Feature 07
below  Figure 1. Natalie Portman
becomes the Black Swan in the final
scenes of the film
Under the Skin: How
Filmmakers Affectively
Reduce the Space
Between the Film and
the Viewer
By Joanna Scholefield
keywords: skin, affect, Black Swan, horror, tactility,
aesthetics, Darren Aronofsky, phenomenology
The liminal space between
the senses of the viewer and the film is
reduced by seductive close-ups and alluring
compositions. They call us closer to the
skin of the film, and we yield, driven by
the pleasure of immersion in the fantastic
stories and teasingly tangible bodies. Liminal
space is also reduced by our innate, visceral
relationship to the aesthetics of the film,
which can leave us repulsed, horrified,
even physically affected by visuals which
our bodies know before our intellects can
comprehend them.
Pre-intellectual responses to films have
formed the basis in film theory for a “need
for control … against a threatening pleasure”
(Shaviro, The Cinematic Body 13). However,
many theorists have sought to “bring the
world of perception back to life … [a] world
hidden from us beneath all the sediment of
knowledge” (Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology
of Perception 93). In this case, the sediment
comes from the analytic deconstruction of
44
film: its content, meanings, representations,
form, and so on. When a film is grasped
as a whole, we can explore its intentions to
make us feel and to affect us, and “far from
having narrowed our horizons by immersing
ourselves in the world of perception, we
have rediscovered a way of looking at works
of art … and culture, which respects their
autonomy and their original richness”
(Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception
101). I believe approaches that voluntarily
succumb to and investigate what Laura
Mulvey calls film’s “threatening pleasure”
are more intriguing, seductive, and more
vital – alive – than the vast range of semiotic,
rhetorical, or psychoanalytic film theories
that have formed the ubiquitous horizon of
more serious or academic discourse on film.
This vitality comes from some theorists not
wanting to distance their receptive bodies
from the sensory and affective medium
of film. Why should we push aside visceral
perceptions and bodily experiences when
Film Matters Spring 2014
we watch and study films? The body, as
Merleau-Ponty writes, is “the seat of a
certain praxis, the point from which there is
something to do in the world, the register in
which we are inscribed” (quoted in Low 74).
This article is shaped by philosophical
and theoretical discourses on select
aspects of affect theory. The power of
cinema is highlighted by exploring film’s
wanton ability to touch us – not from an
emotional perspective in this case, but in a
seductively phenomenological and almost
tangible manner. Seduction can occur upon
viewing a film whose aesthetics have been
deeply considered and constructed.1 The
exploration of these issues is focused on the
compelling visual and visceral relationship
between the skin of the film and the skin of
the viewer.
Human experience is rooted corporeally,
through our eyes and our sense of touch.
Films that can affect how our skin feels – by
haptic and intuitive association between
the skin of the subject and our own skin –
can also manipulate audience responses,
enhancing the viewing experience and
complementing narrative. I would also
argue that the intention of filmmakers to
illicit visceral responses through the skin of
the audience allows for a more immersive
and affective cinematic experience. This is
achieved by playing with ideas of boundaries:
the skin’s surface is a container and boundary
to entities which affect it; the surface of the
film and notions of its tactility is created
by cinematic techniques; and the skin of
the subject within the film and how the
treatment of their skin in turn manipulates
(negatively or otherwise), affects, and touches
the skin of the viewer, thereby breaking
boundaries between viewer and subject.
There are a great number of films which
are incredibly tactile in their visual style,
conveying phenomena such as textures
and moods, and which work to evoke sense
memories in viewers. For this study of
affect theory, the touchstone text will be
Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan (2010). It is a
hauntingly affective film that draws most of
its impact from the director’s stylistic choices
and foregrounding of the suffering of Nina
Sayers’s (Natalie Portman) skin throughout
the film, in order to express the subtle
horrors of her disintegrating mental state
and fracturing identity. Aronofsky presents us
with visions that are real enough to register
viscerally, causing discomfort, unease, and
innate sympathy for Nina’s tortured skin.
The film remains relatively realist in visual
style with its mobile camera work, grainy
film stock and natural lighting, thereby
giving Nina’s worsening corporeal conditions
Feature 07
affective power, even though they are often
revealed to be hallucinatory. Aronofsky
makes full use of the fact that refined
cinematic language and imagery is evocative
and dense with meaning, and knows that
the only way to portray Nina’s mental state
without her vocalizing her anguish is for her
skin and his camera to tell her story. This
mode of storytelling goes beyond seeing.
We are made to feel, and we feel as part of
Nina’s mind and body, inherently bringing
our own tactile life experience to the screen.
Some critical reaction has dismissed Black
Swan as “glamorous trash,” and Steven
Shaviro has observed that it exhibits
psychophysical stimulation and affective
intensity that arguably has the potential to
“overwhelm plot and theme” (“Black Swan”).
But Shaviro believes that in the case of Black
Swan, “psychophysical intensity is the point;
and thematic concerns are deliberately
flattened and simplified, so they do not
interfere with this” (“Black Swan”).
Ultimately, my aim is to elucidate how
subjective and open to interpretation all
of these cinematic experiences are, and
how filmmakers are able to move us in
such tactile, corporeal ways: to feel as the
subjects feel; for our eyes to move across
the screen mirroring camera movements;
to subconsciously know what the imagery is
conveying through our own tactile experience
of the world.
Of course there are affective powers in
other aspects of film – in sound, for example,
or even in particular issues the filmmaker
wants to explore – but they can be made all
the more powerful through the audiovisual
medium of cinema. The research conducted
for this article and the assertions I make are
indubitably subjective, selective, and specific,
and they are also statements that depend
on the notion of a viewer unsupported by
empirical research.
When watching a film, if we do not resist,
thought and sensibility take on a new
dimension, in which every drop of sweat,
every movement of muscle, every quick
drawn breath becomes the symbol of a
story; and as my body reproduces the
particular gait of that story, so does my
mind embrace its meaning. (Levi-Strauss,
quoted in Sobchack ii)
The history of studying the affects that
images and cinema have on the body can
be traced back to theorists such as Walter
Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer. Benjamin
explored the idea of the mimetic faculty and
Kracauer “located the uniqueness of cinema
in the medium’s essential ability to stimulate
45
Under the Skin: How Filmmakers Affectively Reduce Space Between the Film and the Viewer
Aronofsky presents us with visions that are real
enough to register viscerally, causing discomfort,
unease, and innate sympathy for Nina’s tortured skin.
us physiologically and sensually” (Sobchack
55). Filmmakers can utilize of the fact that
“the spectator is a ‘corporeal-material being’,
a human being with skin and hair … ‘The
material elements that present themselves in
films directly stimulate the material layers of
the human being: his nerves, his senses, his
entire physiological substance’” (Sobchack 55).
Definitions of affect vary depending upon
individual perspectives, but they are all a
part of the affective, material, or bodily turn
in film theory. Affect is often used to explain
how phenomena make a person feel, which
can easily be linked to emotions and mental
processes. Still, these mental processes are
immediate, before rationalization. A reduced
definition of affect would be to “impress
the mind” or “move the feelings” of the
viewer, but there are several nuances to this
description of affect, particularly in relation
to film studies. There are phenomenological
points of view that examine the skin in
particular, as well as whole-body affectations
that can take place when watching a film,
or the cultural impetus affect has in today’s
society. These perspectives on analyzing film
have been founded on the idea that
film experience is a holistic event in which
the spectator and the film address each
other in a two way process. Therefore, film
narratives should not be analysed as static
structures but instead as events that involve
embodied spectators and fictional worlds
in a material embrace. (Hiltunen)
Attempts are being made by proponents
of affect theory to undo the “rigid binary
demarcations of externality and internality”
(Sobchack 56). It is from a phenomenological
perspective that this exploration works to
substantiate the power of the image upon the
skin of the viewer: blurring, puncturing, and
penetrating the borders between external and
internal, which deeply, phenomenologically,
and innately affect the viewer.
Perhaps we have not yet come to grips
with the carnal foundations of cinematic
intelligibility.
To understand movies figurally, we first
must make literal sense of them. This
is not a tautology – particularly in the
discipline that has worked long and
hard to separate the sense and meaning
Film Matters Spring 2014 ➜
of vision and specularity from a body
that, in experience, lives vision always in
cooperation and significant exchange with
other sensorial means of access to the
world, a body that makes meaning before
it makes conscious, reflective thought.
(Sobchack 59)
It is difficult to find words for bodily
affectations that have taken place in an
instant while watching a film. It seems
paradoxical to the ideas I am supporting to
analytically deconstruct feelings once felt,
as it often requires thinking and rethinking,
and even repeat viewings, therefore changing
the viewing experience from what it
originally was anyway.2 In spite of its possible
tautological and paradoxical tendencies, this
kind of analysis has served to investigate and
give value to the power that film has upon
our subconscious minds and sensitive bodies,
while still championing and embracing
its enigmatic efficacy. It has shaped an
understanding of the way we view films,
and allowed us to immerse ourselves in the
richness of the perceptive world of cinema.
Tactility
For a great deal of film analysis, the gaze –
of characters, the camera, and the viewer,
and how it is mobilized and exchanged and
imbued with power – has been of prime
concern. We’ve learned to ask questions
about who is looking, at what or whom, and
under what circumstances. But what about
touch? (Barker 25)
When we watch films, our bodies are
open to sensations that register quicker
than they can be intellectually perceived.
This is the nature of the immediacy of film
as an audiovisual medium.3 The sensory
confusion – or rather a blurring of sensory
boundaries – that can occur when watching
an affective film takes place crucially
between sight and touch. Vision is one of
the most immediate and tactile surfaces of
the body, and a vital interface with the world
around us.4 Clearly, for film to be affective it
requires sight, but this is just the beginning
of a number of immediate affects upon the
body and in particular, to the surface of the
skin. This suggests that vision itself can be
tactile: something called “haptic visuality …
as though one were touching a film with
one’s eyes” (Marks xi). The fact that we are
Feature 07
unaware until further reflection of how
film is making us regard its subject matter
emphasizes the innate and subtle affective
nature of film, and heightens the intensity of
the embodied cinematic experience.
The phenomenological approach to film
analysis can be found in Merleau-Ponty’s
only essay on cinema, in which he discusses
feelings and sensations such as pleasure,
grief, love, and hate. These feelings and
sensations are not perceived, expressed,
or made meaningful first through mindful
reflection, but through the viewer and film’s
embodied enactment of them. In summary:
“phenomenological film analysis approaches
the film and the viewer as acting together,
correlationally, along an axis that would itself
constitute the object of study” (Barker 18).
With this in mind, we can begin to study the
nature of tactility along the axis between
film and viewer. Merleau-Ponty’s notion
of reversibility can be used to consider this
relationship:
When I touch one hand with the other
each hand plays the role of both the
touching and the touched, but my
experience of touching and being touched
is not quite simultaneous … I feel one
hand touching the other, but I can’t feel
both at once. (Merleau-Ponty, quoted in
Barker 19)
This vacillation between touching and
being touched is a useful analogy for the
position of the film viewer. The double
sensation provoked by one hand touching
the other is the archetype for the subject/
object relations in the world: irreducible one
to the other, but embedded in a constantly
mutual experience, constituted of the same
“stuff ” (Barker 19). In relation to film and
phenomenology, this “stuff ” is (among other
things) a sharing of sensory receptors such
as eyes and skin. While film does not see us
in the same way that another person can,
much like a relationship with another person,
we are in intimate, tactile contact with the
film’s body – a complex relationship that is
marked as often by tension as alignment,
by repulsion as often as attraction (Barker
19). And while film cannot feel as we do,
there is a notion that “film may be thought
of as impressionable and conductive, like
skin” (Marks xii). This is referencing the
subjectivity of reception, such as when films
are circulated among different audiences,
all of which “mark it with their presence”
(Marks xi).5
A consideration of film as having similar
properties to skin illuminates some of the
affective power of Black Swan. We can
46
Joanna Scholefield
“emphasize the tactile and contagious quality
of cinema as something we viewers brush up
against like another body” (Marks xii). The
ways in which the viewer and film respond
to one another “perform similar modes
of perspective and expressive behaviour
in different ways that are determined by
the specifics of their enabling bodies”
(Barker 32). The camera’s smooth tracking,
slow motion, or invisible/soft editing is
complemented by the viewer’s eyes in turn
moving smoothly across the screen.6 The
film and viewer each respond in their own
uniquely embodied ways to one another’s
style of touch. A sense of the reversibility
of touch and even sight in some instances
between film and viewer are present in brief
moments in Black Swan, for example when
Nina looks into the camera – at the viewer –
and we feel as though she and the film can
see us (Figure 1).
Aronofsky’s use of these moments is
always poignant and fleeting in order to
create a sense of unease for the viewer. To
be suddenly addressed by the film in such a
border-disrupting way has the potential to
evoke a sense of abjection. The skin of the
film and Nina’s skin can also address us in
a border-disrupting way. The grainy film
texture and natural lighting are evocative
of the body worn down from relentlessly
rehearsing ballet, and Nina’s epidermal
conditions remind us that our skin is not an
impermeable container.
Beyond biology, the skin in more
philosophical terms is a vessel for a reversible,
reciprocal, and delineating relationship
between self and other. Connections are
created between film and viewer that are
forged through innately identifiable patterns
of movement, shapes, forms, habits, and
goals (Barker 26). The skin is crucial in the
forging of connections and meaning as it
is the boundary between self and other.
When these borders are played with – skin
of viewer and skin of the film – acutely
affective responses are elicited. However,
“there is never a collapse or dissolution of
the boundary” between viewer and film, even
though film can have physical effects on a
viewer’s skin – goosebumps, sweat, shivers,
for example – and boundaries are played
with to cause such effects (Barker 29).
The mimetic faculty of film viewing or
“mimesis” as a philosophical term carries
a wide range of meanings from imitation
When we watch films, our bodies are open to
sensations that register quicker than they can be
intellectually perceived.
Film Matters Spring 2014
to representation, receptivity to similarity.
Here, I am arguing that some of film’s
affective power comes from a viewer being
moved by the film in such a way that causes
them to mimic the bodily actions of the
film’s subject. It is important to note that the
viewer mimicking the actions of the body
on-screen is a powerful affect, but it is not
the sole reason for film’s power. The opening
scene in which Nina dances part of Swan Lake
is filmed with a very mobile camera, moving
closer to Nina’s face and dodging arms
in arabesque to mirror the dancing style,
ranging from soft and emotional to swift and
frantic. The audience shares the sense of
confusion Nina feels as she is grabbed and
spun by the evil Von Rothbart because of the
frenetic camera work. The framing is tight
to their movements, the lighting seeming to
come only from a single spotlight, with dust
floating in its beam. There are no edits or
cuts in this scene, which adds to its sense of
reality (albeit dreamlike) and affectiveness,
even when Nina’s costumes transform and
her dance partner metamorphosizes into
a black-feathered monster. The touch of
the camera in this scene is a curious mix of
invasive and distanced. We are often looking
at Nina’s face, motions, and feet in close-up,
but the camera also moves back to allow us
to take in her movements and the sudden
subtle and (importantly) dream-like costume
transformations. We are undoubtedly a
part of Nina’s dream, as the camera’s touch
invites us into it.
The mimetic faculty can be regarded as
part of the appeal of what can be called
“body genres”: pornography, melodrama,
and horror (Williams 143). “What seems to
bracket these particular genres from others is
an apparent lack of proper aesthetic distance,
a sense of overinvolvement in sensation
and emotion” (Williams 145). Genres such
as pornography and horror call for bodily
involvement – not necessarily literal, but
what Williams asserts as a sense of mimicry
of the subject by the viewer, forming the
measure of the success of such films.7 They
rely on formulaic plots and stereotypical
characters so the viewer doesn’t have to think
about the film. Within this, there is scope for
problematic representations (for example, of
the female body)8 to go unnoticed, or worse,
to be ignored.
Marks believes that “ultimately … our
experience of cinema is mimetic” (Marks
Feature 07
xvii). I believe that affective cinema goes
beyond mimesis, indulging the senses in
tactile memories, eliciting fear for the skin
as a boundary, and reducing the liminal
space between the skin of film and viewer in
a range of subtle and considered ways. For
example, the scene when Erica cuts Nina’s
nails too short does not draw its affectiveness
from mimicry, but from physiological
identification of the acute pain Nina feels.
The visual style of Black Swan reveals
knowledge to the viewer that has been stored
in the memory of the skin. In the considered
approach to the aesthetics and foregrounding
of corporeal phenomena that Nina
encounters, “information is revealed that was
never verbal or visual to begin with,” but is
experiential and tactile instead (Marks 76).
It is the more subtle and considered affective
qualities of Black Swan that I am interested in
unpacking.
Cinema is not merely a transmitter of
signs; it bears witness of an object and
transfers the presence of that object to
viewers (Marks 162). Images possess haptic
memory-evoking qualities (physiological
identification). In “haptic visuality, the eyes
themselves function as organs of touch”
(Marks 162). “Haptic looking tends to
move over the surface of its object rather
than to plunge into illusionistic depth, not
to distinguish form so much as to discern
texture” (162). This is particularly valuable
to Black Swan, as some critics have dismissed
it as superficial. Applying the concept of
haptic visuality, the textures of Black Swan
can be celebrated for conveying meaning in a
way that subconsciously moves us – possibly
without even knowing it – thereby more
affectively touching us. Black Swan invites a
look that allows viewers to know how Nina
feels. The film is comprised of imagery to
which the viewer “must bring his or her
resources of memory and imagination to
complete” it (Marks 163).
When films are made with tactility in
mind, we are invited or even forced to
perceive them in a different way: as newly
perceptible to the skin. It is almost as if the
images of the film have become a kind of
Braille for our sense knowledge to recognize
textures by touching them with our sense
of sight. Our eyes can caress the skin of
the film. The club scene from the film is an
example of this effect. The red and green
strobe lighting and abstraction of images
of Nina and Lily’s mobile bodies amongst a
throng of other figures renders us incapable
of clearly discerning what is going on in the
scene – an effect most likely employed to
reflect the fact that Nina has taken mind-
altering drugs. So, the movement and texture
47
Under the Skin: How Filmmakers Affectively Reduce Space Between the Film and the Viewer
of the images invite us to press our bodies
against the skin of the film in an attempt to
discern meaning from touch; for our eyes to
dance with them and sense memories of the
heat and sweat of contact between bodies in
the club to be evoked. Such sequences force
the viewer to contemplate the image itself,
which “corresponds to Deleuze’s movement
image, as [they] afford the illusion of
completeness that lends itself to narrative”
(Marks 163). Importantly, a sensuous
response to film can be elicited without
abstraction or restraint from the experience,
and it does not require an initial separation
between viewer and film that is mediated by
representation.
Often, the tactility of the contact
between the skins of film and viewer is
erotic, following on from the idea that
the axis between the two are teasing; a
kind of flirtation that is never satisfied
by physical contact, making it even more
alluring. The touch between our skin and
that of an “other” (not always a personal/
corporeal other, as with film) “brings our
own perceptive and expressive act into
greater relief. In pressing ourselves against
[another] we can feel ourselves touching.
We and the other render each other real,
sensible, palpable, through mutual exposure”
(Barker 34). “The viewer’s skin and film’s
skin allow a fleeting, incomplete kind of
access to the other, which is pleasurable in
its impermanence” (Barker 30). This sense
of teasing is what gives film its allure, what
draws people back again and again, even
if consciously unaware of its seductiveness.
Black Swan is disturbing, yes, but it can also be
seen as erotic and teasing, inviting us through
the frenetic and claustrophobic camera work
and sensually emotive subject matter to press
ourselves against the film, rendering it more
affective, more real.
It is in the meeting of the film and viewer’s
skins that Black Swan has the ability to touch,
create meaning, and metaphorically get
under our skin. Physiological identification
with textures – particularly those of Nina’s
Film Matters Spring 2014 ➜
below  Figure 2. Nina is distracted
from Thomas’s speech as she notices
the skin alongside her nail
tortured skin – arise through immediate,
innate recognition: through the viewer’s
skin. Even when Aronofsky presents us with
something quotidian, the affect is potent
because of the very considered way it is
filmed. As Nina is about to accept her title
of the Swan Queen, she looks to her fingers,
delicately holding a champagne flute. The
audience is placed in the same position as
Nina in an extreme close-up, point-of-view
shot as she looks down at her hands and
notices a piece of skin peeling alongside
her nail (Figure 2). Nina is more concerned
with and focused on the perturbance of her
cuticle than with the speech Thomas is giving
in her honor, and because of the point-of-
view shot, so are we.
As a result of our fluency in the language
of cinema, we understand this causes us
to identify with Nina, and it’s a form of
mimesis in that the audience is sharing the
same point of view as her. The movement
and placement of the camera means we
sympathize with her, and this is the case
almost throughout the film. But Aronofsky’s
camera goes further than this. What we feel
is more than sympathy – which is a function
of intellect/emotion and therefore involving
thought and abstraction – we palpably feel
that piece of skin alongside Nina’s nail. We
feel it because it is something so engrained
in us through experience of our own skin.
By focusing on the hangnail, Aronofsky is
manipulating us to feel more than sympathy
for Nina, and his intention is to home in
on something so familiar that we instantly
understand the feeling, before we consciously
understand her ailment. The touch of the
camera is unflinching, and we know the
disproportional pain as she peels skin from
the side of her nail all the way down her
finger, drawing blood (Figure 3). 9
The sense of touch when watching a film
is put almost on par with the importance of
sight, so it can be questioned in the same way
that the gaze has been scrutinized for decades
in film theory.10 Consider, for example,
the skin of the characters within the film
Feature 07
a b ov e   Figure 3. Nina succumbs to
temptation after she notices a small
piece of skin peeling beside her nail
(tortured or sensual), the touch of the camera
(harsh, invasive, or delicate, distanced), the
skin of the viewer (responding to the film
in a state of mimesis – goosebumps, sweaty,
warm, sympathetic to pain), the skin of
the film and all the complex, fluctuating
exchanges taking place between them. What
are the motives of the filmmaker? Could they
be manipulative? Is this manipulation always
negative?
It has been argued that films causing
primitive responses are lower genres, perhaps
not as worthy of scholarly attention or
critique as films that address issues through
narrative or metaphorical imagery. But
power in the sense of touch derives from all
the subtleties of filmmaking: the fact that
we can be manipulated to feel certain things
almost without knowing about it. We can
be disturbed but not know why, feel intense
unease in the presence of something that
logic tells us cannot touch us, but somehow
it does.
Horror in the contact between skins
Tactile contact between skins has the
potential to elicit horror, disgust, and
repulsion, and Black Swan is particularly
adept at conveying a sense of abjection
in the skin of its protagonist. The power
of some films in part derives from the
“intradiegetic processes of mimetic
participation which serve to bind viewers
to events unfolding on the screen” (Barker
47). Essentially, in focusing on skin and
subjecting it to pain and horror, viewers are
at once bound to the events of the film – as
we all have skin and can empathize with the
skin of the subject – and repulsed by the
instinctive feelings we are manipulated to
experience. In general, we experience the
skin as both a boundary and container; as
something that allows us sensory contact
with the world around us, but also prevents
the exterior from penetrating and becoming
interior, and vice versa.
Images that represent the skin as infected,
cut, or otherwise disturbed cause the viewer,
48
Joanna Scholefield
through innate familiarity with our own
skin, to be reminded of its vulnerability. It
is arguable that to cause such a response,
the thing with which we try not to come
into contact needn’t have the potential to
physically touch us, just as film is literally
unable to do. It is interesting that levels of
fear fluctuate depending upon the proximity
of the subject matter to the viewer. The
scene in which Nina visits Beth in hospital
after her accident can be used to illustrate
this. Because the shot is an extreme close-up
of Beth’s infected, broken leg, the audience is
pressed against the disturbing image, unable
to escape, fearful of its potential to touch and
infect our skin.
Roman Polanski’s Repulsion (1965) centring
on a woman who is disgusted by all things
corporeal is useful in reflecting upon similar
cinematic techniques of affect in Black Swan.
below  Figure 4: The paintings in
Nina’s mother’s room have taken on a
more sinister quality, and they begin to
stare and shout at Nina before she runs
in to tear them down
Film Matters Spring 2014
It is especially valuable as Aronofsky has
said that Repulsion was in part an inspiration
for his film (Ditzian). Similarly to Repulsion,
familiar objects take on menacing qualities
in Black Swan: Nina’s predecessor Beth uses
a nail file to stab herself in the face; the
paintings in Nina’s mother’s room seem to
shift and stare (Figure 4); mirrors are sites for
potential horror (Figure 5);11 even the skin
itself becomes a threat (Figure 6).
Because Black Swan has been considered
as trash cinema and an obscure mixing of
genres, an approach that considers the feel
of the film can begin to grasp Black Swan’s
more radically horrific meanings, rather
than simply analyzing its visual metaphors.
It is worth quoting an extract from a review
published on the website hitfix.com to get an
idea of the reception of Black Swan:
Aronofsky utilizes some of the same
jump-y scare-cuts as you’d expect from a
slasher movie. But grafting the schlocky
and the exploitative onto the esoteric
and the allegedly high-cultured is part of
Aronofsky’s game. Just when you think
you know what movie “Black Swan” is,
it becomes a different movie entirely.
Aronofsky takes something of a buffet
approach to the movie, picking and
choosing genre-wise, but it’s the weirdest
and most twisted buffet imaginable.
(Fienberg)
below  Figure 5. There are many
scenes in Black Swan where Nina’s
fracturing identity is represented
in reflections which do not match
her actions; reflections that seem to
watch her and are like the manipula-
tive, evil side of her personality
Feature 07
below  Figure 6. Nina lifts Beth’s
bed sheets to reveal a horrid infected
wound that we only see for a fraction
of a second, viscerally shocking us and
also leaving a lasting corporeal memory
The film expresses the “terrifying fragility
of the skin” (Barker 53), and creates
meaning in the skin of the viewer as
we press ourselves – or are sometimes
pushed12 – against the skin of the film,
instinctively fearful of the affect the film’s
skin could have upon our own. The camera
lingers and makes us watch as Nina’s skin
is pierced from both inside and outside,
relenting only to show us close-up reaction
shots of her face – compounding the
scene’s affectiveness – contorted into an
expression of pain, confusion, and horror,
not dissimilar to ours. As both pleasure and
horror arise from the skin’s property as a
boundary, when the boundary is pushed or
broken, a sense of the abject arises. This
is a potentially disturbing quality of skin,
situating “us in an ambivalent place on the
border of self and other, inside and outside,
and proper and improper” (Barker 55).
Kristeva’s remarkable Powers of Horror:
An Essay on Abjection (1982), explores in an
affective and almost poetic manner the
disturbing definitions of the abject, which
hinge upon their ambivalence. Even the
language Kristeva uses is ambiguous. She
is not averse to using polysemy to her
advantage, and the nature of French as a
language is that “words tend to point in a
greater number of different directions” than
English, allowing for a greater number of
nuanced meanings to be derived from them
(Roudiez viii). This is more than reminiscent
of the subjective qualities of film. Images
which are metaphorical or abstracted can
point us in a great number of directions as
to their meaning and affective nature, which
is due to everything from the intent of the
filmmaker all the way to the disposition of
the viewer. Affectiveness is phenomenally,
phenomenologically, and inescapably
subjective.
In the translator’s note to Kristeva’s essay,
Roudiez comments on the style of Kristeva’s
work, which also resonates with Aronofsky’s
direction of Black Swan:
49
Under the Skin: How Filmmakers Affectively Reduce Space Between the Film and the Viewer
As sentences become more metaphorical,
more “literary” if you wish, one is liable to
forget that they still are conceptually very
precise. In other words, meaning emerges
out of both the standard denotation(s) and
the connotations suggested by the material
shape of a given word. And it emerges not
solely because of the reader’s creativity …
but because it was put there in the first
place. (Roudiez vii)
Kristeva is interested in forming an affective
piece of writing, and her use of language
complements the text perfectly. In a similar
way, a film could be affective simply because
of its content, politics, or plot; but to create
a ‘whole’ which grasps multifaceted, ever-
fluctuating horrors and all their subtleties
is what makes that ‘whole’ – or film, more
specifically – so affective. As images become
more metaphorical, a viewer may well
become enthralled by them, and liable to
forget that the film is “conceptually very
precise” (Roudiez viii). These techniques are
not employed cover a weak plot or conceptual
ineptitudes, but often serve to enhance the
film in ways that the viewer’s conscious
thought can almost take for granted, while
their corporeal body is left pondering the
blow it has been dealt. This is a case of
when you can’t put your finger on something
precisely because it is not a tangible entity:
the film is physically intangible while still
being able to metaphorically penetrate our
skin. Within the abject, there looms a
dark revolt of being, directed against
a threat that seems to emanate from
an exorbitant outside or inside, ejected
beyond the scope of the possible, the
It is almost as if the images of the film have become
a kind of Braille for our sense knowledge to recognize
textures by touching them with our sense of sight.
Film Matters Spring 2014 ➜
tolerable, the thinkable. It lies there, quite
close, but it cannot be assimilated. It
beseeches, worries, and fascinates desire,
which, nevertheless, does not let itself be
seduced. (Kristeva 1)
In the crescendo to what Shaviro has called
the “full blown body horror” (“Black Swan”)
of Black Swan, we are at once worried and
fascinated with desire at the “dark revolts of
being” that the film presents to us: almost
intolerable and certainly impossible but we
are nevertheless affected by them (Kristeva
1). These intangible qualities of horror lie
uncomfortably close to the skin of the viewer
yet cannot be assimilated – allowing us a
breath of relief  – but remain torturously,
teasingly close to our skins as “other.” That
which is not of “ourselves” (though perhaps
once was), is not understood (cognitively but
possibly corporeally), or is rejected can be
described as abject. But it is the notion that
the indescribable intangibility between the
skin of the viewer and the skin of the film –
the liminal space or that which is not object –
is where abject truly presents itself.
When searching Black Swan for the abject,
it is manifest in many scenes: when Nina’s
skin pushes out black, spiny feathers (Figure
7); when Beth stabs herself in the face with
a nail file; any scene which features blood –
particularly from an unknown source (e.g.
when Nina is in the bathtub and it drips into
the water from above her – Figure 8). Other
scenes that can be considered as abject are
when Nina’s mother is in the room while
Nina is masturbating; suggestions that Nina
is bulimic; Thomas being perverse in his
teaching methods; Nina’s unhealthy obsession
with perfection; hallucinating the murder of
Lily; and her own suggested death at the end
of the film (Figure 9), to name but a few.
Subconscious horror can be found in the
club scene in which Nina and Lily (Mila
Kunis) have both taken drugs (Figures 10–17).
The scene is lit with predominantly red and
green strobe lighting, and many frames have
been manipulated with CGI, from which the
results are a sense of confusion and unease for
us – particularly as a result of the subliminal
editing – and echo Nina’s state of mind.
Although each of these images are only
on the screen for a fraction of a second,
their subliminal qualities touch our eyes and
skin, and affects us before we have a chance
Feature 07
below  Figure 7. Nina is becoming the
Black Swan. From where she used to
scratch her shoulders as a kind of self-
harm, black feathers pierce from within
below  Figure 8. Nina slips under
the bath water when, penetrating
the silence, blood drips into it from
above. Nina opens her eyes to see
herself for a moment, leaning over
the bathtub with a sinister smile,
when it cuts back to her in the
bath, as she emerges, panic-strick-
en from the water
below  Figure 9. A pivotal moment
in the film as Nina realizes that she
hasn’t stabbed her adversary Lily
with a piece of broken mirror, but
herself. She slowly reaches into the
wound in her stomach and pulls out
the bloodied shard of glass in horror
to cognitively register what we are seeing.
Personally, it was only with the ability to
pause, fast-forward and rewind this scene
that I was even aware that Aronofsky had
filled it with such horrors, yet while watching
it I can recall a sense of unease, though not
fully understanding why. These are just a
limited selection of the many, many shots
Aronofsky bombards us with in this short
scene, but this bombardment provides the
viewer with rich visceral, subliminal tableaux,
forming meaning and eliciting response.13
These images flit across the screen and
simultaneously across our skin. In their
transience, they can do nothing but register
viscerally, through our eyes and over our skin.
Aronofsky plays with our skin, making
us feel secure in certain scenes, and tearing
the rug from under us in others. The visuals
50
Joanna Scholefield
complement the narrative as the most
disturbing moments occur when Nina is
considering her darker role as it infects her
mind and her body, breaking boundaries
to become the Black Swan. When the film
Film Matters Spring 2014
opens with the powerful and beautiful
spectacle of Nina performing a scene from
Swan Lake, along with her we are abruptly
woken from her dream. Fascination and
repulsion are at the heart of this film’s
affectiveness, and when it is all over (Figure
18), we are woken from this spectacular
nightmare, acutely aware of every fiber of
our being.
I believe we should allow ourselves to be
moved by film: it is constituted of so much
more than simply an emotive narrative
or an unflinching depiction of violence in
extreme close-ups. This article has not only
revealed a preference for film’s power to
move and touch us – rather than distancing
ourselves from its tenor and impact – but
has investigated the phenomenological,
philosophical, and theoretical concepts
behind the power of film. Films may arrest
our attention, but Black Swan creates a kind
of agitation and connection with the film.
We seek to be touched to subconsciously feel
and learn more.
Mulvey makes a strong case for the
“fundamental sadism of the voyeuristic
position” of film viewing, and calls for
the “destruction of cinematic pleasure”;
an “aesthetics of distance”; and a sort
of passionate detachment (quoted in
Shaviro, The Cinematic Body 12–13). While
her arguments are purposefully polemical
to illustrate problems of representation
in mainstream cinema, it’s as if this
“aesthetics of distance” is the only valid way
to approach films (Shaviro, The Cinematic
Body 12). Supposedly, film’s power is so
alluringly seductive that we must be aware
of all its tricks to snare our bodies and warp
our minds, and that we should constantly
consider deeper meanings, political stances,
and ethical nature. In addition, there seems
to be a general trend suggesting “moral
high ground can only be [attained] through
distancing devices” (Johannes). There’s a fear
of “giving way to the insidious blandishments
of visual fascination” in film theory, and to
avoid this horrid trap, a theoretical edifice
a b ov e   Figure 10. A still of Von Roth-
bart (club scene)
Feature 07
must be constructed as a defence against its
threatening pleasures (Shaviro, The Cinematic
Body 13).
Cinema has the uncanny ability to convey
phenomena that appear real, which in turn
have the ability to move and touch us. This
power marks the confusion and discomfort
a b ov e   Figure 11. Hands filling the
frame (club scene)
a b ov e   Figure 12. Replicated figures
of Nina (club scene)
a b ov e   Figure 13. Nina and Lily (club
scene)
a b ov e   Figure 14: Nina is split (club
scene)
51
Under the Skin: How Filmmakers Affectively Reduce Space Between the Film and the Viewer
scholars have not only in confronting the
sensual experience of cinema but also in
confronting a lack of ability to explain its
somatism as anything more than mere
physiological reflex, or to admit its meaning as
anything more than metaphorical description.
Some of the devaluation of discussing the
Film Matters Spring 2014 ➜
aesthetics of cinema may come from the sense
of voyeurism inherent in cinema, but Black
Swan’s affectiveness hinges on a necessary
interaction with the film. Affect derives not
from the gaze, but from involvement through
physiological identification, mimesis, and
palpable contact between the skin of the film
and the skin of the viewer.
Those who attempt to theorize the kinds
of feelings experienced when watching
film encounter difficulty in simply applying
language to a realm of phenomena for which,
generally speaking, there are few words.
Paradoxically, proponents of affect theory
must analytically deconstruct films in order
to explain immediate phenomenological
and corporeal processes and responses that
are too quick or minute for the intellect
or consciousness to comprehend, or even
be aware of without such retrospective
analysis. Our entire vocabulary has derived
from theories of signification that are still
wedded to structure. In discussing affect the
employment of language is necessary, but
this does not mean that we cannot strive
for a theory that appreciates the value of
filmmakers’ abilities to make us acutely
aware of the body and its interactions with
cinema, and of processes that operate on
multiple levels of sensation beyond the reach
of many philosophical and critical modes
of standard rhetorical and semiotic models.
The intellect serves to distance us from
reality and from experience: from intuition.
We intuit through our skin, our bodies: we
are corporeal material beings. Distance
comes from cognition and abstraction,
which is undoubtedly useful in exploring and
understanding things – scrutinizing as I have
here – on another level to that of immediate
perception. However, when it comes to
experiencing reality, we do not think first and
feel second. This is why affect is so applicable
to film criticism. The way films make us feel,
we can now understand, is far more than
just a physiological identification or mimetic
process. The film is felt on the skin, in the
skin, and under the skin.
/end/
Notes
1. It is interesting to consider the root of the
definition of the word seduction: attraction or
allure, or to lead aside. This idea of cinema
leading aside ties in with the idea that it can
be devious and manipulative, and we should
therefore question its motives. There can
also be a seduction into unpleasant realms
of repulsion and disgust, but we can still be
seduced by the power of the images.
Feature 07
below  Figure 15. Black Swan 4. Within this is a sense of knowing what objects
make-up (club scene)
below Figure 16. Abstraction of
body/movement (club scene)
below  Figure 17. Still filled with
Nina’s image (club scene)
below  Figure 18. Nina’s final dance
as the Black Swan and her complete
(imagined) metamorphosis into the
character
2. There are many philosophers who argue that
perception is continually changing due to all
experience prior to the present moment of
perception. With film, as a temporal object which
is technically the same no matter how many times
it is replayed, this change in our perception is most
apparent as our viewing of it changes depending
on any number of variables (see Bernard Stiegler’s
52
Joanna Scholefield
feel like by simply looking at them, which is as
a result of past experience of touching similar
objects. See Laura Marks (63–64).
5. This is an example of the fundamental
subjectivity of film viewing. See Marks (xi–xii).
6. This introduces the idea of the touch of the
camera, which I will expand upon later.
7. See p. 145 of Film Genre Reader III (Williams).
8. Representations of the female body are what
Williams is most concerned with. See pp.
144–57 of Film Genres Reader III.
9. The scenes in which Nina’s fingers and toes
(particularly cuticles and nails) begin to split, tear,
peel, and bleed are reminiscent of a number
of horror films in which characters are in their
early stages of physical transformation. For
example, Seth Brundle (Jeff Goldblum) in David
Cronenberg’s The Fly (1986) peels of his nails
as his skin begins to change, precluding his full
body mutation into a human fly. Also, in District
9 (Blomkamp, 2009), after coming into contact
with an alien substance, Wikus Van De Merwe’s
(Sharlto Copley) fingernails can be peeled off.
What makes this kind of horror so affective is that
it is at our fingertips. In addition, Julia Kristeva’s
assertion that leprosy is a form of abjection
contributes to the reason behind the horror of
such bodily affectations (see Kristeva 101).
10. Examples, see Norman K. Denzin, The
Cinematic Society: The Voyeur’s Gaze (Thousand
Oaks, CA: Sage, 1995), Clifford T. Manlove,
Visual “Drive” and Cinematic Narrative: Reading
Gaze Theory in Lacan, Hitchcock, and Mulvey
(Cinema Journal 46.3 [2007]: 83-108), and Todd
McGowan, The Real Gaze: Film Theory After
Lacan (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2008).
11. The use of mirrors in Black Swan can be seen
to represent the fracturing/splitting of Nina’s
identity: doppelgängers and reflections which
differ from Nina’s actual movements. In addition,
the featuring of mirrors in horror films is almost
commonplace, so viewers have been conditioned
through past experience to not trust or be fearful
of what we might see in them. (See Lacan’s writing
on “The Mirror Stage” in Contemporary Critical
Theory [Orlando: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich,
1989], 502-509, and also Philip Tallon’s “Through
a Mirror, Darkly” in The Philosophy of Horror
[Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 2010], 33–41.)
12. In the use of extreme close-ups.
13. Shaviro discusses this notion of bombarding the
viewer with audiovisuals. In relation to Gamer
(Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor, 2009),
Technics and Time, 3: Cinematic Time and the Question of another film that’s been critically derided by some,
Malaise [Palo Alto, CA: Stanford UP, 2011], 13–16). Shaviro has observed that it “offers us a continual
See also: Bergson and “interpenetration” (324–38). cinematic barrage, with no respite” (Shaviro
3. By using the term immediacy, I am referencing “Gamer”). He goes further to say that “the frequent
the fact that film is immersive, “which means that cuts and jolting shifts of angle have less to do with
it is a medium whose purpose is to disappear” in orienting us towards action in space, than with
the sense that it must – to be affective – be similar setting off autonomic responses in the viewer …
to reality (Bolter and Grusin 21). the shots, and the way they are edited, have only
Film Matters Spring 2014
Feature 07 Under the Skin: How Filmmakers Affectively Reduce Space Between the Film and the Viewer

to do with their immediate visceral affect on the \

audience moment to moment.” Such films are,
“in their own cheerfully perverse way, in touch
with the urgencies of the moment, and with the
social Real, in a way that contemplative cinema
and modest, humanist cinema are not” (“Gamer”).
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Hutchinson & Co. Publishers Ltd, 1961. Print.
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Low, Douglas. Merleau-Ponty’s Last Vision: A
Proposal for the Completion of the Visible and the
Invisible. Illinois: Northwestern University
Press, 2000. Print.

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Anon. “A Series of Holes Tied Together with \
String: Black Swan Review.” LoveFilm.com. 2011. Marks, Laura U. The Skin of the Film: Author Biography
Web. 9 April 2012. <http://www.lovefilm.com/ Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses. Joanna Scholefield is a First Class
film/Black--Swan/153685/review/958264>. Durham: Duke University Press, 2000. Print. Honors graduate in Film Studies.
\ \ Her interests in both film and art are
Barker, Jennifer M. The Tactile Eye: Touch Massumi, Brian. Movement, Affect, Sensation: grounded in her philosophical exploration
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and the Cinematic Experience. Berkeley, CA: Parables for the Virtual. Durham: Duke She is presently studying in preparation
University of California Press, 2009. Print. University Press, 2002. Print. for a Master’s degree at the London
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Bergson, Henri. Creative Evolution. Trans. Arthur Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Art.
Mitchell. London: Greenwood, 1944. Print. Perception. Trans. Forrest Williams. London:
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Bolter, David, and Richard Grusin. \
Remediation: Understanding New Media. ———. The World of Perception. Trans. Oliver
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010. Print. Davis. London: Routledge, 2004. Print.
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Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 1: The Movement ———. “The Sensible World and The World
Image. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara of Expression.” Themes from the Lectures at
Habberjam. London: Continuum, 2005. Print. the College de France 1952–1960. Trans. John
\ O’Neill. Evanston: Northwestern University

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———. Cinema 2: The Time Image. Trans. Press, 1970. 31-37. Print.
Robert Galeta and Hugh Tomlinson. \ Mentor Biography
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\ Narrative Cinema.” Issues in Feminist Film the University of the West of England,
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news/articles/1646763/black-swan-director- Julia Kristeva, Powers Of Horror: An Essay On and a member of the Editorial Board for
darren-aronofsky-on-ballet-natalie-portman- Abjection. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Movie: A Journal of Film Criticism.
lesbian-kisses.jhtml>. Columbia University Press, 1982. vii–x. Print.
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Fienberg, Daniel. “Movie review: Black Swan.” Shaviro, Steven. “Black Swan.” The Pinocchio
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53 Film Matters Spring 2014 ➜

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