of translucent vessels of blood…. Yet it is nearly no view at all—an almost blindness, with distance so minimal between eye and object that what we see is an unrecognizable blur…. The image we first see is from the other side, from Ada's perspective, her fingers, liquid fingers…. We see Ada's fingers pierced through with sunlight, apparently from her perspective, as we hear the voice of her mind, but then, immediately thereafter, we see them from the clear perspective of the onlookers that we are, as they become matter-of-fact-objects to the lens of the camera.40
As I watched The Piano's opening moments—in that first shot, before I even knew there was an Ada and before I saw her from my side of her vision (that is, before I watched her rather than her vision)—something seemingly extraordinary happened. Despite my “almost blindness,” the “unrecognizable blur,” and resistance of the image to my eyes, my fingers knew what I was lookingat—and this before the objective reverse shot that followed to put those fingers in their proper place (that is, to put them where they could be seen objectively rather than subjectively “looked through”). What I was seeing was, in fact, from the beginning, not an unrecognizable image, however blurred and indeterminate in my vision, however much my eyes could not “make it out.” From the first (although I didn't consciously know it until the second shot), my fingers comprehended that image, grasped it with a nearly imperceptible tingle of attention and anticipation and, offscreen, “felt themselves” as a potentiality in the subjective and fleshy situation figured onscreen. And this before I refigured my carnal comprehension into the conscious thought, “Ah, those are fingers I am looking at.” Indeed, at first, prior to this conscious recognition, I did not understand those fingers as “those” fingers—that is, at a distance from my own fingers and objective in their “thereness.” Rather, those fingers were first known sensually and sensibly as “these” fingers and were located ambiguously both offscreen and on—subjectively “here” as well as objectively “there,” “mine” as well as the image's. Thus, although it should have been a surprising revelation given my “almost blindness” to the first shot, the second and objective reverse shot of a woman peering at the world through her outspread fingers really came as no surprise at all. Instead, it seemed a pleasurable culmination and confirmation of what my fingers—and I, reflexively if not yet reflectively—already knew.
Although this experience of my body's prereflective but reflexive comprehension of the seen (and, hence, the scene) is in some respects extraordinary, it is also in most respects hardly exceptional. Indeed, I would argue that this prereflective bodily responsiveness to films is a commonplace. That is, we do not experience any movie only through our eyes. We see and comprehend and feel films with our entire bodily being, informed by the full history and carnal knowledge of our acculturated sensorium. Normatively, however, the easy givenness of things for us to see at the movies and vision's overarching mastery and comprehension of its objects and its historically hierarchical sway over our other senses tend to occlude our awareness of our body's other ways of taking up and making meaning of the world—and its representation. Thus, what is extraordinary about the opening shot of The Piano is that it offers (at least on first viewing) a relatively rare instance of narrative cinema in which the cultural hegemony of vision is overthrown,41 an instance in which my eyes did not “see” anything meaningful and experienced an almost blindness at the same time that my tactile sense of being in the world through my fingers grasped the image's sense in a way that my forestalled or baffled vision could not.42
Jacobs tells us that the initial image is “like a failed and developed color negative of translucent vessels of blood.” Nonetheless, one senses that her bodily reference is derived less from tactile foresight than from visual hindsight. For, in an otherwise admirable essay that focuses on the film's narrative and visual emphasis on touch, Jacobs objectifies the site of touch far too quickly—rushing to reduce vision to point of view, hurrying to consider tactility and fingers and hands in terms of their narrative symbolism.43 Thus, she tells us that Ada's fingers in that first shot (as well as throughout) are used symbolically to “render us illiterate” and “unable to read them.”44 Now, if vision were an isolated sense and not merely a discrete sense possessing its own structure, capacities, and limits, I suppose this might be true. But vision is not isolated from our other senses. Whatever its specific structure, capacities, and sensual discriminations, vision is only one modality of my lived body's access to the world and only one means of making the world of objects and others sensible—that is, meaningful—to me.45 Vision may be the sense most privileged in the culture and the cinema, with hearing a close second; nonetheless, I do not leave my capacity to touch or to smell or to taste at the door, nor, once in the theater, do I devote these senses only to my popcorn.
Thus I would argue that my experience of The Piano was a heightened instance of our common sensuous experience of the movies: the way we are in some carnal modality able to touch and be touched by the substance and texture of images; to feel a visual atmosphere envelop us; to experience weight, suffocation, and the need for air; to take flight in kinetic exhilaration and freedom even as we are relatively bound to our theater seats; to be knocked backward by a sound; to sometimes even smell and taste the world we see on the screen. Although, perhaps, smell and taste are less called on than touch to inform our comprehension of the images we see, I still remember the “visual aroma” of my experience of Black Narcissus (Michael Powell and Emeric Pressberger, 1946), the film itself named after a perfume, or the pork-noodle taste of portions of Tampopo (Juzo Itami, 1986). (And why should we be surprised at this when the very power of advertising cologne and food rests heavily on transmodal cooperation and translation within and across the sensorium?) Furthermore, as I engaged these films, I did not “think” a translation of my sense of sight into smell or taste; rather I experienced it without a thought. Elena del Rio describes the phenomenological structure of this experience: “As the image becomes translated into a bodily response, body and image no longer function as discrete units, but as surfaces in contact, engaged in a constant activity of reciprocal re-alignment and inflection.”46
In this regard we might wish to think again about processes of identification in the film experience, relating them not to our secondary engagement with and recognition of either “subject positions” or characters but rather to our primary engagement (and the film's) with the sense and sensibility of materiality itself. We, ourselves, are subjective matter: our lived bodies sensually relate to “things” that “matter” on the screen and find them sensible in a primary, prepersonal, and global way that grounds those later secondary identifications that are more discrete and localized. Certainly, my experience of the opening subjective shot of The Piano provides evidence of this prepersonal and globally located bodily comprehension, but such ambient and carnal identification with material subjectivity also occurs when, for example, I “objectively” watch Baines—under the piano and Ada's skirts—reach out and touch Ada's flesh through a hole in her black woolen stocking.47 Looking at this objective image, like the reviewer cited earlier, I also felt an “immediate tactile shock when flesh first touches flesh in close-up.” Yet precisely whose flesh I felt was ambiguous and vague—and emergent from a phenomenological experience structured on ambivalence and diffusion. That is, I had a carnal interest and investment in being both “here” and “there,” in being able both to sense and to be sensible, to be both the subject and the object of tactile desire. At the moment when Baines touches Ada's skin through her stocking, suddenly my skin is both mine and not my own: that is, the “immediate tactile shock” opens me to the general erotic mattering and diffusion of my flesh, and I feel not only my “own” body but also Baines's body, Ada's body, and what I have elsewhere called the “film's body.”48 Thus, even confronted with an “objective” shot, my fingers know and understand the subjective meanings of this “seen” and this viewing situation, and they grasp textural and textual meaning everywhere—not only in the touching but also in the touched. Objectivity and subjectivity lose their presumed clarity. Which is to say, in this viewing situation (and to varying degrees in every viewing situation), “to situate subjectivity in the lived body jeopardizes
