Shattering the Limits of Visual Cinema: Haptic and Sensorial Visuality in Spanish Women Filmmakers

My dissertation, Shattering Limits of Visual Cinema: Haptic and Sensorial Visuality in Contemporary Spanish Women Directors, derives from theoretical paradigms that have lately emerged regarding film aesthetics and production, such as Laura Marks’ (2002) ‘‘haptic visuality’’, which explores and pursues the tactility and texture of images, via sound, smell or taste in film. In fact, I argue that Spanish filmmakers have turned to the haptic and sensorial aesthetics as a strategy to produce a counter-cinema that deconstructs the supremacy of voyeurism in order to provide a different type of access to material bodies on the screen, both visually and acoustically. Due to lack of recognition and visibility of women filmmakers’ work, my project seeks to give voice and visibility to the work filmmakers such as Isabel Coixet, Judith, Colell, Paula Ortiz and Helena Taberna, among others. Their films attempt to consolidate their own linguistic authority on the screen in an effort to deconstruct and reconfigure the passive/feminine- active/masculine binary options. In this project, I will examine how haptic gynofilm -to appropriate an influential term coined by Barbara Zecchi- goes beyond the limits of visual cinema to find other sources of pleasure that undermine the power relationship that interpellates male spectators as sadistic voyeurs, while simultaneously mobilizing the elements on the screen, to lead the spectator into a multisensorial journey of perception where him/ her are more inclined to ‘‘graze’’ than to ‘‘gaze’’, that is, to touch through eye, in a sort of tactile and aural voyeurism. My dissertation thus, contributes to other ways of looking and perceiving cinema, in which the feminist look and voice re-appropriated visual representation to reaffirm their own subjectivity and subvert hegemonic modes of representation and perception.