Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture

by Vivian Sobchack, Univ of California Pr

In these innovative essays, Vivian Sobchack considers the key role our bodies play in making sense of today's image-saturated culture. Emphasizing our corporeal rather than our intellectual engagements with film and other media, Carnal Thoughts shows how our experience always emerges through our senses and how our bodies are not just visible objects but also sense-making, visual subjects. Sobchack draws on both phenomenological philosophy and a broad range of popular sources to explore bodily experience in contemporary, moving-image culture. She examines how, through the conflation of cinema and surgery, we've all "had our eyes done"; why we are "moved" by the movies; and the different ways in which we inhabit photographic, cinematic, and electronic space. Carnal Thoughts provides a lively and engaging challenge to the mind/body split by demonstrating that the process of "making sense" requires an irreducible collaboration between our thoughts and our senses.

Genres: Film, Nonfiction, Philosophy, Theory, Academic, Politics

340 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2004

About the author

Vivian Sobchack was the first woman elected President of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, and is on the Board of Directors of the American Film Institute. Her essays have appeared in journals such as Quarterly Review of Film and Video, Film Comment, camera obscure, Film Quarterly and Representations. Her books include Screening Space: The American Science Fiction Film; The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience; and Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture, and she has edited two anthologies: Meta-Morphing: Visual Transformation and the Culture of Quick-Change; and The Persistence of History: Cinema, Television, and the Modern Event. Her research interests are eclectic: American film genres, philosophy and film theory, history and phenomenology of perception, historiography and cultural studies.

Reviews

[Zachary · Rating 4 out of 5]

Much more accessible than Sobchack's earlier book on film phenomenology, the location of the body directs the reflections contained in this collection, and makes for some interesting, convicting, and oddly consciousness-raising reading. Using her own leg replacement as the starting point for several pieces reflecting on ethics and art and the viewer's relationship to technology in art, the essays here are multifaceted and complex. Some of them border on having sections that are nearly unreadable or at least very, very difficult to comprehend, while others invite readers in to examine Sobchack's body and their own in relation to the artifices and cultural institutions that surround them. These are where the collection really shines.

At its best, the book brings readers into the world of bodily experience. At its worst, it alienates readers through complicated jargon and seemingly disconnected rabbit-trails into arcane subjects that only tangentially relate to the main topic of the essays. But these sections are fewer than the good ones, and easy to sort of plow through and even ignore by each essay's end. If you're seeking something specific out of the book, you're sure to find it, even if you have to wade through some irrelevancies to get there.

[Bryan Kibbe · Rating 4 out of 5]

Although described as a film theorist, Vivian Sobcheck is more expansively a serious and committed thinker, particularly on the topic of human embodiment. This collection of Sobcheck's essays bears witness to her interdisciplinary work and thinking, and accordingly is accessible to a wide audience. Only a few of the essays in the book focus especially on the close analysis of film, and most are on the broader topic of human embodiment and the influence of materiality on our understanding. Replete with a wide array of references, fascinating descriptions and astute insights, Sobcheck is someone worth reading.

[Camille · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very complex film theory, but her writing is so personal it reads like a biography!

[Amber Manning · Rating 5 out of 5]

This might be my favorite film theory book and my favorite explanation of phenomenology EVER. Sobchack refuses to let the abstract body exhaust her body and I'm here for it...
“In sum, even though there has been increasing interest in doing so, we have not yet come to grips with the carnal foundations of cinematic intelligibility, with the fact that to understand movies figurally, we first must make literal sense of them” (Sobchack, Carnal Thoughts 59).
“In sum, 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” (Sobchack, Carnal Thoughts 60).

[Madelyn · Rating 4 out of 5]

This beautiful mix of personal anecdotes, theory, and film will be SO helpful for my thesis. Sobchack is BRILLIANT!