more than metaphorical description.31 Thus, the language used in the press to describe the sensuous and affective dimensions of the film experience has been written off as a popular version of that imprecise humanist criticism drummed out of film studies in the early 1970s with the advent of more “rigorous” and “objective” modes of description. Thus, sensual reference in descriptions of cinema has been generally regarded as rhetorical or poetic excess—sensuality located, then, always less on the side of the body than on the side of language. This view is tautological. As Shaviro points out, it subsumes sensation “within universal (linguistic or conceptual) forms only because it has deployed those forms in order to describe sensation in the first place.” This elision of the body “making sense” in its own right is grounded in “the idealist assumption that human experience is originally and fundamentally cognitive.” To hold such an idealist assumption, Shaviro goes on,
is to reduce the question of perception to a question of knowledge, and to equate sensation with the reflective consciousness of sensation. The Hegelian and structuralist equation suppresses the body. It ignores or abstracts away from the primordial forms of raw sensation: affect, excitation, stimulation and repression, pleasure and pain, shock and habit. It posits instead a disincarnate eye and ear whose data are immediately objectified in the form of self-conscious awareness or positive knowledge.32
In sum, even though there has been increasing interest in doing so, we have not yet come to grips with the carnal foundations of cinematic intelligibility, with the fact that to understand movies figurally, we first must make literal sense of them. This is not a tautology—particularly in a discipline that has worked long and hard to separate the sense and meaning of vision and specularity from a body that, in experience, lives vision always in cooperation and significant exchange with other sensorial means of access to the world, a body that makes meaning before it makes conscious, reflective thought. Thus, despite current academic fetishization of “the body,” most theorists still don't quite know what to do with their unruly responsive flesh and sensorium. Our sensations and responses pose an intolerable question to prevalent linguistic and psychoanalytic understandings of the cinema as grounded in conventional codes and cognitive patterning and grounded on absence, lack, and illusion. They also pose an intolerable challenge to the prevalent cultural assumption that the film image is constituted by a merely two-dimensional geometry.33 Positing cinematic vision as merely a mode of objective symbolic representation, and reductively abstracting—“disincarnating”—the spectator's subjective and full-bodied vision to posit it only as a “distance sense,” contemporary film theory has had major difficulties in comprehending how it is possible for human bodies to be, in fact, really “touched” and “moved” by the movies.
At worst, then, contemporary film theory has not taken bodily being at the movies very seriously—and, at best, it has generally not known how to respond to and describe how it is that movies “move” and “touch” us bodily. Instead, with some noted exceptions, film theory has attempted (somewhat defensively, I think) to put the ambiguous and unruly, subjectively sensuous, embodied experience of going to the movies back where it “properly”—that is, objectively—belongs: it locates the sensuous on the screen as the semiotic effects of cinematic representation and the semantic property of cinematic objects or off the screen in the spectator's phantasmatic psychic formations, cognitive processes, and basic physiological reflexes that do not pose major questions of meaning. Yet as film theorists we are not exempt from sensual being at the movies—nor, let us admit it, would we wish to be. As “lived bodies” (to use a phenomenological term that insists on “the” objective body as always also lived subjectively as “my” body, diacritically invested and active in making sense and meaning in and of the world), our vision is always already “fleshed out.” Even at the movies our vision and hearing are informed and given meaning by our other modes of sensory access to the world: our capacity not only to see and to hear but also to touch, to smell, to taste, and always to proprioceptively feel our weight, dimension, gravity, and movement in the world. In sum, the film experience is meaningful not to the side of our bodies but because of our bodies. Which is to say that movies provoke in us the “carnal thoughts” that ground and inform more conscious analysis.
Thus, we need to alter the binary and bifurcated structures of the film experience suggested by previous formulations and, instead, posit the film viewer's lived body as a carnal “third term” that grounds and mediates experience and language, subjective vision and objective image—both differentiating and unifying them in reversible (or chiasmatic) processes of perception and expression.34 Indeed, it is the lived body that provides both the site and genesis of the “third” or “obtuse” meaning that Roland Barthes suggests escapes language yet resides within it.35 Thrown into a meaningful lifeworld, the lived body is always already engaged in a commutation and transubstantiation of the cooperative meaning-making capacity of its senses (which are always acculturated and never lived as either discrete or raw)—a process that commutes the meaning of one sense to the meaning of another, translates the literal into the figural and back again, and prereflectively grounds the more particular and reflective discriminations of a “higher order” semiology. Put another way, we could say that the lived body both provides and enacts a commutative reversibility between subjective feeling and objective knowledge, between the senses and their sense or conscious meaning. In this regard Shaviro is most eloquent:
There is no structuring lack, no primordial division, but a continuity between the physiological and affective responses of my own body and the appearances and disappearances, the mutations and perdurances, of the bodies and images on screen. The important distinction is not the hierarchical, binary one between bodies and images, or between the real and its representations. It is rather a question of discerning multiple and continually varying interactions among what can be defined indifferently as bodies and as images: degrees of stillness and motion, of action and passion, of clutter and emptiness, of light and lack…. The image cannot be opposed to the body, as representation is opposed to its unattainable referent. For a fugitive, supplemental materiality haunts the (allegedly) idealizing processes of mechanical reproduction…. The flesh is intrinsic to the cinematic apparatus, at once its subject, its substance, and its limit.36
II
At this point, given my rather lengthy critique of theoretical abstraction and its oversight of our bodily experience at the movies, I want to ground my previous discussion “in the flesh.” In my flesh, in fact—and its meaningful responsiveness to and comprehension of an actual film, The Piano. However intellectually problematic in terms of its sexual and colonial politics,37 Campion's film moved me deeply, stirring my bodily senses and my sense of my body. The film not only “filled me up” and often “suffocated” me with feelings that resonated in and constricted my chest and stomach, but it also “sensitized” the very surfaces of my skin—as well as its own—to touch. Throughout the film my whole being was intensely concentrated and, rapt as I was in the world onscreen, I was wrapped also in a body that was achingly aware of itself as a sensuous, sensitized, sensible material capacity.38 (In this context we might remember the reviewers who spoke of the “unremittingly sensuous experience of music and fabric, of mud and flesh” and “immediate tactile shock.”) In particular, I want to focus on my sensual and sense-making experience of The Piano's first two shots—for they, in fact, generated this essay. Although my body's attention was mobilized and concentrated throughout a film that never ceased to move or touch me carnally, emotionally, and consciously in the most complex ways, these first two shots significantly foregrounded for me the issue at hand (so to speak) of our sensual engagement not only with this film but, to varying degrees, with all others.39 Most particularly, these inaugural shots also foregrounded the ambiguity and ambivalence of vision's relation to touch as the latter has been evoked here in both its literal and figurative sense.
In visual and figural terms the very first shot we see in The Piano seems an unidentifiable image. Carol Jacobs gives us a precise description and gloss of both this shot and the one that follows it:
Long,
