Laura U. Marks

Memories that evoke the physical awareness of touch, smell, and bodily presence can be vital links to home for people living in diaspora from their culture of origin. How can filmmakers working between cultures use cinema, a visual medium, to transmit that physical sense of place and culture? In The Skin of the Film Laura U. Marks offers an answer, building on the theories of Gilles Deleuze and others to explain how and why intercultural cinema represents embodied experience in a postcolonial, transnational world. 

Much of intercultural cinema, Marks argues, has its origin in silence, in the gaps left by recorded history. Filmmakers seeking to represent their native cultures have had to develop new forms of cinematic expression. Marks offers a theory of “haptic visuality”—a visuality that functions like the sense of touch by triggering physical memories of smell, touch, and taste—to explain the newfound ways in which intercultural cinema engages the viewer bodily to convey cultural experience and memory. Using close to two hundred examples of intercultural film and video, she shows how the image allows viewers to experience cinema as a physical and multisensory embodiment of culture, not just as a visual representation of experience. Finally, this book offers a guide to many hard-to-find works of independent film and video made by Third World diasporic filmmakers now living in the United States, Great Britain, and Canada.

The Skin of the Film draws on phenomenology, postcolonial and feminist theory, anthropology, and cognitive science. It will be essential reading for those interested in film theory, experimental cinema, the experience of diaspora, and the role of the sensuous in culture.

(Jan 2000)

This book traces the work and research of filmmakers and visual artists Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige and their exploration through their work of online spam e-mails, specifically, advance-fee frauds and scam messages.

This monograph presents material collected by the artists since 1999, focusing on the way that personal narratives are formed and articulated in a post-digital age. This work functions as a starting point for a broader discussion by leading scholars and thinkers on the nature of power and trust in the age of the Internet. Underlying this is an interrogation of faith: How has trust been recomposed by the Internet, and equally, how does the traditional practice of faith question the way that individuals relate to each other online?
Since the mid-1990s, Lebanese artists Joana Hadjithomas & Khalil Joreige (b. 1969, live and work in Beirut, Lebanon, and Paris) have worked together in the visual arts and cinema–shooting documentaries and fictions such as "I Want To See," starring Catherine Deneuve and Rabih Mroué and screened at the Cannes Festival in 2008.

Their practice in both fields is imbued with a distinctive aesthetic that occupies spheres of the visible and the fictional, nourishing a fascinating back and forth between life and fiction. Investigative processes, excavation, and the representations of historic, social, cultural, and political factors are at the heart of their practice. In their words: "All our work exists on the frontier of a reality where the question of the territory and its delimitation (that of art, that of personal life), the question of the social body and the individual body, are constantly being posed."

Their films have been multi awarded in international festivals and enjoyed releases in many countries. Their artworks have been shown in museums, biennials and art centers around the world, in solo or collective exhibitions and are part of important public and private collections, such as Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; Guggenheim, New York; Centre Georges Pompidou, France; V & A London, Sharjah Art Foundation, UAE, etc.

Edited by Omar Kholeif.
Contributions by Nicholas Auray, Finn Brunton, Joana Hadjithomas & Khalil Joreige, Henriette Huldisch, Omar Kholeif, Norman M. Klein, Eric Mangion, Laura U. Marks, Franck Leibovici, Sarah Perks, Jacques Rancière, Uzma Rizvi, Rasha Salti.