Chapter 5: Cinema as Skin – Body and Touch

Gravity – (Re)turn to the Body – Critique of ‘Oocularcentrism’ – Phenomenology, Synaesthesia, Intermodality – Vivian Sobchack – Avant-Garde Practices – Body and Genre (Linda Williams, Barbara Creed) – Haptic Perception and Skin of Film (Laura Marks) – Crash – Skin and Identity – The New World – Accented Cinema (Hamid Naficy) – Ethnographic Filmmaking – Siegfried Kracauer

GRAVITY: All alone in a horizonless space. Courtesy of Photofest / © Warner Bros.

A body, alone in outer space, drifting isolated through the fathomless expanse beyond the earth’s atmosphere. The astronaut is clothed in a protective spacesuit that allows Dr. Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock) to survive in an inhospitable habitat, but she has lost the umbilical cord connecting her to the mothership, which in turn linked her to her planet of origin only visible in the distance as a glimmering globe. The drama of Gravity (US 2013, Alfonso Cuarón), ironically announcing in its title what is absent and desperately sought for the duration of the film, is that of a body desolate in a space without limit, trying to find its way back to a place where gravitational laws give us a certainty of orientation (up/down, left/right) and a sense of belonging and ‘grounding.’ The aesthetics of the film tries to replicate the protagonist’s fearful and fascinated exploration of a horizonless world through 3-D cinematography and very long takes, which together induce in the spectator an equally ambivalent sense of disorientation and weightlessness. The reduced narration and the poetic exploration of zero-gravity turns the film into a laboratory of the senses, which brings the spectator close to the bodily experience of floating, drifting, and being suspended in space. Yet it would not be a Hollywood movie, if Dr. Stone did not live up to her name and find a way to sink back to earth, in the process demonstrating how the cinema can symbolically reenact the ontogenesis of the entire human race, from water to land, from amphibian to mammal. Forget the West, Gravity seems to say, it is the human body that remains our final frontier, a lesson that film theory, too, has learned in the meantime. In film theory, almost from the beginning, an ocularcentric paradigm prevailed that took the cinema to be above all a visual experience. This dominance began in the 1920s when Rudolf Arnheim imported so-called ‘Gestalt’ theory into film theory and Béla Balázs emphasised the significance of close-ups. Eisenstein’s constructivist montage theories and Bazin’s conceptualisation of reality as an ambiguous yet indivisible appearance of being whose basic ontological form is cinema also centred on the eye as the organ of visual perception (although, as shown in Chapter 1, Bazin makes equal room for the material trace and the body, with his metaphors of the mummy and the shroud). It was, however, the dominant theories of the 1960s and 1970s, discussed in the two previous chapters, that privileged the act of seeing even more than earlier theories: mirror-reflexivity and then apparatus theory transported ‘visible man’ into Plato’s cave, while feminist film theory made the male gaze the core concept among keywords such as voyeurism, fetishism, and exhibitionism – all associated with vision.