E-raamat: Sensory Child of Contemporary Cinema: Sight, Sound, Touch [Taylor & Francis e-raamat]

The Sensory Child: Sight, Sound, Touch examines a poetic film form evident in contemporary cinema that seems intent on capturing the textures, the materials, and the sensations of childhood. These films foreground the child’s point of view, construct a child’s gaze, and mobilise an aesthetic that evokes a sensory recollection of childhood. This complex arrangement of aesthetic modes is intended to address the adult spectator bodily, and evoke the vivid, sensory memories of childhood. The Sensory Child rethinks a gap in contemporary film theory created by a seeming hiatus between psychoanalytic and phenomenological approaches to the cinema. The book examines key instances of this aesthetic of childhood in the films Aftersun (2022), The Fits (2015), What Maisie Knew (2013), and Moonlight (2016). May argues that psychoanalytic theory can elucidate the significance of such tactile moments, offering insight into the meaning evoked for the spectator by this sensory, poetic film form. The Sensory Child locates itself at the intersection of feminist psychoanalytic film theory and phenomenological film theory, among other critical approaches, to analyse the complexities of the child figure. The book draws on scholarship from Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Julia Kristeva, alongside Vivian Sobchack, Laura U Marks, and Jennifer Barker. presence. The Sensory Child situates itself in a gap in the literature of cinematic representations of childhood by supplementing psychoanalytic theory with phenomenological perspectives on film form to analyse what I have called ‘the sensory child figure’. These images of childhood have mostly been analysed in terms of their psychoanalytic, cultural or political significances (Jacqueline Rose, James Kincaid, Lawrence Grossberg), but these authors do not write on the cinema or consider the operations of film language. Other scholarship around childhood and cinema does address the modes of looking at images of the child (Vicky Lebeau, Karen Lury), but a development of this discussion is needed around the modes of looking through the child figure, or the construction of a child’s gaze. Phenomenological approaches (Sobchack, Marks) explore the impact of the senses, particularly touch, on film spectatorship but these tend to ignore the discourses in psychoanalytic theory that do address the senses such as sight (Freud, Lacan), and touch in relation to the semiotics of the body (Kristeva). They also tend to disregard the work of theorists that have applied psychoanalytic theory to film (Laura Mulvey, Elizabeth Cowie, Todd McGowan). This is understandable in that these scholars are attempting to redress the dominant influence of theories of spectatorship. Further, scholarship around a haptic film form that evokes a sense of childhood, and that works to elicit empathy from a spectator (Emma Wilson, Stuart Aitken) is an area still ripe for in-depth analysis. This book contributes to these fruitful discussions by adopting a dual methodological approach to the cinema of childhood, and to representations of the sensory child figure. This approach uncovers a significant interrelation between a sensory, tactile and empathetic film form—which I call the aesthetic of childhood —and the psychoanalytic narratives of childhood and identity formation, as well as the operations of memory, the nature of the gaze and relationships of looking.

The Sensory Child: Sight, Sound, Touch examines a poetic film form evident in contemporary cinema that seems intent on capturing the textures, the materials, and the sensations of childhood. These films foreground the child’s point of view, construct a child’s gaze, and mobilise an aesthetic that evokes a sensory recollection of childhood. This complex arrangement of aesthetic modes is intended to address the adult spectator bodily, and evoke the vivid, sensory memories of childhood. The Sensory Child rethinks a gap in contemporary film theory created by a seeming hiatus between psychoanalytic and phenomenological approaches to the cinema. The book examines key instances of this aesthetic of childhood in the films Aftersun (2022), The Fits (2015), What Maisie Knew (2013), and Moonlight (2016). May argues that psychoanalytic theory can elucidate the significance of such tactile moments, offering insight into the meaning evoked for the spectator by this sensory, poetic film form.

The Sensory Child: Sight, Sound, Touch examines a poetic film form evident in contemporary cinema that seems intent on capturing the textures, the materials, and the sensations of childhood. These films foreground the child’s point of view, construct a child’s gaze, and mobilise an aesthetic that evokes a sensory recollection of childhood.