The Matter of Absence: Female Disembodiment and Digital Cinema

Abstract

This dissertation finds the female body present even where it appears to be absent. It tracks the gesture prevalent in contemporary science fiction cinema to attenuate the female body through digitisation, and responds by turning to the materiality of the film itself. In so doing, the dissertation extends phenomenological film theory at a feminist slant, posing that the film’s body may support, or even be particularly suited to, female expression. It asks how the film text can reflect, inflect and invoke the female body that it depicts.

The dissertation’s proposed synergy between depicted and filmic bodies is innate insofar as the figures at hand share their films’ make-up. Since the millennium, the digital format has become increasingly commonplace, and the cinema subject to the attendant charge that it, too, has lost its body. I draw out this similarity between the depicted female body and the film’s digital body to illustrate how we might grasp the presence of one through the other, thereby rescuing both from assumptions of absence. Through a focus on the features of hybridity, hapticity, error and diffusion, this dissertation recovers the digital’s material residue for ends that are jointly feminist and cinephilic.