Critical Writing Index

The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses

by Laura U. Marks

Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2000

Building on the theories of Gilles Deleuze and others, Marks explains how and why intercultural cinema represents embodied experience in a postcolonial, transnational world. 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. The moving 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.

Note that Marks defines "cinema" to include all time-based, audiovisual media -- from short experimental videos to feature-length narratives.

ITEM 2000.156 – available for viewing in the Research Centre

Videos, Artworks and Artists Cited

Aletheia – Tran T. Kim-Trang

Ekleipsis – Tran T. Kim-Trang

Kore – Tran T. Kim-Trang

Ocularis: Eye Surrogates – Tran T. Kim-Trang

Operculum – Tran T. Kim-Trang

Finagnon – Gary Kibbins

A Box of His Own – Yudi Sewraj

Changing Parts – Mona Hatoum

Measures of Distance – Mona Hatoum

Chinese Characters – Richard Fung

Her Sweetness Lingers – Shani Mootoo

Instructions for Recovering Forgotten Childhood Memories – Steve Reinke

I Wet My Hands Etched and Surveyed Vessels Approaching Marks Eyed – Roula Haj-Ismail

Inside – Roula Haj-Ismail

Memories from the Department of Amnesia – Janice Tanaka

Speaking for oneself . . . speaking for others Muqaddimah Li-Nihayat Jidal (Introduction to the end of an argument) – Jayce Salloum

Speaking for oneself . . . speaking for others Muqaddimah Li-Nihayat Jidal (Introduction to the end of an argument) – Elia Suleiman

New View/New Eyes – Gitanjali

Nunaqpa – Igloolik Isuma Productions

Nunavut – Igloolik Isuma Productions

Qaggig – Igloolik Isuma Productions

Saputi – Igloolik Isuma Productions

Sari Red – Pratibha Parmar

Slanted Vision – Ming-Yuen S. Ma

Sniff – Ming-Yuen S. Ma

Toc Storee – Ming-Yuen S. Ma

Talaeen a Junuub (Up From the South) – Jayce Salloum

Talaeen a Junuub (Up From the South) – Walid Ra’ad

water into fire – Zachery Longboy

Who’s Gonna Pay For These Donuts Anyway? – Janice Tanaka

Walid Raad