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BO O K R EVI EWS CO M PTES R E N D U S

THE SKIN OF THE FILM: INTERCULTURAL CINEMA, EMBODIMENT, AND THE SENSES Laura U. Marks Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2000, 298 pp. Reviewed by Donato Totaro

The Skin of the Film is about what author Laura U. Marks calls intercultural cinema, meaning Canadian, U.S., and British films and videos made by people who, by either birth or migration, find themselves caught between their own minority culture and dominant Western culture. As Marks acknowledges, intercultural is a somewhat delicate term, encompassing the wide range of terms that refer to minority/majority power relations and transplanted cultures such as slavery, apartheid, postcolonial, First Nations, refugee, visible minority, exiled, migr, multicultural, and Third World. Exactly how intercultural stands in relation to these other terms is not fully articulated. However, Marks does not assign much conceptual weight to the term, but simply uses it to represent the experience of not being confined or defined by a single culture.

Hence what the films represent theoretically or epistemologically is clear, but exactly which films fall under the term intercultural is less clear. For example, intercultural includes not only the diaspora (immigrants, exiled, displaced peoples), but their offspring and later generations as well. The majority of works discussed in this book are directed by people with first-hand intercultural experience: Arabic/Middle Eastern, African, Indian, Inuit, and First Nations film/video makers. But there are also works directed by white Western directors whose subject and style embody intercultural qualities: among others, Bill Viola, Chris Marker, Phil Hoffman, Stephen Frears, Alain Resnais, and Jean Rouch. This is perhaps a reflection of Markss desire that intercultural cinema evolve into a fullfledged genre, rather than remain a semi-ghettoized movement. The condition of being in-between cultures initiates a search for new forms of visual expression. This leads to the hypothesis that many of these works call upon memories of the senses in order to represent the experiences of people living in diaspora.

CANADIAN JOURNAL OF FILM STUDIES REVUE CANADIENNE DTUDES CINMATOGRAPHIQUES VOLUME 10 NO. 1 PP 106-127

And, unlike Western ocularcentrism, which values sight as the greatest epistemological sense, intercultural cinema embraces the proximal senses (smell, taste, touch) as a means of embodying knowledge and cultivating memory. Although Marks spends considerable time explaining how senses are culturally embodied, and not wholly natural and primitivist, she refrains from making generalizations about how any particular Western or non-Western culture experiences the world sensorially, since the mix of cultures, and the spread of cultural knowledge can overlap to create a sensorial hybrid. This is especially crucial to her corpus, since it consists mainly of filmmakers who are caught in-between cultures, moving from their country of origin to a Western country, or in the case of second generation Westerners, attempting to balance their non-Western ancestral culture with their Western identity. Since many of these filmmakers were either born or trained or now live in the West, they critique ocularcentrism from a Western intellectual and academic perspective. Markss goal is not so much to culturally determine the senses, but to find culture within the body. The method of Markss argument is first, to demonstrate (using, Bergson, Merleau-Ponty, Vivian Sobchack, Walter Benjamin, and others) that the body has a visceral, mimetic relationship

to the external world that, like memory, is both cerebral and emotional. And secondly, that cinema, as part of the external world, can also embody a many-sided sensual experience. Echoing Rudolf Arnheim, who believed that cinema thrived on its inherent limitations, Marks argues that intercultural filmmakers attempt to create memory-images out of the mediums sensorial limitations. Therefore the cinematic language of intercultural cinema is suspicious of conventional visuality (to see is to believe), and presents knowledge through gaps, silences, and absencesan expression of the cultural silencing that many of these artists experience. In defining intercultural cinema as that which engages the full sensorial spectrum, Markss greatest challenge is to demonstrate how cinema appeals to the senses it can not technically represent (touch, smell, and taste), and how these sensory experiences encode cultural memory. This leads to the books central idea: haptic visuality, a term she derives from the art historian Alos Riegls distinction between haptic and optical images. Haptic vision is a tactile-based, closer-to-the-body form of perception, where the eyes themselves function like organs of touch. As Marks explains, in optical visuality the eye perceives objects from a distance far enough to isolate them as forms in space, and therefore assumes a separation between the viewing

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body and the object. Haptic visuality, on the other hand, 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. Haptic visuality does not depend on the viewer identifying with a recognizable figure/character but on a more sensuous bodily relationship between the viewer and the subject. Without representational mediation, the relationship between viewer and image is less one of viewer-engaging-object, than as a dynamic subjectivity between looker and image. The haptic image is less complete, requiring the viewer to contemplate the image as a material presence rather than an easily identifiable cog in a narrative wheel. By contrast, the optical image comes equipped with all the resources necessary to be complete, self-sufficient, and legible. Based on the textual descriptions provided by Marks, the formal and stylistic properties of haptic visuality in cinema include: synesthetic effects; changes in focus, graininess, underand overexposure, unclear imagery, and decaying film and video; optical printing and scratching on the emulsion; video effects and formats such as Pixelvision; the use of extreme closeups, and alternating between film/video media. (To imagine a painting analogy, think of Impressionist and

Post-Impressionist painting as haptic cinema, and 19th Century realist painting as optical cinema). Although Marks relies on several thinkers to support and develop her arguments, the most important of them is Gilles Deleuze. This is fitting, given that he is a thinker who is, like intercultural cinema itself, interstitial, straddled between film and philosophy, academic philosophy and free form speculative thought. Although Marks employs Deleuzian terms, her more profound debt is to Deleuzes methodology. Deleuzes cinema project is about concept building and thinking. Cinema is an object to think with, rather than think about. Taking this as her cue, Marks treats intercultural films as a source of knowledge, parallel to the written word. The films and videos she studies embody speculative and philosophical thought and what Marks calls non-visual knowledge. The nature of this non-visual knowledge is directly connected to Markss intention of drawing out the political implications of Deleuzes theory. This entails, among other things, linking Deleuzes movement-image (the dominant narrative film form in which shots are linked by rational cause and effect and sensory-motor schema) to official history, and, conversely, linking Deleuzes time-image (post-World War II European and art/modernist films in which a breakdown in the sensory-motor system

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gives way to incommensurable, nonrational editing links) to intercultural cinema. Official history and dominant narrative forms value knowledge and memory acquired through the senses of sight and hearing, whereas knowledge and memory that is not encoded through auditory or visual means can slip away from official history, which is where intercultural cinema operates, and where intercultural cinema gains its political edge. To make this important point, Marks relies on Deleuzes philosophical mentor, Henri Bergson, and his belief that perception and memory are multisensory. Equally important is Bergsons view that perception is a condition of both individual consciousness and external reality (something that is partly out there and partly within). From Bergson, Marks politicizes perception by arguing that perception and memory are conditioned by cultural needs. Hence, even though intercultural cinema often employs experimental form and highly perso-nal subject matter, it does so at the service of collective memory, rather than individual, personal memory. One could say that The Skin of the Filmis an attempt to erect a politicized Proustian account of cinema, articula-ting the many cinematic madeleines. While The Skin of the Film contains a fair amount of close textual analysis, it is also rich in theory, borrowing from the

fields of phenomenology, philosophy, cultural anthropology, art history, and cognitive science. There is not enough space here to discuss the many other thinkers woven into Markss thoughts, but her book makes ample use of borrowed terminology, including aura, fetishism, mimesis and fossilization, in addition to her Deleuzian vocabulary. Although her terms are always well defined and clearly incorporated into her overall arguments, the cumulative effect of this theoretical eclecticism can at times be dizzying. Fortunately, at the center of it all is a straightforward premise which continually grounds the theory. In the end, the reader is engaged and challenged by what is an original and well-thought-out critical approach to a group of overlooked, hard to view films and videos. Some readers may benefit by considering the application of haptic visuality to a broader spectrum of films (as is the books design), and come to appreciate well-known films from this new perspective. Most strikingly for this reader, the term corresponds well to the films of Georgian filmmaker Sergei Paradjanov, Russian directors Andrei Tarkovsky and Alexandr Sokurov, and a number of recent Iranian films that feature characters with a powerful tactile dependence on the world, such as Gabbeh, The Apple, The Color of Paradise, The Silence, and The Wind Will Carry Us. By explaining how cinema may engage all the senses (and sense memory), The

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Skin of the Film has given concrete form to something that film viewers have been unconsciously experiencing for generations.

The University of Warwick


AMERICAN MOVIE AUDIENCES: FROM THE TURN OF THE CENTURY TO THE EARLY SOUND ERA Edited by Melvyn Stokes and Richard Maltby London: British Film Institute, 1999, 186 pp. Reviewed by Charles Tepperman

The resulting exchange included several scholars and demonstrated the need for more finely detailed research on the composition and behavior of audiences in New York and elsewhere. Several authors who participated in the Cinema Journal debate (Judith Thissen, William Uricchio and Roberta Pearson) erican MovieAudiences. have contributed to Am The book is divided into three sections The Social Formation of Audiences, The Politics of Audiences, and Audiences and the Coming of Sound although the distinction between parts one and two is difficult to grasp. As the essays themselves make clear, all of these audiences are socially formed and those formations have significant ideological implications. Not surprisingly, New York is the setting for three quite different accounts of nickelodeon exhibition and reception. Taken together, they persuasively demonstrate that despite drawn-out debates over the number and location of nickelodeons in New York, there is still much more to learn about the early film audiences in that city. Judith Thissen examines the experience of Jewish movie-goers in the Lower East Side of Manhattan between 1905 and 1914. Though originally a break with legitimate Yiddish theatre, theatres which showed films were, according to Thissen, far from instruments of Americanization, as they

This new collection of essays provides several examples of impressive historical research on silent and early sound movie audiences. Most of the essays are meticulously documented, presenting detailed case-studies of American audiences of the silent period. Studying audiences raises a variety of theoretical and methodological problems and has been the subject of considerable scholarly discussion in recent years. The editors of this volume frame their anthology in terms of the debate published in Cinema Journal in the wake of Ben Singers 1996 article, Manhattan Nickelodeons: New Data on Audiences and Exhibitors. Singer was responding to Robert C. Allens writing on the same subject, almost two decades before, and he included a critique of Allens evidence and methodology.

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