The cigarette as a cinematic object in Hannah Arendt

What do I mean by a cinematic object? I hope to muster a tentative answer in this post. 

First, I would like to elaborate a few more thoughts about the aesthetic connection that I traced between thinking and dying in the previous post. To begin, it is important to highlight the term dwell, which Heidegger deploys to speak of language as the house of dwelling that relates person to Being. The idea of dwelling suggests a space in which or at which one can reside, spend time, continue to be or being. Could we say that language is where time becomes materialized or spatialized, and thus ceases to be pure negativity? The verb presupposes a spatial configuration that is repository-like, presenting a discernable depth, where the surface-level appearance of things is hardly the most defining aspect. It follows that his magnum opus Being and Time, could also be Being in Time, as Being cannot happen outside the duration or passing of Time. That is, one approaches the truth gradually by journeying through the layered distance of things and in the passing of time.     

In both his books and lectures, Graham Harman reminds us that for Heidegger Being represents the start and end of philosophical thought. And "Letter on Humanism" affords us a glimpse into this paradigmatic view, which largely informed Heidegger's philosophical work. Meaning does not lie on flat surfaces, but rather in that which withdraws from immediate perception. There are levels to things, including, of course, people. Think of his tool analysis, for instance, of which Harman offers an unconventional yet re-energized interpretation. Not all the features of a thing appear or become accessible to the perceiving individual. Harman's treatment of Heidegger's tool analysis takes it a step further to claim that the things hide qualities not only to the perceiving individual but also to other things, that is, not only to things (or beings) that bear consciousness. [I will continue to develop this paragraph in future posts.]   

I view the cigarette in von Trotta's film as a cinematic object insofar as the cigarette's meaning in the many scenes in which it appears cannot be exhausted to operate as a unified, non-contradictory entity of signification. Cinematic objects do not simply amount to narratable signification. It is an object rather than a metaphor or even a figure because the role it is playing in each of the scenes as well as the film as a whole cannot be entirely deciphered or decodified. What the cigarette is in the film becomes decidedly inexhaustible. At the same time, in its varied cinematic articulations, the cigarette assembles aesthetic effects and impressions for the viewer. 

Thus I propose that cinema does not express itself only or mainly through metaphors or figures that advance an intelligible narrative–of meaning or even lack thereof. Despite commonly held beliefs by those who produce cinema and those who consume it, films do not exist only to tell stories. Aesthetically speaking, cinema is composed of objects, cinematic objects that assemble a tenuous whole. In other words, I ask us to view cinema's coming into being not just to represent some other or something other or to tell a story in an inevitably mimetic operation in which the film mimics or prefigures something outside the film.