Cinematic Attunement in Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival
Rebecca Kelley
The heptapod chamber as an atmospheric locus in Arrival.
Cinema has the ability to stitch together different formal and aesthetic elements in order to create an experiential connection between the spectator and the film. Regarding cinematic worlds, Steffen Hven asserts that “narrative space … comes alive through a process of attunement between the rhythms and movements of the film and its audience” (20). This processual and durational attunement to the film world results in a spectatorial experience in which the cinematic atmosphere that expands beyond the diegesis and into the form and aesthetic quality of the film goes even further, saturating the liminal space formed between the body and the film screen wherein the spectatorial experience takes place. Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival (2016) works to attune its audience to the film’s “global aesthetic expression,” formed through the synthesis of distinct formal and referential elements and expressions (Yacavone 196). The film follows Louise (Amy Adams), a world-renowned linguist, as she grapples with the task of deciphering the alien language of heptapods after they arrive on Earth. The heptapods’ environment, located behind a screen-like window inside their spacecraft, is a chamber of indiscriminate size filled with stark white light and billowing clouds of mist. Sound is distorted and rendered strange, and gravity is weaker – the heptapods are able to “fly” through and around the space. Using the theories of Vivian Sobchack and Robert Sinnerbrink, I will argue that this environment functions as the film’s atmospheric center, aesthetically invading the rest of the film world. The spectator is subconsciously familiarized with and attuned to this atmospheric environment through the use of visual and sonic resonances to particular qualities of the space before it is narratively introduced, thus rendering its reveal more visceral.
In “The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience,” Vivian Sobchack argues that cinema is more than an instrument of ideology, instead using “structures of direct experience (the “centering” and bodily situating of existence in relation to the world of objects and other) as the basis for the structures of its language” (5). Cinema becomes, in the presence of the spectator, a sensing, sensual, sense-making subject. Louise’s figure is centered in the frame in certain atmospherically significant long shots throughout the film; her direct experience is the basis for our understanding of the film’s language. Robert Sinnerbrink discusses how film’s immersive power is reliant on mood in his article, “Stimmung: Exploring the Aesthetics of Mood.” He states that “moods always reveal or express a cinematic world, and that distinctive cinematic worlds have their own specific kinds of mood” (149). It is the combined use of “cinematic-aesthetic devices (lighting, mise-en-scène, montage, rhythm, tempo, color, gesture, performance, music, and sound)” that constitute a film’s style and therefore its power to elicit an emotional response from the spectator (Sinnerbrink 151-52). Arrival makes use of a range of these cinematic-aesthetic devices resulting in the heptapod’s environment permeating the fabric of the film as a whole.
In Arrival, Louise is recruited by the government to decipher the heptapods’ alien language with the goal of learning how to communicate with them. 12 identical extraterrestrial spacecraft mysteriously appear in apparently random locations around the Earth, and the stakes of Louise’s work lie in determining if the heptapods are a threat or a friend. Comprehension of their language results in a complete breakdown and restructuring of spatial and temporal perception. As Louise’s understanding of the language grows, so does her ability to traverse boundaries of linear time.
David Evan Richard’s phenomenological analysis of Arrival considers Sobchack’s concept of the “screen-sphere,” a term referring to the “ubiquity, multiplicity, and connectivity of the screens around us” (41). The film introduces the heptapod’s environment through Louise’s first experience entering the spacecraft. She is vertically lifted into the ship from the bottom, where once inside, the gravity changes, rotating 90 degrees so that the wall becomes the floor. Matters of space and physics are immediately challenged, and Louise, along with the spectator, is forced to rework her understanding of perceptual and sensorial information. Louise and the rest of the team enter a large, dark chamber illuminated by a massive rectangle of bright white light. This rectangle is a window that allows Louise to see and communicate with the heptapods. She is in the center of the frame, her body small in comparison. The interior space behind the screen is filled with clouds of swirling white fog that the heptapods, large, black, and possessing seven tentacle-like appendages, emerge from. The mise-en-scène of the long shot that reveals this space is similar to that of a theater space – dark with a wide bright screen in the center. The film is self-reflexive in that it calls attention to its own status as a film, positioning itself as the transformative mechanism that, just like the heptapods to Louise, modulates and transfigures our perceptive expression. The narrative finally allows us into the heptapod’s environment when Louise enters the spacecraft for the last time and the heptapods take her behind the screen and into their space. For the first time in the film, the fog has a status beyond an affect to be observed; Louise is in it now, surrounded by it, physically interacting with it. Sobchack suggests that “the film experience is a system of communication based on bodily perception as a vehicle of conscious expression” (9). The perception of cinematic-aesthetic devices in preceding scenes that emulate qualities of this scene thus serve as the apparatus for Arrival’s conscious expression.
Visual and sonic references to elements of this scene permeate the fabric of the film in both narrative and form. In the opening scene, Louise plays with her daughter in what appears to be a flashback, but is actually a flash forward to events that have not yet transpired. The life of Louise’s daughter is shown through this opening montage; the film cuts from shots of Louise with her as a baby, a child, and then as a teenager when she eventually dies from a terminal illness. A medium close-up shot of Louise, wearing a light blue shirt that matches her eyes, features a shaky, handheld quality that strengthens feelings of subjectivity and the memory-like quality of this scene. She is playing outside with her daughter, holding both arms up and in front of her face, wiggling her fingers as her daughter anticipates being chased. Louise’s hands look like the two heptapods, the moving fingers foreshadowing their tentacle-like appendages. The shots of happy moments are filled with warm colors and an orangey filter over the mise-en-scène, while shots depicting negative emotion have a drained greenish hue that makes everything in the mise-en-scène appear sickly. The tension between warm and cool color palettes as they correlate to emotion exemplifies the film’s use of visual style as a vehicle for intensification of mood (Sinnerbrink). Further, the casting of Amy Adams, with her orangey hair and pale blue eyes, positions Louise at the intersection of these warm and cool palettes. In a sense, the orange and bluish-green that saturate the mise-en-scène are a visual representation of Louise’s understanding of non-linear time. It is her very essence, present in all aspects of the mise-en-scène because she, too, is present in all moments of her life, experiencing every moment simultaneously. Upon the spectator’s first viewing of this film, it cannot be known that Louise’s perception of time becomes so radically altered that it surpasses our threshold of experience. To achieve a similar feat of expression, the film attunes our perception to it through these resonances of cinematic-aesthetic devices.
A helicopter arrives outside of Louise’s house in the middle of the night to take her to the location of the spacecraft. The camera is positioned behind Louise and facing her bedroom window. The first intrusion into the stillness of the scene comes in the form of faint blue light coming through the window from the helicopter as it flies forward towards the camera, directly confronting the spectator (and Louise). The resonant, powerful thrumming sound of the helicopter is similar in volume, texture, tone, and rhythm to the sound that the heptapods make when they audibly communicate. Sound exists in the offscreen, operating in a kind of liminal space that materializes within the very body of the spectator. The intrusion of bright, blueish light and deep thumping sounds into Louise’s bedroom, into her space, strengthens the attunement of the spectator to the film’s atmosphere center.
Louise’s house consists of large rectangular windows and glass doors that bridge the interior and exterior spaces. The living room graphically resonates with the chamber in the spacecraft where Louise works to learn the heptapods’ language; we see a long shot of Louise in a dark environment, centered and minimized in the frame, her back facing the camera, standing in front of a rectangular pane of bright light. Fear of the unknown emanates from this graphic setup, here because Louise knows that she is about to have an unprecedented experience – the helicopter, the thing that brings her to the heptapods and thus changes her life, is the vehicle for devices of atmospheric resonance in this scene. While in the helicopter, the camera captures another instance of a graphic match as Louise approaches the spacecraft. As the camera sweeps around in a circular motion, surveying the landscape, the thrumming of the helicopter is ever-present alongside a tense score of rhythmic, pulsing sounds that convey Louise’s anxiety and awe. An extreme long shot of the landscape from the high angle of a helicopter mid-flight reveals the massive, black, ovular vessel hovering in a flat field surrounded by mountains. A thick layer of fog slopes down the mountains from right to left across the frame, cascading and diffusing around the visual space. This image mirrors a long shot where Louise is staring up at the heptapod’s full body for the first time after she goes behind the screen. As she was in her home, and upon first looking into the screen, she is once again minimized in the center of the frame, her back facing the camera. The full body of the heptapod is in view, graphically a black elliptical shape that spans from the top to the bottom of the film frame. The foggy landscape is a replication of the billowing clouds of mist that swirl around the environment. Across these scenes, the use of the long shot is significant; the film’s atmosphere makes itself more palpable when the environment is more fully in view. These recurrent visual, auditory, and atmospheric markers strengthen the sense of cinematic perception and expression with each iteration, building the film’s sense of mood.
Louise’s (Amy Adams) figure is enveloped in a dense vapor as she beholds a heptapod.
Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight (2016) employs similar techniques as Arrival to establish an emotional and somatic relationship between the spectator and the main character, Chiron, as he grows up. The film is organized into three segments, named in correlation to what Chiron is called in each different stage of his life: Little (child, played by Alex R. Hibbert), Chiron (teenager, played by Ashton Sanders), and Black (adult, played by Trevante Rhodes). Like Arrival, the film continuously makes reference to a specific environment that has significance within the narrative. This environment, a beach in Miami where Little and Chiron have formative experiences, penetrates the larger film world through the spectator’s attunement to Chiron’s subjective experience. Sinnerbrink’s concept of cinema having a spatialized environment is realized through cinematic-aesthetic devices like sound; the atmosphere of the beach is rendered primarily significant within Moonlight’s cinematic body through sonic callbacks in the form of crashing waves. As a teenager, Chiron has his first sexual experience with Kevin (André Holland) on the beach; the moment is charged with intense emotion and heightened sensation through an emphasis on modes of experience beyond vision: sound and touch. This act of intimacy is an extremely vulnerable moment for Chiron, and the film allows him a sense of privacy by only depicting the boys in fragments. Visually, the spectator can only indirectly experience this moment, so the sonic and the tactile take on greater power. A close-up shot of Chiron’s hand gripping the sand stands out as a moment of sensorial impact; the image takes on a tactile quality where we can imagine gripping the sand in the very same way, practically feeling it. During this scene, the soundtrack is purely diegetic. The constant whooshing of the wind and repetitive sounds of crashing waves have their own hypnotic rhythm, punctuated only by the faint sounds of Chiron’s breathing, another emphasis on the sensorial. The sparseness of sound combined with the significance of this scene within the narrative portray a sense of mood that radiates out from the screen, enveloping the perceptual field of the spectator. It feels as though any sudden movement will shatter the delicate expression of the scene and the gravity of Chiron discovering and exploring this aspect of his identity; we hold our breath to avoid this risk. Additionally, everything in the mise-en-scène has a rich twilight blue tint that contributes to the mesmerizing nature of the film’s affective mood. The emotional response that this scene evokes aligns with Sinnerbrink’s argument that mood, as a product of a film’s visual style and aesthetics, permeates beyond the onscreen space and radiates out from the screen into our world.
One such sonic callback to this moment occurs late in the film during a scene where Black meets Kevin at the diner in Miami where he now works. They have not seen each other for years, and this is a spontaneous meeting as a result of Kevin reaching out. The camera is handheld, the unsteadiness an expression of vulnerability and nervousness in the face of the unspoken history and unresolved tension between the two. Kevin cooks dinner for Black and they sit across from one another in a booth. As they talk, the film cuts between medium shots that depict their entire bodies from the side and medium close-up shot/reverse shots of Black and Kevin, the camera positioned slightly behind their shoulders so that both subjects remain in the frame. The focus is on them as a pair, so they exist in the frame together. This changes when Kevin stands up to continue working: the camera tracks him as he moves through the diner, embodying Chiron’s perspective as he watches. While Kevin walks into the kitchen, retreating further into the space of the film world, he passes in front of large windows that reveal cars passing by outside. The mise-en-scène of the interior space is bathed in a yellowish glow, featuring lots of rich color tones and warm lighting. The windows, in contrast, are framed in cool bluish light that calls back to the blue tint of the beach scene and encroaches into the interior space. This tension between warm and cool color palettes, especially executed through lighting, is another commonality between Moonlight and Arrival. The film then cuts back to a medium close-up shot of Black as he looks down contemplatively and the rhythmic whooshing of cars morphs into the familiar sound of wind and crashing waves. The wave sound infiltrates the soundtrack during this moment of reflection, cluing the spectator into what is going on in Black’s mind. Boundaries of time are crossed, and we mentally return to the beach as a liminal space that is suspended outside of the linear progression of time in the film.
The past and present are layered in this moment, and our embodied relationship to Chiron is enhanced by this shared emotional act of remembering; just as Chiron is remembering his teenage encounter on the beach, we are remembering it from earlier in the film. This temporal layering is almost palpable, pushing back against the film’s larger linear structure. Similarly, Arrival’s film body strives to provide the spectator with an experience as close to Louise’s as possible. Learning the heptapod’s language breaks down her perception of linear time into something non-linear and simultaneous; past, present, and future are no longer distinguishable from one another. The spectator, being unable to truly experience non-linear time, must learn the film’s language in order to have an experiential transformation like Louise. In his examination of the film, Richard suggests that “the film proposes that inhabiting a different language can change the way in which we perceive and inhibit the sensible world itself” (43). Sobchack writes, “Through the address of our own vision, we speak back to the cinematic expression before us, using a visual language that is also tactile, that takes hold of and actively grasps the perceptual expression, the seeing, the direct experience of that anonymously present, sensing and sentient ‘other’” (9). There exists a two-way relationship between the perception and expression of the film and the spectator. Arrival utilizes visual and sonic matches in order to gradually familiarize us with the heptapod’s environment; subtle associations build on top of one another to create a “shared affective attunement orienting the spectator” within the film world (Sinnerbrink 148). Atmosphere, as it acts as the very interface between our world and the film world, therefore is the most potent when drawing on the perceptual and sensorial expression of both the film and its spectator.
Works Cited
Hven, Steffen. “The Atmospheric Worlds of Cinema.” Enacting the Worlds of Cinema, 19 May 2022, pp. 41–66, https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780197555101.003.0003.
Richard, D. E. “Film Phenomenology and the ‘Eloquent Gestures’ of Denis Villeneuve’s ‘Arrival’”. Cinephile: The University of British Columbia’s Film Journal, vol. 12, no. 1, Mar. 2018, pp. 41-47, doi:10.14288/cinephile.v12i1.198189.
Sinnerbrink, R. “Stimmung: Exploring the aesthetics of mood.” Screen, vol. 53, no. 2, 1 June 2012, pp. 148–163, https://doi.org/10.1093/screen/hjs007.
Sobchack, Vivian Carol. The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience. Princeton University Press, 2020.
Yacavone, Daniel. Film Worlds: A Philosophical Aesthetics of Cinema. Columbia University Press, 2015.