Saige Walton

Over the past decade, film realism has often been explored through the experiential realism of the body and the ontology of the cinematographic body. Following the film‐phenomenological work of scholars such as Vivian Sobchack and Jennifer Barker and the Deleuzian‐inflected scholarship such as that of Laura U. Marks, much of the affective or sensuous turn of film studies has also modeled itself on or after the literal sense of touch. As a result, the question of film realism has been framed through proximity, sensation and mutual contact.

In seeking to open up the varying aesthetic and sensuous experiences of cinema, this paper will argue for film realism as a matter of film rhythm. Exploring film realism via rhythm has the potential to speak to a much wider range of cinematographic embodiments than the current privileging of bodies‐in‐touch allows. Returning to key theorists and philosophers of rhythm (Germaine Dulac, Jean Epstein, Maya Deren, Henri Lefebvre and Gilles Deleuze), this paper will detail the cinematographic body as vitalist and inherently rhythmic. However, film realism as rhythm is not necessarily equivalent to closeness, harmony and reciprocity. Concentrating on »Stranger by the Lake« (Alain Guiraudie 2013), I consider how the rhythmic realism of this film results in feelings of anxiety and discordance. Film and viewer cannot be understood as two bodies in touch here. Despite its focus on gay male cruising and its scenes of explicit sex, Guiraudie’s film is premised on rhythmically uneasy, unavailable or at‐odds encounters between bodies.

Saige Walton is Lecturer in Screen Studies at the University of South Australia and a member of the Hawke Research Institute. Her research focuses on the aesthetic, embodied and philosophical study of film and media with particular emphasis on American and European cinemas, art and inter‐mediality. She has published in journals such as »NECSUS: European Journal of Media Studies«, »Culture«, »Theory and Critique«, »Australian Journal of French Studies«, »Screening the Past«, »Screen and Senses of Cinema«. Her first scholarly monograph ‐ »Baroque Flesh: Film, Phenomenology and the Art of Entanglement« – is forthcoming from the Film and Media Series of Amsterdam University Press in Fall 2016. She is a former Assistant Curator of Exhibitions with the Australian Centre for the Moving Image.