The Tactile Eye: Touch and the Cinematic Experience

With The Tactile Eye, Barker provides a timely and much needed elaboration on contemporary debates around film and phenomenology. Notions of embodiment, the haptic and sensuousness have become increasingly central to film studies discourse in recent years, with scholars such as Laura U. Marks, Vivian Sobchack and others making some important inroads towards a critical understanding of the film experience that acknowledges both the ‘body’ of the viewer and the ‘body’ of the film. This shift constitutes a move away from traditional, psychoanalytically based approaches centring on conceptualizations of subjectivity that are based almost exclusively on the significance of vision. As part of this shift, The Tactile Eye accounts for the ways in which subjectivity is embodied and lived. Barker's aim is to show how films can ‘make sense’, and how they can ‘move us’ intellectually, emotionally, physically and sensually. Barker's book is a particularly significant addition to debates around film and embodiment, since it not only elaborates on the theoretical underpinnings of a phenomenological understanding of cinema but also begins to outline a conceptual and methodological framework for film analysis. It seems to me that the book's main contribution lies in the provision of a more generally applicable analytical approach for an exploration of the tactile, fleshy, muscular, visceral contact between image, imaged and viewer. It provides the reader with the analytical tools to carry out a tactile/textural film analysis by conceptualizing the reciprocal and reversible relationship between the body of the viewer and the body of the film. Importantly, Barker does not posit a consideration of the embodied and sensuous encounter between film and viewer in opposition to more traditional theoretical and analytical approaches (that might focus on formal, narrative, psychic or cognitive features). Instead, the embodied and tactile aspects of this encounter are conceptualized as an essential means of ‘grasping’ the emotional, intellectual and thematic aspects of any given cinematic experience.