Excerpted from

The Rebirth of Suspense: Slowness and Atmosphere in Cinema by Rick Warner. Copyright (c) 2024 Columbia University Press. Used by arrangement with the Publisher. All rights reserved.

Author’s prefatory statement:

This excerpted material follows from earlier chapters in the book in which I sketch out a flexible morphology of suspense, one that includes art cinema, encompasses a wide range of speeds and intensities, and goes beyond simply defining suspense as a genre unto itself. Plot-basedsuspense is, of course, the most familiar variety: we anxiously wait in anticipation of what will happen next in the unfolding narrative. It is worth noting that the very incipience of plot can be a matter of suspense as the spectator waits for the initial signs of plot to fall into place. Character-based suspense, in most definitions and theories of suspense, has to do with a dynamic of psychological identification with characters who find themselves in a potentially dangerous situation. In my account, however, suspense may form around the withholding of character traits and the acute suppression of character emotion and subjectivity, as in the Bressonian tradition of the “model.” What I call structural suspense comes into effect when a film pressures us to notice and track subtle, possibly augural patterns across its emergent structure—a dynamic that can unfold tangentially to the plot as we wonder where the pattern is headed. Perceptual suspense arises when a film deliberately obscures the visual or sonic field and deprives our senses (indeed, “deprivation” is one of the little-recognized etymological meanings of suspense). Atmospheric suspense entails the spatialization of affect through stylistic operations that revel in ambiguity and lend the film’s world an enveloping quality of emanation. In many cases, atmospheric suspense strikes us first, at the level of sensation. I also theorize generic suspense (situations when the status of a given genre is made ambiguous or mercurial, such that we cannot know the degree to which it is operative) and pseudo-suspense (situations when the style and rhetoric of the film lead us to feel uncertainty even as we know, deep down, there is no real threat at hand). These varieties of suspense are not discreet types so much as interacting levels that can and often do coexist.

Far from being final and definitive, the morphology of suspense put forward in chapter 1 requires tweaks and enhancements as this book progresses. There is plenty more to discover about the sensory workings of suspense in slow-paced art films, and this chapter aims to further develop—not simply rehash—my conception of atmospheric suspense through a more pointed account of cinematic ambience. Here again, my chosen examples are unusual suspects for a study of suspense, but we will see that especially potent operations of suspense may arise under conditions of slow- ness and sparseness that cast ambience as a qualitative environmental force, an encircling and felt extension of the landscape. 

Many of the questions voiced in contemporary debates about cinematic slow- ness come down to the preponderance of landscapes onscreen. Is the viewer bored, frustrated, entranced, finely attuned, or asleep when, for example, what seems to be an establishing shot of a foggy mountainside lake in Hou Hsiao-hsien’s The Assassin (2015) lingers to the point of primacy instead of leading to more plot, like a transition? What political, aesthetic, and philosophical possibilities open up (or disappear) with these experiments in duration and reduction? What counts as an event when action wanes to such a degree? What justifies all the waiting we are asked to endure as the film seems to overemphasize the environment? That slow cinema is a landscape art for meditative engagement is routinely noted. Critics have also considered how cinemas of slowness remediate the landscape practices of painting, photography, and gallery installation art for the purpose of encouraging or even forcing the spectator to adopt a patient look more suited to the fine arts.1 What needs further probing, however, are the ways in which landscapes prime and foster low-key suspense. 

From the mazelike steppe in Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (Ceylan, 2011) to the fading forest in Night Moves (Reichardt, 2014), my examples in this book have already shown the vital role of landscape, both visual and auditory. Indeed, suspense in slow cinema heavily depends on landscapes that restructure traditional hierarchies of the frame. If this use of landscape mingles slow art-house cinema with commercial genres, it also crosses with more radically experimental filmmaking. Consider Scott MacDonald’s estimation of the durationally extended landscape films of James Benning. “Each shot in small roads [2011],” Benning’s survey of forty-seven U.S. roads in as many long takes, “creates suspense.” As MacDonald explains, 

At some point in most of the shots a car or truck . . . interrupts the relative quiet of the shot as it passes Benning’s camera. Suspense is created as viewers wonder when a vehicle will pass; and after Benning first surprises viewers (in shot 7) by not including a passing vehicle, the suspense is doubled: will a vehicle pass—and when? Further, as in [Benning’s] 13 Lakes [2004] and Ten Skies [2004], the succession of shots creates a second kind of suspense: what will the next variation in landscape be; how will it add, visually and sonically, to the variety of what has already been seen and heard?2 

This description of Benning’s road movie of sorts embodies a manner of attention that in earlier chapters I have aligned with structural suspense—the tracking of patterned variations that may or may not pertain to a gradually surfacing arc, be it narrative or some other, perhaps purely formal pattern. Benning’s waiting games, like those of Abbas Kiarostami in Five Dedicated to Ozu (2003) and 24 Frames (2017), relish the tension between a static camera and gently dynamic landscapes that draw attention to inconspicuous change (e.g., stirrings of wildlife, fluctuations of weather and light), everywhere stoking curiosity as to where the lines fall between design and happenstance—between sleight of hand and fortuitous capture. 

Kelly Reichardt’s narrative cinema channels the experimental landscape tradition for the purpose of altering attentional habits. In a tribute to the land- scape filmmaker Peter Hutton, the opening shot of First Cow (2019) has us watch from a distance a freight barge drift glacially across the immobile frame. In addition to its spare graphic scheme (the barge visually supplants a sun- streaked row of trees on the riverbank), the shot imposes a tempo of waiting that will soon “swell into quiet suspense” regarding the fates of two men in the Old West, more specifically Oregon County of the 1820s.3 The plot has yet to announce itself, but the barge’s low growl sets an ominous tone. The extended take acclimates us to the moderate rhythms, the environmental specifics, of the film ahead. For Reichardt, as for Hutton and Benning, landscape entails not just an aesthetic vista but also the process of attending to the materiality and history of place as well as to its ambient pulsations. 

The prominence of landscape in slow cinema can be richly examined through recourse to Martin Lefebvre’s accounts of pictorial space, both painterly and cinematic. Lefebvre contends that “setting” and “landscape” are inherently distinct: whereas “setting” relegates a space to the backdrop for more salient narrative actions, “landscape” in its proper sense is autonomous and expressive of itself. For Lefebvre, the possibility of the autonomous landscape “haunts” films even when it is inhibited by setting (that is, by the promoted mindset that sees space as setting). Any narrative film that features landscapes may prompt viewers to oscillate between different ways of regarding space. A “tug of war,” writes Lefebvre, pits our narrative-based attention against a “landscape gaze” that sees the image primarily as “a space of aesthetic spectacle and contemplation.” The landscape, then, is tenuous: “simultaneously like crystal and smoke,” it passes in and out of the viewer’s perception. However, Lefebvre turns to art-house films such as Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up (1966) and Gus Van Sant’s Gerry (2002) to illustrate how temps morts (dead time) may free up the land- scape for sustained contemplation.4 

Lefebvre’s idea of landscape generally comports with arguments I have taken on board in earlier chapters—namely, Jean Epstein’s poetics of suspension and Robert Spadoni’s separation of atmosphere from mere scenery within a push-and-pull relationship to narrative.5 That said, Lefebvre’s framework doesn’t reach far enough in accounting for sensorial matters beyond vision and thus for the tensions that landscapes (especially those of slow cinema) can heighten not only between narrative and spectacle but also between the image seen as a picture plane and the audiovisual field sensed as an ambient surround. But what does ambience mean where cinema is concerned—beyond being a textbook term for sounds (background noise) and illumination (light that already exists at a chosen location)? In earlier parts of this book, when describing films by Reichardt, Bresson, Akerman, and others, I have used the term as a cognate or synonym of atmosphere, but how, more precisely, should we associate the one word with the other? In this chapter, I want to pursue a specific definition of cinematic ambience that relates to suspenseful functions of landscape. 

To argue for a clean-cut distinction between ambience and atmosphere would be unwise, given their etymological intimacy across cultures and disciplines, but one finds in Francophone and Anglophone research a tendency to construe ambience in terms of a “sensory point of view” bounded and influenced by the resonances of a force-filled space.6 For a handful of authors in fields of geography, sociology, and urban planning, ambience defines an organism’s subjection 

to the atmospheric effects of particular environments. In his book Ambient Media (2016), Paul Roquet contends that the word “always implies a more subjective element of mediation at work: some kind of agency behind the production of mood and a focus on the human body attuning to it.” According to Roquet, atmospheres can be ambient insofar as they are “mediated by and for the human senses,” and he invests ambience with a calming function in con- texts of self-care, while being careful to call it a “provisional comfort that nonetheless registers the presence of external threats.”7 If today’s commonplace uses of the term ambient convey relaxation, its scientific and philosophical meanings have swayed over time between “comfort” and “lack of comfort.” 

In his essay “Milieu and Ambiance” (1942), Leo Spitzer traces the word ambience’s evolutions from antiquity to modernity, observing how its “history . . . cannot be separated from that of medium = milieu.” He points out that the Latin prefix amb– originally meant “on both sides (left and right),” hence the shared root of ambience with ambidextrous, ambivalent, and so on. Only later did the prefix indicate a “surround,” similar to circum-. Ancient Greek precursors of the English term ambience, found in Plato, Aristotle, and physicists under their influence, allege a kinship between humans and a cosmic force in the air that affords warmth and security as it swirls “close to the bodily.” For Cicero, the ambient air “is not only that by means of which we see and hear, but that which sees and hears with us.” Spitzer finds in Sextus a comparable idea of “symphysis”: the physical integration of humans with a circulatory, etherlike air that is both a medium for and an agent of perception. In the early-modern era, this harmonic ambience gives way to colder, less assuasive physical and metaphysical conceptions of the world, such as Descartes’s “subtle matter,” wherein the ambient air, instead of caressing bodies, invades them: “into every pore and crevice,” writes Spitzer, “creeps this subtle ether, the same with which the celestial bodies are surrounded.” With Newton’s notion of “ambient medium,” all “overtones of warmth and beneficence” disappear, leaving a “perfunctory phrase, used in the most trivial of references” to air and space. Ambience in its Newtonian form is banal contiguity and elemental diffusion in “an infinite chilly cosmos traversed by innumerable forces of attraction,” a universe no longer casting humans as its measure.8 

Spitzer’s essay has been a touchstone for the atmospheric turn in film and media studies, with theorists invoking it to shore up their reconceptualizations of the term medium beyond its purely technical bases. In a Walter Benjamin– inspired account of the “medium of perception,” Antonio Somaini glosses ambience as the environment of aesthetic engagement. He historically links the term to the media diaphana, “the various diaphanous substances—air, clouds, smoke, water, fluids, glass, crystals—that, with all their different states and their different degrees of transparency and consistency, condition our sensory perception.”9 Many directors tied to slow cinema (e.g., Hou, Akerman, Antonioni, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Lav Diaz, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, and Alexander Sokurov) bring into play media diaphana for hypnotic or subtly perturbing aesthetic effects that implicate cinema itself as a medium embedded within myriad elemental media.10 Giuliana Bruno cites Spitzer’s study to ballast her genealogical history of the “ambience of projection” as it leads up to installations in museum space.11 It must be said that in some of this contemporary scholarly work on ambience, sweeping comparisons across disciplines, histories, languages, cultures, and media leave us with overly general meanings of the word that are applicable to any instance of mediation and any sort of connection therein. In my use, the term ambience has to do with a specific shape of affective encounter and spatial situatedness. James J. Gibson’s account of the “ambient array” in atmospheric perception is instructive here. The term ambience, for Gibson, refers to a situation where the observer is surrounded by sensations from all directions. Not to be confused with radiance, which is ema- nation from a single point, ambience converges upon a point from multiple reverberating sources and surfaces. It closes the circle around a position, rounding off the “spherical” part of atmosphere, yet it issues from a medium of air that extends well beyond the observer’s locus and perspective.12 

Gibson, I should acknowledge, refers mainly to real-world spatial immersion. He claims that a painted or photographic “picture,” no matter how panoramic its reach, fails to be ambient, but he more favorably (if hypothetically) judges film’s capacity to create conditions analogous to ambience.13 I want to explore how cinema indeed renders ambiences in conflict with the merely pictorial. The films I study in this chapter—Lisandro Alonso’s Jauja (2015), Lucrecia Martel’s Zama (2017), and Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin (2013)—all give rise to suspense through tensions between concretely portrayed visual landscapes and the pressure exerted by the more elusive ambient surround— tensions that become increasingly surreal. The offscreen remains a key concern in this chapter, but the generic and thematic contexts are notably different. As two Argentine quasi-Westerns and a British science fiction/horror hybrid, these art-house films diegetically involve a colonial quest (less overt in Under the Skin) that is stalled and drawn off course—a derailment that, in turn, suspense- fully alters the established protocol of identification between viewer and protagonist. In each case, the relationship of ambience to point of view slips into radical doubt and prompts questions around what it means to perceive with and be affected by cinema as medium and apparatus. Although this is not a novel topic for us in this book, the examples ahead plunge into surrealism of an atmospheric kind that requires fresh analysis with respect to our broadened morphology of suspense. Further, these films demand even more focused attention to sound than I have offered so far, including cinema’s incorporation of the ambient music genre.14 

Desert Campaign Without a Compass: Jauja 

Jauja opens with text defining the titular word as “a mythological land of abundance and happiness,” a paradise that invariably leads astray its seekers. The film takes place in Patagonia in the early 1880s amid the last stretch of Argentina’s military “Conquest of the Desert,” which killed, enslaved, and displaced many thousands of Indigenous people, namely the Mapuche and Tehuelche. The plot, however, makes only glancing reference to this context, not effacing it but treating it elliptically. The opening shots of a coastal landscape suggest the aftermath of carnage: with a knife in his bloody hands (shown in Bressonian close-up), a soldier picks at the viscera of an animal he has already eaten, while on the horizon sea lions squirm and bellow as if in protest. A cut to the horizon introduces another soldier, masturbating in a watery ditch, his bare chest decorated with jewelry he has surely stolen from slain natives. As in a sparse landscape of the American West painted by Frederic Remington (e.g., Fight for the Watering Hole, 1903), we have a belated and manifestly partial image of genocidal history in which the “enemies,” already decimated, are inscribed through haunting absence.15 

The shot of the soldier pleasuring himself in a silvery tide pool is the first surreal jolt that nudges the film and its landscapes away from the traditional period epic. The spectator familiar with the region’s terrain and climate will not fail to identify Patagonia as the location, but as the film advances, one might be excused for understanding the landscape—confined to a squarish 4:3 Academy ratio frame with rounded corners and unnaturally intensified colors—as more a metacinematic place that channels classical American Technicolor Westerns. Our protagonist, Captain Dinesen (Viggo Mortensen) is a Danish military engineer who, along with his teenage daughter, Ingeborg (Viilbjørk Malling Agger), has come to Argentina to assist with the settler task of digging irrigation networks. But, here again, details are so scant that the spectator must extrapolate, and the odd presence of a Danish officer in this environment plays fast and loose with history. When Ingeborg elopes with a soldier, stealing her father’s compass, Dinesen sets out to find her, only to be overwhelmed by the desert as he loses his horse and telescope and is left with no choice but to follow a mysterious wolfhound who lures him and the film itself into a quiet vortex of spatiotemporal confusion. 

Critics have made cosmetic, albeit inescapable comparisons to John Ford’s The Searchers (1956) and have more soundly situated Jauja alongside Werner Herzog’s Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972), in which the European colonial gaze is powerfully disrupted by an all-too-physical landscape shown not to be the El Dorado of myth.16 Yet Dinesen is much more restrained than Herzog’s conquistador as played by Klaus Kinski, just as the style of Jauja is less pitched to an epic scale. Contemporary slow cinema—another invited avenue of comparison—has produced its share of films in which the aesthetics of pause and languorous suspension work to undermine colonial logics of linearity, progress, and efficiency, even as an element of Conradian exoticism regarding the rapturous landscape remains (e.g., in Chantal Akerman’s Almayer’s Folly [2011] and Miguel Gomes’s Tabu [2012]). Lisandro Alonso is habitually named in roll calls of slow cinema, although Jauja departs from his earlier output while still relishing long takes of wilderness. The framing, courtesy of the Finnish cinematographer Timo Salminen, known for his many collaborations with Aki Kaurismäki, is generally more stationary and given to tableaux with a dead- pan comic tone. Wordlessness, instead of marking the whole film, alternates with carefully scripted dialogue by the Argentine poet Fabián Casas. Instead of a nonprofessional lead actor, we have in Mortensen an international star who plays against type and contributes ideas as a coauthor. 

Jauja is designed to flummox each of the interpretive lenses it invites. Much of the film’s mystery and the suspenseful ambient feel has been neglected by readings that enlist explanatory frameworks of genre, transnational cinema, authorship, and postcolonialism without factoring in atmosphere because it is deemed irrelevant. Some have faulted Jauja for carelessly handling the memory of colonial violence; others have converted the film into a more plainspoken critique of empire (including Hollywood’s global dominance) than it is.17 Both positions tend to ignore the soundtrack. Take an odd moment that has gone unmentioned in every assessment of the film I have encountered. As Dinesen embarks on his quest to find Ingeborg, riding his horse into the back- ground of an extended take at dawn, an echoic ping briefly cuts through the ambient sonic blend of wind, ocean, horse trots, and campfire, inciting a peculiar kind of suspense. As viewers, prone to trace sounds to their source, we survey the scene for the cause of this faint sonic disturbance. Is it a jingling sword? An insect’s chirp? Spurs on Dinesen’s or someone else’s boots? Did we in fact hear this noise? Moments later, as the same long take pans over to a French administrator kneeling by the fire, this ping returns, confirming we heard it the first time and triggering a cut. 

What is this carefully expressed sound doing in the film? Is it diegetic and therefore able to be heard by the characters? What creates it? Is it musical score, an extremely discreet cue that anticipates weighty events ahead? Suspense of a perceptual and atmospheric kind ramps up these questions over and against the plot-based suspense regarding the fates of Ingeborg and Dinesen and the ominous references to a defected military commander, Zuluaga, rumored to be hiding in the desert with Indigenous rebels. Untethered to the visual incident, this noise is fundamentally unlocatable, what Timothy Morton would call “Aeolian”—an indefinite “of the wind” sonority that is neither quite within nor quite without the world of the fiction.18 The multichannel Dolby mix has it emerge evenly across the frontal loudspeakers and quickly reverb in the side 

and rear ones: it encircles us but lacks both a clear emanation point and a synchronization point with the image, unless we count the precise moment when Dinesen’s dark figure graphically reaches the horizon. This ambient event softly destabilizes the onscreen world for us by evoking a beyond that is not adjacent to what the frame displays.19 

This enigmatic ping is part of a host of formal operations that engender a slowly phased rupture in the film’s spatiotemporal fabric. If the tableau style of composition initially seems to squeeze all the important information into the compact 4:3 frame, evoking order and mastery in step with the logic of colonial territorial conquest, we are increasingly invited to reflect on the folly of this view of space as it comes up against manifold tensions with an ambient field that cannot be neatly contained or navigated. Suspense mounts because of the felt conflict between the focus of a given shot and suggestions of a less scrutable environment beyond its margins. “Suspense exacerbates geography” by infusing the framed event with “ ‘background radiation’ from all directions,” writes Raymond Durgnat. Although Durgnat is referring to Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) and its stoking of uncertainty by means of the offscreen, this remark applies no less to Jauja’s ambient pressures and spatially disruptive forms.20 

The 4:3 aspect ratio, which other slow films of the decade use with equal cleverness (e.g., Reichardt’s Meek’s Cutoff [2010], Pawel Pawlikowski’s Ida [2013], Pedro Costa’s Horse Money [2014], Hou’s The Assassin, and Paul Schrader’s First Reformed [2017]), is fundamental to the suspenseful exacerbation of geography throughout Jauja. Alonso has stated that he chose this aspect ratio to neutralize his star actor’s association with heroic sword-swinging action and horse- manship.21 The format also provokes anxious awareness of borders and limits— of the partiality of each view. From the outset, as Ingeborg looks out of frame and scans the desert, warmly professing that it “fills” her, there is an inborn strain between the boxy image and the vastness of the Patagonian surround.22 Coupling surplus duration with maximum depth of field, Alonso’s long takes often approach their end with the exits of characters on opposite planes of the shot, which divides the spectator’s attention between the outer edges of the foreground and the background as the camera then holds on a vacated landscape. As Chelsea Birks observes, Jauja constructs space “backward” in relation to the audience. As opposed to the lateral staging in widescreen Westerns, in Jauja “actions tend to occur from back to front [and vice versa].”23 Time and again we are made to wait as Dinesen trudges, shrinkingly, from the foreground toward a horizon behind which he disappears. More than once, he dips into a void in the middle planar range of the shot, as if swallowed by the landscape, never resurfacing before the cut finally arrives. These zones of disappearance within the frame are not quite spatially and temporally of a piece with the rest of the scene: they don’t seem contiguous to the visual field in the sense that, say, the shark in Jaws (Spielberg, 1975) is implied to be just under the water’s surface when it momentarily disappears. Rather, Dinesen’s vanishings open onto “a more radical Elsewhere, outside homogenous time and space,” as Gilles Deleuze defines the offscreen in its modernist guise.24 Even when Dinesen’s movements on foot or horseback continue between shots with little to no lag, something feels off. Coming and going seem indistinguishable, uncannily mirrored (fig. 3.1). 

Figure 3.1 Jauja: Reduced to a dark blip on the horizon, Dinesen’s movement is unclear. Is he drawing closer or moving farther away? 

The frames that linger on nothing but the weathered terrain break with Dinesen’s point of view—a disruption that further comes across through games with sound perspective (he sings a nationalistic song that becomes louder the more he fades into the background) and through camera positions that are bluntly removed from his spyglass views of climactic action, such as a hilltop killing of a soldier at the hands of Zuluaga and a Mapuche rebel, an event we can barely make out because of its drastic scalar reduction. Though Dinesen manages to detect Ingeborg’s trail, he is outpaced by a largely unseen Indigenous presence who also searches for the Danish young woman and more intimately knows the landscape. In a suspenseful scene where Dinesen finds Inge- borg’s boyfriend left for dead (by Zuluaga, who seems to have kidnapped Ingeborg), the arm of a Mapuche insurgent reaches into the frame to steal Dinesen’s rifle and hat. In a dryly comic bit, this same character then seizes Dinesen’s horse offscreen and is already riding into the distance by the time our chivalrous protagonist notices. 

The convolution of linear, rational space–time that follows from this play with perspective in cramped frames is announced by the wolfhound’s abrupt emergence in the mountains, sitting within an improbable pool of water (fig. 3.2) and thus evoking Tarkovsky’s German Shepherd in Stalker (1979), a film whose folded, mercurial landscapes Jauja has on its mind. Dinesen, while trying ineffectually to give the dog commands, trails the animal, hoping to be taken to Ingeborg, and, indeed, he discovers on a rock a wooden toy soldier that she found earlier in the film, but at the same time the desert seems increasingly indifferent to his goal, as if the stonier topography and the colder, mistier cli- mate no longer ground the original basis of the plot. Like in a fairy tale or, bet- ter, a fairy tale “for adults,” as André Breton would have it,25 the wolfhound escorts Dinesen to a cave and a water spring over which an elderly woman pre- sides, a dressed-in-black, witchlike character (Ghita Nørby) whose dialogue in Danish confuses grammatical registers and morphs into riddles (fig. 3.2). Defined by liminality, she enters the film’s world as a disincarnated voice anchored only by Dinesen’s gaze out of frame. The countershot confirming her physical presence is suspensefully delayed, so that Dinesen at first seems to be talking to himself. 

More uncanny business ensues when they enter the cave (blatantly a soundstage, the dark and sonorous conditions of which parallel those of the film theater). Conversation, with pronoun slippage, insinuates that this woman is somehow an aged and transformed version of Ingeborg, a feeling reinforced by the exchange of objects: she returns the stolen compass, and he returns to her the toy soldier, which brings a laugh of recognition. Chillingly, she says that all families are in time engulfed by the desert, “wiped off the face of the earth. I think it’s for the best.” The shot/countershot alternations, with long lags on either side of the cut, frame the woman and Dinesen against inky, abstract dark- ness. As they finish their dialogue, she vanishes into the offscreen again, while his back is turned. He restarts his quest under an imminent storm, yet her voice continues to haunt the landscape—a voice he hears, too, but cannot place. It comes from nowhere and everywhere at once. “What makes a life function and move forward?” the voice asks twice, bringing him to his knees in submission. “I don’t know,” he says before making his final, deathly disappearance into a furrow in the landscape near the horizon in another distantly offered long take. 

But there is still more surrealist mischief. The film then cuts, with an ambient sound dissolve, to a chateau in the modern-day Danish countryside, where the same teenage actress who plays Ingeborg wakes from a night’s sleep, leading us to wonder whether this character has dreamed the Patagonian affair. Has she stirred from or passed into a dream? The surreal oneiric mood is augmented by the return of objects and motifs from the Argentine diegesis: the toy soldier and the girl’s pet wolfhounds, one of whom has a “hot spot” on his side—a region he has scratched raw because of a nervous uncertainty he can’t resolve. At least, this is how a houndsman explains the spot to the girl, alluding to her irresponsible absence. The film comes to an open end as the girl loses track of this dog in the forest and tosses the soldier figurine (to which the dog has just led her) into a pond. The rippling water dissolves back into the Patagonian shot that opened the film: sea lions on a horizon, stones blanketed with algae that chromatically matches the Danish green forest, but no humans in sight this time. This ending implies a loop, as if she returns the figurine, through the portal-like pond, to the Patagonian landscape where her double, Ingeborg, found it earlier. At the very least, this use of water imagery ties the Danish pond back to the cave spring and the irrigation ditch under Dinesen’s supervision, suggesting forgotten links between modern European wealth and colonial plunder. 

Figure 3.2 Jauja: In the desert, the wolfhound escorts Dinesen to a woman in a cave. 

Critics have understandably taken up Jauja’s oneiric surrealism through comparisons to films by Raúl Ruiz (the set-in-Patagonia but filmed-in-Rotterdam On Top of the Whale [1982], with its mystical landscapes and send- up of colonialism), Luis Buñuel (barbed critiques of the ruling class in increasingly off-the-wall narratives offered up with matter-of-factness),26 David Lynch (bifurcated worlds and identities beset with strange ambient powers), and Apichatpong (doublings and wilderness landscapes tinged with folkloric supernatural influences). Much of surrealist cinema, from the entomologist quirks of Buñuel and the scientific documentaries of Jean Painléve onward, playfully entangles humans with other species, as pertains to the wolfhounds and horses of Jauja. The film’s mockery of assumed rational order and function is paradigmatic surrealist humor. And the linkage of the different diegeses through recurrent red accents (the wooden soldier, Dinesen’s uniform, the hot spot on the wolfhound, and the blood-smeared soldier’s hands in the first shot) exhibits a Nicolas Roeg–like logic of surreal iteration across subtle vertigoes of time and space. Tarkovsky’s Stalker is part of this intertextual mix as well in that its German Shepherd is a material link between the numinous landscape of the Zone and the protagonist’s return to his wearisome reality. Beyond being an appeal to our associative attention, Alonso’s dog bears an arcane connection to the viewer through relays of red. Is there not a connection between the wolfhound’s disquiet and that of the viewer, who is likewise left to confront a feeling of mystery that does not incline toward resolution? 

To be sure, a resilient suspense grows out of the surrealism afoot in Jauja, suspense that is as much about the atmosphere as it is about hidden meanings. Surrealism, as regards the task of the spectator, is too frequently construed as parsing symbolism, deciphering codes. Let us not forget Buñuel’s curt advice to the audience of his and Salvador Dalí’s Un chien andalou (1929): 

“NOTHING, in the film, SYMBOLIZES ANYTHING.”27 Putting aside what the toy soldier in Jauja means or whose dream the film might be, let us con- sider the ambient factors that actualize a key operation in surrealist cinema: what Breton, Jacques Brunius, and Ado Kyrou in their own ways call “crossing the bridge”—a phrase that, as Adam Lowenstein reminds us, Breton derives from an intertitle in F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922) as the naive estates clerk enters an altered landscape: “When he had crossed the bridge the phantoms came to meet him.”28 

For Brunius, “crossing the bridge” refers to cinema’s ability to objectify a mental process while also in the same moment converting external reality into subjective interiority.29 For Kyrou, the phrase describes an orientation toward “surreality” as it exists in the earthly world, far from mere fantasy.30 These writers apply the bridge metaphor to surrealist cinema’s traversals of the gaps between binary oppositions: object versus subject, rational versus irrational, dream versus waking, intention versus accident, and so on. I am interested in the spatial and affective resonances of this process. In my sense, “crossing the bridge” has to do with an aesthetic transition that starts within a habituated, concretely established register of reality and then slides—piecemeal—into otherworldly impressions, but without sacrificing the foothold on the real, which is transformed under a different manner of perceiving. This phased, gradated “crossing” effect, which may span multiple scenes, slowly brings on a shockless shudder (close to how I conceptualize eeriness in chapter 5) and occasions a radical modulation of the film’s world. Consider the atmospheric disruptions of the neorealist veneer of Buñuel’s Los olvidados (1950) or the influx of gradually more apocalyptic weather in Peter Weir’s The Last Wave (1977).31 “Crossing the bridge,” in this sense, newly calibrates all levels of suspense as it changes the viewer’s, and perhaps an attendant character’s, orientation to and grasp on the world. 

Although Jauja’s desert cave warps the feel and the very status of the onscreen world, it comes into presence through a careful series of ambient shifts that soften its surprise (and there is delight in watching the film carry off this high- risk turnabout as it brazenly courts absurdity).32 The suspense of not knowing our bearings is viscerally enhanced and extended by the vaporous environment, the closing in of a thunderstorm, the intensified winds with hints of microphone rumble, and the hypnotic, Tarkovskian dripping of water in the cave. When Dinesen exits the cave, the ambient charge of the world has a surplus value that doesn’t fully conform to what the screen depicts. The vegetation is barely mussed by the stronger aeolian surges we hear. Despite this incongruity, it pays to recall that surrealist cinema, even when “crossing the bridge,” tends to preserve an ontological rapport with physical reality (the word surrealism includes realism). There remains in Jauja a tangible commitment to the indexical properties of the image and to what André Bazin calls the “integrity” of the profilmic event.33 

Yet there is also an impulse to bend these indexical traces toward ambient overflowings of the frame that involve an uncanny, less cooperative sound field. The sur-realism astir in Jauja’s landscapes is less the antithesis of a realist approach than its aberrant companion. 

As the pomp of the colonial endeavor finds itself reduced to existential dust in the desert, the surrealist crossing, in turn, culminates the transition in Jauja’s presentational system from a geographical conception of space (as rationally navigable and compliant with racist attitudes of territorial requisition) toward an ambient sense of landscape as an uncontrollable and nebulous surround. Rather than being the ground against which more important action occurs, ambience becomes an environing force that ungrounds the action and asserts a less tractable, less chiefly visual landscape. Ceasing to be a basis for identification, Dinesen is dissolved into the ambience that encroachingly claims the viewer as its midpoint. 

Rick Warner

1. See Catherine Fowler, “Obscurity and Stillness: Potentiality in the Moving Image,” Art Journal 72, no. 1 (2013): 64–79; Fowler, “Slow Looking: Confronting Moving Images with Georges Didi-Huberman,” in Indefinite Visions: Cinema and the Attractions of Uncertainty, ed. Martine Beugnet (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017), 241–54. 
2. Scott MacDonald, “Surveying JamesBenning,”in James Benning’s Environments: Politics, Ecology, Duration, ed. Nikolaj Lübecker and Daniele Rugo (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018), 28. 
3. Courtney Duckworth, “Got Milk,” Artforum, March 5, 2020, https://www.artforum.com/film/courtney-duckworth-on-kelly-reichardt-s-first-cow-2019–82356. 
4. Martin Lefebvre, “Between Setting and Landscape in Cinema,” in Landscape and Film, ed. Martin Lefebvre (New York: Routledge, 2006), 28–29, 30, 38–44. For Lefebvre’s more recent discussion of Gerry (2002), see Lefebvre, “On Landscape in Narrative Cin- ema,” Canadian Journal of Film Studies 20, no. 1 (Spring 2011): 65–66. 
5. Christophe Wall-Romana, Jean Epstein: Corporeal Cinema and Film Philosophy (Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press, 2013), 54–55; Robert Spadoni, “Horror Film Atmosphere as Anti-narrative (and Vice Versa),” in Merchants of Menace: The Business of Horror Cinema, ed. Richard Nowell (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 109–28. 
6. Jean-Paul Thibaud, “A Brief Archaeology of the Notion of Ambience,” Unlikely 6 (2020), https://unlikely.net.au/issue-06/notion-of-ambiance. In philosophical accounts, the terms ambience and atmosphere are sometimes taken to be interchangeable and sometimes not, and the variances may depend on differences in language. The German thinker Gernot Böhme predominantly uses atmosphere (Atmosphäre) but invokes ambience (Ambiente) to emphasize that in discussing atmosphere we are talking not just about space but also about qualitative presences. Böhme, “Atmosphere as an Aesthetic Concept,” in The Aesthetics of Atmospheres, ed. Jean-Paul Thibaud (New York: Routledge, 2017), 25–26. 
7. Paul Roquet, Ambient Media: Japanese Atmospheres of Self (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016), 3–5, 18. Where Roquet casts “ambient” as a vector of “subjectivation,” my account argues otherwise. Slow atmospheric suspense, in our three case studies in this chapter, partakes of a bewildering process of desubjectivation. 
8. Leo Spitzer, “Milieu and Ambiance: An Essay in Historical Semantics,” Philosophy and Phenomenology 3, no. 1 (September 1942): 2, 13 n. 3, 9–10, 4 (emphasis added), 34–35, 41. 
9. Antonio Somaini, “Walter Benjamin’s Media Theory: The Medium and the Apparat,” Grey Room 62 (Winter 2016): 8. In this essay, Somaini also makes the key point about early German-language film theorists such as Béla Balázs never using the word Medium in reference to “the film medium” so much as to define the “medium of per- ception” (27). See also Somaini, “The Atmospheric Screen: Turner, Hazlitt, Ruskin,” in Screen Genealogies: From Optical Device to Environmental Medium, ed. Craig Buckley, Rüdiger Campe, and Francesco Casetti (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2019), 159–86, esp. 167–68, where Somaini traces the conception of media diaphana back to Aristotle’s De anima (c. 350 BCE). 
10. See my discussion of Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s work in chapter 5 for a lightly gothic example of this imbrication of elemental media involving cinema. 
11. Giuliana Bruno, Atmospheres of Projection: Environmentality in Art and Screen Media (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022), 22–27. 
12. James J. Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (1986; reprint, New York: Psychology Press, 2015), 41, 44–46, 58. Gibson prioritizes vision in this study, but his concept of ambience also includes listening to sonic vibrations in the surrounding air (13). 
13. Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, 255–89. 
14. For an instructive overview, both historical and theoretical, of the sonic aspects of atmosphere and the transition “from a vococentric to a noise-centric” sound experience in contemporary cinema, see Steffen Hven, Enacting the Worlds of Cinema (New York: Oxford University Press, 2022), 121–43, 133. 
15. On Remington’s evocations of carnage, see Maurizia Natali, “The Course of the Empire: Sublime Landscapes in the American Cinema,” in Landscape and Film, ed. Lefebvre, 103. 
16. Adrian Martin observes how Jauja (2015), as a transition from Alonso’s earlier films, “enters into an extremely rich, flowing, unforced dialogue with certain key forms and traditions in cinema history.” Martin, “Jauja,” Sight & Sound, May 2015, 66. Martin mentions Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Oedipus Rex (1967), Valeria Sarmiento’s Our Marriage (1984), David Lynch’s Inland Empire (2006), Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s work, and Miguel Gomes’s Tabu (2012) as films that compare to Jauja. Alonso lists Herzog’s Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972) and Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979) among his ten favorite films submitted to Sight & Sound in 2012, https:// www2.bfi.org.uk/films-tv-people/sightandsoundpoll2012/voter/1035. Alonso also includes on the list canonical slow films such as Tsai Ming-liang’s The River (1997) and Carlos Reygadas’s Silent Light (2007). It is clear that Alonso self-consciously approaches slow cinema as a field of artistic experimentation within an international community of kindred artists. 
17. See, for example, Jenny Barrett, “(Not) John Wayne and (Not) the US-AmericanWest,” in Transnationalism and Imperialism: Endurance of the Global Western Film, ed. Hervé Mayer and David Roche (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2022), 214–29. 
18. Timothy Morton, Ecology Without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics (Cam- bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 41–43. For Morton, “the Aeolian provokes anxiety, because built into it is a hesitation between an obscure source and no source at all” (43). Furthermore, “a disembodied Aeolian sound emanates ‘from the background’ but appears ‘in the foreground.’ With Aeolian events, we have a paradoxical situation in which background and foreground have collapsed in one sense, but persist in another sense. . . . The Aeolian attempts to undo the difference between a perceptual event upon which we can focus, and one that appears to surround us and which cannot be directly brought ‘in front of’ the sense organs without losing its environing properties” (47). 
19. The suspenseful effects of ambient sound that I examine in this chapter and throughout this book more generally attest to what Danijela Kulezic-Wilson has called the “musicalization” of sound design—practices that are more aesthetic than strictly representational as they render hazy the perceptible differences among score, effects, and noise. See Kulezic-Wilson, Sound Design Is the New Score: Theory, Aesthetics, and Erotics of the Integrated Soundtrack (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020). Of particular relevance to my study is Kulezic-Wilson’s discussion of “sensuous” aesthetic design and experience in slow-cinematic experiments by Gus Van Sant (99–105), Béla Tarr (105–10), and Hou Hsiao-hsien (117–23). 
20. Raymond Durgnat, A Long Hard Look at “Psycho” (London: British Film Institute, 2002), 169.  
21. Nicolas Rapold, “Interview: Lisandro Alonso,” Film Comment, March 25, 2015, https:// www.filmcomment.com/blog/interview-lisandro-alonso-jauja/. 
22. John Belton speaks to the “anxiety” that attends the 4:3 frame given its palpable restrictedness as a field of action flanked by absences, whereas the widescreen format slows and suppresses the viewer’s awareness of the frame’s limitations. Belton, Wide- screen Cinema (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 196–97. 
23. Chelsea Birks, “Objectivity, Speculative Realism, and the Cinematic Apparatus,”Cinema Journal 57, no. 4 (Summer 2018): 23. 
24. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image (French orig. 1983), trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 17. 
25. André Breton, “Manifesto of Surrealism” (French orig. 1924), in Manifestoes of Surrealism, trans. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1972), 16. 
26. Also relevant to Jauja and its surrealism is Buñuel’s devilish, self-critical dissection of the colonial gaze in his pseudo-travelogue essay film Land Without Bread (1933).
27. Luis Buñuel, “Notes on the Making of Un chien andalou,”trans. Grace L. McCann Morley (trans. orig. pub. 1947), in Art in Cinema: Documents Toward a History of the Film Society, ed. Scott MacDonald (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006), 102. Buñuel goes even further to claim that the images in Un chien andalou (1929) “are as mysterious and inexplicable to the two collaborators [Buñuel and Dalí] as to the spec- tator” (102). This admonition to be wary of symbolic interpretation usefully applies to much of cinematic surrealism. Not unlike David Lynch and Apichatpong Weerasethakul, the Alonso of Jauja is a custodian of the insoluble who regards the film medium as a site for experimentation beyond the director’s knowledge, too. As he states in an interview, “The film breaks itself a little bit and starts to have distortions in time, space, and reality. I’m not sure what it is, but I don’t really want to know. Not yet.” Rapold, “Interview: Lisandro Alonso.” 
28. Adam Lowenstein, Dreaming of Cinema: Spectatorship, Surrealism, and the Age of Digital Media (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), 181–82. See also Jacques Brunius, “Crossing the Bridge,” and Ado Kyrou, “The Fantastic—the Marvelous,” in The Shadow and Its Shadow: Surrealist Writings on the Cinema, 3rd ed., ed. and trans. Paul Hammond (San Francisco: City Lights, 2000), 99–102, 158–60. 
29. Brunius, “Crossing the Bridge,” 101–2. This piece is taken from Brunius’s book En marge du cinéma français (Paris: Arcanes, 1954). 
30. Kyrou, “The Fantastic—the Marvelous,” 158–60. This chapter is excerpted from Kyrou’s book Le surréalisme au cinéma (Paris: Éditions le Terrain Vague, 1963). 
31. One could find countless other examples of such atmospheric “bridge crossing” in surrealist cinema in what Adrian Martin has called its “eternal” phase—that is, its global continuation well beyond its French interwar heyday. See Martin, “The Artificial Night: Surrealism and Cinema,” in Surrealism: Revolution by Night (Canberra: National Gallery of Australia, 1993), 190–95. The not exactly adversarial relationship between neorealism and surrealism war- rants further attention in the context of slow-cinematic suspense than I can offer here. An important text in this regard is Luis Buñuel’s essay “The Cinema, Instrument of Poetry” (1958), which Buñuel wrote following the success of his film Los olvidados (1950). He takes Italian neorealism to task for excluding “mystery and the fantastic” but also praises the scenarist and theorist Cesare Zavattini for “raising the anodyne act to the level of a dramatic category.” Buñuel points to the celebrated sequence in Umberto D. (1952), scripted by Zavattini and directed by Vittorio de Sica, in which the pregnant maid awakes in the middle of the night and performs a series of wordless gestures in the kitchen—a scene that many discussions of slow, contemplative cinema have cited as a key prototypical sequence. “Despite the triviality of these situations,” writes Buñuel, “the action is followed with interest and even with suspense.” Buñuel, “The Cinema, Instrument of Poetry” (1958), in The Shadow and Its Shadow, ed. and trans. Hammond, 115, emphasis added. 
32. The role of suspense within surrealist cinema more generally calls out for further discussion. Across several examples, much of the suspense unfolds as a balancing act between registers of expression in tension with one another. Of use here is the concept of “aesthetic suspense” that V. F. Perkins develops in his little-discussed analysis of Nicholas Ray’s Western melodrama Johnny Guitar (1954). Perkins uses the phrase aesthetic suspense in reference to the viewer’s supple appreciation for stylistic feats that teeter on the cusp of absurdity. Perkins, “Johnny Guitar,” in The Movie Book of the Western, ed. Ian Cameron and Douglas Pye (London: Studio Vista, 1996), 221–28. “Aesthetic suspense,” then, refers not simply to the aesthetic impact of suspense but instead to a more specialized critical and spectatorial consciousness of the risky aesthetic strategy of the film as it develops, leaving us to wonder where it is headed and whether the patterned arc of development will find an elegant and resonant way to complete itself despite the air of ridiculousness (this is close in spirit to what I theorize as “structural suspense” in my suspense morphology). Alex Clayton writes in his helpful expansion on Perkins’s concept, “Aesthetic suspense results from the perception that we are only a whisker away from risibility.” Turning to Gus Van Sant’s Elephant (2003), Clayton finds that aesthetic suspense stems from how the slow film tensely “walks the line between aestheticism and naturalism, mystification and cliché, subjective alignment and autonomy of viewpoint.” Clayton, “V. F. Perkins: Aesthetic Suspense,” in Thinking in the Dark: Cinema, Theory, Practice, ed. Murray Pomerance and R. Barton Palmer (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2016), 214. Aesthetic suspense of this sort builds up around Jauja’s eleventh-hour sur- realism and applies to what I have termed, drawing on Jacques Brunius, “crossing the bridge.” 
33. André Bazin, What Is Cinema?, trans. Timothy Barnard (Montreal: Caboose, 2009), 241.