Description
By (author) Marks Laura U.
Short /annotation
How can filmmakers working between cultures use cinema, a visual medium, to transmit that physical sense of place and culture? This book 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.
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.
Table of contents
List of IllustrationsPrefaceAcknowledgementsIntroduction1. The Memory of Images2. The Memory of Things3. The Memory of Touch4. The Memory of the SensesConclusion: The Portable SensoriumNotesBibliographyFilmography/VideographyIndex
Review quote
“The promise of Laura Marks’s The Skin of Film is the promise of thinking and living between critical discourses, experiences and cultures: the willingness to explore an embodied response capable of meeting the ‘hybrid microcultures’ of global modernity; the power to transform the memory of images, things, and the senses into ‘sensuous geographies’ of touch, smell and rhythm that inhabit and drift into a world increasingly divided between the policed frontier and the ‘placeless’ metropolis; and finally, the capacity to dwell in the critical interstice that allows thought to articulate itself on the edge of the unthought. – Tollof Nelson, CiNéMAS
Review quote
“[A] fascinating exploration of the ways that diasporic filmmakers have excavated, rediscovered, and reignited cultural memories through appeals to multisensorial forms of recollection that challenge the Western cinematic reliance on visual imagery . . . . [H]ighly informative and will introduce the reader to many intercultural works that have previously gone unnoticed. Marks’s clear exuberance for her work and passion for the films she discusses also shine through. Highly recommended.” – Avi Santo, The Velvet Light Trap
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“[A]n important document and substantial treatment of many sometimes ephemeral works of intercultural cinema. . . . Marks draws on a rich and somewhat dazzling array of theoretical sources and disciplinary fields. . . . The Skin of the Film als
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