The haecceity effect

Humphrey Bogart pauses to look up at a sign while walking across the street in The Big Sleep (Howard Hawks, 1946); Lauren Bacall clutches and unclutches her chair in the background of a scene in Key Largo (John Huston, 1948); Jeffrey Hunter attempts to leap onto John Wayne’s horse, then seemingly levitates for an instant in The Searchers (John Ford, 1956); a bowling pin twirls, pauses, then falls – as if to its death – in Scarface (Howard Hawks, 1932).1 Singled out by cinephiles for the inexplicable pleasure they produce, each of these moments typifies what many critics and theorists have identified as a ‘cinephiliac moment’, a brief fragment from a film that compels rapturous and loving description, and resists systematic analysis. As Christian Keathley explains, ‘Whether it is the gesture of a hand, the odd rhythm of a horse’s gait, or the sudden change in expression on a face’, cinephiliac moments involve ‘the fetishizing of fragments of a film, either individual shots or marginal (often unintentional) details [...] that appear only for a moment’.2

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