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An Oceanic Feeling: Cinema and the Sea
What is oceanic feeling? For Sigmund Freud, it is the sensation of an unbreakable bond between oneself and the outside world, a quasi-sublime state in which the integrity of the self is lost, or a least compromised, in a feeling of limitlessness, unboundedness, and interconnectedness.
An Oceanic Feeling: Cinema and the Sea takes Freud's metaphor literally, returning this sense of "belonging inseparably to the external world as a whole" to its aquatic origins to explore how the ocean forges connections between people, between communities, and between the human and nonhuman. Across five themes - the elemental contingencies of water, the fascination of submarine cinematography, representations of littoral labour, approaches to the Middle Passage and illegalized migration, and the materiality of global maritime circulation - An Oceanic Feeling drifts idiosyncratically through the history of cinematic representations of the sea. From Hollywood to documentary and the avant-garde, it searches for reflections on what it means o belong to the whole of a world in our time of ecological, humanitarian and political emergency.
An Oceanic Feeling: Cinema and the Sea takes Freud's metaphor literally, returning this sense of "belonging inseparably to the external world as a whole" to its aquatic origins to explore how the ocean forges connections between people, between communities, and between the human and nonhuman. Across five themes - the elemental contingencies of water, the fascination of submarine cinematography, representations of littoral labour, approaches to the Middle Passage and illegalized migration, and the materiality of global maritime circulation - An Oceanic Feeling drifts idiosyncratically through the history of cinematic representations of the sea. From Hollywood to documentary and the avant-garde, it searches for reflections on what it means o belong to the whole of a world in our time of ecological, humanitarian and political emergency.
- GenresFilm
79 pages, Paperback
Published August 4, 2018
99 people want to read
About the author
Erika Balsom
29 books12 followersErika Balsom is a Lecturer in Film Studies and Liberal Arts at King's College London and the author of Exhibition Cinema in Contemporary Art.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
February 26, 2025
out of this world we cannot fall
"The ocean undoes. According to Deleuze and Guattari, “the sea is the smooth space par excellence”: unmarked by the divisions & territorialisations associated with striated space, it is an expanse of intensities where all that is fixed dissolves into fluidity & flux, where Eros and Thanatos are not opposed but interpenetrating forces. For centuries, and across cultures, the sea’s amorphous darkness has been imagined as home to fantastical monsters. This ancient, abyssal ocean is unconquerable and wild, its energies unbound."
"The ocean undoes. According to Deleuze and Guattari, “the sea is the smooth space par excellence”: unmarked by the divisions & territorialisations associated with striated space, it is an expanse of intensities where all that is fixed dissolves into fluidity & flux, where Eros and Thanatos are not opposed but interpenetrating forces. For centuries, and across cultures, the sea’s amorphous darkness has been imagined as home to fantastical monsters. This ancient, abyssal ocean is unconquerable and wild, its energies unbound."
December 27, 2023
A broad survey of films that explore the sea.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews