Description: Memories that evoke the physical awareness of touch, smell, and bodily presence can be vital links to home for people living in diaspora from their culture of origin. How can filmmakers working between cultures use cinema, a visual medium, to transmit that physical sense of place and culture? In The Skin of the Film Laura U. Marks offers an answer, building on the theories of Gilles Deleuze and others to explain how and why intercultural cinema represents embodied experience in a postcolonial, transnational world.Much of intercultural cinema, Marks argues, has its origin in silence, in the gaps left by recorded history. Filmmakers seeking to represent their native cultures have had to develop new forms of cinematic expression. Marks offers a theory of "haptic visuality"-a visuality that functions like the sense of touch by triggering physical memories of smell, touch, and taste-to explain the newfound ways in which intercultural cinema engages the viewer bodily to convey cultural experience and memory. Using close to two hundred examples of intercultural film and video, she shows how the image allows viewers to experience cinema as a physical and multisensory embodiment of culture, not just as a visual representation of experience. Finally, this book offers a guide to many hard-to-find works of independent film and video made by Third World diasporic filmmakers now living in the United States, Great Britain, and Canada.The Skin of the Film draws on phenomenology, postcolonial and feminist theory, anthropology, and cognitive science. It will be essential reading for those interested in film theory, experimental cinema, the experience of diaspora, and the role of the sensuous in culture.
Review: "[A]n important document and substantial treatment of many sometimes ephemeral works of intercultural cinema. . . . Marks draws on a rich and somewhat dazzling array of theoretical sources and disciplinary fields. . . . The Skin of the Film also offers a very rich and extensive archive of intercultural cinematic productions of the eighties and nineties. . . . She manages to cover a vast range of work in an elegant, often moving writing style with curatorial detail. . . . [A]n extremely stimulating and original book. It signals a promising and very welcome move in film theory. . . . It has much to contribute to the emerging literature on affect in political and cultural studies. . . . Like the sound of dripping water or an itch that you don't feel until you scratch, once your attention is drawn to The Skin of the Film, it becomes impossible to ignore it." -- Tamara Vukov * Topia: A Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies * "[A] rich and rewarding read. . . . The Skin of the Film is quite unique. Offering important contributions to the redefinition of aesthetic scholarship, the author simultaneously conducts close readings of filmic works which are not well known, and presents nuanced readings of their significance, within an original theoretical framework." -- Melanie Swalwell * Film-Philosophy * "The promise of Laura Marks's The Skin of Film is the promise of thinking and living between critical discourses, experiences and cultures: the willingness to explore an embodied response capable of meeting the `hybrid microcultures' of global modernity; the power to transform the memory of images, things, and the senses into `sensuous geographies' of touch, smell and rhythm that inhabit and drift into a world increasingly divided between the policed frontier and the `placeless' metropolis; and finally, the capacity to dwell in the critical interstice that allows thought to articulate itself on the edge of the unthought. -- Tollof Nelson * CiNeMAS * "[A] fascinating exploration of the ways that diasporic filmmakers have excavated, rediscovered, and reignited cultural memories through appeals to multisensorial forms of recollection that challenge the Western cinematic reliance on visual imagery . . . . [H]ighly informative and will introduce the reader to many intercultural works that have previously gone unnoticed. Marks's clear exuberance for her work and passion for the films she discusses also shine through. Highly recommended." -- Avi Santo * The Velvet Light Trap * "This is a terrific book! Not only does it have a significant argument to make, but it also works with a variety of little-known film/video examples in such a way as to give the reader both a vivid sense of them and a desire to go out and get hold of them."-Vivian Sobchack, University of California at Los Angeles "Marks's nuanced reading of a large number of films and videos is based on her deep engagement with the politics of place and displacement that drives the films. This book is a delightful read."-Hamid Naficy, Rice University "A marvelous interweaving of theory and historiography. This is a book that can interest film theorists, film historians, students of performance art, and scholars of postcoloniality and interculturalism. Marks explains-with rich detail-a whole range of recent cultural productions in film and video and makes those works come to life. The Skin of the Film suggests important ways to extend film theory."-Dana Polan, University of Southern California "[A] rich and rewarding read. . . . The Skin of the Film is quite unique. Offering important contributions to the redefinition of aesthetic scholarship, the author simultaneously conducts close readings of filmic works which are not well known, and presents nuanced readings of their significance, within an original theoretical framework." - Melanie Swalwell, Film-Philosophy "[A]n important document and substantial treatment of many sometimes ephemeral works of intercultural cinema. . . . Marks draws on a rich and somewhat dazzling array of theoretical sources and disciplinary fields. . . . The Skin of the Film also offers a very rich and extensive archive of intercultural cinematic productions of the eighties and nineties. . . . She manages to cover a vast range of work in an elegant, often moving writing style with curatorial detail. . . . [A]n extremely stimulating and original book. It signals a promising and very welcome move in film theory. . . . It has much to contribute to the emerging literature on affect in political and cultural studies. . . . Like the sound of dripping water or an itch that you don't feel until you scratch, once your attention is drawn to The Skin of the Film, it becomes impossible to ignore it." - Tamara Vukov, Topia: A Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies "[A] fascinating exploration of the ways that diasporic filmmakers have excavated, rediscovered, and reignited cultural memories through appeals to multisensorial forms of recollection that challenge the Western cinematic reliance on visual imagery . . . . [H]ighly informative and will introduce the reader to many intercultural works that have previously gone unnoticed. Marks's clear exuberance for her work and passion for the films she discusses also shine through. Highly recommended." - Avi Santo, The Velvet Light Trap "The promise of Laura Marks's The Skin of Film is the promise of thinking and living between critical discourses, experiences and cultures: the willingness to explore an embodied response capable of meeting the `hybrid microcultures' of global modernity; the power to transform the memory of images, things, and the senses into `sensuous geographies' of touch, smell and rhythm that inhabit and drift into a world increasingly divided between the policed frontier and the `placeless' metropolis; and finally, the capacity to dwell in the critical interstice that allows thought to articulate itself on the edge of the unthought. - Tollof Nelson, CiNeMAS
Contents: List of Illustrations Preface Acknowledgements Introduction 1. The Memory of Images 2. The Memory of Things 3. The Memory of Touch 4. The Memory of the Senses Conclusion: The Portable Sensorium Notes Bibliography Filmography/Videography Index
Author Biography: Laura U. Marks is an independent critic and curator, as well as Assistant Professor of Film Studies at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada.
