Esthetic Intensity and Cinema

Abstract

Cinema is an emotions-producing machine. And intensity is the way emo­tions articulate, both in relation to the viewer and within the textual oper­ation. In cinema, intensity is both force and difference, dynamism and flow: it is a curved line, a variation, a process, a mutation that changes the leveling. Intensity is a fundamental aesthetic category, that in cinema acquires especially meaningful forms. It is not only linked to excess, but also to its opposite, utmost reduction. At times it correlates to dynamism and pathos, and to the enigma as well. It shares in some of the avanguarde movement’s features, difference firstly, innovation and code violation, as Deleuze and Guattari and, before them, Eisenstein, pointed out. Intensity also marks the relation with the spectator, which is characterized by a variability of the psychic processes, triggered by a complex ensemble of determinations, and above all, by identification and sadomasochism, as it can be argued thanks also to some of Freud’s notions.