Touches: the Invisible and Unobserved in the Film's Intra-frame Space

Abstract

The article examines a specific case of the interaction between montage and an actor’s particular gesture: a touch. The relevance of the topic is based on the fact that this gesture plays an important role in the dramatic structure of a scene, especially if besides depicting the subtleties of the characters’ inner states, the film construct entails some multilayer meanings and inter-textual links.
Unlike the character’s tactile locating an object, the touch does not only transmit their feelings and inner state, but also assumes the object’s response to the touch. Therefore, instead of being a mere gesture, the touch is the culminating point of a process that comprises the “pre-touch” and “posttouch” periods in the evolution of the character’s emotional experience.
The analysis of different types and meanings of the touch is exemplified by a number of films by Michelangelo Antonioni, Ingmar Bergman, Jane Campion, Krzysztof Zanussi and Pavel Slavin. Special emphasis is laid on the diversity of touches in Bergman’s films. The author argues that the obviousness of this gesture never exhausts its meaning: it always contains an additional inconspicuous message.
Jane Campion’s “The Piano” demonstrates that the character’s touches may become the subject of an academic discourse in terms of modern phenomenological aesthetics.
The analysis of Zanussi’s feature “The Silent Touch” and Pavel Slavin’s documentary “The Condo Mirror: Seeing with Hands” reveals the capability of the characters’ touches to express the inherent moral and spiritual implications of the plot.
To vindicate the novelty of the research, the article introduces a number of terms that help codify the concepts referring to the touch in a motion picture: “touch-desire,” “touch-mercy,” “touch-hate,” “touch-acting,” “touchpenetration.”