Radical Embodiment on Film

This volume reconceptualises film as an expression of embodied time; drawing specific attention to key moments of change and transformation so as to explore how films operate as dynamic carriers of social meaning.

Through a re-examination of the theoretical study of time and embodiment, this collection proposes an innovative new discourse in which to situate film.

Each of its essays, written by a host of renowned international scholars, demonstrate the embodiment of time to be a vital part of the aesthetic experience of cinema. Analysing a broad range of films such as Beasts of the Southern Wild (USA, 2012), Talk to Her (Spain, 2002), Millennium Actress (Japan, 2001), Jab Tak Hai Jaan (India, 2012), and Jinpa (China, 2018), they each draw specific attention to moments of change and transformation, so as to explore how films operate as dynamic carriers of social meaning.

Contributors examine key questions of embodied time as represented on screen; as a way of rethinking the centrality of the individual, of depicting gendered differences, of decentring western perspectives to consider embodied time in a widened global context, and as a way of expanding what embodiment means in post-human narratives. In doing so, this study not only highlights specific discourses of radical, lived experience in film, but also considers how distinctions of race and class, gender and sexuality, migration, religion, and indigeneity affect these depictions of embodied subjectivity.