Leaning In

At a major cultural institution in New York City, I once served on a committee that had been tasked with making recommendations as to what kind of seating should be installed in new screening rooms they were planning to build. I and the other members of the committee were driven around in a bus to a smorgasbord of cinemas within the greater New York Area. The purpose was so that we could see first hand the different kinds of seating and of consumption of food and drink these cinemas offered their patrons. If we had questions, the owners were available to answer them. We found that some of these cinemas featured the type of recliners that have become very popular in the U.S. in recent years.

Michele Williams in A HOLE IN ONE, directed by Richard C. Ledes.

These allow viewers to recline almost to where they are looking at the ceiling, with their feet raised by an attached Ottoman. Others recline partially when the viewer leans back while simultaneously applying forward pressure with their legs. We visited cinemas that were experimenting with various arrangements to allow viewers to have food and beverages delivered to them by waiters during the screening. My own choice remains more traditional seating--albeit with as much comfort as is practical–the kind of seating that is popular in Paris cinemas today, such as at le Champo or the Action Christine. This type of seating keeps the viewer in what I would characterize as a more active relation to the screen. Food being served is of no interest to me.

My preference in seating might surprise some people, given that I have now made two films which give a sympathetic view of psychoanalysis: ADIEU LACAN and V13. After all, don’t people in analysis ideally recline on a couch? And furthermore, isn’t a film like a dream, and why shouldn’t we be reclining as if we were having a dream?

Let me start by dismantling the comparison with a couch in psychoanalysis. As I heard the Lacanian psychoanalyst Alain Didier-Weill, author of the play Vienne 1913, on which the screenplay for my film V13 is based, say during a lecture that I was attending the first time we ever met, part of Freud’s inheritance from his own Jewish upbringing was to prioritize truth as transmitted through the ear rather than through the eye. Ancient Greek utilizes the metaphor of vision for insight whereas, in what is known in the Bible as the Old Testament, it is through the voice that God speaks, for example, through the burning bush that speaks to Moses. Additionally, there is the prohibition against idolatry in Judaism. Freud would sit behind the person on the couch, putting the emphasis on the ear and what was being said. The point of this arrangement was to make someone pay less attention to what appeared to their eye and more to their ear. Therefore the comparison to someone reclining in a cinema is misguided.

For seating  I would start from a different point of view. The filmmaker Paul Schrader, in his book Transcendental Cinema, contrasts what, on the one hand, he terms as the usual approach of Hollywood films, which seek to grab the viewer by the throat and never let go, with, on the other hand, what he calls “the transcendental style of cinema”--as exemplified by the works of Bresson, Dreyer, Ozu, Tarkovsky and Chantal Akerman. The work of these filmmakers–rather than leaning into the viewer–lean back. They show us, for example,  what Schrader calls “dead time,” that we would usually not imbue with meaning, and make us focus on it. These films–as Schrader puts it–elicit us to lean in and participate. These are films to which I want our seating to leave us open–to allow us to suddenly find ourselves leaning in, participating in the making of meaning.