The shock of boredom: The aesthetics of absence, futility, and bliss in moving images (Michelangelo Antonioni, Andy Warhol, Bruce Nauman, Lumiere brothers)

This dissertation examines how boredom as a psychological and aesthetic experience has extended its meanings and effects through cinematic expression. In a culture that privileges excitement, spectacle, and excess, boredom is generally understood as an undesired state of being that involves the decline of excitement, discomfort at enduring a long duration, loss of mental absorption or motivation, anxiety over absence, debasement of profound meaning in life, or even dismissal of socially reinforced values. I argue that cinema has cultivated a systematic and elastic response to these aspects of boredom. In this context, boredom is redefined as a form of shock or trauma that ultimately inspires subversive transcendence of desire and euphoric pleasure. In other words, boredom assumes a kind of paradoxical duality in meaning, as both a form of mental malady and a condition for self-awareness, and I examine this ambivalence of boredom in a range of cinematic practices including narrative films, early cinema, experimental films, and video art, focusing on works by Michelangelo Antonioni, the Lumiere brothers, Andy Warhol, and Bruce Nauman, among others.; The primary goal of this study is to establish an organic, structural relation between the psychological mechanism of boredom and the semantic structure of cinematic imaging. In other words, this is not a descriptive study of how certain films narrate stories about boring incidents or being bored. My argument is based on the proposition that cinema has developed an elaborate system of expression that synthetically reduplicate the psychological dynamics of traumatic as well as everyday experiences, including loss, failure, and anxiety. While classical narrative cinema has cultured a methodical defense mechanism against the experience of boredom, cinematic language inherently embodies the fundamental elements of boredom. The unique semantic structure of cinema has accordingly allowed demonstrative expression of absence, repetition, futility, and negation as complex aesthetic problems that challenge our habitual thinking. In doing so, cinema has embraced multiple meanings of boredom, from passive withdrawal and indifference to bliss and aesthetic revelation.