rigidly repetitive structure; on the other, it resists predictability by refusing narrative development. The viewer anticipates change – but it never comes. However, the paradox of predictability and unpredictability in Afternoons of Solitude can be situated within the broader context of slow cinema – a movement often associated with structural or minimalist approaches to filmmaking. Alongside such directors as Lisandro Alonso, Béla Tarr and Pedro Costa, Serra is frequently identified with this phenomenon, a connection made already with his debut Honor of the Knights (Honor de cavalleria [2006]), which similarly explores iconic Spanish themes by emphasizing presence over action and pause over deed. As Evgeniy Maizel observes, for Serra, “Quixote’s discourse is repetitive, and his general inactivity contrasts sharply with Cervantes’ original novel, rich with adventures, suggesting that such deeds now belong to the past.” [24] This idea of the past – conceived as presence, opaque and monotonous – is also central to Serra’s own aesthetic thinking. Referring to Hans-Jürgen Syberberg, whose method he implicitly aligns with, the director explains that such repetitive filmic signals allow us “to concentrate on them, but not go through them,” and compares this artistic condition to “a boxing ball, which gets hit all the time yet remains in place.” [25] Thus – and to some extent, this applies to slow cinema as a whole – the opacity and anticlimactic quality of the genre forms its unpredictable avant-garde side: the one that engages some viewers through estrangement and discomfort, while logically provoking scepticism in others.

Continuing with the tension between the cyclical and the singular, we return to the opening nocturnal sequence of Afternoons of Solitude, which – though brief – establishes a perceptual framework shaped by dream, fantasy, and something akin to a Goyaesque nightmare. The night, a recurring motif in Serra’s work, operates here not merely as a setting but as a conceptual threshold. In Liberté, for example, night is not the backdrop for action but a principle of fragmentation – a disruption of linear and spatial coherence. Serra often speaks of the dialectic between day and night in his oeuvre, suggesting that while the day implies continuity and accumulation, the night unfolds in a manner that is arbitrary, directionless, and built around the “idea of waste” and a perpetual confusion – “of the film and of the night”– from which he, as an author, can ultimately profit. [26] It is therefore striking that Serra begins a film so preoccupied with diurnal routine with a nocturnal image. This contrast foregrounds a tension between two spatial logics: the perplexing singularity of night and the cyclical regularity of day.

This contrast between the two spaces finds a conceptual echo in the early pages of The Logic of Sensation, where Deleuze invokes El Greco’s The Burial of the Count of Orgaz (El entierro del Conde de Orgaz, 1586–1588) to explore a pictorial dichotomy: below, the realm of verisimilitude; above, the domain of the spiritual and imaginary – a space of artistic freedom. This upper half becomes a place of “wild liberation, a total emancipation,” where “the Figures are lifted up and elongated, refined without measure, outside all constraint.” [27] As Deleuze points out, “[w]ith God—but also with Christ, the Virgin, and even Hell—lines, colors, and movements are freed from the demands of representation”, marking a rupture from narration. [28] In this reading, he radically inverts Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s well-known adage, suggesting that in El Greco’s case, it is with God that everything becomes permitted. The divine space is no longer bound by rational or conscious constraints and does not aim to portray or describe – akin to the realm evoked in Francisco de Goya’s The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters (El sueño de la razón produce monstruos, 1797–1799), where, freed from reason, the nightmare gives birth to irregularity, and distortion (Figure 6). This juxtaposition, however, is not meant to suggest that any bullfighting arena should be understood as a literal space of freedom; rather, it is Serra’s treatment of this space that evokes something closer to El Greco’s upper realm or Goya’s nightmare-like dimension, untethered from figurative depiction and resonating with the gestural and conceptual freedom found in Bacon’s paintings.

Pictorial space

Deleuze argues that no artist ever truly begins with a blank canvas – the surface is already saturated with banalities, with images inherited, repeated, and internalized over centuries. The first task for any author, then, is to confront what he calls the “hydra-headed cliché,” a mythical beast that, once wounded, grows back multiple heads—an apt metaphor for the persistence and survivability of the commonplace. [29] Few subjects are as encumbered by such cultural excess as bullfighting: endlessly reproduced in both high and popular culture, and heavily exploited by mass tourism, the image of the corrida risks becoming purely ornamental, if not outright kitsch. Not to mention the ideological, ethical, and political tensions that further complicate its representation. Serra’s artistic strategy, however, is not to abstract or negate the image, nor to empty it of its figurative charge. Instead, borrowing a Deleuzian term, he isolates the figure(s) and in doing so – like Bacon – defeating the hydra of banality, he seeks to break through the plane of representation, transfiguring the overly familiar into something unexpected.

One of the film’s most conceptually original isolating gestures is the previously mentioned elimination of the audience – Serra literally breaks the conventional circle, allowing the folkloric layer to fall away. The emptied arena becomes a disorienting space, a Deleuzian field, a “vertical sky”; what takes precedence is its texture, its colour, its physical presence. [30] Similarly, in his Study for Bullfight No. 1 (1971), Bacon displaces the public, suggesting that the spectacle requires an attendant, but not necessarily a viewer (Figure 7). As Deleuze notes, “[i]n both Bacon and Beckett, the attendant can be reduced to the circle of the circus ring, to a photographic apparatus or camera, to a photo-memory”– there is no need for a pronounced human presence. [31]

In the introduction to this study, I mentioned Serra’s remark that cinema, as he sees it, is a medium destined for suffering—though not in a sentimental sense, but from a formal and conceptual perspective. Similarly, for Bacon, suffering is not equated with narrative violence; as he famously stated, he never wanted to paint horror, but rather the scream. As Deleuze explains, in Bacon “Figures are not depicted as violent – they are violently projected into the field,” and he warns that “the violence of a sensation must not be confused with the violence of a represented scene.” [32] This distinction is crucial – especially when the very subject matter is as charged as bullfighting, a spectacle premised on the ritualised proximity of death. Yet Serra’s film stages violence not so much through the subject itself, but through cinematic sensation: in the structure of repetition, the fragmentation, the anticlimax, the prolonged anticipation, the isolated figures, and the abundance of close-ups. This is where the suffering resides – in the form, not merely in the content.

The phenomenon of isolation is understood by Deleuze as the pure presence of a pictorial event that has nothing left to narrate. In Bacon, these matters of fact, as Deleuze defines them, often take the form of singular or coupled figures constructed from two bodies, without any identifiable plot. The focus here, as Deleuze suggests, is on creating a zone of indiscernibility between men or man and animal. He also recalls how Bacon imagined himself crucified in a butcher’s shop, doubting why he was not in his proper place. “The man who suffers is a beast; the beast who suffers is a man” – a body in a stage of becoming, enacting the “reality of becoming,” as Deleuze formulates it. [33] A similar dynamic emerges in Afternoons of Solitude, where radical choices such as close-ups of the toro and the torero create mirroring, hybrid-like figures that render separation between them impossible. The sound design reinforces this echoing sensation – breaths, murmurs, and repeated exclamations become matters of fact, immersing the viewer in a poetic and disorienting experience. [34] In Bacon’s paintings, as Deleuze observes, mirrors are opaque and do not reflect identities but function as spaces where heads – never faces – appear. Moreover, the mirror becomes a head itself, with nothing behind, as exemplified in Portrait of George Dyer in a Mirror (1968) (Figure 8). This anomalous spatial logic resonates with Serra’s film, where mirrors recur as devices that enact the ongoing interplay and echo between human and animal. The insistent mirroring – between the bullfighter and the bull, or between the protagonist and sacred imagery – functions as a visual rhyme, emphasising their ambiguous nature.

Although this may verge on analytical speculation, another motif that, in my opinion, invites particular attention is the recurring image of the mouth – both human and animal. In a number of arena scenes, the camera lingers on the bull’s tongue or, in case of the vehicle sequences, on Roca Rey’s unconscious lip and tongue movements. This mouth optics could also be read as a visual rhyme between the two antagonists, reinforcing the uncertainty of identity, the mirroring effect and the perpetual becoming. Deleuze also notes that in Bacon, mouths often appear dislocated, in the wrong places – as holes, openings in heads – while bodies seem to leak or collapse around orifices. Serra’s lingering attention to these gestures seems to evoke a similar sense of loss of control, where the body part – whether human or non-human – escapes conventional structure. Particularly striking in the film is not only the involuntary gesture itself, but also the colour, especially that of the bull’s tongue – a pale, almost sandy hue – that adds a further layer of estrangement to the image.

In Bacon’s work, as Deleuze points out, colour does not lie behind or beyond the figure, but exists alongside it – haptic, tactile, as if it had weight, forming, as Deleuze calls it, a “closed and revolving space”. [35] A similar dynamic, in my view, is echoed in Serra’s film: the field surrounding the figures – and the very colour of the arena – becomes visible, almost tangible. Though post-production colour correction in the film is minimal, it subtly enhances the purples, pomegranates, and golden tones, lending them a soft glow, a slight saturation that reinforces their material presence. From one arena sequence to another, we observe how the sand shifts from golden ochre to a pale, almost grey tone. Through the use of digital zoom and prolonged takes, the space becomes tactile – it acquires an existence of its own. In one scene, filmed during heavy rain in the Bilbao arena, the camera lingers on the wet, dark mud, sharply contrasting with the saturated fuchsia tights and fine black leather slippers of the torero (Figure 9).

In a later moment in the film, shortly after the withdrawal of the bull’s body, its mass having just marked the ground, an ephemeral cluster of minuscule scattered white pieces of paper dances in the wind, emphasizing the contrasts in weight and texture between the animal, the human, the sand, and the wind-blown paper. Cinema, as Hanich suggests, frequently exhibits an affinity for the “gently rustling wind,” even “anemophilia, a love of the wind.” [36] Here, however, these fleeting, aerial fragments stand in stark contrast to the repetitive heaviness of the falls that we face in the film – of the bull, and at times, of the protagonist – creating a tension that echoes Deleuze’s observation that “all tension is experienced in a fall.” [37] This fall – as a visible expression of tension and of weight – brings us closer to one of the director’s central concerns: presence. This notion is one of the cornerstones of Serra’s work, already foregrounded in his early essay, where – echoing Manny Farber – he advocates for a dramaturgy of presence over one of action. Moreover, this concept resonates with the first words the writer Michel Leiris utters before one of Bacon’s paintings: “Presence, presence…”

Conclusion

In this paper, I have proposed a reading of Albert Serra’s Afternoons of Solitude through three types of spatial experience that shape its conceptual landscape: the real, the imagined or mythological, and the pictorial space informed by the legacy of visual art. Drawing on Deleuze’s study of Bacon, I have argued that the film is neither a commentary on the ideology or controversy of bullfighting, nor an attempt at explanation or psychological portrayal of its protagonist – as Guy Lodge notes, “Serra has little interest in investigating the man’s interior or domestic life” – but rather a meditation on the aesthetics of solitude, tension, and presence. [38] It treats violence not as subject matter but as cinematic form, through fragmentation, repetition, and distance. The film shares with Bacon a subversive optics: one that breaks figuration to reveal figure, disrupts representation to disclose sensation, privileging texture over significance and presence over coherence. As Deleuze writes of Bacon, “the abjection becomes splendor; the horror of life becomes a very pure and very intense life” – a logic Serra seems to echo when he claims that “in the future, people will go to the cinema to suffer.” [39] Perhaps this is how a pure and intense existence can ultimately be achieved: through the uncompromising presence of cinematic suffering.

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Notes

[1] Albert Serra, “FFQ&A: Albert Serra,” Film Festival Cologne, posted May 10, 2025, YouTube video, 45:53, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G5CEOe6R2uw.

[2] Gianfranco Rosi, “Notturno: Treatment for a Documentary Film Shot in the Middle East,” Journal of Italian Cinema and Media Studies 10, no. 3 (2022): 522.

[3] Ibid., 519.

[4] Bill Nichols, Introduction to Documentary (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), 33–34.

[5] Richard Brody, “Glory and Gore in Afternoons of Solitude,” The New Yorker (2025), accessed August 1, 2025, https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-front-row/glory-and-gore-in-afternoons-of-solitude.

[6] This selection, as Serra explains, was made for a simple yet notably cinematic reason related to portraiture and proportion: Andrés Roca Rey, the protagonist, is exceptionally tall, and only the largest bulls appear visually balanced beside him, and the largest bulls can be found in the biggest arenas.

[7] Albert Serra, interview by Alexandra Semenova, “The Art of Bullfighting Is the Art of Stopping Time,” Revista de Occidente, no. 525 (2025): 216. Translation from Spanish is mine.

[8] Fassbinder’s aesthetics can be considered a significant point of reference in Serra’s work. Even in Afternoons of Solitude, certain visual effects – such as subtle glow, likely introduced in post-production – recall Fassbinder’s stylised imagery. This resonance is even more pronounced in Serra’s previous feature Pacifiction, where the use of colour and atmosphere establishes a more direct affinity with Fassbinder’s Lola (1981) or Querelle (1982). Beyond visual parallels, Fassbinder’s presence recurs in Serra’s oeuvre: the project Cuba Libre (2014) was dedicated to Günter Kaufmann (1947-2012). Fassbinder was also one of the three protagonists in Serra’s video installation The Three Little Pigs (2012).

[9] From a Lacanian perspective, the mirror functions as a site of specular identification, where the subject recognizes its image but also experiences a fundamental misrecognition, shaping the formation of the self in relation to the Other. Christian Metz extended this insight to cinema, highlighting how mirrors on screen engage spectators in a complex process of identification and alienation within the filmic apparatus.

[10] The lyrical piece used in the film’s final sequence is The Swan (Le Cygne) from The Carnival of the Animals (Le Carnaval des animaux, 1886) by Camille Saint-Saëns (1835-1921). In Serra’s film, this slow theme underscores a sense of grace, fragility and the solitude of the departing figure of the protagonist. Alongside original music composed for the film, another notable piece is Sad Waltz (Valse triste, 1903) by Jean Sibelius (1865-1957). While the swan, often associated with death and transcendence, evokes the image of a solitary, vanishing figure, the waltz, by contrast, is traditionally linked to the circular dynamics and shared motion.

[11] Albert Serra, interview by Ryan Akler-Bishop, “You Cannot Project Your Desire: Albert Serra on Afternoons of Solitude, Bullfighting, and Kristen Stewart,” The Film Stage (2025), accessed August 1, 2025, https://thefilmstage.com/you-cannot-project-your-desire-albert-serra-on-afternoons-of-solitude-bullfighting-and-kristen-stewart/.

[12] Julian Hanich, “Six Types of Silence: On Quiet Atmospheres in Cinema,” The Oxford Handbook of Moving Image Atmospheres and Felt Environments (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2024), 7.

[13] Guy Lodge, “Afternoons of Solitude Review: Albert Serra Observes the Matador Life in All Its Absurd Beauty and Obscene Bloodshed,” Variety (2024), accessed August 1, 2025, https://variety.com/2024/film/reviews/afternoons-of-solitude-review-1236157814/.

[14] Michel Chion, Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019), 67.

[15] Robert Spadoni, “What Is Film Atmosphere,” Quarterly Review of Film and Video 37, no. 1 (2020): 60, https://doi.org/10.1080/10509208.2019.1606558.

[16] The original Spanish title of the film evokes rich literary resonances, calling to mind Ernest Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon (1932) and Federico García Lorca’s Lament for Ignacio Sánchez Mejías (Llanto por Ignacio Sánchez Mejías, 1935), where the line “a las cinco de la tarde” (at five in the afternoon) is repeated twenty-nine times.

[17] Roland Barthes, Mythologies (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1991), 128.

[18] Serra, interview, “The Art of Bullfighting,” 214.

[19] In the history of art, the depiction of mythic and biblical figures such as David and Goliath, and Perseus and Medusa, often carries layered meanings. Notably, artists have at times inserted their own likenesses into these works as subtle self-portraits, emphasising the dialectic not only between creator and subject, but also between the hero and the beast, underscoring how artistic identity intertwines with mythological representation. For example, Caravaggio’s David with the Head of Goliath (Davide con la testa di Golia, c.1610) is famously believed to feature the author’s own face in the severed head, while Benvenuto Cellini included his profile in the serpentine hair of Medusa in his Perseus with the Head of Medusa (Perseo con la testa di Medusa, 1554).

[20] The figure of the Minotaur has been a recurring object of fascination for many twentieth-century artists and writers. Pablo Picasso frequently identified with the Minotaur, portraying himself in its image in numerous drawings and prints from the 1930s. In literature, the myth was radically reinterpreted in works such as André Gide’s Theseus (Thésée, 1946) and Jorge Luis Borges’s The House of Asterion (La casa de Asterión, 1947); a particularly significant reinterpretation appears in Julio Cortázar’s The Kings (Los reyes, 1949), where the Minotaur is depicted not as a beast but as the essence of the artist – sensitive, sacrificial, and ultimately misjudged. In Cortázar’s version, the labyrinth becomes a metaphor for artistic interiority, and Theseus emerges not as a hero, but as a banal, ambition-driven figure, devoid of any depth.

[21] Serra himself has commented on this aspect, noting that during the editing process he considered introducing a layer of contemplation – particularly as embodied by female spectators within the audience. However, he ultimately decided this dimension was not substantial enough to constitute a meaningful line in the film. Its inclusion would also have implied the presence of an audience, which he deliberately chose to exclude. For more on this, see the interview in Revista de Occidente, no. 525.

[22] Amos Vogel, “Amos Vogel: Why People Object to Avantgarde Cinema?” Komarkive, posted March 27, 2014, YouTube video, 1:35, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EEykjF3bL2g

[23] José Hernández Aparicio and Hernán Cernadas, reviews of Afternoons of Solitude, Google Reviews, translation from Spanish is mine, accessed August 1, 2025, https://www.google.com/search?q=tardes+de+soledad.

[24] Evgeniy Maizel, “On Dwarfs Who Started Small,” Syg.ma (2022), accessed August 1, 2025, https://syg.ma/@sygma/ievghienii-maiziel-o-karlikakh-nachinavshikh-s-malogho.

[25] Albert Serra, Diari de Kassel (Barcelona: Núvol, 2018, Kindle edition), 38. Translation from Catalan is mine.

[26] Albert Serra, “Liberté Q&A with Albert Serra,” Film at Lincoln Center, streamed live on May 3, 2020, YouTube video, 1:05:58, accessed August 1, 2025. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O4MxlEAjiOA.

[27] Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, (London: Continuum, 2003), 9.

[28] Ibid.

[29] Ibid., 88.

[30] Ibid., 31.

[31] Ibid., 71.

[32] Ibid., 83, 40.

[33] Ibid., 25.

[34] One notable aspect of the film – highlighted both by audiences and by Serra himself – is the poetic quality of the dialogues within the cuadrilla, captured via wireless microphones. These spontaneous, often repetitive exchanges, rarely heard by the general public, revealed a surprising humour, intimacy and rhythm.

[35]  Deleuze, Francis Bacon, 6.

[36] Julian Hanich, “When the Wind Is Gently Rustling: Film and Aesthetics of Natural Beauty,” Film-Philosophy 28, no. 2 (2024), 156.

[37] Deleuze, Francis Bacon, 81. Author’s emphasis.

[38]  Lodge, “Afternoons of Solitude.”

[39] Deleuze, Francis Bacon, 52.

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Bibliography

Akler-Bishop, Ryan. “You Cannot Project Your Desire: Albert Serra on Afternoons of Solitude, Bullfighting, and Kristen Stewart.” The Film Stage. 2024. Accessed August 1, 2025. https://thefilmstage.com/you-cannot-project-your-desire-albert-serra-on-afternoons-of-solitude-bullfighting-and-kristen-stewart/.

Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 1991 [1972].

Brody, Richard. “Glory and Gore in Afternoons of Solitude.” The New Yorker. 2025. Accessed August 1, 2025. https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-front-row/glory-and-gore-in-afternoons-of-solitude.

Chion, Michel. Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen. Edited and translated by Claudia Gorbman. New York: Columbia University Press. 2019.

Deleuze, Gilles. Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation. Translated by Daniel W. Smith. London: Continuum. 2003.

Google Reviews. Tardes de Soledad. Last accessed August 1, 2025. https://www.google.com/search?q=tardes+de+soledad

Hanich, Julian. “When the Wind Is Gently Rustling: Film and Aesthetics of Natural Beauty.” Film-Philosophy 28, no. 2 (2024): 153–180.

Hanich, Julian. “Six Types of Silence: On Quiet Atmospheres in Cinema. Forthcoming in The Oxford Handbook of Moving Image Atmospheres and Felt Environments,” edited by Daniel Yacavone and Steffen Hven. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2024.

Lodge, Guy. “Afternoons of Solitude Review: Albert Serra Observes the Matador Life in All Its Absurd Beauty and Obscene Bloodshed.” Variety. 2024. Accessed August 1, 2025. https://variety.com/2024/film/reviews/afternoons-of-solitude-review-1236157814/.

Maizel, Evgeniy. “О карликах, начинавших с малого” [“On Dwarfs Who Started Small”]. Syg.ma. 2022. Accessed August 1, 2025. https://syg.ma/@sygma/ievghienii-maiziel-o-karlikakh-nachinavshikh-s-malogho.

Nichols, Bill. Introduction to Documentary. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 2001.

Rosi, Gianfranco. “Notturno: Treatment for a Documentary Film Shot in the Middle East.” Journal of Italian Cinema and Media Studies 10 (no. 3) (2022): 517–22.

Serra, Albert. Diari de Kassel. Barcelona: Núvol.  2018. Kindle edition.

Serra, Albert. “Liberté Q&A with Albert Serra.” Film at Lincoln Center. Streamed live on May 3, 2020. YouTube video, 1:05:58. Accessed August 1, 2025. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O4MxlEAjiOA.

Serra, Albert. “FFQ&A: Albert Serra.” Film Festival Cologne. Posted May 10, 2025. YouTube video, 45:53, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G5CEOe6R2uw.

Semenova, Alexandra. “Albert Serra: El arte del toreo es el arte de parar el tiempo [The Art of Bullfighting Is the Art of Stopping Time].” Revista de Occidente, no. 525 (2025): 111–130.

Spadoni, Robert. “What Is Film Atmosphere.” Quarterly Review of Film and Video 37, no. 1 (2020): 48–75. https://doi.org/10.1080/10509208.2019.1606558.

Vogel, Amos. “Amos Vogel: Why People Object to Avantgarde Cinema?” Komarkive. Posted March 27, 2014. YouTube video, 1:35. Accessed August 1, 2025. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EEykjF3bL2g.

 

Filmography

Serra, Albert, dir. Liberté. 2019; France, Spain, Portugal: Idéale Audience / Andergraun Films / Lupa Film / Rosa Filmes. Digital.

Serra, Albert, dir. Afternoons of Solitude. 2024; France, Spain, Portugal: Andergraun Films / Lacima Producciones / Idéale Audience / Arte France Cinéma / Rosa Filmes. Digital.

 

Biography

Alexandra Semenova is a multidisciplinary artist and researcher, currently completing a doctoral thesis at the Autonomous University of Madrid. Trained in Fine Arts, she has received several awards and participated in numerous exhibitions and artistic residencies. Alongside her work in illustration, stage design, and education, she has developed a strong interest in the theoretical dimensions of the arts, particularly film philosophy and aesthetics. Her research examines auteur cinema in dialogue with art and literature, drawing on structuralist and post-structuralist approaches while engaging broader questions in contemporary aesthetics. Recent publications include “Through the Lens of Presence: Construction and Deconstruction of the Fourth Wall in the Work of Albert Serra” (Schermi tra lingue, letterature e culture, Ledizioni, 2024).

 

Acknowledgements

The author would like to express sincere gratitude to the following art institutions for their invaluable support in enabling the inclusion of reproductions and images, which enrich the visual dimension of this article alongside the film stills: Museo de Bellas Artes de Bilbao; Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid; VEGAP; Toledo Museum of Art, Toledo, Ohio; Franz Hals Museum, Haarlem and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Special thanks are due to Dr. Susanne Fusso (Wesleyan University) for her careful reading and expert guidance in refining the English text.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.15664/fcj.v22.i0.2992

This article contends with the cinematic form of the tourist romance, investigating how it represents and ideologises urban space through its appropriation of the figure of the flâneur. I discuss here how this subgenre of the romantic comedy is fundamentally bound up with concerns over space, mobility, consumption, and discursive boundaries between inside and outside. I suggest that the figure of the urban flâneur subject is mobilised within this genre as a fantasy of white, bourgeois subjectivity who transforms and takes ownership of city space through means of his romantic encounters, therefore enacting what I suggest is the genre’s endemic spatial logic: a necessarily exclusionary logic which hinges on upholding raced, classed, and gendered power structures. However, while conversations on the tourist romance have largely revolved around dominant US forms, I instead seek to widen the scope of study by analysing a film within the broader global genre which unsettles this understanding of space and the flâneur itself – South Korean auteur Hong Sang-soo’s Parisian romance Night and Day (2008).

Before situating my discussion of Hong Sang-soo within the tourist romance tradition, I first briefly wish to mark a differentiation from the classical mode of the tourist romance which originates in the post-war period, which has been studied closely by scholars like Diane Negra (2001) and Vanessa Schwartz (2007) and include films such as Funny Face (Stanley Donen 1955) and An American in Paris (Vincente Minnelli 1953). However, I outline here a theory of the tourist romance’s exclusionary logic as it appears in this ‘nervous’ mode, one popularised by Woody Allen’s European-set romances such as Everybody Says I Love You (1996) and Midnight in Paris (2012), alongside works by other US auteurs such as Richard Linklater. This mode is ostensibly defined by its formal and ideological opposition to the perceived inauthenticity or superficiality of the classic Hollywood romances. [1] Rather than the quaint artificiality of Hollywood studio sets, primary inspiration is instead drawn from European art cinema, notably the French New Wave or Italian neorealism. As such, a great deal more focus is placed on realist approaches to urban representation.  I therefore suggest that the mode of the ‘nervous’ tourist romance bears significantly upon our understanding of Hong’s film here not only because they share similar artistic influences – most notably the films of Éric Rohmer – but because the nervous mode lays greater claims to realism and ‘authentic’ representation of urban encounter. Thus, it proves rich ground to excavate the more covert forms through which exclusionary spatial logics manifest within the genre.

The literary figure of the urban flâneur – detailed by the French poet Baudelaire and later theorist Walter Benjamin – is particularly vital within the vocabulary of the nervous tourist romance. It is a figure employed in these films to evoke a form of masculine European cultural heritage more elite than the feminised, ‘inauthentic’ tourist subjects of the mainstream Hollywood romances. The symbolic transformation from tourist to flâneur is essential to the romantic urban fantasy of the nervous romances, as it is the way through which they gain access to hidden or exclusive knowledges of city space usually reserved for locals. Thus, this article moves to briefly contextualise how the cultural and urban histories of Paris undergird the nervous tourist romance’s specific characterisations of ‘tourist’ and ‘flâneur ’as forms of urban subjectivity. The cinematic flâneur has been associated with a psychological positionality of alienation or isolation; as I will argue here, however, it operates within the generic framework of tourist romance not as a psychological condition but as a symbolic ideal. These films narrate a subject’s romantic transformation from ‘tourist’ to ‘flâneur’: a racialised and classed fantasy of ultimate freedom, knowledge, and ownership. The tourist romance’s appropriation of New Wave aesthetics – and the evocation of the flâneur figure – creates a space through which American whiteness can be reconstituted by means of retreating into a nostalgic, idealised past and rediscovering a romanticised European cultural heritage. Yet the films of the French New Wave also enacted their own exclusions and erasures within the urban spaces of Paris, often erasing the presence of postcolonial migrants and non-white bodies, reflective of “interior colonialism” occurring in post-war France. [2] David Scott Diffrient notes that, in the same way that the ‘snapshot’ properties of a picture-postcard capture only one static frame of a given landscape, “their form and expression…is contingent upon framing.” [3] He stresses that such exclusionary framing, the “structured absence of racial and ethnic difference” from the film’s composite of Parisian urban life, is employed as direct recourse to what he calls the “empty centre” of Paris: “a dream image of Old Paris that has evaporated into the wisps of an era all but forgotten by an indigenous populace in the throes of industrial modernization.” [4] Theorising this “inner/outer”, or inclusion/exclusion dialectic, within the context of the tourist romance film, we can view the urban fantasy space of the tourist romance film as an attempted reconstitution of this “empty centre” specifically for the benefit of the foreign tourist. By means of erasing racial, cultural, or class difference within Paris’s inner city, the tourist romance covertly privileges affiliations with a white, bourgeois subjectivity as a method of claiming the flâneur ’s access to an otherwise unattainable romantic fantasy of Paris. [5]

Through my concluding reading of South Korean auteur Hong Sang-soo’s 2008 film Night and Day – arguably a tourist romance film, but one not usually framed in such terms – we can see these processes at work more clearly. Night and Day evidences a reflexive exploration of the systematic erasure of racial and class difference from city space, which is inherent to the US form but typically obscured by it. While Night and Day in many ways maintains the tourist romance’s fantasy vision of Paris, it also holds an uneasy textual negotiation with those dimensions of global cities that romance narratives centred around foreign tourists and the middle-class often overlook – undocumented migration, economic inequality, racism, violence, and class conflict.

Hong Sang-soo’s films are not typically studied alongside popular genres; rather, they tend to be framed within the canon of Korean auteur cinema that scholars like Jinhee Choi and Kim Kyung-hyun describe. [6] They highlight Hong’s remarkable uniformity regarding characters and subject matter (films about “a man chasing a woman, foolish decisions, embarrassing conversations, and lots of drinking” [7]) as well as his formal proclivities – complex, puzzle-like narratives, constant use of repetition and doubling within the narrative, use of zoom shots and long takes, and so on. [8] These formal characteristics have lent themselves to a number of psychoanalytic and political readings: both Kim and Choi, for example, argue that Hong’s inert, impotent male characters reflect a broader “crisis of masculinity” in post-military era Korea. [9] Hee-seung Irene Lee and Marc Raymond, by contrast, draw upon the psychoanalytic theories of Lacan and Deleuze to characterise Hong’s male characters as highly self-reflexive, ‘essayistic’ critiques of his own positionality as an artist. [10] Similarly, Hong’s work is frequently analysed within a wider global canon of auteur cinema, with scholars noting narrative and aesthetic influences from other Asian New Wave artists of the era, such as Tsai Ming Liang or Wong Kar-Wai, or with the European New Wave auteurs, particularly French filmmaker Éric Rohmer. [11] Marco Grosoli, in particular, has noted how Hong’s formal and narrative trademarks – his love of stories about misplaced desire and awkward romantic connections, his representation of morally-complex protagonists, his “cold and abstract humour” – all form part of his “Rohmerian filiation.”  [12] Despite the clear transnational dialogues and intertextuality within his work, however, Hong is rarely put in conversation with global genre texts. Sueyoung Park Primiano is one of the few scholars to re-consider Hong’s films along the terms of romantic comedy, as she astutely notes that they “both reject familiar romantic comedy conventions and embrace the popular genre.” [13]

What I am interested in here is not whether Night and Day is or isn’t a romantic comedy, but rather how the film’s own representation of Paris, and of the male tourist/flâneur in Paris, might then produce an understanding of how the tourist romance functions on a global scale – one which is not currently accounted for in scholarship solely focused on the Euro-American films. Night and Day is a limit case that tests the very form of the tourist romance itself. In its convergence of “Nouvelle Vague-ish” narratives and aesthetics with the romantic comedy, Night and Day enacts a similar project to that of the Euro-American films – a nostalgic longing to reconstruct the “empty center” of mid-century Paris in the modern city. [14] Night and Day’s depiction of Paris is made more complex, however, by its simultaneous desire to expose the more negative aspects of global mobility for raced subjects, whilst also maintaining the types of structured gazes (white, male, and bourgeois) which grant access to the nervous romance’s spatiality.

 

Paris and Tourist Cinema

While the tourist romance is a form that is by no means solely defined by a relationship to the city of Paris, or even to Europe, Paris is my specific focus here because of its persistent association with cinematic romances since the post-war period. It is the city that is still the most often commodified as an object for the foreign tourist, the most widely circulated within global popular cinema, but it is also a city whose fraught history of erasure, oppression, and violence produces points of tension with this romantic imagination.

Although Paris has been settled since before the Roman Empire and has seen cycles of prosperity and deterioration, it was Baron Haussman’s radical “creative destruction” [15] in the nineteenth century, the razing and reconstruction of vast areas of the medieval city, that arguably consolidated Paris’s status as a modern, innovative, and fashionable capital. [16] One of the vital successes of this reinvention – one that arguably anticipated neoliberal imperatives of urban redevelopment a century later – was Haussman’s reconfiguration of urban space to privilege a specifically touristic gaze, to “reconstruct the city itself as a spectacular image.” [17] Paris’s “belle époque”, the nineteenth and early twentieth century boom in cultural activity which championed the city’s charms, helped consolidate its global–reputation as bohemian, sublimely beautiful, and romantic. This epoch was importantly shaped by American tourists and ex-patriates, formed as part of a bourgeois impulse to visit a city which “welcomed looking.” [18] Some of the most famous were the “lost generation” of American writers – Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, and Ezra Pound – whose bohemian lifestyle of café-dwelling and artistic collaboration solidified Paris’s status in the American imagination as a haven for creative expression. [19] Paris was also alluring for African American writers and musicians, who settled here after  World War I, feeling a greater degree of freedom than back at home, in part due to Paris’s reputation for cosmopolitanism, liberty, and its history as a centre of political revolution. [20]

Paris’s perceived tolerance of diversity remained integral to the romantic fantasy of the city, despite it being arguably superficial in reality: as Charles Rearick notes, this ‘revolutionary’ or progressive reputation tends to gloss over Paris’s connection to the nation’s “ugly history” of colonialism and the city as a site where violent acts of xenophobia, such as the 1961 massacre of Algerians, have taken place. [21] For Americans, however, Paris became an object of immense fascination through the mass reproduction of the city’s image in advertisements, guidebooks, posters, fashion magazines, photographs, popular music, and cinema, all of which endorsed Paris as the capital of romantic love, as a “place of beauty, romance, and pleasure.” [22] The latter point gestures to the start of Americanised tourist gaze, enacting a certain ignorance or exclusion of specific kinds of histories within the city in favour of others – Paris memorialises some revolutions and violently suppresses others, it welcomes immigrants from America but not its former colonies. This can help us contextualise the types of spatialised exclusions at work in the tourist rom-com.

Although varied in their approaches, scholars have largely theorised the workings of a few interconnected factors which vectorise the complex relationship between Paris city space, romance, and tourist subjectivity: the reconstruction of the city as itself an object of touristic spectacle, the emergence of the distinctly Parisian literary and cinematic concept of flâneur, and the social changes in the nineteenth and twentieth century that enabled both the emergence of the fashionable female body of the Parisienne and city’s reputation for tolerance, bohemian lifestyles, and sexual freedom. [23] Vital for the romantic mythology of the city since the nineteenth century was not just the physical transformation from a medieval, narrow, cramped urban layout to a city of lush green parks, wide boulevards, and open squares, but also the emergence of the flâneur as a new type of urban figure to traverse these spaces. First identified within the literary works of Baudelaire, Walter Benjamin’s unfinished Arcades Project claims the flâneur, a detached observer who is free to admire and catalogue the activities he sees on the city streets, as the archetypal figure emerging from the conditions of urban modernity. [24] Baudelaire’s flâneur was not only an “archetypal Parisian” but also invariably male, contrasted against the prostitute or streetwalker as the female wandering figure. [25] As Kaitlyn Greenidge argues, the flâneur’s characteristic ability to blend into the crowd, to observe the city without himself being observed, is due to the inherent privilege and anonymity that maleness and whiteness afford. [26]

Flâneur and tourism as two forms of urban spectatorship share a great deal of characteristics. Both are, as noted by Hazel H. Hahn, defined by their “mobility and curiosity.” [27] But whereas the flâneur is posed as distinctly Parisian, an encapsulation of an informed, intellectual observer, the tourist is the flâneur’s foil – the foreigner, or ‘provincial’, whose spectatorship is seen as rapid, superficial, “vacuous.” [28] Although Hahn associates the derision of the tourist figure with a French sense of superiority over English culture, what is also suggested is the implicitly xenophobic motivations of the tourist/flâneur dichotomy. The flâneur maintains his privileged position, his access to the city, and the ability to unveil the city’s philosophical mysteries by means of his maleness, his whiteness, and his identification with a specifically Parisian lifestyle. Many of the pursuits of modern tourism in Paris (both in terms of physical and cinematic tourism) endeavour to cultivate an experience of the city beyond the denigrated perception of the foreign tourist and instead enact the flâneur’s ownership and intimate knowledge of its streets and public spaces, to replicate a romanticised ‘true’ Parisian experience, and to “to mingle with the anonymous crowd, to come across little-known sites in chance encounters.” [29] The flâneur’s assumed whiteness is, as Richard Dyer has famously observed, central to his claim to anonymity and ‘unmarked-ness’; the white man claims universality, speaks for all human experience as opposed to just for his race and his gender, the default from which all others deviate (and whose bodies are discursively marked) – in this way, the flâneur “secures a position of power.” [30] Drawing from as far back as the Lost Generation, the urban fantasy of Paris has become structured around this very transformation from tourist to flâneur (or, in the case of the female tourist, into an object of spectacle in the form of the alluring and fashionable figure of the Parisienne). In other words, the transnational spatiality of Paris as a romantic city is necessarily both an imagined space and an imagined kind of racialised and gendered subjectivity.

Corresponding to these dichotomised spaces and subjectivities – local and foreign, tourist and flâneur – I suggest that there are therefore two branching forms in which the tourist romance film manifests: firstly, the rom com “postcard” aesthetic mode, a largely feminine register characterised by built studio sets, musical sequences, and with a focus on painterly compositions and colours [31]; secondly, the ‘nervous’ romantic mode, a more masculinised approach to the genre commonly associated with American independent filmmaking traditions, which is heavily influenced by European cinematic forms as opposed to other artforms, and which usually de-values “prettiness” in favour of realism, ambivalence, and authenticity [32]. This dual-pronged formulation of the US tourist romance’s spatiality is applicable across multiple cities of Western Europe: Vienna in Before Sunrise (Richard Linklater, 1995), for example, or Rome in Roman Holiday (Billy Wilder, 1953). Yet the urban fantasy of Paris in particular, as the “romance capital of the world”, has been by far the subject of most interest. In both modes, Paris functions as an object of sublime touristic consumption, a fantasy space where great importance is placed on nostalgia and the claiming of ennobled European cultural heritage through the invocation of French artistic forms – primarily paintings, music, ballet, literature, and cinema. In these films, Europe becomes a “staging ground for nostalgic fantasies of whiteness” in which white Americans can escape to an abstracted past, their “imaginary homelands”, and are transformed by its romantic possibilities – usually resulting in the formation of a heterosexual coupling [33]. The two modes are inherently invested in the privileged access to the city that is granted by white bourgeois subjectivity.

At the same time, however, a great majority of Parisian tourist films within the nervous mode have often seen a more ambivalent treatment of Paris. [34] In these films, the city’s cinematic histories are self-reflexively evoked as a way to confront the characters with their own romantic delusions, to have them discover the fault lines between fantasy and reality, between a nostalgic fantasy of ‘Old’ Paris and the modern realities of the global city. Yet they are ultimately reluctant to discard either rom-com narrative convention or Paris’s romanticised aesthetics altogether, instead often upholding both Paris’s potency as a magical space of idealised romance and the privileged position of the romantic couple within it.

Such spatialised tensions between real and imagined Paris are constructed (and ultimately reconciled) in rather an extreme fashion in Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris: the film follows a successful but creatively unfulfilled screenwriter, Gil (Owen Wilson), who takes a trip to Paris with disparaging fiancée Inez (Rachel McAdams) but finds the modern city, and current partner, shallow and uninspiring. While writing a novel about a man who owns a ‘nostalgia shop’ – a detail that itself is a kind of winking meta-commentary about the commodification of an imagined past – he is unable to be productive until, at midnight, he stumbles back in time to 1920s Paris.  There he converses with his idols – Hemingway, Stein, the Fitzgeralds – and falls in love with a beautiful Parisienne (Marion Cottillard). Allen’s film is undoubtedly a glorification of Paris and its cultural legacies, with its dreamy cinematography “mirror[ing] the admiring and monumentalizing gaze of the appreciative tourist.” [35] While the American tourist fantasy is indulged for both Gil, as Allen’s persona, and the viewer (particularly in the love plot between an American visitor and a seductive, beautiful Parisienne), it also criticises it as ultimately unobtainable. Gil’s ‘hero’s journey concludes with him realising that he cannot continue retreating into his nostalgic fantasies but should instead enjoy the present-day city and its romantic possibilities. As a contemporary American tourist in Paris, Gil must wander through both the real city and its unreal fantasy spaces to disillusion himself of his desire to live in the Paris of an idealised past and of his current romantic relationship. Thus, his dalliance with Adriana is left in the past, and he starts anew by breaking his engagement with Inez and embarking on a fledgling relationship with a modern-day Parisienne (Lea Seydoux) (see Figure 1).

The way in which the protagonists of tourist romances like Midnight have a doubled experience of Paris as both a ‘real’ and romanticised city mirrors broader accounts of global tourist experiences in the city. In recent years, for example, “Paris Syndrome” has been introduced as a term to describe the experience of many Japanese and Chinese tourists who experience alienation, disillusionment, and sometimes even severe anxiety and depression when confronted with the real city compared to the romanticised image conveyed to them by various mediated images. [36] Dung and Reijinders’s work “Paris Off-Screen: Chinese Tourists in Cinematic Paris” finds that the rom-com genre in particular seems to be the primary agent in the idealisation of Paris in Asia as “a dreamland filled with romantic possibilities… [an] idealistic image for the tourists to fulfill the needs of romantic escapism and for extraordinary experiences.” [37] Within the body of scholarship surrounding Paris and the rom-com genre, the great majority has focused exclusively on the relationship between France and the US. Yet what phenomena like the Paris Syndrome demonstrate is that Paris tourist romance narratives proliferate and circulate globally. [38] In the last few decades, increasing numbers of foreign visitors to the city hail from East and South Asia, most notably India, China, Japan, and South Korea [39]: John Urry’s third edition of his influential study, The Tourist Gaze (2011), notes this phenomenon as part of the “globalising of the tourist gaze.” He argues that multiple tourist gazes “have become core to global culture”, with modern tourist practices forming part of a complex ‘global hybrid’ of “infrastructures, flows of images and people…that spread across the globe and reshape and re-perform what is ‘global.’” [40] Urry’s recognition of this returned gaze invites us to reconsider dominant understandings of the cinematic tourist romance as a primarily white Western endeavour.

It is surprising, then, that scholars have been disinclined to theorise films outside of the Euro-American axis as part of a global tourist romance genre – especially when films like Night and Day share such a similar interest in self-reflexivity towards romance, and towards genre itself as the nervous romances like Midnight in Paris. Such omission might be symptomatic of both a US-centric tendency within rom-com studies itself and certain residual snobbish legacies of global art cinema discourse, whereby the genre is assumed to be too inherently commercial, mainstream, or simplistic to coincide with auteurist works. However, it is indeed the case that when looking across global cinemas, Paris is posed as a more complex site of desire and conflict. Similarly, the dualistic categories of urban mobility and spectatorship, split in terms of ‘tourist’ and ‘flâneur’, become significantly troubled. Both domestic French cinema and global cinema’s depictions of diasporic, immigrant, or postcolonial subjectivities in Paris rarely coincide with the rom-com at all. [41] Films like Senegalese Touki Bouki, L’afrance (Alain Gomis 2001), and Taiwanese What Time is it There? (Tsai Ming-liang 2001) configure Paris as simultaneously an object of immense desire (both aspirational and romantic) and a space in which their subjects’ very presence forces them into a state of surveillance, alienation, and abjection. [42] The superficiality and detachment of the tourist gaze is displaced with the alienated, fractured diasporic (or migrant) experience of the city: as Dorottya Mozes notes about the practice of Black flânerie, the non-white (and female) flâneur, without the safety of such privileges within urban space, must negotiate “the homelessness, dislocation, alienation, and objectification of the Black subject.” [43] In the context of Asian New Wave art cinema more broadly – the tradition from which Night and Day emerged – the male flâneur is similarly configured as the alienated, fractured subject of urban modernity. Interestingly, Jinhee Choi argues that the male flâneur of South Korean cinema is fundamentally unable to attain the romantic love and connection he constantly searches for within the city; thus, he is a figure in fact antithetical to the generic logic of the romantic comedy. [44]

As the brief discussion above makes clear, the Euro-American modes of the tourist rom-com do not account for the experience of non-white or non-Western conceptions of urban flânerie, nor reflect the entirety of global film traditions that engage the tourist gaze. What my concluding analysis of Night and Day intends to demonstrate here, then, is a clearer understanding of the racialised and classed dimensions of the genre’s construction of urban space that are not necessarily revealed by standalone readings of the transatlantic films.

 

Night and Day

Night and Day concerns middle-aged painter Sung-nam, who has fled to Paris from Seoul to avoid prosecution for the possession of marijuana. Leaving his frantic wife behind, Sung-nam stays in a run-down guesthouse for Korean visitors and wanders the streets of Paris, in the process meeting an ex-girlfriend who introduces him to a community of Korean expatriate artists. Sung-nam’s dalliances with these female artists (including his married ex-girlfriend and a young art student, Yu-jeon) display a stark cynicism and viciousness towards “sentimentality and idealized love” and to the rom-com form itself. [45] Sung-nam is, in many ways, a typical Hong Sang-soo protagonist; however, his obsessive and neurotic behaviour towards women and constant desire to secure his own sense of bourgeois masculinity also importantly align him with the male flâneurs of the Euro-American nervous romances – particularly Allen’s on-screen personas such as Gil Pender in Midnight in Paris. Further, there are also clear points of reference to Éric Rohmer’s Moral Tales series, especially the Paris-set films such as The Bakery Girl of Monceau (1963) or Love in the Afternoon (1972). While both Night and Day and the US nervous romances draw significant stylistic inspiration from French New Wave films more broadly (including Rohmer’s other Paris-set romantic comedy films such as Rendevous in Paris [1995] and The Aviator’s Wife [1981]), Hong’s most close referents are the films in which love stories are framed as moral dilemmas as opposed to romantic ones. Night and Day moves away from ‘romance’ as the main organising logic of male desire, and instead poses it in terms of sin, lust, and carnality: the married Sung-nam’s encounters and dates with the various Korean expatriate women are framed as the hero’s trials, him trying (and failing) to resist temptation and remain faithful to his wife. As part of these, the film features recurring motifs of religiosity and Sung-nam’s obsession with sin: he takes naps on the pews of a church; he reads a passage of the Bible to his ex-girlfriend about casting out sin in order to try and dissuade her from having an affair with him; he notes in one of Yu-Jeon’s paintings that the subject “looked like a sinner”.

In this way, Night and Day arguably unveils what is usually obfuscated within the spatial construction of the tourist rom-com. Its central ‘hero’ Sung-nam (Yeong-ho Kim) desperately strives to transform himself into the white, bourgeois flâneur subject through his walks and encounters in Paris – and thus ‘redeem’ himself – but is under constant threat of failing, of becoming too closely associated with the types of subjects made invisible through the tourist rom-com’s structuring of space – such as “sinners”, criminals, the homeless, the informal workers, and the undocumented immigrants. Despite being himself a member of a global bourgeois class, Sung-nam is displaced from the kind of privileged subjectivity claimed by the white tourist subjects of the Euro-American nervous romances, and thus cannot be transformed into the flâneur. Instead, both his racialised Otherness and the circumstances through which he comes to Paris (being on the run from the police) place him in close physical proximity to migrant and working-class subjects.

This sense of liminality informs much of the aesthetic regime of Night and Day. For example, the squalid and cramped interior of the guest house for Korean migrants (in which Sung-nam rents a bunk-bed in a room with 10 others) is juxtaposed against its beautiful, Haussmanian exterior and the picturesque Parisian cobbled streets and sidewalk cafes surrounding it. The discrepancy between interior and exterior surfaces visually reinforces the discrepancies between the sanitised, romantic spaces of tourist Paris and the unseen, hidden spaces of the immigrant. The film’s roving, improvisational style of cinematography means that the camera is frequently diverted away from the landmark, the picturesque, and the bourgeois, and instead directed to the ground levels, to the city’s hidden spaces: we see the quaint cobbled pavements mired by dirt and grime, including Sung-nam’s (and our, the viewer) gaze lingering on the sight of a dead bird on the road, or a sanitary worker brushing dog shit off the kerb. Similarly, Hong having elected to shoot the film digitally as opposed to on 35mm film means that the filmic texture is much less dreamy and aestheticised. Unlike the smoothed-over quality of the film stock typically used by tourist rom-coms like Midnight in Paris, Night and Day’s digital sharpness ensures that Sung-nam’s flâneurial wanderings are captured with more uncompromising and unflattering detail (see Figure 2).

Throughout the film, Sung-nam is often placed within surroundings that shift between bourgeois aesthetics and the aesthetics of transience and deprivation: he lives in cramped hostels and carries a plastic bag holding his possessions, but also looks on longingly at a group of French men and women eating oysters in a Parisian restaurant. The latter shot is particularly potent in crystallising the inside/outside dialectic – and its relationship to a masculinised sense of power and ownership of space – that this film plays upon: as Sung-nam strolls on one of his many walks around the streets of Paris, carrying his plastic convenience store bag and wearing his scruffy, ill-fitting shirt, he stops upon this picturesque scenario of the two couples having lunch. This shot is framed from the interior, with Sung-nam walking into the centre of frame, aligned with the table that holds the extravagant display of oysters, and in-between the two couples on either side; he is here excluded outside of the restaurant, only able to peer in through the window. Notably, all members of the couple are white. Sung-nam, on the other side of the window, gazes intensely at what could be encapsulated as a typically Parisian scene (and indeed a romantic scene), thus adopting the positionality of the tourist in this moment. Yet the composition frames Sung-nam as uneasily situated within this positionality. Here he is aligned with the tourist gaze, but also, in his exclusion from the privileges of whiteness, is not yet able to claim access to the romantic spaces of the city, nor to the subjectivity of the flâneur.

The kinds of unstable, or precarious, gazes that characterise the racialised subjectivity of the tourist/migrant – but not the tourist/flâneur – are reflected not just in the film’s construction of space, but also in the narrative itself. Unusually for the Parisian tourist romance, the film depicts the experiences of migrant struggle. On arrival, Sung-nam tries to find temporary work, but the only option available to him without a valid working visa, he is frankly told, is to become a janitor or a mover. While the white, middle-class, American writers and artists that populate the nervous tourist romances take their transnational mobility for granted, with their legal status to live and work in Paris never in question, Sung-nam, as a raced subject in Paris, is more rigidly policed. He cannot stake the same unquestioned claim on a bourgeois profession and lifestyle that he has always enjoyed at home, and instead is forced into more informal or precarious work.

However, despite his status as an undocumented migrant and criminal, Sung-nam is ultimately able to gain access to a privileged gaze over Paris during the course of the film and can experience it as a romanticised, homogenised fantasy space. Yet to achieve this, the film envisions Paris as an overtly white space, contrasting the protagonist’s own Otherness. While modern Paris is incredibly ethnically diverse, Night and Day erases other non-white bodies almost completely. The community of Korean expatriates within which Sung-nam finds refuge appears as the only othered figures against a white majority: Sung-nam’s spontaneous encounters on the streets of Paris – such as with the young couple he observes buying cigarettes at a local store, or his ex-girlfriend that he spots crossing the street near the Boulevard Saint-Germain – are exclusively with Koreans. The only interactions Sung-nam has with non-Koreans are his wordless, longing gazes at the two white couples from outside a restaurant window, and at the young white man whom Sung-nam envies for “having a house and a car”. In this way, the film in fact seems to work within, and not against, the surreal fantasy construction of rom-com Paris as a space of racial homogeneity.

Night and Day not only retains the nervous tourist romance’s construction of Paris through its exclusion of racial difference, but also re-entrenches it through its construction of gender. The film’s romance plot enacts a re-assertion of a masculine, bourgeois ownership of Parisian city space through both Sung-nam’s practice of flânerie and his courtship of women. Sung-nam has frequent encounters with attractive women on the city streets, and the spaces he visits are often adorned with erotic imagery of the female body at which he can level his fetishising gaze; during a visit to Musée d’Orsay with a female companion, the pair linger on a hanging portrait of nude female genitalia – Gustave Courbet’s The Origin of the World (1866). As Youngmin Choe observes in her own analysis of this scene, the shot is composed almost as a mise-en-abyme in which Sung-nam takes the position of the repossoir figure (the device through which the viewer’s gaze is directed into the composition). This gaze upon the painting, and upon Paris city space more broadly, is a deforming and misogynistic one for Choe; the film thus favours a masculinised line of perspective of the city not only through Sung-nam as flâneur but also at the level of filmic composition itself. [46]

The film stresses Sung-nam’s practice of flânerie as both a sexualised form of voyeurism and an explicit seduction technique – for example, his desperate attempts to meet Yu-Jeon on the street outside her apartment building in hopes of gaining access to her tiny chambre de bonne apartment. There are also explicit sequences of sexual fantasy within the film, including a dream sequence in which Sung-nam, highly aroused by the sight of Yu-Jeon’s feet, enters her apartment and sucks on her toes as she sleeps. His fixation on her feet becomes a potent symbol in the context of the film’s emphasis on mobility, transience, and walking within the city. This sexual fantasy betrays Sung-nam’s desire to violate and take mastery of the female object of desire (being that she is unconscious, and thus without any agency), with the object being in fact both Yu-Jeon and also the city of Paris. His aggressive pursuit of Yu-Jeon ultimately results in a trip away to the French seaside, where they finally sleep together. In their hotel room, Sung-nam pressures Yu-Jeon into sex even though he failed to buy a condom; once his fantasy has been actualised, however, Sung-nam abandons her to return to his wife in Korea, despite Yu-Jeon telling him that she might be pregnant. In this final act of seduction (even to the extreme possessiveness of potential impregnation), Night and Day uncomfortably renders – even makes grotesque – the masculinised, bourgeois logics of ownership that have typically underpinned the nervous tourist romance’s urban fantasy as a whole.

 

Conclusion

Night and Day’s use of generic convention, its nasty re-staging of a romance plot in the vein of the Euro-American tourist romance, can be read as not merely narrative reference or pastiche but rather a self-reflexive interrogation of the very power structures that have always existed under the surface of both the nervous romance’s fantasy construction of Paris and its distinction between tourist and flâneur subjectivities. The film questions if these kinds of positionalities and, indeed, the very romantic fantasy of transforming from one into the other, can reasonably be re-established once both the city and popular genre texts themselves have been thrown into a global frame.

What is at stake in reading a film like Night and Day as a part of the global tourist rom com genre, I have argued, is acknowledgment of how the genre itself functions spatially and ideologically as a cinematic framework that constructs a fantasy image of a city which is inherently exclusive to certain subjects. This exclusivity is created – and naturalised – in especially insidious ways in the ‘nervous’ mode popularised by US indie romances, as its central transformation narrative of the foreign tourist subject into the sophisticated flâneur is predicated upon racialised, classed, and gendered forms of urban subjectivity that determine the boundaries of “inside” against “outside”, “authentic” against “inauthentic”.

This article has stressed how the city of Paris holds particular significance within the global tourist romance and therefore lays out most clearly these processes at work. Through my focus on Night and Day, it has also highlighted the need for film scholarship to revisit and critique the form of tourist romance itself through a global lens and better understand the ways in which it constructs a spatiality that imposes a rigid script for how to gaze at, move within, and experience the city.

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Notes

[1]The nervous romance as a whole has been theorised as a masculinisation of a predominantly feminine genre; Frank Krutnik’s influential discussion of the nervous romances of the 1970s points to the interest of male auteurs such as Woody Allen in formulating a more ambivalent, cynical approach to modern romance in response to second-wave feminism’s perceived destabilising of masculinity (Krutnik 1990, p 63–64).

[2] Ross 1996, 112-13.

[3] Diffrient 2015, 591.

[4] Ibid., 596.

[5] Ibid., 606-7.

[6] Choi 2010; Kim 2004; Kim 2011.

[7] Lee 2015, 152-3.

[8] See Choi  2010; Lee 2015; Kim 2004; Unger 2012.

[9] Choi 2010, 175.

[10] Lee 2017; Raymond 2014.

[11] Choi 2010, 184-5.

[12] Grosoli 2010,  98-9. Hong has made his fascination with French art cinema even more visible through his frequent collaborations with arthouse film star Isabelle Huppert in films such as Claire’s Camera (2017) and In Another Country (2012), with the former film’s name taking direct inspiration from Rohmer’s 1970 film Claire’s Knee; his connections to Éric Rohmer’s oeuvre have in fact been so strong that the Asian Film Archive even curated a curated programme titled “Twin Tales: Hong Sang-soo and Éric Rohmer” in 2025 (‘Twin Tales: Éric Rohmer and Hong Sang-soo’, Asian Film Archive, Jul 2025).

[13] Park-Primiano 2020, 54.

[14] Grosoli 2010,  95; Diffrient 2015, 596.

[15] Harvey 2007.

[16] Schwartz 2007, 97.

[17] Ibid., 57.

[18] Ibid., 135, 166.

[19] Bell and Shalit 2010,  9.

[20] Schwartz 2007, 169; Bell and de Shalit 2011, 11.

[21] Rearick 2011, 195.

[22] Ibid., 202.

[23] DeJean 2014, 473; Chase 2007, 66

[24] Buck-Morss 1986.

[25] Friedberg 1993, 30; Gunning 1997, 42

[26] Greenidge 2020, 212.

[27] Hahn 2014, 204.

[28] Hahn 2014, 195–96.

[29] Ibid., 201.

[30] Dyer 1997, 9.

[31] See Schwartz 2007; Negra 2001; Handyside 2004.

[32] See Deleyto 2009; Galt 2011.

[33] Negra 2001, 90.

[34] Included with this trend are films as early as Richard Linklater’s Before Sunset, Julie Delpy’s 2 Days in Paris (2007), Hong Sang Soo’s Night and Day (2008), and portmanteau film Paris, Je T’aime (2006), but it has proliferated in the 2010s; films such as Taiwan’s Au Revoir Taipei, the USA’s Midnight in Paris, Under the Eiffel Tower (Archie Borders 2014), and Frances Ha (Noah Baumbach 2012), Britain’s Le Weekend (Roger Mitchell 2014), Hong Kong’s Paris Holiday (James Yuen 2015), Japan’s I Have to Buy New Shoes (Eriko Kitagawa 2012), Belgium’s Emma Peeters (Nicole Palo 2019) and Lost in Paris (Dominique Abel 2016), and India’s Queen (Vikhas Bahl 2013), Befikre (Adidtya Chopra 2016), and Ae Dil Hai Mushkil (Karan Johar 2016) all depict a somewhat conflicted view of both Paris and modern romance itself.

[35] Fusco 2013, 312.

[36] Dupain and Novitskaya 2015,  325, 336.

[37] Ibid., 292.

[38] Humbert 2013,  17.

[39] ‘France Posts New Tourist Record despite Yellow Vest Unrest,’ France24, 2019.

[40] Urry and Larsen 2011,  21-22.

[41] As Mary Harrod notes, the rom-com genre in France still largely privileges white characters, although contemporary films such as Un bonheur n’arrive jamais seul (James Huth, 2012) and Samba are part of a more recent cycle that attempts to address these divides (Harrod 2015, 208). On the whole, however, films focused on Parisian immigrant subjectivities tend to depict the darker or more violent aspects of the city’s globality, posing Paris’s romantic image as a site of liberty, justice, and political revolution at odds with its history of colonialism, oppression, and systematic exclusion of marginalised subjects from its inner city (See Will Higbee 2015).

[42] In Touki Bouki(1973), for example, the Senegalese couple’s aspirations for a glamorous Parisian lifestyle are constantly thwarted by their struggle to come up with the money to pay for the voyage from Dakar to Paris. Thus, economic disadvantage (a legacy of colonial oppression) is stressed as the systemic barrier preventing them from the ease of travel and border-crossing that the tourist enjoys.

[43] Mózes 2020, 35.

[44] Choi 2015, 71.

[45] Lisiak 2015, 839.

[46] Choe 2023, 244.

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Buck-Morss, Susan. “The Flâneur, the Sandwichman and the Whore: The Politics of Loitering.” New German Critique, no. 39 (1986): 99–140. https://doi.org/10.2307/488122.

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Choi, Jinhee. The South Korean Film Renaissance: Local Hitmakers, Global Provocateurs. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2010.

———. “Seoul Flâneur? Breathless and Café Noir.” Journal of Japanese and Korean Cinema 7, no. 1 (2015): 57–72.

Croll, Ben. “Emily in Paris and Monsieur Spade Lead the Charge for France-Focused Shoots.” Variety, May 8, 2024. https://variety.com/2024/film/focus/france-film-production-emily-in-paris-franklin-1235994437/.

———. “France Lures International Productions Via Incentives, Amenities.” Variety, October 29, 2023. https://variety.com/2023/artisans/global/france-lures-international-productions-incentives-amenities-1235772516/.

DeJean, Joan. How Paris Became Paris: The Invention of the Modern City. London: Bloomsbury, 2014. https://go.exlibris.link/knhh4wST.

Deleyto, Celestino. The Secret Life of Romantic Comedy. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009.

Diffrient, David Scott. “Collecting Views and Visions of the City: Episode Films, Paris vu Par, and ‘Postcard Cinema.’” Quarterly Review of Film and Video 32, no. 7 (2015): 589–610. https://doi.org/10.1080/10509208.2015.968758.

Dung, Yun-An, and Stijn Reijnders. “Paris Offscreen: Chinese Tourists in Cinematic Paris.” Tourist Studies 13, no. 3 (2013): 287–303. https://doi.org/10.1177/1468797613498164.

Dupain, Claire, and Olga Novitskaya. “Paris Destination Image from the Point of View of Asian Tourists.” In ISCONTOUR 2015 – Tourism Research Perspectives, edited by Roman Egger and Christian Maurer, 2015.

“France Posts New Tourist Record Despite Yellow Vest Unrest.” France 24, May 17, 2019. https://www.france24.com/en/20190517-france-tourism-record-number-visitors-tourists-despite-yellow-vests-paris.

Friedberg, Anne. Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.

Fusco, Katherine. “Love and Citation in Midnight in Paris.” In A Companion to Woody Allen, edited by Peter Bailey and Sam Girgus. London: Wiley, 2013.

Galt, Rosalind. Pretty: Film and the Decorative Image. New York: Columbia University Press, 2011.

Greenidge, Kaitlyn. “Sex in the City: The Black Female Flâneur in Raven Leilani’s Luster.” Virginia Quarterly Review 96, no. 2 (2020).

Grosoli, Marco. “Moral Tales from Korea: Hong Sang-soo and Éric Rohmer.” Acta Universitatis Sapientiae, Film and Media Studies 3 (2010): 95–108.

Guha, Malini. From Empire to the World: Migrant London and Paris in the Cinema. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015.

Gunning, Tom. “From the Kaleidoscope to the X-Ray: Urban Spectatorship, Poe, Benjamin, and Traffic in Souls (1913).” Wide Angle 19, no. 4 (1997): 25–61.

Harrod, Mary. From France with Love: Gender and Identity in French Romantic Comedy. London: I.B. Tauris, 2015.

Harvey, David. “Neoliberalism as Creative Destruction.” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 610, no. 1 (2007): 22–44.

Higbee, Will. “Diasporic and Postcolonial Cinema from the 1990s to the Present.” In A Companion to Contemporary French Cinema, edited by Raphaëlle Moine et al., 136–161. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2015.

Hahn, H. Hazel. “The Flâneur, the Tourist, the Global Flâneur, and Magazine Reading as Flânerie.” Dix-Neuf, March 2014.

Handyside, Fiona. “Beyond Hollywood, into Europe: The Tourist Gaze in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (Hawks, 1953) and Funny Face (Donen, 1957).” Studies in European Cinema 1, no. 2 (2004): 77–89.

Humbert, Brigitte. “Nostalgia and Modernity in Two Recent ‘Paris’ Films.” Quarterly Review of Film and Video 30, no. 1 (2013): 16–24.

Kim, Kyung-hyun. The Remasculinization of Korean Cinema. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004.

———. Virtual Hallyu: Korean Cinema of the Global Era. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011.

Krutnik, Frank. “The Faint Aroma of Performing Seals: The ‘Nervous’ Romance and the Comedy of the Sexes.” The Velvet Light Trap, no. 26 (1990): 57.

Lee, Hee-seung Irene. “The Ethics of Becoming a Subject: A Reading of Hong Sang-soo’s Right Now, Wrong Then.” Journal of Japanese and Korean Cinema 9, no. 2 (2015): 141–54.

Lisiak, Agata A. “Making Sense of Absence: Tsai Ming-Liang’s Cinematic Portrayals of Cities.” City 19, no. 6 (2015): 837–56.

Marston, Kendra. “The World Is Her Oyster: Negotiating Contemporary White Womanhood in Hollywood’s Tourist Spaces.” Cinema Journal 55, no. 4 (Summer 2016): 3–27.

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Mazumdar, Ranjani. “Aviation, Tourism and Dreaming in 1960s Bombay Cinema.” BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies 2, no. 2 (2011): 129–55.

 

Filmography

Night and Day (2008) Hong Sang soo [online]. South Korea: Sponge Entertainment 

Touki Bouki (1973) Djibril Diop Mambéty [DVD]. United States: World Cinema Foundation.

What Time is it There? (2001) Tsai Ming Liang [online]. United States: WinStar Cinema.

Midnight in Paris (2011) Woody Allen [online]. United States: Song Pictures Classics.  

Before Sunrise (1995) Richard Linklater [DVD]. United States: Columbia Pictures.

Before Sunset (2004) Richard Linklater [DVD]. United States: Warner Independent Pictures. 

Roman Holiday (1953) William Wyler [DVD]. United States: Paramount Pictures. 

An American in Paris (1951) Vincente Minnelli [DVD]. United States: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.  

The Bakery Girl of Morceau (1963) Éric Rohmer [online]. France: Les Films du Losange. 

The Aviator’s Wife (1981) Éric Rohmer [online]. France: Les Films du Losange. 

Rendezvous in Paris (1995) Éric Rohmer [online]. France: Les Films du Losange.

Love in the Afternoon (1972) Éric Rohmer [online]. United States: Columbia Pictures. 

L’afrance (2001) Alain Gomis [online]. France: Cine-Classic.

Everybody Says I Love You (1996) Woody Allen [online]. United States: Miramax.

 

Biography

Harriet Idle received her PhD in Film Studies at University College Dublin in 2025, where her research focused on the romantic comedy genre, urban space, and contemporary global popular cinemas. Her work on romantic comedy has appeared in The Velvet Light Trap and, most recently, in an edited book collection on Holiday romance films. She is Programme Manager of Samizdat Film Festival, a Glasgow-based festival dedicated to films from Eastern Europe, Central Asia, and the Caucasus.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.15664/fcj.v22.i0.2968

Great are the stars, and man is of no account to them. But man is a fair spirit, whom a star conceived and a star kills. He is greater than those bright blind companies. For though in them there is incalculable potentiality, in him there is achievement, small, but actual. Too soon, seemingly, he comes to his end. But when he is done he will not be nothing, not as though he had never been; for he is eternally a beauty in the eternal form of things.

– Olaf Stapledon, Last and First Men [1]

 

Introduction

Our current epoch is defined by permanent crisis, decay, and disintegration. Humanity faces many interrelated existential threats – ecological collapse, economic instability, political authoritarianism – on an unprecedented, planetary scale. Societies across the globe are stuck in noxious political and economic structures that are fracturing in an increasingly spectacular fashion. If we accept the idea that every cultural artefact bears traces of its epoch, we may recognise that contemporary art, including cinema, reflects the mental and affective weight of our present condition. With a certain aesthetic sensibility, we may even identify a feeling of civilisational melancholy lingering in global culture: a bittersweet, reflective attunement to collective decline. [2] This omnipresent mood, sometimes striking us without warning, sometimes crystallising sharply in art, is no doubt a product of the times, brought about by the slow violence of decay shaping our psyches and environments.

My aim is to examine how civilisational melancholy is made perceptible through the aesthetic intertwinement of space and time in what I call contemplative science fiction cinema, a hybrid film genre merging science fiction and slow cinema. In my approach, genre is not defined primarily by iconography or linguistic categories, but by its capacity to shape experience through feelings and form, inviting attunements that are open to cultural interpretation. My case study is the film Last and First Men (2020) by Jóhann Jóhannsson: a deeply evocative adaptation of Olaf Stapledon’s eponymous 1930 novel that transforms its source material into an audiovisual elegy for our dying civilisation.

Thus, the essay’s central question is: how does Last and First Men make felt the unity of filmic space and time as a holistic mood, while combining elements of different genres and capturing a cultural sentiment of melancholy? I argue that the film grounds its expression in temporalised space: the indivisible intertwinement of time and space in the film experience, whereby space is constituted through duration and time is given shape through spatial arrangement. Through its spatiotemporal wholeness, Last and First Men creates a melancholic mood and instantiates the hybrid genre of contemplative science fiction cinema, which fuses the estrangement and wonder of science fiction with the durational aesthetics of slow cinema. In this fusion, the temporalised space of Last and First Men not only defines a distinctive genre aesthetic but also resonates with the cultural experience of the Anthropocene – the geological epoch in which humanity has become a planetary force. The film discloses this condition by attuning the viewer to a melancholy rooted in our times’ temporal disorientation and heightened awareness of impermanence.

I open with a discussion of the research context, followed by a theoretical intervention and methodological reflection that reorients film phenomenology towards the spatiotemporal structure of the film experience. Then, after clarifying the key concepts, I immerse the reader in the film’s mood through a detailed phenomenological description. Finally, I analyse my findings in the framework of genre theory and cultural hermeneutics, linking the melancholic world-feeling of Last and First Men to contemplative science fiction cinema and the Anthropocene. To articulate this multidimensional argument, my research takes an interdisciplinary approach that cuts across film phenomenology, ecocriticism, genre theory, and cultural studies of affect, with the common foundation that experience is the source of all theory.

 

Research Context

The field of phenomenological film theory has been witnessing a productive tension between the materialist, body-focused approach of Vivian Sobchack and her disciples, and a more idealist and aesthetics-oriented theoretical current spearheaded by Daniel Yacavone. [3] It is within this debate that I situate my project as an intervention that challenges the spatial bias in classical film phenomenology. In the field of genre theory, recent studies on science fiction are abundant, while slow cinema has also been properly theorised. [4] I draw on this research to conceptualise the hybrid mode of contemplative science fiction cinema. Finally, the concept of mood – referring to the affective ambience of artworks and other cultural artefacts – has long been a favoured topic in film and cultural studies. Research on its history and aesthetics allows me to ground my approach in the insight that feelings are always culturally embedded. Taken together, these strands support a holistic account of film mood that foregrounds how cinematic space is shaped by time and culture.

 

Intervention and Methodology: Space in Film Phenomenology

Phenomenology is a philosophical tradition that is concerned with the essential, invariant structures of conscious experience. [5] As a methodological attitude, it entails a commitment to suspending theoretical presuppositions through a gesture of “bracketing”, or “epoché”. Following Don Ihde’s practical guide, this requires attending to phenomena as and how they show themselves, describing instead of explaining, and giving equal attention to all immediate aspects of experience. [6] Phenomenological bracketing is crucial to my approach, as I prioritise direct experience over floating abstraction. Still, it is necessary to clarify my understanding of the film experience as such.

After a long period of ostracism, phenomenology entered film studies in the early 1990s with Sobchack’s The Address of the Eye. [7] Sobchack famously argued that the film itself functions as a viewing subject, being both a “viewing-view” and “viewed-view”, and that cinematic experience is fundamentally intersubjective, grounded in the bodily engagement between spectator and film. [8] In her words, “the power of the medium […] resides in the experience common to both film and spectator: the act of viewing as experienced from within.” [9]

Sobchack’s innovation was questioning all existing assumptions of film theory and demonstrating that the film experience involves an intertwinement of two subjectivities, rather than a passive reception of images. However, the elements of space, materiality, and embodiment came to dominate her own account and the tradition of film phenomenology as a whole. Her explicitly materialist framework posits that cinematic meaning emerges primarily from our lived body’s engagement with how the film spatially inhabits its world. [10] Yet Sobchack’s exclusive focus on space and materiality raises questions. It is counterintuitive, given that a film’s projected world is entirely immaterial; to manifest as a spatial and embodied experience, it depends on a temporal flow and organisation of frames, as well as the spectator’s nonspatial sense of time. Consequently, Sobchack’s framework offers an impoverished image of film’s aesthetic capabilities and neglects how it replicates dimensions of human subjectivity that are irreducible to physical movement and behaviour (e.g. imagination, memory, and mood).

Daniel Yacavone critiqued these limitations most thoroughly in his article “Film and the Phenomenology of Art” (2016). His central issue was with Sobchack’s assumption that merely by virtue of its medial property of presenting material reality through moving images, “cinema is automatically able to embody or present processes of ‘lived perception’.” [11] Yacavone reminds us that a substantial part of the film experience resides in how formal elements (e.g. composition, lighting, depth of field) are organised into a meaningful aesthetic whole. Crucially, this involves editing and an audiovisual “cinematic rhythm” that shapes the viewer’s subjective experience of time. [12] As Corey P. Cribb observes, such rhythm incorporates immaterial meaning or “sensible ideas” into form, giving artworks a “cohesion without a concept”. [13] Temporality is almost completely absent from Sobchack’s phenomenology, given her theoretical stance that time is a retroactive construction from movement in space. [14]

Yacavone had already developed a sophisticated theory of film experience in Film Worlds (2014), drawing heavily on Mikel Dufrenne’s phenomenological aesthetics. For Dufrenne, any “aesthetic object” is experienced by the beholder as a “quasi-subject” that invites immersion into an entire world of its own. [15] Building on this, Yacavone explores how films create a “global, cineaesthetic world-feeling” through aesthetic expression. He argues that films possess a holistic mood rooted in the spectator’s subjective experience of time, irreducible to any single formal element. [16] Contra Sobchack, he places temporality at the heart of cinema, appealing to a significantly different model of consciousness. He locates time in the “nonspatial interiority of conscious mind” which interacts with the space of the outer world to produce experience. [17] According to him, this structure is mirrored in films, for they present the intertwinement of an “objective, spatial, ‘represented world’” with an immaterial “’inner’ time sense of consciousness”. Or in Dufrenne’s terms, “time is ‘spatialized’ and space ‘temporalized’ in the aesthetic object.” [18] Films, therefore, present time and space as an organic unity, just as human consciousness does, which is why they acquire a quasi-subjectivity.

Crucially, Yacavone also asserts that a film’s world-feeling always relates to the external world and is therefore open to cultural interpretation. Drawing on Martin Heidegger and Hans-Georg Gadamer, he states that cinema has a “truth-telling function” because “the artistic event of film is always (also) a conveyance, in some manner and degree, of intersubjective truth about human cultural realities existing apart from and outside of its own singular perceptual and affective confines.” [19] Furthermore, he asserts that the process of interpretation is not a “postexperience activity” of analysis, but an affectively grounded understanding that “always and necessarily begins during a film experience but need not cease with the final credits”. [20]

In sum, while I embrace Sobchack’s foundational insights on embodiment and intersubjectivity, I align more closely with Yacavone’s expanded conception of the film experience. In place of a strictly embodied and spatial view of film spectatorship, I argue for a richer understanding that foregrounds its temporal, aesthetic, and mooded dimensions. This reorientation also reframes cinematic space: rather than treating it as something directly given to the viewer, I understand it as an aesthetic structure shaped by time and culture. This theoretical outlook anchors my method: a phenomenological description attending to both first-person experience and aesthetic form to capture the overall feeling-structure that binds perceiver, film, and world together. As final step before that phenomenology, I clarify how I understand the concepts of mood and melancholy.

 

Clarifying Concepts: Mood and Melancholy

The concept of Stimmung (“attunement” or “mood”) has a long history in Western philosophy, tracing back to Immanuel Kant’s aesthetic theory in Critique of Judgment (1790). Gerhard Thonhauser calls it an “absolute metaphor” evoking the musical act of attunement to describe the feeling of being in harmonious unity with the environment. [21] From Kant through Schopenhauer to Heidegger, Stimmung kept functioning as “a unifying principle of wholes that are more than their parts; a dynamic that is applicable to subjects and objects alike”. [22] Mood is thus a diffuse and holistic affective state that is neither a subjective mental projection nor an objective property of the environment. Instead, it arises in a unified field of experience and forms the background to all events and encounters. In cultural studies, Stimmung has gained traction due to its link to history and culture; Heidegger himself linked collective moods to historical periods and “epochal changes”. [23] The concept also appeared in film studies thanks to scholars such as Robert Sinnerbrink. [24]

In The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), Robert Burton famously remarked that “[t]he Tower of Babel never yielded such confusion of tongues as this Chaos of Melancholy doth variety of symptoms.” [25] Melancholy is nearly as old as Western culture itself. Deriving etymologically from the Greek melas (“dark”) and kholē (“bile”), the feeling was seen in premodern times as an affliction caused by an excess of “black bile” rooted in the medical theory of the four humours. [26] Throughout its long history, however, melancholy was “not only one of the four humours, but also a temperament, an illness, an affectation, a mood, a cosmological principle”. [27] It is this philosophical richness that underlies Burton’s expression of confusion.

In contemporary aesthetics, Hans Maes offers a compelling account of the experience of melancholy. He defines melancholy as a complex, reflective, and bittersweet “affective state,” during which “[g]rasping a harsh truth about human existence may put the precarious value of something you care about in sharp relief in such a way that you come to appreciate it more deeply.” [28] It involves “affectively appraised” reflections on human existence, wherein “negative feelings or emotion (for example, sadness or agony)” may “co-occur or alternate with positive feelings or emotions (for example, joy or gratitude)”. [29] Indeed, the value of the feeling lies in its delicate and bittersweet blend of sadness, gratitude, and far-reaching reflection.

Timothy Barr deepens this account by exploring melancholy’s social and epistemological dimensions. Despite the enduring stereotype of the lonely and self-centred melancholic, Barr argues that melancholy “has been and may yet be made a mode of fellow-feeling and communal practice.” [30] Melancholy is commonly thought to occur “without any apparent occasion” – as Burton phrased – because it is often a sign of social strife that leaves individuals feeling uncertain and out of place. [31] For Barr, melancholy holds potential precisely in this condition of doubt: it can serve as a melancholic epistemology of uncertainty, prompting people to deliberate on their situation together, or to melancholise, which “is to join one’s sense of loss with another”. [32]

Synthesising these accounts, I understand melancholy as a bittersweet, reflective, and objectless mood with both existential and sociohistorical significance. In the specific case of Last and First Men, I examine a form of cultural melancholy that stretches across our entire civilisation in response to global crises. With these concepts in place, I now turn to the film to trace how they are realised in its fabric as a total mood of civilisational melancholy, setting the stage for the genre and cultural analyses to follow.

 

The Phenomenology of Last and First Men

The Hungarian film critic György Andorka describes Last and First Men as “a tender ode to the fragility of existence, giving voice to the melancholy of impermanence” and making us reflect on our tragic destruction of the planet. [33] Indeed, Last and First Men is a remarkable yet overlooked film from the start of the Covid-19 period. Eric Kohn from IndieWire even calls it “one of the most original science fiction movies in recent memory” that “tips its hat to Béla Tarr”. [34] Its director, Jóhann Jóhannsson, was an Icelandic composer who became famous for composing expressive scores and soundscapes for films like Prisoners (2013) and Mandy (2018). He originally conceived Last and First Men as a live multimedia performance and it premiered as a feature film in 2020, two years after his death. [35]

The film is a 70-minute audiovisual poem, blending science fiction motifs with a slow, contemplative style. It consists mostly of black-and-white 16mm images of the “spomenik” monuments – brutalist memorials across former Yugoslavia commemorating anti-fascist resistance in WWII – accompanied by Jóhannsson’s music and a voiceover by Tilda Swinton. Loosely adapted from Stapledon’s genre-defining 1930 novel, it recounts humanity’s history two billion years into the future, framed as a telepathic message from the 18th race of men before their extinction. Discarding linear narrative, the film creates an immersive, melancholic mood that sustains the unity of space and time. To describe this complex attunement, I examine the film experience along five interrelated layers: (1) visuals, texture, and environment; (2) sound, music, and voice; (3) movement and time; (4) cognition and imagination; and (5) total mood.

 

Visuals, Texture, and Environment

The visual style of Last and First Men is grounded in the elemental presence of the spomenik monuments and the vast landscapes surrounding them. Nearly every shot features these enigmatic structures, whose imposing presence has a potentially haptic effect. Sobchack has argued in her later work that our experiences are fundamentally synaesthetic, and film can invoke cross-sensory perception. [36] Accordingly, viewers may feel that they can literally touch or smell the stone surfaces or the damp air, despite their purely visual appearance. The long takes allow for a slow, almost tactile observation of every textural detail and foreground weather conditions, which heightens the synaesthetic potential. [37]

The camera’s gaze oscillates fluidly between the spomeniks and the landscape. When both are in frame, the manmade and natural geometric patterns create a visual tension that is reconciled by balanced compositions. Meanwhile, the signs of nature creeping up on the spomeniks, like lichen and water stains, integrate them further into their organic surroundings (Figure 1).

 

On a purely optical level, the black-and-white, high-contrast imagery heightens the expressivity of light and makes surface texture even more pronounced. The grain and scratches of the 16mm stock foreground the film’s own materiality, making the images seem like decaying traces of a future civilisation. Overall, the visuals constitute a material base to the film’s total melancholic mood. The monuments merging with nature combine endurance and erosion in the same frame. Their very surfaces offer a space saturated with traces of time; the spomeniks impress upon the viewer a sense of impermanence bound to civilisational grandeur, while their strange, ahistorical look evokes an enigmatic beauty (Figure 2).

 

Sound, Music, and Voice

Last and First Men presents us with a highly expressive ambient soundscape, consisting of natural sounds, Jóhannsson’s music, and Swinton’s voiceover. These three layers interpenetrate throughout the film experience and create an engrossing atmosphere. We hear sounds of rain, wind, and rumbling noises of distant geological movement, which increase the perceived presence of the natural environment. Jóhannsson’s music has a pulsating quality, moving back and forth between silence and thundering volume. It has a slow and fluid rhythm composed of prolonged, overlapping notes and tonalities. Combining melodic elements, such as ethereal string movements, deep drum beats, solemn female voices, and religious chants, Jóhannsson evokes beauty, grandeur, and a melancholic fusion of wonder and mourning. All the while, Swinton recites Stapledon’s words with relatively long pauses and a calm, monotone intonation. Overall, the three sonic strata fuse into a hypnotic and otherworldly soundscape that does not merely accompany the visuals but creates an entire spatiotemporal aura: sound does not merely fill space but extends it in time, turning the environment into a space where duration becomes as palpable. The effect on the spectator’s lived body is expansive, inviting an embodied opening onto the film-world.

 

Movement and Time

The subjective experience of time, or duration, is at the centre of film viewing. It is felt inwardly in consciousness and outwardly in the movement of things. Last and First Men brings forth a very distinct temporal experience through its flow and motion. The film has a general sense of stillness, with long takes averaging thirty seconds. Lacking an overarching linear narrative, each shot becomes an event in itself, characterised by what is called “temps mort” or “dead time”, when nothing conventionally dramatic happens. Yet subtle motion is present throughout the whole film through shifting clouds, drifting fog, and slow camera movements (pans, tilts, zooms, rotations). Nature’s gentle vitality and the camera’s choreographies animate the otherwise inert spomeniks, granting them a ghostly presence. The calm movements of the cinematography and the environment create a spatiotemporal rhythm that structures the viewer’s experience.

The film invokes at once the immediacy of an embodied “now” or pure, meditative presence; the cyclical temporality of the rise and fall of civilisations; and the incomprehensibly vast scale of geological deep time. The spomeniks become emblems of this layered temporality: enduringly present yet impossibly old, they inscribe time as such into space and materiality. Experiencing time in such a way defines the melancholic mood of Last and First Men – it makes the spectator intuitively feel the impermanence of all human endeavours in the face of nature and the cosmos, but also the indestructible presence of beauty and form, whether manmade or natural. The film thus opens onto a temporalised space where shifting skies, eroding stone, and slow camera motion render different senses of time – subjective, cyclical, geologic – palpable in the very fabric of the world (Figure 3).

 

Cognition and Imagination

Despite the nonnarrative nature of Last and First Men, cognition plays an integral role in the film experience. The film neither presents a clear causal chain of events nor puzzles to solve, yet it offers a contemplative space where the viewer can construct meaning through association and imagination. Swinton’s voiceover does not tell a story in the conventional sense, instead delivering scattered reflections from a future civilisation: fragments of cosmic history, philosophical meditations on fate, and aphoristic observations. The verbal punctuations enter into a productive tension with the images, as the fantastical content of the narration repeatedly meets the realness of the monuments and landscapes. This interplay creates a spatiotemporal paradox: a future-history narrated from the vantage point of a humanity soon to be extinct, anchored in ruinous memorials of our own past.

The spomeniks themselves resist direct symbolism: they do not point to any determinate cultural meaning that would anchor their sight. Still, their overbearing presence invites imaginative projection, making them what might be called “quasi-symbols” of a vanished civilisation (Figure 4). Furthermore, the unrecognisability, rather than diminishing their impact, makes the monuments align with what Kant terms free beauty – a beauty that “presupposes no concept of what the object should be,” pleasing by virtue of shape and proportion alone, leaving the imagination to free play. [38] In this way, cognition in Last and First Men is not narrative construction but speculative reflection – on human finitude, the transience of all civilisations, and the sublime power of nature. Cognition becomes mood-like in its associative flight while being shaded by melancholy through its content. Meanwhile, it hovers in an abstract spatiotemporal field, where past, present, and speculative futures are held together by our mental operations. Thought, then, temporalises space in a very distinct way: imagination animates the monuments as living symbols in which temporal horizons intersect, giving spatial presence to otherwise abstract scales of history and futurity.

 

Total Mood

As an aesthetic whole, Last and First Men is defined by a sustained melancholic attunement that is more than the sum of its parts. It is held together by a total mood: an irreducible synthesis of form and experience arising from the interplay of its spatial and temporal, affective and cognitive layers. The tactile monumentality and atmospheric textures of the imagery provide a material base; the immersive soundscape anchors reflection while opening imaginative depth; the slow, deliberate movement of camera and environment folds multiple temporalities into one another; and the speculative reflections prompted by voiceover and image invite a free play of the imagination shaded by melancholy. In each case, space and time are not separate but mutually constitutive – we experience a temporalised space in which spatial presence is continually shaped by duration, and temporal sense takes shape as a spatial field. Together, the experiential layers produce an embodied, expansive openness onto the film-world, inducing awe while sustaining calm reflection.

The film’s mood is marked by the estrangement, speculation, and wonder associated with science fiction, yet also by the meditative stillness and durational immersion of slow cinema. What emerges is civilisational melancholy: an attunement to decline, finitude, and fragile beauty as spatiotemporal presence. Echoing Maes’s notion of melancholy as a bittersweet recognition of impermanence, the film makes us aware “that beauty can be tinged by pain—which has to do not least with its transient, ephemeral quality. […] [W]e know it won’t last endlessly: it fades and perishes, often in no time.” [39] At the same time, it resonates with Barr’s insight that melancholy can be a mode of fellow-feeling, binding the viewer’s contemplation to a collective sense of loss. The result is a cosmic vantage from which human achievements are seen as brief episodes within broader cosmic rhythms – a vantage opened up by feeling time through space, and one that provides the point of departure for interpreting Last and First Men within broader generic and cultural frameworks.

 

Genre Analysis: Contemplative Science Fiction Cinema

Film genres are often defined in terms of formal, narrative, or linguistic features: recurring settings, character types, story structures, or stylistic devices that enable audiences and institutions to classify a work within a familiar category. [40] While these approaches have proved useful, they tend to overlook a crucial dimension of genre: its capacity to shape and be shaped by experience. Inspired by Barry Keith Grant, I take film genre not as a fixed taxonomy, but as a typical film encounter directly rooted in lived experience and reflective of the given zeitgeist. [41] Film genres, in this sense, are as much about how we experience a work as about what it depicts. Additionally, they are not static systems but fundamentally vital phenomena. They evolve like biological organisms in response to constant changes in their environment, whether cultural, economic, political, or natural. They are never entirely pure either, instead constantly cross-pollinating and manifesting in manifold hybrid forms. Film genres, then, are processual, dynamic, experiential, and always historically inflected; they are living formations that link aesthetic form, viewer, and culture – often saturated with malicious ideologies – in a single evolving system.

From this perspective, the mood of Last and First Men is also the basis of its generic identity. [42] Its immersive spatiotemporal experience resonates with central definitions of science fiction. Darko Suvin famously theorised that the genre operates through cognitive estrangement and a novum – a “strange newness” marking a radical difference from the artist’s empirical environment – that is usually technological in nature and prompts critical reflection on the world. [43] Closely related to this, science fiction is also held to involve “a philosophical openness described as a ‘sense of wonder’”. [44] We encounter imagined worlds filled with alternative possibilities and marvellous inventions, which stretch our mental capacity for fantasy and reflection. Yet science fiction is not confined to uplifting awe, equally drawing upon darker affective impulses. According to Susan Sontag, the genre reflects perennial fears of humanity, while in it also “lurk the deepest anxieties about contemporary existence”. [45] Hence, science fiction’s imaginative flexibility and concern with humanity’s technological progress lends it a special social relevance.

Last and First Men both manifests and reconfigures these genre dynamics. It fits the science fiction tradition through its feelings of wonder and estrangement and its creation of a world markedly different from our own. Yet its novum is neither a technological invention nor a coherent future-world. Rather, it is an experiential and spatiotemporal dislocation: we hear a message from a future humanity projected onto traces of our own history. The speculative estrangement does not unfold through plot or technological spectacle but an aesthetic arrangement of time and space that invites sustained attunement. In this regard, Last and First Men supports Steen Ledet Christiansen’s redefinition of the novum in atmospheric terms. He argues that science fiction relies not primarily on object-directed estrangement, but the creation of “an atmospheric background feeling of the world” as a worldbuilding device. [46] Atmosphere is not merely an aesthetic supplement; it is both the means of estrangement and of setting up the imagined world, however discontinuous or impossible, as a “distinctive cognitive  environment”. [47] In Last and First Men, mood is thus a genre function that discloses an unfamiliar world while making it coherent and inhabitable through immersion.

Through its emphasis durational experience, Last and First Men also aligns with what has come to be called “slow cinema”. In theoretical discourse, the term refers to a stylistic tendency or quasi-genre in global cinema characterised by minimalism, long takes, reduced narrativity, and contemplative engagement with time and the natural environment. [48] It is also interpreted as part of a cultural response to late capitalism, reintroducing slowness and contemplation into a world dominated by speed, fragmentation, and distraction. [49] Although slow cinema is a relatively new concept, its aesthetic strategies have long-been present in art cinema, notably during postwar neorealism and 1960s modernism. [50] Owing to this profile, the films of slow cinema often “paint a pessimistic vision of the world […] underpinned by an emotional tone characterised by anxiety, depression, desperation, loneliness, boredom, alienation, monotony, and physical and spiritual exhaustion”. [51] In line with said tradition, Last and First Men offers a temporalised space where the viewer dwells melancholically. The long, glacial pans and still compositions do not advance a story but allow time to be experienced through space.

Bringing the two genres together, the film exemplifies a hybrid I term contemplative science fiction cinema. This neglected mode fuses science fiction’s speculative estrangement, wonder, and reflection of civilisational anxieties with slow cinema’s durational immersion and reflective stillness. Through this blend, Last and First Men evokes a pessimistic wonder sometimes felt in science fiction films when “our security in the power of being human […] is visually undermined.” [52] At the same time, it soothes that very pessimism by encouraging a melancholic appreciation of ephemeral beauty. The film’s mixed generic form activates a world-feeling born of the interdependence of time and space to open new vistas for contemplation.

This hybrid is not without precedent. Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris (1972) and Stalker (1979) or Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey all stretch the frame of science fiction, privileging mood, duration, and philosophical inquiry over plot resolution. [53] Yet Last and First Men pushes this tendency further, stripping away almost all narrative scaffolding in favour of world-feeling. In doing so, it does not merely hybridise two genres but enacts cultural and philosophical reflection: its science fiction dimension defamiliarises the temporality of our present, while its slow cinema dimension focuses our attention on the ruins of our past. The result is a mood of civilisational melancholy reflecting an age where both time and space seem irretrievably lost – an attunement that resonates with the experience of the Anthropocene and grounds my cultural analysis.

 

Cultural Analysis: Space and Time in the Anthropocene

If science fiction “clusters in the great whirlpool periods of history,” as Suvin proclaimed, then an offshoot like contemplative science fiction cinema must be no exception. [54] The mood that Last and First Men stages through its fusion of genres is indeed symptomatic of our historical moment defined by malaise and disorientation. As of 2025, the Doomsday Clock was set to 89 seconds to midnight, the closest to apocalypse it has ever been. The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists cites not only nuclear war and climate change, but also the rise of destabilizing technologies and the failure of political will to change course. “Blindly continuing on the current path is a form of madness,” they write. [55]

At stake here is what recent criticism gathers under discussions of “the Anthropocene” – the phenomenon of living in a geological epoch where human activity functions as a geophysical force with disastrous consequences. Initially coined by the climate scientists Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer, the concept has been refined and contested; for example, some argue for the name “Capitalocene” instead to stress the role of fossil capital, corporate infrastructures, and uneven responsibility. [56] In this era, climate has itself become a cultural force: far more than just “weather,” it fundamentally frames how the world is imagined and made sensible. Furthermore, we are confronted by phenomena that are too vast, slow, or complex to be grasped intuitively – what Timothy Morton famously coined hyperobjects – like climate change and mass extinction. [57]

Therefore, the Anthropocene is not merely an external condition but a ubiquitous experiential condition with epistemic effects. It confuses scale, collapses temporal frames, and unsettles emplacement on a planetary scale. Alexa Weik von Mossner characterises its affective dimension by referencing Glenn Albrecht’s concept of “psychoterratic dis-eases”, that is, pathologies of emotional and cognitive distress triggered by our changing relationship to the Earth. These include eco-anxiety, solastalgia, and other forms of climate grief – widespread feelings that are nonetheless difficult to locate and articulate. [58] These pervasive but vague affects may crystallise in cultural moods; it is in this context that the notion of civilisational melancholy becomes salient: a historically specific world-feeling defined by a sense of civilisational unravelling, a loss of existential bearings, and a mournful awareness of likely extinction. It is attuned to the erosion of modern promises – progress, mastery, futurity – and haunted by the suspicion that the future is no longer what it used to be.

Against the Anthropocene’s horizon, Last and First Men imagines a future beyond humanity. It is a world without humans but saturated by the traces of human effort and imagination. The spomeniks – the film’s primary visual subject – are not just abstract concrete forms, they are affective icons that communicate a vanished vision of the future. Built between the 1950s and 1980s across Tito’s Yugoslavia, these uncanny brutalist monuments were conceived to commemorate anti-fascist resistance during WWII and to symbolise a utopian dream of collective unity. [59] According to the official Spomenik Database, “[t]hrough the creation of these hyper-forward-looking forms, Yugoslavia hoped to embody and shape a national collective vision which aimed towards an optimistic and hopeful future defined by unity and symbolic universalism.” [60] Their abstract geometry was meant to transcend ethnic-nationalist divisions and articulate a utopian vision of socialist futurity.

But that utopia failed. In the wake of the Yugoslav Wars and the collapse of the socialist federation, many of the spomeniks now stand forgotten, neglected, and desecrated. “Despite their historic significance and architectural beauty,” writes The Guardian, “the Spomeniks are crumbling: they are urinated on and scrawled with graffiti.” [61] They were monuments of hope and reconciliation, but in their current state they have become ruinous symbols of lost futures. As such, they are inherently spatiotemporal: once sites of public memory and imagined destiny, they now exist as monumental ghosts suspended between past and future. They register both deep time and political time, geological persistence and historical obsolescence. Their presence in the film is never merely visual but sensible and meaningful: they resonate as affective indices of civilisational failure.

Ultimately, Last and First Men invites us to dwell in a world already empty of us, but not empty of meaning. The spomeniks mark not only past battles and revolutions, but the aspirations, contradictions, and eventual dissolution of an entire civilisational project. They index a failed utopia, but in their uncanny abstraction, they open new imaginative space. The mood they generate is not only one of grief but of speculative reorientation, shaping the film’s melancholy to resonate with our shared civilisational condition of living in the Anthropocene. By drawing us into contemplation through temporalised space, the film mirrors the dislocated temporal experience of our epoch and generates a melancholy rooted in a tacit recognition of shared loss, fostering solidarity with an unspoken community of witnesses. In bringing together the endurance of nature, the fragility of human aspiration, and the inexorable passage of time, the film turns mourning into an act of sustained reflection; it invites us to imagine what remains thinkable at the very end of the human story.

 

Conclusion

To experience Last and First Men is to enter a cinematic space where time becomes tangible and melancholy becomes a mode of perception. Drawing on phenomenological aesthetics, I have argued that the film produces a spatiotemporal mood – an immersive attunement to civilisational fragility. It fuses the contemplative temporality of slow cinema with the speculative scope of science fiction, forming a distinct mode I call contemplative science fiction cinema. This hybrid does not rely on narrative progression or technological optimism; instead, it constructs a reflective aesthetic space grounded in mood and time. The film’s focus on the spomenik monuments situates viewers within a complex temporal field. These decaying structures, remnants of a failed utopia, are framed as both artifacts of a lost past and symbols of an uncertain future. Through lingering camerawork, tactile textures, and Jóhannsson’s enveloping soundscape, the film temporalises space, producing an experiential tension between persistence and disappearance. This tension is central to the melancholic tone that permeates the work: a recognition of human finitude and historical decline that resists both nostalgia and apocalypticism.

Last and First Men does not deliver a message; it stages an encounter. The viewer is drawn into an aesthetic mood that reflects the broader cultural context of the Anthropocene, an age marked by ecological crisis, civilisational exhaustion, temporal disorientation, and the loss of utopian horizons. The film’s layering of deep time, human history, and speculative futurity not only mirrors the Anthropocene’s dislocated sense of time, but turns it into a contemplative ground from which civilisational melancholy gains depth and resonance. In doing so, it makes clear what this essay has argued more broadly: that contra Sobchack’s materialist film phenomenology, space, matter, and affect in themselves cannot account for the film experience, for it is time – whether cultural, cosmic, or individually felt – that configures space into a medium of thought and thereby renders any experience meaningful.

In closing, Last and First Men offers a cinematic meditation on the aesthetic experience of human finitude. It shows that even at the edge of extinction, there is a form of meaning grounded not in survival or resolution, but in perception, attunement, and the quiet work of reflection. Meanwhile, the film also realises what Barr identifies as melancholy’s highest potential – not withdrawal, but a form of knowing that emerges from shared loss – and invites us to recognise ourselves as part of a dispersed yet connected community of witnesses, gathered within the same awareness of an ending. As Stapledon wrote, “man is a fair spirit, whom a star conceived and a star kills. He is greater than those bright blind companies. For though in them there is incalculable potentiality, in him there is achievement, small, but actual.” [62] Last and First Men affirms that such achievement lies in our collective capacity to feel, imagine, and reflect. It invites us not to act, but to dwell – briefly and lucidly – within the fading contours of our own civilisation.

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Notes

[1] Olaf Stapledon, Last and First Men (1930; repr., Gollancz, 1999), 303–4

[2] Civilisational melancholy resonates across artforms: in literature, powerful distillations are found in the work of Michel Houellebecq and László Krasznahorkai, both of whom stage modernity as cosmic decline; in cinema, one can consider Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Memoria (2021), David Cronenberg’s Crimes of the Future (2022), and Sam Esmail’s Leave the World Behind (2023); and in the visual arts, Ólafur Eliasson’s Lifeworld (2024) and Maya Lin’s Ghost Forest (2021) likewise confront civilisational impermanence and environmental fragility by transforming public space.

[3] Besides the authors I discuss in the methodology and intervention section, the following works are exemplary of the two currents. On materialist phenomenological film theory, see Laura U. Marks, Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002) and Jennifer M. Barker, The Tactile Eye: Touch and the Cinematic Experience (Berkeley, California: University Of California Press, 2009). For the idealist-leaning strand, see Malin Wahlberg, Documentary Time: Film and Phenomenology (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008) and Sarah Cooper, The Soul of Film Theory (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).

[4] For recent scholarship on science fiction cinema, see Eli Park Sorensen, Science Fiction Film: Predicting the Impossible in the Age of Neoliberalism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2021); Pablo Gómez-Muñoz, Science Fiction Cinema in the Twenty-First Century (Routledge, 2022); Terence McSweeney and Stuart Joy, Contemporary American Science Fiction Film (Routledge, 2022). On slow cinema, see especially Tiago de Luca and Nuno Barradas Jorge, eds., Slow Cinema (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016); Emre Çağlayan, Poetics of Slow Cinema: Nostalgia, Absurdism, Boredom (Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2018).

[5] One example of an “invariant structure of consciousness” would be the fact that remembering always takes place in the present, which makes the content of a memory have meaning in relation to one’s present experience.

[6] Don Ihde, Experimental Phenomenology: Multistabilities, 2nd ed. (1977; repr., Albany: State University of New York Press, 2012), 22.

[7] See Julian Hanich and Christian Ferencz-Flatz, “What Is Film Phenomenology?,” Studia Phaenomenologica 16 (2016), for an overview of the entire history of film phenomenology.

[8] Vivian Sobchack, The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 133.

[9] Ibid., 135-36, author’s emphasis.

[10] Sobchack went as far as coining the concept of the film’s body, positing that “the film can be said to genuinely have and live a body.” Sobchack, The Address of the Eye, 205.

[11] Daniel Yacavone, “Film and the Phenomenology of Art: Reappraising Merleau-Ponty on Cinema as Form, Medium, and Expression,” New Literary History 47, no. 1 (2016): 159–85, https://www.jstor.org/stable/24772802, 172, author’s emphasis.

[12] Ibid., 178.

[13] Corey P. Cribb, “Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Vivian Sobchack and the Materialization of Cinematic Sense,” Transformations, no. 37 (2024), 41, 49.

[14] Sobchack stated in an interview with Marquard Smith that “I ground being and seeing and cinema as, from the first, movement – action – in space, not […] in time which I think is constituted as a reflexive reflection on that spatial movement.” Marquard Smith, Visual Culture Studies: Interviews with Key Thinkers (London: Sage Publications, 2008), 127.

[15] Edward S. Casey, “Aesthetic Experience,” in Handbook of Phenomenological Aesthetics, ed. Hans Rainer Sepp and Lester Embree (Springer, 2010), 1–9, 4.

[16] Daniel Yacavone, Film Worlds: A Philosophical Aesthetics of Cinema (Columbia University Press, 2014), 199, 207.

[17] Hence, Yacavone embraces what Dufrenne calls the “phenomenological solidarity of time and space.” Ibid., 212.

[18] Ibid., 211, 212, emphasis added.

[19] Ibid., 231, 245.

[20] Ibid., 243, author’s emphasis.

[21] Gerhard Thonhauser, “Beyond Mood and Atmosphere: A Conceptual History of the Term Stimmung,” Philosophia 49, no. 3 (November 27, 2020): 1247–65, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-020-00290-7, 1248-49. While the history of the concept of Stimmung is rooted in Western philosophy including figures whose broader views may be problematic, I hold that philosophical tools can retain their value when applied beyond their original context.

[22] Ibid., 1262.

[23] Erik Wallrup, “Music’s Attunement: Stimmung, Mood, Atmosphere,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Phenomenology of Music, ed. Jonathan De Souza, Benjamin Steege, and Jessica Wiskus (Oxford University Press, 2023).

[24] See Robert Sinnerbrink, “Stimmung: exploring the aesthetics of mood,” Screen 53, no. 2 (June 1, 2012): 148–63, https://doi.org/10.1093/screen/hjs007, where he identifies four different types of cinematic moods according to their narrative function: disclosive, episodic, transitional, and autonomous moods.

[25] Quoted in Jennifer Radden, The Nature of Melancholy (Oxford University Press, 2002), 5.

[26] Hans Maes, “Aesthetic Melancholy,” Contemporary Aesthetics 21 (2023), https://contempaesthetics.org/2023/06/20/aesthetic-melancholy/.

[27] Timothy Barr, “Without Apparent Occasion: Recent Research on Melancholy,” Journal of the History of Ideas 80, no. 2 (April 2019): 313–32, https://doi.org/10.2307/26661335, 314.

[28] Maes, “Aesthetic Melancholy,”.

[29] Ibid.

[30] Barr, “Without Apparent Occasion”, 315, emphasis added.

[31] Ibid., 331.

[32] Ibid., 329.

[33] György Andorka, “A szférák zenéje – Jóhann Jóhannsson: Az utolsó és Az első emberek (2020),” Filmvilág 64, no. 11 (2021): 40–41, https://epa.oszk.hu/03000/03028/00218/pdf/EPA03028_filmvilag_2021_11_40-41.pdf, 41. My own translation of the original in Hungarian.

[34] Eric Kohn, “‘Last and First Men’ Review: Jóhann Jóhannsson’s Posthumous Film Is a Dazzling Vision of the Apocalypse,” IndieWire, February 26, 2020, https://www.indiewire.com/criticism/movies/last-and-first-men-review-johann-johannsson-berlin-1202213596/.

[35] Ibid.

[36] Vivian Sobchack, Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture (Berkeley: University Of California Press, 2004), 70.

[37] This is supported by Kristi McKim’s claim that weather is an overlooked but fundamental element of cinematic expression. By virtue of its universal relevance in human experience, screened weather can create “atmospheric identification […] as a means of involvement in the film world.” McKim, Cinema as Weather: Stylistic Screens and Atmospheric Change (New York: Routledge, 2013), 28.

[38] Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement, ed. Nicholas Walker, trans. James Creed Meredith (1790; repr., Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 60.

[39] Julian Hanich, “. . . Striking Beauty: On Recuperating the Beautiful in Cinema,” in What Film Is Good For: On the Values of Spectatorship, ed. Julian Hanich and Martin P. Rossouw (University of California Press, 2023), 169.

[40] For an overview of formal and linguistic approaches to genre, see Steve Neale, Genre and Hollywood (London: Routledge, 2000), 8–24.

[41] Barry Keith Grant, “Experience and Meaning in Genre Films,” in Film Genre Reader IV, ed. Barry Keith Grant (University of Texas Press, 2012), 133–47, 134–35.

[42] Sinnerbrink agrees: “we define certain genres […] by suggesting the moods they evoke (suspense, the thriller, the romance).” Robert Sinnerbrink, “Stimmung”, 148.

[43] Darko Suvin, “On the Poetics of the Science Fiction Genre,” College English 34, no. 3 (December 1972): 372, https://doi.org/10.2307/375141, 373–75.

[44] Grant, “‘Sensuous Elaboration’: Reason and the Visible in Science Fiction Film,” in Liquid Metal: The Science Fiction Film Reader, ed. Sean Redmond (Wallflower Press, 2004), 17–23, 17.

[45] Susan Sontag, “The Imagination of Disaster,” in Liquid Metal, 40–47, 45–46.

[46] Steen Ledet Christiansen, “Atmospheres and Science Fiction,” ed. Anezka Kuzmicova, Cogent Arts & Humanities 6, no. 1 (January 1, 2019): 1686799, https://doi.org/10.1080/23311983.2019.1686799, 6.

[47] Ibid., 10.

[48] de Luca and Jorge, Slow Cinema, 4–7.

[49] Ibid., 3; Çağlayan, Poetics of Slow Cinema” 7–8.

[50] de Luca and Jorge, Cinema, 9; Çağlayan, Poetics of Slow Cinema, 9–10.

[51] Çağlayan, Poetics of Slow Cinema, 24.

[52] Vivian Sobchack, Screening Space: The American Science Fiction Film, 2^nd ed. (1980; repr., New Brunswick, New Jersey, and London: Rutgers University Press, 1987), 109.

[53] From more recent times, potential examples include Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin (2013), Claire Denis’ High Life (2018), and Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Memoria (2021).

[54] Suvin, “On the Poetics of the Science Fiction Genre,” 375.

[55] John Mecklin, “2025 Doomsday Clock Statement,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, January 28, 2025, https://thebulletin.org/doomsday-clock/2025-statement/.

[56] Andrew Milner and J.R. Burgmann, Science Fiction and Climate Change: A Sociological Approach (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2020), 28–33.

[57] E. Ann Kaplan, Climate Trauma: Foreseeing the Future in Dystopian Film and Fiction (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2016), 9.

[58] Alexa Weik von Mossner, “From Nostalgic Longing to Solastalgic Distress: A Cognitive Approach to Love in the Anthropocene,” in Affective Ecocriticism: Emotion, Embodiment, Environment, ed. Kyle Bladow and Jennifer Ladino (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2018), 51–70, 52–3.

[59] Donald Niebyl, “What Are Spomeniks?,” Spomenik Database, 2016, https://www.spomenikdatabase.org/what-are-spomeniks.

[60] Donald Niebyl, “Introduction: The Bizarre Shapes of the Spomenik,” Spomenik Database, 2016, https://www.spomenikdatabase.org/bizarre-shapes.

[61] Joshua Surtees, “Spomeniks: The Second World War Memorials That Look like Alien Art,” The Guardian, June 18, 2013, https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/photography-blog/2013/jun/18/spomeniks-war-monuments-former-yugoslavia-photography.

[62] Stapledon, Last and First Men, 303–4.

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Wallrup, Erik. “Music’s Attunement: Stimmung, Mood, Atmosphere.” In The Oxford Handbook of the Phenomenology of Music, edited by Jonathan De Souza, Benjamin Steege, and Jessica Wiskus. Oxford University Press, 2023.

Weik von Mossner, Alexa. “From Nostalgic Longing to Solastalgic Distress: A Cognitive Approach to Love in the Anthropocene.” In Affective Ecocriticism: Emotion,         Embodiment, Environment, edited by Kyle Bladow and Jennifer Ladino, 51–70.            Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2018.

Yacavone, Daniel. “Film and the Phenomenology of Art: Reappraising Merleau-Ponty on Cinema as Form, Medium, and Expression.” New Literary History 47, no. 1 (2016):   159–85. https://www.jstor.org/stable/24772802.

———. Film Worlds: A Philosophical Aesthetics of Cinema. Columbia University Press,  2014.

 

Filmography

Cosmatos, Panos. Mandy. 2018; Los Angeles: RLJE Films, 2018. Film.

Cronenberg, David. Crimes of the Future. 2022; Los Angeles: Neon, 2022. Film.

Esmail, Sam. Leave the World Behind. 2023; Los Angeles: Netflix, 2023. Film.

Jóhannsson, Jóhann. Last and First Men. 2020; Reykjavík: Zik Zak Filmworks, 2020. Film.

Kubrick, Stanley. 2001: A Space Odyssey. 1968; Los Angeles: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Film.

Tarkovsky, Andrei. Solaris. 1972; Moscow: Mosfilm. Film.

Tarkovsky, Andrei. Stalker. 1979; Moscow: Mosfilm. Film.

Villeneuve, Denis. Prisoners. 2013; Los Angeles: Warner Bros. Pictures, 2013. Film.

Weerasethakul, Apichatpong. Memoria. 2021; Bogotá: Sovereign Films, 2022. Film.

 

Biography

Marcell Bárdos is a Research Master’s student in the Arts, Media and Literary Studies program at the University of Groningen. He obtained a cum laude Bachelor’s degree in Liberal Arts and Sciences at Amsterdam University College in 2023. Specializing in film, media, and cultural theory, his research integrates film phenomenology and cultural hermeneutics. He published two articles in AUC’s official undergraduate scientific journal: an essay investigating the House of Terror Museum in Budapest as a site of postmodern media spectacle and political propaganda, and his Bachelor’s thesis examining the experience of melancholy in Béla Tarr’s films from a film-phenomenological perspective. Currently, he participates as a research assistant in Prof. Julian Hanich and Dr. Jakob Boer’s ongoing research project that studies the experience of cinematic beauty through microphenomenology and other empirical methods.