From the Story of an Eye to a Cinema of Bodies

Abstract

This chapter takes as its point of entry a brief reading of one of art cinema’s most provocative scenes—the eye-slicing sequence in Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí’s Un Chien Andalou (1929)—and considers how this affectively-charged example from film history invites a thoroughgoing reflection the relationship between gender, affect and cinema. The chapter goes on to offer a synoptic account of some key developments in film theory from the 1970s—a period dominated by psychoanalytic and semiotic theory—to the early 1990s, which saw a repudiation of this paradigm and a call for an “affective turn” in the field of film and media studies. Drawing in particular on the writing by Linda Williams, Steven Shaviro and Vivian Sobchack, the chapter presents some of the conceptual and methodological contributions that these thinkers offered to scholars of gender and film. In addition to a discussion of more recent work on feminist film-phenomenology and multisensory film theory—two areas of growth in recent years—this chapter also considers how writing on cinematic affect is starting to inform work in the field of masculinities studies and trans cinema.