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.
- Cover
- Table of contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Flesh and its Reversibility
- Defining the Baroque
- ‘Good Looking’
- A Cinema of Baroque Flesh
- 1. Flesh, Cinema and the Baroque: The Aesthetics of Reversibility
- Baroque Vision and Painting the Flesh
- Baroque Flesh
- Analogous Embodiments: The Film’s Body
- Baroque Vision and Cinema
- Summation: Face to Face—Feeling Baroque Deixis
- 2. Knots of Sensation: Co-Extensive Space and a Cinema of the Passions
- Synaesthesia, Phenomenology, and the Senses
- Cinesthesia and the Bel Composto
- A Passionate Baroque: Emotion, Excess, and Co-Extensive Space
- Assault and Absorption: Cruel Baroque
- Summation: Beside Oneself
- 3. Baroque Skin/Semiotics
- Chiasm: Language and Experience
- Baroque Poetic Language and the Seventeenth-Century Infinite
- Baroque Luxury
- Skin-Deep: Baroque Texturology
- Tickles: Baroque Wit
- Summation: Cine-Mimesis
- 4. One Hand Films the Other: Baroque Haptics
- Touching-Touched
- Haptic Visuality and the Baroque
- Baroque Haptics and Cinema
- Analogical Assemblages: Baroque Databases
- Summation: TEXXTURE
- Conclusion: Or the Baroque ‘Beauty of the Act’
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Filmography
- Index
Text
Audio
Adobe DRM
Login to your account