Abstract

In ‘Sensing Film Performance’, Sean Redmond analyses three films—Under the Skin, The Wrestler, and Lust, Caution —with an eye towards the way in which a phenomenological perspective can underscore the essentially embodied nature of experiencing film. Redmond suggests a series of ‘carnal alignments’ emerge between the bodies of the actor, character, and viewer, and that these conjunctions are at once individual and collective. In tracing these alignments, Redmond helps expand our sense of the performative, by positing the cinematic screen itself as a performative environment, and the embodied spectator as a performative being.