The concept of atmosphere is the beating heart of the New Aesthetics project initiated by Gernot Böhme, aimed at relaunching a theory of perception that starts from the sensitive and affective experience generated by the encounter with the surrounding world. Building his theory of Aesthetics starting from the reflections of authors such as Hermann Schmitz and Hubertus Tellenbach, Böhme identifies atmospheres as the "primary perceptive object", or what a subject instantly perceives upon entering a space, prior to any decoding process. The centrality of the pathic dimension is what removes aesthetics from the sphere of interpretation and evaluation, embracing an idea of perception that has to do with the way in which we are involved in certain affective situations. Atmosphere is a spatially effused feeling (Schmitz 2023) that permeates an indefinite portion of space and envelops the perceiver from the outside, inviting him to come to terms with it through a pre-reflective involvement. Therefore, it is experienced through a holistic perceptive modality that does not correspond to the elaboration of distinct signs, but rather to the immediate reception of simultaneous impressions. This redefinition of aesthetics is not only the basis of a new theory of experience, but offers new significant models for the analysis of the work of art. The aesthetics of atmospheres allows us to question the role played by atmospheric elements in the creation and ways in which a work is experienced: according to Gernot Böhme, the atmospheric irradiation of any artistic artefact is the result of an «aesthetic work», or the set of operations implemented to prepare a specific disposition of mind in a subject, or in a spectator. Furthermore, Tonino Griffero, whose work constitutes the major contribution to the debate on atmospheres in Italy, states that art is nothing but a form of intensification of the atmospheres that surround us, which allows us to experience them in a more controlled manner.
In the case of cinema, the possibility of configuring and recording these «median entities» (Somaini 2006) that are between subject and object is the basis of the medium's ability to weave deep bonds between the affective tones released by an environment and the characters that populate it. This emerges in the essay Visible Man by Béla Balázs, in which the aesthetic reflection on cinema is intertwined with the concepts of Stimmung, aura and atmosphere, in order to outline the ways in which the camera's gaze is able to offer the spectator a new perception of the world, highlighting the expressive properties of the elements that compose it.
This ability does not reside solely in the design of the object set that concerns the staging, but also extends to all the components of the aesthetic work that underpins the creation of a cinematographic work: the compositional, chromatic, luministic or sound values, together with the choice of camera movements and editing, contribute to the transmission of specific moods, to which the spectator is invited to agree. In this sense, we can come to identify in the atmosphere of the film or television series a true object of aesthetic appreciation both of the work itself (the atmosphere of Once Upon a Time in America), and of aggregations of works (the atmosphere of noir or the Star Wars media franchise), to the point of constituting an autonomous object that can be reproduced and recognized (a Fellini-esque atmosphere). Furthermore, in terms of geographical aesthetics, if the atmosphere is a feeling effused in the space of a primary ontology (forest, garden, house, city), we can analyze the aesthetic work that is carried out to operate a transformation in secondary ontology (from the atmosphere of Venice to the atmosphere of Death in Venice), with the consequent effects of the work's feedback on the starting atmosphere (the contribution of Woody Allen's or Martin Scorsese's films to the atmosphere of New York). In accordance with this process of documentation and transformation of space, even the meteorological and environmental conditions of a real place can be used to generate affective atmospheres capable of transmitting feelings such as fear, melancholy, sadness or happiness (the cinema of the Galician Lois Patiño). Spatial imagination of a productive nature then allows us to construct atmospheres without a referent in the primary ontology, as in the cases of the sinister atmosphere of the planetoid in Alien or the dreamy atmosphere of Cinderella's castle.
We are therefore interested in the «structural or intrinsic conditions of the staging of a film that make it atmospheric» (Tawa 2022), or in the strategies used by cinema and television to generate different atmospheres, through the possibilities offered by the media themselves, activating transformative processes both on the narrative level and on the image level.
