The Body, Emotion and Cinema: Perspectives on Cinematic Experiences of das Unheimlich and Estranged Body States in The Others (Alejandro Amenabar, 2001)

Abstract

In the darkened space of the cinema auditorium, the film lights up the screen, absorbs our attention and taps into all the sensory stimuli that affect us. It does this via vision and sound, but a film is not only perceptual, it is sensational, ‘hitting in the guts’, so to speak. The hit is bodily and even visceral, as our eyes well up with tears as sadness overwhelms, or an erotic scene sexually arouses, or palpitations and heartbeat race as excitation sets in and fear grips. This chapter sets out to explore how film depicts bodily states and affects us in unconscious and bodily ways by exploring a particular film, The Others (Alejandro Amenábar, US/Spain, 2001). Film is not only about pleasure as it can also evoke painful and difficult feelings and tap into profound anxieties. Cinema helps us to escape into a place where there is an imaginary idealisation of bodies, yet it can also capture the inverse underside, the precarious, unstable and frightening aspects of bodily being and identity.

This chapter is published online in a longer form in the Journal of Psycho-Social Studies, 7 (1). The author holds copyright and we are grateful for her permission to reprint parts of the work here.