Neither here nor there: synaesthesia and the cosmic zoom

Abstract

The cosmic zoom is ontologically puzzling: neither a ‘zoom’ nor a ‘travelling’ or ‘tracking’ shot in the conventional sense of those terms, it exists somewhere in between. Faced with a well-executed cosmic zoom, the viewer is hard-pressed to distinguish between optical and kinetic movement; the difference is rendered obsolete. The cosmic zoom's phenomenological ambivalence confounds as well the neat division between vision and the non-visual senses. As digital effect and sensory event, the cosmic zoom in this way bears some resemblance to synaesthesia, or the experiential mingling (perhaps even non-differentiation) of the sense modalities. Drawing examples from Moulin Rouge!, Sweeney Todd, and Perfume, which use the post-filmic cosmic zoom to depict pre-modern Europe in terms of hearing, taste, smell, and proprioception, the paper argues that the synaesthetic quality of these films ultimately has less to do with their explicit narrative focus on the senses and their overt attempt to represent acts of hearing, taste, and smell as fixed, metaphorical images than with the cosmic zoom's visual rendering of the phenomenological process of synaesthesia itself, as a moving experience and an experience of movement.

Keywords:

• synaesthesia
• cosmic zoom
• proprioception
• Baz Luhrmann
• Tim Burton
• Tom Tykwer
• Moulin Rouge! (2001)
• Sweeney Todd (2007)
• Perfume (2007)

Notes

^1. The notion is implied by Charles Baudelaire's ‘Correspondences’ and made explicit by Arthur Rimbaud's ‘Vowels’ poem and the work of Alexander Scriabin, who attempted to set down in writing and establish in his musical compositions a universal set of sound/sound associations. For an overview of the history of synaesthesia, see Berman, 1999; van Campen, 2008.

^2. Sobchack's use of the term ‘tonal’ recalls Sergei Eisenstein's notion of the ‘visual overtonal complex of the shot’, which ‘by analogy with music’ produces ‘the particular “feeling” of the shot’. For him, the visual overtone and the sound overtone ‘are constants in a single dimension!’ and should be considered ‘one and the same kind, outside the sound of acoustic categories that serve merely as guides, as paths to its achievement’ (Eisenstein 1929, 115).

^3. I have made a similar argument regarding cinematic tactility in The Tactile Eye (Barker, 2009).