Abstract:
We come into the world without ready-made systems of aesthetics and ethics, and even without ready-made selfhood and ego. Our first skin-to-skin contact with our own mother at birth marks the transition to our life outside the womb. Skin is something that everyone has, yet the sense of touch is underexamined compared to the other senses we have. The tactility of skin implies an intimacy embedded in both personal and physical distance. In cinema, which constantly plays on the dialectic between intimacy and distance, we often feel touched by films and emotionally connected with them. Such an intimate sensation is worthy of both aesthetic and ethical evaluation, using the skin as a critical means of reflecting on contemporary moving image culture in a primordial and meaningful manner. Focusing on Pedro Almodóvar’s The Skin I Live in, Julia Leigh’s Sleeping Beauty, Jonathan Glaze’s Under the Skin, and Gasper Noé’s Enter the Void, this thesis investigates the different aesthetic manifestations of skin in the films’ approach to depicting human suffering and release from suffering. Drawing on Vivian Sobchack’s phenomenological film criticism, the thesis seeks to articulate an embodied ethics that arises from our inherent sensibility and spontaneous responsibility. I argue that skin is the transformative material between “my” body and “my” self, and between “me” and the rest of the world, through which “my” body is able to relate with others and hence to come into being. The transformative capacity of skin testifies to a fluid and dynamic relational network that is supported by our material body and built upon our perception. This thesis demonstrates that the skin is able to transform a male body into becoming-woman, a fetishised and desensitised female body into a sentient becoming-body, and an insensitive and indifferent non-human into becoming-human. In addition, the last chapter indicates that the versatile screen is able to mimic various structures of the human membrane, including not only the skin and the retina but also the sensory cortex and uterine wall, thereby engaging viewers through the porous skin of the screen with the representation of transcendence.