Do contemporary big-budget blockbuster films like Gravity move something in us that is fundamentally the same as what avant-garde and experimental films have done for more than a century? In a powerful challenge to mainstream film theory, Cinema’s Bodily Illusions demonstrates that this is the case.
Scott C. Richmond bridges genres and periods by focusing, most palpably, on cinema’s power to evoke illusions: feeling like you’re flying through space, experiencing 3D without glasses, or even hallucinating. He argues that cinema is, first and foremost, a technology to modulate perception. He presents a theory of cinema as a proprioceptive technology: cinema becomes art by modulating viewers’ embodied sense of space. It works primarily not at the level of the intellect but at the level of the body. Richmond develops his theory through examples of direct perceptual illusion in cinema: hallucinatory flicker phenomena in Tony Conrad&r
Trade Review
"In laying out his theory of proprioceptive aesthetics in cinema, Cinema’s Bodily Illusions makes a boldly provocative contribution to the study of bodies, film screens, and media technology. Rescuing cinematic illusion from the perjorative sense with which modernist film scholarship disparages it, Scott C. Richmond finds a visceral (rather than cerebral) thematization of the resonance between ordinary perception and cinematic perception."—Jennifer M. Barker, author of The Tactile Eye: Touch and the Cinematic Experience
"Richmond’s theory and method offers an important tool for doing some of the critical work that spectator theory cannot. Cinema’s Bodily Illusions may become an influential vein within postmodern phenomenology. It offers a critical method for understanding the aesthetic moment outside of representational blinders."—PopMatters
Table of ContentsContents
Introduction. Proprioceptive Aesthetics, or the Cinema
1. The Unfinished Business of Modernism: Anémic Cinéma
2. Beyond the Infinite, At Home in Finitude: 2001
3. Ecological Phenomenology: Merleau-Ponty and Gibson
4. Proprioception, the Écart: Koyaanisqatsi
5. The Body, Unbounded: Gravity
6. Aesthetics beyond the Phenomenal: The Flicker
Conclusion. The Technicity of the Cinema: Apparatuses and Technics
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
