Vital Resonances : Encountering Film with Varda, Haneke and Nancy

Since the pioneering work of Vivian Sobchack, Laura U. Marks and Jennifer M. Barker, film studies has increasingly embraced multisensory spectatorship. Such approaches privilege a carnal vision and knowledge of the world. Vital Resonances furthers this work and attunes to what is a foundational, yet overlooked, principle of film studies’ bodily turn: resonance. In keeping with the soft touch that characterises some of this turn’s critical literature – the feel of velvet, the (frustrated) tactility of a sari, the skin of a lover’s body – resonance has been brushed over. Through the work of three leading figures in European cinema, Agnès Varda, Michael Haneke and Jean-Luc Nancy, this book establishes resonance as a critical and conceptual paradigm for film analysis, transforming it from a footnote to the bodily turn and finally placing it at the forefront of our fleshy encounter with film.