Hyper-Haptic Visuality

Abstract

The recent turn to phenomenology in film studies has, in the first instance, refocused attention on the role of the body and multifaceted sensory perception in spectators hip. In the second instance, it has been able to acknowledge the different qualities of moving image types, styles and genres and the role they play in the production of embodied perception so as to avoid a totalising system of cinematic viewership. Under this model, Jennifer Barker’s The Tactile Eye (2009) explores the potential for experimental films to elicit tactile exploration of their textural surfaces and the propensity for the chase film to produce heighted musculature and kinaesthetic reaction. Vivian Sobchack’s numerous essays in Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture (2004) examine how diverse films and media texts are able to make meaning out of bodily sense. Elena del Río’s Deleuze and the Cinemas of Performance: Powers of Affection (2008) utilises a Deleuzean reading to explain the way films with performing bodies create affective intensity. In a similar vein is one of the most widely used texts, and most useful for this study of 3D cinema: Laura U. Marks’ The Skin of the Film (2000). She examines the way haptic visuality is produced by a specific mode of cinema which, in her book, she identifies as intercultural cinema: films which, when dealing with ‘the power-inflected spaces of diaspora, (post- or neo-) colonialism and cultural apartheid,’ are concerned with embodiment and sense perception (2000: 1).