Body, Cinema and Performance

One of the media-specific qualities of the time-based moving image medium film is the aesthetic organization of the dynamization of space through a choreography of bodies (proxemics). The aesthetic patterns of this organization have a centuries-old tradition from dance theater, social dance in general, but also from martial arts. The sequences of movement in the choreography, which follow ritualized patterns, have always taken up the gesture of courting, competing, but also of dueling. This ambivalence between desire and aggression is, for example, the basic aesthetic principle of tango dance, in which courtship, attraction, repulsion, love and hate, life and death are ritualized into sequences of movement. The physical expression of desire revolves around Venus and Mars at the same time, which is elaborated in all its ambivalence. Such choreographies appear in film stagings not only in a direct sense (in musicals, dance films, ballet films), but also indirectly as the basis for the design of fight and action scenes. The kata of Japanese martial arts, for example, precisely defines every step and movement, so that the combat actions between two or more opponents appear like a dance. This combat choreography serves as the staging basis for classic martial arts cinema, as can be clearly seen in Akira Kurosawa’s Sanjuro (1962). Precisely this form of ritualized movement, given its often universalized aesthetic form and its associative comprehensibility across national borders, occupies an important place within the repertoire of seductive staging strategies. The following chapter will discuss this phenomenon using a film that combines the tradition of the ballet film with the mode of the psychothriller, resulting in an experience of ambivalence that can be very well demonstrated using formal means and at the same time leads to a complementary analytical approach: the schizoanalysis of the film. The choreography not only becomes a sensual experience of ambivalence for the audience, but also enables the visualization of a mental split, which can provide the audience with an intuitive access to the third level of seduction in this case.