Vivian Sobchack’s chapter, “What My Fingers Knew: The Cinesthetic Subject, or Vision in the Flesh” makes the argument that “the film experience is meaningful not to the side of our bodies but because of our bodies. Which is to say that movies provoke in us the ‘carnal thoughts’ that ground and inform more conscious analysis” (p.60).
On pages 63-65 she describes her own experience of watching The Piano and locates her own understanding of a scene from the film through her own embodied spectatorhsip of it. She describes the feelings she has in her fingers and how that relates to her comprehension of the scene.
Using her prose on those pages as a model, try to describe your own viewing of the Afronauts in haptic terms. Try to describe your viewing of some specific scene. Pay close attention to your experience and use that experience as a mode of analysis.
*** Write in complete sentences, do not use bullet points or ellipses. Your response should be between 250-500 words. The style of your post can be speculative and personal, you do need to come up with arguments, rather just reflect on your own comprehension of the material. Write in your own voice. But this is not a social media space– your posts should be thoughtful and structured.
