The Body, Unbounded

The fifth chapter uses Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity to offer an in-depth theoretical discussion of the term “proprioceptive aesthetics,” and offers a schematic discussion of the main aesthetic problems of the proprioceptive cinema. Taking Gravity as an exemplar and developing proprioceptive aesthetics in terms of its fundamental aesthetic problems, the chapter argues that in the locution proprioceptive aesthetics, the term proprioceptive is not merely some qualification of a previously understood aesthetics, but a modular adjective specifying a region of aesthetics. Rather, proprioceptive aesthetics entails the sense of aesthetics in which it names how we resonate with the world and attune ourselves to it.

Introduction

The introduction of Cinema's Bodily Illusions offers an overview of proprioceptive aesthetics as a problem in contemporary film and film theory. It lays out the problems of the book: proprioception and the ecological approach, the critique of modernism, and the technicity of the cinema.

Conclusion The Technicity of the Cinema

Lastly, the conclusion of Cinema’s Bodily Illusions draws various strands of the book together in an analysis of the cinema as an aesthetic technics, in which the reflexivity and exorbitance of aesthetic perception is not the property of a subject, but is distributed across the viewer’s organic body and the inorganic system of the cinema in their coupling.

Aesthetics Beyond the Phenomenal

The sixth chapter considers Tony Conrad’s The Flicker, arguing that it leads the way to an aesthetics beyond the phenomenal, that is, an aesthetics—and a phenomenology—without experience as its organizing category. It shows the fundamental technicity of such inherence, how our presence in and presentness to the world are at once technically enabled and also technically transformed. In The Flicker aesthetics is not the experience or property of a spectator but rather distributed across both the organic body of the viewer and the inorganic technics of the cinema. It belongs to the coupling between them.

Ecological Phenomenology

The third chapter introduces Gibson’s ecological approach to perception and develops it in relation to the cinematic illusion of bodily movement and the cinema more generally. Moving forward, it describes cinema’s perceptual work in ecological terms, developing one of the most important terms at length, ‘perceptual resonance’. Finally, the chapter shows how Gibson’s doctrine of perceptual resonance is profoundly complemented by Merleau-Ponty’s investigation of perceptual faith.

Beyond the Infinite, at Home in Finitude

The second chapter turns to the question of illusion in a sustained system. Attending closely to the illusion of bodily movement on offer in Kubrick’s 2001, the chapter argues that it demands a response different from the skepticism that usually attends discussions of illusion. Introducing antirepresentational phenomenology of the cinema, the chapter contends that a properly antiskeptical phenomenology of the cinema must, as its method (in its epochē), suspend the representational character of the cinematic image. It must cease to appeal to the lived experience, turning instead to a phenomenology of appearance.

The Unfinished Business of Modernism

The first chapter uses Marcel Duchamp’s only surviving film, Anémic Cinéma, to show how proprioceptive aesthetics is a crucial alternative to the modernist aesthetics that orients most of film and media theory, emphasizing their decisively different structures of reflexivity. Anémic Cinéma creates an illusory depth in the coupling between the cinema and its viewers’ bodies: it configures the cinema as an optical device, or a machine for the modulation of its viewers’ perception. In place of representation, it engenders voluptuous illusion. It becomes a schematic diagram for an alternative to modernism, for proprioceptive aesthetics.

Proprioception, The Écart

Using Godfrey Reggio’s highly kinesthetic film Koyaanisqatsi as a case study, the fourth chapter analyzes how proprioceptive aesthetics not only emphasizes the formation of onscreen worlds, but also thematizes viewers’ embodiment through its modulation of proprioception. It continue the project of bringing Gibson and Merleau-Ponty together, showing how Gibson’s theories of proprioception intersect with Merleau-Ponty’s late doctrine of the Écart, or the paradoxical separation from but continuity with the world.