Abstract: Through an engagement with film phenomenology and phenomenologists, this paper establishes the empathy of the lived body as a tool to rehabilitate the image of Woman from objectification in film. In a comparative analysis of Charles Vidor’s Gilda and Jane Campion’s The Piano under the aspect of allowing sensual intrusion of the viewer into the film’s fabric and the categories of the hardness and softness of the material of a film’s body, this paper concludes that the identification of the viewer’s body and the experience of the film in alignment with its sensual rhythms generates knowledge drawn from the body. By comparing the cinematic techniques used to portray the protagonists Gilda and Ada and the relationship established between their bodies and the viewers’ bodies, the creation of the ‘image of Woman’ and her objectification is outlined. The tactile can serve as a subversive strategy which may forego this objectification and rehabilitate self-understanding from its fragmentation.
What in this paper is discussed as ‘the image of Woman in film’ has occupied film criticism and scholarship almost since its inception, from debating film’s contribution to the cultural idea of Woman, to exploring the possibilities in film to participate in feminist discourse, for example in terms of the rehabilitation of self-understanding from objectification. The objective of this paper is to understand empathy generated through the cinematic technique of foregrounding the haptic as a means of accessing ways of knowing outside of patriarchal structures and gender binaries. In order to substantiate the generation of knowledge through the film experience and cinematic technique, phenomenology is engaged, as it understands film as experience, centering ideas of embodiment, sensual understanding, and reciprocity between the film’s body and the viewer’s body. Phenomenology and the haptic and tactile in cinema are closely interwoven in their conceptualization of ‘the flesh’ and will allow the outlining of necessary vocabulary to tease out the effect of tactility in the depiction of Woman in Charles Vidor’s noir Gilda (1946) and Jane Campion’s historical romance The Piano (1992). The comparison of these films illustrates how their differing approaches in representing the leading women’s bodies on screen either afford or prohibit the generation of empathy through the viewer’s body.