A kiss in the tunnel: Dialectics, phenomenology and sexual representation

Tuck, Greg

Abstract

Starting with early ‘kissing-films’, this paper argued that a phenomenological analysis is best suited to help us to understand how film ‘thinks and feels’ about sex. Cinematic representations are neither simply empirical truths nor idealised concepts, but a complex revelation of the possibilities and limitations of the lived body that address us at both the perceptual and conceptual level, as raw visceral experiences and complex presentations of social situations. In particular, I argued that the complex dialectic between the overt and the implied, the mimetic and the metaphoric and the banal and the profound that we find in contemporary cinema is visible at the very outset of filmmaking.

• Presentation Conference Type: Conference Paper (unpublished)
• Conference Name: Philosophy and Film/Film and Philosophy
• Start Date: Jul 1, 2008
• End Date: Jul 1, 2008
• Peer Reviewed: Not Peer Reviewed
• Keywords: early cinema, sexuality, phenomenology
• Public URL: https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/1011555
• Additional Information: Additional Information : A print version of this paper will form part of the introduction to Greg Tuck's monograph Philosophy, Cinema and Sex due out in 2010.