The Place of Breath in Cinema

An exploration of the figuring of absence in film. How can the cinema articulate the interstices between visibility and invisibility, and how are such notions of absence and the unseen implicated in the film experience? This study considers the locus of the breathing body in the film experience and its implications for the study of embodiment in film and sensuous spectatorship. Quinlivan puts forward a mode of critical engagement with film shaped by the foregrounding of the human body in the filmic diegesis and the viewing experience. The book's foregrounding of the human body as an, importantly, breathing body in film, coupled with its fresh engagement with continental philosophy, Post-Structuralist Film Theory and Contemporary Western Cinema, makes a unique and valuable contribution to the field.

Davina Quinlivan is Part-time Lecturer at the King's College, London and Kingston University