Memories that evoke the physical awareness of touch, smell, and bodily presence can be vital links to home for people living in diaspora from their culture of origin. How can filmmakers working between cultures use cinema, a visual medium, to transmit that physical sense of place and culture? In The Skin of the Film Laura U. Marks offers an answer, building on the theories of Gilles Deleuze and others to explain how and why intercultural cinema represents embodied experience in a postcolonial, transnational world. Much of intercultural cinema, Marks argues, has its origin in silence, in the gaps left by recorded history. Filmmakers seeking to represent their native cultures have had to develop new forms of cinematic expression. Marks offers a theory of “haptic visuality”—a visuality that functions like the sense of touch by triggering physical memories of smell, touch, and taste—to explain the newfound ways in which intercultural cinema engages the viewer bodily to convey cultural experience and memory. Using close to two hundred examples of intercultural film and video, she shows how the image allows viewers to experience cinema as a physical and multisensory embodiment of culture, not just as a visual representation of experience. Finally, this book offers a guide to many hard-to-find works of independent film and video made by Third World diasporic filmmakers now living in the United States, Great Britain, and Canada. The Skin of the Film draws on phenomenology, postcolonial and feminist theory, anthropology, and cognitive science. It will be essential reading for those interested in film theory, experimental cinema, the experience of diaspora, and the role of the sensuous in culture.

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Objective: Continuous performance tests are widely used to aid diagnostic decision making and measure symptom reduction in adult ADHD clinical populations. The diagnostic accuracy of the Quantified Behavior Test plus (QbTest+), developed to identify ADHD populations as an objective measure of ADHD symptoms, was explored. Methods: The utility of the QbTest+ was investigated in a clinical cohort of 69 adult patients referred to a specialist ADHD clinic in the UK. Results: Scores from the QbTest+ failed to differentiate between patients diagnosed with ADHD and those who did not receive a diagnosis after full clinical assessment. Conclusions: Based on our findings, we recommend clinicians are cautious when interpreting results of the QbTest+ in clinical populations. This study highlights the need for investigation into the lack of validation of commonly used objective measures in ADHD populations.

The scholarly turn toward visual culture has left in place the sensory hierarchy that subtends Western philosophy. Yet given the commodification of sense experience, an inversion of the sensory hierarchy with the proximal senses of touch, taste, and smell at the top is not necessarily any more conducive to knowledge or justice. I argue that proximal sense experience may be a vehicle of knowledge, beauty and even ethics. Operating at a membrane between the sensible and the thinkable, the proximal senses have an affective dimension that permits an immanent epistemology. My examples and olfactory 'illustrations' emphasize the sense of smell, which, I posit, given its intimacy with emotion and memory, gives rise to an 'olfactory unconscious'.

ABSTRACTThe author explores how a viewer identifies with a decaying or disintegrating film or videotape, given that cinema is, in effect, dying even as we watch it. She discusses several experimental films and videos that take as their subject the disintegration of film, often erotic film. A psychoanalytic model of melancholia is posited for this identificatory process, but it is found to be unsatisfactory since it is premised on the maintenance of the ego's coherence. Instead a model of devotional melancholia is posited for how one might love a disappearing image.