Julian Hanich

University of Groningen | RUG · Department of Arts, Culture and Media

The University of Groningen is looking for a PhD student with an expertise in film theory and aesthetics (application deadline: August 31, 2023). Please apply via this link: https://www.rug.nl/about-ug/work-with-us/job-opportunities/?details=00347-02S000AANP

This is a preprint version of a chapter that has come out in Julian Hanich/Martin Rossouw (eds.): WHAT FILM IS GOOD FOR: ON THE VALUES OF SPECTATORSHIP. Oakland: University of California Press, 2023. Please cite the printed version.

For well over a century, going to the movies has been a favorite pastime for billions across the globe. But is film actually good for anything? This volume brings together thirty-six scholars, critics, and filmmakers in search of an answer. Their responses range from the most personal to the most theoretical—and, together, recast current debates ab...

In this brief essay for the online journal "In Media Res" I propose the concept of "mise en esprit" as a companion term to "mise en scène" for film studies. Mise en esprit refers to the phenomenon when, provoked by evocative aesthetics, our embodied mind complements mentally what a film affords us suggestively and thereby 'puts something in our min...

This small monograph on Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau's beautiful film "City Girl" (1930)—written in German—is the first in-depth study of the last Hollywood movie of the German silent-era director. I show that the film has been unduly neglected by film critics and scholars alike and that "City Girl" is deeply interwoven with public debates of the late...

Since it is first and foremost the cinema that enables—or at least facilitates—concentrated and focused film experiences, this article makes a strong plea for the ongoing importance of the movie theater as a vital cultural practice and social institution. Although we better engage some films privately and alone at home, we do better to watch other...

A glossary of terms can often be a student’s closest ally, gearing them up to navigate the myriad labels and concepts they will undoubtedly encounter in their academic careers. They will encounter several in Julian Hanich’s article “Suggestive Verbalizations in Film: On Character Speech and Sensory Imagination,” in which various concepts are unpack...

Against the background of a widespread language skepticism among film theorists and practitioners, this article aims to highlight the evocative potential of spoken words in cinema. Focusing on an aesthetic device dubbed ‘suggestive verbalization,’ it demonstrates how character speech can powerfully appeal to the spectator’s sensory imagination: lan...

This chapter pursues two main goals. First, I want to extend a critique that – despite their indebtedness to it – Gernot Böhme and Tonino Griffero have levelled against Hermann Schmitz’s notion of atmospheres: that atmospheres can be actively produced and that we can even reconstruct a poetics of atmospheres. However, and here I see a potential to...

A look at current emotion research in film studies, a field that has been thriving for over three decades, reveals three limitations: (1) Film scholars concentrate strongly on a restricted set of garden-variety emotions—some emotions are therefore neglected. (2) Their understanding of standard emotions is often too monolithic—some subtypes of these...

This article tries to shed light on the multiple, but underrated pleasures of the heist film-a genre that has attracted numerous major directors from Jean-Pierre Melville and Stanley Kubrick to Michael Mann and Steven Soderbergh, but has received limited scholarly attention. I approach the genre from a, broadly, philosophical perspective and draw o...

This article starts out by introducing the category of the 'one-character film,' that is, narrative feature films that rely on a single onscreen character. One-character films can range from extremely laconic movies entirely focused on the action in the narrative here-and-now via highly talkative films that revolve around soliloquies of self-reflec...

Our theoretical model (Menninghaus et al., 2019) defines aesthetic emotions by reference to their role in aesthetic evaluation, and specifically as being predictive of aesthetic liking/disliking. Skov and Nadal (2020) dismiss the construct of "aesthetic emotions" as a "dated supposition" adopted from a "speculative" tradition and assert that there...

In this brief essay I draw attention to the effects momentous historical events – such as the Covid-19 pandemic, the Brexit referendum or the 9/11 attacks – can have on a film viewer’s interpretive horizon. How we interpret films shot long before the event can be altered rather abruptly with the onset of the event.

Dieser Text geht aus von einer Problematisierung des Spannungsverhältnisses zwischen Filmphänomenologie und Filmanalyse. Definiert man nämlich das Ziel der Filmphänomenologie als Beschreibung invarianter Strukturen des bewussten subjektiven Erlebens von Filmen, scheint das Vorhaben einer phänomenologischen Filmanalyse beinahe widersprüchlich. Erwei...

For the first time this volume makes Jean-Pierre Meunier’s insightful thoughts on the film experience available for an English-speaking readership. Introduced and commented by specialists in film studies and philosophy, Meunier’s intricate phenomenological descriptions of the spectator’s engagement with fiction films, documentaries and home movies...

This 17-page interview with psychologist and film-phenomenologist Jean-Pierre Meunier was conducted by Julian Hanich and Daniel Fairfax on two occasions. Meunier speaks about his origins as a researcher, how he came to write his first book "The Structures of the Film Experience: Filmic Identification," his interest in phenomenology and other topics...

For the first time this volume makes Jean-Pierre Meunier’s insightful thoughts on the film experience available for an English-speaking readership. Introduced and commented by specialists in film studies and philosophy, Meunier’s intricate phenomenological descriptions of the spectator’s engagement with fiction films, documentaries and home movies...

This introduction for a special issue of the journal NECSUS - co-written with Jens Eder and Jane Stadler - provides an overview of the central research questions, concepts, and lines of conflict at the nexus between media and emotions. It interrogates key terms such as affect and emotion, discusses a variety of influential approaches in emotion res...

This special issue of NECSUS - which I co-edited with Jens Eder and Jane Stadler - features seven articles about emotion and affect from scholars working in Germany, the US, China, Australia, and England. They offer theoretical, methodological, and analytic contributions to media studies spanning cinema, television, photography, and social media. C...

Due to its spatial and technological features the cinema allows us to follow films of a more challenging kind with deep attention, but it does so in part because of another central characteristic: the co-presence of other viewers. Their deep attention can contagiously rub off on ours and help us keep focused. The social affordances of the cinema th...

Why are readers of novels so frequently disappointed about film adaptations? This essay explores the grounds for this enduring question, focusing on filmed versions of illusion-creating novels. It does so by presenting a psychological hypothesis of the most common reasons and supports it with a comparative media phenomenology and reception aestheti...

This is the in-press version of an article that will soon be published in Psychological Review. It is the first comprehensive theoretical article on aesthetic emotions. Following Kant’s definition, we propose that it is the first and foremost characteristic of aesthetic emotions to make a direct contribution to aesthetic evaluation/appreciation. Ea...

For more than two decades emotions have been a major topic of discussion and contention in film and media studies. From cognitive theories and phenomenology to affect studies, many different approaches have been suggested, many books written, and many insights won. However, some crucial questions have barely been discussed. This special issue on em...

Dieser Text geht aus von einer Problematisierung des Spannungsverhältnisses zwischen Filmphänomenologie und Filmanalyse. Definiert man nämlich das Ziel der Filmphänomenologie als Beschreibung invarianter Strukturen des bewussten subjektiven Erlebens von Filmen, scheint das Vorhaben einer phänomenologischen Filmanalyse beinahe widersprüchlich. Erwei...

This article counters the widespread assumption that film is exclusively a medium of showing, presentation or appearing by emphasizing the importance of the viewer’s act of imagination. At the center of attention is the aesthetic principle of omission, suggestion, and completion in film – in other words, cases in which a conspicuous elision and fi...

This is a book review which has come out with the journal "Screen" (Vol. 59, No. 1, Spring 2018, pp. 136–140).

In this book I try to systematically describe the experiences spectators have when they watch a film collectively in a cinema. Watching a film in the presence of others is different from watching a film alone: The collective constellation always has an effect on the way viewers experience the film, be it positive or negative. And this is all the mo...

In this interview Vivian Sobchack, a leading film phenomenologist worldwide and Professor Emerita at UCLA, looks back at her career as a film and media scholar. She relates how she first wanted to become a novelist – as well as an astronomer – before academia and the study of film attracted her attention. She describes how she became interested in...

While covering all commentaries, our response specifically focuses on the following issues: How can the hypothesis of emotional distancing (qua art framing) be compatible with stipulating high levels of felt negative emotions in art reception? Which concept of altogether pleasurable mixed emotions does our model involve? Can mechanisms of predictiv...

International Symposium, Goethe-Universität Frankfurt, 23-25 November 2017 The Structures of the Film Experience Jean-Pierre Meunier, Film-Phenomenology and Contemporary Film Studies Conference Location: Aula der Städelschule, Dürerstraße 10, 60596 Frankfurt am Main Jean-Pierre Meunier’s Les structures de l’experience filmique: L’identification...

What did the great French film theorist André Bazin think of the collective experience in the cinema? What did he write about the influence co-viewers can have on the emotional engagement, the evaluation and the interpretation of a film? In short: What was his audience theory? To be sure, Bazin is not primarily known as a theorist of the (individua...

This article investigates the effects mirrors in films can have on the composition of a filmic image, the staging of a scene and the viewing activities of the spectators. It discusses four such effects: (1) So-called ‘complex mirror shots’ can modify how spectators look onto the picture as a flat composition by way of a quasi-transformation of the...

Why are negative emotions so central in art reception far beyond tragedy? Revisiting classical aesthetics in light of recent psychological research, we present a novel model to explain this much-discussed (apparent) paradox. We argue that negative emotions are an important resource for the arts in general rather than a special license for exception...

This essay explores how Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau’s classic silent film Sunrise (1927) participates in discourses of modernity in the mid- to late-1920s. It shows that the film – against many prior interpretations – can be read as a timely contribution to specific US-American debates: discourses about the big city, the new consumer society, tourism,...

For a detailed overview of the content, including abstracts, please follow this link: http://www.zetabooks.com/featured/studia-phaenomenologica-vol-16-2016-film-and-phenomenology.html

Dieser Artikel stellt einige der zentralen Theoriepositionen vor, die sich mit dem Kino (a) als Raum kollektiver Erfahrung und (b) als Ort der Öffentlichkeit auseinandergesetzt haben. Einen Bogen von der frühen zur zeitgenössischen Filmtheorie schlagend, unterscheidet der Beitrag dabei eine im weitesten Sinne phänomenologische Perspektive mit Blick...

The Invisible Cinema was an experimental movie theater designed by an experimental filmmaker. Devised by the Austrian avantgardist Peter Kubelka, it served as the first place of exhibition for the Anthology Film Archives in New York. Apart from the screen (and some exit signs and aisle lights installed for safety reasons), the auditorium was comple...

This is a revised, updated and translated version of an earlier article that had appeared in the journal "Movie."

In this article Christian Ferencz-Flatz and I try to give an answer to the question what film phenomenology actually is. We proceed in three steps. First, we provide a survey of five different research practices within current film phenomenological writing: We call them excavation, explanation, exemplification, extrapolation and expansion. Then we...

The wish to accurately represent the subjective perceptual experience of a filmic character and to intimately connect these character perceptions with the viewer’s experience has a long history. However, this history of extreme first-person perspectives in film—from the inside out, so to speak—is a troubled one. The aim of this essay is to discuss,...

This article focuses on a standard melodramatic scene in which a character either sends or receives a farewell message through a medium. I call this the ‘farewell-note motif.’ The article has three goals. First, I explore some reasons for the emotional effectiveness of this motif: Scenes in which a medium functions as a messenger entangle the viewe...

The emotional state of being moved, though frequently referred to in both classical rhetoric and current language use, is far from established as a well-defined psychological construct. In a series of three studies, we investigated eliciting scenarios, emotional ingredients, appraisal patterns, feeling qualities, and the affective signature of bein...

We investigated cognitive "art schema" effects-as resulting from framing a situation as one of art reception-on the enjoyability of negative emotions by means of an elaborate disguised anger induction in the field. Because situations of both art reception and participation in lab experiments are typically safe and have a reduced bearing on personal...

This article explores the question of what we are actually afraid of when we are scared at the movies. It is usually claimed that our fear derives from our engagement with characters and our participation through thought, simulation, or make-believe in fearful situations of the filmic world. These standard accounts provide part of the explanation w...

This article looks at how the collective experience of laughter in the movie theater is related to the idea of the cinema as a public space. Through the non-verbal expression of laughter the audience ‘constructs’ a public space the viewers may not have been aware of to the same degree prior to the collective public expression. Moreover, the public...

This essay suggests that collectively watching a film with quiet attention should be considered a kind of joint action. When silently watching a film in a cinema the viewers are not merely engaged in individual actions – watching a film with others often implies a shared activity based on a collective intention in which the viewers jointly attend t...

Can we experience depictions of repulsive objects more positively when we watch them as part of a work of art? We addressed this question by using a scenario approach in a laboratory setting designed to activate two different cognitive schemata: participants viewed the same pictures framed either as art photographs or as documentary photographs for...

This article investigates an age-old, puzzling question: how can a negatively valenced emotion such as sadness go together with aesthetic liking and even pleasure? We propose that an answer to this question must take into account the feeling of being moved, a complex emotional state that plays a major role in the history of poetics and aesthetics a...

Im Anschauen erschöpft sich die Tätigkeit der Zuschauer keineswegs. Imaginative Ergänzungen sind notwendig, um einen Film verstehen zu können. Auch die Vorstellung wird gelenkt durch zum Teil explizite Markierungen im Filmtext. Diese steuern ganz erheblich die emotionale Einbindung der Rezipienten. Sie müssen Schauplätze erkennen, handelnde Figuren...

In this article I suggest that we, as human beings, gain personal recognition not only through intersubjective encounters with others, but also through aesthetic experience. To support my claims about what I call 'aesthetic recognition,' I focus on a pervasive but rarely explored phenomenon: the cinematic shock. Not only a staple ingredient of thri...

In this essay 1 I try to categorize the range of artistic options that filmmakers currently have at hand to evoke bodily disgust. 2 Or, to reframe this approach in a slightly different manner: If we examine the variety of disgusting scenes at the movies, how can we usefully distinguish them? My aim is to provide a number of brushstrokes for a broad...

Hanich looks at fear at the movies — its aesthetics, its experience and its pleasures--in this thought-provoking study. Looking at over 150 different films including Seven, Rosemary's Baby, and Silence of the Lambs, Hanich attempts to answer the paradox of why we enjoy films that thrill us, that scare us, that threaten us, that shock us —affects th...

In diesem Aufsatz untersuchen wir die erstaunliche Emotionsvielfalt des filmischen Melodrams. Mithilfe einer detaillierten Analyse einer tief bewegenden Szene aus dem Film 21 Grams von Alejandro Gonzáles Iñárritu versuchen wir, einem verkürzten Verständnis der emotionalen Wirkung dieses Genres entgegenzutreten. Melodramen lassen sich nicht auf Trau...

The main thesis of this essay is rather straightforward. A crucial pleasure of watching an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie derives from the possibility of partaking in the actor’s muscular strength. Thanks to a process late 19th and early 20th century philosophy and psychology dubbed Einfühlung—I will also speak of somatic empathy—the viewer can experi...

When we watch a movie with others, we automatically enter a social relationship that changes our experience of the film—collective viewing is different from watching a film alone. Particularly when strong emotions and affects come into play, we often become conscious of what I call “affective audience interrelations” in the cinema. In this essay I...

Disgust is a frequent and often powerful part of the cinematic experience – from horror movies and teenage comedies to fantasy films and art-house pictures. This paper aims in three directions: (a) it sheds light on the structure of the cinematic disgust experience; (b) it points out aesthetic strategies that provoke disgust effectively; (c) it tri...

This essay deals with Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau's last film TABU: A Story of the South Seas, which occupied the German director from 1929 until shortly before his death in 1931. The film is interpreted against the background of Murnau's negative experiences in Hollywood (1926 to 1929), his flight to the South Seas and the collaboration with noted Am...