Radical Embodiment on Film

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.

Louis Bayman is Associate Professor of Film Studies at the University of Southampton, UK. He has published extensively on Italian cinema, melodrama studies, and popular cinema. He is author of The Operatic and the Everyday in Postwar Italian Film Melodrama (2014) and co-editor of Folk Horror Films: Return of Britain's Repressed (upcoming, 2023).
Davina Quinlivan is Senior Lecturer in Performance and Screen Studies at Kingston University, UK. She is author of Shalimar: A Story of Place and Migration (upcoming, 2023), The Spirit of the Beehive (BFI Film Classics, upcoming, 2023), and Filming the Body in Crisis: Trauma, Healing and Hopefulness (2015). She has taught and published widely on the subject of girlhood and cinema, her articles have featured in Screen, Music, Sound and the Moving Image, and Screening the Past.