Sensuous Cinema

<i>Sensuous Cinema: The Body in Contemporary Maghrebi Film</i> examines a cluster of recent films that feature Maghrebi(-French) people and position corporeality as a site through which subjectivity and self-other relations are constituted and experienced. These films are set in and between the countries of the Maghreb France and to a lesser degree Switzerland and often adopt a sensual aesthetic that prioritizes embodied knowledge the interrelation of the senses and the material realities of emotional experience. However despite the importance of the body in these films no study to date has taken corporeality as its primary point of concern. <br/><br/>This new addition to the Thinking Cinema series interweaves corporeal phenomenology with theological and feminist scholarship on the body from the Maghreb and the Middle East to examine how Maghrebi(-French) people of different genders ethnicities sexualities ages and classes have been represented corporeally in contemporary Maghrebi and French cinemas. Via detailed textual and phenomenological analyses of films such as <i>Red Satin</i> (Amari 2002) <i>Exiles</i> (Gatlif 2004) <i>Couscous</i> (Kechiche 2007) and<i> Salvation Army</i>(Taïa 2014) Kaya Hayon Davies conveys the pivotal role that corporeality plays in articulating identity and the emotions in these films.