In the Mood for Heideggerian Boredom? Film Viewership as Being-in-the-World

In this article, I engage with Shawn Loht’s argument concerning film viewing as being-in-the-world, developed in his book Phenomenology of Film: A Heideggerian Account of the Film Experience (2017), focusing on the aesthetics of mood with particular attention to boredom. I elaborate on a phenomenological ontology of the film experience and its perceptual “rules” which hinge on aesthetic choices: what kind of world does the film open up for the viewer? Loht’s account of viewing Dasein enables us to deepen phenomenological approaches regarding the relationship between (cinematic) moods and (filmic) understanding, and through his engagement with Mitsein, to expand on film spectatorship conceived as a relation with a shared film world. I look at how Heideggerian boredom can elicit spectatorial experiences and disclosure of meaning, as well as allowing characters’ being in the film world. A broader engagement with cinematic moods is also conducive to exploring limits and potentialities of a possible Heideggerian film-philosophy. To illustrate some of these points, I discuss Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Drive My Car (2021), wherein boredom is consistently awakened through aesthetic strategies of dead-time, silence, slowness and repetition. In the film, the mood of boredom, but also that of love and grief as world-disclosing moods which produce a radical change in our being-in-the-world, is a way to establish a sense of our embeddedness, orient our understanding and disclose our finitude and solitude.