Inspired by scholarship on the aesthetics of breath in cinema, this article explores a contentious type of breathing prevalent on the screen, namely, smoking in films. The complaint has often been leveled that films have excessively glamorized the act of smoking. Despite cigarettes rarely being essential to any film plot, they are strewn across the liminal spaces of cinematic history, constituting a core element of its atmosphere and mood. What purpose do they serve, and what is their appeal to both filmmakers and audiences? Nicotine cannot be a factor if the medium of cinema is said to influence smoking. The appeal of cigarettes seems not to be merely chemical but visual, conveying a phenomenological posture of ritual. In the act of smoking, the smoker’s repetitive focus on the breath conveys a meditative bodily stance, and the cathartic exhalation of a smoke cloud evokes an offering akin to prayer—a vulnerable surrender of hopes and fears. In religious rituals where goods, such as incense, are burnt as offerings, the intangible spirit or breath becomes manifest. To read smoking phenomenologically as an embodied process, a posture of dwelling, is not to romanticize it but to move beyond reductive readings of it as an addiction that can be solved with a nicotine patch. Cinema’s virtue is taking the everyday and rendering it uncanny. It trains the eye to see prayers in everyday gestures, to glimpse the vestiges of rituals in the mundane and liminal spaces, the stirrings of the sacred in the folding of a kitchen towel, and the kneading of bread. Likewise, with smoking, the slight gesture of the hands, the gentle sway of breath, the cinematic portrayals of smoking manifest this chorus of sighs, the primordial groan behind all things. Taking the profanity of modernity, cinema articulates the rituals therein, disclosing existential and spiritual yearnings.
