Touch as Proximate Distance: Post-Phenomenological Ethics in the Cinema of Isabel Coixet

Abstract

In the wake of paradigm-shifting works on cinematic affect over the last few decades that have challenged psychoanalytically based gaze theory, embodied perception and sensory-affective experience have become fundamental concepts in much of contemporary screen studies. Even though the proponents of the affective turn in film studies present diverse theoretical approaches to affect – from Deleuzian “haptic visuality” to phenomenologically informed film theory – it seems evident that they all draw, to a greater or lesser degree, on the sense of touch as the affective axis of perception. Conceptualized this way, the sense of touch facilitates a mode of mutual embodiment between the viewer and the film image, a relationship based on immediacy and exchange, which, according to some of the approaches to cinematic affect, might also translate into a particular ethical position of embracing and opening up to the world and to the Other. The cinema of Isabel Coixet seems to exemplify these claims. Her oeuvre, as I shall illustrate, is often discussed in terms of intimacy, encounter and reciprocity, as well as the sensuous visual and sonorous textures which compose her films. Nevertheless, in this article I will suggest that Coixet evinces a much more ambiguous attitude towards touch, which often goes beyond the prevalent models of haptic visuality or embodied perception as conceptualized in phenomenological film theory. Drawing on Laura McMahon, I seek to interrogate the concept of touch by engaging with Jean-Luc Nancy's anti-ocularcentric, post-phenomenological reflections on community, offering an analysis of three films produced at different moments in Coixet's career – The Secret Life of Words (2005), Yesterday Never Ends (2013) and Endless Night (2015). The choice of works is dictated by their particular tactile aesthetics, as well as their explicit concern to go beyond the models of autonomous being towards an ethics of relationality between self and world, while being mindful of the limit as the very condition for its emergence.