Thank you for reading Cross Dissolve.
I called my blog “Cross Dissolve” because when I go to the movies, keeping an open spirit, I feel the borders of my self dissipate so I can give myself over completely to the experience. Likewise, the movie loses itself in me. If the movie is really good, it colors my life and I leave the theater feeling the world differently; if I am generous in return, my experiences and perspective color the film—each one becomes a new object every time I approach it. Together we create new feelings, meanings, and points of view. A cross dissolve is a type of film transition where the first image fades out and the second fades in, so they briefly overlap. We share these overlapping moments with films, where the first-and-a-half image becomes more than two images superimposed, but a singular and previously unknown interaction greater than its constituent parts. In the case of drawing, Eisenstein called this “interpenetration.”1
Sobchack writes2 that films, like their viewers, have bodies and perspectives. When we dissolve into films and they dissolve into us, we lose the divide between the subject (us) and the object (the film). We touch and speak to one another. Schefer called this the “private pact,”3 where films reach deep into our inner worlds, to places even we rarely go to, and form a sympathetic bond, and we reach into them as well. I think we all experience this at the movies and it’s why the movies not only help us to understand our world, but also to shape it.
I first got interested in film after taking a course on Andrei Tarkovsky in college. His films always feature things falling from the sky, like snow or feathers. In the spring I saw the pollen on the wind and it looked like it could be out of one of his films, and everything was full of beauty and life. Deleuze wrote that cinema should condition philosophy, rather than the other way around.4 I think it does without us realizing it; we know this because we leave the theater different from when we entered it, leaving pieces of us behind but taking new things back into the world.
I found this when I was writing my grad thesis on Eisenstein, in a racy but bashful theoretical essay called “Some Personal Reflections on Taboo.”
In the introduction to her book, The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience.
In his unusual book, The Ordinary Man of Cinema.
I read about this in Nico Baumbach’s very cool book, Cinema/Politics/Philosophy.
