1

This is the original version of an article in Agata Blachnio & Aneta Przepiórka (Eds.) (2008). Blizej Emocji (Closer to emotions) (pp. 155-163). Lublin: Wydawnictwo, Katolicki Uniwersystet Lubelski. © Copyright 2008 Keith Oatley and Maja Djikic.

Coming Closer to Emotions by Way of Kieslowski’s Film Blue Keith Oatley and Maja Djikic University of Toronto

Abstract Emotions are sometimes so close that they take us over. But when we read about them in the works of psychologists, they often seem rather distant. An aim of psychology is to understand what goes on beneath the surface of behavior. Can we hold on to this aim, while holding on also to the closeness of emotions? We propose that it is possible to do this by combining psychology and fiction. In novels, plays and films, emotions can again come very close. Here we explore how Kieslowski’s film Blue can bring us closer to emotions while at the same time illuminating their psychology, which includes a potential for transformation of the self.

2

Coming Closer to Emotions by Way of Kieslowski’s Film Blue Krzysztof Kieslowski’s film Blue brings us close to emotions in two ways. First, it employs methods—common in novels but rarer in films—that invite us to enter the mind of the protagonist and to feel emotions related to hers. Second, it teaches us about emotions of others through our own emotions as we watch the film. Blue is the first part of a trilogy (Three colours: Blue, White, Red, 1994). It was co-written by Kieslowski with Krzysztof Piesiewiczc, who had the idea of making the films based on colors of the French Tricoleur, which represent respectively Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity. The story is of Julie de Courcy who survives a car accident that kills her husband, a famous composer, and their seven-year-old daughter. Julie’s liberty is to free herself from all attachments. She disposes of every part of her previous life. Juliette Binoche, who plays Julie, is superb in her depiction of the grief of someone who has lost everything that was meaningful to her. Method goes to the movies The distribution of movies on DVDs has allowed the emergence of a new genre: film plus commentaries by directors, actors and others. One could say that every work of art has two parts, the work itself and the penumbra of discussion that surrounds it. On the DVD of Blue are commentaries by Kieslowski and others. We indicate in our discussion where we have drawn on them. In one, Geoff Andrew explains that Kieslowski started his film career by making documentaries, but decided “he could get closer to the truth by fiction.” Methods used by Kieslowski and Piesiewicz in this film allow the audience to come closer to the truths of their own emotions. We can even imagine the two writers as psychologists saying to each other: “Experiments and questionnaires are all very well, but what methods could we use, like the demonstrations beloved of researchers in perception, to enable viewers to experience emotions?” We focus on four such methods. Metaphor Blue is the colour of grief, and this is no-doubt part of what prompted the idea for a film based on a searing loss. In one of the commentaries, the film’s cinematographer, Slawomir Idziak, says that in an early script Julie was to go jogging to portray her attempt to substitute the physical for the mental. He suggested swimming, a brilliant substitution. Not only does it allow for a lot of blueness, but it offers a metaphor of a surface, with life above and both the unconscious and death below. When Julie plunges beneath the surface, we wonder whether she will reappear. At one point during shooting,

3

as Binoche climbed out of the pool, she had the thought of water in terms of first things, of where we come from. Kieslowski liked the idea and Julie, beneath the surface in a foetal position is in the film, a metaphor that augments that of the water’s surface. The strength of the metaphor of the color blue as grief is intensified by its linkage to the metaphor of melody as creative impulse. The moving musical score of Blue was composed by Zbigniew Preisner. In the film it is presented as based on a theme of the composition on which Julie’s husband, Patrice, had been working before he died: Song for the Unification of Europe. The plot indicates that, although Patrice was the famous composer, it may have been Julie who was the creative force behind her husband’s work, and that it was she who had been writing this much-anticipated piece of music. The entry of the melody at various points in the film is accompanied by blue light. This combination of metaphors of grief and creative impulse invade Julie’s consciousness from a substratum of suppressed emotion. Twice we see her trying to leave the blueness of the pool only to be struck by the melody imposing itself on her consciousness, forcing her back into the water. Even submerging herself beneath the water’s surface effects only a temporary relief. Music and color are woven throughout Blue as governing metaphors of Julie’s suppressed emotionality. Metonym The principal metonymic device in Blue is the close-up of Julie’s face, for the most part expressionless. Metonym is less familiar than metaphor, but just as important. The most common metonym of film is synecdoche, part for whole, a close-up face for the whole person, an outward aspect for the more extensive inner experience. Jakobson (1988) proposed that metaphor and metonymy are two poles of language (see Lodge, 1977, for further explication). Metaphor is a semantic operation, in which we project our knowledge of something known onto a different thing that is less known. In Blue, we project our knowledge of the depth of water onto the idea of grief. Jakobson argues that, by contrast, metonymy is a syntactic operation in which one thing is juxtaposed with another. Any object or image can be brought close to a current subject to cast, by association, a certain light upon it. Metaphor and metonymy are not just poles of language, but poles of thought. Metaphor is when we realize a this is a that, or when we take one thing as model of another. Metonym is when anything prompts an association to something else, for instance in the cognitive process of priming. Priming tends to work unconsciously, and can induce not only a set of meanings but also

4

behavior. For instance, in an ingenious priming study, Kay, Wheeler, Bargh, and Ross (2004) had participants sit at one end of a large table to play an investment game in which participants had to propose how to share an amount of money with another player whom they could not see. On the other end of the table there was, for half the participants a briefcase with some other office materials, and for the other half a backpack with other informal materials. Those who played in the presence of the briefcase were more competitive and offered to share less money than those who played in the presence of the backpack. In film, briefcases and backpacks are exactly the kinds of objects used to suggest, metonymically, a person’s character and preoccupations. In literary analysis, Booth (1988) has pointed out that metonymy is a route to intimacy with a character or author: a route to the inner mind of that person. Such effects can be thought of in terms of two layers of mind, as proposed by Clark (2006): a verbal layer and a deeper intuitive layer. One can think of successful metonyms as being able to by-pass the verbal layer and penetrate directly to the intuitive layer. In the movies, one way in which metonymic juxtaposition is often accomplished is by a cut from one shot to the next. A telling example is the Kuleshov-effect (see e.g. Smith, 1995). It was discovered in the 1920s, when Soviet film-makers became interested in the idea of a cut as laying one image onto another. In Blue the effect is used in a closeup of Julie’s face, expressionless, as she lies immobile in a hospital bed. Olivier, her husband’s collaborator, has brought her a small portable television so she can see the funeral of her husband and daughter. There is a cut from an image of Julie’s face to what she is looking at: a brief TV image of Olivier, then an image of two coffins. One is smaller than the other. Then there is another metonym. We see the shadow of Julie’s finger as she reaches to touch the TV image of the smaller coffin. Then there is a cut to a close-up of Julie’s face again, and her lips tremble slightly, but it is the eyes of us, members of the audience, that well with tears. We can go further with the idea of close-ups. Think about it like this. Western theatre, and in its wake, film, have tended toward realism: the idea that what we experience in a drama is what we would see if we were there. An actor’s face may display the smile of invitation, the frown of anger, the wide eyes of fear. The play takes place out there, on the stage or on the screen. Like an invisible observer, we watch it, and it includes such facial expressions. By contrast, certain forms of Japanese drama such as Bun Raku and Kabuki take place within the mind. The stories are of intense emotion, but

5

the characters are played in Bun Raku by large puppets that necessarily have immobile faces and in Kabuki by actors who keep their faces very still. The intention is not for the actors to experience emotions, but for the audience to do so. Binoche is superb at the immobile face, and occasionally she adds a slight tremor. In these methods, we argue, the unexpressive face is itself a metonym, a face without its usual expressiveness. It not only provides a contrast to the intense emotions of the drama, but it prompts the audience to experience emotions of the kind that usually animate the face in those contexts. In Blue, the method of juxtaposition by means of cuts is extended by a more distant kind of metonym: juxtaposition of a close-up of Binoche’s face with nothing. In the language of film (as Jacques Witta, the film’s editor says in his commentary) a fade usually indicates the passage of time. But the film-makers found that a fade to black and a fade back to the image of Julie’s face without passage of time was striking. We suggest this is because the blank screen prompts the audience to feel into her emotion. One might think that an alternative to the metonymic close-up would be to put the camera in the position of the actor, and thus see (as it were) from the mind of the character. This method is used several times in Blue. In one place that Kieslowski discusses in his commentary, his intention was to have the camera focus on specific things in close up, for instance a cup of coffee in which a sugar cube is dipped so the coffee soaks into it, to show what Julie sees with her mind free of everything but what she looks at in that moment. Zillmann (1994) describes an unpublished experiment by Sapolski on this issue. Two different versions were filmed of a man and a woman in an erotic scene. Both versions had the same beginning, but in one the camera was in the position of one of the actors, filming what the actor would see, and “simulating the visual perception of the male or female engaged in intercourse.” In the other, more conventional, version the camera “isolated either the male or the female, showing his or her action on the partner whose presence was only suggested” (p. 38). Measures included heart rates of the viewers. The conclusion was that shots in which viewers took, as it were, the place of an actor did not work well, and did not invite them to enter the character’s mind. Instead, the conventional film-making technique in which viewers follow intentions and plans of a character worked better. The shot of the coffee soaking into the sugar cube is, we suggest, of the kind that Sapolski and Zillmann found less effective. They are visually striking (as is the shot of a doctor reflected in Julie’s eye as

6

he tells her that her husband and daughter are dead) but, we suggest, not as effective in prompting the audience to inwardness as the juxtapositions we have discussed. Music and lighting as an emotion line Vygotsky (1971) proposed an aesthetic theory (see also Kozulin, 1990) that in a drama the plot is just one line that connects the parts. The plot includes a structure of who causes what, and what happens next. But, Vygotsky argued, there is another line that runs alongside it, which he called the aesthetic line. As a good Marxist, he argued that in a true work of art, the aesthetic line overcomes the plot in the dialectical relation between them. Oatley (2004) has argued that Vygotsky’s aesthetic line might better be thought of as an emotion line, a sequence of changing emotions. Because music is known to induce emotions, and now is even used to induce moods in psychological experiments (see Johnson-Laird & Oatley, 2007), it was a beautiful idea in the development of the movies to include musical scores, accompanied sometimes by special lighting effects. They augment the emotion line. In Blue one could argue that rather than being in the background, such effects are in the foreground. The plot of Blue is that Julie loses everything important to her, so she gets rid of her husband’s unfinished composition, of her house and furniture, and of Olivier who, as well as being her husband’s musical collaborator, becomes briefly her lover following her husband’s death. She moves into an anonymous apartment, but seemingly against her will becomes reconnected to the world. Because this plot is so minimal there is not much, in Vygotsky’s dialectical sense, to overcome. Music and lighting carry more of the weight than is usual in a film. Moreover, the film is not very verbal. Indeed its only memorable verbal exchange occurs when, near the beginning, Julie asks her housekeeper why she is crying, and the housekeeper replies: “Because you’re not.” If we return to Clark’s (2006) idea of two layers of mind—a relatively recently installed verbal layer that overlays an evolutionarily older intuitive-associative layer—the film works largely at the older level, and music can be thought of as articulating directly with the emotional structures of this layer (Langer, 1953). When Julie decides to destroy the manuscripts of the Song for the Unification of Europe and to relinquish all thought of completing the work, this is not just a personal act but one that would deprive a wider audience of a piece of music that is important not only in itself but in the idea of unification for which it stands. The plot line includes Julie hearing the theme of this music played by a street musician who says: “I invent a lot of

7

stuff I like to play.” “Oh,” thinks the audience. “Patrice did not compose this, but heard it from this man.” The plot line is that perhaps Julie will relent, collaborate with Olivier to complete the work, and let her part in it become publicly known. Once again, Kieslowski’s commentary is interesting. His idea is to prompt us towards what we call the intuitive layer. Kieslowski says that he is interested in how people in different places can think the same things. He says: “It’s the same for this feeling and this music. All those notes exist, scattered somewhere waiting for the one who will assemble them, put them in order. That different people with different social status can assemble the notes in the same way is for me a sign of what unites all people.” The musical theme, for Kieslowski, is of interdependence. The emotions this theme suggests are of connectedness among people. The internalization of others If Blue were a plot-based movie, it would end with Julie completing Song for the Unification of Europe, with its performance, and with Julie appearing on a stage to acknowledge the applause of a rapturous audience. Although we see Julie working on the manuscript, writing notes with a blue pen as the music sounds in our ears, the film does not end individualistically with her accepting such acknowledgement. It ends with a sequence of images in her mind of the people she met by chance after she abandoned her country house. The images include that of a sex worker who lived on the ground floor of her apartment building, whom she accidentally befriended, of Olivier who only by chance found where she was living, and of an ultrasound of a foetus—fathered by her husband— in the uterus of a woman whom she by chance discovered was her husband’s mistress. The sequence ends with a shot of Julie’s face, at last letting fall sad tears. The succession of images of these people is evocative of Freud’s (1923) notion of the formation of the ego. Freud writes that in melancholia (Julie’s state through much of the movie) a person’s objects—loved ones—have to be given up but remain installed in the ego. We take others into ourselves, and when they are lost, says Freud, “the character of the ego is a precipitate of abandoned object-cathexes” (p. 368). In the film, Julie has cleared out her tables, chairs, and bookshelves, as well as the inner furniture of attachments to her husband and daughter. It is as if human inwardness abhors a vacuum. Julie’s inner space becomes occupied with images of people she meets. The ego is not an individual thing. Even in an extreme attempt to abandon all attachments, the emotional draw towards others moves these others into the self.

8

From emotion to transformation Emotions play a crucial role in changing the way one relates to oneself, others, and the world. They initiate and guide transformation. Often, emotions caused by traumatic events provide a catalyst for such change. As we meet Julie following her tragedy, in the beginning sequences of Blue, she gives an impression of someone who has been only partially connected to her pre-tragedy life. We discover she did not know of husband’s long-standing infidelity. We discover she was unwilling to acknowledge her own gifts for composition but hid behind the screen of her famous husband’s work. We discover she had not noticed that her husband’s colleague has been in love with her for years. When Julie decides to deal with her tragedy by trying to withdraw from all attachments, we might suppose that her behavior is an endpoint of a continuum of behaviors in which she is well-practiced. At the close of the film, we see a transformed Julie: a Julie who faces the unpleasant fact of her husband’s pregnant mistress and generously allows this woman to live in her country house, a Julie who acknowledges her own musical gifts, a Julie who is willing to engage with life. This transformation does not happen, however, before she, and we in the audience, learn profound lessons about nature of emotions. First, no matter how much Julie would like to function on a level of animal actions—where feeding, survival, and sex take the place of friendship, creative work, and love—she discovers that human emotions persist and cannot be entirely suppressed. In the conspicuous intrusion of the melody of the Song for the Unification of Europe and the color blue into Julie’s consciousness, we discover that short of suicide (at which she fails in the opening part of the film, and says “I can’t”), her human impulses to feel, create, and connect to others, coax her into life no matter how painful a return to feeling may be. Second, Julie learns (as do we) an existential lesson: there is no such thing as not making a choice. After she refuses to sign a petition that would evict a sex-worker from the building in which she lives (not on principle, but because she can’t bother to care about it), the woman comes to thank her and the two become friends. When she refuses to open a door to a victim of a street beating, she inadvertently locks herself out of her apartment, and witnesses a marital infidelity between two neighbors. When she discovers a mouse nest in her pantry, her first impulse is to find another apartment. Realizing the absurdity of doing this, she borrows a cat from one of her adulterous neighbors, but cannot face the clean-up. By letting the neighbor do what she cannot, she strengthens a

9

friendship with this person. When she refuses to take ownership of her husband’s papers (which include evidence of his extra-marital affair), she inadvertently causes these papers to be combed publicly in a TV show. We see Julie refusing to act, but even her refusals bring her closer to a variety of human emotions she was trying to avoid: compassion, curiosity, gratitude, grief. Blue offers the idea that emotions that connect us to ourselves and others are as powerful and insistent as the need to breathe. It teaches us that convenient and inconvenient emotions cannot be easily compartmentalized, that grief and the creative impulse reside in the same emotional substratum. It teaches us that emotions, even in the wake of a tragedy, are guides to understanding, to living, to transforming our selves. Discussion At first Julie is immobilized: in a neck brace. Inwardly she is stunned. She deals with her grief by trying to feel nothing and by getting rid of everything. She enters a period occupied only by such matters as swimming and cups of coffee. The story is that towards the end of the film she starts to rejoin life. But there is a more subterranean level. At first emotions seem entirely personal and entirely individual. But we find that—like Kieslowski’s idea of music—they are distributed among us. They are the threads that hold people together, even unlikely people: threads that hold society together. In psychological research this theme is starting to emerge in studies of emotions. Someone who rejects our line of argument might say: “There is nothing in what you write that tells us anything about human emotions, only about the entertainment medium of a film.” We would disagree. Not all novels and films, but some, are made as simulations of human existence and social life, simulations that enable us better to understand what goes on within us and among us. We argue that such simulations (of the kind that run on minds) have as much importance in understanding emotions as do simulations (of the kind that run on computers) in understanding perception. Moreover, the fact that novels, plays, and films move their readers and audiences emotionally means that that these fictional forms can be studied to see what configurations cause emotions and in what kinds of ways. Of course we know that loss of attachment figures causes grief and sadness. But we do not know all the pathways such grief and sadness might take. Art allows us to search the space of possibilities. Certain works of fiction, including Blue, offer the experience of emotions occurring not outside us but within. In the novels we might read and films we might see,

10

we can experience circumstances that it would take a hundred different lifetimes to encounter. Of any one circumstance, we can ask: “How do these events give rise to this emotion?” We test the question on ourselves. So literature and cinema can be laboratories of emotions. A work of art can translate an emotion that is inchoate, perhaps unrecognized, into an outward form that can be experienced inwardly, reflected upon by oneself, and discussed with others. References Clark, A. (2006). Material symbols. Philosophical Psychology, 19, 291-307. Freud, S. (1923). The ego and the id. In J. Strachey (Ed.), Pelican Freud Library, Vol 11: On metapsychology (pp. 341-406). London: Penguin (current edition 1984). Jakobson, R. (1988). The metaphoric and metonymic poles. In D. Lodge (Ed.), Modern criticism and theory: A reader (pp. 57-61). Longman: London. Johnson-Laird, P.N. & Oatley, K. (2007). Emotions, music, and literature. In M. Lewis, J. Haviland-Jones, and L. F. Feldman-Barrett (Eds.) Handbook of emotions, third edition. New York: Guilford. Kay, A., Wheeler, S. C., Bargh, J. A., & Ross, L. (2004). Material priming: The influence of mundane physical objects on situational construal and competitive behavioral choice. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 95, 83-96. Kieslowski, K. (Director) (1994). Blue. France. Kozulin, A. (1990). Vygotsky's psychology: A biography of ideas. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Langer, S. K. (1953). Feeling and form: A theory of art. New York: Scribner. Lodge, D. (1977). The modes of modern writing: Metaphor, metonymy, and the typology of modern fiction. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Oatley, K. (2004). Scripts, transformations, and suggestiveness, of emotions in Shakespeare and Chekhov. Review of General Psychology, 8, 323-340. Smith, M. (1995). Engaging characters: Fiction, emotion, and the cinema. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Vygotsky, L. S. (1971). The psychology of art. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Zillmann, D. (1994). Mechanisms of emotional involvement with drama. Poetics, 23, 33– 51.

11

Keith Oatley, PhD, is professor emeritus in the Department of Human Development and Applied Psychology, University of Toronto. His research is on the psychology of emotions and the psychology of fiction. His most recent book of psychology is Emotions: A brief history (2004). His novel, The case of Emily V., which won the 1994 Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best First Novel, has recently been reissued (2006) by the New York Publisher, Pleasure Boat Studio. Maja Djikic, PhD, is a post-doctoral fellow in the Desautels Centre for Integrative Thinking, Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto, and in the Psychology Department, Harvard University. Her research is on creativity and the effects of art on thinking and personal transformation. A recent publication is Djikic, M, Oatley, K. & Peterson, J. (2006). The bitter-sweet labor of emoting: The linguistic comparison of writers and physicists. Creativity Research Journal, 18, 191-197.