2017/09/22 by Margaret D. Carroll · 1 citation
Neuroscience · Arts and Humanities · #Aesthetic Perception and Analysis #Visual Culture and Art Theory #Architecture and Art History Studies
paper · doi:10.1093/oxartj/kcx035
openalex publication_date 2017/09/22 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/29
Just as film theorists have fruitfully appropriated critical concepts developed by art historians—for example, Aloïs Riegl’s distinction between ‘haptic’ and ‘optic’ modes of seeing—so too are art historians learning to deploy critical concepts advanced by film theorists.1 In the case of Rembrandt’s Slaughtered Ox, I find that the notion of ‘cinematic excess’ is particularly suggestive (Fig. 1). The term is used in two ways. In one sense, cinematic excess refers to ways of intensifying the emotional impact of a cinematic sequence by manipulating lighting effects, colour, camera movement, and sound to heighten the emotional impact of a scene.2 Cinematic excess, in another seemingly contradictory sense, refers to ways of subverting the narrative plausibility, the verisimilitude of a sequence, so as to draw attention to the artifice of the cinematic illusion.3 An example is the way the eyeglasses of the murder victim, Miriam, are filmed in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1951 thriller, Strangers on a Train. At first, we barely notice the oddity of the glasses: the exaggerated glow around the rims of Miriam’s thick lenses the first time we see her, in a record shop (Fig. 2). Later, a flash of reflected light on the lenses momentarily dazzles us when she turns to face her murderer, Bruno, in a fairground at night (Fig. 3). By the time she reaches the island on which Bruno will murder her, the eyeglasses gain in uncanny importance (Fig. 4), until, having fallen to the ground, one of the lenses becomes a gigantic distorting mirror reflecting the anamorphic images of Miriam and her murderer (Fig. 5). Finally, the glasses reappear as a quotidian object, lying cracked, next to a cigarette lighter on the grass (Fig. 6).