Touching the Screen, Striding through the Mirror: The Haptic in Film.

Cinema, by virtue of the prevalence of such metaphors as ‘the camera-eye’ and ‘the gaze’, can be taken to epitomize the Western primacy of vision. It might be counterintuitive to assume that the experience of cinema is an inter-modal experience, involving senses other than vision and aurality. In line with phenomenological and feminist approaches to film experience this book chapter argues that spectatorship in the cinema is essentially a synaesthetic experience. In order to corroborate this contention this contribution focuses on the importance of the haptic for cinematic aesthetics. By elucidating the interweaving of representations and evocations of tactile experience in a set of films from a range of different genres, time periods and national contexts, it aims to put forward some suggestions as to the interplay of the senses within film spectatorship, which are considered here under the rubric of immersive experience.