Abstract

Going to the movies is a sensual experience. When we say we are moved by a film, that it touches us, or that we respond to it viscerally, we mean it in a more-than-metaphorical sense. These claims imply an intimate and distinctly tactile relationship between film and viewer that is an important factor in our attraction and response to the movies. "The Tactile Eye" examines the tactility of the film experience, asking how films' meaning and significance are made at our fingertips and in the very deepest recesses of our bodies. The project considers the film and viewer to be in a relationship of tactile contact and reciprocity, a view that is indebted to existential phenomenology's descriptions of subjectivity and perception as well as to descriptions of the relationship between the senses that have emerged in disciplines such as philosophy, anthropology, psychology, and art criticism. ;"The Tactile Eye" demonstrates that the filmgoer's tactile experience and behaviors are in fact shared in some way by the film. The relationship between viewer and film is not anthropomorphic; instead, it's a matter of shared styles of touch, and the differences between film's body and viewer's body in this respect are as important as the similarities. Each chapter illustrates a few specific modes of touch as they occur within three locales of the spectator's body and the film itself: the skin, the musculature, and the viscera, which are considered in terms of their phenomenological significance rather than, or in addition to, their physiological definitions. ;Each chapter offers close analyses not only of films but also, and more importantly, of film experiences that exhibit a certain style of tactile behavior that is shared, though enacted in distinct ways, by the film and viewer. These analyses, whose subjects include early cinema, experimental films, animation, art films, action films, and silent comedies, for example, employ phenomenological description as a means of seeing more clearly what the body already feels. Ultimately, the project demonstrates that our fascination with cinema stems from a tactile resonance and reciprocity between the film and the viewer, which are experienced sensually and subjectively