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Strange encounters: Exploring law and film in the affective register

Studies in Law, Politics and Society

ISBN: 978-1-84855-378-1, eISBN: 978-1-84855-379-8

Publication date: 22 December 2008

Abstract

Law and Film both enjoy the power to mediate the social imaginary. Here, we explore the resonance of this insight in the register of affect and intensity, movement, and change. This demands a different approach to doing theory. As Andrew (1976, pp. 66–67) argues, ‘film is not a product but an organically unfolding creative process in which the audience participates both emotionally and intellectually.’ Seeing a film is not just an exercise in imagining alternatives; it is an unfolding experience in time. It is an event shaded with particular embodied dimensions: one's heart races, pupils contract, skin shivers, muscles tense. Involuntary sensations of nausea or vertigo combine with cognitive responses to produce the lived experience of viewing a particular film that is incorporated into one's sensibility, sometimes very powerfully. It is not just that the mind has spent time in a darkened theatre. The body has also had an affect-laden auditory, visual, and tactile encounter. The affect-rooted experience of the film is a piece of the subject's past, its history, its self. This is another way to understand how film not only represents the world, but participates in its making.

Citation

Buchanan, R. and Johnson, R. (2008), "Strange encounters: Exploring law and film in the affective register", Sarat, A. (Ed.) Studies in Law, Politics and Society (Studies in Law, Politics, and Society, Vol. 46), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 33-60. https://doi.org/10.1108/S1059-4337(2009)0000046002

Publisher

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Emerald Group Publishing Limited

Copyright © 2009, Emerald Group Publishing Limited