Cinema's Bodily Illusions: Flying, Floating, and Hallucinating
Scott C. Richmond
Abstract
Before it is a technology for representation, the cinema is a technology for the modulation of its viewers’ perception. Cinema’s Bodily Illusions offers a theory of the cinema as a proprioceptive technology: the cinema makes its art by modulating viewers’ embodied sense of space. Grounded in phenomenology and media theory, the book offers a non-representational approach to the cinema that is in close conversation with theories of media and mediation, experimental film, and broader currents in cultural theory. Disputing against the deeply ingrained modernist habits of mind in film theory and ae ... More
Before it is a technology for representation, the cinema is a technology for the modulation of its viewers’ perception. Cinema’s Bodily Illusions offers a theory of the cinema as a proprioceptive technology: the cinema makes its art by modulating viewers’ embodied sense of space. Grounded in phenomenology and media theory, the book offers a non-representational approach to the cinema that is in close conversation with theories of media and mediation, experimental film, and broader currents in cultural theory. Disputing against the deeply ingrained modernist habits of mind in film theory and aesthetics, and the attendant proclamations of cinema’s death (or at least its irrelevance), Cinema’s Bodily Illusions argues that the cinema’s proprioceptive aesthetics make it an urgent site of contemporary inquiry. In a moment when technologies seem to be disappearing from view, the cinema orchestrates an encounter with technology that is simultaneously an encounter with a world onscreen.
Keywords:
Phenomenology,
Film theory,
Media theory,
Aesthetics,
Experimental film,
Embodiment,
James J. Gibson
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2016 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780816690961 |
| Published to Minnesota Scholarship Online: May 2017 |
DOI:10.5749/minnesota/9780816690961.001.0001 |
