a partir de ahora voy a empezar a subir unas entregas semanales que tenemos que hacer para la materia "Asian Public Cultures", es una materia sobre antropologia, cine, cultura popular, lo publico, y esas yerbas.
aca el post mio de esta semana.

Commentary on skins, senses, films and other socializations.

In her suggestive book, “The Skin of the Film,” Laura Marks intends to
think what is to feel and (make) sense intercultural cinema, as a
skin/embodiment and sensory representation in cinema. She is
particularly interested in a specific form of cinema; the experimental
and intercultural cinema and it embodied experience where “the body is a
source not just of individual but of cultural memory” (xiii). Her
approach is relevant, and perhaps a step forward to our previous
reading, because she is willing to add more layers to our comprehension
of “what is going on” in the field of cultural production. Also because
she seems to be standing in the middle of production and reception with
her focus on the multisensorial aspects of intercultural cinema beyond
the merely visual.
Marks is very clear and precise in the way she build her (sometimes
eclectic) theoretical framework, starting with Deleuze’s film theory.
Though she is honest in her exploration of new analytical paths, because
“[T]he elements of an embodied response to cinema, the response in terms
of touch, smell, rhythm, and other bodily perceptions, have until
recently been considered ‘excessive’ and not amenable to analysis”
(xvii). This kind of challenge, try to understand in a multisensorial
and embodied way intercultural cinema, is what makes her book fascinating.

In “The haptic codes of Bollywood cinema in New York City” Dudrah and
Rai provocatively argue that Boollywood films are products/producers of
complex and intense “sensations” in a powerful montage of ethnicity,
class, caste, gender, diasporic belonging, affections, affects-effects,
and social imagination. Their analysis come in the peak of the spread
and globalization of Bollywood cinema, where, although the first cinema
industry in the world, is clearly speeding up its presence and influence
all around the world.

One keeps wondering if this speed up and spread of Bollywood cinema,
along with Chinese cinema, is an analogy or symptom of the expansion of
both societies/capitalisms and their social values in competition with
US society/capitalism/social values/cinema. It is quite obvious, but
perhaps a bit naturalized, that is not free and “natural” that we all
know by heart dozens of actors, actresses and directors from US and
England, but just few from Asia, and not one from India (me, Rafa, I
know that some of you were/are socialized under her Majesty Bollywood
cinema). Therefore, this spreading out of Bollywood cinema
bring/carry/assemble new types of textures, sensations and aesthetics:
what the authors called as “haptic” and “contagious juice.” This “haptic
media” and “these sensations that can be read through the body are
affects-effects embedded in the ‘interruptive narrative’” which become
for the authors the “cinematic assemblage” or in other words “the
passage from narrative to sensation and back” (2005: 153). These
multiplicities and the cinematic assemblages are what the authors and
Laura Marks are trying to taste and translate to us.