Intimacy in Cinema: Critical Essays on English Language Films

Though intimacy has been a wide concern in the humanities, it has received little critical attention in film studies. I Feel Different Inside: Essays on Intimacy in English-Speaking Cinema thus proposes to investigate both the potential intimacy of cinema as a medium and the possibility of a cinema of intimacy where it is least expected. As a notion that relies on binaries such as inside and outside, surface and depth, public and private, and self and other, intimacy, because it implies sharing, is especially apt to call into question the borders between these binaries, and, accordingly, the border which separates mainstream cinema and independent, underground or auteur cinema. Following on Thomas Elsaesser’s theoretical interrogation of the relationship between the intimacy of cinema and the cinema of intimacy, the essays, organized mainly according to chronology, explore intimacy in silent and classical Hollywood cinema, underground, documentary and animation films, and finally contemporary Hollywood, British, Canadian and Australian cinema, from a variety of approaches that are grounded in neo-formalism and narratology, phenomenology, psychoanalysis and cognitive psychology, cultural, gender, reception and film genre studies.