Reflections on The Skin of Film, 25 years on

It’s often the case that artists develop an idea first, in audiovisual form, and theory catches up with it later. It was my good luck to witness a movement in art – movies that that did not fit into current ways of thinking about cinema. These films and videos (a distinction from the analogue days) from in the late 1980s and early 1990s were short or relatively obscure experiments, many in cross-cultural and queer cinema. I saw them when I attended festivals and visited distributors while working at Afterimage magazine, and later as a freelance writer and programmer. The Robert Flaherty Seminar blew my mind several years running with its programmers’ discoveries, especially Coco Fusco and Steve Gallagher’s program for the Flaherty in 1991 and their larger program “The Hybrid State” at Anthology Film Archives in New York.

The movies that captured me seemed apolitical according to the politics of representation. Movies like Samirah Alkassim’s Far from You (1997), Mona Hatoum’s Measures of Distance (1988), Rea Tajiri’s History and Memory: For Akiko and Takashige (1991), Ming-Yuen S. Ma’s Sniff (1997), Hopi video artist Victor Masayesva’s Siskyavi: The Place of Chasms (1991), and many experiments by Trinh T. Minh-ha and Black Audio Film Collective suggested to me a way of being that elides representation and instead clings close to the thing seen and heard. Many of the movies that inspired me were non-fiction works that skated on the edge of the knowable. The eroticism of some of the experimental movies I was seeing, many of them feminist or queer in their address like Sadie Benning’s Jollies (1991, famously shot on Fisher-Price Pixelvision toy camera) and Mike Hoolboom’s Frank’s Cock (1994) and Letters from Home (1996), impressed me for their way of partially veiling their subjects from the viewer, so that the viewer is drawn in to merge with the subject in a material way. These thoughts showed up in my book Touch,¹ a more intimate, less academic parallel to Skin drawn from my journalistic writing.

The knowledge these movies granted required that I yield to them, loosen my own subjectivity, or enter a kind of dialectic between audiovisual certainty and haptic doubt. They demonstrated again and again that when vision, and sometimes hearing, were colonized by dominant ways of grasping the world, the closer senses of touch, taste, smell, and kinaesthesia bore knowledge that was relatively less colonized. The movies opened perception into the body, appealing to sense memories and forgettings as a repository of cultural meaning for people whose experiences are elided in dominant culture. I expanded Henri Bergson’s concept of the image to include images of touch, smell-images, and other images that take shape on the surface of the body. My ignorance, faced with a cultural experience that was not mine, acknowledged that much of experience remains opaque to those who do not have the means to unfold it – the understanding that grounds my later concept of enfolding-unfolding aesthetics. 

I went into contortions trying to accommodate my own inchoate thoughts to the Lacanian psychoanalytic theory that dominated film studies in those days. Identification, it seemed to me, was not the only way of relating to these movies. Openness, not mastery, seemed like an attractive model of subjectivity. Vivian Sobchack’s The Address of the Eye² liberated me with her observation, from existential phenomenology, that to see is also to be an object for others’ seeing.

A slim extract from Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia published by Semiotext(e) was my first exposure to their writing and I was thunderstruck.³ The chapter “1440: The Smooth and the Striated” startled me with the distinction between optical and haptic space. The authors of schizoanalysis alter concepts from early art historians Aloïs Riegl and Wilhelm Worringer’s Abstraction and Empathy to describe forms that express without capturing.

In 1993 I was invited to give a presentation, “The Haptic Critic,” by fax (!) to a gathering in France. I made myself Haptic Critic business cards. The phrase “The skin of the film” first appeared in my 1993 review of films and videos at the 1993 Whitney Biennial: I was thinking of how, as movies circulate, they pick up the traces of all the audiences that have seen them, in a kind of tactile contact.

By this time I was in graduate school at the University of Rochester. My paper for David Rodowick’s course on Deleuze’s cinematic philosophy became an article in Screen, “A Deleuzian Politics of Hybrid Cinema,”⁴ which was the ground of The Skin of the Film. I redefined Bergson’s image to include images received by other sense modalities. To give flesh to the multisensory cinema I theorized and to emphasize the mutuality of perceiving and being perceived, I also drew from Merleau-Ponty’s existential phenomenology. Informed by visual anthropology, I developed a theory of mimesis as an embodied opening to the other and to the world that is especially useful for thinking and feeling across cultural differences.

25 years later, sometimes I feel like I put the concept of haptic visuality out into the world in 2000 (and before) as a fresh-born innocent and it returned to me 25 years later a hydra-headed monster, celebrated, squeezed, misinterpreted, contorted – like the monstrous but still charmingly smiling creature Elisabeth Sparkle becomes at the end of The Substance (Coralie Fargeat, 2024). For example, the sentence about haptic visuality that people most often quote is actually not by me but by my friend Mike Hoolboom, who when I described my idea to him said, “It’s not gazing but grazing.” When the voice-dictation software I was using a few years ago translated “the theory of haptic visuality” to “Siri have to face reality,” I took it as a sign that once you publish an idea it ceases to belong to you.

In the years after Skin was published I drew out some of the strands that were knotted in it or that trailed as phrases or footnotes in other writings. I created a method to work through affective, perceptual, and, if we are lucky, conceptual responses to a movie (or anything). I published “Affective Analysis” in 2018⁵ and, revised, in my book The Fold: From Your Body to the Cosmos.⁶

Beyond haptic visuality, The Skin of the Film explored embodied empathy, or bodily mimesis, as one of the ways we feel along with the beings on the screen. Thanks to a group that filmmaker Daria Martin convened to explore mirror-touch synaesthesia (named after one iteration, feeling on your own body what happens to another body you see, as though you mirror them), I discovered that I likely have a touch of it, in the form of an exaggerated bodily empathy. This makes it easier for me to experience everyday visual and narrative phenomena in an embodied way, feeling on my own body what I see or even hear of another being, not only human, undergoing. It was a tiny letdown to realize that my smart ideas in Skin were partly the result of a neural condition beyond my control, but it was also pleasing to know that my body really does give me ideas that my mind doesn’t come up with alone. 

After Skin my fascination extended to the abstract line, especially in visual art prior to the 19th century. I found my eyes shifting from the narrative events in the painting and toward the curlicues and arabesques of its frame, which relaxed and rejuvenated my vision. This shift of attention was accompanied by Riegl’s observation of a dialectic between argument, the scene, and ornament, the frame. 

Riegl was a curator of textiles at Vienna’s Museum of Decorative Art. I like to imagine that he was nearsighted like me, and to think of him hunched over the pattern in a carpet or tracing the intricate design of a wood carving, lost in the meanderings of abstract lines and in the haptic space that they describe. Following hunches and my own desires, I traversed a long trajectory into textiles and other artworks from the Muslim world, which I felt could give an origin story for digital media. I spent hours poring over carpets, embroideries, ceramics, and other objects, losing myself in their haptic spaces and abstract lines, as I also felt along with the eyes, hands, and aching backs of the people who made them centuries earlier. That research eventually became the book Enfoldment and Infinity: An Islamic Genealogy of New Media Art, published in 2010.⁷ Not many of the fans of my earlier work followed me down this particular rabbit hole, but a bunch a new friends came along, including the group of artists and scholars in the Substantial Motion Research Network that Azadeh Emadi and I founded in 2017, many of whom are also researching and inventing non-Western roots for what are thought to be Western media technologies.

Most of the works I write about in Skin are made by emigrants or people living between cultures. Central among them are artists from the Arab diaspora, like Mona Hatoum, Samirah Alkassim, and Walid Ra’ad. Deciding to follow that thread back to its roots, I began researching the exciting new movements of experimental cinema and media art in the Arab world. This work led to my 2015 book Hanan Al-Cinema: Affections for the Moving Image.⁸ My editor at MIT Press said it was a terrible title, but I was trying to signal that the book was a sort of sequel to Skin. Hanan expands my embodied method. It also floats the idea that the tactile contact of circulation is more important than the tactility of a haptic image, especially for Palestinian makers who cannot travel. That is partly because I had realized that there is nothing necessarily ground-breaking about haptic images. They served the movement of intercultural cinema that initially inspired me, but they also serve commercial and conventional cinema and media. A haptic shot of a juicy hamburger does indeed invite an embodied response, but it is not reinventing the language of cinema.

Technically much has changed since the movies I wrote about in The Skin of the Film, which were recorded on film, often 16mm film, or on analogue video. Shortly after the book was published, digital video became available to filmmakers, and over a few years its resolution increased greatly. Especially in the early years of digital video, the edges of figures were sharply distinct from whatever surrounded them. Soon, if a filmmaker wanted to make a movie that was mostly soft focus or low resolution, they would have to mess with their digital camera’s presets. Shallow focal plane became the most common way to produce a haptic image. Or, regrettably, post-production.

My favourite part of Skin may be something that struck me while watching Tajiri’s History and Memory. Trying to recreate her mother’s repressed memories of life in a Japanese internment camp in California during the Second World War, Tajiri finds a piece of tar shingle that might have come from the roof of the building her mother’s family had been forced to inhabit. I felt that the shingle was a kind of photograph, but one that only stores an image without expressing it; very special means are necessary to coax the memory out of it. I termed such objects fossil-images. Now I also think of them as radically enfolded, in that they enfold experience that is not accessible from my (or some other being’s) point of view. They remain indexical, but they index something inaccessible, something that may be far away in space, in time, or in the depths of one’s own being.

Over the years my interest in the indexical has grown like a wild vine, to become a concept of the tactile cosmos, where all is connected to all but in ways that are mostly inaccessible to us. My friends to thought in this period have ranged from Leibniz’s fold-philosophy, as tinkered with by Deleuze, to physicist David Bohm’s holographic image that reflects the entire universe, to Édouard Glissant’s point that what is opaque to one may be unfolded by another, to tenth-century philosopher Al-Kindī’s conception that the universe is causally interconnected by rays that touch every being differently. Touch is still the foundation, though now it moves from the cosmos to your body, as I write in my recent book The Fold.

Above I wrote that haptic images fell away with the rise of high-resolution digital video.  However, a happy side effect of my dolorous research on the carbon footprint of online video is a new kind of haptic image. I founded the Small File Media Festival in 2020 to draw attention to this disturbing contribution of cinephilia to global warming. For six years, filmmakers have risen to our challenge to make movies of extremely low bitrate. To satisfy our strict criterion of 1.44 MB/minute, filmmakers use compression as a creative constraint. Rather than overwhelm us with high-resolution images, many of the resulting small-file movies are gorgeously haptic. They invite a viewer to lean in and use all their senses.

Original edition: Laura U. Marks, The Skin of Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000).

Endnotes