ABSTRACT
DC-JM: At the beginning of your very inspiring book, The Skin of the Film, you write that this title “offers a metaphor to emphasize the way the film signifies through its materiality, through a contact between perceiver and object represented.” 1 And you define haptic visuality as “the way vision itself can be tactile, as though one were touching a film with one’s eyes.” 2 Between “materiality” and “touch,” on one side, and “metaphor” and “vision,” on the other, haptic visuality concerns two theoretically distinguished, though strongly related, aspects of cinema spectatorship. The first aspect concerns the real conditions according to which the spectator is connected to the film. The second aspect concerns the way the spectator’s eye functions insofar as the connection with film involves not only the organ of vision but also a range of other feelings mediated by vision, starting with the haptic ones. The issue of concern to us, to begin with, is how one can possibly consider the definition of screen and screening to include these two aspects and their interrelationships in order to build the kind of new reading you are aiming at.
