Breath Control: The Sound and Sight of Respiration as Hyperrealist Corporeality in Breaking the Waves

Abstract

In her book Nothing Happens, Ivone Margulies remarks on cinema’s potential not only to reflect the social realism of the human condition but also to create a heightened sense of ‘hyperreality’ (Margulies, 1996, p. 45). For Margulies, hyperrealism, particularly in the case of Chantal Ackerman’s cinema, fleshes out the otherwise discrete, liminal or even invisible moments that are normally untraceable, forgotten or lost within the cumulative cycle of the everyday. Above all, it is the resurfacing of such moments through the profilmic body or, rather, everything placed before the camera that is concretely visible, that affirms, for Margulies, a highly ‘corporeal cinema’ (Margulies, 1996, p. 19). Although Margulies is particularly concerned with the material representation and assertion of the everyday conveyed through the profilmic body, this paper focuses primarily on the filmed, embodied subject on screen in order to suggest the human body as itself a source of the banal and unremarkable that gains value through hyperreal-ism. In this respect, I explore one of the most mundane andoverlooked, yet crucial, aspects of human corporeality that is charged with meaning when foregrounded: the sound and sight of the breathing body.