The Skin of the Film : Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses

Memories that evoke the physical awareness of touch, smell, and bodily presence can be vital links to home for people living in diaspora from their culture of origin. How can filmmakers working between cultures use cinema, a visual medium, to transmit that physical sense of place and culture? In The Skin of the Film Laura U. Marks offers an answer, building on the theories of Gilles Deleuze and others to explain how and why intercultural cinema represents embodied experience in a postcolonial, transnational world. Much of intercultural cinema, Marks argues, has its origin in silence, in the gaps left by recorded history. Filmmakers seeking to represent their native cultures have had to develop new forms of cinematic expression. Marks offers a theory of "haptic visuality"--a visuality that functions like the sense of touch by triggering physical memories of smell, touch, and taste--to explain the newfound ways in which intercultural cinema engages the viewer bodily to convey cultural experience and memory. Using close to two hundred examples of intercultural film and video, she shows how the image allows viewers to experience cinema as a physical and multisensory embodiment of culture, not just as a visual representation of experience. Finally, this book offers a guide to many hard-to-find works of independent film and video made by Third World diasporic filmmakers now living in the United States, Great Britain, and Canada. The Skin of the Film draws on phenomenology, postcolonial and feminist theory, anthropology, and cognitive science. It will be essential reading for those interested in film theory, experimental cinema, the experience of diaspora, and the role of the sensuous in culture Provided by publisher Annotation Memories that evoke the physical awareness of touch, smell, and bodily presence can be vital links to home for people living in diaspora from their culture of origin. How can filmmakers working between cultures use cinema, a visual medium, to transmit that physical sense of place and culture? InThe Skin of the FilmLaura U. Marks offers an answer, building on the theories of Gilles Deleuze and others to explain how and why intercultural cinema represents embodied experience in a postcolonial, transnational world. Much of intercultural cinema, Marks argues, has its origin in silence, in the gaps left by recorded history. Filmmakers seeking to represent their native cultures have had to develop new forms of cinematic expression. Marks offers a theory of haptic visualitya visuality that functions like the sense of touch by triggering physical memories of smell, touch, and tasteto explain the newfound ways in which intercultural cinema engages the viewer bodily to convey cultural experience and memory. Using close to two hundred examples of intercultural film and video, she shows how the image allows viewers to experience cinema as a physical and multisensory embodiment of culture, not just as a visual representation of experience. Finally, this book offers a guide to many hard-to-find works of independent film and video made by Third World diasporic filmmakers now living in the United States, Great Britain, and Canada. The Skin of the Filmdraws on phenomenology, postcolonial and feminist theory, anthropology, and cognitive science. It will be essential reading for those interested in film theory, experimental cinema, the experience of diaspora, and the role of the sensuous in culture Cover ......Page 1 Contents......Page 6 List of illustrations......Page 8 Preface......Page 12 Acknowledgments......Page 20 Introduction......Page 22 1 The Memory of Images......Page 45 2 The Memory of Things......Page 98 3 The Memory of Touch......Page 148 4 The Memory of the Senses......Page 215 Conclusion: The Portable Sensorium......Page 264 Notes ......Page 270 Bibliography......Page 280 Filmography/Videography......Page 296 Index......Page 306 Cover 1 Contents 6 List of illustrations 8 Preface 12 Acknowledgments 20 Introduction 22 1 The Memory of Images 45 2 The Memory of Things 98 3 The Memory of Touch 148 4 The Memory of the Senses 215 Conclusion: The Portable Sensorium 264 Notes 270 Bibliography 280 Filmography/Videography 296 Index 306 0822323915,9780822323914,0822323583,9780822323587 Intercultural cinema by definition operates at the intersections of two or more cultural regimes of knowledge. Uses Deleuze to explore new ways of looking at intercultural and experimental cinema