Kaisa Hiltunen

Closeness in Film Experience: At the Intersection of Cinematic and Human Skin

Film and media studies are going through a change of perspective which could be characterized

as a material, bodily or affective turn. Various theories which share a central, unifying idea have

emerged. The idea of this turn can be formulated as follows: film experience is a holistic event in

which the spectator and the film address each other in a two way process. Therefore film

narratives should not be analyzed as static structures but as events that involve embodied

spectators and fictional worlds in a material embrace. Film viewing is thus seen not merely as a

rational cognitive process but as an event that evokes immediate experiences; experiences that

affect us both on a psychological and a bodily level and that allow us to get a glimpse into other

people’s consciousnesses. The encounter of the spectator and the film is an event, or a process,

which enables the formation of some kind of a common space. In contrast to most of the earlier

film theories such as cognitive and psychoanalytic theory, this bodily approach allows for a more

intimate and interactive experience. Indeed, what is common to the different variations of this

approach is the emphasis on the experiential, multi-sensory nature of film.

In this article I shall discuss what intimacy and closeness could mean in film experience in the

framework of the approach delineated above. I shall make use of the ideas of mainly two

theorists, Vivian Sobchack and Laura U. Marks, and the concept of skin to characterize the afore

mentioned cinematic space and cinematic closeness. This concept is a combination of their and

my own ideas. I understand skin here as an element that both connects and separates, brings

closer and creates distance between the spectator and the film. It operates as a kind of interface

between them. I relate skin to the questions of how films address us as sensuous and material

beings and how we perceive films as material objects. Skin appears here in at least four senses: as

the skin of the film, the skin of the spectator, the skin of the fictional character and the skin of

reality. In the last chapter I shall illustrate the theory with a short analysis of aspects of Wong

Kar-Wai’s film Ashes of Time (1994).

The emergence and basic assumptions of the material turn

1

What I refer to as a material or bodily turn is not a coherent theoretical movement, but rather a

body of related theories by several film scholars with different theoretical backgrounds. Their

theories can be seen as a reaction against excessively eye-centred and cognitive theories, as well

as theories that emphasise film as representation or narrative, but do not have much to say about

film as experience. However, this is not a place to give an exhaustive account of this turn.

Instead, I shall give a short outline of some of the reasons behind the turn.

The material body of the spectator has not figured much in film theory after its early days, as

Sobchack notes.1 In the 1920s the French theorist and film maker Jean Epstein wrote

enthusiastically about the effects that close-ups had on him. The newly revealed facial

movements in particular had downright corporeal effects on him as far as can be judged from his

dramatic descriptions: “Intermittent paroxysms affect me the way needles do.” “Pain is within

reach. If I stretch out my arm I touch you and that is intimacy. I can count the eyelashes of this

suffering. I would be able to taste the tears. Never before has a face turned to mine in that way.

Ever closer it presses against me, and I follow it face to face. It’s not even true that there is air

between us; I consume it. It is in me like a sacrament.”2 Despite such intense and clearly multi-

sensory experiences Epstein goes on to claim that cinema is a fully eye-centred medium: “Truly,

the cinema creates a particular system of consciousness limited to a single sense.”3 This over-

emphasis on vision can be explained at least partly by the fact that cinema was silent and that

cinematic technology in general was still in its early stages. It was a cinema of attractions –

attractions for eyes mostly.

Sobchack argues that theorists have been embarrassed to admit the bodily effects of cinema.

Talking about bodies and senses was apparently not considered scientific enough for academic

film studies.4 But even before film studies was established as a discipline another theorist,

German Siegfried Kracauer, drew attention to the material effects of cinema. In his writings from

1940s, which were part of the manuscript for his Theory of Film (1960) Kracauer claims that

cinema does not communicate so much with the spectator’s consciousness as with her bodily

being: “The material elements that present themselves in film directly stimulate the material

layers of the human being: his nerves, his senses, his entire physiological substance.”5 However,

this material emphasis is missing from Theory of Film except for one short chapter in which he

writes that the seeing of cinematic movements causes kinaesthetic reactions such as muscular

reflexes and motor impulses in the spectator. He points out that it appears that the spectator is

engaged in such physiological effects before she is ready to respond intellectually.6 Some other

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theorists, such as Sergei Eistenstein, have made observations about film as a medium that

engages several senses. His thoughts on the synchrony of senses were related to his idea of

vertical montage.7

References to senses, sensations and bodily experiences can be found scattered here and there,

but the overall emphasis has been on visual aspects of film experience. Film has been studied as

an art form that appeals primarily to vision and intellect, or to vision and the unconscious.

Sobchack has expressed her willingness to fill in the hole concerning the body that was put aside

in film theory after the reign of the linguistic and (psycho)semiotic theories.8 In psychosemiotic

theory film spectatorship was understood as a process of identification where the spectator

identified primarily with the point of view of narration and thus became abstracted from her own

body. According to psychoanalytic theory the ill-advised spectator pursues unified subjectivity

through cinema. It was thought that this unity is possible to achieve only if appropriate distance is

maintained both in relation to the spectacle and to the material conditions of perceiving.9

Sobchack thinks that references to sense experiences have been considered chiefly a rhetorical or

poetic excess and that sensuousness has been located in language rather than in the body. It has

been located on the cinema screen as a semiotic effect of cinematic representation, as a semantic

quality of a film, or in the spectator’s psychic processes, cognitive operations, or physiological

reflexes. She claims that behind this attitude is the supposition that human experience is primarily

and fundamentally cognitive.10 Recent cognitive film theory tends to see even emotions as

primarily cognitive.11

Even if we did not consider the standpoints of different theoretical trends, the visual emphasis is

not surprising given that film is primarily an audiovisual medium. Yet everyone who has been to

cinema knows that the experience encompasses more, that other senses are involved even if not

as directly as sight and hearing. Theorists such as Sobchack and Marks are interested in

explaining how sight and hearing activate other senses, most notably touch. They stress that the

spectator is corporal and views with her whole body, not only with her eyes. Barbara M. Kennedy

who deals with similar issues but from a strictly Deleuzean perspective says that look is never

purely visual but also tactile, sensuous and material.12

Closeness and distance

3

In Sobchack and Marks’s theories the relationship of the spectator to film is more fluid and

dynamic than in the earlier linguistic-based theories or cognitive theories even though in the latter

the interactive character of film experience and the active role of the spectator has been

emphasised. Sobchack and Marks’s theories are examples of the unravelling of the traditional

spectator – object of perception dualism which is to be seen in other recent theories too. Their

concerns overlap in many respects. Both are interested in explaining how cinema touches us and

which forms cinematic intimacy may take. The concept of skin is explicitly thematised in Marks

as the skin of the film, by which she refers to the surface of the cinematic image and the haptic

qualities of the image. Sobchack does not discuss skin so explicitly, but her discussion of the

spectator’s body involves the idea of experiencing in one’s own skin. Actually, the idea of skin

was articulated already by Antonin Artaud in his essay Cinema and reality where he wrote: “The

human skin of things, the epidermis of reality: this is the primary raw material of cinema.”13

However, for Artaud skin has a slightly different sense. The radically minded artist called for a

cinema that would crack the surface of the material world and release the spiritual forces lurking

behind. Yet, he also wanted cinema to affect, to shake, the viewer physically.14

Sobchack has attempted to give an accurate account of the manner in which cinema touches us.

She stresses that even though cinematic sense experiences are not literal, they are not based on

metaphorical thinking either. By this she means that we do not form metaphors cognitively after

the film experience. She sees this bodily effect as more fundamental for film experience than

intellectual processing. She claims that figurative understanding of films requires that we

understand them literally through our bodies and that our bodies construct meanings even before

we think about them consciously.15

Sobchack, whose film theory is based mainly on Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy, has

argued that since we cannot partake of the sense experiences of fictional characters as fully as we

perhaps would like to we instead turn, or film makes us turn, our intention toward our own

subjectively lived bodies. This sudden turn of intention causes us to reflect reflexively on our

own attempts to touch, taste or smell the film – in other words, to touch ourselves touching, to

smell ourselves smelling, etc. Such reflection is not fully conscious, however, because our

intention in cinema is usually directed towards the screen events. But some vivid sense

experience may cause it to bounce off towards ourselves and then back to the screen again. So in

a way, she claims, we catch ourselves reflecting reflexively on our sensations. The turning

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towards us happens, because cinema cannot satisfy fully our sensuous desire which it has

awakened and so our body becomes a substitute for the fictional bodies. This turning of intention

makes of us both subjects and objects: we can sense and be sensible. We become objects of our

own perceptions.16

The relationship between the body and the cinematic representation that results from the turning

of intention is something between literal and figural, real and as-if-real. According to Sobchack,

this ambivalent relationship has a precise phenomenological structure: it is a non hierarchical and

reversible relationship between body and language based on their mutual informing. Meaning is

thus a combination of carnal matter and conscious meanings that emerge simultaneously from the

lived body. The spectator’s body is a “third term” that functions as a mediator between

experience and language, between the subjective (me) and the objective (film), uniting and

separating them. Meanings are born neither in the spectator’s body nor in the cinematic

representation, but in their chiasmatic relationship. This reversible relationship bridges the gap

that was earlier thought to exist between the spectator and the film.17 Here the influence of

Merleau-Ponty’s late philosophy in which he strove to undo the immanence – transcendence

dualism is strongly felt.

What is described above is cinema’s indirect way of touching our skin. Sobchack claims,

however, that cinematic touching is something more than metaphorical. If I understand Sobchack

correctly, this “more” could be demonstrated in the following simple manner. Isobel Armstrong

says in her book The Radical Aesthetic (2000) that film’s sudden movements and sounds affect us

physically by altering the rhythm of our breathing for example.18 The more we are absorbed in a

film the more palpable such physical effects are. Sweaty hands and a pounding heart are familiar

to all cinemagoers. So it can be said that even though films do not touch us literally they do have

literal effects that we can feel on our skin and inside our bodies as well. Already Epstein noticed

this when he described the effect of close-ups as needle pricks.

Sobchack terms the film spectator cinesthetic subject which means that the spectator’s look is

embodied or carnal, informed by other senses. The term is a combination of synesthesia and

coenaesthesia. Synesthesia refers to the co-operation of the senses; their mutual reversibility and

comprehensibility. In neurological research the existence of synesthesia has been proved

scientifically. Some people are exceptionally sensitive to the transmodal functioning of the

senses. They may sense sounds as colours, for example. But we all have experiences of such co-

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functioning of senses, even if less strong ones. Many visual presentations familiar from everyday

life are based on the transmodal functioning of the senses. The effectiveness of perfume and food

advertisements for example is based on our ability to transform sight into taste or smell.19

Coenaesthesia in contrast refers to the way in which the roles and hierarchy of the senses that are

equally available in principle vary according to historical and cultural factors. Sobchack refers to

research that has set out to prove that among newborn babies all senses are equally strong but in

the course of acculturation to a particular culture the hierarchy of senses is created. The body that

is both a conscious subject and a material object works as the basis of the cinesthetic subject or

film spectator.20 What Sobchack claims is that behind the intellectual activity involved in viewing

films – such as interpreting meanings – is a bodily spectator. While she emphasises the loosening

of the subject (viewer) – object (film) dichotomy, other similar dichotomies – that of mind and

body, and rational and emotional – are also unravelled in such understanding of film

spectatorship.

However, it seems to me that it is often precisely when film tries to make its characters’ intimate

experiences palpable and put us into their situation that the cinematic surface becomes visible as

a mediator between us and the fictional world. The cinematic surface then as a sort of transparent

skin, skin of the film as Laura U. Marks says. It is this skin that stylistic devices, such as filters or

arresting colours seem to be attached to. Such stylistic devices are often used to mark the image

as subjective. Extreme close-ups and subjective point-of-view shots that reveal uncommon views

of the world may also draw our attention to the intervention of the cinematic technology.21 But

noticing the cinematic skin does not necessarily distance us from the film. The transparent

cinematic skin has many functions: it draws us close to the film in its materiality asking us to

palpate the image with our eyes; it draws us to the fictional world in the psychic sense, and also

makes our intention turn towards ourselves, our own skin just as Sobchack says. Cinematic sense

of closeness paradoxically seems to include a sense of distance, but the closeness is not

threatened by this distance, by the fact that we accept the film’s role as a mediator. Some of the

makers of very intimate films, such as Andrey Tarkovsky, Krzysztof Kieślowski or Wong Kar-

Wai, do not try to hide the presence of the medium, on the contrary. In addition, this way of

seeing things sheds new light on the question of identification: we do not identify so much – or at

least not primarily – with characters or the camera as the French film theorist Christian Metz

claimed, but with the sense of materiality and presence of the whole experience.

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Experiences of closeness and distance may also be highlighted with the concepts of optic and

haptic images or optic and haptic visuality. These concepts have been adopted from art historian

Aloïs Riegl by Laura U. Marks and modified for the purposes of film studies. With the notion of

optic visuality Marks refers to situations where we can perceive the object clearly, from an

optimal distance and point of view and in a three dimensional space. Optic images are

representational. Haptic images in turn draw us close to the object, sometimes so close that the

object becomes isolated from its context and we cannot perceive it properly. This is when the

illusion of depth disappears. Haptic images reveal details, such as surfaces and textures, and

stress the material presence of the object which makes it a tactile or mimetic representation, or

epistemology. A mimetic relationship as defined by Walter Benjamin is based on a material

contact at a certain moment. This can be seen as brushstrokes in a painting, for example. With the

help of its technology cinema can imitate such a contact by trying to evoke the materiality of its

object, the skin of reality, so to speak. The film material itself, such as grainy film stock or

scratches on the film, may create haptic visuality too. This is when the skin of the film is revealed

to us in the most concrete sense. Marks thinks that grainy and slightly blurred video images are

the best examples of hapticity.22

The categorization of images into optic and haptic is useful in theory, but it is difficult to make

distinctions between them in practice. An image that gives an optimal view of its object may still

produce an intimate and haptic feel. I argue that ultimately it is the context in which the image

appears that determines whether it is sensed as optic or haptic. It should be added that by haptic

visuality Marks means not just individual images but a mode of visuality where boundaries

between spectator and object of perception are blurred and hierarchies lowered. This is the most

interesting aspect of her theory and it reveals similarities to Sobchack’s thinking. If we cannot

perceive the entire object in haptic visuality, we cannot rise above it and therefore cannot so

easily assume an authoritative and harmful attitude towards it. Such thinking has relevance for

ethics of viewing as it demands mutual recognition between the viewer and the object of

perception, but this is a subject for another article.23 In Marks’s view cinema is an extension of

bodily existence because meanings are not communicated only through signs but are experienced

in an intelligent body. Though direct, embodied knowledge is culturally informed. Since

incomplete, haptic visuality invites the spectator to complete the image in her own body, through

her own experiences and memories, to feel her way through the image, so to speak. Unlike

Sobchack she claims that this kind of tactile epistemology has to be approached through

metaphor. 24

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The term haptic visuality can refer to characteristics of both the spectator and the film. It can refer

to the spectator’s tendency to perceive haptically, or to adopt a haptic attitude. However, a film

itself may be haptic on purpose and thus encourage the spectator to perceive it haptically. In this

respect film spectatorship, as well as the making of films, is culturally determined. I believe it can

be assumed that if a film’s world is unfamiliar to us culturally, that is to say, if we for example do

not know what the things presented feel, smell, taste or sound like, our haptic experience is likely

to be rather poor, or at least poor in comparison to a native viewer’s experience. What I

understand by purposeful hapticity is exemplified in my analysis of Ashes of Time in the last

chapter.

A short summary of the aims of the material or bodily turn is in order here. The turn is concerned

with possible ways of talking or writing about film experience in such a manner that its holistic

nature, its materiality is communicated. Theorists occupied with such questions ask how to

translate qualities from one sense modality to another, how to communicate sense experiences

with words. These are the same questions a filmmaker has to face as she tries to find counterparts

for various sense experiences in the cinematic expression. The material turn also criticizes the

eye-centred theories and tries to point out the limits of vision. Yet, as I pointed out in the

beginning, we are not talking about a unified theory here. Nor does this approach aim to discard

other theories or approaches. Rather, I see as its goal the completion of other theories as regards

the bodily basis of cinema experience.

Laura U. Marks has pointed out that the materialization of the object of perception is particularly

important in the digital age, as we draw even further away from hapticity and increasingly have

no way of knowing whether images have anything to do with reality. What is more, the material

turn evokes theories that acknowledge that there is more to films than narratives. How the viewer

makes sense of the narrative, or how she builds the fabula on the basis of syuzhet, as Bordwell

says, is not the only or the most important aspect of film experience. The viewer does not merely

follow a story and operate with hypotheses like a puzzle solver.25 Just as important is the affective

and sensuous side of the experience. Films always arouse emotions and sensations and that makes

the experience intimate and meaningful for us.

What I have written about the bodily or material turn in film studies is just a fraction of what is

going on in the study of visual culture more generally. The Deleuzean theorist Barbara M.

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Kennedy gives her contribution to this discussion with her new definition of aesthetics which,

interestingly enough, emphasises the material and the affective.26 The documentary theorist David

MacDougall describes nicely the general idea that it is finally on the surface of our skins that

films come into existence. He speaks not just about films but about images in general: “Meaning

is produced by our whole bodies, not just by conscious thought. We see with our bodies, and any

image we make carries the imprint of our bodies; that is to say, of our being as well as the

meanings we intend to convey. (…) The images we make (…) are, in a sense, mirrors of our

bodies, replicating the whole of the body’s activity, with its physical movements, its shifting

attention (…)”27

Images of touching – touching images

In this final chapter I shall give a short demonstration of the ideas above by using Ashes of Time

(1994), a film with an intimate tone by the Hong Kong director Wong Kar-wai. My intention is

not to give a detailed analysis of it, but rather to indicate some of its mechanisms that make it an

embodied and haptic experience for the viewer. It is characteristic of Wong to disguise reality in

order to emphasise its subjective aspects. This is evident in all of his films which are highly

stylized. Ashes of Time is an indigenous version of the Chinese wuxia, or martial arts film, the

heroes of which are chivalric warriors. All the elements of the genre are there, but only as a

background for a suggestive story about memories, regrets and time. The story links several

human destinies – four males and four females – in an ambiguous manner. At first viewing it is

almost impossible to recognize their mutual relationships and even to tell the characters apart.

The events take place in a desert-like landscape and in shady dwellings in the 12 th century

China.28

Because its primary concern is not the plot, Ashes of Time enables a sensuous and contemplative

experience by giving time for the spectator to notice details and associate the images with her

own sense and other memories and experiences. The sense of time in this film is rather of thick

duration than of thin linearity. The narration does not strive for a conclusion, or closure, but

instead lingers on moments during which the characters are remembering something or during

which we are shown views of landscapes while the voice-over narrates the thoughts of the main

character. The film deals with emotions and moods. Ashes of Time makes it easy and tempting for

the viewer to give up trying to make sense of the story and instead give herself over to the

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sensuous flow of images. Once the spectator has realized that there will not be clear causality

linking the images and scenes her thinking becomes more like a process of noticing and

following fascinating visual and aural cues rather than a forward-directed process of solving the

riddles of the plot.

Ashes of Time sensitises tactile senses by emphasising textures of reality: of fabrics, water, earth,

cliffs, human skin, horse’s skin, hair, etc. in numerous close-ups, or haptic images. Repeatedly

we see hands or other body parts literally caressing skin or some other material, but skin appears

also in a more metaphorical fashion, as the skin of the film. By this I mean that from time to time

the image ceases to be a representation of three-dimensional space and is transformed into a two-

dimensional plane. During such moments the contents of the image appear to be attached to the

surface like in a painting. Sequences of movement and static moments alternate in the film. It is

particularly during moments of stasis, of carefully composed images, that the skin of the film is

activated in the viewer’s vision in the above-mentioned sense. Many landscape shots look like

paintings in their two-dimensionality and immobility, but they may burst into life suddenly and

the three-dimensionality is restored. Some of the landscape shots are abstract and their content is

difficult to perceive immediately. Before we can make out depth-cues the image appears for a

moment like a two-dimensional plane of shapes and colours. In fact, there is a constant tension

between surface, or the skin, and depth.

Alternatively the image retains its three-dimensionality, but a sort of transparent layer appears

between the spectator and the depth depicted in the image. This happens for instance when

something is seen through a thin fabric, a cloud of dust, haze or a ray of sunlight. In such images

there is a lot of movement both near and far and we must discern the farther away objects through

flickering lights and shadows, or something else that plays on the cinematic skin. Various

physical “vibrations” that operate both inside individual shots and in scenes keep us sensuously

engaged throughout the film. It could be said that the kinetic potential of images is made the most

of in Ashes of Time. Wong’s approach to narration is not to stitch the spectator into the narrative

in the classical manner. While watching Ashes we do not have the sensation of occupying the best

possible position in the middle of the events (optic visuality), but the sensation of being touched

by the events – touched in a broad sense –is much stronger.

Throughout the film the graininess of the image adds to the hapticity. This is particularly notable

in images of the dry desert landscape, in which the grains of the image are like grains of sand in

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the desert. It is as if the image was beginning to dissolve before our eyes just like the memories of

the melancholy protagonists. The landscape changes into a mirage – or maybe it already is. Here

the materiality of the film itself is sensed. As the images do not strive for clarity and are not

always causally linked, sense of sight and cognition as ways of knowing are exceeded. At this

point we can just relax and start feeling the atmosphere with our bodies just as the characters

seem to be doing. One of the most sensuous scenes is the one in which the female character

Peach Blossoms seeks solace by caressing her horse. Close-ups show her bare skin against the

horse’s hair and fingers stroking the mane. The tips of her toes touch the surface of the water in

which the horse is standing. Another female character relieves her pent-up desire by rubbing

herself against a tree trunk the branches of which stretch towards the spectator like giant fingers.

Despite the emotionally charged character portrayals we rather identify with the sense of

materiality present in the images than with the characters. As Stephen Teo points out, these haptic

elements do not have so much to do with the narrative as “with the tactile sensation that the

director wants us to feel. (…) Like a textile artist, Wong weaves together the pieces of his

narrative with the use of textures”.29 As I understand it, haptic visuality is not inherently anti-

narrative, but it does seem that filmmakers who create such images are more interested in

evoking moods and memories than their more plot-oriented colleagues.

In fact, the hapticity of Ashes of Time is linked to its anti-genre, and thus also anti-plot, features.

There are at least two reasons why we are not to take martial arts as seriously in this film as in

more genre-bound films. Firstly, the action scenes are so hectic that we cannot perceive them as

part of a coherent narrative but simply take them as kinaesthetic flux that appeals first of all to

our senses. It is almost impossible to see who are involved in the fights and how they move. In

addition, it is not entirely clear why there are fights in the first place. Anyway, it does not matter

so much, because only two of the main characters are involved in the fighting scenes and there

seems to be a more important concern in their lives – love. Secondly, most of the time framing is

so tight that we see only a fraction of the actions going on, while usually martial arts films show

the events on a grand scale. The tight framings can be interpreted as part of the subjectivity of the

narration and the themes. The narrative draws us close to the characters and to their intimate

micro-worlds.30

In this article I have asked what closeness could mean on bodily level in film experience. The

theoretical framework of my discussion was based on two examples of recent film theories that

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emphasize the embodied nature of film viewing formed. I examined and developed further the

idea of skin which appears in the thinking of Vivian Sobchack and Laura U. Marks in order to

flesh out the nature of the “material embrace” that takes place between the viewer and the film.

The idea behind the concept of skin was to stress that the closeness that the viewer feels is more

than just the psychological identification process; that film is literally felt on, and inside, the skin.

The challenge of this kind of approach is how to put such an experience into words. I hope I have

managed to come at least close enough to this experience through my brief analysis.

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Sobchack, Vivian (2004), Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture. Berkeley:

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Teo, Stephen 2005. Wong Kar-wai. London: British Film Institute.

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1 Sobchack 2004, 54 – 55.2 Abel 1988, 236; 239.3 Ibid., 240.4 Sobchack 2004, 55 – 58.5 Hansen 1993, 458. See also Sobchack 2004, 55.6 Kracauer 1960, 157–159.7 These ideas can be found in Eisenstein, Sergei 1986. Film Sense. London: Faber and Faber.8 Sobchack 2004, 9 Hansen 1993, 464. See also Sobchack 2004, 55.10 Sobchack 2004, 58 – 60. See also Shaviro1993, for example 25 – 27.11 See for example Plantinga, Carl and Greg M. Smith (eds.) 1999. Passionate Views. Film, Cognition, and Emotion. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press and Tan, Ed S. 1996. Emotion and the Structure of Narrative Film. Film as an Emotion Machine. Mahwah, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.12 Kennedy 2000, 3.13 Quoted in Lippit 1999, 79–80. 14 Jamieson 2007.15 Sobchack 2004, 63 – 66.16 Ibid., 76 – 79.17 Ibid. 73 – 84.18 Amstrong 2000.19 Sobchack 2004, 67 – 72.20 Sobchack 2004, 67 – 69.21 A good example is the first subjective shot from the point of view of the recovering Julie in Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Blue (1993). The film exemplifies also in other way the intervention of the cinematic skin.22 Marks 2000, 143 – 145, 162-163; Marks 2002, xii – xiii, 1 – 20.23 Maurice Merleau-Ponty has argued that the fact that perceiving is embodied has ethical significance, because it implies that an ethical view is a felt experience rather than something that can be understood on a purely conceptual level. (See Stadler, Jane 2001, Intersubjective, Embodied, Evaluative Perception: A Phenomenological Approach to the Ethics of Film. Quarterly Review of Film & Video 19, 237 – 248.) 24 Marks 2000, 162–163; Marks 2002, xii-xiii, 1–20. Marks uses the concept haptic visuality to analyse multicultural films whose makers are for the most part people who have moved to a foreign culture. These very personal films deal with cultural differences and culture-related memories, such as memories of people, objects and sense experiences. Film theories that emphasise the need for (physical or psychic) distance and rational knowing are inadequate for the analysis of such experiences. 25 See Bordwell, David 1985. Narration in the Fiction Film. London: Methuen.26 See Kennedy, Barbara 2000. Deleuze and Cinema. The Aesthetics of Sensation. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.27 MacDougall 2006, 3.28 Teo (2005, 66) says that the characters’ costumes date from the Song and Jin periods of the 12th century.29 Teo 2005, 79.30 See also Brunette 2005, 38.