Philosophical Screens Event: “Experiencing the Body of Film” – Lucy Bolton on The Machinist (Brad Anderson, 2003).

Lucy Bolton presents a reading of The Machinist that explores how cinema provokes profound and meaningful bodily affects.

Whether we recoil in horror from graphic gore, or are aroused by erotica, the immaterial mode of cinema has an undeniable (and perhaps paradoxical) power to take hold of our physical bodies. In the latest in a series exploring film through a philosophical lens, Lucy Bolton (Queen Mary, University of London) presents a reading of The Machinist that explores how cinema provokes profound and meaningful bodily affects. She draws on exciting strands in contemporary film theory that emphasise the role of touch, sense and our bodies (the ‘haptic’ – as opposed to the optic, or the cognitive). She suggests that this nightmarish psychological thriller