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MLN, Volume 124, Number 3, April 2009 (German Issue), pp. 683-707
(Article)
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DOI: 10.1353/mln.0.0157

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Toward a Phenomenology
of Emotion in Film:
Michael Brynntrup and
The Face of Gay Shame

Randall Halle

On a neuro-physiological level, the study of emotion has been relatively

excluded from studies of cognition in part simply because the emotional and sensory centers in the brain are distinct, but increasingly
cognitive science has recognized that these centers are linked, sharing and passing on information and creating responses in as yet not
comprehended ways. For the most part though in the 1990s cognitive
theory sought to contend with emotions in what we could describe as
a neo-Kantian approach, ascribing them to the realm of judgment.
Appraisal theory describes emotions as arising in a complex condition
of evaluation or appraisal; we experience love because we appraise
that we are being treated well.1 However, such a rational judgment
model, subsuming emotions into a computational approach, cannot
take into account dispositions or temperament that have nothing to
do with rational judgments or choices. Suspicions, fears, phobias,
anxieties, angst, shame and other negative states can arise contrary to
interests or cognitive processes of appraisal, indicating at least some

1
For an overview discussion see Klaus Scherer, Profiles of emotion-antecedent
appraisal, Cognition and Emotion 11:2 (1997): 11350; Klaus Scherer, Universality of
emotional expression, Encyclopedia of Human Emotions, ed. D. Levinson, J. Ponzetti,
and P. Jorgenson, vol. 2 (New York: Macmillan, 1999) 66974.

MLN 124 (2009): 683707 2009 by The Johns Hopkins University Press

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other component to emotions, i.e. a more primary even drive-based

form of affect.2
Thus a turn came in cognitive science with the investigation of
affective elements and memory. It might seem like a simple matter
of common sense, but the premise that strong emotional-affective
experiences can color memories, for instance simply make them
more vivid, offered a breakthrough in the consideration of how cognitive representations work. Michael Martinez described the state of
research developing out of this insight: representations are often
portrayed as valueless, cool records of information and experience.
This portrayal is misleading because represented knowledge very
often does have emotional and motivational value; representations
are words, images, goals, and plans charged with meaning, valence,
emotion, and energy.3
That this affective turn began in cognitive science roughly a
decade ago and is only now gaining momentum might, from outside
the discipline, seem a bit contrary to expectations but we might want
to recall that, as psychologist Eleanor Rosch noted, since the Greeks,
Western psychology has treated affect and cognition as separate faculties, states, or processes, and through history cognition has been valued
more positively than affect. Emotion tends to be seen as irrational
and reason as affectless.4 As the Martinez quote indicates, seeing and
perceiving, as fundamentals of cognition, were primarily approached
from the camera obscura perspective, as if the image was written innocently on the grey matter of the brain. That perhaps experiences of
affect, emotions, or desire could prove more primary, or if they have
a fundamental evaluative function, or how they might color cognition
with a particular valence is an open field of exploration.5 Inquiry in
2
See Louis Charland, The Natural Kind Status of Emotion, British Journal for the
Philosophy of Science 53 (2002): 51137 and Feeling and Representing: Computational
Theory and the Modularity of Affect, Synthese 105 (1995): 273301; Peter Goldie, The
Emotions: A Philosophical Exploration (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000); Richard Wollheim, On
the Emotions (New Haven: Yale UP, 2000).
3
Michael Martinez, Cognitive Representations: Distinctions, Implications, and
Elaborations, Development of Mental Representation: Theories and Applications, edited by
Irving E. Sigel (Mahwah, NJ: L. Erlbaum Associates, 1999) 25.
4
Eleanor Rosch, Mindfulness meditation and the private (?) self, The Conceptual
Self in Context: Culture, Experience, Self-Understanding, ed. Uric Neiser and David Jopling
(Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997) 197.
5
In the history of philosophy, a few voices have raised doubt as to the innocence of
the process of cognition, e.g. Spinoza, Hume, William James, Nietzsche and Bergson.
They assert instead that the emotions belong to the body in a process separate from
rational cognition. But the primary approach in cognitive science has only recently

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this area marks the beginning of the affective turn. It has led to an
expansion of new research and new models of perception, emotion,
and affect, and it will be of central consideration in this essay.6
There is a second turn of central interest to this essay and that
is the turn to cognitive film studies. While cognitive scientists have
carefully constructed experiments with visual materials to trace out
how perception functions, they have not extensively considered different modes of viewing, different media of seeing.7 Cognitive film
studies holds the potential to offer to cognitive scientists a wealth
of information and an elaborated language developed over years to
describe various aspects of image and viewing, frame and positionality, the embodiment of viewing as it interacts with the constructed
viewing space and directed viewing material. Cognitive film studies is
a new development, having emerged in the span of the last decade.8
While posing new productive questions, the attempt to develop an
interdisciplinary relationship between cognitive science and film studies up until now has resulted mainly in a rather one-sided direction
of application.9 Cognitive film studies have primarily sought to adopt

begun to consider the possible primacy of emotions and affective states in establishing
in Nietzschean termsa reactive filter or an active constituting mechanism within the
process of cognition. Indeed, seeing and perception as part of cognition are increasingly
understood as part of a process that shapes, forms, and constitutes what is seen.
6
See Patricia Ticineto Clough and Jean Halley eds., The Affective Turn: Theorizing the
Social (Durham: Duke UP, 2007); Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotions (New
York: Routledge, 2004); Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham: Duke UP, 2002).
7
Terence Horgan and John Tienson did initiate what is known as the frame problem
in cognitive science, but this problem is largely about individual circumstances and
social positioning and has never taken on the quality of exploring the visual frame or
the embodiment of seeing. See Terence Horgan and John Tienson, Representations
Without Rules, Philosophical Topics 17 (1989): 14774.
8
Seeking to draw on the insights of cognitive science and analytic philosophy, cognitive film studies were initiated with some controversy by David Bordwell and Nol
Carroll, and have led to productive studies that chart out new directions for the discipline. See David Bordwell and Nol Carroll, eds., Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies
(Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1996). See also David Bordwell, Figures Traced in Light: On
Cinematic Staging (Berkeley: U of California P, 2005), and also his own webpage with
extensive discussions and blogs: http://www.davidbordwell.net/essays/zizek.php. Warren Bucklands excellent synthetic study of cognitive and semiotic approaches and Per
Perrsons attempt to develop a psychological theory of moving imagery have helped
reinvigorate areas of investigation, like spectator studies, that had reached impasses
in existing critical methodologies. See Warren Buckland, The Cognitive Semiotics of Film
(Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000); Per Persson, Understanding Cinema: A Psychological
Theory of Moving Imagery (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003).
9
Bordwell and Carroll, xiii.

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the insights of cognitive science, applying studies developed in very

different contexts to the moving image and cinematic space.10 This
approach does open up new understanding but it moves in a singular
direction of applying cognitive/analytic work to film. The problem,
and point of critical intervention here, is first that such an approach
easily overlooks the fact that the work being adopted may itself exist
within a series of disciplinary internal contestations and critiques.
What is taken as fact by someone from outside, is often itself only a
proposition under investigation within a discipline. Such is the case
with cognitive theory and the approach to the image and emotions;
it is, as noted above, the site of various and lively debates. Secondly
and relatedly, such research does not move in the other direction,
with inquiry into film and the cognitive processes it unleashes being
perceived as making a contribution to existing debates in cognitive
science. Film scholars are not producing investigations of interest to
their colleagues in cognitive science. This is understandable, given
the nature of the training of film scholars. The type of experimental
procedures in cognitive science is not yet part of the background of
most of the new cognitive film scholars, nor do cognitive scientists
understand how to benefit from the non-clinical models of research
in film studies. However, I contend that an awareness of the debates
within cognitive approaches does allow for a type of research and
investigation that establishes an inter-disciplinary conversation.
What can the study of the moving image and how it constitutes an
emotional state reveal to us about the processes of cognition? This
essay will offer a critical intervention by undertaking a sort of case
study of the work of Michael Brynntrup.11 Brynntrup is one of the most
10
Persson draws for instance on discourse understanding as developed by psychologists Arthur Graesser, Paul van den Broek, and Rolf Zwaan. Greg M. Smith applies an
emotion system developed likewise by psychologists such as Michael Lewis, Joseph
LeDoux, or Richard J. Davidson. Greg M. Smith, Film Structure and the Emotion System
(Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003); Carl Plantinga and Greg M. Smith, eds, Passionate Views: Film, Cognition, and Emotion (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1999). The first
85 pages of Smiths innovative study are oriented toward developing the approach
out of cognitive psychologists work on emotions. Such an orientation results in film
studies by non-psychologists applying psychological models, rather than film studies
that contribute to the understanding of cognitive processes through the specific potential of the filmic medium. This singular direction of the flow of information is not
necessary nor need we assume it is permanent. It has a great deal to do with the way
interdisciplinary investigations often begin as a one-sided opening by one discipline
(film studies) to another (psychology in this instance).
11
Much of Brynntrups work, and especially the work discussed here, is at least in part
viewable through his website www.brynntrup.de. The website itself should be considered
a piece of that work, to be explored in its own right.

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significant contemporary artists of the moving image. Mike Hoolboom

has described Michael Brynntrup as the most fiercely prolific filmmaker of the German fringe. Indeed Brynntrup has produced close
to one hundred moving image pieces: films, videos, digital images, as
well as a series of drawings and other art objects. Further he has kept
an artists diary and has constructed a web site that pushes his entire
life into the realm of mediatized art. It is an impressive oeuvre that
covers an expansive set of concerns. Moreover the work continually
becomes more complicated, drawing on new technologies and new
forms of signification. Brynntrup even reworks his older pieces, drawing old images into new settings and transforming the format itself,
converting for example early super 8 films from the 1980s into interactive digital texts to be posted on his website. In terms of content,
Hoolboom notes that Brynntrup has undertaken an exhaustive cinematic self-examination, conjuring the subject as a fictional amalgam
of semiotic slippage, male/male desire and broken historical recall.12
Alice Kuzniar points out that Brynntrup consistently dismantles the
barriers between genres and media, raising questions. Are his films
educational, documentary, autobiographical, or pornographic? Do
they resemble Silent comedies, animation, or movemented collections
of still-life photos?13 Subjectivity, death, AIDS, reproduction, body
alteration, digitization, communication, mediation and mediatization,
popular culture, high culture, and culture industry are just a few of
the themes Brynntrup investigates.
Brynntrup does not produce narrative films; rather he creates what
might be described as experiments in visual form. These experiments
belong to an approach that picks up on aspects of the historical avantgarde, without adopting the unfulfillable revolutionary claims of its
grandiose manifesto rhetoric.14 My case study will focus on Brynntrups
more modest neo-avant-garde experiments, with the goal of considering how they might offer interventions in current cognitive debates.
After a general overview of the parameters of Brynntrups experiments,
I will focus on what we could call the Face of the Other Trilogy:
ALL YOU CAN EAT (1993), LOVERFILMAn Uncontrolled Dispersion
of Information (1996) and FACE IT! (face-to-face) (2007). In these works
Brynntrup turns to desiring genres: pornography, biography or the
12
Mike Hoolboom, The Death Dances of Michael Brynntrup, Millenium Film Journal
30/31 (1997): 3942.
13
Alice Kuzniar, The Queer German Cinema (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2000) 198.
14
See Randall Halle and Reinhild Steingrver, eds., After the Avant-Garde: Contemporary
German and Austrian Experimental Film (Rochester: Camden House, 2008).

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confessional mode, and cyber-contact images respectively. However,

he decontexualizes the images such that they cannot deliver what is
expected of the genre. In this decontextualization or deformation of
the visual language, Brynntrup establishes an experimental space in
which something other than the expected incitement of desire takes
place. These moving-images allow subjective awareness of affective and
perceptive faculties to arise. With these pieces, you never get what you
want, but instead, to paraphrase the Stones, you just might find how
you need. Such experimentation, while not a clinical model, places
Brynntrups work interestingly at the nexus of questions being posed
in philosophy, cognitive science, and increasingly, film studies. This
essay cannot hope to answer all those questions, but it can make a
contribution to the debates that generate them.
Toward a New Philosophy of Cognition:
The Logical Facts of the Thought are the Picture
In the 1960s cognitive science emerged as an interdisciplinary direction drawing on input from psychology, neuroscience, and philosophy.
Especially in the United States it was a welcome way out of many of
the impasses reached by the behaviorist model that dominated psychology. It is important in this context to note that initially, cognitive
science developed in an interdisciplinary environment with primary
input from the humanities. Out of the analytic philosophical approach,
cognitive science began as a discipline which presumed cognition to
be dominated by the logic of speech, and thus the so-called image
controversy proved to be one of the initial debates of the discipline.
The controversy developed around a fundamental question of whether
the interior language of the brain functions according to images, or
according to a language grammar. Cognitive scientists started from
an imagist presumption wherein imagination was taken as a sign of
the interiority of the mind, and following a line of reasoning already
explored philosophically by Kant, among others, they stressed the
import of our ability to imagine objects and things we have never
seen: e.g. mermaids and centaurs, or they noted the ability to mentally rotate and manipulate images into heretofore unseen objects.
These abilities bespeak an interiority that is distinct from the material
world, an interiority that allows us to act upon and even shape the
exterior. As early as the 1970s, the descriptionists doubted the ability
of the multivalent image to serve as a fundamental building block of
cognitive processes. The descriptionists drew the influence of Witt

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genstein and linguists like Noam Chomsky into cognitive science.

They responded to the imagists by seeking to describe a fundamental
grammar, a sentential state, to which images are eventually attached.15
The descriptionist approach rejected the inherent multi-valence of
the image; for them there was no guarantee of definite meaning
for any particular image. The suggestion was that there is a form of
computation or cybernetics at the heart of cognitive processes that
is distinct from image, leaving them to concentrate on defining syntactic subroutines.16 In the 1970s and 80s, along with the Chomskian
search for the deep structures of language, the expanding research
in cybernetics fostered this approach.
Brynntrups films first emerged in the 1980s against this backdrop. As
experimental films, they fundamentally seek to establish environments
that challenge the perceptive faculty. Moreover, they directly engage
significant aspects of the philosophical tradition; the filmmaker himself
makes this plain by quoting Hegel and Kant in the textual titles of his
films. For Michael Brynntrup, who initially studied philosophy from
197787 in Mnster, Freiburg, Rome and Berlin, these acts of quoting
are not simply clever decorations. Integrated into experimental films,
they offer what can be described as a visual philosophical text, actually
reworking into visual language some of the central problems in modern
European philosophy. Brynntrup significantly begins his work Tabu V
with an adaptation of the Wittgensteinian citation, Wovon man nicht
sprechen kann, darber mu man Filme machen [of what one cannot
speak, one must make films], and one is justified in understanding
this paraphrase as more than superficial play. It indicates an active
engagement with and response to a classic proposition of analytic
philosophy which was crucial to the genesis of cognitive science. But
while Wittgensteins original seventh proposition from the Tractatus
Logico-Philosophicuswhat we cannot speak about, we must pass over
in silenceleads to an impasse and silence, Brynntrup counters with
an active expression located in other media than the spoken word.
15
See Nigel Thomas, Mental Imagery, Philosophical Issues About, Encyclopedia of
Cognitive Science, ed. Lynn Nadel (London: Nature, 2003); Zenon Pylyshyn, Visual
indexes, preconceptual objects, and situated vision, Cognition 80:12 (2001): 12758
and Situating vision in the world, Trends in Cognitive Sciences 4.5 (2000): 197207; R.
Rensink, The dynamic representation of scenes, Visual Cognition 7 (2000): 1742;
M. Behrmann, The minds eye mapped onto the brains matter, Current Directions in
Psychological Science 9.2 (2000): 5054.
16
Mark Rollins, Mental Imagery: On the Limits of Cognitive Science (New Haven: Yale
UP, 1989) 54. See also his Romantic Science: On the Role of Images in Cognition,
Begetting Images: Studies in the Art and Science of Symbol Production, ed. Mary B. Campbell
and Mark Rollins (New York: Peter Lang, 1989).

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It is in this engagement with Wittgenstein, a founding figure for

cognitive science, that we can see the extent to which Brynntrups
work intersects with cognitive science. Tabu V does not just take on
the seventh but also inverts Wittgensteins third proposition from the
Tractatus: Das logische Bild der Tatsachen ist der Gedanke [The logical
picture of the facts is the thought]. Tabu Vand Brynntrups work in
generalcounters Wittgensteins proposition with a filmic statement
that the logical facts of the thought are the picture. By this I mean that the
figurative in the moving image is not simply subordinate to the limitations of expression in words; rather, the filmmaker has access to a
mode of expression that can weave together associations exceeding not
only the capability of speech but also the logic of cognition. It is this
picture that establishes the ground of the thinkable. Brynntrups films
thus counter both the linguistic concentration in analytic philosophy
and descriptionist cognitive studies. We can immediately recognize
that Brynntrups work responds to the descriptionist presumed primacy of specific linguistic forms of expressiona deep structure of
cognitionby offering visual perception as more fundamental or at
least of a primary order.
How this non-linguistic expression takes place is therefore difficult
to describe in words. It is best seen. Nevertheless, in films like Herzsofort.Setzung (I) [Heart.Instant/iation (I)] (1994), Mein zweiter Vers (1993)
or Die Statik der Eselsbrcken [The StaticsEngineering Memory Bridges]
(1990), Brynntrup leaves narrative and denotative logic behind for
a rich associative web of images that push the viewing subject into a
kind of cognitive overload. These pieces are difficult to describe, to
put into words, precisely because they are specifically experimenting
with visuality. All three begin from a conundrum of reproduction.
Herzsofort.Setzung, for instance, features a manipulated series of images
of Brynntrup himself over a ten-minute time frame.17 The images are
primarily of Brynntrup looking directly at a recording device. It is not
just a camera; his face is manipulated in various technologies and media
through 56 different generations in twelve sequences. The technologies involved range from polaroids and photocopying through photo,
video, 35mm, and digital. The images that appear in ten minutes were
produced over a ten-year time frameand continue to be produced.
They thus display a real time aging of Brynntrup. The constantly
transforming image begins showing an image of Brynntrup with his
face paintedthe original is thus already an image of a decorated
Stills from the work are available at www.brynntrup.de.

17

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and manipulated body. That image is then blown up and appears

with Brynntrup standing in front of it, which is then blown up and
manipulated so that another Brynntrup stands in front of the image
of Brynntrup in front of the image of Brynntrup and so on; however
the image at the end shows a Brynntrup ten years older than the
image at the start of the sequence. Each generation adds colors and
the multiplying layers push the film into the kaleidoscopic.
The project should be understood as a cognitive experiment in
perception or an attempt at expanding consciousness. The eye scans
each new image to make sense of what it sees, searching to recognize
the successively transmuting Brynntrup, and meanwhile, without a
narrative, the mind races behind the fleeting moments of recognition,
attempting to create connections with the preceding image. Brynntrup
described the images of Herzsofort.setzung enigmatically as stimulating
the retinas sense of touch in order to make the folds of the brain
palpable. The project seeks to make us physically aware of the physical
faculties of perception and cognition. Herz establishes an associative
web of images that ultimately bring that-which-cannot-be-physically-felt
into awareness and that-which-cannot-be-contained-in-language into
picture. Within this project, then, we find that the picture drives the
logical facts of thought, thought in its most physical sense as literally
the perceptive faculty.
Brynntrups work thus performs a fundamental critique of descriptionist cognitive science, suggesting that the descriptionists ignored
or overlooked the fact that in cognitive development, seeing precedes
speaking, and while the ability to communicate in language must
indeed be understood as a fundamental structure of cognitive processes, this faculty is preceded by abilities to perceive, recognize, and
respond that are more primary than the spoken word. The ability to
perceive is a faculty more primary and if not fundamental certainly
not subordinated to any deep structures of spoken language. But
Brynntrups works go further than simply reasserting the model
of imagist cognitive science, ultimately rejecting both imagist and
descriptionist approaches. As experiments they point to a fundamental and problematic unexamined presumption of interiority in both
the imagist and descriptionist directions in cognitive science. Both
directions fundamentally concentrate on processes in the brain as
generators of perception and cognition, not considering the role of
the exterior world. Critical of the general concept of interiority in
cognitive science and analytic philosophy, Brynntrup offers evidence
of what we could term a phenomenological approach. There is not simply

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an interior, neither is there some behaviorist exterior that is at work;

rather, there is a calling out into a world that invites perception and a
development of cognition. Brynntrups experimental work reinforces
the fact that perception is not a thing in itself. Perception is always
perception of something. In perception the surface and boundaries
of the body and the world take shape.
Brynntrups films offer a neo-avant-garde response to both analytic
philosophy and cognitive science by creating an actual experience of
the faculty of perception. These works give the observer a chance to
become aware of a logic that precedes the rational sense-making of
descriptive speech. It is not nonsense but rather the sensible production of a provocational ineffable. The provocational ineffable is not to
be confused with techniques of Brechtian distanciation that were
deployed especially in the neo-avant-garde of the 1960s and 70s. The
ineffable Brynntrup produces is about distance from emotions but
about experiencing something in cognition that cannot be expressed
in words, that even precedes words. Speech cannot represent everything one sees, and conversely one can imagine and make as image
that whereof one cannot speak. The strategies of representation in
Brynntrups films are thus often cryptic, aestheticized, associative,
often dissociativethe connections one begins to make fall apart in
a visual and sensory overload. This overload is a provocation to cognition, eliciting in the spectator a sense of the ineffable. (The ineffable
here is akin to the sublime, but not that of Kants rationalization of
threatening excesses, rather that of Schillers more fundamental
celebration of the emotive or affective states the sublime unleashes in
the subject.)18 In such provocation the subject becomes aware of other
processes at work, which are generally masked by cognition, especially
emotion and affect. It is in this regard that Brynntrups work makes
some of its most compelling interventions in current debates.
The Affective Turn and the Face
While Brynntrup used his own face as the central motif in Herzsofort.setzung, in the work that followed he focused on the face of the
other. Beginning with ALL YOU CAN EAT (1993) and continuing
with LOVERFILMAn Uncontrolled Dispersion of Information (1996) and
FACE IT! (face-to-face) (2007), he drew on various media from super
18
See Friedrich Schiller, ber das Schne und die Kunst (Munich: DTV, 1984); Immanuel
Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1974).

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8 to contemporary digital imaging to create what could be taken as

a trilogy in experimental film. He distilled faces, decontextualized
them, and established what could almost be described as controlled
experimental spaces in which we can experience general and specific
aspects of our perceptive faculties.
Cognitive film studies, especially the work of scholars like Carl
Plantinga, Greg Smith or Torban Grodal, has attended to some of the
aspects with which Brynntrup experiments. The work of Plantinga,
Smith, and Grodal, inspired by the larger affective turn in the social
and behavioral sciences, offers some descriptive paradigms for what
takes place in Brynntrups trilogy.19 Especially Plantinga has focused on
the face as one of the specific motifs in film that compels an emotional
experience. The face, he has argued, serves to establish the scene
of empathy and initiate the process of emotional contagion.20 The
face can infect the viewer with its own emotional state. A laughing
face on the screen elicits laughter from the spectators. Factors like
attention, duration, and context in the close-up on the face lead to a
facial feedback in the spectators.21
Still, the work of Plantinga, Smith, and Grodal on film has expressed
itself largely in analyses of popular narrative film, like Smiths work
on Raiders of the Lost Ark (Spielberg, 1981) or Grodals on E.T. (Spielberg, 1982). Grodal, one of the first cognitive film scholars to take
the affective turn, ascribes narrative films attractiveness to its ability
to activate the body: narrative patterns in films are mechanisms in
which fictional actions and changes in fictional situations transform
the arousal induced by the spectators engagement with characters.22
Smith has expanded on this work, investigating film structure and
what he calls the emotion system, a combination of longer orienting
tendencies and briefer emotional states arranged into a process that
allows us to evaluate and act upon our environment.23
19
Greg M. Smith, Film Structure and the Emotion System (Cambridge: Cambridge UP,
2003); Carl Plantinga and Greg M. Smith, eds., Passionate Views: Film, Cognition, and
Emotion (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1999); Torben Grodal, Moving Pictures: A New
Theory of Film Genres, Feelings, and Cognition (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1997).
20
Carl Plantinga, Scene of Empathy and the Human Face, Passionate Views 23955.
See also his Moving Viewers: American Film and the Spectators Experience (Berkeley: U of
California P, 2009).
21
Plantinga, Scene of Empathy 243.
22
Torben Grodal, Emotions, Cognitions, and Narrative Patterns, Passionate Views
130. See also Torben Grodal, Moving Pictures: A New Theory of Film Genres, Feelings, and
Cognition (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999).
23
Greg M. Smith, Local Emotions, Global Moods, Passionate Views 242. See also Greg
M. Smith, Film Structure and the Emotion System (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007).

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Such research focuses on a viewing experience in which the spectator

enters into a willing suspension of disbelief to allow, as Grodal terms
it, narrative patterns to direct emotional and emotive experiences.
Plantingas focus on the face as site of empathy adds to narrative context a mechanism he terms affective congruence.24 He notes how
film techniques of editing and sound incite the spectator to lend a
depth of character to an otherwise two-dimensional image of a face:
a certain menacing chord in the John Williams score of Star Wars
(Lucas, 1977) indicates Darth Vaders imperial evil, while John Morriss
score for the satirical Spaceballs (Brooks, 1987) manages to express the
ineptitude of the character Dark Helmet. Lighting and score work in
congruence with narrative to elicit certain affective states.
Plantinga observed the possibilities afforded by non-narrative films
that play on the involuntary process of emotional contagion, but
discourage contagion through various distancing strategies.25 What
happens when a filmmaker actively strives for an affective discord, a
disjoining of filmic techniques from emotive and affective intent, an
undermining or rejection of narrativeas with Brynntrups provocational ineffable? Certainly the analysis of narrative film the dominant
mode of film productionis primary in Plantingas work. Nevertheless
he notes that through non-narrative work, the rhetorical, ideological,
and aesthetic uses of filmic representations are opened to investigation. Such possibilities appear if we attend to the 530 short ALL
YOU CAN EAT, which relies on found footage from 1970s gay male
pornography. Brynntrup did not seek to create a pornographic film
himself, but to highlight and underscore the activities of the frame
and framings of desire. Instead of allowing the spectator to enter
into a familiar narrative context, Brynntrup reworks the images into
unfamiliar patterns.
EAT selectively edits the images of the material, extracting a series
of shots that focus primarily on a mans face. In EAT, Brynntrup does
not create a narrative pattern or emotion system out of the found footage; rather, he picks up on a theme first explored in Andy Warhols
1963 classic Blow Job and revisited in his lesser-known Eating too Fast
(1966). In those films Warhol focused on the face of the recipient
of the act of fellatio. It is a study in reaction. Where Warhols films
encourage a desiring identificatory relationship to the image, even

Plantinga, Scene of Empathy 253.

Plantinga, Scene of Empathy 256.

24
25

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establishing what Smith describes as mood, Brynntrup dismantles

the structures of that relationship.
Brynntrups film offers single faces in a sexual encounter. Pornography, the genre from which Brynntrup drew his found images, is
a genre the emotion system of which is certainly designed to allow
the spectator to enter into a desiring relationship with the image. It
is often referred to as a body genre, promising to excite, entice,
move the spectator. Given the films background in this genre, its
early reviewers expected scenes from pornography. The description
of the film and its source material predisposed them to a certain
mood. Smith speaks of emotion markers in a films narrative.26 In
Brynntrups case, the markers toward a particular system pre-formed
the experience, and instead the reviewers got a rapid series of faces
with 1970s-style electronic music. Their anticipation of something
more confused and disappointed a number of the reviewers and
critics: having expected something sexually explicit, they assessed the
film negatively. Peter Goddard, a reviewer for the Toronto Star, had
to explain to potential viewers, By the way, anyone coming to ... to
see more porn than its bad hair, will be disappointed. Brynntrup may
start with whats on top of the head, but what hes really interested in
is what goes on inside.27
Here the ineffable in ALL YOU CAN EAT comes out as affective
discord or dissonance. It is important, however, to underscore that
this discord is not without its own form of pleasure. A few reviewers
praised the focus on moments of ecstasy from a pre-AIDS period of
freedom. Christina Nord from the Tageszeitung found in the film a
sophisticated play with the dialectic of seeing and revealing.28 The
spectator of pornography expects to be moved, but this movement
is not typically associated with the face. The money shot is the
quasi-star of the porn film. Seeing ejaculation is a sign of a consummation of some form of desire-effect on the part of the actor while
the face plays a decidedly minor role in the porn shoot. Brynntrup
once humorously noted that he had to go through a large amount
of porn film material to find enough shots solely of faces. Out of the
eight hours he had at his disposal, there was only enough for under
Smith 117.
Peter Goddard, Shaking the citys culture; Filmmakers series critiques gay sensibilities, The Toronto Star 18 November 1999: 1.
28
Cristina Nord, Einblicke ohne Offenbarung: Die Kurzfilme des Experimentalfilmers
Michael Brynntrup im Filmkunsthaus Babylon, Tageszeitung 31 Oct. 1998: 29.
26
27

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five minutes. When Plantinga focused on the face as site of affective

congruence and emotional contagion, he noted that narrative film
relies on attention, duration, and allegiance to establish a scene of
empathy. The reduction in EAT to the face brings to bear an attention
and duration that is otherwise not in the original. This focus ultimately
frames out all that is anticipated in pornography; nevertheless, it
underscores that while the face shot may appear infrequently, it is in
the editing of the face shot that the emotional relationship between
spectator and image develops the rhythm to crescendo. The face is
essential, not incidental.
Nevertheless, regardless of the specific frame of the found shots,
by body movement and posture, or by facial features and gestures,
it is still clear that the faces presented are part of a sex act. It is also
clear that the images derive from male-male sex. The film offers its
viewers a pleasure of recognition. Through the film the spectators
can become aware of the larger social conventions and presumptions
about male (hetero)sexuality that infuse the frame. This play with
recognition counters the typical presumption that imagination leads
desire; the film allows spectators to experience how desiring expectations form imagination.
Unlike Blow Job, these images were embedded in a larger narrative
context where more was shown. This leaves the spectator in a quasi
generic awareness of the source of the image, aware of what is missing, not shown, outside the focus on the face. The partner, sexual
positions, location, erotica, all the elements of pornography, become
an unseen other outside the frame but essential to the experience
of the film. The spectator of Blow Job imagined how the blowjob was
proceeding outside the frame; the spectator of EAT speculates on what
is happening, how bodies attach to the face shown, how the genre
scenario played out. Through genre expectations, the imagination
fills in and expands the frame but the spectator is overwhelmed not
by emotion or desire, but by the rhetoric of the face.
The sequel to ALL YOU CAN EAT restores a certain individuality
and subjectivity to the face, which had been missing from the found
footage. In 22 minutes LOVERFILM passes review over twenty years
of sexual experiences and over one hundred different partners.
Brynntrup notes that the idea for this film developed out of ALL YOU
CAN EAT. There are numerous points in which the films resemble
each other visually. LOVERFILM presents pictures, films or videos of
the lovers faces while Brynntrup narrates their names in a monotone
voice. There are also other images; apparently when no photo of a

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former partner was available, Brynntrup inserted a sequence like that

found in EAT. Primarily, though, the images are of former lovers as
they look into the camera. They pose and address it as one would when
being photographed by a friend and lover. Robin Curtis describes the
experience of the film as similar to flipping through a friends photo
album.29 While this is true, the emotion system established here is not
an intimate mood. The monotone quality of the voice establishes a
sort of cognitive dissonance between the image and a certain expectation of emotional attachment established by the title, LOVERFILM.
The voice is not the studied voice of a Straub/Huillet film, it is more
an echo of Warhols famous indifference. It passes review without an
inflection of love, fondness, or concern.
In addition to the images through the voice we are given bits of
further information from Brynntrups diaries, like when he got herpes,
or who was his first Asian or African, or the results of his HIV tests:
1989, Its August 20th; Im still negative. This information contributes
to the sense of dissonance. Curtis further observes in this regard that
the passages from the diaries describing the trials and tribulations of
particular relationships are contrasted with the imperatives of the medical discourse that views each individual with respect to the AIDS virus,
in the language of epidemic modelling, simply as either infected,
susceptible, or dead. This is underscored by the fact that some of
the protagonists from LOVERFILM, such as Baldiga or Ovo Maltine,
are now also subjects of memorial works by Brynntrup. Hovering
over all these images without being stated explicitly is a revision of gay
sexuality in the era of AIDS. It asserts a non-monogamous sexuality of
the kind eschewed in the era of safer sex and sexual respectability. Of
interest here though is the monotony of the voice listing the names
and stating intimate facts frequently related to health. This voice
jars vis--vis the often innocent and even nave pictures. The monotone does not sensationalize, rather it holds up for consideration. It
conveys a confusing sense of coldness, investigation, concern, listing,
and even surveillance.
Beyond the framing of the images within the litany of sexual partners, the film warns the spectator that those photographed have
not been notified that their likeness is being used in this context,
nor has their permission been approved. This notice underscores,
29
Robin Curtis, From the Diary to the Webcam: Michael Brynntrup and the Medial
Self, After the Avant-Garde: Contemporary German and Austrian Experimental Film, ed. Randall
Halle and Reinhild Steingrver (Rochester: Camden House, 2008) 22545; 235.

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in contradistinction to EAT and the pornographic source of the footage, that these images come from a private and even intimate sphere
and were not intended or released for appropriation into a public
and sexualized sphere. It further provokes with Warning title cards
and at two points either delays or stops the review of names and faces
by instructing the spectator in 1950s stylized lurid language of the
social problem film that the viewer is also responsible for images
made public. Be aware that when you watch the following film, you
will infringe upon the privacy of those persons who have been photographed. You have one minute to decide if you really want to see
this film. Dont hesitate to leave the theater with a clear conscience
if that be your choice.
The face here is the face of the lover with personal information
attached. The emotional register explored, however, is not that of a
melodramatic register, or even that of flipping through a friends photo
album. In contradistinction to EAT, the face is identified and the question of permission draws up a sense of ownership and (failed) agency
over the image. This is an unusual state to describe as emotional, and
again with Brynntrup we reach the limits of the expressible in words.
The cognitive theories all work to describe emotion within narrative.
How does this non-narrative focus on the face require an expanded
understanding of emotional systems?
In their work, Grodal, Smith, and Plantinga all rely on a downstream
flow of perception, cognition, emotional processing in narrative film.30
It is a uni-directional flow; the viewers see, they comprehend, they
experience emotion. However, underlying all of their work are Silvan
Tomkinss foundational studies of affect from the 1960s. Tomkinss
analyses make possible a more complicated multi-directional understanding of affect, an understanding that better describes Brynntrups
work. Tomkins explored affect as located in the voice, skin, autonomic
nervous system, hand, body, and most extensively, the face. Rather
than perceive affect and emotion as developing outward from the
inner organs as Henri Bergson, William James, or Carl Lange had
suggested, Tomkins and his colleagues Carrol Izard and Paul Ekman
focused mostly on the face as an organ for the maximal transmission
of information, to the self and to others and concluded that the
information it transmits is largely concerned with affects.31 This is the
Grodal 132.
Silvan Tomkins, What and Where are the Primary Affects? Some Evidence for a
Theory, Exploring Affect: The Selected Writings of Silvan S. Tomkins, ed. E. Virginia Demos
(Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995) 218.
30
31

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point on which narrative film studies has focused. Tomkins conducted

extensive tests to discover how we present and perceive affect, including
using an ultra-high-speed camera to record micro-movements in the
face of a subject displaying changing affective states. Ekman condensed
the central theoretical points of Tomkins clinical work, noting that for
Tomkins the face is central to emotion and has priority over visceral
changes because of its speed, visibility, and precision.32
However, the recognition that affect is independent of cognition
proved important and highly suggestive to new paradigms of how
affect works. Tomkins suggested that the face informs not just others,
but also the self, of affective states. Further Ekman notes feedback
of the facial response is the experience of affect.33 The subject
becomes aware of the state by actually feeling it in the face, meaning
that it precedes cognition. You do not necessarily smile because you
are happy; rather you smile and become aware of your happiness.
Likewise, the face of the other transmits information that causes an
immediate response in your face, of which you become aware only
afterwards. Thus, emotional processing, cognition, and perception
are not a matter of a series of events but variables that lead to rapid
transformations of subjective states.
As with EAT, the face in LOVERFILM unleashes the potential of
emotional states in the spectator, but on different terms. Unlike in
EAT, LOVERFILM (re)personalizes the image. The spectator is invited
to consider that there is a person behind the image, albeit one who
has not given their consent. Moreover, the images often have nothing
to do with the specific description of the narrator. We contemplate
the information and context that adds to our ability to read the face
but we do not bring it into conjunction with our desire, or that of the
narrator. The face in LOVERFILM is a sexualized face, albeit not an
eroticized one. The narrators voice is that of the former lover, but
monotonous, without affect. The spectator views the images in the
context of a transgression, albeit not a sexualized one. There is an
affective dissonance here between the intimacy of the lovers face, the
cold informational tone of the narrating voice, the censorial warnings of the title cards, and the ensuing volition of the spectator. The
cinematic space that such a work constructs is not one in which the
32
Paul Ekman, Silvan Tomkins and Facial Expression, Exploring Affect 210. This point
proved central to Ekmans development of the Facial Action Coding System. See Paul
Eckman, W. V. Friesen, and J. C. Hager, The Facial Action Coding System, 2nd ed. (1974;
Salt Lake City: Research Nexus eBook, 2002).
33
Ekman 210.

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spectators are led to experience emotion, rather it is one in which they

are provoked into an experience of the experiencing of emotion.
Because of this affective dissonance, the emotional processing of
the individual spectator becomes more important in the assessment
of the films images. It forces a revision of what is perceived and
how the perceived comes into cognition. For instance, the film creates the sense that there is something wrong with the image. This is
of central importance to the affect of the film. The film sets up its
own viewing as a transgression of privacy: By continuing to view, the
spectator is forced to become aware of the desire to view. The film
instantiates a condition of scandal and even shame around the image.
To view the film is to violate a norm, to view the faces is to enter into
an uncomfortable condition outside of permission. Exhibition and
inhibition are not typically considered emotional states, but the piece
highlights their emotional aspects. Fundamentally, what the piece
does is establish a very different condition in its spectators. The often
negative response of film festivals and critics, describing the film as
embarrassing, leading by the nose, provocative, or obscene,
suggests that the film can make its spectators squirm. It unleashes
unpleasant emotions.
Gay Shame
It is important at this point to make a clarification. In this discussion
I have not yet considered the distinctness of desire, emotion, and
affect. As a short-hand, I actually have at times condensed the three.
However, within cognitive theory and the psychology of emotions,
psychologists like Silvan Tomkins have insisted on the distinction
between psychoanalytic notions of desire, emotions, and affect.34 In his
considerations of affect Tomkins followed a path initiated by Wilhelm
Wundt in the 19th century, insisting on a limited number of classifiable
affects. Tomkins counted only nine biologically based affects that were
to be distinguished as unattached and discrete from the attached and
indistinct emotions. While the particular number of affects and their
designations has been critiqued, his major breakthroughthat affect
is biologically based and discrete in its formis widely accepted and
has generated intense research.
The distinction of affect from emotion and desire proves useful for
34
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank, eds., Shame and Its Sisters: A Silvan Tomkins
Reader (Durham: Duke UP, 1995).

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the consideration of Brynntrups work, particularly in the final part

of Brynntrups trilogy, FACE IT, in which affect plays a central and
discrete role. FACE IT! (face-to-face) premiered as an installation piece
at the Berlin Film Festival in Forum Expanded, the section devoted
to experimental work. Brynntrup described FACE IT! (face-to-face) as
a peer-to-peer installation in offline mode. A big, walk-in corner
wardrobe. The spectators enter individually and then see a video on
a vertically mounted flat screen with life-size self-portraits from current chat profiles. FACE IT! is a confrontation with the new privacy
of the World Wide Web (2.0). Passing through swinging doors, the
spectator stands alone, literally in a closet, inches away from a flat
screen monitor. On the monitor is a collage of images drawn from
gay chat rooms and contact sites on the www. In the images men pre
sent themselves for display in order to appear attractive. Most of them
are at least shirtless. The goal of the original image is clearly to take
up contact with other men; however, in the images there is nothing
explicitly sexual or more risqu than one might see at a (European)
beach. Still, the men present themselves to be sexually attractive. Their
physicality is visceral. They want to appear hot.
The spectators, alone with these images in close proximity, have an
opportunity to become aware of their own bodies. They can experience phenomenologically an image, given to perception, that calls
out a response. The spectator who enters into the booth may or may
not have an economy of desire that corresponds to these images, but
the arousal of physical or sexual desire is not the goal of the installation. The installation abstracts the images from their original context
and puts them into a new one. Originally, although semi-public, they
were deployed to engage private communication. The communicative
aspect is lost in the installation. The booth in which they now appear,
with its peepshow quality, actually removes the images from the typical
private experience of viewing at the computer terminal. It underscores the actual public quality of the chat room, and by placing the
spectator in such proximity to the images in a public installation, it
distills and intensifies the awareness of this public/private dynamic.
Like LOVERFILM, it can make the spectator uncomfortable. It places
the spectator into a position not of arousal but of awareness of the
possibility of arousal.
And yet, a central motif and key to the brilliance of Brynntrups
piece is the fact that none of the bodies have faces. Brynntrup selected
images that anonymize the figures. These are not images where the
head is cropped out but rather images where the subject holds a camera

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in front of his face and shoots into a mirror. All the men, presenting
themselves, take self-portraits in a mirror, holding the camera in front
of their faces. The body appears but the eyes, nose, mouth, the specific
facial features, are obscured. Sometimes it is simply a camera that is
positioned in front of the face. Often, however, it is a flash from the
camera. In place of the face alluded to in the title, FACE IT, the viewer
sees a bright blast, a flare, a sort of radiant halo.
This motif of the flash is new. The other and older strategy of choice
to preserve a form of anonymity while presenting the self as incitement
is to cut the head out of the frame. This strategy establishes an aesthetic connection to antiquity: the men display themselves as a classic
Greek torso. The flash, however, belongs to the aesthetic aspects of
the technological possibilities opened up by the cheap digital cameras
and ubiquitous hosting platforms of Web 2.0. This flash that effaces
is a new form of self-representation.
Brynntrup edited these images together so that they pass review at
various speeds to the rhythm of an electronic soundtrack. Periodically
there is a countdown of the type that usually appears in a film trailer;
this acts as a sort of coda or refrain. Toward the end, the montage
accelerates, taking on the quality of collage. The final sequence
occludes the men and shows instead only the cameras, repeating the
entire sequence again, as if to suggest that it was always only about the
cameras. In the absence of the bodies the erotic aspect of the images
dissipates. Plantinga, Smith, or Grodal offer little that can address
these non-narrative faceless pieces. Where Plantinga considered the
close-up and the face, Brynntrup offers the body without a head (and
the camera without the body without the head). Nevertheless, clearly,
the piece can affect its viewers.
The significance of the images grew as FACE IT began to circulate.
During the Berlinale, the closet was positioned in the Atrium of the
Filmhaus on Berlins Potsdamer Platz. Starting the following August,
it traveled as a projected piece through a large festival circuit from
Berlin to Budapest, Moscow, Istanbul, So Paulo, Seoul, the Hague,
and Paris. And then in a new form, as a return of the project to the
web, Brynntrup loaded FACE IT (Cast your self ) as streaming video
onto YouTube. In spite of its success on the festival circuit, the debut
of the piece on YouTube lasted only a half hour before it was flagged
as inappropriate content. Here the piece returned the images to the
web, their original medium, albeit in a different forum. Nevertheless
the YouTube viewer had the opportunity to experience the images in
that illusory private space in which they originally appeared, while
bringing them into a decidedly less gay, more public space.

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We cannot be certain of the motivations for censorship; YouTube gets

so many uploads per day that it is impossible for the systems operators
to review everything, so they have established a self-regulating mechanism where users can flag a piece. Viewers can flag the content and
once reviewed, it is then removed without explanation. The image of
the other, the images of men, the images of men presenting themselves
sexually, the images of men seeking to appeal to other men, the act
of effacement in the imagessomething was able to provoke enough
YouTube users to flag the video for it to be removed in short order.
Something in the video made it stand out as particularly appropriate
for censorship from the field of over 1000 classic beefcake images,
or the 120,000 Paris Hilton videos, or 96,500 car crash videos, or
even 250 dog excrement videos that YouTube hosts. It is impossible
to reconstruct what it really was that motivated the users. It is possible that it was disgust with the images. It is also possible that one
or more of the men recognized themselves and were embarrassed
to find themselves on display in a way they did not originally intend.
Brynntrup noted that the anonymity of this democratic censorship
pushed the concept of Web 2.0 to reveal its limits: There are mechanisms that continually close down this endless freedom. I approve of
digital freedom, but one should always reflect on who has control
over the circuits of power.35
Inasmuch as FACE IT attracts, it is also able to repel. The piece
obviously has the ability to elicit some form of censorious response:
the YouTube users responded directly to the images, provoked by
them into action. The face here in its effacement may be taken to
exhibit Tomkins understanding of shame. Shame, Tomkins suggested,
exhibits itself in a weakening of the neck muscles so that the head
wants to hang. He describes how the subject possibly blushes and the
eyes avert. Aesthetically the flash could be understood as an extreme
abstraction of the blush that hides the head. This self-portrait replaces
the direct look. It averts the gaze of the subject, while at the same
time attracting the affect of the observer.
Of Tomkins nine forms of biologically based affects (interest-excitement, enjoyment-joy, surprise-startle, distress-anguish, anger-rage, fearterror, shame-humiliation, dissmell, and disgust) shame-humiliation
was one of the last to evolve. Shame might be understood as working
35
Es gibt eben Mechanismen, die dieser grenzenlosen Freiheit immer wieder Riegel
vorschieben. Ich finde die digitale Freiheit gut, aber man muss immer reflektieren,
wer ber die Schaltstellen verfgt. Michael Brynntrup, Rette dein Leben, interview
by Bert Rebhandl, TAZ 12 June 2008 <http://www.taz.de/1/leben/film/artikel/1/
rette-dein-leben>.

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in conjunction with the other, positive affects, especially the primary

pairs of interest-excitement and enjoyment-joy. It is not their opposite
but a deep and constantly changing bodily response to new circumstances, experienced at the point of contact between the body and the
social world. It is felt especially when the individual experiences an
impediment to interest or enjoyment. Thus, shame is not the opposite
of enjoyment but rather an experience potentially felt in conjunction with it (or excitement, or interest). Even though it is felt in the
individual, it is a response across individuals. Therefore this process
should not be understood as an individual process. It is intersubjective
and communicative in a form outside of spoken language.
Alice Kuzniar and Eve Sedgwick have extended this work, concentrating on how the affect of shame in particular exists between the
body and the face of the other.36 Both Kuzniar and Sedgwick stress
that shame is that particular form of affect most profoundly felt in
relationship to others and in social circumstances that matter the
most, or in which the individual is most invested. Furthermore, in
pairing shame-humiliation Tomkins also underscored that the affect
arises with a lack of response to interest-excitement, in conditions of
non-recognition. The exposed body may or may not appeal and in that
moment of exposure, the affective possibilities are in flux. The effaced
image captures that flux and expresses multiple affective potentials.
Is there something specific to be described in the presentation
of mens bodies for other men? Is there a form of shame specific to
gay people? A number of critics and theorists have recently begun to
answer this question affirmatively. David Halperin and Valerie Traub
argue in the introduction to their edited collection of essays Gay Shame
that gay shame is an outcome of conditions of non-recognition or
social ostracism especially for gay people.37 In a heteronormative social
environment, conditions of nonrecognition lead to an experience of
shameespecially in gays and lesbians. Being ignored or excluded
leads to a lessening of self-value. Gay pride, as the foundation of gay
liberation in the 1970s, thus has a counterpart in gay shame, and is
thus not the opposite but an outgrowth of gay shame of the 1950s
and 60s.
36
See in particular Alice Kuzniar, Melancholias Dog: Reflections on Our Animal Kinship
(Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2006); and Eve Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy,
Performativity (Durham: Duke UP, 2003). See also Eve Sedgwick, Shame in the Cybernetic Fold: Reading Silvan Tomkins, Shame and Its Sisters 128.
37
David N. Halperin and Valerie Traub, eds., Gay Shame (Chicago: U of Chicago P,
2008).

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In Moving Politics Debbie Gould explores the role of noncognitive,

nonconscious, nonlinguistic, and nonrational motivations for social
movements.38 She extends the analysis, focusing on activism and
political feelings, including expected and often evident feelings in
the realm of activism like rage, anger, indignation, hope, pride, and
solidarity, but also those that might be less perceptible but nevertheless in play, like fear, shame, embarrassment, guilt, overwhelmedness,
desperation, and despair (4). Goulds work is an important innovation in the analysis of the role of affect in the social and behavioral
sciences because to this point, on a fundamental level, emotions have
been assessed negatively, especially as a destructive aspect of crowd or
mob behavior.39 It was not until the emergence of civil rights, womens
rights, and gay rights that participation in extra-parliamentary social
movements became understood as justified and reasonable. Goulds
work on affect suggests that gay pride does not undo or dispense with
shame. Moreover, it also suggests that there is no need to be ashamed
of shame. Gould, Halperin, Traub, Sedgwick, and Kuzniars research
suggests that gay shame can be assessed positively. Shame as affect is
productive in its connection to movement and expression. Gay shame
can produce significant activity, activity that signifies more profoundly
than gay pride.
Thus, to open up a discussion of gay shame is not a way of saying that
the men presenting themselves were too ashamed in the commonly
understood way to show their faces. Rather, shame in its productive
capacity may have motivated the effacement allowed by the flash.
Certainly, however, the men were digitally cruising an electronically
semi-public site in order to present themselves and to attract interest.
Shame as affect interacts with other affects in such a setting, including excitement and enjoyment, coordinating visceral responses. The
suggestion is, then, that shame travels as affect between the body and
the face of the other. The act of cruising that generated the images is
a deep and constantly changing bodily response to new circumstances.
The users of the chat rooms sought a point of contact with another
and with an other. It is contact ultimately between the body and the
social world. Yet cruising is not always successful, generating many
impediments to interest or enjoyment. The faceless image puts the

Deborah Gould, Moving Politics (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2009).

Protest and participation in protest was perceived from the 19th century (Le Bon)
to the 1970s as a sign of weak ego boundaries (Freud) and a propensity to come under
the sway of authoritarian figures (Lasswell or Adorno et al).
38
39

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body on display while hiding the response to the interest/lack of

interest of the other.
The origin of the images, then, is clear, but how do they function
in their appropriated context? The spectator of the piece certainly
lacks the typical point of identification and recognition. To be sure,
regardless of the spectators economy of desire, the screening space
of FACE IT creates an environment in which the spectators affective
state is keyed to and cued to the image. Especially in the confined
space of the installation, the spectator confronts a series of images of
men presenting themselves to other menwith no face. Regardless
of the economy of desire of the spectators, FACE IT positions them as
the other to the faceless image. Do I want them? What do they want
of me? The camera, however, stands in for an act of reflection and
refraction typical of Brynntrups ineffable. The camera in the images
simultaneously represents what the man on display sees: himself in
a mirror, but it also refracts back a gaze at the spectator. The mans
look passes through the camera to the spectator. The camera thus
simultaneously blocks what the spectator wants to see and stands in
for an eye that sees the spectator. The spectator gives interest to an
image that does not look back. Spectatorial recognition is doomed to
failure. FACE IT thereby shames its spectatorsif shame is that affect
that arises most directly in relationship to the other from whom one
seeks recognition or in whom one is most invested.
The negativity of the speedy response on YouTube arose because in
Brynntrups piece we feel not just any shame, but the specific experience of gay shame. Gay shame here could mean that the images are
not just marked by their facelessness but by their being men on display
for other men; the original direction of desire remains, marking their
alterity. But I would insist that in a heteronormative society, gay will
always mark a position from which one seeks recognition from the
other, but may be denied it or may receive it in a way that does not
elicit joy or interest. And that is what the spectator is made to feel.
FACE IT establishes a space in which the spectators affect can
become an explicit object of perception and cognition. What the
spectator feels does not result simply from a downstream flow but
is part of the cycle of facial response Tomkins identified. There is
much that could be said about this cycle, but suffice it to observe that
for the spectator who benefits from heteronormative social orders,
this experience of gay shame can prove profoundly moving to the
point of calling forth a strong censoring mechanism. Moreover, this
differential response raises a fundamental objection to the interiority

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of the imagist and descriptionist models discussed earlier. It would be

banal to suggest that a gay spectator will have a gay way of seeing, but
such a statement would be in line with the interiority of the cognitive models. The spectator is not bound by a fundamental grammar,
or subject to a single sentential state. Both spectator and image are
multivalent and differential. The image is the point through which
the body and the social world come into contact.
The experimental space established in this piece, as in the others
discussed, underscores how the world that calls forth perception is
a vast field containing differing forms. We are not simply observers
on a vast horizon of the world but spectators perceiving according to
determining conditions of visibility. We can therefore refine further
the proposition formulated earlier: if perception is always perception
of something, it is not simply perception of any thing. The thing given
to perception affects it, calls perception forth, gives it direction, and
provides it with a sense of shape and form.
Cognitive film studies begin from the understanding that the
cinematic represents a site of a particular mode of perception. Only
with an awareness of how environmentslike the cinematicframe
vision, can we draw some conclusions about the more general phenomenon of cognition and affect. In general, a cognitive study of film
and the cinematic can support the emergence of such an approach.
It does so fundamentally through its precise and specific attention
to the embodied nature of the spectator and the specific positions
of perception.
On this basis cognitive film studies holds the potential to make an
equivalent and strong contribution to cognitive science. However,
cognitive film studies has focused largely on narrative film, in which
the thing perceived has multiple variations, yet is structured in a way
that relies on a foundation of familiarity, readability, and legibility.
Experimental film in contradistinction offers a surface that tests and
plays with perception. Brynntrups work can make us aware of perception as such. Brynntrups associative webs of the ineffable draw out
an experience of cognitions freedom to go beyond the linguistically
expressible into other realms of affective experience. This ineffable
points in effect to that which is felt in the body. It fundamentally
relies on offering new experiences for perception, thereby offering
perception a chance to experience itself differently, anew.
University of Pittsburgh