Seeing and Nothingness: Aposiopetic Cinema and Sartrean Spectatorship

Abstract

Film scholarship has considered the affective qualities of cinema’s patterns of closure, but has neglected the methods and implications of narrative openness. Generally, entirely open-ended films are considered on a case-by-case basis and are not situated in dialogue with one another. In such cases, these films’ deviations have 1) been considered through a lens of narrative theory, and 2) been likened to “ellipses.” Considering open-ended films as provocative only by virtue of their narrative deviation, or as carrying the affective weight of an ellipsis, does not account for the often shocking, unsettling, or profoundly moving experiences these films generate. In this thesis, I bring together a selection of open-ended, unresolved narrative films and read them as “aposiopetic,” a label borrowed from rhetoric and literature that more accurately accounts for the abruptness of their irresolution than existing structural and affective descriptions.

In exploring the affect generated by this structural deviation, I undertake a phenomenological analysis, explicitly taking up the view of nothingness argued by Jean-Paul Sartre in Being and Nothingness (1943).

Across five chapters, this thesis specifically considers films about missing, disappeared, and ontologically dubious characters, and suggests that the affect engendered by these films’ regimes of ambiguity, silence, absence and negation echoes Sartre’s contention that “nothingness is right inside being, in its heart, like a worm.” I find that in the aposiopetic film’s lack of closure, there arises a provocation of imagination, anxiety, freedom, and nothingness that generates a rich spectatorial experience.

This thesis highlights how a film might reify abstract philosophical ideas not just within its narrative content and through its form, but also in its extra-textual afterlife—an afterlife that is uniquely encouraged and facilitated in the aposiopetic mode.