BO O K R EVI EWS • CO M PTES R E N D U S
THE SKIN OF THE FILM:
INTERCULTURAL CINEMA,
EMBODIMENT, AND THE SENSES
Laura U. Marks
Durham and London: Duke University
Press, 2000, 298 pp.
Reviewed by Donato Totaro
The Skin of the Film is about what author
Laura U. Marks calls intercultural cin-
ema, meaning Canadian, U.S., and
British films and videos made by peo-
ple who, by either birth or migration,
find themselves caught between their
own minority culture and dominant
Western culture. As Marks acknowl-
edges, intercultural is a somewhat del-
icate term, encompassing the wide
range of terms that refer to minori-
ty/majority power relations and trans-
planted cultures such as slavery,
apartheid, postcolonial, First Nations,
refugee, visible minority, exiled, émi-
gré, multicultural, and Third World.
Exactly how intercultural stands in
relation to these other terms is not
fully articulated. However, Marks
does not assign much conceptual
weight to the term, but simply uses it
to represent the experience of not
being confined or defined by a single
culture.
CANADIAN JOURNAL OF FILM STUDIES • REVUE CANADIENNE D’ÉTUDES CINÉMATOGRAPHIQUES
VOLUME 10 NO. 1 • PP 106-127
Hence what the films represent theo-
retically or epistemologically is clear,
but exactly which films fall under the
term intercultural is less clear. For
example, intercultural includes not
only the diaspora (immigrants, exiled,
displaced peoples), but their offspring
and later generations as well. The
majority of works discussed in this
book are directed by people with
first-hand intercultural experience:
Arabic/Middle Eastern, African,
Indian, Inuit, and First Nations
film/video makers. But there are also
works directed by white Western
directors whose subject and style
embody intercultural qualities: among
others, Bill Viola, Chris Marker, Phil
Hoffman, Stephen Frears, Alain
Resnais, and Jean Rouch. This is per-
haps a reflection of Marks’s desire that
intercultural cinema evolve into a full-
fledged genre, rather than remain a
semi-ghettoized movement.
The condition of being in-between
cultures initiates a search for new
forms of visual expression. This leads
to the hypothesis that many of these
works “call upon memories of the
senses in order to represent the expe-
riences of people living in diaspora.”
And, unlike Western ocularcentrism,
which values sight as the greatest
epistemological sense, intercultural cine-
ma embraces the proximal senses (smell,
taste, touch) as a means of embodying
knowledge and cultivating memory.
Although Marks spends considerable
time explaining how senses are cultur-
ally embodied, and not wholly natural
and primitivist, she refrains from mak-
ing generalizations about how any
particular Western or non-Western
culture experiences the world sensori-
ally, since the mix of cultures, and the
spread of cultural knowledge can over-
lap to create a sensorial hybrid. This is
especially crucial to her corpus, since
it consists mainly of filmmakers who
are caught in-between cultures, mov-
ing from their country of origin to a
Western country, or in the case of sec-
ond generation Westerners, attempt-
ing to balance their non-Western
ancestral culture with their Western
identity. Since many of these filmmak-
ers were either born or trained or now
live in the West, they critique ocular-
centrism from a Western intellectual
and academic perspective. Marks’s
goal is not so much to culturally deter-
mine the senses, but “to find culture
within the body.”
The method of Marks’s argument is
first, to demonstrate (using, Bergson,
Merleau-Ponty, Vivian Sobchack,
Walter Benjamin, and others) that the
body has a visceral, mimetic relationship
to the external world that, like mem-
ory, is both cerebral and emotional.
And secondly, that cinema, as part of
the external world, can also embody a
many-sided sensual experience. Echoing
Rudolf Arnheim, who believed that
cinema thrived on its inherent limi-
tations, Marks argues that intercul-
tural filmmakers attempt to create
memory-images out of the medium’s
sensorial limitations. Therefore the
cinematic language of intercultural
cinema is suspicious of conventional
visuality (“to see is to believe”), and
presents knowledge through gaps,
silences, and absences—an expression
of the cultural silencing that many of
these artists experience.
In defining intercultural cinema as that
which engages the full sensorial spec-
trum, Marks’s greatest challenge is to
demonstrate how cinema appeals to
the senses it can not technically repre-
sent (touch, smell, and taste), and how
these sensory experiences encode cul-
tural memory. This leads to the book’s
central idea: “haptic visuality,” a term
she derives from the art historian Aloïs
Riegl’s “distinction between haptic and
optical images.” Haptic vision is a tac-
tile-based, closer-to-the-body form of
perception, where “the eyes them-
selves function like organs of touch.”
As Marks explains, in optical visuality
the eye perceives objects from a dis-
tance far enough to isolate them as
forms in space, and therefore assumes
a separation between the viewing
CJ FS • RCEC 107
body and the object. Haptic visuality,
on the other hand, tends to “move
over the surface of its object rather
than plunge into illusionistic depth,
not to distinguish form so much as to
discern texture.”
Haptic visuality does not depend on
the viewer identifying with a recog-
nizable figure/character but on a more
sensuous bodily relationship between
the viewer and the subject. Without
representational mediation, the rela-
tionship between viewer and image is
less one of viewer-engaging-object,
than as a “dynamic subjectivity
between looker and image.” The hap-
tic image is “less complete,” requiring
the viewer to contemplate the image
as a material presence rather than an
easily identifiable cog in a narrative
wheel. By contrast, the optical image
comes equipped with all the resources
necessary to be complete, self-suffi-
cient, and legible.
Based on the textual descriptions pro-
vided by Marks, the formal and stylis-
tic properties of haptic visuality in
cinema include: synesthetic effects;
changes in focus, graininess, under-
and overexposure, unclear imagery,
and decaying film and video; optical
printing and scratching on the emul-
sion; video effects and formats such as
Pixelvision; the use of extreme close-
ups, and alternating between
film/video media. (To imagine a paint-
ing analogy, think of Impressionist and
108 Volume 10 No. 1
Post-Impressionist painting as haptic
cinema, and 19th Century realist
painting as optical cinema).
Although Marks relies on several
thinkers to support and develop her
arguments, the most important of them
is Gilles Deleuze. This is fitting, given
that he is a thinker who is, like inter-
cultural cinema itself, interstitial, strad-
dled between film and philosophy, aca-
demic philosophy and free form specu-
lative thought. Although Marks
employs Deleuzian terms, her more
profound debt is to Deleuze’s method-
ology. Deleuze’s cinema project is
about concept building and thinking.
Cinema is an object to think with,
rather than think about. Taking this as
her cue, Marks treats intercultural films
as a source of knowledge, parallel to the
written word. The films and videos she
studies embody speculative and philo-
sophical thought and what Marks calls
“non-visual knowledge.”
The nature of this “non-visual knowl-
edge” is directly connected to Marks’s
intention of drawing out the political
implications of Deleuze’s theory. This
entails, among other things, linking
Deleuze’s movement-image (the domi-
nant narrative film form in which shots
are linked by rational cause and effect
and sensory-motor schema) to “official
history,” and, conversely, linking Deleuze’s
time-image (post-World War II Euro-
pean and art/modernist films in which a
breakdown in the sensory-motor system
gives way to “incommensurable,” non-
rational editing links) to intercultural
cinema. Official history and dominant
narrative forms value knowledge and
memory acquired through the senses
of sight and hearing, whereas knowl-
edge and memory that is not encoded
through auditory or visual means can
slip away from official history, which
is where intercultural cinema operates,
and where intercultural cinema gains
its political edge.
To make this important point, Marks
relies on Deleuze’s philosophical men-
tor, Henri Bergson, and his belief that
perception and memory are multisen-
sory. Equally important is Bergson’s
view that perception is a condition of
both individual consciousness and
external reality (something that is
partly “out there” and partly “within”).
From Bergson, Marks politicizes per-
ception by arguing that perception
and memory are conditioned by cul-
tural needs. Hence, even though inter-
cultural cinema often employs experi-
mental form and highly perso-nal sub-
ject matter, it does so at the service of
collective memory, rather than indi-
vidual, personal memory. One could
say that The Skin of the Filmis an attempt
to erect a politicized Proustian
account of cinema, articula-ting the
many cinematic “madeleines.”
While The Skin of the Film contains a fair
amount of close textual analysis, it is
also rich in theory, borrowing from the
fields of phenomenology, philosophy,
cultural anthropology, art history, and
cognitive science. There is not enough
space here to discuss the many other
thinkers woven into Marks’s thoughts,
but her book makes ample use of bor-
rowed terminology, including aura,
fetishism, mimesis and fossilization, in
addition to her Deleuzian vocabulary.
Although her terms are always well
defined and clearly incorporated into
her overall arguments, the cumulative
effect of this theoretical eclecticism can
at times be dizzying. Fortunately, at the
center of it all is a straightforward
premise which continually grounds the
theory. In the end, the reader is
engaged and challenged by what is an
original and well-thought-out critical
approach to a group of overlooked,
hard to view films and videos.
Some readers may benefit by consider-
ing the application of “haptic visuality”
to a broader spectrum of films (as is
the book’s design), and come to appre-
ciate well-known films from this new
perspective. Most strikingly for this
reader, the term corresponds well to
the films of Georgian filmmaker Sergei
Paradjanov, Russian directors Andrei
Tarkovsky and Alexandr Sokurov, and
a number of recent Iranian films that
feature characters with a powerful tac-
tile dependence on the world, such as
Gabbeh, The Apple, The Color of Paradise,
The Silence, and The Wind Will Carry Us.
By explaining how cinema may engage
all the senses (and sense memory), The
CJ FS • RCEC 109
Skin of the Film has given concrete form
to something that film viewers have
been unconsciously experiencing for
generations.
The University of Warwick
AMERICAN MOVIE AUDIENCES:
FROM THE TURN OF THE CENTURY
TO THE EARLY SOUND ERA
Edited by Melvyn Stokes and
Richard Maltby
London: British Film Institute, 1999,
186 pp.
Reviewed by Charles Tepperman
This new collection of essays provides
several examples of impressive histor-
ical research on silent and early sound
movie audiences. Most of the essays
are meticulously documented, present-
ing detailed case-studies of American
audiences of the silent period. Studying
audiences raises a variety of theoretical
and methodological problems and has
been the subject of considerable schol-
arly discussion in recent years.
The editors of this volume frame their
anthology in terms of the debate pub-
lished in Cinema Journal in the wake of
Ben Singer’s 1996 article, “Manhattan
Nickelodeons: New Data on Audiences
and Exhibitors.” Singer was respond-
ing to Robert C. Allen’s writing on the
same subject, almost two decades
before, and he included a critique of
Allen’s evidence and methodology.
110 Volume 10 No. 1
The resulting exchange included several
scholars and demonstrated the need
for more finely detailed research on
the composition and behavior of audi-
ences in New York and elsewhere.
Several authors who participated in the
Cinema Journal debate (Judith Thissen,
William Uricchio and Roberta Pearson)
have contributed to American MovieAudiences.
The book is divided into three sections–
“The Social Formation of Audiences,”
“The Politics of Audiences,” and
“Audiences and the Coming of Sound”–
although the distinction between parts
one and two is difficult to grasp. As the
essays themselves make clear, all of
these audiences are socially formed
and those formations have significant
ideological implications.
Not surprisingly, New York is the set-
ting for three quite different accounts
of nickelodeon exhibition and recep-
tion. Taken together, they persuasively
demonstrate that despite drawn-out
debates over the number and location
of nickelodeons in New York, there is
still much more to learn about the
early film audiences in that city.
Judith Thissen examines the experience
of Jewish movie-goers in the Lower
East Side of Manhattan between
1905 and 1914. Though originally a
break with “legitimate” Yiddish the-
atre, theatres which showed films
were, according to Thissen, far from
instruments of Americanization, as they