How does film affect the way we understand crises of the body and mind and how does it manifest other kinds of crises levelled at the spectator? This book offers vital scholarly analysis of the embodied nature of film viewing and the ways in which film deals with the question of loss, the healing body and its material registering of trauma.

How does film affect the way we understand crises of the body and mind and how does it manifest other kinds of crises levelled at the spectator? This book offers vital scholarly analysis of the embodied nature of film viewing and the ways in which film deals with the question of loss, the healing body and its material registering of trauma.

In her mid-twenties, shortly before her father's death, Davina Quinlivan moved from her family home in west London to begin a transitory life in the countryside: here she felt restless and rootless, stuck between Deep England and the technicolour memories of her family's migration story. Beginning in colonial India and Burma, from the indigenous tribes from which the women in Quinlivan's family are descended, and reaching the streets of Southall and Ealing, the stories of her ancestors persisted in the tales, the language, the cooking and culture of her family. Quinlivan conjures a place between continents and worlds in a lyrical debut of migration, and homecoming, marking the arrival of an exceptional new voice.

This is an exploration of the figuring of absence in film. This study considers the placement of the breathing body in the film experience and its implications for the study of embodiment in film and sensuous spectatorship. Davina Quinlivan shapes her engagement with film by the foregrounding of the human body in the filmic diegesis and the viewing experience. This emphasis on the human body as an breathing body coupled with its fresh engagement with continental philosophy, Post-Structuralist Film Theory and Contemporary Western Cinema, makes a unique and valuable contribution to the field. Case studies are taken from the work of major directors, including Cronenberg and von Trier. Key concepts explored are filmic space (air and the elemental in film), corporeality (bodies on screen and the film itself as a breathing body) and inter-subjectivity (community and sociality). It makes a notable contribution to the study of film sound and haptic perception.