Atlas of Emotion has been a cornerstone of Bruno’s work, and informs her more recent books on more complicated topics such as the materiality of surfaces and the art of projection as an environment. But her drive to build connections across various domains of human experience remains intact. As she says in an interview she gave in 2023:
Openness and attunement to an environment engage a form of receptivity that I think is particularly important today, as we tend to make borders rather than cross boundaries. Borders are walls; boundaries are membranes. If we recognize projection and atmosphere as such, as environmental mediums of transmission between inside and outside — spaces of transfer between the environment, technical objects, and spectators — we can pursue forms of attunement and relationality that can, in turn, transform the environment in which we live. …To think of projection creatively and to use projection as a creative artistic medium also means approaching territories of otherness not to appropriate them, but to instead attune yourself to an understanding of diversity, and engage it in dialogue. To me, that’s the sense in which notions of projection, atmosphere, and interrelationality are important to affirm in today’s culture. [Significação, São Paulo, v. 50 p. 1-31 2023 |10 ]
Despite its length, Atlas is a very readable text; it’s like taking a series of excursions into different domains. When it was published, reviewers praised its scope and originality, its deep research into the histories of western art and technology, and its All this is true of course, but for me what stood out most is Bruno’s linkage of the psychic with the geographic, her highlighting of internal spaces vis-a-vis the external environs we traverse. This, to my mind, is the greatest contribution of the book and its ability to gently but forcefully push against the boundaries of academic protocols of writing. She chooses “mental meandering” as an organizational schema, and the journey as reality as well as metaphor. Indeed, so wide-ranging is her embrace of the concept of movement that it can paradoxically get lost in all the turns of the imagination that she captures. Her fascination with language as replete with metaphors of travel makes for this cozy interaction. And perhaps it is precisely the separation of thought from feeling that she is urging us to let go. “When knowledge is set in motion, one senses a critical sympathy shared with a body of texts and with human subjects. This sympathy may lead to absorption and drive knowledge on its path, sculpting the itinerary of its multiple positioning” (p. 412). For instance, situatedness comes from “a shift in viewpoint” (p. 410) rather than being held in place.
The book has six sections, entitled Architecture, Travel, Geography, Art of Mapping, Design, and House. Under each of these topics, Bruno seeks the intimate and emotional dimensions of experience, emphasizing the haptic or sense of touch rather than the optic or detached observation. Her intention is to move the discourse of cinema in new directions.
- From sight to site
- From text to texture
- From the analytical mind to the feeling body
In the section on Architecture with which she begins the book, for instance, Bruno describes the importance of movie palaces to the experience of cinema for early audiences. She traces the history of the cine-city, giving examples of numerous films that have shaped the city as a place of flanerie or movement. The Travel chapters are devoted to a critique of normative associations of the domestic or home (as female) that, in its opposition to travel (as male), constructs sexual difference. She retheorizes dwelling as denoting home and house, and the latter as architecture through which one moves, noting that home itself is “made up of layers of passages that are voyages of habitation” and that “it is a site of continual transformation” (103). Under Geography, Bruno cites a range of perambulating activities that resulted in “cabinets to museums to exhibition halls to film” (p. 154). In The Art of Mapping section, Bruno uses the analogy of film as vessel, that which transports us away. Reclaiming maps from their association as hegemonic, she analyzes “partial mappings” as intimate and emotional expressions. In the Design section, there is an extended discussion of “epistemic odyssey”s of filmmakers such as Peter Greenaway and Stanley Kubrick. Filmmakers are map-makers as well, she argues, because they take us on journey through the “surface-spaces” we travel through. The last two essays, under House, concern Naples, Bruno’s birthplace in Italy, as a cine-city, as it has been the site of numerous drawings, photographs, and films from 1472. She concludes with a personal trip to her home in Naples and the emotions it arouses. Through these many sections, Bruno provides fresh readings of films, places, artifacts, and events in the history of western modernity.
One of the delights of the book (and there are many!) is her interest in pointing out the etymology of words that connect to movement such as kinema, error, site, voyageur, haptic, grapho, and more. Her’s is a work of archaeology, finding the genealogies from pre-cinema to post-cinema, from cabinets of curiosities to museum archives. Another is the metaphor of travel itself as an academic stance, dislodging the analytical approach for an e-motional one.
So many of Bruno’s insights are axiomatic in cinema studies. For instance, she writes, “Filmic genres and cycles are specific to sites and even to means of transportation, and, in turn, they change the way we remap those sites” (p.28). The western was shaped by the railroad and the open landscape, science fiction is linked to outer space, the car to the road movie, the house to melodrama. Indeed, these connections have become organic to us all.
Bruno noted that in Atlas her objective was to connect emotion to motion, since “[E]motion is a “moving out,” and this moving out is also about migration, which involves an interaction with otherness that is transformative. (p11)
She also explained how her latest work on “environmentality” and ecological thinking could be traced back to the picturesque garden as a place of motion through which scenes unfolded.
Identifying herself as a “resident alien” in the United States, Bruno foregrounds the shifting terrain of bordering, observing, and inhabiting that defines e-motion.
In the interview cited earlier, Bruno says, “I’ve always had an interest in thresholds and migrations, in connecting and in relationality rather than divisiveness (p 20). At a time when movements of all sorts are under erasure, it is more important than ever to think of all the productive ways in which our shared global history is bound up with knowledge and understanding of the forces that move us.
It is impossible to enumerate the riches contained in this book, and it will remain valuable reading for the foreseeable future.
Washington DC Feb 2025