Cinema and the body

This chapter gives students a strong basis in contemporary approaches to thinking about the body as it relates to film and how these concerns intersect with various identity categories from gender and sexuality to race and ability. One of the potential shortcomings of the psychoanalytic paradigm that became so predominant in the early years of feminist film studies was its lesser ability to account for affect, emotion, and the bodily encounter with films. Because women have been associated historically with the body, as opposed to the mind, feminists have had a heightened investment in these questions. This chapter will examine some of the developments within this strain, starting with phenomenological approaches to cinema and moving into Deleuzian and affect-based ways of thinking about the body onscreen and the encounter between viewer and image. Disability studies and Trauma theory will serve as ways to apply and interrogate some of our dominant ways of thinking about the body both onscreen and in the case of the spectator. Trauma theory in particular connects these traditions back to psychoanalysis. Case studies include: Under the Skin (Jonathan Glazer, 2013, UK), Nénette and Boni (Claire Denis, 1996, France) and Pan’s Labyrinth (Guillermo del Toro, 2006, Spain/Mexico).

Chapter 3 objectives

Explain how bodily or affect-based approaches are connected to feminist perspectives

Identify the gaps these approaches attempt to address in the theoretical literature

Outline the differences between the major methodological strains

Be able to discern the utility of these approaches to specific films or other media texts

Identify the potential shortcomings of each approach with respect to their Western-centric orientation