The Scene In Cinema – Epiphany 1

This week, I did have an epiphany. No, it wasn’t a forced one. I have been learning about Jean Epstein and photogenie in Histories of Film Theory. What I thought would be a really boring topic about a theorist who had ideas, but then rephrased them in a constructed way to sound mystical and wondrous therefore harnessing the image of the infinite intellect of artists, that would absolutely bore me to death. Instead, what I found was this concept that by filming the everyday and mundane, the shot creates a meta physical context of emotion, style, atmosphere, and what would be considered ‘another world’. I have been feeling this emotion with film since I was 11. I watched Reservoir Dogs without my parents permission, and was opened to Quentin Tarantino’s universe. I could feel the atmosphere of a by-gone-era still resonating in the 1990’s, despite it being 2005 at the time. I felt the weird styles of different characters, and how their dialogue was full of pop culture references and vulgar wit. I loved it! I would walk down the street feeling this universe, and I had no idea why, until now. I see the photogenie of this film, and perceive it emotionally by an identification of colours and music. The colours represent different things to me about the context of what I am seeing, as well as the ideological, political and social aspects of the film, scene or shot. So, my epiphany is that this feeling that I can feel in cinema of a ‘universe’ of style, is derivative of photogenie.