From Hypnosis to Animals

Abstract

A translation of a section of Bellour's "Le corps du cinéma: Hypnoses, émotions, animalités" ("The Body of Cinema: Hypnoses, Emotions, Animalities") is presented. The excerpt lays out the points of commonality between hypnosis and animality which offers an understanding of the nature of cinema's physical impact on the body. Bellour posits that the way in which hypnosis is represented in film allows for a mise en abyme of cinema as itself a device that captures, or entrances, a viewer-and by extension, an audience-whereby he or she becomes prey to somatic affects (emotions experienced as the viewer's own, introduced from elsewhere and registered on the body itself).