Touch as Proximate Distance: Post-Phenomenological Ethics in the Cinema of Isabel Coixet

Abstract

[eng] In the wake of paradigm-shifting works on cinematic affect over the last few decades that have challenged psychoanalytically based gaze theory, embodied perception and sensory-affective experience have become fundamental concepts in much of contemporary screen studies. Even though the proponents of the affective turn in film studies present diverse theoretical approaches to affect – from Deleuzian “haptic visuality” to phenomenologically informed film theory – it seems evident that they all draw, to a greater or lesser degree, on the sense of touch as the affective axis of perception. Conceptualized this way, the sense of touch facilitates a mode of mutual embodiment between the viewer and the film image, a relationship based on immediacy and exchange, which, according to some of the approaches to cinematic affect, might also translate into a particular ethical position of embracing and opening up to the world and to the Other. The cinema of Isabel Coixet seems to exemplify these claims. Her oeuvre, as I shall illustrate, is often discussed in terms of intimacy, encounter and reciprocity, as well as the sensuous visual and sonorous textures which compose her films. Nevertheless, in this article I will suggest that Coixet evinces a much more ambiguous attitude towards touch, which often goes beyond the prevalent models of haptic visuality or embodied perception as conceptualized in phenomenological film theory. Drawing on Laura McMahon, I seek to interrogate the concept of touch by engaging with Jean-Luc Nancy’s anti-ocularcentric, post-phenomenological reflections on community, offering an analysis of three films produced at different moments in Coixet’s career – The Secret Life of Words (2005), Yesterday Never Ends (2013)