The Bodily Turn Lecture

Unlearning

Laura Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’

‘The conventions of mainstream film focus attention on the human form. Scale, space, stories are all anthropomorphic. Here, curiosity and the wish to look intermingle with a fascination with likeness and recognition: the human face, the human body, the relationship between the human form and its surroundings, the visible presence of the person in the world'.

Jennifer Barker, ‘The Tactile Eye, p.74

‘Viewers’ responses to films are necessarily physical, full-bodied responses, because our vision is always fully embodied, intimately connected to our fingertips, our funny bones, and our feet’

Metz 1983; original emphasis

‘Spectator-fish, taking in everything with their eyes, nothing with their bodies: the institution of the cinema requires a silent, motionless spectator, a vacant spectator, constantly in a sub-motor and hyperperceptive state, a spectator at once alienated and happy’

Steven Shaviro, ‘The Cinematic Body, p.32

The camera does not invent, and does not even represent; it only passively records. But this passivity allows it to penetrate, or to be enveloped by, the flux of the material world. The automatism and nonselectivity of mechanical reproduction make it possible for cinema to break with traditional hierarchies of representation and enter directly into a realm of matter, life, and movement.

Anne Rutherford, ‘Cinema and Embodied Affect’, Senses of Cinema 2003

Nitty-gritty is the best way to define this concept: in a film like Microcosmos you may be down there in the mud with the copulating lady-birds—it doesn’t mean that this is identification, an imaginary mimicry. It may be red-and-black-spottedness, or jiggleness that attracts you, just as in watching an aquarium you may not have an anthropomorphic identification with a fish, but a recognition of floatingness or bubbleness. It may contact some place in your self that knows weightless suspension and set up a sympathetic vibration with it. Similarly you may find rollingness in the image of giant wave, spinningness with a windmill, or bristliness with the spiny protuberances on a prickly pear. Shape, colour, texture, protrusions and flourishes all reach out and draw us to them in an affective resonance.

Laura Marks, ‘Thinking Multisensory Cinema’, 2008

‘the turn toward visual culture has left in place the sensory hierarchy that subtends Western philosophy, in which only the distance senses are vehicles of knowledge, and Western aesthetics, in which only vision and hearing can be vehicles of beauty. It seems that the democratization of the object of aesthetic study to include high and low or popular arts has not really extended to non-visual objects, except for the audiovisual arts such as cinema. The neglect of touch, smell, and taste (and to some extent, hearing) in visual culture descends particularly, of course, from art history, and generally, from the tendency to dismiss the proximal senses as inferior that underpins Western thought’.

Distance senses

•        Vision

•        Hearing

-   ‘furthest from the body’; ‘closest to the intellect’ (Marks, 119)

Proximal senses

•        Touch

•        Taste

•        Smell

-   ‘most bodily’ senses (Marks, 119)

‘only [treat] the distance senses are vehicles of knowledge’

Embodied Spectatorship

Vivian Sobchack, ‘The Address of the Eye’, p.77-8

'I am able to see texture. My sense of sight is pervaded by my sense of touch. Smell is cooperative with taste and taste with sight. […] My sense of sight, then is a modality of perception that is commutable to my other senses, and vice-versa. My sight is never only sight – it sees what my ear can hear, my hand can touch, my nose can smell, and my tongue can taste. My entire bodily existence is implicated in my vision'

Haptic Visuality

Laura Marks, ‘The Skin of the Film’, 162

• ‘the eyes themselves function like organs of touch’

• Haptic visuality is distinguished from optical visuality, which sees things from enough distance to perceive them as distinct forms in deep space: in other words, how we usually conceive of vision. Optical visuality depends on a separation between the viewing subject and the object. Haptic looking tends to move over the surface of its object rather than plunge into illusionistic depth, not to distinguish form so much as to discern texture. It is more inclined to move than to focus, more inclined to graze than to gaze.

• (149) ‘while looking tends to be unidirectional, one cannot touch without being touched’

Limitations and Motivations

• Multisensory moments - ‘a closed circuit… not extended in time.’

• ‘the haptic image forces the viewer to contemplate the image itself instead of being pulled into narrative.’ (Marks, 163)

• Ethical dimension to embodied spectatorship = 'apprehend what it is to be present to the image'.

• ‘While optical perception privileges the representational power of the image, haptic perception privileges the material presence of the image’ (Marks, 163).

Matilda Mraz, ‘Temporality and Film Analysis’, 30

'One of the consequences of Sobchack’s emphasis upon a pre-reflective moment of sensation is that the way in which sensual apprehension and intellectual comprehension interweave through the duration of the film remains a theoretically underdeveloped issue in her analysis. Sobchack’s writings suggest that her physical reactions constitute a closed circuit, already a thought as well as a sensation, and thus are not extended into time'

Barker, 110

‘the film is to our bodies like car is to driver: we live through it vicariously, allowing it to shape our own bodily image. It becomes our proxy, our vehicle for movement and action, as well as the thing that provides us a safe haven from which to experience real danger’

Jenny Chamarette, ‘Phenomenology and the Future of Film, 224

'Instances such as haptic visuality might be considered more productively not as the insistence of some semi-empirical examples where the eye ‘touches’, but as a contact of the abstract and the concrete in thinking embodied ontological relationships to and with the specific visuality of cinema. Haptic visuality is a strategy not only to apprehend the image but also to apprehend what it is to be present to the image, to share its actual and virtual spatialities and temporalities, beyond representation. Cinema, and in particular non-narrative or narratively curtailed cinema, often makes itself apprehensible to the body-subject via an overlapping of sense experiences, both actual and remembered or projected, and this sense experience is at the same time both embodied and subjective'

L&M: Silent Archives

Political Impetus

• ‘often meaning escapes the audiovisual registers altogether’ (Marks, 129)

• ‘When the verbal and visual archives are silent, information is revealed that was never verbal or visual to begin with’ (76)