Film and Contemporary Audiovisual Media colloquium – Steffen Hven (Filmuniversity Babelsberg): Cinema’s Diaphanous Atmospheres

The theory and philosophy of atmosphere – understood as the emotional tonality, mood, and ambience of spatial constellations – have been rapidly growing areas of research in fields ranging from phenomenological and aesthetic philosophy to architectural studies and human geography. More recently, a similar ‘atmospheric turn’ in film and media studies has begun to surface. Aiming to contribute to this emerging discourse, this lecture studies a specific kind of ‘cinematic atmosphere’, that I propose to call diaphanous. Borrowing Aristotle’s term for those material substances – air, water, fire, fog, glass, smoke, etc. – that through their various densities and degrees of opacities condition and articulate the field of perception, diaphanous atmospheres are characterized by the active shining through of the ‘medium of perception’ in its very act of mediation the field of appearances.

In addition to the ‘elemental media’ highlighted by Aristotle, I argue that to this category counts also how cinematic techniques (slow and fast motion, superimposition, camera movements, etc.) as well the material basis (film stock, digital film, data moshing, etc.) shape our perception of the film world. Outlining the historical-theoretical foundation of diaphanous atmospheres from Aristotle to Böhme over Goethe and Benjamin, while relating their implications to other types of cinematic atmospheres as well as their relevance to current film and media theoretical debates (e.g., post-cinema, environmental media studies, elemental media theory), this lecture provides numerous examples ranging from experimental films such as Stan Brakhage’s The Text of Light (1974) and Larry Gottheim’s Fog Line to more recent narrative films such as La Ciénaga (2001), Aftersun (Welles, 2022) to demonstrate the value of cinema’s diaphanous atmospheres and the virtue of studying them.