Cinematic Qualia and Haptic Visuality
The subjective sensory and emotional impressions a film creates—the visceral, hard-to-describe feeling—have a name I only recently learned: cinematic qualia. It is an amalgamation of look, atmosphere, and texture, creating a resonant quality that makes certain films feel “alive” to the viewer. It’s both the subtle and unsubtle ways great film can tap into deep sensory experience—blending what we see, hear, and feel into impactful screen experiences.
Cinematic qualia is a byproduct of shared cognitive orientation. Tapping into a shared mental framework for interpreting reality, it transforms that collective framework into a deeply personal, sensory experience for each viewer. Through vivid sights, sounds, and textures, movies routinely evoke powerful emotions, making the viewer feel close to being there. After all, it is the attraction of heightened emotion in a safe space that is one of cinema’s primary appeals.
Making Reels Real
The “Why Movies Just Don’t Feel ‘Real’ Anymore” video essay explores why older films more frequently conveyed a sense of authenticity and immersion, remarking on the loss of an intangible quality which results in modern cinema’s repeated failure to viscerally connect to the audience. Like Stories of Old (LSOO) runs head into the common sentiments of ‘they just don’t make things like they used to.’
Now, there is no end of YouTube channels that devote themselves to the supposed inferior spectacle of modern cinema. This dialogue takes up a good chunk of internet discussion boards and video essays for years. LSOO does something a bit different, though. He does not start with prejudgment but with observation, and asks not why are they “worse,” but why do modern movies “feel” different.
The question finds footing by describing the loss of embodied experience in modern cinema. As a channel dedicated to both the art of film and filmmaking, LSOO first brings his focus to the change not only of technology but also of techniques. It is not merely a matter of celluloid vs. digital prints; more accurately, it is a change in actual filmmaking techniques. Things like deep focus, environmental integration, and tangible locations all translate to a shared sense of “being there.”
Before the ‘fix it in post’ green screen era, real locations made things feel, well, real. They were immediately grounding and offered a sense of environmental integration. The addition of haptic visuality, wherein the films create a tactile experience—highlighting textures and close-up details—can also deepen immersion.
This cinematic stew of visceral, sensory feelings all amounts to what LSOO describes as cinematic qualia—a quality of previous films that allowed audiences to collectively feel and interpret the cinematic world in similar, meaningful ways. By contrast, modern films too often forgo that former perceptual realism.
While LSOO has plenty of praise for some modern films, he notes that reliance on synthetic visuals and processed aesthetics too often erode a shared orientation. They can fragment perception, and as fewer viewers consume films in theatres, that loss of shared physical space is being mirrored by a loss of shared cognitive space. In the end, it can lead to a lost connection not only with a film but also with each other.
“What I love about movies is that they can invoke deeper forms of realism, not just perceptual with regards to form and space, not just haptic in a material sense, but also in relation to states of being, to emotions, dreams, memories. You know, the physicality of a panic attack, the nostalgia for a half-remembered past, childhood nightmares about being alone in the dark. All the more abstract interactions and subjective phenomena that define the human experience, and that can be articulated through great filmmaking.”
Tom van der Linden / Like Stories of Old