The method of directing performers intrinsic in affective atmosphere is the focused and present becoming with reality that is not interrupted by separation between periods of filming and not filming. This approach instead transcends the separation between actuality and pro-filmic reality, and it equally transcends the separation between the habitual effect of the self and the representation of a fictional character. The borders between subjects, and between reality, the filming process, and the aesthetic world of the image, become blurred as part of the affective atmosphere. In the two films I present in this exposition, the affective atmosphere method implemented the element of journey, in order to constitute a unique basis for a film – a role conventionally served by a script. For Becoming, Barcelona, any sense of a conventional script was replaced by the rhizomatic script, which distilled the affective atmosphere method and preserved it as something transferable and repeatable (so that other films could potentially be made on this basis). Becoming Granular absorbed the written form of the rhizomatic script into an even looser and less defined structure, emerging from the becoming of the moment, but held together by a few basic logistical decisions on the level of the (real) journey itself. Through my presence and direction, the rhizomatic script was implemented, but merely to the extent that it had been implemented in the preceding film through the performers who had internalised it. I too was intuitively connected to the becoming of the moment rather than being attached to a conscious memory of the elements of the script.

References

Anderson, Ben. 2009. ‘Affective Atmospheres’, Emotion, Space and Society, 2: 77–81

Baron, Cynthia, and Sharon Marie Carnicke. 2011. Reframing Screen Performance (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press)

Bartow, Arthur. 2009. ‘Introduction’, in Arthur Bartow (ed.), Handbook of Acting Techniques (London: Nick Hern Books), pp. xv–xxxvii

Benjamin, Walter. 2008. The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media, ed. by Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin, trans. by Edmund Jephcott and others (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press)

Böhme, Gernot. 2017. The Aesthetics of Atmospheres, ed. by Jean-Paul Thibaud (London: Routledge)

Cavell, Stanley. 1979. The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film, enlarged edn (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press)

Colebrook, Claire. 2002. Gilles Deleuze (London: Routledge) 

Deleuze, Gilles. 1986. Cinema 1: The Movement Image, trans. by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (London: Athlone Press)

Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. by Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press)

—— 1994. What Is Philosophy?, trans. by Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press)

Del Río, Elena. 2008. Deleuze and the Cinemas of Performance: Powers of Affection (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press)

Griffero, Tonino. 2016. Atmospheres: Aesthetics of Emotional Spaces, trans. by Sarah de Sanctis (London: Routledge)

Kuleshov, Lev. 1974. Kuleshov on Film: Writings of Lev Kuleshov, trans. and ed. by Ronald Levaco (Berkeley: University of California Press)

Mersch, Dieter. 2012. ‘Passion and Exposure: New Paradoxes of the Actor’, in Jörg Sternagel, Deborah Levitt, and Dieter Mersch (eds), Acting and Performance in Moving Image Culture: Bodies, Screens, Renderings(Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag), pp. 447–77

Salata, Kris. 2013. The Unwritten Grotowski: Theory and Practice of the Encounter (New York: Routledge)

Schmitz, Hermann, Rudolf Owen Müllan, and Jan Slaby. 2011. ‘Emotions outside the Box – The New Phenomenology of Feeling and Corporeality’, Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 10: 241–59

Shaviro, Steven. 1993. The Cinematic Body (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press)

Stanislavski, Constantin. 2008. An Actor Prepares, trans. by Elizabeth Reynolds Hapgood (London: Methuen Drama)

Weston, Judith. 1996. Directing Actors: Creating Memorable Performances for Film and Television (Studio City, CA: Michael Wiese Productions)

—— 2003. The Film Director’s Intuition: Script Analysis and Rehearsal Techniques (Studio City, CA: Michael Wiese Productions)

The way in which affective atmosphere was applied in this project hopefully presents a useful guide and inspiration for filmmakers and performers alike. The specific practitioner decisions and considerations outlined in this exposition can serve as a departure point for new creative experimentation – taking the lead from the unpredictable becoming of the real. At the heart of the practitioner choices informed by affective atmosphere is the fundamental belief – grounded in the theoretical research and its practical application – that the direct encounter with the real is potentially a more powerful and productive basis for a film (performance) than ideas and imagination. This is because film has the unique ability to capture a direct, mechanical imprint of the real (light) as movement, while the post-production process of editing allows for a delimitation of shots out of the raw footage, and for a radical selection and reordering of the material – thus shaping the becoming in reality into a subtle sense of meaning and narrative. The rhizomatic script then very much reflects this prioritisation of the spontaneous and unpredictable over the planned and premeditated, creating opportunities for loose affective connections as an alternative to dramatic/narrative structure and meaning. In line with the earlier quotation from Deleuze and Guattari (1987) about the rhizome, the rhizomatic script, as much as the affective atmosphere approach as a whole, is ‘entirely oriented toward an experimentation in contact with the real’.