Magical History Tour: Bodies in Cinema

On Screen Bodies and Spectator Perception

Since the beginnings of cinematography, the fascination with moving images is in part due to the bodily depiction of acting persons on the screen. It is not by chance that the first movie recordings show good-humored workers, men doing gymnastics or fresh kids. Yet in the audience's enthusiasm when viewing these images, the direct communication between the film and one's own (spectator) body was already inscribed. Nothing has changed until this day regarding the potential of film to affect the spectator's body. Moreover, cinematic depiction and staging, the illusion and (de)construction of the body are still elementary aesthetic methods of cinema. The films we have selected this month – from throughout the history of film – are examples of the different forms of depicting the body and corporeality, body constructions and stagings. The supporting films are selected either in a complementary or contrapuntal way. The forms of embodied (spectator) experience resulting from the shown films and the ways in which they are positioned in the overall complex of filmic experience, are what viewers can retrace anew with their own bodies (almost) every evening.