For many critics and theorists, viewing a film is constructed, according to a deeply imbedded Western bias that stretches back to Plato, as something which essentially engages the mind rather than the body. This view which privileges mind over body attempts to separate the intellectual and the emotional from the physical. In contrast to this, I experience the process of viewing a film as something far more holistic. Something conditioned by environment, one’s mood, the presence of other people, etc. That is, I experience the process of viewing a film as something which is every bit as physical as it is mental. To take just one of these factors, the presence or absence of people has complexified my viewing experience on many occasions and has contributed to the ways in which a film’s meanings where generated, on both superficial and profound levels.

For example, a few months ago on a flight to Vienna I was sitting next to two German girls, both nurses, who were returning home after a holiday in Australia. During the flight I was flicking through the movie channels and stopped on Swimming Pool (François Ozon, 2003). I’m the sort of person who’ll sit through any film, and never get offended by the material, and never feel embarrassed about watching it. But sitting there watching almost-naked 24-year old French actress Ludivine Sagnier glistening with water after a dip in the pool while one of the German nurses glanced in my direction, I felt like a real pervert and quickly turned the film off. This experience which caused me to construe some scenes in the film as a species of pornography rather than as a species of aestheticized entertainment, may only have scratched the surface of the way in which I viewed this film and responded to its meanings, but in other instances the surrounding physical conditions have cut far more deeply into my viewing experience.

One particular viewing environment I frequently encounter is an empty, or near-empty, cinema. Last Friday, around midday, I went to see Zhang Yimou’s martial arts film Hero (2002, in Australia 2004). I walked into the cinema and saw that it was entirely empty. Onscreen were the rolling end credits of the film that had previously played. Watching the dying embers of this film play to no-one, and looking at the empty seats around me, I realized what lonely places commercial multiplexes are during a weekday matinee. So here I was, waiting for yet another film to start, wondering what its director might think if he could see me here, sitting alone, the only person in a whole cinema, watching his movie. Unlike watching such a film alone at home where I wouldn’t notice the absence of others, in a cinema the very emptiness of the seats asserts itself. Their emptiness speaks of the people who aren’t there. I glanced at my ticket stub and put it in my wallet. There I found a whole pile of stubs that triggered an avalanche of memories of misspent afternoons and mornings at the movies, most of which played for one or two or three people at most. The film starred Jet Li as a swordsman who holds court with the Emperor of China and recalls how he defeated three dangerous and wanted criminals. Li’s character was, in the vein of countless existentialist-infused films from both the East and the West, a silent nameless sword-for-hire. Well, almost. He is nameless but, with a subtle sense of irony, he has adopted ‘Nameless’ as his actual name. This places him as a direct heir to characters such as Clint Eastwood’s ‘the man with no name’, but also positions him as distinct from these characters. By naming Li’s character ‘Nameless’, Zhang Yimou turns him into someone who is not simply nameless and wandering, but whose very identity is that of a nameless wanderer, that is, it turns him into someone whose identity is constituted by their anonymity. The signifier ‘Nameless’ becomes this character’s socially accepted and adopted moniker. While thinking about the way in which Li’s character personified namelessness, and I guess to some extent loneliness, I became acutely aware of the empty cinema in which I sat, and of how this particular environment was effecting the way I viewed Hero. It would be too easy to reduce this effect to an analogue between my sitting all alone in the cinema, and Nameless all alone, an orphan who blows across the Earth like wind or dust. It’s true that I was interested in his character. But sitting there, occasionally gazing into the empty seats, occasionally gazing into the haze of this mysterious nameless character, I realized that such a character works precisely because he is not alone. True, in the closed fictional space of the narrative he is alone -- but in the space created by the intersection of the film and the cinema, he isn’t alone: the viewer completes him. I don’t just mean that the viewers’ sympathies lie with Nameless, nor merely that they follow his every move attentively. I mean that a character who is presented as mysterious, whose feelings, thoughts and desires are opaque, provides a kind of vessel which each and every member of the audience can fill with his or her own feelings, thoughts and desires. Thus, the process of watching a character such as Nameless involves the audience in a process of looking into themselves. Instead of being presented with, and asked to enter into, a fictional character’s psychological perspective, they’re asked to enter into their own. After the film, I stayed to the end of the credits. And longer. I thought about what it would be like to watch this film in a cinema crammed and crowded with people. Would I have been as attuned to the way in which I was filling Nameless with my own thoughts, feelings and desires? The curtains had closed and I was staring blankly at nothing, thinking that perhaps a small hint of Nameless was still somewhere in the room. If there was such a hint floating about, I was the only person there to carry it out.