Vivian Sobchack

Question 1

About the theorist

Answer 1

• Vivian Sobchack (What My Fingers knew, 2004)
• American Phenomenologist
• Frustrated with the gap between film theory and film experience
• Grounds the cinematic experience in the human body

Question 2

Sobchack Critique

Answer 2

• Contemporary film theory has ignored the viewer’s corporeal-material being
• In structuralism, only the eye makes sense of date
• In Grand Theory there is a mastering gaze over the image
• Linguistic and psychoanalytic understanding of the cinema should be replaced

Question 3

Sobchack’s Theory

Answer 3

• We own a sensuous embodied experience
• Our vision and hearing are given meaning by other senses
• The data of the different senses communicate through the lived body
• Neuroscience supports this
• This is a synaesthetic perception
• The conscious experience is created through this cross-modal sensory exchange
• This intercommunication of senses provides us with a carnal knowledge that makes the film experience meaningful

Question 4

Origin of carnal knowledge: Cinesthetic Subject

Answer 4

• This carnal knowledge (meaning) does not originate in either the spectator’s body or cinematic representation
• In their conjunction, when there is a reversible structure between subjective spectator and objective image
• Conception of objective image and subjective spectator in cinema gets blurred
• This shapes a disruptive body is called the cinesthetic subject
• The cinesthetic subject experiences a movie as here and there rather than locating the cinematic experience as onscreen or offscreen
• We can touch and be touched by the texture of images (tactile shock)
• The cinesthetic subject is the viewer who through carnal knowledge makes sense of what it is to see a movie
• Movies thus provoke a carnal though that should run film analysis

Question 5

How are we given carnal knowledge? (structure of reversibility in our sensual experience)

Answer 5

• In the theatre your intentionality streams towards the world onscreen
• There is a conscious and attention and bodily tension
• As I cannot literally touch the screen (my sensual desire), the body’s, seeking a sensible object to fulfil, will reverse its direction to locate its sensual grasp on my own subjectively felt body
• My senses are enhanced because my only partially fulfilled grasp of the cinematic object is completed through my own body
• Carnal knowledge occurs through the reversible sensual structure that connects the sense of my literal body to the sense of the figurative bodies
• Spectators have both a real (literal) sensual experience and an as-if-real (figural) sensual experience
• Within this structure my experience of my sensorium becomes heightened
• Your senses become literally sensitised to the texture on screen
• You neither feel the texture on screen or the silk you are wearing
• The carnal movement of an ongoing back and forth of tactile desire intensifies sense of touch (open to all fabrics)
• Meaning (carnal knowledge) is constituted as both a carnal matter and a conscious understanding that emerge simultaneously

Question 6

Conclusion

Answer 6

• It is not metaphorical to say that we touch or are touched by a film
• In cinema all of our senses are mobilised
• The body fills in the gap in its sensual grasp of the figurative world by turning back on itself to flesh it out into a physicalised sense
• This is why we describe films so sensually
• The function of the lived body is both carnal and conscious (have and make sense at the same time)
• This is revealed through the phenomenology of the cinesthetic subject