Cinema's Baroque Flesh: Film, Phenomenology and the Art of Entanglement

by Saige Walton

Amsterdam University Press, 2016
eISBN: 978-90-485-2849-3 | Cloth: 978-90-8964-951-5
Library of Congress Classification PN1995.25.W35 2016
Dewey Decimal Classification 791.43615

ABOUT THIS BOOK | AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY | REVIEWS | TOC

ABOUT THIS BOOK
In Cinema's Baroque Flesh, Saige Walton draws on the philosophy of Maurice Merleau-Ponty to argue for a distinct aesthetic category of film and a unique cinema of the senses: baroque cinema. Combining media archaeological work with art history, phenomenology, and film studies, the book offers close analyses of a range of historic baroque artworks and films, including Caché, Strange Days, the films of Buster Keaton, and many more. Walton pursues previously unexplored connections between film, the baroque, and the body, opening up new avenues of embodied film theory that can make room for structure, signification, and thought, as well as the aesthetics of sensation.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
Saige Walton is Lecturer in Screen Studies at the University of South Australia, a member of the Hawke Research Institute and a former assistant curator with the Australian Centre for the Moving Image.

REVIEWS

“Cinema enables us to look back, in a productive anachronism, to the radical way baroque thought and aesthetics refused to consider the mind on its own. Through detailed analyses, Saige Walton discovers Merleau-Ponty as a baroque thinker. But to make that discovery, cinema’s fundamental baroqueness need(s) uncovering as well. Walton stages a sparkling encounter between three moments, aesthetics, and modes of looking.”

— Mieke Bal, professor of theory of literature and founding director of the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis

“In the tradition of scholarship devoted to cinema as embodied and sensorial experience, Saige Walton’s book distinguishes itself as a truly original and passionate work. In a bold move, Walton’s exploration of the baroque finds inspiration in a felicitous connection with Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of flesh. Cinema’s Baroque Flesh is essential reading for all film students and scholars seeking to feel the thoughtful and sensuous entanglements of cinema.”

— Elena del Río, professor of film studies, University of Alberta, and author of The Grace of Destruction: A Vital Ethology of Extreme Cinemas

TABLE OF CONTENTS

IntroductionChapter 1 Flesh, Cinema and the Baroque: The Aesthetics of ReversibilityChapter 2 Knots of Sensation: Co-Extensive Space and a Cinema of the PassionsChapter 3 Baroque Skin/Semiotics Chapter 4 One Hand Films the Other: Towards a Baroque Haptics Conclusion: Or the Baroque 'Beauty of the Act'BibliographyFilmographyEndnotes

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