Book review of "The Tactile Eye: touch and the cinematic experience" by Jennifer M. Barker, University of California Press, Berkeley.

Abstract

[Extract] The motion picture is not just a reflection upon the perception of our lived reality, but takes us - its viewers - into a relationship with the world we dwell in. Jennifer M. Barker calls this relationship inspiration – 'a full-bodied opening into and suffusion or one with the other that goes beyond surface, middle, and depth' (p. 146).

The Tactile Eye brings the cinematic experience to the emergence and convergence or our and the film's bodies. The chapters or the book carry titles such as Skin, Musculature and Viscera, dealing with a diversity or human experience including eroticism, pleasure, horror, empathy, apprehension, heart-stopping, hiccups, or breathtaking. While watching a film, the human body reacts haptically, kinaesthetically, muscularly and viscerally. So does the film's 'body', through the screen's surface, its shimmering, off- and on-screen spaces, and through 'breathing' of the lenses. One concentrates visually as well as 'auditively', one feels muscular tension, one's feelings are shown on one's face expressions and gestures. The experience of a film is something meaningful to us because of our bodies. One feels it, one actually dives into one's own body, first to be swallowed and then spit out into the world. '[F]ilms can pierce, pummel, push, palpate, and strike us; they also slide, puff, flutter, flay, and cascade along our skin' (p. 36).