Gaston Bachelard distinguishes the radical novelty and newness of the imagination from pre-existing sensory impressions. In this article, I explore Bachelard's connections between time, the imagined image and poetic form, and I consider their implications for the cinema. Concentrating my analysis on Ildikó Enyedi's Testről és lélekről/ On Body and Soul — a film that alternates between doubled worlds, depictions of human and animal life — I draw out the temporality and the diversity of Bachelard's imagined images. Bringing Bachelard's instant, (...) vertical time and the crystalline to bear on Enyedi's film, I argue that, under the pretext of sleep, rest and dreaming, On Body and Soul engages the temporality and attentiveness of the Bachelardian imagination, together with its poetic effects. (shrink)

Introduction. Flesh and its reversibility ; Defining the baroque ; 'Good looking' ; A cinema of baroque flesh -- 1. Flesh, cinema and the baroque : the aesthetics of reversibility. Baroque vision and painting the flesh ; Baroque flesh ; Analogous embodiments : the film's body ; Baroque vision and cinema ; Summation : face to face-feeling baroque deixis -- 2. Knots of sensation : co-extensive space and a cinema of the passions. Synaesthesia, phenomenology, and the senses ; Cinesthesia and (...) the Bel composto ; A passionate baroque : emotion, excess, and co-extensive space ; Assault and absorption : cruel baroque ; Summation : beside oneself -- 3. Baroque skin/semiotics. Chiasm : language and experience ; Baroque poetic language and the seventeenth-century infinite ; Baroque luxury ; Skin-deep : baroque texturology ; Tickles : baroque wit ; Summation : cine-mimesis -- 4. One hand films the other : baroque haptics. Touching-touched ; Haptic visuality and the baroque ; Baroque haptics and cinema ; Analogical assemblages : Baroque databases ; Summation: TEXXTURE -- Conclusion : or the baroque 'Beauty of the act'. (shrink)

This article draws on the interrelated concepts of reverie and repose in Gaston Bachelard's philosophy to approach Claire Denis' poetic foregrounding of objects in 35 Shots of Rum (35 Rhums, 2008). Connecting Bachelard's work on time to his later studies of the imagination, I demonstrate how the poetic time of reverie and repose are essential to Bachelard's thinking. Focusing on three especially charged objects (trains, rice cookers and lanterns), I argue for reverie and repose as being embedded into the rhythmic (...) structure, affective organisation and form of Denis' film. Contextualising Bachelard's later thinking in relation to Eugène Minkowski, I maintain that Denis' objects reverberate (both formally and sensuously). In 35 Shots of Rum, Denis' poetic objects and her evocation of different in-between states parallels Bachelard's own materialist thinking on the imagination, reverie and repose. (shrink)