Cinema's Baroque Flesh: Film, Phenomenology and the Art of Entanglement [Hardcover]

InCinema’s Baroque Flesh, Saige Walton draws on the philosophy of Maurice Merleau-Ponty to argue for a distinct aesthetic category of film and a unique cinema of the senses: baroque cinema. Combining media archaeological work with art history, phenomenology, and film studies, the book offers close analyses of a range of historic baroque artworks and films, includingCaché,Strange Days, the films of Buster Keaton, and many more. Walton pursues previously unexplored connections between film, the baroque, and the body, opening up new avenues of embodied film theory that can make room for structure, signification, and thought, as well as the aesthetics of sensation.
 

Saige Waltonis a lecturer in screen studies at the University of South Australia, a member of the Hawke Research Institute, and a former assistant curator with the Australian Centre for the Moving Image.
 

“Cinema enables us to look back, in a productive anachronism, to the radical way baroque thought and aesthetics refused to consider the mind on its own. Through detailed analyses, Saige Walton discovers Merleau-Ponty as a baroque thinker. But to make that discovery, cinema’s fundamental baroqueness need(s) uncovering as well. Walton stages a sparkling encounter between three moments, aesthetics, and modes of looking.”

“In the tradition of scholarship devoted to cinema as embodied and sensorial experience, Saige Walton’s book distinguishes itself as a truly original and passionate work. In a bold move, Walton’s exploration of the baroque finds inspiration in a felicitous connection with Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of flesh.Cinema’s Baroque Fleshis essential reading for all film students and scholars seeking to feel the thoughtful and sensuous entanglements of cinema.”