Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

CINEMA AS SECOND SKIN

2006; Routledge; Volume: 4; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/17400300600768414

1740-7923

Tarja Laine,

South Asian Cinema and Culture

The concept of skin touches upon the growing interest in the senses among cultural theorists, an interest that is driven by a reaction against what is felt to be an unjustified privileging of some senses. It is customarily said that whereas sight and hearing are public senses, more assimilated to reason, smell, taste and touch are more related to subjective and personal perception, because of their proximity to the body. In the contemporary attention for the senses in cultural theory, the emphasis lies not in the separation, but in the meaningful relation between sense‐making and our sensate bodies. In cinema studies, too, there seems to be a tendency to re‐think spectatorship in terms of the sensual and the mimetic. This paper seeks to find the essence of affective engagement in the cinematic experience by introducing the notion of skin as a medium of intersubjective connection, a perceptual surface that travels through the senses, and between the self and the world. I shall show how skin structures our perception, and that cinema is able to touch us by means of emotion because the affect is situated in the skin, with examples from films such as Ringu, Halloween and The Silence of the Lambs.