Introduction: Screening Embodiment

Abstract

The idea for this special issue of Paragraph on the theme ‘Screening Embodiment’ emerged from our long-standing research interests regarding the interrelationships between film, gender and the body. The title of the issue aims to capture some of the varied ways in which these relationships can be conceived. Etymologically, the word ‘screen’ has roots in the Old High German term skrank which refers to a bar, barrier or fence. Film itself, as a photosensitive material and surface across which images are inscribed and through which light is projected, acts as a filter and forms a site of representation. It can be understood as a material that mediates the (real or imagined) world. From cinema, to video, to the interface of the World Wide Web, the concept of the ‘screen’ touches upon the ways in which the body is symbolized and imagined, sifting bodies into those deemed acceptable or unacceptable to put on view, constructing ideals of corporeality and bodily comportment. In this context, screen images are marked by the processes of mediation that accompany their production and reception, as they potentially both proffer and withhold bodies. In turn, films such as Decasia (Dir. Bill Morrison, USA, 2002) and Lyrical Nitrate (Dir. Peter Delpeut, Netherlands, 1991) employ found footage from silent cinema to draw attention to a carnal, sensual dimension to the medium that is often overlooked, seen through, screened out.1 Contemporary digital films and videos also possess a material substrate, a body, which is often disavowed.2 To screen any film, then, is always implicitly (or, rarely, explicitly) to broadcast embodied dimensions of the medium. The changing grain of film stock, manifested through phenomena such as chromatics and image clarity, embodies the history of motionpicture technology. Writing about film as a kind of embodiment, however, may act to screen this body even as it strives to describe it. Putting what is seen, heard, felt on screen into words is a significant challenge.