Neither Here Nor There: Synaesthesia And The Cosmic Zoom

The cosmic zoom is ontologically puzzling: neither a 'zoom' nor a 'travelling' or 'tracking' shot in the conventional sense of those terms, it exists somewhere in between. Faced with a well-executed cosmic zoom, the viewer is hard-pressed to distinguish between optical and kinetic movement; the difference is rendered obsolete. The cosmic zoom's phenomenological ambivalence confounds as well the neat division between vision and the non-visual senses. As digital effect and sensory event, the cosmic zoom in this way bears some resemblance to synaesthesia, or the experiential mingling (perhaps even non-differentiation) of the sense modalities. Drawing examples from Moulin Rouge!, Sweeney Todd, and Perfume, which use the post-filmic cosmic zoom to depict pre-modern Europe in terms of hearing, taste, smell, and proprioception, the paper argues that the synaesthetic quality of these films ultimately has less to do with their explicit narrative focus on the senses and their overt attempt to represent acts of hearing, taste, and smell as fixed, metaphorical images than with the cosmic zoom's visual rendering of the phenomenological process of synaesthesia itself, as a moving experience and an experience of movement.