Sense & Space: The Experience of Corporeal Immersion in the Moving Image

Abstract

This thesis examines physical space in the moving image, and the viewer’s experience of corporeal immersion within the screen’s depths. As it relates to the subjective, bodily experience of film and video art, this study is primarily a phenomenological one, developed from the philosophy of Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Their ideas are the basis of both film phenomenology, as it has been developed by Vivian Sobchack, as well as architectural phenomenology. Those two disciplines are united here to construct a new theory of the lived spaces of the screen. The works of the moving image that incite corporeal immersion provide their own theorization of space which echoes the theory developed here, and parallel the phenomenological investigations of theorists like Sobchack and Juhani Pallasmaa. Such works emerge from the genre of slow cinema, and this study thoroughly examines significant works by directors including Hou Hsiao-Hsien and Tsai Ming-Liang. In addition, artworks which utilize similar aesthetics and formal strategies, and which engage with similar subject matter to slow cinema are also examined. This theory has profound ethical implications, and films and video artworks concerned with lived bodies and lived spaces are politically resonant. These ethics become more acutely political in those works which directly address their socio-political context, and its conditions such as the emphasis on spatial abstraction and an obsession with the present. Such conditions, characteristic of contemporary, global, late-capitalist societies, are of concern to theorists, filmmakers, and artists alike. The thought of french philosopher Jacques Rancière, particularly the notion of aesthetic dissensus, is also utilised in this study to illuminate the broader implications of fulfilling spatial experiences via the screen. The primary suggestion of this study is that space, as it is experienced by the embodied subject, is worth taking seriously. It is a project that is taken up equally by theorists, and by filmmakers and artists, whose multiple concerns coalesce in this thesis around the experience of corporeal immersion.