In the episode ‘Love Among the Ruins’ of Matthew Weiner’s Mad Men (AMC, S03xE02, 2009), Don Draper (John Hamm) is fascinated by Suzanne Farrell (Abigail Spencer): his fingers represent and caress the barefoot dance steps of this Flora of the sixties. I study this vicarious performance in light of the theories of empathy (Vischer, 1873) and ‘embodied simulation’ (Gallese, Freedberg, 2007). This haptic displacement of the male gaze is an erotic interplay between projection and incorporation, predatory aspirations and un-reflected imitation, the masculine and the feminine, leading to a hysterical embodiment akin to Aristotle’s tactile illusion and the reprise of scientific iconography by Max Ernst in Au Premier Mot Limpide (1923). Driven by the movement of the camera, our gaze leaves the dance and ends in foliage stirred by the wind. Watching this nonintentional ‘touch in nature’ (Ebisch, Perrucci, Ferretti, Del Gratta, Romani, Gallese, 2009), we are moved as if we mirrored a real moment of contact, both material and animistic. In discussing A Day in the Country (Une Partie de Campagne, Jean Renoir, 1936) and Jeff Wall’s A Sudden Gust of Wind (after Hokusai) (1993), I show how this visual phenomenon — an obsession of cinema — triggers an abstract and tactile empathy within us (Gallese, 2009).
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Dancing Fingers: Moving Mimicry and Abstract Tactility
Filippo Fimiani, University of Salerno




Abstract

    In the episode ‘Love Among the Ruins’ of Matthew Weiner’s Mad Men (AMC,
    S03xE02, 2009), Don Draper (John Hamm) is fascinated by Suzanne Farrell
    (Abigail Spencer): his fingers represent and caress the barefoot dance steps of
    this Flora of the sixties. I study this vicarious performance in light of the theories
    of empathy (Vischer, 1873) and ‘embodied simulation’ (Gallese, Freedberg,
    2007). This haptic displacement of the male gaze is an erotic interplay between
    projection and incorporation, predatory aspirations and un-reflected imitation,
    the masculine and the feminine, leading to a hysterical embodiment akin to
    Aristotle’s tactile illusion and the reprise of scientific iconography by Max Ernst
    in Au Premier Mot Limpide (1923). Driven by the movement of the camera, our
    gaze leaves the dance and ends in foliage stirred by the wind. Watching this non-
    intentional ‘touch in nature’ (Ebisch, Perrucci, Ferretti, Del Gratta, Romani,
    Gallese, 2009), we are moved as if we mirrored a real moment of contact,
    both material and animistic. In discussing A Day in the Country (Une Partie
    de Campagne, Jean Renoir, 1936) and Jeff Wall’s A Sudden Gust of Wind (after
    Hokusai) (1993), I show how this visual phenomenon — an obsession of cinema
    — triggers an abstract and tactile empathy within us (Gallese, 2009).


TV Fiction with an Ancient Touch

   I wish to discuss ‘Love Among the Ruins’, an episode of Mad Men (AMC,
S03xE02, 2009) dramatized by Matthew Weiner and Cathryn Humphries
and directed by Lesli Linka Glatter. The title itself suggests a kind of survival.
Borrowed from Robert Browning’s ‘Sicilian’ pastoral poem (1855) and George
Kukor’s television adaptation (ABC, 1975), it points to the ongoing relevance of
the clash between male and female in the early 1960s, between ‘Earth’s returns’,
i.e. the cyclical phases of natu­re, and the ruins of the City, i.e. the vanity of human
society and culture.
   I consider the brief dance all’antica of ‘Love Among the Ruins’ as a testing
ground for the theory of ‘embodied simulation’ and tactile empathy, as applied
to audiovisual images in movement. Whether seen live or in representation

                                                       Cinéma & Cie, vol. XX, no. 35, Fall 2020
                                        Filippo Fimiani


— and whatever the medium: painting or sketches, sculpture, plays, films or
photographs — the movement of a dancing body is the most powerful visual
appeal to our attention and potentially to our kinetic mimicry.1
   I shall develop my hypothesis in two stages: first, through some visual
examples (not by seeking out iconographic sources, but rather by suggesting
comparative illustrations); I shall stress the polarity, already well defined under
Robert Vischer’s theory of Einfühlung, of the empathy of motion, as displaced
in the male spectator’s hand move­ments, both absorbed and proactive; I shall
attempt to unveil, in the mimetic assimilation, a latent sexual identification and
ambiguity. Then, while following the movement of the camera, but no longer
taking into account the kinesthetic feedback between living beings, or between
human bodies and similar moving objects, I shall propose a mimetic tactility
that is more abstract and responsive to a contingent, non-intentional touch in
nature. This haptic attraction for a self-replicating movement without a visible
cause, and for a metonymic animation through contact between undifferentiated
elements, haunts the spectator and the cinema itself.


Apparitions and Renewals

   In the scene of the maypole school dance, a captivating, over-the-shoulder
shot create the impression that we ourselves are mirroring bodies,2 behaving
as if we were actually there, perceiving and suffering everything, in the same
way as the fictional character’s body. In the case of Don Draper (John Hamm),
we are not only consciously suspending our disbelief, but, to borrow the term
used by nineteenth- and twentieth-century scholars of Einfühlung,3 we are also
experiencing an involuntary ‘empathy of activities’ [Tätigkeitseinfühlung], along
with an ‘inner mimicry’ [innere Nachahmung], of the same dancing body that he
observes and desires from afar.
   Thanks to an alternating series of reverse camera angles, our point of view
coincides with the on-screen focus of our delegated male viewer, who sits on
a folding chair, lounging and still, as if it were a seat in a movie theatre, or in
a laboratory of experimental psychology. A young dancing woman exercises
a powerful attraction on his erotic attention, gripping our hermeneutic


1
  See Dee Reynolds, ‘Kinesthetic Empathy and the Dance’s Body: From Emotion to Affect’, in
Kinesthetic Empathy in Creative and Cultural Practices, ed. by Dee Reynolds, Matthew Reason
(Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2012), pp. 121–38, and Corinne Jola, ‘Choreographed Science:
Merging Dance and Cognitive Neuroscience’, in The Neurocognition of Dance: Mind, Movement
and Motor Skills, ed. by Bettina Bläsing, Martin Puttke and Thomas Schack (Abingdon: Routledge,
2nd edn, 2019), pp. 258–88.
2
  Vittorio Gallese, Corrado Sinigaglia, ‘The Bodily Self as Power for Action’, Neuropsychologia,
48.3 (2010), p. 752.
3
  See Andrea Pinotti, ‘Empathy’, in Handbook of Phenomenological Aesthetics, ed. by Hans Reiner
Sepp, Lester Embree (Dordrecht, New York: Springer, 2010), pp. 94–95.

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interest about the unreflective movements of his hand in response to the
movements of the body observed from afar. The effectiveness of this amateur
performance, however, is due neither to the abilities of the dancer, nor to
the cultural preparation of the spectator. No one in this small, fictional New
York suburban neighbourhood knows or remembers the erudite meaning of
the maypole school dance, or of ‘Earth’s returns’ from the Browning poem,
nor do they realise that the name of this young Flora reborn, Suzanne Farrell
(played by Abigail Spencer), is that of the celebrated muse of Balanchine’s
New York City Ballet. It is worth mentioning that, when considering the
Nymph4 in Renaissance dances and popular festivals, Warburg stressed that
the female body is the ‘living figure’ that manages to merge everyday life, art
and archaeology. The Ninfa rediviva of ‘Love Among the Ruins’, with her bare
feet, flowing hair and head crowned with a wreath of wild flowers is also a
manifestation in movement of the ancient rites, reprised and imitated in the
daily choreographies of fashion and school recitals before being interpreted as
an erudite iconographic motif.
   The natural gaze of the male spectator of the maypole school dance responds
to this amateur, popular choreography, extending beyond the sensorimotor
economy of mere vision. As Robert Vischer5 once said, his vision becomes
‘attentive sensation’ and ‘attentive feeling’ [Anempfindung, Anfühlung], like that
of a hunter stalking the prey. Hidden behind the dark lenses of his trendy aviator
glasses — comparable to the Kulturbrille, or ‘cultural lenses’, criticised by Aby
Warburg and Franz Boas because they blind us to the living force of ancient, or
archaic and ritual, images — Don Draper’s ignorant, avid gaze expresses itself
in virtual actions performed in an intensified, indirect, condensed fashion: his
hold on his drink loosens, freeing his fingers from their limited scope of action
and the pragmatic completion of perception, at which point they stroke the grass
below, mimicking the dance steps. In a rapid succession of reverse-angle shots,
close-ups and details, heightened by a slow-motion effect, we see — and feel —
as if they were ours: not the static body or the hidden gaze, but only the lazy,
empty fingers of the spectator’s hand, attentively and erotically entranced as they
perform an immediate, unintentional corporeal imitation of the dance steps. The
movements of these dancing fingers are a narrative focal point and an expressive
hotbed, they are ultimately a vicarious, tactile, peripheral and symptomatic
sensory adventure as well as an almost imperceptible endokinetic autoaffection.




4
  Aby Warburg, ‘The Theatrical Costumes for the Intermedi of 1589’ (1895), in The Renewal of
Pagan Antiquity, intr. by Kurt W. Forster and trans. by David Britt (Los Angeles: Getty Research
Institute for the Research of Arts and Humanities, 1999), p. 381.
5
  Robert Vischer, ‘On the Optical Sense of Form: A Contribution to Aesthetics’ (1873), in Empathy,
Form, and Space: Problems in German Aesthetics, 1873–1893, ed. and transl. by Harry Francis
Mallgrave, Eleftherios Ikonomou (Santa Monica, CA: Getty Center for the History of Art and the
Humanities, 1994), p. 105, p. 107 and p. 109.

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Loving Hands

   The pirouettes sur place performed by the fingers of the on-screen spectator,
and potentially by our own fingers, embody what Robert Vischer termed
‘kinaesthetic responsive feeling’ [motorische Nachfühlung] triggered by a visual
and ‘sensory immediate feeling’ [sensitive Zufühlung].6 Such peripheral and
aimless movements personify the ‘mimicking, acting or affective empathy of a
truly or apparently moved object’.7
   What are Don Draper’s fingers doing? Such organic miniaturisations
and synecdoches of the desire of the hidden gaze and the inactive body of
the spectator generate a two-fold embodiment, at one and the same time
an ‘incorporation’ and a ‘projection’. The lightly implied movements of our
spectator’s wandering, almost autonomous fingers are both concrete and
abstract gestures, both iconic and metaphorical, pantomimic and expressive,
rhythmic and non-representational.8 They are not only a schematic imitation
of the movements of the female body viewed from afar, but also a performative
manifestation of the autoaffection of the spectatorial body. They are both
mimémata and pathémata in action, an endokinetic resonance of the body of
the Other and a crypto-prensive pulsation that wishes to touch it. They are
both echo and caress.9
   The spectator’s fingers, while doing their cross-step, embody an undecidability
between imitation and sensory appropriation, emulation and tactile usurpation.
The molecular movements of the male spectator’s fingers hold the two opposites
together: a passive, centripetal incorporation of the expressive qualities of the
object in movement and an active, centrifugal projection of actions, or the
equivalent of actions. Both poles are iconic, i.e. mimetic, and loving, i.e. acting:
as they move ‘in and with the forms’,10 they repeat the sinuous movements of the
woman’s legs and feet, while figuratively stroking her moving contours and fleshy
substance. This is a true haptic reversibility: the hand of our spectator gauges the
body in movement and adapts to what is seen from afar, ultimately becoming one
with it. The male spectator’s hand touches and is touched, it is transferred and
transformed by the Other: the dancing female legs.
   In order to arrive at an initial assessment of this reversibility and potential
sexual inversion in kinetic and tactile empathy, before relating it first to an


6
  Ivi, p. 92.
7
   Ivi, p. 105; see Vittorio Gallese, ‘Embodied Simulation: From Neurons to Phenomenal
Experience’, Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 4.4 (2005), 34–36.
8
   According to David McNeill, Hand and Mind: What Gestures Reveal about Thought (Chicago:
Chicago University Press, 1992), pp. 104–34 and pp. 145–81.
9
   As regards ‘responsive sensation’ as ‘a successive enveloping, embracing, and caress­ing of the
object’, see Vischer, ‘On the Optical Sense of Form: A Contribution to Aesthetics’, p. 106.
10
    Ivi, p. 101. The original text states: ‘Wir bewegen uns in und an den Formen. Allen
Raumveränderungen tasten wir mit liebenden Händen nach.’ I quote Robert Vischer, Über das
optische Formgefühl: Ein Beitrag zur Ästhetik (Leipzig: Hermann Credner, 1873), p. 15.

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unambiguous male desire, and subsequently to a pantheistic empathy with
nature and movements per se, I feel that a brief reference is in order to two
visual examples.
   First, I wish to discuss Max Ernst’s Au Premier Mot Limpide.11 The source
of this painting, executed with the techniques of Pompeian frescoes, was an
illustration found in an anonymous scientific article on the Aristotelian ‘illusion
du tact’.12 Ernst places the two elements described by Aristotle side by side:13 an
insect, perhaps a mantis, sits next to a window, while a right hand with its index
and middle fingers crossed, holding a bead between them, extends out from a
second, larger window. There is no indication of the gender of the hand, isolated
as it is from the rest of the body, so that the overall vision, which normally dissolves
the tactile illusion, is of no help. The surrealistic painter, hearkening back to
stereoscopic and cinematic pornographic images, uses repetition to amplify the
haptic inversion.14 The isolated hand is detached from a hysterical body, while
the vertical, tapering shapes of the fingers are like those of a woman’s crossed
legs, forming an X, the symbol of the mystery of Eros and the intertwining of
sexual genders;15 just like the fingers, both mimicking and loving, of the man
who observes and repeats the agile choreography of a re-enacted Flora in an
American Yankee park.
   In contrast, as an example of the unambiguous tactile intensification of the
sexual desire of the male gaze, I wish to cite A Day in the Country (Une Partie
de Campagne, Jean Renoir, 1936).16 Rodolphe (Jacques Borel, a.k.a. Jacques
Brunius) looks out a window and strokes his moustache, twisting its tips
between the thumb and index finger of his right hand. During this autoerotic
game, he stares at Henriette Dufour (Sylvia Bataille), ecstatically absorbed by
the movements of a swing that pushes her figure upwards, against the empty
blue backdrop of the sky, and then, on the other side, against the dense foliage


11
   Max Ernst, Au Premier Mot Limpide, 1923, oil on plaster transferred to canvas, 232×167 cm,
Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf.
12
   La Nature: Revue des Sciences et de leurs Applications aux Arts et a l’Industrie, n. 415, 14 May
1881, p. 384; the illustrator is Louis Poyet. See Charlotte Stokes’s ‘The Scientific Methods of Max
Ernst: His Use of Scientific Subjects from La Nature’, The Art Bullettin, 62.3 (1980), 453–65, and
Volkmar Mühleis, Kunst im Sehverlust (München: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2005), pp. 29–35.
13
   Met. IV, 1011a, Probl. XXXI, 11, 958b ss.
14
   See Trotter David, ‘Stereoscopy: Modernism and the “Haptic”’, Critical Quarterly, 46.4 (special
issue Low Modernism, Winter 2004), 38–58, and Abigail Susik, ‘“The Man of These Infinite
Possibilities”: Max Ernst’s Cinematic Collages’, Contemporaneity: Historical Presence in Visual
Culture, 1 (2011), 86–87.
15
   The scientific iconography of a bodiless hand is taken up in … Et la Troisième Fois Manquée, the
fourth plate of the 1929 narrative-collage La Femme 100 Têtes (Paris: Éditions du Carrefour, 1929).
See Rosalind Krauss, The Optical Unconscious (Cambridge, MA, London: MIT Press, 1993), pp.
76–80, and Emmanuelle André, Le Choc du Sujet: De l’Hystérie au Cinéma (xix–xxi siècle) (Rennes:
Presses Univer­sitaires de Rennes, 2011), pp. 118–21.
16
   The film is available on DVD with unpublished material and the documentary Un Tournage à la
Campagne by Alain Fleischer (CNC Images de la Culture, 1994); see Dominique Chateau, ‘Diégèse
et Enonciation’, Communications, 38 (1983), 143–45.

                                                                                                89
                                       Filippo Fimiani


of trees stirred by the invisible motion of the breeze. In another scene, Henriette
reveals a kind of tenderness for everything, for grass, water and trees, a sort of
vague desire above and beyond the separation between subject and object, as if
possessed by an impersonal empathy that touches and unites living beings and
things, all moving phenomena. While she expresses this, something happens,
in the form of a random, natural, moving entity that breaks into the scene and
crosses the line between profilmic and filmic, between life and fiction: namely, a
butterfly that comes and goes, returns, touches down, flies away and then comes
back again. The spectator is moved less by Henriette’s emotional realism than
by this touch of reality in motion, by this incidental punctum and material point
of contact with the film itself. The apparition is less pathetic than Dreyer’s fly on
Joan of Arc’s sweating face, and less striking than the creeping black tarantula
on James Bond’s masculine chest in Dr. No (Terence Young, 1962), quoted as an
opening example in an experimental study on ‘touching sight’.17
   The effect on the spectator of a similarly contingent, minimal and repetitive
tactility could perhaps be measured empirically; in any case, my hypothesis
considers an index of a more abstract, mimetic, motor empathy between living
beings, things and movements.


An Abstract Tactility, an Obsession

   After following the man’s gaze in ‘Love Among the Ruins’, and the way in
which he touches the dancing woman from afar, depicted in a fetishistic manner,
with a focus on anatomical details and expressive accessories, the camera leaves
the body the moment it stops moving. As soon as the centripetal, clockwise curve
of the dance around the wooden maypole ends, our gaze — no longer entrusted
to the over-the-shoulder shot, but, as several recent studies have shown,18 still
driven by the impersonal movement of the camera — gently ends its centrifugal
movement in the top-right portion of the frame, amidst the densely packed leaves
stirred by the wind.
   As we know from many experimental papers on embodied simulation, the
responsiveness of the visuotactile mirroring mechanism also applies when
we watch movements and contacts between living beings, whether animal or
human, as well as between inanimate objects and phenomena. The space that
surrounds us is full of entities which touch each other without any ‘human [or]
animate involvement’, due to ‘accidental-animate’ or ‘non-intentional contact’.19

17
   Christian Keysers, Bruno Wicker, Valeria Gazzola and others, ‘A Touching Sight: SII/PV
Activation During the Observation and Experience of Touch’, Neuron, 42.2 (2004), 335–46.
18
   See Katrin Heimann, Sebo Uithol, Marta Calbi and others, ‘Embodying the Camera: An EEG
Study on the Effect of Camera Movements on Film Spectators´ Sensorimotor Cortex Activation’,
PLOS ONE, 14.3 (2019), 1–18.
19
   Sjoerg J.H. Ebisch, Mauro Gianni Perrucci, Antonio Ferretti and others, ‘The Sense of Touch:
Embodied Simulation in a Visuotactile Mirroring Mechanism for Observed Animate or Inanimate

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                   Dancing Fingers: Moving Mimicry and Abstract Tactility


What we witness is ‘a touch in nature’, when we observe and are emotionally
moved: i.e. when we move with, and are touched by, not merely the falling of a
pine tree in a park — erect and individual like our bodies — but also by the rain
piercing the quiet surface of a river or dripping from leaves, or by leaves moved
by the wind — in short, by moving shapes that are barely discernible from one
another, whose contact does not consist of a singular, precise physical touching.
   In adopting the two principles of Fraser’s magical logic, I believe we are
not just dealing, in this case, with analogy or corporeal similarity as the basis
for metaphors, symbols and meanings, but also with metonymy, i.e. contact,
contagion and confusion. On the other hand, Freedberg and Gallese, in
addressing dynamic empathy in response to images, prefer the law of similarities.
A discussion of this problematic point is well served by the following example,
also meant to provide further support for my concluding hypothesis on the
subject of abstract tactile empathy.
   When considering Jeff Wall’s A Sudden Gust of Wind (after Hokusai), a
lightbox at the Tate Modern, Freedberg states that our bodies do not ‘twist
and turn’ merely in response to those of others of our species, but also find
themselves ‘almost in a complete physical sintonia’ with the trees, upright and
bent over, as if they were ‘a twisted Romanesque column’.20 Wall’s monumental
work (250×397×34 cm), and Hokusai’s view of Mount Fuji (25.4×37.1 cm),21
also reveal something further. Together with the winter scene of two tall
trees, overarching and bare, and the four men who are struggling against the
invisible gusts of the wind, there are bits of paper that are scattered in the air
and almost indistinguishable. Freedberg insists, on the one hand, that mimi­
cry and motor empathy are not limited to human actions and gestures, but
also encompass movements and contacts in nature without any visible causes,
though he points only to plant forms, described as if they were inorganic and
lifeless. The architectural analogy is an epistemological symptom of the desire
to distance oneself from the abstract and animistic connotation of motor and
tactile empathy, from its conversion into sympathy with all moving beings and
elements in nature, with their touching and being touched. Moreover, the
comparison to a Doric column, already made by Lipps and others, and later put
forth in modernist dance theory,22 denotes a preference for the constructed and


Touch’, Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 20.9 (2008), 1621; see Vittorio Gallese, ‘Motor
Abstraction: A Neuroscientific Account of How Action Goals and Intentions Are Mapped and
Understood’, Psychological Research, 73.4 (2009), 486–98, and Matthew Ratcliffe, ‘Touch and the
Sense of Reality’, in The Hand, an Organ of the Mind: What the Manual Tells the Mental, ed. by
Zdravko Radman (Cambridge MA, London: MIT Press, 2013), pp. 144−45.
20
   David Freedberg, ‘Movement, Embodiment, Emotion’, in Wie sich Gefühle Ausdruck verschaffen:
Emotionen in Nahsicht, ed. by Klaus Herding and Antje Krause-Wahl (Taunusstein: Driesen,
2007), p. 61, and David Freedberg, Vittorio Gallese, ‘Motion, Emotion and Empathy in Aesthetic
Experience’, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 11.5 (2007), p. 197.
21
   Katsushika Hokusai, Ejiri in Suruga Province (Sunshû Ejiri), 1830–1833, polychrome woodblock
print, ink and colour on paper, 25.4x37.1 cm, MFA, Boston.
22
   See Susan Leigh Foster, Choreographing Empathy: Kinesthesia in Performance (New York:

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artistic rather than the natural and incidental, ultimately betraying a removal of
pantheistic empathic feeling.
   We are, therefore, more than just eyewitnesses: we are also tactile witnesses
of the invisible but material force that touches and drives the myriad tiny
objects in movement in Hokusai’s print and in its subsequent variations. The
countless pieces of paper flying in the air are both metaphors and metonymies
of our individual bodies. When our visual attention is attracted by their
upward movement away from us, i.e. by a motion without visible cause,
produced and reproduced by a non-intentional and contingent contact,
what happens to us? Paul Valéry perfectly described this amorphous and
autogenerated movement as a generalized imitation without models, like an
expanded kinetic and tactile analogy without terms of comparison, producing
itself by contact and through differentiation and repetition: ‘This tree,
whose leaves are so agile, confounding my gaze, entangling, self-replicating,
infinitely changing, defying my thought, visible and non-imaginable, this is
not something of mine’.23 Like Valéry, we too imitate the natural and material
mimicry that is the movement of the leaves stroked by the wind or beaten by
rain drops; we replicate and repeat it with our corporeal schemas and motor
responsive feelings or actions, just as we do when we move our fingers to
emulate the woman dancing in ‘Love Among the Ruins’, virtually twisting
and turning our bodies, like the bending trees of Hokusai and Wall. But
looking at the leaves touched by the rain or moved by the wind, or at the
material whirlwind of countless sheets of paper — or of plastic envelopes24
— scattered in the air, we respond with a mimetic, empathic and kinaesthetic
sense of touch that is no longer limited to our hands, but more abstract: an
‘abstract’ that, once again, should not be considered conceptual or general,
but rather embodied and pre-linguistic, sensitive and pre-categorical.
   Such challenging movements, with no apparent cause or direction, constitute
a haunting topic for filmmakers, cinephiles and scholars.25 In the short sequence


Routledge, 2010), pp. 252–53, and Robin Curtis, ‘Is the Movement of the Filmic Image a Sign of
Vitality?’, in Touching and Being Touched: Kinesthesia and Empathy in Dance and Movement, ed.
by Gabriele Brandstetter, Gerko Egert and Sabine Zubarik (Berlin, Boston: Walter de Gruyter,
2013), pp. 257–58.
23
   Paul Valéry, Cahiers/Notebooks 5, trans. and ed. by Brian Stimpson, Paul Gifford, Robert
Pickering and others (Frankfurt am Main, Berlin, Bern, Brussels, New York, Oxford, Wien: Peter
Lang, 2010), p. 193.
24
   I am thinking, in particular, of American Beauty (Sam Mendes, 1999), as well as of Igor and
Svetlana Kopystiansky Igor and Svetlana Kopystiansky in Incidents (14’ and 49”, 2007, Tate
Modern, London), an extraordinary video that covers one year, from 1996 to 1997, and shows
the dance of myriad discarded objects and waste blown by the wind in the outer boroughs of
Manhattan.
25
   See Christian Keathley, Cinephilia and History, or The Wind in the Trees (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 2006), pp. 29–53; Nico Baumbach, ‘Nature Caught in the Act: On the
Transformation of an Idea of Art in Early Cinema’, Comparative Critical Studies, 6.3 (2009), 373–
83, and Jordan Schonig, ‘Contingent Motion: Rethinking the “Wind in the Trees” in Early Cinema
and CGI’, Discourse, 40.1 (2018), 30−61.

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of ‘Love Among the Ruins’ that I have set out to analyse, I have pointed to three
aspects of this haptic obsession.
   At first, I showed how our gaze does not cast itself off from indirect motor
affection, but is triggered by our embodied belief in the point of view of the
on-screen spectator, i.e. by Don Draper’s erotic perspective. Our sense of tactile
sight shifts between the aimless actions of the beauty in motion of the female
dancer and the visual-motor imitation of the spectator’s fingers, at one and the
same time displaced, projective and incorporating, but ultimately embodying an
ambivalent tactile and erotic self-affection, as exemplified by Max Ernst’s painting
and the scene from Renoir’s movie. I then assessed the camera movements and
their effects on our tactile eye as spectators. After leaving the dancing body, or
some other inanimate object that is similar to our own body and is moved by an
external cause, our gaze is drawn to the most unstable and ephemeral aspects of
the visual — like the butterfly of A Day in the Country, or the sheets of paper
shifting in the wind in Jeff Wall’s A Sudden Gust of Wind (after Hokusai) — at
which point it is touched by that which, in an absolutely contingent, material
manner, also touches the very body of the film. Finally, I have attempted to show
how our vision dissolves itself in an impersonal, unintentional visual field, like
the foliage blown by the wind evoked by Valéry, and how the empathic feeling-in
and feeling-with this raw and material movement transports us ecstatically out of
ourselves, into the very texture of the film.
   At the end of this lengthy empty-handed visual journey, when our eyes and
hands, as both spectators and readers, once again have to deal with everyday
life, we may murmur to ourselves something to the effect of: ‘I was in thee, O
movement — outside all things […]’.26




 Paul Valéry, ‘The Soul and Dance’ (1924), in An Anthology, ed. by Jackson Matthews (London,
26

Henley: Routledge-Kegan Paul, 1977), p. 326.

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