Screen Bodies

Our summer issue begins with a three-part special section on phenomenologies of perception in screen media. These articles focus on novel technological means of representing embodied, lived experience, as well as ways that visual media can impact embodied spectatorship. Each examines media artworks that attempt to represent the seemingly intangible, such as loss, decay, and temporality. The authors in this section offer nuanced and ethically oriented phenomenologies of vision, motion, and time. In “Projecting the Colors of Vision,” Wendy Haslem discusses how artists working in animation, cinema, and virtual reality use visual media to represent the lived experience of sight loss. Haslem analyzes the “haptic optics” of Yoav Brill's Ishihara (2010), Derek Jarman's Blue (1993), and James Spinney and Peter Middleton's Notes on Blindness (2016) to show how these artists use technological tools and experiments with color to represent diverse, embodied experiences of visual disability, and to encourage “empathic awareness” in viewers. In his article, Yifei Sun critiques the analog-contingent theories of movement put forward by Henri Bergson and Gilles Deleuze. Sun modifies aspects of Deleuze's Cinema 1: The Movement-Image to offer a theory that accommodates the qualities of digital film. Sun considers the possibilities for software art to produce what he calls “voyeuristic authorship” and applies his “ontology of decay” to Marc Lafia and Fang-Yu Lin's The Battle of Algiers (2006). In “Aesthetics of Slowness, Aesthetics of Boredom,” Giulia Tronconi examines slow cinema's phenomenology of time. Tronconi offers an incisive reading of Tsai Ming-liang's films I Don't Want to Sleep Alone (2006) and Days (2020) that reveals how the filmmaker uses “felt duration” as a strategy to cultivate “empathic contemplation” and “respectful observation” in viewers. The author engages with the work of Schopenhauer and Heidegger and with Deleuze's Cinema 2: The Time-Image to explain the political and ethical potential of delaying movement in film.

“Projecting the Colors of Vision” investigates the role of color in the depiction of changing visual dispositions across four screen texts and the technologies that create them. This article explores the role of color in the depiction of color blindness in the abstract cell animation, Ishihara, directed by Yoav Brill (2010). It examines the role of blue in Derek Jarman's experimental film Blue (1993), and it looks into the ways that both the feature film and the virtual reality version of Notes on Blindness (James Spinney and Peter Middleton, 2016) use color, rain, and sound to sculpt spaces. This article develops an intermedial comparison of each text, focusing on image and sound as dialectical forces that invite an embodied experience of distinct perspectives.

Following Henri Bergson's third thesis of movement in Creative Evolution, Gilles Deleuze devotes a large section of Cinema I to applying the concept of the mobile section and the open whole to the narrative of analog cinema. By adopting a material ontological perspective and taking the disciplines of art-making into consideration, this article criticizes Deleuze's approach and proposes to rethink Bergson's and Deleuze's theories of movement in both analog cinema and digital moving images. In response to its main question, can analog and digital moving images constitute the open whole, this article examines the material degradation of film in the analog, investigates the phenomenon of morphing in the digital, and pays special attention to the real-time creation as well as the voyeuristic authorship of digital artworks.

Within the contemporary discourse on slow cinema and independent arthouse filmmaking, emerges the figure of Malaysian-born, Taiwan-based director Tsai Ming-liang. His works, situated at a crossing between different forms of expression—film and installation, narrative film and ethnography—have often been deemed tiresome, boring. The following article explores where and how boredom may be identified in his films, and questions whether the languid feeling can be considered an aesthetic achievement. In particular, the article offers close textual analysis of I Don't Want to Sleep Alone (2006) and Days (2020). Leveraging on the personal quality of felt duration, these films attune the viewer to the possibility of wonder and encourage considerations of the embodied representation of profound emotions such as solitude, alienation, and melancholy.

“Identification and Contagion” asks the question of how film can address the body of its viewer in an ethical dimension. Because contemporary movements such as Black Lives Matter and #MeToo have insisted that being in public means always being a raced and sexed body, film's ability to address audiences as though they were perspectives divorced of corporeal matter must be considered an ethical problem. The 2016 film The Fits provides a model of how a film can formally and thematically address an embodied audience. At the level of form, characters stare out through the camera at the audience, returning their gaze. Through the use of staging that places the camera (and therefore viewers) between characters, the film's director Anna Rose Holmer suggests an equivalence between the characters which are under observation and the audience. Furthermore, the film's treatment of the theme of conversion disorders implies a form of transmission between bodies that does not require physical contact to take place. Freudian psychoanalysis describes how such symptoms can pass from person to person even through a medium such as film. A recent example of conversion disorder in New York demonstrates how even watching a video of a person suffering hysterical symptoms can cause a viewer thousands of miles away to contract the same symptoms. The Fits therefore provides a model for how film can formally and thematically address an audience ethically at the level of their presence as bodies in social space.

The media theorist Sandy Stone has referred to flattened and digitized modes of communication in terms of “tokens,” using this framework specifically to address the ways in which we employ technology to compress, send, and receive desire. In taking up this thread, this article examines how tokens of desire are compressed and passed through the specific video game genre of dating simulators. While addressing a number of popular titles, the article highlights one offering in particular, the 2017 release Dream Daddy: A Dad Dating Simulator. The scope of this analysis extends beyond the game itself to consider the physical responses of its players—as made visible in game tutorials and walkthroughs distributed online. This exploration of the relationship between players and the game highlights how gameplay facilitates desires, how elements like agency and fictionality encourage certain responses from players, and how the genre ultimately functions alongside earlier, predigital objects of affection.

This article examines how continuity is dealt with in fictional feminist texts that depict gender or sexuate transition, via surgical intervention or transmogrification, in terms of naming and pronoun use, self-image, and perceived image. The texts here examined—literary and filmic works by cis artists Angela Carter, Sally Potter, and Octavia Butler, principally—all pastiche the familiar narratological mode of transsexual autobiography, aping the convention of internal focalization, though each elides the wrong-body formula that frequently accompanies such narratives to justify access to medical treatment and care. I situate each alongside scholarly engagements with transsexual embodiment, surgery, and lived experience, with particular focus on flesh as that which both contains and determines gendered and sexed readings, to ground these fictive accounts of becoming.

Implicitly or explicitly, society constantly gives us the imperative never to age, to keep our bodies and minds young in order to be valuable—this is particularly the case for women. However, the ageing body tells a valuable story that is worth tracing and analyzing in more depth. In this article, I explore two groups of films in which the ageing bodies of the characters and actors contribute to understanding the narrative of what I call the time-critical sequel. These are sequels produced several years or even decades since their original story was released, in which the years between one film and the other are incorporated into the narrative. First, I will define the time-critical sequel and how it interacts with its parent film. Following, I will develop how the duality of the ageing body of the character/actor, along with their corporeality and embodiment, becomes the means through which a story is told on our screens. I will do this by analyzing Richard Linklater's Before trilogy (1995–2013) and Danny Boyle's Trainspotting (1996), and T2 Trainspotting (2017).

This article examines a 2010s wave of US primetime television shows centered around the experiences of mad or distressed characters. Drawing upon research in critical disability and mad studies, the article identifies positive trends in US media surrounding mental disability, distress, and medication. Although the portrayals of madness in the shows discussed are complex and not without issue, this article argues that these series make space for alternative narratives of madness in popular culture that do not rely wholly on stereotypes of crime, genius, or violence.

Steinbock, Eliza. Shimmering Images: Trans Cinema, Embodiment, and the Aesthetics of Change. Durham: Duke University Press, 2019. 248 pp. Cloth, $102.95; Paperback, $26.95.