Kaisa Hiltunen

Closeness in Film Experience: At the Intersection of Cinematic and Human Skin

Film and media studies are going through a change of perspective which could be characterized as a material, bodily or affective turn. Various theories which share a central, unifying idea have emerged. The idea of this turn can be formulated as follows: film experience is a holistic event in which the spectator and the film address each other in a two way process. Therefore film narratives should not be analyzed as static structures but as events that involve embodied spectators and fictional worlds in a material embrace. Film viewing is thus seen not merely as a rational cognitive process but as an event that evokes immediate experiences; experiences that affect us both on a psychological and a bodily level and that allow us to get a glimpse into other peoples consciousnesses. The encounter of the spectator and the film is an event, or a process, which enables the formation of some kind of a common space. In contrast to most of the earlier film theories such as cognitive and psychoanalytic theory, this bodily approach allows for a more intimate and interactive experience. Indeed, what is common to the different variations of this approach is the emphasis on the experiential, multi-sensory nature of film. In this article I shall discuss what intimacy and closeness could mean in film experience in the framework of the approach delineated above. I shall make use of the ideas of mainly two theorists, Vivian Sobchack and Laura U. Marks, and the concept of skin to characterize the afore mentioned cinematic space and cinematic closeness. This concept is a combination of their and my own ideas. I understand skin here as an element that both connects and separates, brings closer and creates distance between the spectator and the film. It operates as a kind of interface between them. I relate skin to the questions of how films address us as sensuous and material beings and how we perceive films as material objects. Skin appears here in at least four senses: as the skin of the film, the skin of the spectator, the skin of the fictional character and the skin of reality. In the last chapter I shall illustrate the theory with a short analysis of aspects of Wong Kar-Wais film Ashes of Time (1994). The emergence and basic assumptions of the material turn

What I refer to as a material or bodily turn is not a coherent theoretical movement, but rather a body of related theories by several film scholars with different theoretical backgrounds. Their theories can be seen as a reaction against excessively eye-centred and cognitive theories, as well as theories that emphasise film as representation or narrative, but do not have much to say about film as experience. However, this is not a place to give an exhaustive account of this turn. Instead, I shall give a short outline of some of the reasons behind the turn. The material body of the spectator has not figured much in film theory after its early days, as Sobchack notes.1 In the 1920s the French theorist and film maker Jean Epstein wrote enthusiastically about the effects that close-ups had on him. The newly revealed facial movements in particular had downright corporeal effects on him as far as can be judged from his dramatic descriptions: Intermittent paroxysms affect me the way needles do. Pain is within reach. If I stretch out my arm I touch you and that is intimacy. I can count the eyelashes of this suffering. I would be able to taste the tears. Never before has a face turned to mine in that way. Ever closer it presses against me, and I follow it face to face. Its not even true that there is air between us; I consume it. It is in me like a sacrament.2 Despite such intense and clearly multisensory experiences Epstein goes on to claim that cinema is a fully eye-centred medium: Truly, the cinema creates a particular system of consciousness limited to a single sense. 3 This overemphasis on vision can be explained at least partly by the fact that cinema was silent and that cinematic technology in general was still in its early stages. It was a cinema of attractions attractions for eyes mostly. Sobchack argues that theorists have been embarrassed to admit the bodily effects of cinema. Talking about bodies and senses was apparently not considered scientific enough for academic film studies.4 But even before film studies was established as a discipline another theorist, German Siegfried Kracauer, drew attention to the material effects of cinema. In his writings from 1940s, which were part of the manuscript for his Theory of Film (1960) Kracauer claims that cinema does not communicate so much with the spectators consciousness as with her bodily being: The material elements that present themselves in film directly stimulate the material layers of the human being: his nerves, his senses, his entire physiological substance.5 However, this material emphasis is missing from Theory of Film except for one short chapter in which he writes that the seeing of cinematic movements causes kinaesthetic reactions such as muscular reflexes and motor impulses in the spectator. He points out that it appears that the spectator is engaged in such physiological effects before she is ready to respond intellectually. 6 Some other 2

theorists, such as Sergei Eistenstein, have made observations about film as a medium that engages several senses. His thoughts on the synchrony of senses were related to his idea of vertical montage.7 References to senses, sensations and bodily experiences can be found scattered here and there, but the overall emphasis has been on visual aspects of film experience. Film has been studied as an art form that appeals primarily to vision and intellect, or to vision and the unconscious. Sobchack has expressed her willingness to fill in the hole concerning the body that was put aside in film theory after the reign of the linguistic and (psycho)semiotic theories.8 In psychosemiotic theory film spectatorship was understood as a process of identification where the spectator identified primarily with the point of view of narration and thus became abstracted from her own body. According to psychoanalytic theory the ill-advised spectator pursues unified subjectivity through cinema. It was thought that this unity is possible to achieve only if appropriate distance is maintained both in relation to the spectacle and to the material conditions of perceiving.9 Sobchack thinks that references to sense experiences have been considered chiefly a rhetorical or poetic excess and that sensuousness has been located in language rather than in the body. It has been located on the cinema screen as a semiotic effect of cinematic representation, as a semantic quality of a film, or in the spectators psychic processes, cognitive operations, or physiological reflexes. She claims that behind this attitude is the supposition that human experience is primarily and fundamentally cognitive.10 Recent cognitive film theory tends to see even emotions as primarily cognitive.11 Even if we did not consider the standpoints of different theoretical trends, the visual emphasis is not surprising given that film is primarily an audiovisual medium. Yet everyone who has been to cinema knows that the experience encompasses more, that other senses are involved even if not as directly as sight and hearing. Theorists such as Sobchack and Marks are interested in explaining how sight and hearing activate other senses, most notably touch. They stress that the spectator is corporal and views with her whole body, not only with her eyes. Barbara M. Kennedy who deals with similar issues but from a strictly Deleuzean perspective says that look is never purely visual but also tactile, sensuous and material.12

Closeness and distance 3

In Sobchack and Markss theories the relationship of the spectator to film is more fluid and dynamic than in the earlier linguistic-based theories or cognitive theories even though in the latter the interactive character of film experience and the active role of the spectator has been emphasised. Sobchack and Markss theories are examples of the unravelling of the traditional spectator object of perception dualism which is to be seen in other recent theories too. Their concerns overlap in many respects. Both are interested in explaining how cinema touches us and which forms cinematic intimacy may take. The concept of skin is explicitly thematised in Marks as the skin of the film, by which she refers to the surface of the cinematic image and the haptic qualities of the image. Sobchack does not discuss skin so explicitly, but her discussion of the spectators body involves the idea of experiencing in ones own skin. Actually, the idea of skin was articulated already by Antonin Artaud in his essay Cinema and reality where he wrote: The human skin of things, the epidermis of reality: this is the primary raw material of cinema.13 However, for Artaud skin has a slightly different sense. The radically minded artist called for a cinema that would crack the surface of the material world and release the spiritual forces lurking behind. Yet, he also wanted cinema to affect, to shake, the viewer physically.14 Sobchack has attempted to give an accurate account of the manner in which cinema touches us. She stresses that even though cinematic sense experiences are not literal, they are not based on metaphorical thinking either. By this she means that we do not form metaphors cognitively after the film experience. She sees this bodily effect as more fundamental for film experience than intellectual processing. She claims that figurative understanding of films requires that we understand them literally through our bodies and that our bodies construct meanings even before we think about them consciously.15 Sobchack, whose film theory is based mainly on Maurice Merleau-Pontys philosophy, has argued that since we cannot partake of the sense experiences of fictional characters as fully as we perhaps would like to we instead turn, or film makes us turn, our intention toward our own subjectively lived bodies. This sudden turn of intention causes us to reflect reflexively on our own attempts to touch, taste or smell the film in other words, to touch ourselves touching, to smell ourselves smelling, etc. Such reflection is not fully conscious, however, because our intention in cinema is usually directed towards the screen events. But some vivid sense experience may cause it to bounce off towards ourselves and then back to the screen again. So in a way, she claims, we catch ourselves reflecting reflexively on our sensations. The turning 4

towards us happens, because cinema cannot satisfy fully our sensuous desire which it has awakened and so our body becomes a substitute for the fictional bodies. This turning of intention makes of us both subjects and objects: we can sense and be sensible. We become objects of our own perceptions.16 The relationship between the body and the cinematic representation that results from the turning of intention is something between literal and figural, real and as-if-real. According to Sobchack, this ambivalent relationship has a precise phenomenological structure: it is a non hierarchical and reversible relationship between body and language based on their mutual informing. Meaning is thus a combination of carnal matter and conscious meanings that emerge simultaneously from the lived body. The spectators body is a third term that functions as a mediator between experience and language, between the subjective (me) and the objective (film), uniting and separating them. Meanings are born neither in the spectators body nor in the cinematic representation, but in their chiasmatic relationship. This reversible relationship bridges the gap that was earlier thought to exist between the spectator and the film. 17 Here the influence of Merleau-Pontys late philosophy in which he strove to undo the immanence transcendence dualism is strongly felt. What is described above is cinemas indirect way of touching our skin. Sobchack claims, however, that cinematic touching is something more than metaphorical. If I understand Sobchack correctly, this more could be demonstrated in the following simple manner. Isobel Armstrong says in her book The Radical Aesthetic (2000) that films sudden movements and sounds affect us physically by altering the rhythm of our breathing for example. 18 The more we are absorbed in a film the more palpable such physical effects are. Sweaty hands and a pounding heart are familiar to all cinemagoers. So it can be said that even though films do not touch us literally they do have literal effects that we can feel on our skin and inside our bodies as well. Already Epstein noticed this when he described the effect of close-ups as needle pricks. Sobchack terms the film spectator cinesthetic subject which means that the spectators look is embodied or carnal, informed by other senses. The term is a combination of synesthesia and coenaesthesia. Synesthesia refers to the co-operation of the senses; their mutual reversibility and comprehensibility. In neurological research the existence of synesthesia has been proved scientifically. Some people are exceptionally sensitive to the transmodal functioning of the senses. They may sense sounds as colours, for example. But we all have experiences of such co5

functioning of senses, even if less strong ones. Many visual presentations familiar from everyday life are based on the transmodal functioning of the senses. The effectiveness of perfume and food advertisements for example is based on our ability to transform sight into taste or smell.19 Coenaesthesia in contrast refers to the way in which the roles and hierarchy of the senses that are equally available in principle vary according to historical and cultural factors. Sobchack refers to research that has set out to prove that among newborn babies all senses are equally strong but in the course of acculturation to a particular culture the hierarchy of senses is created. The body that is both a conscious subject and a material object works as the basis of the cinesthetic subject or film spectator.20 What Sobchack claims is that behind the intellectual activity involved in viewing films such as interpreting meanings is a bodily spectator. While she emphasises the loosening of the subject (viewer) object (film) dichotomy, other similar dichotomies that of mind and body, and rational and emotional are also unravelled in such understanding of film spectatorship. However, it seems to me that it is often precisely when film tries to make its characters intimate experiences palpable and put us into their situation that the cinematic surface becomes visible as a mediator between us and the fictional world. The cinematic surface then as a sort of transparent skin, skin of the film as Laura U. Marks says. It is this skin that stylistic devices, such as filters or arresting colours seem to be attached to. Such stylistic devices are often used to mark the image as subjective. Extreme close-ups and subjective point-of-view shots that reveal uncommon views of the world may also draw our attention to the intervention of the cinematic technology. 21 But noticing the cinematic skin does not necessarily distance us from the film. The transparent cinematic skin has many functions: it draws us close to the film in its materiality asking us to palpate the image with our eyes; it draws us to the fictional world in the psychic sense, and also makes our intention turn towards ourselves, our own skin just as Sobchack says. Cinematic sense of closeness paradoxically seems to include a sense of distance, but the closeness is not threatened by this distance, by the fact that we accept the films role as a mediator. Some of the makers of very intimate films, such as Andrey Tarkovsky, Krzysztof Kielowski or Wong KarWai, do not try to hide the presence of the medium, on the contrary. In addition, this way of seeing things sheds new light on the question of identification: we do not identify so much or at least not primarily with characters or the camera as the French film theorist Christian Metz claimed, but with the sense of materiality and presence of the whole experience.

Experiences of closeness and distance may also be highlighted with the concepts of optic and haptic images or optic and haptic visuality. These concepts have been adopted from art historian Alos Riegl by Laura U. Marks and modified for the purposes of film studies. With the notion of optic visuality Marks refers to situations where we can perceive the object clearly, from an optimal distance and point of view and in a three dimensional space. Optic images are representational. Haptic images in turn draw us close to the object, sometimes so close that the object becomes isolated from its context and we cannot perceive it properly. This is when the illusion of depth disappears. Haptic images reveal details, such as surfaces and textures, and stress the material presence of the object which makes it a tactile or mimetic representation, or epistemology. A mimetic relationship as defined by Walter Benjamin is based on a material contact at a certain moment. This can be seen as brushstrokes in a painting, for example. With the help of its technology cinema can imitate such a contact by trying to evoke the materiality of its object, the skin of reality, so to speak. The film material itself, such as grainy film stock or scratches on the film, may create haptic visuality too. This is when the skin of the film is revealed to us in the most concrete sense. Marks thinks that grainy and slightly blurred video images are the best examples of hapticity.22 The categorization of images into optic and haptic is useful in theory, but it is difficult to make distinctions between them in practice. An image that gives an optimal view of its object may still produce an intimate and haptic feel. I argue that ultimately it is the context in which the image appears that determines whether it is sensed as optic or haptic. It should be added that by haptic visuality Marks means not just individual images but a mode of visuality where boundaries between spectator and object of perception are blurred and hierarchies lowered. This is the most interesting aspect of her theory and it reveals similarities to Sobchacks thinking. If we cannot perceive the entire object in haptic visuality, we cannot rise above it and therefore cannot so easily assume an authoritative and harmful attitude towards it. Such thinking has relevance for ethics of viewing as it demands mutual recognition between the viewer and the object of perception, but this is a subject for another article.23 In Markss view cinema is an extension of bodily existence because meanings are not communicated only through signs but are experienced in an intelligent body. Though direct, embodied knowledge is culturally informed. Since incomplete, haptic visuality invites the spectator to complete the image in her own body, through her own experiences and memories, to feel her way through the image, so to speak. Unlike Sobchack she claims that this kind of tactile epistemology has to be approached through metaphor. 24 7

The term haptic visuality can refer to characteristics of both the spectator and the film. It can refer to the spectators tendency to perceive haptically, or to adopt a haptic attitude. However, a film itself may be haptic on purpose and thus encourage the spectator to perceive it haptically. In this respect film spectatorship, as well as the making of films, is culturally determined. I believe it can be assumed that if a films world is unfamiliar to us culturally, that is to say, if we for example do not know what the things presented feel, smell, taste or sound like, our haptic experience is likely to be rather poor, or at least poor in comparison to a native viewers experience. What I understand by purposeful hapticity is exemplified in my analysis of Ashes of Time in the last chapter. A short summary of the aims of the material or bodily turn is in order here. The turn is concerned with possible ways of talking or writing about film experience in such a manner that its holistic nature, its materiality is communicated. Theorists occupied with such questions ask how to translate qualities from one sense modality to another, how to communicate sense experiences with words. These are the same questions a filmmaker has to face as she tries to find counterparts for various sense experiences in the cinematic expression. The material turn also criticizes the eye-centred theories and tries to point out the limits of vision. Yet, as I pointed out in the beginning, we are not talking about a unified theory here. Nor does this approach aim to discard other theories or approaches. Rather, I see as its goal the completion of other theories as regards the bodily basis of cinema experience. Laura U. Marks has pointed out that the materialization of the object of perception is particularly important in the digital age, as we draw even further away from hapticity and increasingly have no way of knowing whether images have anything to do with reality. What is more, the material turn evokes theories that acknowledge that there is more to films than narratives. How the viewer makes sense of the narrative, or how she builds the fabula on the basis of syuzhet, as Bordwell says, is not the only or the most important aspect of film experience. The viewer does not merely follow a story and operate with hypotheses like a puzzle solver.25 Just as important is the affective and sensuous side of the experience. Films always arouse emotions and sensations and that makes the experience intimate and meaningful for us. What I have written about the bodily or material turn in film studies is just a fraction of what is going on in the study of visual culture more generally. The Deleuzean theorist Barbara M. 8

Kennedy gives her contribution to this discussion with her new definition of aesthetics which, interestingly enough, emphasises the material and the affective.26 The documentary theorist David MacDougall describes nicely the general idea that it is finally on the surface of our skins that films come into existence. He speaks not just about films but about images in general: Meaning is produced by our whole bodies, not just by conscious thought. We see with our bodies, and any image we make carries the imprint of our bodies; that is to say, of our being as well as the meanings we intend to convey. () The images we make () are, in a sense, mirrors of our bodies, replicating the whole of the bodys activity, with its physical movements, its shifting attention ()27

Images of touching touching images In this final chapter I shall give a short demonstration of the ideas above by using Ashes of Time (1994), a film with an intimate tone by the Hong Kong director Wong Kar-wai. My intention is not to give a detailed analysis of it, but rather to indicate some of its mechanisms that make it an embodied and haptic experience for the viewer. It is characteristic of Wong to disguise reality in order to emphasise its subjective aspects. This is evident in all of his films which are highly stylized. Ashes of Time is an indigenous version of the Chinese wuxia, or martial arts film, the heroes of which are chivalric warriors. All the elements of the genre are there, but only as a background for a suggestive story about memories, regrets and time. The story links several human destinies four males and four females in an ambiguous manner. At first viewing it is almost impossible to recognize their mutual relationships and even to tell the characters apart. The events take place in a desert-like landscape and in shady dwellings in the 12 th century China.28 Because its primary concern is not the plot, Ashes of Time enables a sensuous and contemplative experience by giving time for the spectator to notice details and associate the images with her own sense and other memories and experiences. The sense of time in this film is rather of thick duration than of thin linearity. The narration does not strive for a conclusion, or closure, but instead lingers on moments during which the characters are remembering something or during which we are shown views of landscapes while the voice-over narrates the thoughts of the main character. The film deals with emotions and moods. Ashes of Time makes it easy and tempting for the viewer to give up trying to make sense of the story and instead give herself over to the 9

sensuous flow of images. Once the spectator has realized that there will not be clear causality linking the images and scenes her thinking becomes more like a process of noticing and following fascinating visual and aural cues rather than a forward-directed process of solving the riddles of the plot. Ashes of Time sensitises tactile senses by emphasising textures of reality: of fabrics, water, earth, cliffs, human skin, horses skin, hair, etc. in numerous close-ups, or haptic images. Repeatedly we see hands or other body parts literally caressing skin or some other material, but skin appears also in a more metaphorical fashion, as the skin of the film. By this I mean that from time to time the image ceases to be a representation of three-dimensional space and is transformed into a twodimensional plane. During such moments the contents of the image appear to be attached to the surface like in a painting. Sequences of movement and static moments alternate in the film. It is particularly during moments of stasis, of carefully composed images, that the skin of the film is activated in the viewers vision in the above-mentioned sense. Many landscape shots look like paintings in their two-dimensionality and immobility, but they may burst into life suddenly and the three-dimensionality is restored. Some of the landscape shots are abstract and their content is difficult to perceive immediately. Before we can make out depth-cues the image appears for a moment like a two-dimensional plane of shapes and colours. In fact, there is a constant tension between surface, or the skin, and depth. Alternatively the image retains its three-dimensionality, but a sort of transparent layer appears between the spectator and the depth depicted in the image. This happens for instance when something is seen through a thin fabric, a cloud of dust, haze or a ray of sunlight. In such images there is a lot of movement both near and far and we must discern the farther away objects through flickering lights and shadows, or something else that plays on the cinematic skin. Various physical vibrations that operate both inside individual shots and in scenes keep us sensuously engaged throughout the film. It could be said that the kinetic potential of images is made the most of in Ashes of Time. Wongs approach to narration is not to stitch the spectator into the narrative in the classical manner. While watching Ashes we do not have the sensation of occupying the best possible position in the middle of the events (optic visuality), but the sensation of being touched by the events touched in a broad sense is much stronger. Throughout the film the graininess of the image adds to the hapticity. This is particularly notable in images of the dry desert landscape, in which the grains of the image are like grains of sand in 10

the desert. It is as if the image was beginning to dissolve before our eyes just like the memories of the melancholy protagonists. The landscape changes into a mirage or maybe it already is. Here the materiality of the film itself is sensed. As the images do not strive for clarity and are not always causally linked, sense of sight and cognition as ways of knowing are exceeded. At this point we can just relax and start feeling the atmosphere with our bodies just as the characters seem to be doing. One of the most sensuous scenes is the one in which the female character Peach Blossoms seeks solace by caressing her horse. Close-ups show her bare skin against the horses hair and fingers stroking the mane. The tips of her toes touch the surface of the water in which the horse is standing. Another female character relieves her pent-up desire by rubbing herself against a tree trunk the branches of which stretch towards the spectator like giant fingers. Despite the emotionally charged character portrayals we rather identify with the sense of materiality present in the images than with the characters. As Stephen Teo points out, these haptic elements do not have so much to do with the narrative as with the tactile sensation that the director wants us to feel. () Like a textile artist, Wong weaves together the pieces of his narrative with the use of textures.29 As I understand it, haptic visuality is not inherently antinarrative, but it does seem that filmmakers who create such images are more interested in evoking moods and memories than their more plot-oriented colleagues. In fact, the hapticity of Ashes of Time is linked to its anti-genre, and thus also anti-plot, features. There are at least two reasons why we are not to take martial arts as seriously in this film as in more genre-bound films. Firstly, the action scenes are so hectic that we cannot perceive them as part of a coherent narrative but simply take them as kinaesthetic flux that appeals first of all to our senses. It is almost impossible to see who are involved in the fights and how they move. In addition, it is not entirely clear why there are fights in the first place. Anyway, it does not matter so much, because only two of the main characters are involved in the fighting scenes and there seems to be a more important concern in their lives love. Secondly, most of the time framing is so tight that we see only a fraction of the actions going on, while usually martial arts films show the events on a grand scale. The tight framings can be interpreted as part of the subjectivity of the narration and the themes. The narrative draws us close to the characters and to their intimate micro-worlds.30 In this article I have asked what closeness could mean on bodily level in film experience. The theoretical framework of my discussion was based on two examples of recent film theories that 11

emphasize the embodied nature of film viewing formed. I examined and developed further the idea of skin which appears in the thinking of Vivian Sobchack and Laura U. Marks in order to flesh out the nature of the material embrace that takes place between the viewer and the film. The idea behind the concept of skin was to stress that the closeness that the viewer feels is more than just the psychological identification process; that film is literally felt on, and inside, the skin. The challenge of this kind of approach is how to put such an experience into words. I hope I have managed to come at least close enough to this experience through my brief analysis.

Bibliography Abel, Richard (ed.) 1988. French Film Theory and Criticism: A History/Anthology, 1917-1959. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Armstrong, Isobel 2000. The Radical Aesthetic. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. Brunette, Peter 2005. Wong Kar-wai. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Hansen, Miriam 1993. With Skin and Hair: Kracauers Theoryof Film, Marseille 1940. Critical Inquiry 19, 437469. Jamieson, Lee 2007. The Lost Prophet of Cinema: The Film Theory of Antonin Artaud. Senses of Cinema 44. URL http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/07/44/film-theory-antoninartaud.html (link checked: February 2008) Kennedy, Barbara M. 2000. Deleuze and Cinema. The Aesthetics of Sensation. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Kracauer, Siegfried 1960. Theory of Film. London: Oxford University Press. MacDougall, David 2006. The Corporeal Image. Film, Ethnography, and the Senses. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Lippitt, Akira Mizuta 1999. Phenomenologies of the Surface: Radiation-Body-Image. In Gaines, Jane M. and Michael Renov (eds.) Collecting Visible Evidence. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Marks, Laura U. 2000. The Skin of the Film. Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Marks, Laura U. (2002) Touch. Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Sobchack, Vivian (1992), The Address of the Eye. A Phenomenology of Film Experience. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 12

Sobchack, Vivian (2004), Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press. Teo, Stephen 2005. Wong Kar-wai. London: British Film Institute.

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Sobchack 2004, 54 55. Abel 1988, 236; 239. 3 Ibid., 240. 4 Sobchack 2004, 55 58. 5 Hansen 1993, 458. See also Sobchack 2004, 55. 6 Kracauer 1960, 157159. 7 These ideas can be found in Eisenstein, Sergei 1986. Film Sense. London: Faber and Faber. 8 Sobchack 2004, 9 Hansen 1993, 464. See also Sobchack 2004, 55. 10 Sobchack 2004, 58 60. See also Shaviro1993, for example 25 27. 11 See for example Plantinga, Carl and Greg M. Smith (eds.) 1999. Passionate Views. Film, Cognition, and Emotion. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press and Tan, Ed S. 1996. Emotion and the Structure of Narrative Film. Film as an Emotion Machine. Mahwah, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. 12 Kennedy 2000, 3. 13 Quoted in Lippit 1999, 7980. 14 Jamieson 2007. 15 Sobchack 2004, 63 66. 16 Ibid., 76 79. 17 Ibid. 73 84. 18 Amstrong 2000. 19 Sobchack 2004, 67 72. 20 Sobchack 2004, 67 69. 21 A good example is the first subjective shot from the point of view of the recovering Julie in Krzysztof Kielowskis Blue (1993). The film exemplifies also in other way the intervention of the cinematic skin. 22 Marks 2000, 143 145, 162-163; Marks 2002, xii xiii, 1 20. 23 Maurice Merleau-Ponty has argued that the fact that perceiving is embodied has ethical significance, because it implies that an ethical view is a felt experience rather than something that can be understood on a purely conceptual level. (See Stadler, Jane 2001, Intersubjective, Embodied, Evaluative Perception: A Phenomenological Approach to the Ethics of Film. Quarterly Review of Film & Video 19, 237 248.) 24 Marks 2000, 162163; Marks 2002, xii-xiii, 120. Marks uses the concept haptic visuality to analyse multicultural films whose makers are for the most part people who have moved to a foreign culture. These very personal films deal with cultural differences and culture-related memories, such as memories of people, objects and sense experiences. Film theories that emphasise the need for (physical or psychic) distance and rational knowing are inadequate for the analysis of such experiences. 25 See Bordwell, David 1985. Narration in the Fiction Film. London: Methuen. 26 See Kennedy, Barbara 2000. Deleuze and Cinema. The Aesthetics of Sensation. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. 27 MacDougall 2006, 3. 28 Teo (2005, 66) says that the characters costumes date from the Song and Jin periods of the 12th century. 29 Teo 2005, 79. 30 See also Brunette 2005, 38.