For a New Poetics of Cinema: Women of the Dunes

Amy Goh
EAST 467: Politics, Experiments, and Theory: Japanese Cinema of the 1960s
Professor Yuriko Furuhata
20th April 2010

For a New Poetics of Cinema: Women of the Dunes

Women of the Dunes opens up a new way of relating to the film with the opening of an expressive space within durational time. With the manipulation of scale, and by combining the affective charges of close-ups with the optical effects of long shots, Teshigahara takes advantage of what Laura Marks calls the ‘optical vision’ to generate knowledge, and the potential of ‘haptic vision’1 to create a new positionality to the filmic material whereby he can engage with it not as an object to be mastered by the forces of intellect, but as an equal ‘Other’2 to be understood empathetically. Through the dynamics of sound, movement and space in the close-up, Teshigahara brings the viewer outside of the narrative time and space of normal filmic experience, and draws him within his inner consciousness and visceral experiences. Here, the nuances, the ‘poetics’, what Walter Benjamin calls the ‘optical unconscious’ can re-surface. Thus, in his combining of the close-up and the long shot to expand the diegesis, he proposes a new kind of relational ‘poetics’ to the cinematic medium wherein ‘infertile’ affective4 charges5, combined with the objective, intellectual way of viewing in ‘optical vision’ free the viewer from the confines of the fatalistic system of representational meanings present in cinema’s “impression of reality” (Allen 2) without compromising his own subjectivity or the subjectivity of the object portrayed.

1 Harvey’s ‘haptic’ vision refers to the ‘feeling with one’s eyes’ of the image; ‘the optical vision’, conversely, refers to the thinking out of the object through the perception process. While the former invokes the sensory organs, the latter utilises the cognitive process. This concept will be explained in greater detail later in the essay.

2 I refer to Lacan’s definition of the “The Other” wherein the Other constitutes as the persons or objects outside the capsule of the self.

3 According to Walter Benjamin, the close-up has the potential to reveal the facets of daily life usually left unseen. Similarly, the creation of poetry depends intrinsically on the magnification of the nuances of life to elicit feeling.

4 To ‘affect’ involves feeling, while to ‘effect’ involves an acting upon, whether of belief, feeling, or emotion.

In the creation of this new dimension, the film product evades the power dynamics of the directorial and editorial process, freeing itself from the confines of its materiality using techniques usually analogous to painting, modern poetry and music, mediums of which have the ability to exist ‘outside time’ in the space of the senses. Thus, a new kind of ‘avant-garde’ outside traditional reactionary politics and ideologies is created wherein distinct feeling, emotion, and tactile ‘haptic’ effects produce a personalised and involved film viewing experience. Furthermore, in the new poetic relationality he creates, the narrative serves to build mutuality, rather than distance between spectator and filmic object.6 Thus, neither object nor spectator is compromised in the film viewing experience.

According to Lyotard, cinematography is “the writing of movements” (350); it is the inscribing of an overall script- the ‘doctrine’ of the director- upon the viewer. Thus, the viewer invests belief not by virtue of choice, but in favour of sympathy and identification with the projected reality and its central protagonist. In order to participate and engage in the plot and story, the viewer has to subscribe to the specific reality- that which is inevitably embedded with the director’s ideology through selecting of camera angles7- the director chooses to show. This reality projected by the filmic product, however, is not a faithful reproduction of reality, but a subjective perspective that erases the nuances of physical reality by the erasure of minute differences through editing, shooting and directing. In this constructed dimension of sound, space and time to where a credible ‘impression of reality’ is created, there is no space for personal viewer participation through a dialectical confrontation with the filmic material- what can be called the reactionary movement.

5 ‘Fertile charges’ would correspond to Lyotard’s idea of “fertile motion” that refers to any movement that contributes to the illusion of reality the film seeks to show.

6 The “filmic object” can refer to the protagonist, the subject matter of the film, or the reality the film draws from.


Several elements are required in the creation of the director’s vision in the fictive space of the narrative duration. Firstly, the construction of a temporal continuity through the creating of a logical beginning, middle and end that the viewer can follow; secondly, a regime of steady referents that are, in turn, recognisable to the reality of the viewer and thirdly, a regulation of filmic space through the selection of perspectives that contribute to the emotions that the film tries to elicit. An added soundtrack, furthermore, serves in generating the atmosphere that the film seeks to represent to its ideological ends. Out of this regimented process of structuring, slicing and piecing together, the filmic entity rises from the incongruous litter of individual ‘slices’ of reality to give the illusion of a homogenous whole. From the filmic unconscious, thus, a logical diegesis unfolds in sequential time, invariably hiding the material conditions that govern its creation. The integrity of the organic whole- the illusion of seamlessness- is vital in creating continuity, ensuring the viewer is able to follow the actions, motions and drama of the protagonist. This is essential for the process of identification and the production of sympathy. Furthermore, structuring of the selectively screened reality creates selective emotions during viewer identification; this controlling of libidinal drives serves to impose the director’s overall ideology upon the viewer, making the film viewing experience less of a subjective, individual one. In Lyotard’s “Acinema”, he calls this the sterile motion that film produces, by which each movement in cinematography “sends back to something else, is inscribed as a plus or minus… is valuable because it returns to something else” (350). The simulacrum- the representation of reality- in cinema inevitably contributes to the affective charges the director seeks to produce in identification. Thus, it is inevitably locked to the director’s vision of what the viewer should feel, think and identify with. As Lyotard states, “all movement”- all the nuances of distinct reality the film tears from to create a coherent fictive actuality- “which would escape identification, recognition, and the mnemic fixation” (Lyotard 355) are erased in favour of the director’s vision.

7 Camera angles enforce perspectives, which are in effect the image seen by a single eye. Thus, they are invariably inextricable from the director’s personal ‘impression of reality’.



Traditionally, the Japanese avant-garde movement of the ‘60s8 has tried to confront this problematic inseparable from the materiality of film production by a defamiliarisation of the viewer’s habitual perceptions via a variety of techniques. Such techniques, ultimately, attempt to break the illusion of filmic reality through the abrupt halting of spectator identification. Through the revealing of the filmic process (most evident in Toshio Matsumoto’s Funeral Parade of Roses), viewer reflexivity, deconstructive techniques, or the creating of a fracturing of distance 9, the viewer is pulled away from the identification process in the darkness of the theatre to his own experience of film viewing. Inevitably, all these reactionary movements seek to combat the fascist regulating of pleasure (the libidinal movements that generate emotions and sympathy) and the production of ideology (in other words, the fictive reality of the director’s vision) through the re-surfacing of the subconscious experience into the conscious realm of immediate reality, thus breaking the illusion of film as reality. However, due to the inherently violent nature of these anti-illusionist techniques, the director unavoidably imposes his own ideology- his ‘impression’ of what reality should contain- on the viewer, serving to enforce yet another perspective, instead of subverting its previous ideology. In other words, the process of breaking the ‘impression of reality’ conventional narrative film projects always involves a brutality committed towards the film material itself and thus, is done at the expense of the filmic object; as a result, the director invariably exchanges one way of subjugation for another. Consequently he always ends up re-affirming the power dynamics implicit in the play of power within filmic production.

8 I refer to directors such as Oshima Nagisa, Matsumoto Toshio, Terayama Shûji and others of this group.

9 I use the Brechtian understanding of this term in which the film creates a distance between spectator and protagonist, breaking the process of identification and allowing for a self-reflective stage.


In Women of the Dunes, however, Teshigahara creates- through a tapestry of tactile sound, close-ups and long shots- a construction of reality that evades both the policing techniques in narrative cinema, as well as the brutality of anti-illusionist techniques in avant-garde cinema. He does this by the freeing of an expressive dimension wherein sensory experience reigns supreme. In the space and time of the narrative, a dimension opens up wherein temporality ceases and the viewer is released into the expansive horizon of visceral experience wherein his existence is re-affirmed. The ‘ideology’ of this new expressive space is unique in its ability to collapse “detail and totality, part and whole, microcosm and macrocosm, the miniature and the gigantic” (Doanne 107). It is confined by no spatial-temporal ratios and operates by no internal logic. It has the ability to magnify and collapse reality, reveal the nuances of life while contributing to the totality of the narrative, in addition to amplifying feeling without sacrificing viewer subjectivity. Through the insertion of close-up sequences, reality becomes amplified as the viewer unconsciously constructs- in the corporeality of his own being- the fictive experience of the film’s protagonist in the space of a highly sensitised ‘silent soliloquy’10 wherein sterile libidinal forces11 can overflow.

Firstly, this expressive space freed up by the close-up is not a ‘detail’ that is part of the overall ‘scene’, but a totality in itself, containing its own existence. As such, even though it magnifies reality through a manipulation of scale and thus erases the peripheral portion of details in a scene, it also reveals the individual nuances in reality that may be sacrificed in slicing of shots during the editing process. The use of close-ups, in this case, returns unity to the film product through the abstracting of a piece of individual reality “from the scene… body, (and) the spatiotemporal coordinates of the narrative” (Doanne 90). Furthermore, the revealing of the intricate details of reality- what can be said to constitute the poetics of daily life- serve to enhance the viewer’s experience by revealing the “hidden parts in our polyphonous life… (teaching) us to see the intricate visual details of life as one reads an orchestral score” (Balázs 118).


Furthermore, this space- like that of melody-, “do(es) not belong to the dimension of (durational) time” (Balázs 121). As a result, the viewer ‘feels’ through his own senses- rather than ‘thinking out’ through a process of assimilation- the narrative unfolding. The viewing process, thus, becomes a subjective experience wherein the viewer does not have to invest ‘belief’ in the reality projected through the intellectual process of thinking. Therefore, the viewer is able to, in effect, ‘write his own script’ within the film through a personalised, subjective viewing experience. Spectatorial space, thus, is salvaged as the viewer is able to construct his own viewer experience independent from, yet within, the filmic plot. Consequently, instead of generating ideologies, Teshigahara generates emotions and feelings in which the viewer- in addition to relating to the protagonist- takes his place in a subjective experience of filmic reality. Hence, empathy- personal, individualised active involvement with the protagonist-, rather than sympathy- the passive position which enforces blind identification-, is produced. As such, the “corporeality of the classically disembodied spectator” (Doanne 108) is resurrected in the constructing of a visceral experience. The close-up, thus, closes and opens up a distance, and re-affirms the viewer’s existence without sacrificing the generation of sympathy integral to the viewer’s personal enjoyment of and engagement with the plot and protagonist. Rather than blindly subscribing to the reality the film projects, the viewer interacts with it emphatically as a homogenous entity.

10 The metaphor of the ‘silent soliloquy’, here, can refer to the internal monologue the viewer constructs out of his imagination. It is, thus, like the film viewing experience Teshigahara suggests in Women of the Dunes in its fictional and personal nature, as well as its ability to affect the soul through an expressive poetics.

11 Lyotard calls this the ‘sterile’ production of pleasure the “motion of pleasure... split from the motion of the propagation of the species, would be… that motion which in going beyond the point of no return spills the libidinal forces outside the whole, at the expense of the whole” (Lyotard 351)

Correspondingly, this space is characterised by the haptic way of experiencing, as opposed to the optical way of film viewing. According to Laura Marks, the optical vision is characterised by “a separation between the viewing subject and the object” (Marks 162) in order to comprehend it that inevitably involves a master-slave dynamic. The haptic vision, on the other hand, is able to close this distance in its tactile materiality and imperative to the present. While optical vision depends on the possessing of the knowledge of the object, haptic vision seeks to ‘know’ the object through a mutual encounter whereby the eyes ‘seek’ and ‘feel’ its textures in order to understand it. Likewise, the former depends on the object’s relation to a representational reality and engages the cognitive processes, while the latter is defined by abstractness and the sensory way of experiencing. As such, optical vision is predicated on thought processes happening in real time, while the haptic vision relies on the viewer’s own sensory engagement with the object on screen and thus, takes place outside time in the subjective space of the viewer’s body.

Teshigahara continually employs jumping between the haptic way of seeing in the close-up to an optical vision in the long shot and back again, enhancing the viewing experience by making it possible to know the same event, person or object in different ways. With a switch from the sensory way of knowing wherein one ‘knows’ through his body in haptic vision, to the objective mode of perceiving in optical vision, the distance between the spectator and the protagonist closes as the viewer experiences the diegesis intellectually and personally, enabling for an empathy and mutuality, rather than sympathy and mastery. As a result, in the expressive space Teshigahara opens, the viewer is able to interact on a level basis with the film object in a haptic, intimate way, discovering it with the “the skin of (his) eyes” (Marks 126). Thus, the power dynamics involved in the politics of vision (by which the object perceived is always ‘possessed’ by the perceiver through the intellectual process of ‘knowing’) is inverted, as, through a mutual meeting, the viewer comes to terms with the filmic object without compromising his subjectivity or the film’s integrity.

In Women of the Dunes, Teshigahara utilises the ability of the close-up to create haptic effects, but takes this a step further through the sudden, disconcerting insertion of long shots in-between close-up sequences. In this way, Teshigahara plays with the disparity in scale to create an amplified, sensory experience. In a particular sequence, the cut from a long shot to a close up, accentuated by sound, creates a tangible experience of thirst in the viewer. Here, the viewer is shown a disparate shot of a glacier of sand falling like waves, backed by the shrilling strings of dissonant violins melting into the clangour of an orchestra of cymbals. The long shot of the desert, here, creates a fracturing of distance between spectator and filmic material, as the viewer engages with the material through the ‘optical vision’. However, this is followed by a sudden, momentary silence wherein the viewer hears the gentle susurration of sand falling as the camera cuts to a close-up of the woman’s skin, highlighting the minute, gritty particles that encrust her lips and throat. The camera moves slowly and seductively down the bottom half of her face to the gentle reverberating movements of the woman’s throat, as it pulsates gently up and down. The lack of facial features, in this shot, only serve to accentuate the tactility of the filmic material as the gritty hairs and grains achieve an almost touchable quality. A sensuous engagement with the textures of her skin occurs, as the camera serves to mimic the viewer’s desire to ‘touch’, experience and identify with the woman. With the annihilation of depth in the close-up of the woman’s skin, the viewer is, thus, plunged into “an illusionistic depth” wherein it becomes imperative not so much “to distinguish form so much as to discern texture” (Marks 162). The film, here, becomes the threshold to another world both of sensory space and relational knowing. Thus, the close-up, here, serves to create empathy with the woman, wherein the viewer comprehends her thirst through the ‘skin of his eyes’ by mimetically feeling it through his body12.

In addition, the sudden cut from the long shot to the close-up serves as a disconcerting experience, pulling the viewer into the intimacy of the screen. In the long shot of the desert cliffs cascading down like water that precedes the close-up, sand achieves an almost water-like consistency. Thus, the sudden juxtaposing of the following close-up of minute particles of sand on the woman’s skin provides a closing of distance between viewer and filmic object as viewer- through disparity of scale- is forced into the immediacy of the fictive space within the screen in a violent movement. Here, there is a dialectical movement between depth and surface, optical and haptic vision, three-dimensional to two-dimensional space, and distance to a disarming closeness. Due to the disjunctive difference in distance and the resultant annihilation of depth created from this jump, the viewer is pulled into the shot abruptly in order to identify- through the senses rather than intellect- with the woman’s predicament: that she is dehydrated and needs water. However, this identification is unlike the identification that takes place in Marks ‘optical cinema’ as it is “predicated on closeness”- the viewer’s ability to personally engage- “rather than on the distance that allows the beholder to imaginatively project onto the object” (Marks 188). The switch from these two different ways of viewing, here, serves not to create a distance between the object and the spectatorial space, but to close it, as the viewer is able to engage with the ‘Other’ within the film on an equal basis without undermining it through the politics of power inevitable in the traditional, objective mode of perceiving in the long shot. The long shot, to the contrary, serves to reveal the intensity woman’s thirst in the immensity of the desert, amplifying the feeling of empathy that follows as the viewer approaches the subject mutually in the following close-up. Both the viewer and the woman are confronted, here, with the immensity of the desert and the feeling of thirst it can elicit, and are forced- in a participatory, intimate moment- to come to terms with it.

12 Laura Marks mentions in her book The Skin of the Film that the haptic way of knowing is characterised by an “embodied and mimetic intelligence” (190).

Similarly, the magnification that takes place in the close-up shot serves to reveal the minute details- the particles of sand- that line her throat, serving to magnify the feeling of thirst. A tactile realism, thus, is created. The use of the close-up, here, serves to uncover the nuances present in experience through the revealing of the minute details of reality. Although her body is obliterated from the shot, the haptic quality that the sand acquires on her skin creates a feeling of aridness in the viewer. In the expressive space opened through the close-up here, the realism produced is not mediated by a representational referent, as the viewer is not shown, but personally feels the woman’s thirst through his body in a haptic mode of engagement. The intensity of the woman’s thirst, here, acquires a disconcertingly realistic quality as the viewer’s senses become amplified and highly sensitised to the minute granulations that stroke the filmic strip and likewise, the woman's experience of thirst. The macro-lens that the close-up provides therefore creates a new, nuanced realism, serving to amplify the reality projected in the fictive space of the diegesis (in turn, unfolded in the long shot) enabling the viewer to not so much as sympathise- the process which typically involves an assumed superiority-, but empathise with the woman’s predicament. Although the reality projected in this shot is abstract and ‘unrealistic’ as it cuts off most of the woman’s body, it serves to provide a more faithful rendition of reality as we know it than traditional realism as it privileges the expressive over blind mimesis 13, calling on a ‘poetics’14 as opposed to a narrative.

Likewise, the director’s manipulation of scale, here, provides an imaginal metaphor to the experience of thirst. However, unlike metaphors present in the narrative medium that invariably create a distance between the object signified and the signifier, the viewer feels the experience the woman feels through an emotive experience that bypasses the intellectual processes. Instead of being told that ‘the woman was so thirsty the desert provided an hallucination, disintegrating in her eyes like a cascading waterfall in a parody of her thirst’ in narration, or shown through in the ‘acting out’ of the protagonist in the unfolding diegesis, the viewer- through the movement of the camera that mimic a caress- feels her thirst undulating like waves in his own throat. Thus, camera movement serves as the ‘bridge’ between subject matter in the film and the spectator, enabling the viewer to- instead of ‘reading’ the film (the process by which always involves a mediator)- experience it through his senses.

13 Traditional Realism was conceived in the 19th century, and seeks to portray an object in its actuality. Even though the image created corresponds to reality as we know it in its visual verisimilitude, it is ultimately a fictive rendition of reality that attempts to hide its status as mimesis in its faithfulness to depicted reality with the use of steady of referents. Likewise, perspectival realism in conventional cinema relies on the use of camera angles to create to create an ‘impression of reality’ that is believable. Even though this reality corresponds to a perception enforced by the use of perspectives, this fact is hidden under the facade of realism in the product’s similarity to the viewer’s reality.

14 Poetics always seek to magnify the minute to create emotion, whereas narratives seek to distance the object in order to produce logical meaning.

In this sequence, thus, Teshigahara is able to create in the viewer a magnification of the feeling of thirst through the weaving of imaginal metaphors, sound, and the use of scale in the intermingling of close-ups with a long shot. The viewer, thus, called upon to use his own imagination to construct his position to the film by an active engagement with the film material and subject.

Furthermore, Teshigahara complicates the haptic effects in this sequence by using the potential of sound and dialogue, creating sensual textures that the viewer feels in his body. The shrill sounds in the long shot represent the woman’s predicament at being torn from all sources of water- that which can be said to constitute the ‘macrocosm’ of her thirst and the corresponding issues it entails in the narrative. The intrinsic violence of the sound used in this shot jolts the viewer’s body, so the viewer feels as upon his own self the violence inflicted upon the woman through water deprivation. The corresponding sound of sand seepage in the close-up, conversely, reveals the woman’s individual position in relation to the overall towering issue of thirst by magnifying the intensity of her experience- what would be the ‘microcosm’ or immediate imperative of her problem. The use of gentle, susurration of sand creates a pleasing sensation in the viewer’s body alike the languor that comes from fatigue, causing the viewer to feel the same strained tiredness the woman feels from being dehydrated. Thus, with the use of sound, Teshigahara again plays with the issue of ‘scale’ in regards to the intensity of the experience of thirst and the magnitude of the issue of thirst, enabling the viewer to comprehend both sensually and intellectually the significance of the woman’s thirst in an empathetic manner. In a similar corresponding sequence, the camera moves horizontally sideways up and down the grainy particles of the woman’s fingers intimately while she explains, in an exhausted, strained voice, that the only way they can get water is if they start working again. The movement of the dialogue, here, serves as an extension of the camera. Just as her voice is strained at almost at the brink of exhaustion, the camera moves lethargically sideways with a weary languor across the skin of her fingers to her dirt-encrusted fingertips. The cadences of syllables, likewise, mimic the seeping of sand in the earlier shot, creating the same strained, lethargy in the viewer. The viewer, thus, ‘feels’ in his own interiority the despair that results in the intensity of thirst the previous shots have already highlighted. Here, dialogue and sound is used in a similar manner as visuality to create a haptic effect in the viewer’s body, enabling the viewer to experience the woman’s predicament for himself.

The next few shots, likewise, accentuate the woman and Jumpei’s thirst, juxtaposing the issue of thirst against the background of their overall predicament in being trapped within the village. Through another manipulation of scale, the intensity of Jumpei’s thirst is put in the backdrop of the overall intensity of Jumpei’s predicament. After being shown a long shot of Jumpei kick-boxing the air futilely, the viewer is given a close-up of his hand moving a water dish in a dejected, circular motion. Both movements serve to engage the imperative reality of Jumpei’s situation on the macro and micro-level, allowing for two different ways of experiencing and comprehending Jumpei’s problem of being- in essence- trapped against his will to a futile task of shovelling sand nightly. While the image of him kick-boxing the air serves as a farcical portrait- a kind of metaphor- to his predicament, the close-up serves to engage the spectator viscerally as the water acquires a swollen, pregnant quality next to the dry sand and thus, the viewer feels a thirst echoing that of Jumpei. While the long shot of Jumpei boxing the air serves to allow the viewer to comprehend, at a distance, the narrative implications of his predicament in connection to the overall diegesis, the close-up serves to allow the viewer to empathise with Jumpei’s predicament through haptic touch, having known what is at stake.

Lastly, Teshigahara abruptly inserts a metaphor in between all these shots, stating “the sand can swallow up cities if it wants”. This final poetic line serves to encompass the overall helplessness of Jumpei and the woman’s situation that had already been expressed in the former shots through the sensory and intellectual way of engagement. Thus, the viewer feels a sense of catharsis that is both pleasant and painful with the falling of these final syllables. As such, a nuanced poignancy is created, as the viewer feels the fatigue of Jumpei and the woman in the body as a delicious languor. Engagement, thus, takes on an erotic hue, as through the process of empathy created with the production of haptic effects, the viewer gives over to the pleasure that lies in understanding the Other- whether in film, or in reality- on a mutual basis. As Levinas states, the viewer obtains “a delight in the resistant alterity of the erotic other” (Marks 184). Likewise, in his shifting from the intellectual mode of perceiving to the sensory mode of feeling, “the image points to its own asymptotic, caressing relation to the real, and to the same relation between perception and linage” (Marks 192).

All in all, Women in the Dunes presents the viewer with a transformative way of approaching the film, wherein engagement takes forefront. Through an intimate process of sensory knowing with the ‘skin of one’s eyes’, the viewer comes to terms with the film material on a level basis through an intellectual and sensory process. Thus, film viewing becomes a re-affirmative experience by which both the viewer and the filmic object is freed from the constraints of referentiality, the binding processes of optical perception, and the enforcing of ideologies through this tactile way of ‘experiencing’. Although the woman in Women of the Dunes and Jumpei are trapped in the endless futility of their daily work of shovelling sand in order to stay alive, they eventually realise that they are, in fact, ‘free’ of the constraints they thought bound them to the desert. Similarly, the watcher- in this expressive space of film viewing- is freed from the materialism embedded in avant-garde cinema and the policing techniques in conventional narrative film through the magnification of the minute details of the moment. Likewise, the poetics of this space privileges wholeness over disruption, lending a more ‘complete’ way of understanding the film entity. Having exited the encapsulated bubble of the theatre, thus, the viewer is given the means to approach the filmic matter on his own terms, allowing for an equalising approach to the process of ‘knowing’


Works Cited

Woman of the Dunes (Suna no onna, Teshigahara Hiroshi, 1964, 123mins). DVD

Allen, Richard. Projecting Illusion: Film Spectatorship and the Impression of Reality (Cambridge Studies in Film). New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Print.

Béla Balázs, “The Close-Up and The Face of Man,” The Visual Turn: Classical Film Theory and Art History, ed. Angela Dalle Vacche (New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 2008), 117-126. Print.

Doane, Mary Ann. "The Close-Up: Scale and Detail in the Cinema." differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 14.3 (2003): 89-111. Project MUSE. [Library name], [City], [State abbreviation]. 20 Apr. 2010 .

Jean-François Lyotard, “Acinema,” Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Theory Reader, ed. Philip Rosen. (New York: Columbia UP, 1986), 349-359. Print.

Marks, Laura U., and Laura U. Marks. "The Memory of Touch." The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses. London: Duke University Press, 1999. 127-193. Print.