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Cruising the unknown: film as rhythm and embodied apprehension in L’Inconnu du lac/Stranger by the Lake (2013)

2018; Routledge; Volume: 16; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/17400309.2018.1479183

1740-7923

Saige Walton,

Literature and Culture Studies

In Alain Guiraudie's L'Inconnu du lac/Stranger by the Lake (2013), rhythm spans the human, the non-human and the cinematic. This article examines how Guiraudie's film is invested in narrative, ecological and choreographic rhythms, and in a gap or spacing between bodies and things. Despite its depictions of queer sex, love and desire, Guiraudie's film cannot be understood through bodies 'in touch'. Bringing together accounts of lived and cinematic rhythm, the article develops an alternative account of film and the body that includes the sensing of distance, spatiality and dissonance. Returning to Maurice Merleau-Ponty's interest in rhythm and the cinema, the article broadens touch-based accounts of film beyond that of a shared and/or proximate encounter. Drawing attention to the sensuality of bodies in space and to the connections between touch, rhythm and film style, the article reconsiders Jennifer M. Barker's tactile account of cinematic 'apprehension'. As it solicits our embodied apprehension and is organised by a fatal arrhythmia, Stranger by the Lake highlights the gaps and the spaces, the felt distances and the conflicts that also shape filmic corporeality (including that of film and viewer).