I M A G I NE Y O U A R E watching a

I M A G I NE Y O U A R E watching a film. What is it that you actually do, and what happens to you if it is a film that “works” for you in the sense of it being able to captivate your attention? You may experience a gradual disappearance of your physical environment and a sense of transportation into the alternative world of the film. The sensual presence of that storyworld may be so vivid and immersive that you almost forget where you are as you mentally simulate the events presented to you on the screen. This may result in distinct physical reactions: your heart rate and other bodily processes change as you duck into your seat during suspenseful passages and jolt backwards in response to moments of startling surprise. Or you find yourself helplessly crying as you watch characters you care for suffer or die.Clearly, some elements of this experience are quite similar to that of reading an immersive novel. Just as clearly, however, there are also some rather dramatic differences. Whereas literature consists of linguistic structures that, upon decoding, cue us to imagine the appearance of storyworlds as well as the sensations, thoughts and actions of characters, film offers us actual sight and sound. That addition has some rather drastic consequences. A literary text, as I have discussed in the previous chapter, is full of informational gaps when it comes to the evocation of a character’s environment, even in moments when it is of great importance. The text might offer a very detailed description of the environment, and yet there are countless elements that remain unclear, such as the exact spatial relations among objects and people, or the exact number, color, and shape of things that are not in the focus of the narrator and/or the character. Film cannot afford such vagueness. The fact that filmmakers have to provide viewers with images means that they have to make very concrete decisions about the storyworlds they present, such as the spatial relations between characters, the exact time of the day, and the numbers, shapes, and colors of even the most mundane object in the visual composition of a given scene, the so- called mise-en-scè ne. This is why the names of an army of location managers, production designers, painters, carpenters, drapesmasters, greensmen, props masters, and (often) computer animation specialists can be found on the final credits of any major movie production. If it wasn’t for them, we would end up with cinematic environments not unlike the one we find in Lars von Trier’s Dogville (2003): drastically impoverished and almost theatrical settings that only contain objects that are of central importance to the plot. Such a cinematic experiment has its own charms, but it won’t fulfill most viewers’ expectations. Unlike when they pick up a novel, the majority of people expect an immersive sensual experience when they buy a movie ticket or flip on their computer or television set to watch a film.