ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses that the material body of the audience rather than the film screen serves as the most significant site of cinematic action. It develops a musical way of addressing the effects of cinematic gestures that are not conventionally musical in nature. In developing a musical way of thinking about film experience, the chapter incorporates principles of Sobchack’s film phenomenology, Hatten’s theory of musical gesture, and psychoanalytically based theories of non-verbal, human communication, particularly those of Daniel Stern, Colwyn Trevarthen, and Stephen Malloch. Sobchack convincingly outlines the two-way structure of film experience, and furthermore integrating the phenomena of vitality forms within the intersubjective matrix from which film experience derives suggests that internalized sensations of movement induced via real-time film experience establish periods of affective synchronicity between film and audience. Within this framework, affect attunement among human subjects analogizes aspects of film experience.
