Film-Philosophy
Journal | Salon | Portal (ISSN 1466-4615)
Vol. 6 No. 32, October 2002
Melanie Swalwell
The Senses and Memory in Intercultural Cinema
Laura U. Marks _The Skin of the Film:
Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses_ Durham, NC: Duke
University Press,
2000 ISBN
0-8223-2391-5 298 pp. 'Often the sensorium is the
only place where cultural memories are preserved'
(195). Laura Marks's book, _The
Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the
Senses_ is a study of intercultural film and video works,
approached by way of the senses and the representation of
memory in these works. The book is concerned with a range of
aesthetic, cultural, and ethical questions raised by
intercultural films, as well as with the implications of
these concerns for theorising film and embodied
spectatorship. Identifying what she designates as a
'movement' in intercultural cinema -- a powerful phenomenon
whose most recent emergence, according to the author, was
between 1985 and 1995 -- Marks seeks both to celebrate these
works, many of which are quite ephemeral, 'at the moment of
their brief flowering' (2), and to develop and offer a
theory of representation that she hopes might be appropriate
to many other kinds of cinema. Given these dual roles, and
that many of the intercultural films Marks discusses are
concerned with experiences of diaspora or loss of cultural
identity, with a number explicitly critiquing a range of
colonial and ethnographic gazes, it is appropriate to begin
by mentioning how Marks situates the works she studies. In
the Preface she states that, 'what pulls this writing most
forcefully is the films and videos themselves. The works I
examine in this book are themselves works of theory, many
explicitly so. They are not waiting to have theory 'done to'
them; they are not illustrations of theory but theoretical
essays in their own right' (xiv). That Marks says the films
exert a 'pull' on her writing strikes me as both significant
and appropriate: the theory of mimetic spectatorship (as
well as the opening to sense knowledge) that she elaborates
rests upon a kind of yielding knowing rather than a *killing
into* knowledge (193). Appropriately then, Marks's
*engagement* with (as distinct from analysis or critique of)
the films and videos is a dynamic and interactive process,
evident in the arguments which unfold over the course of the
volume. Not only did the works *pull* at the writing, but
Marks writes that she was inspired by them: indeed, that
'catch[ing] up verbally with arguments that these
works have developed in audio-visual (as well as verbal)
form' (xv) provided one of the reasons for writing the
book. Intercultural films and
videos are often low budget, experimental works which, Marks
argues, represent the cultural memories and sensoria of
their makers. While mindful of its difficulties (6-8), she
elects to use the term intercultural, to refer to the
international phenomenon where 'people of different cultural
backgrounds live together in the power-inflected spaces of
diaspora, (post- or neo-) colonialism, and cultural
apartheid' (1). In many cases, Marks claims, filmmakers'
intercultural experience and status provides subject matter
for the films produced; however, a significant number of the
films discussed also incorporate meditations on perception
and the differences in sensing that intercultural experience
makes evident. As the author writes: 'intercultural experience is
violent at the level of the body, for the recent immigrant
must choose whether to keep his or her bodily habits, at the
cost of being considered primitive or exotic, or to shed
them, at the cost of shedding the memory these habits
encode. This hard (and not necessarily conscious) decision
underlies the ambivalence toward sensory traditions
characteristic of much intercultural cinema'
(209). Marks argues that the
experience of being inbetween cultures, as well as the
ambivalence of many filmmakers towards the media
technologies that have often been used to reduce complex
experience (215), accounts for the formal experimentation
evident in many works, which utilise a range of techniques
to evoke that which is not, or cannot be, represented
(43). The book is clearly an
interdisciplinary foray, drawing on a range of approaches
including film theory, postcolonial theory, art history,
anthropology, and phenomenology, an array of approaches that
the author combines in novel ways, often producing stunning
and unorthodox readings. Marks explains her concepts and how
she is using them, and provides lucid descriptions of films
under discussion, an important consideration given the
limited circulation of many of the works. The book's
syntheses and commentaries will be of interest to many:
Marks undertakes at times broad-ranging surveys of
theorists, combining them in ways that are both provocative
and productive. Gilles Deleuze, Henri Bergson, and Walter
Benjamin -- figuring prominently in the text as they do --
all receive this treatment. Deleuze figures for his writings
on cinema as well as for the discussion (with Guattari) in
_A Thousand Plateaus_ of optical and haptic space in
relation to nomad art, Bergson for his work on memory and
the senses (and as a basis for much of Deleuze's work), and
Benjamin for his work on the mimetic faculty and aura, as
well as for his engagement with Bergson. As far as film theory is
concerned, Marks acknowledges that her study departs from
many of the ways film is often studied and written about, as
she seeks to move beyond the limitations of some existing
approaches to film. Nevertheless, there are continuities
with a number of traditions: for instance, she draws the
term haptic cinema from Noel Burch's work (171), and, as
Deleuzian cinematic philosophy is not a theory of
spectatorship (150), Marks relies on Merleau-Ponty's
phenomenology together with 'recent returns to
phenomenology' (152) (the influence of Vivian Sobchack's
work is evident). Finally, Marks acknowledges certain
continuities between her work and the early cinema
phenomenon of a 'cinema of attractions', given its interest
in embodied response (170). The study's breadth is
certainly one of its strengths. This breadth also presents
something of a challenge for a reviewer: given the number of
different arguments and perspectives, the question of how to
do justice to the work's complexity and inter-woven
arguments is a real issue. In this I take my cue from
Marks's stated preparedness to be productively pulled off
course, encouragement for which she finds in Deleuze and
Guattari's writing (xiv). Therefore, this review will focus
on Mark's arguments on the senses in the context of
intercultural film, attempting to tease out some of the
philosophical contributions of this aspect of her
scholarship, areas which coincide with my own research
interests. Marks sees her particular
challenge as being 'to suggest how film and video, which are
audiovisual media, can represent nonaudiovisual sense
experiences' (2). In this she is concerned with (cinematic)
perception as multisensory, an approach which is remarkable
both within film and sensory scholarship. For instance,
while film's status as an audiovisual medium is readily
acknowledged, the visual has often tended to receive the
lion's share of critical attention. Though cinesonics are
increasingly being studied and theorised (as the conference
series of that name suggests), [1] there are still
risks attached to the single sense approaches, not least of
which is their susceptibility to questions like 'which one
comes first?', or 'which one is more important?', especially
when faced with multisensory experiences or media. Though
these questions have been characteristic of much discourse
on the senses to date, the tendency to focus on single
senses is limited. Another common claim circulating at
present about the senses is that a particular product will
stimulate *all your senses*, as if automatically. Marks's
multisensory account of spectatorship is considerably more
nuanced than these approaches. Marks accords the senses and
aesthetics a significant role in perception, meaning making,
and memory. Her concern with the senses extends over a
number of related aspects, which it is perhaps helpful to
delineate. Her project addresses: the enculturation of the
senses, and relatedly, how sense memories are laid down; how
such memories are encoded within film by intercultural
filmmakers, an enterprise which frequently takes them to the
limits of representation; and how the audiovisual act of
seeing a film can '[call] up multisensory
experience' for the cinema audience (130). In Chapter One, Marks
defines intercultural cinema as operating at the
intersection of two or more cultural regimes of knowledge.
The concerns of this cinema, she suggests, fit within the
general shift that Deleuze describes from movement-image to
time-image cinema. In particular, his notion of
'any-spaces-whatever' is useful: 'I would argue that these
'any-spaces-whatever' are not simply the disjunctive spaces
of postmodernism, but also the disruptive spaces of
postcolonialism, where non-Western cultures erupt into
Western metropolises, and repressed cultural memories return
to destabilize national histories' (27). Marks provides a
number of examples of how intercultural cinema expresses the
disjunction between orders of knowledge, such as official
history and private memory, unrepresentable memories or a
lack of access to archived images. For example, in the video
_History and Memory: For Akiko and Takashige_ by Rea Tajiri,
an attempt to reconstruct Tajiri's Japanese-American
family's memory of their internment during the Second World
War, the artist uses a combination of text scrolling over an
aerial view (representing the spirit of the artist's dead
grandfather), voiceovers, and a visual image with personal
meaning (a woman filling a canteen with water). For Marks,
the significance of this is that while official images exist
of the internment camps, these cannot act as memory vehicles
for Tajiri's family: in the absence of such images, she
writes, 'archaeology must be done in order to create images'
(33). In other examples discussed:
filmmakers use drawn images rather than photographic or film
footage of the site of an assassination (Raoul Peck's
_Lumumba: The Death of a Prophet_), screens of Arabic script
over the top of images (_Measures of Distance_ by Mona
Hatoum), or partial translations of dialogue (_Siskyavi: The
Place of Chasms_, by Victor Masayesva Jr). A number of works
use discontinuous configurations of sound, image, and text
to destabilise meaning, with some inserting black leader
tape, refusing to show what is being described on the
soundtrack. At times, Marks notes, a sceptical approach on
the part of the audience is warranted and indeed encouraged,
such as in Black Audio Film Collective's _Who Needs A
Heart?_, which eschews documentary in favour of docudrama.
'All these images are quite slight and 'meaningless' in
themselves, but they call up volumes of images that are not
or cannot be represented' (43). As she writes later: 'The
works strive to recover sensuous geographies distant in
space and time, sense memories faintly present in the body
itself. If they do manage to recover these precious
knowledges, they may use screens and ruses to protect them
from casual consumption' (230). As well as introducing an
uncertainty or ambivalence to the stories being told, these
techniques also serve to frustrate a purely instrumental
vision. They cannot be mastered through vision
alone. A range of circumstances is
considered in which images partially connect, or fail to
connect, with memories, with Marks developing concepts from
Deleuze (and Bergson) to help with this, among which the
optical-image and recollection-image are prominent.
Recollection-images are, she argues, particularly important
for the representation of memory and history in
intercultural film. While they do not themselves represent
an event, recollection-images embody the traces of an event
whose representation has been buried. She writes: 'Through
attentive recognition, [a recollection-image] may
provoke an imaginative reconstruction, such as a flashback,
that pulls it back into understandable causal relationships'
(50). And: 'Like those dry paper flowers that expand in
water, a recollection-image, moistened with memory, springs
to life. Intercultural works redeem these stranded images by
bringing them into the very present, even into the body of
the viewer' (53). The concern with the
recollection-image extends into the next chapter, where
Marks considers the power that objects have to evoke memory
(what she terms the 'recollection-object'), the way that
personal objects 'remember and attest to events that people
have forgotten' (107). Marks suggests that fetishisation of
objects in colonial contexts functions to preserve a
controlling distance from that culture. In redeeming
fetishised objects 'by finding values in them that are
unrecognized in the colonial context' (79), postcolonial
cinema often reflects on the ways that objects are taken up
and circulated, and how their meanings change with varying
contexts. Of the many possibilities surveyed for recoding,
that of 'propos[ing] a nonfetishizing form of
looking, one that invites the 'viewer' to experience the
object not so much visually as through a bodily contact'
(79) prepares us for the tactile epistemology that is
elaborated in Chapters Three and Four. Marks's deployment of
Deleuze in these chapters, in conjunction with postcolonial
and phenomenological concerns, is certainly provocative and
may be controversial. While other readers will be in a
better position to comment on the particular readings she
makes of Deleuze, I can say that Marks's use of Deleuze
moves the analysis beyond purely literal notions of
representation and affective responses to images. Otherwise,
the very notion of *representing memory* would seem to rely
on the intent and will of filmmakers and audiences, and be
vulnerable to charges of voluntarism. In the current context
where popular representations frequently portray sensory
affects as the automatic outcome of purchasing experiences
(including in some filmic contexts), this is an important
contribution. Also of interest in Chapter
Two is the discussion of the silk sari which features in
Shauna Beharry's film _Seeing is Believing_, a work which
Marks returns to frequently. The sari belonged to Beharry's
mother, and after discussing the sari's significance as an
object which transmits tactile knowledge between mother and
daughter, Marks segues into a very interesting discussion of
Beharry's performance, 'Ashes to Flowers: The Breathing'.
Discussing this performance enables Marks to reflect on the
meeting of different sensory knowledges and culturally
specific sensoria, providing in turn for reflection on the
importance of attending to the *enculturation* of the
senses. To quote Marks at length: ''Sensual abandon' is a
phrase of Enlightenment subjectivity, implying that the
senses (except maybe vision, and possibly hearing) dull the
powers of the intellect. It implies that the Orientalist
desire for the sense experience of other cultures is in part
a desire to stop thinking, as though sensory knowledge is
radically opposed to intellectual knowledge. But when, in
'Ashes to Flowers', Beharry lights incense, washes our hands
with rose water, and encourages us to dance, she is not
encouraging us to 'abandon' ourselves to our bodies but to
respect our bodies' capacities for knowledge. This is a
knowledge that requires just as much effort to acquire as
intellectual knowledge. The 'Oriental' trip she gives us is
not an opportunity to breathe in the smells and let it all
hang out but a time to do a particular sort of work where
bodies and minds work together. This appeal to olfactory,
tactile, and other nonvisual bodily knowledges makes many
participants uncomfortable, since these knowledges are
little valued or cultivated in modern Western contexts, even
in the art world. Even if we respect them, we may not know
how to make sense of them. In short, stirring up the
hierarchy of the senses is not a chance to play dumb: in
fact it's quite exhausting' (118-19). This passage sparks off a
number of ideas for me. The discomfort of participants in
the above quote makes clear their encounter with difference,
with a sensorium that has been enculturated differently.
Never just receptors, the senses are trained and organised
in culturally specific ways, which is one factor that makes
sensory perception *interested* rather than neutral. Indeed,
Chapter Four usefully discusses different cultural
configurations of the senses (a discussion which I feel
might have been better situated earlier in the book, given
that many of Marks's arguments rely on this point).
Nevertheless, the emphasis on sensory enculturation here has
important implications for how we think about phenomenology.
Phenomenology has of course been criticised for according
the conscious subject primacy. Attending to the differential
training of the senses across cultures provides, then, an
important corrective to phenomenology's privileging of
conscious perception, and of a prior, perceiving subject,
given that the senses play a pivotal role in perception.
Also, aesthetic experiences like the ''Oriental' trip'
described by Marks, clearly make it difficult to maintain
distinctions between body and mind. [2] Embodied
sensory experience cannot be kept separate from cognition;
rather, aesthetic factors affect perception and cognition.
[3] The refusal of dichotomous modes of thought is
further evident in Marks's description of haptic visuality
as a mutually constitutive vision: rather than a distancing
vision that is based on separation between subject and
object, the subject's relationship with the image is dynamic
and responsive. The notion of aesthetic or
sensory responsiveness is one which figures prominently in
Marks's account of haptic visuality, which she develops most
fully in Chapter Three, and for this reader, at least, this
is where _The Skin of the Film_ really hits its stride. This
is no reflection on Marks's writing, which is clear and
assured throughout; rather, it's that her argument on haptic
visuality seems to me to be the strongest. Marks discusses
an image from Beharry's film _Seeing Is Believing_ as an
illustration of one sort of haptic look. The scene in
question features a photograph of the artist, wearing her
mother's sari. The movement of the camera is described as
caressing the surface of this photograph, searching it, as
Beharry relates in the voiceover how she was unable to
recognise herself in photographs after her mother's death.
While the rest of Marks's reading of this image is also very
interesting, the caressing camera movement exemplifies what
she means by a haptic vision. The over-close camera means
that the image is not in focus: 'the camera [looks]
ever more closely . . . [at the] folds of silk as
they dissolve into grain and resolve again' (127). Marks
writes that 'the tape has been using my vision as though it
were a sense of touch; I have been brushing the (image of
the) fabric with the skin of my eyes, rather than looking at
it' (127). Marks's arguments on the
tactile in vision are made through recourse to mimeticism.
She draws on a wide range of writings on mimesis,
negotiating between the theories of Benjamin, Susan
Buck-Morss, Roger Caillois, Michael Taussig, Alois Riegl, as
well as Deleuze and Guattari. Her skilful negotiation of
these positions is evident in her consideration of Max
Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, 'Frankfurt School critics
[who] valued sensuous knowledge as a reservoir of
nonalienated experience . . . Mimesis, they argued, is a
form of yielding to one's environment, rather than
dominating it, and thus offers a radical alternative to the
controlling distance from the environment so well served by
vision' (140). Returning to comment on this a couple of
pages later, after discussing Susan Buck-Morss's and Michael
Taussig's contributions to these debates, Marks
observes: 'One might argue that
[these arguments] hint of a sort of prelapsarian
longing. However, I believe that these theorists are
borrowing from other cultures and ages in order to 'think at
the edge of what can be thought', to create a new language
for a mimetic knowledge that exists in a nascent and latent
form in the contemporary West.' (143-44) Nevertheless, she
differentiates her approach, claiming that: 'It is possible
to take up theories of tactile epistemology without adopting
the dire diagnoses of complete cultural alienation on which
these scholars' arguments rest' (144). Haptic films or videos,
then: 'invite a look that moves
over the surface plane of the screen for some time before
the viewer realizes what she or he is beholding. Such images
resolve into figuration only gradually, if at all.
Conversely, a haptic work may create an image of such
detail, sometimes through miniaturism, that it evades a
distanced view, instead pulling the viewer in close. Such
images offer such a proliferation of figures that the viewer
perceives the texture as much as the objects imaged.'
(163) A distinction is made
between haptic images and haptic visuality, as Marks
continues: 'While optical perception
privileges the representational power of the image, haptic
perception privileges the material presence of the image.
Drawing from other forms of sense experience, primarily
touch and kinesthetics, haptic visuality involves the body
more than is the case with optical visuality'
(163). Haptic visuality is a way of
seeing images which references the viewer's inclination to
perceive them (162). Indeed, in haptic cinema, a bodily
relationship is encouraged between the viewer and the image.
In a phrase of Erich Auerbach's that Marks cites and that
strongly resonates with me, mimesis involves a 'lively and
responsive relationship' between (in this case) audience and
film (138). The cinematic encounter acquires an ethical, as
well as an erotic tinge here, as the implications for
relating with others are considered. Haptic visuality is
compared to an 'intersubjective eroticism' in which 'I and
the object of my vision constitute each other. By
interacting up close with an image, close enough that figure
and ground commingle, the viewer relinquishes her own sense
of separateness from the image -- not to know it, but to
give herself up to her desire for it' (183). Later, Marks
formulates this as follows: 'some works experiment with a
visual erotic: one that offers its object to the viewer but
only on the condition that its unknowability remain intact'
(193). Of course these questions of
responsiveness and alterity have a particular resonance in
postcolonial and other intercultural contexts. Readers are
told that haptic images are often used in intercultural
cinema to critique visual mastery, as well as in the search
for ways to bring the image closer to the body and the other
senses (152-3). But while Marks contrasts optical visuality
with haptic visuality to make the point, she acknowledges
that her project 'is not to condemn all vision as bent on
mastery, nor indeed to condemn all mastery, but to open up
visuality along the continua of the distant and the
embodied, and the optical and the haptic' (132). Later, she
writes: 'In most processes of seeing, both are involved, it
is hard to look closely at a lover's skin with optical
vision; it is hard to drive a car with haptic vision.' (163)
Given that migrants or indigenous peoples have so often been
subjected to, and objectified by, the colonial or
ethnographic or touristic gaze, fixed as Other, the goal to
'reconsider the now-common critique of visuality as bent on
mastery' (191), *through* the study of intercultural cinema
is quite poignant. Yet the decision to look to intercultural
cinema as 'one of the most important sites on non-mastering
visuality' (193), has yielded significant results,
particularly in terms of the discussion of a range of other
representational and spectatorial possibilities. Marks's notion of haptic
visuality as a *non-instrumental* way of seeing is important
for visual theory as well as for work on the senses more
broadly. A desire to recuperate vision from its many
critiques is evident here, as when Marks writes 'the
exploration of haptic visuality permits us to reconsider the
now-common critique of visuality as bent on mastery.
Evidently this critique need not be extended to all forms of
vision' (191). Having observed the recent proliferation of
highly instrumental discourses on maximising and accruing
intense sensory experiences, it is encouraging to see
someone questioning the stability of the nexus between
instrumentality and sentience. Chapter Three also addresses
questions of how audiences experience intercultural films.
In appreciation of difference in sensory regimes, Marks
notes that 'intercultural works are tailor-made only for a
very few people' (21), and that these sensory experiences
'are differently available to viewers depending on their own
sensoria' (23). 'Spectatorship is thus an
act of sensory translation of cultural knowledge. For
example, when a work is viewed in a cultural context
different from that in which it was produced, viewers may
miss some multisensory images: many viewers will miss the
implications of references to cooking, dance, and hairstyle
in Julie Dash's _Daughters of the Dust_ (1992) that are more
likely to be clear to an African diasporan viewer . . . And
then again, viewers in the intercultural encounter may
discover sense information that was not obvious in the
original context' (153). This treatment of audience
response as contingent on a range of factors is a welcome
change from the proscription of affect in stimulus-response
conceptions of sentience. Marks acknowledges that many
factors come into play in viewing (especially) intercultural
works, including the viewer's individual and cultural
learning and predisposition (170). In the fourth chapter
Marks reiterates this point, discussing some anthropological
accounts of the senses, which she reads as primitivist and
exoticising of non-Western cultures. Chapter Four also
extends some of the principles of a tactile epistemology to
inter-sensory references involving other senses, such as
smell and taste: 'In some cases, documentary appeals to what
escapes the visual altogether but can be known, for example,
through the sense of touch, or of smell' (194). Marks writes in Chapter Four
of her belief that there is a gradual movement underway to
more mimetic technologies, which she characterises as
'technologies that call upon, or attempt to recreate, our
pre-existing sensuous relationship to the world' (215). This
is a significant argument and one for which earlier chapters
have prepared the ground. Nevertheless, I have some concerns
about the way this is conceived. I have already noted
Marks's criticism of accounts evidencing a 'prelapsarian
longing', for a time before the 'alienation' of the senses.
I query whether this argument does not also have a tinge of
longing about it; what exactly does this sensuous
relationship to the world *pre-exist*? While Marks has
otherwise critiqued desires to return to a more 'authentic'
past, and addresses what she neatly terms 'sense envy'
(239), this point is not clear to me and could do with some
clarification. Perhaps Marks is building on her earlier
comparisons of optical and haptic visualities, implying that
through sensory training in visual cultures, we *unlearn*
how to be in a more reciprocal, responsive relationship with
the world. On a related point, Marks
draws on Paul Rodaway's work on 'sensuous geographies',
writing on the difference Rodaway captures 'between the rich
environment of ambient sound typical of rural life, and the
packaged, often electronically reproduced sounds of urban
environments' (244). The decorative and warning sounds of
the city -- muzak, sirens, alarms -- are described as
reassuring, yet as mak[ing] for 'a thin and
instrumental auditory relationship to the world' (244).
These comments rub with earlier ones: that a viewer's -- or
in this case, auditor's -- individual and cultural learning
and predisposition are factors in *how* they might
experience a particular work, for instance. Surely, as Marks
argues regarding the visual, the question of whether city
sounds merely make for a 'thin and instrumental' auditory
relationship to the world or for something more engaged and
mimetic, it all depends? There is a degree of slippage with
respect to instrumentality and sensation which I suggest is
important to attend to here, given that what is experienced
or intended as instrumental on one day or even at one moment
can quite easily become something else. [4] It is
possible -- as Marks's labelling of car alarm sirens as
reassuring suggests -- to enjoy a chance city symphony of
noise. Other factors, such as unfamiliarity, also mitigate
against a 'thin' auditory relationship. For instance, I
recall emerging from a subway station while travelling a
couple of years ago and finding myself in the middle of what
was at that time one of the busiest building sites in the
world -- Potsdamer Platz, in Berlin -- amid the sounds of
every conceivable piece of building machinery. It was an
exciting, and intensely visceral experience, not one that I
would characterise as either thin or instrumental. (Of
course, encountering similar sounds on a regular basis --
outside one's home, for instance -- is more likely to be
annoying than exciting.) While I don't think Marks intends
to, the association that she makes here, between the
technologically produced sounds of the city and a 'thin and
instrumental' auditory relationship, falls into a well-worn
groove whereby technology is linked with sensory
impoverishment. While this is a common perception, it is not
an adequate explanation for what is a more complex dynamic,
as Marks has elsewhere shown. _The Skin of the Film_ is a
rich and rewarding read. Marks's hope is that the theory of
representation that emerges from (her readings of)
intercultural cinema -- that is, one that is auratic,
embodied, and mimetic -- will also be appropriate to cinemas
beyond that from which it springs, and I would expect a
number of the book's concepts to find their way into
discussions within and beyond film theory. Marks's readings
of the haptic image, haptic visuality, and mimeticism are
particularly important, usefully advancing a number of
filmic debates in non-imitative directions. It is worth
noting, I think, that the exciting perspectives this volume
offers to film-philosophy spring from the original
treatments Marks gives to films and theorists alike,
demonstrating the energy that such interdisciplinary work
can generate. While the book's focus is on
technologies of film and video, many of Marks's arguments
invite application elsewhere. For instance, I was intrigued
to notice that a number of the intercultural film and video
makers whose work is discussed are moving beyond an
audio-visual consciousness, [5] perhaps indicating a
point of contact with some artists working with newer media,
who experiment with the configuration of different media
elements, and with the implications this might have for
audiences' encounters with such works. The experimentation
of these intercultural artists with film and video has
produced results which seem concerned not just with a
cultural inbetween-ness, but with a media inbetween-ness as
well. To sum up, _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. University
of Technology, Sydney,
Australia Footnotes 1. Philip Brophy, for
instance, claims that: 'Nowhere near enough has been said
about sound and music in the cinema'; and: 'As the deep
oceans of the planet remain unexplored, so does the world of
sound in film exist as a deep, moist terrain, submerged by
the weight of literary and visual discourse'; Brophy,
'Introduction', in Brophy, ed., _Cinesonic: The World of
Sound in Film_, (North Ryde, Sydney: AFTRS, 1999), p. v. The
Cinesonics conference website is at http://cinesonic.rmit.edu.au/CNSNC01/C01cinesonic.html;
accessed 23 October 2001. While recognising the importance
of sound, Marks admits that her work cannot give it the
attention it deserves. 2. In Marks's description of
Beharry's performance, the dualism finds another of its
forms, with the 'East' serving as the 'nose' and sensual
'body' to the visual, 'cerebral' 'West'. 3. I mean to refer to the
full sense of the term cognition here. John Waterworth, for
instance, argues that cognition has been much reduced, so
that it is now generally taken to refer to rational problem
solving. See his 'Creativity and Sensation: The Case for
Synaesthetic Media', _Leonardo_, vol. 30 no. 4,
1997. 4. Alphonso Lingis's reading
of Heidegger's famous hammer example presents a useful
example of this. See his _ Sensation: Intelligibility in
Sensibility_, (Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey: Humanities
Press, 1996), p. 21. 5. I borrow the notion of an
'audiovisual consciousness' from Ross Gibson, who writes
that while digital multimedia has inherited many aspects of
cinema, it has also mutated them. Included here is digital
multimedia's ability to 'federate disparate elements in
astonishing configurations'; Ross Gibson, 'Projected
Backwards into the Future: Cinemedia's Platform 1.0 on
Federation Square', _Wide
Angle_, vol. 21 no.
1, 1999, p. 175. Copyright ©
_Film-Philosophy_ 2002 Melanie Swalwell, 'The
Senses and Memory in Intercultural Cinema',
_Film-Philosophy_, vol. 6 no. 32, October 2002
<http://www.film-philosophy.com/vol6-2002/n32swalwell>. Read Laura U. Marks's
Response: Laura U. Marks, 'Emergent
Senses: A Response to Swalwell', _Film-Philosophy_, vol. 6
no. 36, October 2002 <http://www.film-philosophy.com/vol6-2002/n36marks>.
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