ACTA UNIV.

SAPIENTIAE, FILM AND MEDIA STUDIES, 5 (2012) 87–106

Film in Depth.
Water and Immersivity in the
Contemporary Film Experience
Adriano D’Aloia
Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore (Milan)
E-mail: adriano.daloia@unicatt.it

Abstract. Since its beginnings, cinema has recognised that water can
visually give matter and meaning to human desires, dreams and secrets,
eliciting suspense and fear. Using different aesthetical and technical
strategies, contemporary cinema shows immersed and drowning bodies to
represent and express intimacy and protection, suspense and fear,
obsession and depression, state of shock, past or infancy trauma,
hallucinations and nightmares, etc. The case of enwaterment (i.e. “water-
embodiment”) is significant because of its relevance to the point where
psychoanalysis and philosophy meet. In this essay, I attempt to investigate
what is actually meant today by making a bodily and sensible experience
of film by analysing the substance of water and the figures of the drowning
and immersed body. Cinema embodies aquatic modalities of perception
and expression, pulling the viewer into a liquid environment that is the
confluence between the film-body and the filmgoer-body.

The pupil is made of water.

Aristotle, De Anima, III

The true eye of the earth is water.

Gaston Bachelard, L’Eau et les rêves, 1942

A deep relationship binds water and cinema. Images and sounds stream on
the screen like an inexhaustible flow of water, a ‘mechanical fluidity’ that
perfectly expresses the spirit of modern times. In the beginning, cinema aimed
both to provide a fluid rendering of reality and to astonish the spectators by
shocking their senses. In Panorama of Gorge Railway (Thomas Edison, 1900),
for example, the stream of an impetuous river is combined with the motion of
the camera, placed on the front end of a train, in the opposite direction. The
conflict between the movement of the water and that of the camera, and the
88 Adriano D’Aloia

masses of spray and foam that seem to fly at and wet the camera, emphasise the
spectators’ sense of motion. The foaming waves of the sea have a key part in
early British films like Rough Sea at Dover (Birt Acres, 1895), Dover Pier in a
Storm (Cecil M. Hepworth, 1900) and Breaking Waves (Cecil M. Hepworth,
1900). In watching American falls from above, American side (Thomas Edison,
1896), the spectator experiences the power of waterfalls, even if the film
consists of a single stationary shot. In Sutro Baths, Sutro Baths, No. 1 and
Lurline Baths (Thomas Edison, 1897), a series of short films set in two
swimming pools in San Francisco, the descent of bathers from the slipway and
the swarming crowd in the pool create splashes of water up towards the camera,
with an effect similar to that of the river foam in Panorama of Gorge Railway.
The mechanical nature of cinematic fluidity emerges in Les bains de Diane à
Milan (Louis Lumière, 1896) and Bathers (Cecil M. Hepworth, 1900), where
through reverse motion, human bodies dive into and seemingly come out of the
water. Very soon, water begins to immerse the body of the characters
completely, e.g. in Visite Sous-Marine du Maine (Georges Méliès, 1898) and
Divers: Diving for Treasure (Robert W. Paul, 1900). These films suggest an
analogy between the transparency of water and the act of vision, evoking a
conception of film viewing as an immersive experience that is capable not only
of shocking and astonishing the spectator, but also of inviting and involving
him or her into a specific ‘sensorial space.’
Plenty of water has passed under the bridge of cinema since it took its first
exploratory steps. In this essay, I argue that the choice of water as a setting and
the expressive use of its properties (e.g. depth, density and transparency) as
stylistic solutions in contemporary mainstream narrative cinema are functional
to the constitution of specific ‘water-based’ film experiences. More and more
often, contemporary cinema presents crucial scenes that represent immersed
and drowning bodies in order to involve the spectators in an enveloping and
breathtaking experience. Moreover, many contemporary films embody ‘aquatic’
modes of expression and perception, even if water is not explicitly used as a
subject or a setting. These films tend to ‘enwater’ the spectators, i.e. embody
them in water, in an immersive and fluid experience. Today the film-theatre is
not simply a marvelous aquarium that confines the spectator to appreciating
fine specimens at a distance, like in early cinema, but it is rather a huge pool,
an ocean bed, a swampy marsh or a limpid bay in which spectators experience
a sense of being engulfed and dragged toward the waterfall of perception, or
getting sucked into a whirlpool of emotion.
Immersivity has become a distinctive trait of the theatrical experience, which
is forced to resort to new and enhanced solutions in order to contend with the
impoverishment of the viewing experience caused by the process of relocation.
 Film in Depth. Water and Immersivity in the Contemporary Film Experience 89

Relocation is causing the film experience to ‘migrate’ from one place to another,
from its ‘motherland’ to new frontiers: a film can be watched in various places,
in various individual and interpersonal contexts, and by means of various
devices and screens (Casetti 2009, 62). This process does not simply concern
the locations where films are viewed, nor the aesthetic or textual characteristics
of films, nor the technical platforms of film delivery. Rather, it consists in the
‘displacement’ of the experience: a corpus of social and cultural needs, rules
and pleasures that arose with the advent of cinema, developed as it evolved,
and that are still present today in the ‘relocated cinematic practices.’ The main
response of theatrical cinema to this scenario has been to search for new and
enhanced forms of immersivity, refining its technical means and special effects
in order to provide the spectator with both the impression of really being in the
space of the fictional events depicted and an intense sensorial experience (via
special effects, CGI, 3D, etc.).
Inevitably, the appearance of water on the screen gives rise to a whole series
of possible inherent meanings. Since ancient times, the element of water has
represented the ‘great mother,’ the substance that generates life on Earth. For
Thales of Miletus, water is the origin of every vital principle, the source from
which every living thing stems. According to Empedocles, all matter is
comprised of four ‘roots,’ or elements. Knowledge originates in the encounter
between an element within a human being and the same element outside of
him/her: “for with earth do we see earth, with water water, with air bright air,
with fire consuming fire, with Love do we see Love, Strife with dread Strife”
(Empedocles, B 109 – see: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/empedocles/). This
idea is further developed by Aristotle to assert that the elements all arise from
the interplay between the archetypal properties of hotness and coldness,
dryness and wetness. Water is wet and cold and its qualities are fluidity and
flexibility, the ability to adapt to external conditions (Aristotle 1998). As a
consequence, water tends to be expansive, since it can fill spaces in its
surroundings. In De Anima, Aristotle divides the senses into two categories: the
senses of touch and taste that apprehend their objects by direct contact, and the
‘distance-senses’ – sight, hearing and smell – that approach their objects
without immediate contact. The objects of sight are perceptible through media.
The medium of sight is composed of simple elements, i.e. air and water. The
power of sight must be realised in an organ made of a transparent liquid, in
order that it be receptive of colour and light (Aristotle 1993, III: 1).
The figures of Poseidon/Neptune, Aphrodite/Venus, Narcissus and Ulysses
testify that water has a crucial role in both Greek and Latin mythology. It is also
thus in the Jewish and Christian tradition. In Genesis, “Darkness covered the
deep and the Spirit of God hovered over the water” (Genesis 1: 2). The flood
90 Adriano D’Aloia

extended over all the Earth from which Noah and his family and livestock were
saved in the ark (Genesis 6–9). In the New Testament, water is a means of
purification, a factor of regeneration. The Baptism of Christ in the Jordan
symbolises purification and new birth (John 1: 29–33). Blood and water flow
from his side during the Crucifixion (John 19: 34). In any religious context,
waters disintegrate and dissolve forms, and wash away sins; they are at once
purifying and regenerating. Purification and contamination, life and death,
transparency and opacity… These ambiguous roots of the meaning of water in
Western culture are reflected in literature, figurative art and, of course, in
cinema. On the one hand, in a continuation of the ‘attractive’ tendency of early
cinema, water is a means of engendering physical involvement by astonishing
the spectator; on the other hand, the symbolic meanings of water implicitly
emerge on the surface of the screen, to the extent that even in the most
intellectual and symbolised cinematographic uses of water – consider, for
example, Tarkovsky’s works – the perceptual and tangible consistency of
images and sounds and their symbolic meanings are mutually embodied.
As cinema has developed, it has aspired to being more than a mere attraction
and, accordingly, it has focused on the metaphorical and symbolic meanings of
water. For example, in Terje Vigen (Victor Sjöström, 1916), the sea is used as a
backdrop to the main character’s rage against the evil fate. In Mother (Vsevolod I.
Pudovkin, 1926), the happiness of the prisoner for his imminent freedom is
expressed by the non-diegetic inserts of the fresh waters of a stream. Filmmakers
quickly recognised the expressive potential of water and allowed it to permeate
the language of film: just consider the bobbing, wave-like opening titles of Emak
Bakia (Man Ray, 1926) or the fading images of Étoile de mer (Man Ray, 1928). In
the 1920s and 1930s, French directors (e.g. L’Herbier, Epstein and Vigo) profusely
used the visual and dramaturgic richness of water and created solutions inspired
by its dynamic properties, e.g. flou, superimposition, filters, and out-of-focus,
marking “a passage from a mechanics of solids to a mechanics of fluids… [Water]
provided better conditions to pass from the concrete to the abstract, a greater
possibility of communicating an irreversible duration to movements,
independently of their figurative characters, a more certain power of extracting
movement from the thing moved” (Deleuze 1986, 43). In Ménilmontant (Dimitri
Kirsanov, 1924), the shocked state of the protagonist is visualised through the
superimposition of her face and the streaming river water into which she is
contemplating throwing herself to commit suicide (like a modern Ophelia). In
L’Atalante (Jean Vigo, 1934), the slow flow of the river on which the boat floats is
a metaphor of life and love, until the scene in which Jean dives into the river and
has a vision of his love Juliette. The series of Jean Epstein’s documentary films set
in coastal Britain is particularly significant in order to explain the concept of
 Film in Depth. Water and Immersivity in the Contemporary Film Experience 91

‘paysage-acteur,’ namely that nature on screen has the same role as actors in
dramatic films and is subject to the same detailed critical analysis (see Epstein
1974–75). In Le Tempestaire (Jean Epstein, 1947), “Epstein was able to express it
from the inside, the viewer is absorbed by it. The heart of the storm is suggested
by a sense of entrapment and engulfment. The filmmaker uses the cliffs to create
dives into the body of water” (Dulac 2008). [Fig. 1.]

Water in Contemporary Narrative Cinema

In the wake of this centuries-old tradition, contemporary cinema exploited

the capability of water, visually and aurally, to give a palpable form to human
desires and dreams. Water is often represented or evoked in film as a substance
that submerges something that is destined to re-emerge. Through its semantic
fluidity, cinema lets the unconscious drift before the eyes of the spectators and
infiltrate their limpid gaze. A psychological malaise affects the main characters
and has to be washed away with clean water.
For example, in the finale of The Hours (Stephen Daldry, 2004), Virginia
Woolf fills her pockets with stones and commits suicide by allowing the current
of the river to engulf her. In The Truman Show (Peter Weir, 1998), to prevent
Truman from discovering reality, the show’s creators stage his father’s death in
a storm while on a fishing trip and instil Truman with a fear of water. Water
surrounds the city where Truman lives, Sea Haven, a sort of postmodern
Atlantis submerged in the television reality. The separation of a son from his
father is represented in the muddy waters of a sewer even in animation films,
e.g. Ratatouille (Brad Bird, 2007). In Minority Report (Steven Spielberg, 2002),
John Anderton’s son has been kidnapped in a crowded swimming pool. In this
film, water receptacles form a recurring motif, e.g. the warm pool in which
‘precogs’ are immersed evokes the pre-birth situation, and the icy water of a
bathtub into which Anderton immerses himself in an attempt to keep a pack of
menacing spider-like robots off his scent. In Titanic (James Cameron, 1997),
after many vicissitudes during the foundering of the steamship, Jack Dawson
dies in the icy water of the Atlantic Ocean. Water in a pool conducts electricity
and kills a child in Syriana (Stephen Gaghan, 2005). In The Prestige
(Christopher Nolan, 2006), Robert Angier’s clones drown in water after each
‘transportation’ trick. In What Lies Beneath (Robert Zemeckis, 2000), water
conceals the traces of criminal acts and compromising pieces of evidence,
which are inevitably destined to emerge. Fear follows a new Acherons – the
river of pain in Greek mythology – in Cape Fear (Martin Scorsese, 1991), The
River Wild (Curtis Hanson, 1994), and Insomnia (Christopher Nolan, 2002).
92 Adriano D’Aloia

Water in malicious and mysterious guise submerges the cinematic screen in

science fiction films like Sphere (Barry Levinson, 1998). The destructive power
of oceans swamp mankind in catastrophic films like Deep Impact (Mimi Leder,
1998), The Perfect Storm (Wolfgang Petersen, 2000) and 2012 (Roland
Emmerich, 2009). The endless expanse of the sea isolates humans as in Cast
Away (Robert Zemeckis, 2000), or generates new Ulysses, new sirens, new
Jonahs, new Noahs, as in Waterworld (Kevin Reynolds, 1995), Master &
Commander (Peter Weir, 2003), Lady in the Water (M. Night Shyamalan, 2006)
and Big Fish (Tim Burton, 2003). [Fig. 2.]
Dozens of other examples from the last fifteen years can be cited. And, of
course, this tendency goes beyond the borders of Hollywood. In the poetic
finale of The Piano (Jane Campion, 1993), as we hear Ada’s mental voice, we
see her body floating above her piano lying in the seabed. “There is a silence
where hath been no sound,” she says quoting Thomas Hood’s poem Silence,
“There is a silence where no sound may be. In the cold grave, under the deep
deep sea.” In Atonement (Joe Wright, 2007), the bodies of the characters interact
with water of many different kinds, which can be considered the very vital
principle of the plot: the fountain into which Cecilia jumps to retrieve the
fragments of the broken vase, the basin in which Briony pretends to drown in
order to be rescued by Robbie, and the water that floods the subway station
used as a refuge and kills Cecilia. Water takes on intellectual meanings in The
Wild Blue Yonder (Werner Herzog, 2005), in which underwater shots made
under the ice of the South Pole are presented as if showing the liquid
atmosphere of the alien water planet. Here water is the domain of the stranger,
the mutable incarnation of ungraspable meanings, for the mind rather than for
the senses. In The Sea Inside (Alejandro Amenábar, 2004), Ramón Sampedro’s
quadriplegia is caused by a dive from a rock in the Mediterranean Sea gone
wrong. The scene of the accident returns in a flashback as the spectator
experiences the interplay between the physical trauma and its psychological
consequences.
In all these films and many others, water is a substance that particularly
lends itself to the representation of nightmares, hallucinations, depression and
trauma, an unusual place of concealment and refuge, an element that can wash
away sin, or from which sin re-emerges. Water is strategically used as a
substance capable of marking the passage from one psychological condition to
another, and of ‘hosting’ a crucial event, e.g. loss, trauma, separation, or death.
Cinematic water is an elusive fluid that stirs the innermost human drives and
pours them forth to quench their thirst for fancy and aspiration, but it can also
swallow them in a whirlpool of their fears. Troubles pass under the bridge of
cinema and, nonetheless, as water appears on the screen, something menacing
 Film in Depth. Water and Immersivity in the Contemporary Film Experience 93

always lies in ambush – a sea monster, an oppressive past, a looming

catastrophe, a tsunami. Not always does the river reach the vast horizon of the
ocean and debouch the troubles that it bears along with it. This is particularly
clear in science-fiction and horror movies, in which obscure forces and
unforeseeable but imminent dangers come from deep water. From Jaws (Steven
Spielberg, 1975) onward, cinema has used water to give substance to ghosts in
the unconscious, an abyss that is mental rather that physical.

Dreams of Water

In Freudian psychoanalysis, the presence of water in dreams refers to the pre-

utero state: “A large number of dreams, which are frequently full of anxiety, and
whose content often involves the traversing of narrow spaces or staying long in
the water, are based upon phantasies concerning the intra-uterine life, the
sojourn in the mother’s womb, and the act of birth” (Freud 1913, 250).
Immersion in water also means birth: “Dreams of this sort are parturition
dreams; their interpretation is effected by reversing the fact recorded in the
manifest dream-content; thus, instead of ‘flinging oneself into the water,’ read
‘coming out of the water’ – that is, ‘being born’” (Freud 1913, 250). Water is an
insidious challenge for the senses. In Phaedo, Plato pointed out that a
straight stick put in water appears bent (Plato 1993, 66a). The problem is to
recognise and distinguish reality from the distorted images of what is not
reality. And as Freud himself remembers, referring to Aristotle, “the best
interpreter of dreams is he who can best grasp similarities. For dream-pictures,
like pictures in water, are disfigured by the motion (of the water), so that he hits
the target best who is able to recognise the true picture in the distorted one”
(Freud 1913, 71).
As Carl G. Jung states in The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, in
dreams and fantasies the sea or any large expanse of water is the
commonest symbol for the unconscious (Jung 1959, 18), the “deep valley of
the psyche” (Jung 1959, 17–18). The way of the soul in search of something or
someone that has been lost “leads to the water, to the dark mirror that reposes at
its bottom” (Jung 1959, 17); “the treasure lies in the depths of the water” (Jung
1959, 24). Nonetheless, “this water is no figure of speech, but a living symbol of
the dark psyche” (Jung 1959, 17). The living nature of the symbol of water
suggested by Jung allows us to clarify that the use of water in cinema – to be
conceived as the concrete and perceivable projection of an inner projection of
the psyche – is not merely as a film setting, nor only an aesthetic solution to
express the internal state of the character. Water is a substance capable of
94 Adriano D’Aloia

directly communicating symbols and meanings to the spectator, reducing the

separation between the fictional space on the screen and the psychic space in
front of the screen. In the films cited – and in many others –, as water appears
on the surface of the cinematic screen, its deep meanings loom up, with no
recourse, on the part of the spectator, to cultural background or encyclopedic
knowledge, nor to mental processes of inference and interpretation.
Inspired by both Jungian archetypes and his interest in alchemy, Gaston
Bachelard pointed out in his study on the ‘imaginary waters’ in poetry and
literature that water ranges from the clear, slow moving, innocent and
transparent river, that is related to the natural beauty of a young naked woman,
innocent and unmysterious (Bachelard 1983, 33), to the deep, ‘heavy’ and
running waters that symbolise the passing of time and death (Bachelard 1983,
46). Bachelard argued that human imagination does not draw on interpretation,
but rather it is supported by “direct images of matter” (Bachelard 1983, 8),
images in which “the form is deeply sunk in a substance” (Bachelard 1994, ix).
Daydreaming (rêverie) sends “waves” of the unreal into reality and allows the
daydreamer to reach the sleeping waters within themselves. The sensorial and
sensuous experience of matter, memory and imagination find expression in
poetic imagery based on water: “A poet who begins with a mirror must end
with the water of a fountain if he wants to present a complete poetic
experience” (Bachelard 1983, 21–22). This experience takes place in physical
spaces in which human beings dwell and that themselves influence human
memories, feelings and thoughts. Inner and outer space – the mind and the
world – are reciprocally implicated (Bachelard 1994, 201). If we include the
film-theatre in the space of poetic experience, we may approach the water-
based film experience as an immersion of the material imagination.
In approaching the film experience, pre-cognitive and pre-linguistic
‘knowledge’ has a crucial role. Every spectator has a primordial sense of
liquidity or fluidity and has an (unconscious) memory of the in-utero state. We
instinctively associate water and drinkable fluids in general with the act of
swallowing or with the state of being thirsty; we contrast the solidity of our
bodies to the liquidity of water, our opacity with its transparency, our stillness
with its flowing, and, though we recognise a common substance of which both
we and the world are made, we involuntarily associate the qualities of warmth
or cold, fluidity or muddiness, with human expressive states, like relaxation or
annoyance, safety or danger, calmness or impetuosity. Before any deliberate
inferences are made, the spectators explore the ‘surface’ of the screen, with no
recourse to cultural background or cognitive activity. Only after this ‘immediate’
approach to the expressive forces of film images do spectators dive into the
depths and call on their socio-cultural knowledge and background skills in order
to interpret the meaning.
 Film in Depth. Water and Immersivity in the Contemporary Film Experience 95

Enwaterment

Cinema cannot avoid the tendency to use the concreteness and symbolism of
water for its immersive purposes. The film experience is the elective situation
in which meaning can be directly communicated and experienced by the
spectator. The use of water and its properties in the construction of the film
experience may be considered as a form of Bachelardian ‘materialising
imagination,’ or a Jungian ‘living symbol’ that offers its symbolic meaning as
something to be experienced, rather than and prior to being understood and
interiorised. Cinema literally and metaphorically seeks to construct a ‘water-
based’ environment, a sharable site of experience in which the spectator can
feel fully involved. This result is achieved by the extension of the expressive
properties of water outside the fictional space of the screen. In this sense, the
cinematic screen can be ideally thought of as a surface lapped by the gentle
rippling of the waves, broken by the violence of the storm, flooded by deep
seas, and the film-theatre as a vessel that sails the oceans, a canoe launched on
the rapids, a crowded submarine, or a diving suit. In this environment that is
perceived and experienced as unitary and homogeneous, different waters
merge, permeating and infiltrating the psychological space of the experience,
providing immersive and intense opportunities for involvement. The film has a
‘liquid skin’ that is perceived by the spectator haptically (Marks 2000; 2002). In
the films cited above, water is a stylistic solution capable of stimulating
engagement on a number of levels, from the intensification of visual and aural
perception to the enhancement of synæsthetic perception. The narrative role of
water is functional to the eliciting of emotions and the cognitive process of
attribution of meaning. Throughout this composite process of involvement,
spectators experience a sense of immersion as if they had been placed in the
space of representation.
The point is that water is not only a representational substance that
effectively visualises and symbolises the characters’ psychic condition, but also
a substance in which the film characters’ bodies are immersed or drown
together with their troubles. The fluid properties of water find an expressive
cinematic ‘translation’ in the choice of precise technical and stylistic solutions
with which narrative mainstream contemporary cinema both physically and
psychically engages the spectator in a ‘water-based relationship.’ In the
remainder of this essay, I shall reflect on the connection between the expressive
role of water and its ability to provide cinematic experiences of immersion and
drowning for the spectator. As examples of this, I briefly analyse some
successful fictional American films, in particular A. I. – Artificial Intelligence
(Steven Spielberg, 2001) and Ray (Taylor Hackford, 2004).
96 Adriano D’Aloia

Suspension of Perception

Enwaterment specifically concerns aural and visual activity that is proper to

the film experience. In A. I., a group of children are playing beside a swimming
pool and one of them tries to hurt the ‘mecha’ David with a knife to see if he
can feel physical pain. Once pinched, David feels pain and, overtaken by fear,
clutches at his human ‘stepbrother’ Martin and plunges them both into the
swimming pool. Alerted by Martin’s mother’s scream for help, three men dive
into the pool and free Martin from David’s hold and rescue him from drowning.
Nobody cares about David, who remains motionless at the bottom of the
swimming pool (being a ‘mecha,’ he does not actually breathe). David’s fear and
disorientation are rendered with an effective point-of-view construction. In one
type of shot he is shown staring at the top corner of the swimming pool, with a
stunned expression and with open arms – as if in an unrequited embrace. The
camera slowly approaches him, up to a close-up. The relative shot from the
bottom of the swimming pool shows what David sees: Martin’s unmoving feet
just under the surface and the people trying to resuscitate him through the
surface. These latter figures are distorted by the fluid, irregular movement of the
water. The distortion of the perceptual world through the surface of water
directly represents the disturbance of a psychological perspective and of social
relationships. Mechas and humans inevitably live in different conditions and
they cannot find mutual integration. The water surface acts as a sight-filter that
offers a view into an altered, faraway and hostile world. This ineradicable
separation is expressed through a different point-of-view that marks a difference
in both social and ontological positions. The interesting fact is that David’s
perception is not distorted by a psychic or imaginative alteration, but rather by
a ‘natural’ filter that enwaters his mental and emotional state. [Fig. 3.]
In this sequence, it is not only the optical perspective that is altered. David’s
immersion in the water also distorts aural perception. Human voices coming
from the other side of the water surface are muffled, every movement produces
an echoed noise, two curt splashes break the surface as men dive, bubbles
envelop their bodies and a hollow and ever louder sound fills the scene… The
spectator is aligned to David’s ‘point-of-hear’ and each audible element is
‘made’ of water, with the effect of enhancing the watery nature of his perceptual
experience. A liquid substance, with particular audible properties, lends an
emotional charge to the movement.
Another good example of aural enwaterment is in the intense Normandy
landings scene in Saving Private Ryan (Steven Spielberg, 1998): captain John
Miller falls into the sea and witnesses the dramatic deaths of his men. The
bullets of the German defence force cross the water and clouds of blood pump
 Film in Depth. Water and Immersivity in the Contemporary Film Experience 97

out of stricken Allied soldiers, who are dragged towards the seabed by the
weight of their weapons. As he emerges and reaches the foreshore, the muffled
sound enables spectators to experience the temporary suspension of his
perception and his state of shock. Here too, it is interesting to note that water
continues to affect captain Miller’s perceptions even once his body is out of it.
In fact, the most ‘aquatic’ shot of the A. I. scene described above does not take
place in the swimming pool, but on its edge. Before David and Martin fall into
the pool, their mother turns her face, in response to Martin’s cry for help. [Fig.
4.] Such a movement can be described as ‘fluid,’ a slowed-down and softened
movement. With no manipulation of time, a slow-motion effect is obtained with
a mirrored-parabolic movement of the camera with respect to the movement of
the face and, at the same time, with a typical, cushioned, underwater sound.
The spectator is already immersed in a liquid environment before any
characters’ bodies have plunged into the water: ‘aquatic’ modes of perception
are not always achieved in water.

Feet in the Water

Scenes in which a character’s body is completely surrounded by water help

to illuminate how water can constitute the ‘bodily environment’ of the film
experience, and how the spectators can experience the perceivable qualities of
water. Enwaterment concerns the body and its entire sensoriality. “Diving into
water, for example, or sinking into a bath, we are not only in the realm of the
audiovisual sensorium; all our senses, in fact all of our body, is encapsulated,
surrounded. In that sense, it is a haptic experience, not merely an optical one”
(Holmberg 2003, 132). This sensation arises as a physiological reaction, before
being interpreted in a narrative logic. The spectators’ skin synæsthetically
comes into contact with the water and they feel as if they were fully immersed
in the film. Drowning scenes especially arouse spectators’ sensory-motor
responses, like breathlessness and a sense of choking. Spectators may actually
hold their breath, and even feel as if they are suffocating. This happens in the
swimming pool scene in A. I., as, for example, in one of the final scenes of The
Prestige, in which Alfred Borden tries in vain to rescue Robert Angier’s clone
from drowning; or Truman’s sailing toward freedom in The Truman Show; or
the race against time in Titanic, emotionally intensified by the progressive
rising of the ocean water that floods the steamship’s various rooms and
passageways. It is as if water floods into the film-theatre and progressively
submerges the spectators.
In this regard, a very interesting case is the presence of water in Ray. In this
film, the protagonist’s blindness accentuates spectators’ tactile awareness.
98 Adriano D’Aloia

Moreover, the spectator can share Ray’s mental visions and see the hallucinations
and nightmares caused by his psychological illness and drug addiction. There are
five water-based fragments in the film. The first two depict Ray Charles’s
hallucinations. We first see Ray performing a tactile activity (he is packing his
suitcase, he has been kissed and wipes his lips). Then we hear the noise of water.
Only at this point does a close-up that is both audio and visual allow us to see
and hear Ray’s fingertips exploring the wet clothes, until he encounters a lifeless
foreign body. Ray encounters the human limbs of a child (hands touch hands…).
He is horrified and abruptly withdraws his hands and stumbles backward, and
the spectators physiologically mirror his reaction by starting in fear in their seats.
The synæsthetic strategy of film puts us in Ray’s hands, so that the spectator
experiences his sensory-motor activity. The spectators’ physical body remains
still ‘in front of’ the screen, but they instinctively ‘simulate’ actions and
movements, through a form of physiological sensory-motor mirroring. The second
hallucination is constructed with the same structure, but in this case Ray’s feet
are shown immersed in the water; he bends over the floor, and his hands
encounter George’s dead foot; he leaps up and stumbles backward. [Fig. 5.]
Here water is the most functional solution for expressing the trauma of the
characters. The property of water that best fulfils this function is depth. Both
hallucination sequences are characterised by the contrast between the shallow
water that fills small recipients (the suitcase) or that covers wide surfaces (the
floor) and the profound depth of his troubles. Ray’s hallucinations lie in
shallow water, but they plunge into the deep darkness of his soul. Both his
body, and, synæsthetically, the spectator’s body, are only partially immersed in
the water, but both Ray’s and the spectator’s sensorial, cognitive and emotional
experiential frameworks are entirely immersed in the liquid substance that
infiltrates the past and pushes it to the surface. During his rehabilitation
therapy, after a conversation with the doctor, Ray has other hallucinations in
which he accesses his past by plunging into the tub. He goes into himself in
depth to resolve the sense of guilt that haunts him. As he decides to face the
present (he is addicted to heroin) by facing up to his past, he breaks the water’s
surface. Cinema conveys the psychological progress/regress dynamic with a
deep/surface dynamic. [Figs. 6–7.]

Narrative Flows

Immersion and drowning are often strategically used at particular turning

points of the plot (prologue/epilogue, climax, finale, etc.) and have a crucial
role in narrative development. In What Lies Beneath (Robert Zemeckis, 2000), a
female face appears first as a floating corpse in the dense, murky surface of the
 Film in Depth. Water and Immersivity in the Contemporary Film Experience 99

lake, while later it is mysteriously reflected in the transparent and reflective

(though menacing) water in the bathtub. The submerged crimes committed by
Norman Spencer progressively emerge. His wife Claire uncovers the facts and
then Norman’s attempts on her life by letting her drown in the bathtub after
having paralysed her. Claire fights against her husband, their truck veers off the
bridge and plunges into the lake, where the dead body of Norman’s previous
victim drags him down. The body of his shameful past (the adultery and the
homicide) comes back to life to take revenge. A range of depths and densities
are used with a precise narrative function.
In I, Robot (Alex Proyas, 2004), troubling past events surface in Del Spooner’s
nightmares caused by his survivor’s guilt: after a car accident, he was rescued
by a robot instead of a little girl, who drowns in the water-filled vehicle. This
painful precedent returns various times during the plot and progressively
reveals Spooner’s trouble and the reason for his distrust of robots. Moreover, the
underwater style of the accident scene is used as a graphic style for the opening
credits. This solution both anticipates the rest of the film and, in a way,
imprints it with the substance of water. Also, in the opening credits of The New
World (Terrence Malik, 2005), the network of canals visually evokes the spread of
colonisation. In the first scene, the pleasure with which the bodies of the natives
bathe in clear water is contrasted to the violence with which the huge English
ships sail the seas, announcing the imminent transition from a ‘primitive’ state in
harmony with the natural environment to the ‘civilisation’ that imposes the
domination and the violation of the landscape.
Usually, water offers a solution to signal the passage to another temporal
framework of the events, e.g. a cross-fade before a flashback. In The Truman
Show – another film which is sprinkled with references to water throughout
(the sea that killed his father, the ditch that surrounds his town and his life, the
only way for freedom…) – the flashback to Truman’s college years begins with
eddying water, as when the surface is broken by a stone, signifying a plunge
into the past. This solution imitates the cross-fade and superimposition, typical
aquatic formal solutions that visualise the idea of the merging of space and
time, the soft and liquid transition from one place to another, from one time to
another, from one state of things to another, the echo of the past in the present
and vice-versa.
In the two sequences from Ray analysed above, water is initially kept off-
screen. The passage from reality to the hallucination sequences is, as it were, en
abyme, with no recourse to cross-fade, or perceptual alteration, nor any explicit
signs of narrative cuts or a standard solution for signalling such a change. This
stylistic choice aims to surprise the spectators at the moment when water
appears on screen. In other water-based fragments of the film, we witness the
100 Adriano D’Aloia

emersion of the trauma from his painful past experience. In Ray’s nightmares,
the spectator finally comprehends the cause of his crisis, and once again water
is a very effective stylistic solution for representing this immersion/emersion
dynamic. During the medication treatment, Ray has a nightmare in which the
water becomes blood and the whole world is transformed by solarised
photography and a stormy montage. Blood-coloured water leaks from the tub
onto the camera lens, that is, onto the screen. Waters of the past overflow and
merge with waters of the present, flowing toward the sea and healing old
wounds.

Cutting Surfaces

The surface of the water inevitably refers to the surface of the cinematic
screen. As water appears on the screen, one surface cuts another. Water makes
the screen a fluid and interconnecting threshold between two places, between
here and there, between present and past, conscious and unconscious, waking
and sleeping, life and death. Just as the screen both separates and brings
together the fictional and the actual world, water is also a plane of separation
and connection between two different but not incompatible worlds.
When the water surface meets the screen at right angles (i.e. the frame is split
perpendicularly by the edge of the water), this offers a specific point of view,
e.g. the ‘awash shots’ in Jaws (Steven Spielberg, 1975). By embodying the
perceptual frame of a shark, the camera immediately creates a high level of
suspense that is experienced bodily by the spectator. This stylistic solution is,
in fact, a particular type of split screen, or even a special kind of internal
editing. The splitting acts both at a visual level and at an ontological level,
dividing the world into the human and the non-human (e.g. monsters, animals,
robots and replicants).
The line of the water surface may also intersect the body. In Ray’s nightmares,
only the limbs of his brother George are visible. In the flashback that makes the
spectators aware of Ray’s past trauma, in fact, a close-up shows George’s feet
slipping and his falling into a rinse tub. While he is drowning, the camera shows
his tumbling legs, until they stop, in front of Ray’s shocked gaze. George’s body is
a divided body, split into two worlds by the water in the tub. The surface is a
space of appearing and disappearing, through which something emerges and
something is immersed. Water cuts and sutures, gives life and kills.
In A. I. as well, the surface explicitly splits the body with no actual cut: we
see the legs and the feet of Martin, David’s stepbrother, this time returning from
motionlessness to movement, from death to life. The two last shots of this
sequence are particularly important in order to understand another aspect of
 Film in Depth. Water and Immersivity in the Contemporary Film Experience 101

enwaterment. In the first shot, David sees Martin brought away by his mother
and his father. Their figures, deformed by the movement of water, move away
until they disappear from David’s field of view. David is eventually left alone.
The image of their absence continues to fluctuate. The second shot is a dolly out
that shows David at the bottom of the swimming pool and gradually moves
upward, until he is a small and motionless body in the middle of the water.
Thanks to the immersion in the water of the point-of-view structure that shows
the observing subject and the ‘subjectified’ (altered) observed object, the spectator
experiences both the character’s inner state and his or her own state, his or her
bodily position in the psychological space of the film experience. This point-of-
view dynamic makes the spectator aware of two things: (s)he sees the world from
a new, underwater and enwatered point-of-view, and (s)he sees the place and the
body that (s)he occupied before. As Vivian Sobchack would argue in the wake of
Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s notion of reversibility (Merleau-Ponty 1968, 139), the
spectator is both a seeing and seen subject (Sobchack 1992, 103–104), involved in
both the act of perceiving and the act of perceiving his or her perceiving. More
than mere physiological reflex responses to sensorial stimuli, and far from being a
metaphor of the screen as a Narcissistic mirror, cinema uses watery modes of
expression and encourages watery modes of perception, with the effect of
revealing its inherent reflexive nature.
In brief, enwaterment is a process of constructing and organising water-based
film experience, which aims to merge the tendency of film to express
sensoriality and the spectators’ tendency to feel the sense of film directly with
their senses. The transparency of water evokes the act of seeing, streaming
water suggests the motion of images, and the surface of water replicates the
surface of the screen. Many stylistic and formal modes of representation – e.g.
cross-fade, slow motion, split screen and flashback – are typically ‘aquatic,’
since they involve the visual and aural concretisation of the dynamic properties
of water. The fluid’s movement accelerates or decelerates bodily motion, aquatic
photography makes the characters’ bodies ‘dense’ or ‘diluted,’ while underwater
sounds and ‘awash’ shots produce a liquid film style that calls for a liquid
spectatorship. Haptic perception is enhanced by immersion, physiological
reactions are stimulated by the representation of drowning bodies, and the
characters evolve through narrative points that are imbued with water. This is as
true in the water as out of it: this enwaterment is not merely a way of
experiencing the film in which water is a subject or a setting, but it is also a
general attitude of the spectator, who, at least in the most effective cases,
comprehends and internalises even the symbolic substance of film by
experiencing it in a bodily, immediate, empathetic and reflexive form.
102 Adriano D’Aloia

References

Aristotle. 1993. De Anima, (trans. D. W. Hamlyn). Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Aristotle. 1998. Aristotle’s Metaphysics, (trans. H. Lawson-Tancred). New York:
Penguin.
Bachelard, Gaston. 1983 [1942]. Water and Dreams. An Essay on the Imagination
of Matter. Dallas: Pegasus Foundation.
Bachelard, Gaston. 1994 [1958]. The Poetics of Space. Boston: Beacon Press.
Casetti, Francesco. 2009. The Film Experience. Screen vol. 50 no. 1: 56–66.
Deleuze, Gilles. 1986 [1983]. Cinema I: The Movement Image. London: Athlone.
Dulac, Elodie. 2008. Une seconde nature. Cadrage.
Epstein, Jean. 1974–1975. Écrits sur le cinéma, 2 vols. Paris: Seghers.
Freud, Sigmund. 1913 [1900]. The Interpretation of Dreams, 3rd ed. New York:
Macmillan.
Jung, Carl G. 1959 [1934–1954]. The Collected Works, vol. 9, part 1, The
Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Marks, Laura U. 2000. The Skin of Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment,
and the Senses. Durham: Duke University Press.
Marks, Laura U. 2002. Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1968 [1964]. The Visible and the Invisible, Evanston:
Northwestern University Press.
Plato. 1993. Phaedo, (trans. David Gallop). Oxford,- New York: Oxford University
Press.
Sargeant, Amy. 2005. Celluloid and Water. In I cinque sensi del cinema, eds.
Alice Autelitano, Veronica Innocenti and Valentina Re, 429–433. Udine:
Forum.
Sobchack, Vivian. 1992. The Address of the Eye. A Phenomenology of the Film
Experience. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
 Film in Depth. Water and Immersivity in the Contemporary Film Experience 103

List of Figures

Figure 1. Ménilmontant (Dimitri Kirsanov, 1924); L’Atalante (Jean Vigo, 1934);

Le Tempestaire (Jean Epstein, 1947).

Figure 2. Drowning and immersive scenes in contemporary cinema: Atonement

(Joe Wright, 2007), Minority Report (Steven Spielberg, 2002), Syriana (Stephen
Gaghan, 2005), What Lies Beneath (Robert Zemeckis, 2000), Saving Private
Ryan (Steven Spielberg, 1998), Sphere (Barry Levinson, 1998), The Truman
Show (Peter Weir, 1998), The Hours (Stephen Daldry, 2004), The Sea Inside
(Alejandro Amenábar, 2004).
104 Adriano D’Aloia

Figure 3. A. I. – Artificial Intelligence (Steven Spielberg, 2001).

 Film in Depth. Water and Immersivity in the Contemporary Film Experience 105

Figure 4. Fluid camera movement in A. I. – Artificial Intelligence (Steven

Spielberg, 2001).

Figure 5. Ray (Taylor Hackford, 2004).

Figures 6–7. Hallucinations and nightmares in Ray (Taylor Hackford, 2004).

106 Adriano D’Aloia