ENG 5138 Spring 2023 Parker

Film aesthetics, in returning to the original Greek understanding of the word, produce sensations meant to be perceived by the cinematic spectator—an embodied affect. In this course, we will explore and interrogate the aesthetics of embodiment in and of film, the phenomenology of film (Sobchak), the haptic qualities of the cinematic text (Barker), the body’s role in the activity of cinematic spectatorship (Williams, Clover), and question how the body operates as the existential ground for perception in and of film, as inherited from the corporeal concepts of vision that emerged in the 19th century (Jonathan Crary, Walter Benjamin, etc.).

Bodies of investigation may include: Nascent Film Bodies, The Body of the Film, Embodiment in Film, “Her Body,” Men of Steel, The Monstrous Feminine, Queer Bodies, Heavenly Bodies, Abject Beings, Alien Bodies, Corps de ballet, Dead Bodies, Nobodies, and Body Parts.

Texts for study may include: Tom Gunning, “The Impossible Body of Early Film”; Roland Barthes, “Garbo’s Face”; Carol Clover, “Her Body, Himself: Gender in the Slasher Film”; Barbara Creed, The Monstrous-Feminine and Return of the Monstrous-Feminine; Linda Williams, “Film Bodies”; Slavoj Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology; Vivian Sobchak, “The Address of the Eye”; Martine Beugnet, Cinema of Sensation; Jennifer M. Barker, The Tactile Eye: Touch and the Cinematic Experience; Katharina Linder, Film Bodies: Queer Feminist Encounters with Gender and Sexuality in Cinema; Noa Steimatsky, The Face on Film.

Films of study may include those by Georges Méliès, Germaine Dulac, Alfred Hitchcock, Brian DePalma, Ridley Scott, Jonathan Glazer, Marina del Van, etc.