The Problem of Bodily Autonomy in the Cinematic Arts

In writing about the production of cinema's felt bodily illusions for moving through space, Scott C. Richmond sets himself the task of describing what cinema does to modulate human perception, how we attune to cinema, and how cinema operates above and below the representational level, that is, at the infrastructural and circuitous sensate levels that bodies plug into during a film encounter. The organizing investigation is into "the set of perceptual processes whereby we orient ourselves in and coordinate ourselves with the world" named proprioception, on which a selection of films "thematize and roughen our perceptual and, thus, embodied involvement with the world unfolding before us onscreen" (6). Richmond seizes on the paradoxical doubled body in proprioception that involves the self in the world and one's reflexive self-perception of that self. Polemically then, Richmond seeks to invigorate a "true phenomenology of perception" (69) for cinema studies that refocuses its attention on the viewer's thickened, resonant, and voluptuous experience of films by rehabilitating the concept of pro-prioception via James J. Gibson, Renaud Barbaras, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty in conjunction with aesthetics refashioned by Steven Shaviro after Kant and Whitehead (plus a late reading of Walter Benjamin) to account for what happens in the "technicity of the flesh" (a combination of Bernard Stiegler and Mark Hanson) during the coupling of viewer and cinematic technics. In this regard the book is a startling composition of theoretical frameworks from psychology, media theory, and continental philosophy that enriches every field it engages but most of all seems concerned with advancing the philosophical purchase of cinema for rethinking bodily being as partial, processual, relational.

I enjoyed the challenge of reading with Richmond across highly technical idioms to finesse new understandings of "the illusion of bodily movement through onscreen space, or cinematic kinesthesis" (18) by developing the central concepts of "proprioceptive aesthetics" (chapters 1 and 5), "ecolog ical phenomenology" (chapter 3), the Epochē and the Écart (chapters 2 and 4), and "cinema as technics" (chapter 6). But, for me, it was Richmond's tackling of the simple idea that cinema presents an illusion to its audience that accomplished the difficult work of overturning hegemonic perspectives in film studies that adhere to philosophical skepticism and modernist debates on medium specificity. Typically scholars are concerned with the "illusion of reality" or the illusion of moving images (58). "Illusions that feel like illusions are not deceptive," he writes (58). This is against the field's skeptical bias that would assume cinema is a system for representing objects that fool the spectator into believing they actually appear. Richmond insists that on the nonrepresentational level, one's proprioceptive grasp of movement abides even when one knows they are not actually moving. Attending to the illusion of flying sidelines the problem of correspondence onscreen and off that entangles debates on film's photographic realism, also in comparison with digital technologies. Instead bodily illusions of proprioceptive movement index "the always palpable divergence between ordinary perception and its technical modulation by the cinema" (70). I was convinced that the overriding cinematic illusion is the proprioceptive fun of being "compelled, even captivated, by the cinema's aberrant information" that I accept (however provisionally) due to what Merleau-Ponty describes as the perceptual faith that conditions my inherence in this world, which is given to the world onscreen and off (89).

The "I" that foregrounds his spectatorial position leads the reader into thick description of select scenes and illusory effects in Marcel Duchamp's Anémic Cinéma (1926), Tony Conrad's The Flicker (1965), Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Godfrey Reggio's Koyaanisqatsi (1982), and Alfonso Cuarón's Gravity (2013) that together amass a range of periods, genres, and technical supports. The chapters that center on these filmic examples each offer an elaboration of what is at stake in the deconstruction of dualist concepts for embodiment such as the visible and invisible with flesh, and of...