The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses
English · Duke University Press · 2000
ISBN 9780822323914Verify editionNo verifiable published translation record was located.
Core question
When colonial, migratory, and diasporic experience lacks a complete archive, how can cinema preserve history through surfaces, grain, food, fabric, sound, and bodily memory? How can viewers approach difference without immediately possessing it as knowledge?
Argument
Marks studies intercultural cinema within unequal contact zones and develops haptic visuality, sense memory, fetish/fossil, and the portable sensorium as key tools. Low definition and proximate surfaces delay recognition, mobilize tactile viewing, and carry private sensory experience into colonial history, migration, and collective memory. Form, production infrastructure, cultural location, and viewing ethics occupy one analytical plane.
Argument structure
Intercultural memory is bound to concrete positions of power. Absent archives, objects, and material surfaces preserve pasts; haptic visuality, nonvisual senses, and the portable sensorium explain how those pasts can be felt. Material facts and sensory memories remain connected without making history fully available to the spectator.