Phenomenology of In-betweenness: The Shimmering Images in Jane Schoenbrun’s Films

In 2004 French writer/director Claire Denis remarked that her films are sometimes unbalanced, a comment made with reference to her eighth feature film, L'intrus (2004), which like the earlier Trouble Every Day (2001), and her most recent film Les Salauds (2013), features protagonists involved in graphic acts of murder and/or torture. Denis offers little psychological depth to her protagonists in these films, preferring to keep the focus on the surface of their bodies. As characters move through rituals of killing (Trouble Every Day), heart transplant surgery (L'intrus), or episodes of sexual transgression (Les salauds), stylized cinematography and mise-en-scène breaks down the line between object and subject, keeping the spectator close to the graphic and gory action unfolding on screen. This article explores the frequently irrational, out of control and mutating bodies featured within these confronting works. Considering Vivian Sobchack's writings on ‘self-touching’ and Laura Marks' theory of ‘haptic visuality’, I investigate how these films engage the audience using a sense of touch, as well as sight and sound. I argue that Denis has subverted traditional patterns of film viewing by employing stylistic approaches that attempt to destabilize her protagonists' bodies, and by extension, that of the embodied film spectator.

This article analyses Sally Potter’s use of cinematic techniques (haptic visuality) and literary resources (poetic language, theatrical strategies and intertextual allusions) in Yes (2004) as a means to explore female subjectivity and the empowering potential of intersubjectivity in the cinematic medium. The analysis offers a feminist reading of subjectivity as a narrative and spectatorial construct. Kaja Silverman’s psychoanalytical semiotics, Vivian Sobchack’s feminist phenomenological take on cinematic experience and Julia Kristeva’s sujet en procès and revolutionary poetic language provide the theoretical background for a close reading of Sally Potter’s film distinguished by a knowing, transmedial reaffirmation of third-wave, intersectional feminist theory, as well as modernist literary intertexts, particularly James Joyce’s Ulysses.

The recent turn to phenomenology in film studies has, in the first instance, refocused attention on the role of the body and multifaceted sensory perception in spectators hip. In the second instance, it has been able to acknowledge the different qualities of moving image types, styles and genres and the role they play in the production of embodied perception so as to avoid a totalising system of cinematic viewership. Under this model, Jennifer Barker’s The Tactile Eye (2009) explores the potential for experimental films to elicit tactile exploration of their textural surfaces and the propensity for the chase film to produce heighted musculature and kinaesthetic reaction. Vivian Sobchack’s numerous essays in Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture (2004) examine how diverse films and media texts are able to make meaning out of bodily sense. Elena del Río’s Deleuze and the Cinemas of Performance: Powers of Affection (2008) utilises a Deleuzean reading to explain the way films with performing bodies create affective intensity. In a similar vein is one of the most widely used texts, and most useful for this study of 3D cinema: Laura U. Marks’ The Skin of the Film (2000). She examines the way haptic visuality is produced by a specific mode of cinema which, in her book, she identifies as intercultural cinema: films which, when dealing with ‘the power-inflected spaces of diaspora, (post- or neo-) colonialism and cultural apartheid,’ are concerned with embodiment and sense perception (2000: 1).

Camera Work

ABSTRACTThe article argues that the recent output by a group of South Slavic female directors has created a synergy of thematic preoccupations and stylistic choices which constitute a new coherent development. Previously dominated by male figures, the region’s film industries have suffered a series of political and economic setbacks in the last three decades which additionally reduced opportunities for women. The authors discussed include Jasmila Žbanić (Grbavica aka Esma’s Secret, 2006), Aida Begić (Children of Sarajevo, 2012), Mirjana Karanović (A Good Wife, 2016), Ivona Juka (You Carry Me, 2015), and Hana Jušić (Quit Staring at My Plate, 2016). I rely on theoretical works by Elaine Scarry, Cathy Caruth, and Dominick LaCapra as a foundation for discussion of representation of trauma, as well as on Vivian Sobchack’s and Laura U. Marks’ phenomenologically informed approach to film interpretation, in particular their understanding of the role of the non-ocular senses in evoking an affective response in the spectator. Having focused on post-war themes, the five South Slavic female directors mobilize the mechanism of haptic visuality to appeal to the spectator’s embodied intelligence and his/her empathic involvement related to the traumas suffered by the female protagonists. In these films the violated and injured bodies serve as a site of cultural encoding and speak in place of the characters, some of whom have been silenced. Their traumas become a vehicle for soul-searching, resulting in substitution of the loss with a future-oriented agency. This space between the character’s trauma and her agency becomes an active ground for engaging the viewer through a set of representational strategies which, in turn, hold an inherent call to his/her own agency. Such politics of viewing suggested by these directors highlights an ethical dimension and lends agency to the region overwhelmed by narratives of victimization.

This book looks at a much-debated phenomenon in contemporary cinema: the re-emergence of filmmaking practices – and, by extension, of theoretical approaches – that give precedence to cinema as the medium of sensation. France offers an intriguing case in point here. A specific sense of momentum comes from the work of a group of filmmakers bent on exploring cinema's unique capacity to move us both viscerally and intellectually. Though extremely diverse, the films of Olivier Assayas, Catherine Breillat, Claire Denis, Vincent Dieutre, Bruno Dumont, Bertrand Bonello, Philippe Grandrieux, Pascal Ferrand and Nicolas Klotz, to name but a few, demonstrate a characteristic awareness of cinema's sensory impact and transgressive nature. In effect, with its interweaving of theoretical enquiry and film analysis, and its emphasis on the materiality of film, Cinema and Sensation's approach could also apply to the work of comparable filmmakers like David Lynch, Abel Ferrara or Wong Kar-Wai. Cinema and Sensation draws on the writings of Antonin Artaud, George Bataille and Gilles Deleuze, whilst also responding to the continuing interest in theories of haptic visuality (Laura Marks) and embodied spectatorship (Vivian Sobchack) inspired by Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology.Explored as forms of embodied thought, the films are shown to offer alternative ways of approaching key existential and socio-cultural questions: desire, violence and abjection as well as the growing supremacy of technology, globalisation, exile and exclusion – these are the themes and issues that appear embedded here in the very texture of images and sounds.

This study investigates how contemporary women directors challenge and reconfigure the patriarchal logic of the male gaze through strategies of haptic visuality and narrative spacing. Using qualitative textual analysis, the study examines cinematography, mise-en-scne, sound design, and the role of silence and omission in shaping spectatorship. The findings reveal that Sciammas film generates intersubjective intimacy through reciprocal gazes, tactile imagery, and affective silences, while Triet destabilizes courtroom conventions by withholding visual certainty, emphasizing sound as embodied perception, and foregrounding epistemological gaps. Both films displace the spectator from a passive to an active interpretive position, thereby re-conceptualizing feminist theories of gaze, touch, and narrative. The research concludes that feminist aesthetics are not fixed but context-sensitive: in the romantic genre, they cultivate intimacy and desire; in the courtroom drama, they expose instability and power asymmetries. These results underscore the need to revise feminist film theory in dialogue with contemporary cinematic practice and highlight its continued relevance to cultural politics in the twenty-first century.

Regarded as a landmark in Brazilian film history, Susana Amaral’s A hora da estrela/The Hour of the Star (1985) received critical acclaim when it was released in the 1980s, and continues to receive scholarly attention, especially from feminist, ideological and sociological perspectives. This article examines the film’s use of aesthetic strategies that produce affective and sensorial experiences from a phenomenological position, rather than providing a sociological reading of the protagonist’s condition as a migrant. I argue that Amaral’s focus on the film frame and duration, which favours the close-up, mirror images and still-life images, reveals the protagonist’s minimal gestures, which give rise to affects. From a discussion of the concepts of the time-image, haptic visuality, mimesis, I contend that these embodied and affective spatial experiences construct the protagonist’s sense of self and subjectivity instead of a psychologizing portrayal of her condition as a migrant.

This article examines how the landscape photography of bogs in Rachel Giese's The Donegal Pictures addresses the pressing concerns occluded by ubiquitous tourist photography, lending itself to an analysis of contemporary visual culture and bogs. This article also argues that Giese's photographs of the Irish landscape can be viewed as part of visual culture using what Laura Marks has coined in The Skin of the Film (2000) as haptic visuality—seeing as tactile—as an alternative strategy of photography in order to revision bogs as a sensory experience. Through this tactile quasiexperience the viewer develops a deeper relationship with the landscape and the photograph, thereby bridging the separation between viewer and object in what media scholars have called “embodied spectatorship.” Once these two traditionally opposed points of view gain an aligned embodiment, a sustained connection with the object (in this case the bog landscape) can enhance the empathy and responsibility of the viewer toward this enigmatic ecosystem. This article dispels previous notions of Irish landscape photography while also focusing on a specific region in Ireland by conflating the present environmental sensitivity of bogs with a focused consciousness around photographic representation.

Background:Depersonalization and derealization (DPDR) syndrome results from complex interwoven sensory motor experiences seen across psychiatric disorders. There is sparse literature from India on DPDR symptoms, their clinical and research utility. This study focuses frequency of coding the diagnosis of DPDR (ICD-10) and critical discussion about its clinical and research utility.Methods:A retrospective review of case files coded under ICD code F48.1 was carried out for 10 years and details were systematically analyzed for age, gender, duration, phenomenology, comorbid diagnosis, and pharmacological treatment.Results:Fourteen patients received the diagnosis of DPDR. Mean duration of DPDR syndrome was 6 years (standard deviation [SD] = 2.2) while mean age of presentation to hospital was 24 years (SD = 2.5). Tactile imagery (50%), self-environmental integration (42%), and dream-reality integration (28%) were the major themes. Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors were used as primary medication for 65% of patients.Conclusion:Isolated DPDR syndrome has been diagnosed very rarely in recent past. Reasons may include ignoring the comorbid DPDR coding, inability to articulate DPDR symptoms, inadequate documentation and misinterpretation of symptoms or actually less prevalence of DPDR syndrome in India. Considering scanty literature on DPDR as a primary diagnosis, more studies are required to identify the actual prevalence and coding of DPDR in future.

Image reproduction has expanded our knowledge of the world’s great art collections, but the viewing experience of a reproduction as against an actual work is altered. Images evoke a range of sensory, emotional and cognitive experiences that go beyond the merely visual. In particular, paintings displayed in galleries are presumed to hold preeminence for spectators over reproductions of them. We might be said to engage a range of senses in a more active manner in the presence of a painting. This preeminence emerges in the availability for inspection of information about physical relief that we can add to the colour, texture and form - information that is available in both paintings and reproductions. This study of Manet’s A Bar at the Folies Bergere by a team of artists and psychologists using eye-tracking technology tests this hypothesis, asking whether the availability of relief information changes the pattern of fixations for spectators viewing the picture. Four expert and four novice spectators viewed the original painting in situ at the Courtauld gallery, and sixteen novices viewed a to-scale reproduction of the picture. All spectators had their eye movements recorded as they verbally described the image and their response to it.

Redeeming the Aural:Amodal Resonance and Media History Ian Mason Kennedy (bio) Sounding New Media: Immersion and Embodiment in the Arts and Culture by Frances Dyson. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009. Pp. 262. $60.00 cloth, $28.95 paper. In tracing the hitherto overlooked influence of sound on the theory and practice of new media art, Frances Dyson’s Sounding New Media offers a productive point of entry into historicizing 1990s cyberculture and the newness of new media. Dyson’s central argument is twofold. First, Dyson claims that the features that supposedly mark new media as new—qualities such as tactile interactivity and total sensory immersion—have roots in older, predominantly sonic media (e.g., radio, telephone, and early electroacoustic sound art). In developing this first claim, Dyson argues additionally that “sound is simultaneously neglected and appropriated by the rhetorics of immersion and embodiment that have inaugurated new media discourse and have announced new media as ‘new’” (6). That is, for Dyson, the rhetorical frameworks through which we make sense of sound—the distinction between original sound and recorded sound, for instance, or between signal and noise—have quietly and tacitly laid the groundwork for the visual and tactile tropes we tend to use when we talk about digital media. At stake, then, is the redemption of the aural in a regime that only seems to be dominated by other sense modalities. Although Sounding New Media offers a compelling impressive account of new media, the book has greater consequences for what has become a central problem for [End Page 507] scholarship on audiovisual media in general—namely, the relationship between the modal and the amodal. By modal, I mean the idea that sensory experience differentiates into discrete modalities: sight, sound, touch, smell, and so on. In contrast, to describe sensation as amodal is to emphasize how any given perceptual event cannot be reduced to just one modality. When a car speeds by me, for instance, I not only hear and see the car but also feel a rush of air and a slight rumble. In cinema and media studies, the following questions arise: How do media such as the cinema and television use sight and sound to evoke sensations that resonate in the human body amodally, beyond merely the visual and sonic modalities? And, for that matter, how can we identify ourselves as scholars in one modality—musicology, sound studies, visual culture, and so on— while doing justice to the richness and complexity of resonance among multiple modalities? Dyson answers these questions by using a sonic figure: the embodied voice. The dominant tendency in cinema and media studies, however, has been to answer in another register: that of touch. The aspect of touch that has done the most theoretical work is the reflexivity of self-touching—in particular, the experience of touching one’s left hand with one’s right hand. Especially in film theory, scholars such as Jennifer Barker and Vivian Sobchack have taken this figure from Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who uses it to describe the fundamental reversibility of subject and object in perception. For example, for Barker, just as I may reverse between being in my left hand touching the right hand and in my right hand touching the left, so, in the cinema, may I reverse between being in my body and being in the counterfactual world of the film.1 The amodal is central to this discussion in that tactile structures come to underpin all other sense modalities; the tactile is posited as the reversibility from which all other modes of reversibility derive. This bias toward the tactile—and an attendant denigration of the visual—is less ingrained in the field of media studies, in which Dyson is writing, than it is in the narrower field of cinema studies. It is, however, present, and is best exemplified by media theorist Mark B. N. Hansen’s concept of “primary tactility,” which he develops in Bodies in Code (2006). Tactility is primary or originary for Hansen in that other modalities, such as vision, need something outside the body—a “technical artifact,” such as a mirror—to produce the kind of specular, reflexive relation (seeing oneself seeing-oneself...

The continued growth in the interaction of photography with other media, together with a revived interest in analogue technologies in reaction against the growing digitisation of the image, have served to focus interest in the broader sensorial experience of the photograph. Film theory, using a range of ideas drawn from phenomenology and embodiment theory, provides a useful model through which to rethink our understanding of the way in which photographs are experienced at the level of the body. Working critically with a range of such ideas, this paper takes the example of photographs of the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, together with subsequent photographic projects based on those events, in order to further contribute to this rethinking of the sensorial experience of the photograph.

Is feminist postpornography a medium through which it might be possible to experience porn not only from a voyeuristic perspective? Can feminist postpornography provide a deeper sensorial experience? Through the feminist close-reading analysis of one short film, Instinct (2019), directed by Marit Östberg, Adrienne Teicher, Ester Martin Bergsmark and Mad Kate, from the Swedish feminist porn collection Dirty Diaries (2019), this article demonstrates how this kind of approach to pornography can awake senses and lead the spectators to experience porn at a deeper level stimulating an engaged spectatorship. Spectators are active agents in the construction of meaning and value of the artistic product, going beyond the mere passive role of recipient of information. The analysis employs mainly Laura Marks’s concepts of “haptic visuality” and “haptic hearing,” as well as Irina Leimbacher’s “haptic listening,” together with key insights of feminist film theory.

This article describes a walking interview with a sex worker who is an advocate for sex worker rights in Ireland. Walking interviews have been proposed as a biographical method which can be used to explore the relationship between personal concerns and public questions, and the method is characterised by mobile, relational and embodied practice (O’Neill and Roberts [2019. Walking Methods: Research on the Move. London: Routledge]). Walking with research participants addresses the power imbalances inherent in interviews, striving for ethical praxis, by allowing a shared perspective and a shared sensory experience. Together we investigate the ethics of sex work research, allyship and education, and we consider ways to strengthen alliances between sex working and non-sex working feminists. Opportunities for social justice for sex workers are considered, and a radical democratic imaginary is proposed, where sex workers are afforded full citizenship of an inclusive society. This imaginary follows work by O’Neill [2010. “Cultural Criminology and Sex Work: Resisting Regulation Through Radical Democracy and Participatory Action Research PAR.” Journal of Law and Society 37 (1): 210–232], O’Neill and Seal [2012. Transgressive Imaginations: Crime, Deviance and Culture. London: Palgrave Macmillan] and FitzGerald, O’Neill, and Wylie [2020b. “Social Justice for Sex Workers as a ‘Politics of Doing’: Research, Policy and Practice.” Irish Journal of Sociology 28 (3): 257–279], who have imagined full participation for sex workers in civic, political and social spheres. Starting with a radical openness to and acceptance of each other, as well as a firm dedication to bodily autonomy and social justice for all, we propose a path towards this imagined society.