The Character’s Body and the Viewer: Cinematic Empathy and Embodied Simulation in the Film Experience

Establishing an intimate relationship between fictional characters and the viewer is of primary significance to the narrative film. In this chapter, I conceive film viewing as a quasi-intersubjective relationship between the viewer and the (main) character—two bodies involved in a physical, mental and emotional experience, while mediated by a third quasi-body: the film. To explore the nature of this complex relationship, I adopt a phenomenological perspective and rely on the notion of cinematic empathy: a pre-reflexive and ‘immediate’ psycho-physical process through which the viewer experiences a character’s perceptions, thoughts, actions, and emotions via embodied simulation. When conflating the bodily expression the character and the bodily perception of the viewer, a ‘shared experiential space’ emerges. My analysis of a scene of Alfonso Cuarón’s space-exploration film Gravity untangles this notion, placing particular attention on the character’s physical appearance and behaviour (e.g., body postures and facial expressions) in relation to the viewer. I depart from a phenomenological account of cinematic empathy and an ‘embodied’ conception of simulation offered by Belgian experimental psychologist Albert Michotte van der Berck, and subsequently explore relatively new assumptions from neuroscientific research.