Call For Papers:

Touch Screen. Imaginaries of Hapticity in Audiovisual Media
Comparative Cinema Nº 26 (Summer 2026)
https://raco.cat/index.php/Comparativecinema/announcement/view/240

Deadline for submissions: January 30, 2026

In the preface of The Address of the Eye (1992), Vivian Sobchack demands an opening towards phenomenology, a need to transcend the psychoanalytic and Marxist perspectives that had dominated film theory until then, and that had “obscured the dynamic, synoptic, and lived-body situation of both the spectator and the film” (1992, xvi). Through the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Sobchack led a cinematographic way of thinking focused on affect—and in consonance with the “affective turn” that has been bolstered by the Humanities since the 1990s—, in which the experience of looking, hearing and feeling a film gained protagonism. In her denouncement of “the neglect of the body and embodied perception in film theory” and her claim to understand the skin as a “field of rich semantic references” (Elsaesser and Hagener 2015, 111), Sobchack challenged the “ocularcentrism” and the disembodiment of theory, which positioned thinkers in the role of mere brains and eyes in a vat.

A decade after this book, Sobchack herself elaborated on her reflections in Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture (2004), in which the essay “What my fingers knew: The Cinesthetic Subject, or Vision in the Flesh” stood out both as a concretization of her most significant contributions and as an illustrious example of phenomenological thinking in action. Through a handful of images from The Piano (Jane Campion, 1993)—in particular, its beginning, through Ada’s fingers, and the moment where Baines touches her skin through a hole in her stocking—, the author works with images that touch the audience’s bodies in an affective way, or that make that body feel synesthetically, instead of merely adding to the mise-en-scène, characterization or stimmung of a film.

Following after Sobchack, Laura U. Marks developed The Skin of Film (2000) and Touch (2002), books that explore what the author termed “haptic visuality”—in contrast to “optic visuality”—, “a visuality that functions like the sense of touch”, in which images “engage the viewer tactilely and… define a kind of knowledge based in touch” (2000, 22). The audiovisual channels, image and sound, are capable of awakening the spectrum of the human sensorium even if they cannot interpellate it directly, resorting to affects moved by evocation. Marks, in her analysis of intercultural film, through works such as Measures of Distance (Mona Hatoum, 1988) or History and Memory: For Akiko and Takashige (Rea Tajiri, 1991), condenses hapticity in a series of mostly visual resources such as the acts of smelling, eating, touching, close textural shots, whether of skin or objects, rack focus, lack of sharpness, darkened images and the materiality of celluloid. From Marks’ explorations, Jennifer M. Barker proposes, in The Tactile Eye: Touch and the Cinematic Experience, a “cinematic tactility” comprised of the haptic, now associated with skin (of living beings or of the film); kinesthetics, in relation to bodies that inhabit cinematographic spaces and their movements; and the visceral, which connects the rhythms of the body, its pulsations and tensions. Marks and Barker’s works inaugurated a century dominated by the mutations of the haptic, which have contaminated contemporary audiovisual practice and analysis, affecting study fields as varied as feminism, queer theory, ecocriticism, and new media, among others.

In order to continue contributing to this research line and its multiple intersections, Comparative Cinema invites authors to submit articles that analyze and reflect on hapticity in film and television. The articles, which must have a comparative methodology and an extension between 5.000 and 7.000 words —including footnotes but not references— can tackle, but are not limited to:

• THE AFFECTIVE TURN: thinkers such as Sara Ahmed and Brian Massumi understand affects as intensive forces that dismantle the hegemony of reason in the construction of subjectivity, opposing a discursive logic in which language crushes any possibility of circulation of perception. Films such as Here (2023), by Bas Devos, Gunda (2020), by Viktor Kossakovsky, or Wuthering Heights (2011), by Andrea Arnold, propose different versions of a gaze impregnated with a fusion of the affective and the haptic.
• THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF PERCEPTION AND MEMORY: Filmmakers such as Naomi Kawase (Ni Tsutsumarete [1992], Katatsumori [1994], Tarachime [2006]), Chantal Akerman (No Home Movie [2016]), or Agnès Varda (Les glaneurs et la glaneuse [2001]) have constructed their documentary discourse on the basis of haptic visuality, which conjoins an embodied manifestation of perception with the construction of memory. The eyes can touch; the skin of a film “offers a metaphor to emphasize the way film signifies through its materiality, through a contact between perceiver and object represented” (Marks 2000, xi).
• THE CINEMA OF THE BODY: Sobchack demonstrates that “the film experience is meaningful not to the side of our bodies but because of our bodies” (Sobchack 2004, 60). Haptic visuality supposes, then, a return to the body as a repository of visual thinking: a thinking “incarnated” in the intimate register of bodies (Beau Travail [1999], L’intrus [2002], High Life [2018], by Claire Denis; Crimes of the future [2022], by David Cronenberg), and also attentive to the skin of the image, understanding film as a body that beats and vibrates (La vie nouvelle [2002], White Epilepsy [2012] and Malgré la nuit [2015], by Phillippe Grandrieux) or a body that can be traversed as a cavern, a world to discover (De Humanis Corporis Fabrica [2022], by Verena Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor).
• THE CINEMATOGRAPHIC EVOCATION OF THE SENSES BEYOND THE TACTILE: In The Skin of Film (2000), Marks transcends the visual representation of sensorial acts (eating, smelling, touching) and examines, as does the work of Terrence Malick or Lynne Ramsay, the possibility of mobilizing hapticity through audiovisual resources such as shifts in focus, or blurring or darkening the image, among others. Furthermore, Marks proposes the idea of a “haptic identification”, a form of suture between the audience and the characters that is moved by the proximity and familiarity with which both experience the world.
• INTERSECTIONS BETWEEN HAPTIC CINEMA AND GENDER TECHNOLOGIES: If, as Teresa de Lauretis states, gender is a social construction produced by cultural technologies, including film, hapticity then produces gender subjectivities that transcend heteropatriarchal control. There is no intention of dominating the actor’s body through mise-en-scène but to show its vulnerability, its frailty (such as in the films by Barbara Hammer and Carolee Schneemann), its instability, and, of course, its capacity to rebel (Raw [2016] and Titane [2021], by Julia Ducournau).
• INTERSECTIONS BETWEEN HAPTIC CINEMA, QUEER THEORY, AND THE FEMINIST CRITIQUE OF AN OCULARCENTRIC CINEMA: Breaking with the hegemony of the visual implies a mise-en-scène of difference. One that can construct alternative spaces of meaning through Otherness (the sexual-Other, the racial-Other, the animal-Other…). This enables a displacement of the anthropocentric gaze towards a more holistic dimension of perception. Projects such as Leviathan (2012), by Paravel and Castaing-Taylor, or the ecocinema of Isabelle Carbonell contribute to this new gaze.
• EXPERIMENTAL CINEMA FOCUSED ON THE SENSORY: In looking for the physical dimension of our surroundings, some manifestations of experimental cinema have proposed ways of thinking and presenting nature, bodies, and matter with attention to the minuscule and anodyne, while also attempting to develop a cinema of skin and organs. From the films by Bill Morrison to the cinema of Stan Brakhage, this focus on materiality has even touched the celluloid as a medium with a malleable physical existence, creating, thus, a cinema that can see and touch itself.
• HAPTICITY AND SOUND STUDIES: If the optical has ceased to define the full scope of the perceptual, then the auditory, which is omnidirectional, has taken over. The ear sees, makes a synesthetic experience possible, and its very prominence proposes a hermeneutic model that cancels empirical ocular verification as a source of cognitive data to privilege “factors such as the sense of balance or equilibrium, organized not around the frame, but around duration, location, interval and inter-action” (Elsaesser and Hegener, 2015, 10), (Memoria [2021], by Apichatpong Weerasethakul; Tres [2021], by Juanjo Giménez; Sorda [2025], by Eva Libertad).
• SCREEN CULTURES AND HAPTICITY (VIRTUAL REALITY, 3D): Digital technology has turned our bodies into extensible prostheses of cameras. It’s difficult to say where the body begins and where the mobile phone ends. On the one hand, consuming images now means touching them, caressing them, scrolling through them; on the other, virtual and augmented reality techniques, such as 360-degree panoramas, are intended to create immersive sensory experiences.

For writing, Comparative Cinema recommends following a structure that includes: an introduction to the topic, a theoretical framework, a hypothesis and specific objectives, conclusions, and a list of bibliographical references. Potential contributors are also asked to adhere to the comparative methodology promoted by the journal and explained in our “About” section.

Full articles must be sent following the guidelines of the journal and through our RACO platform: https://raco.cat/index.php/Comparativecinema. Sending preliminary proposals to the editors (comparativecinema@upf.edu) is not mandatory, but it is advisable.

Comparative Cinema accepts articles in English, Spanish, and Catalan.

IMPORTANT DATES

Submission of full text: January 30, 2026
Acceptance or rejection notifications: February 13, 2026
Peer-review process: February-March 2026
Submission of the final revised version of the text: March-April 2026
Issue publication: Summer 2026

Contact: comparativecinema@upf.edu
https://raco.cat/index.php/Comparativecinema

RECOMMENDED BIBLIOGRAPHY

• Barker, Jennifer M. 2009. The Tactile Eye: Touch and the Cinematic Experience. University of California Press.
• Beugnet, Martine. 2007. Cinema and Sensation: French Film and the Art of Transgression. Edinburgh University Press.
• Bruno, Giuliana. 2002. Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture, and Film. Verso.
• Cancela, Nuria and Míriam Sánchez Manzano. 2020. “La visualidad háptica en las directoras españolas de la cuarta generación: la reflexión táctil y aural sobre el lenguaje”. Tecmerin. Revista de Ensayos Audiovisuales 6 (3). https://tecmerin.uc3m.es/project/a-visualidad-haptica-en-las-directoras-espanolas-de-la-cuarta-generacion-la-reflexion-tactil-y-aural-sobre-el-lenguaje/
• Del Rio, Elena. 2008. Deleuze and the Cinema of Performance: Powers of Affection. Edinburgh University Press.
• Elsaesser, Thomas and Malte Hegener. 2015. Film Theory. An Introduction Through the Senses. Routledge.
• Grant, Catherine. 2011. “Touching the Film Object? Notes on the ‘Haptic’ in Videographical Film Studies.” Filmanalytical.blogspot.com, August 29. http://ilmanalytical.blogspot.com/2011/08/touching-film-object-notes-on-haptic-in.html
• Guillamón-Carrasco, Silvia. 2020. “Haptic Visuality and Film Narration. Mapping New Women’s Cinema in Spain”. Communication & Society 33 (3): 137-147. https://doi.org/10.15581/003.33.3
• Howes, David, ed. 2005. Empire of the Senses: The Sensual Culture Reader. Berg.
• Lant, Antonia. 1995. “Haptic Cinema”. October 74: 45-73. The MIT Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/778820
• Marks, Laura U. 1998. “Video Haptics and Erotics”. Screen 39 (4): 331–348. https://doi.org/10.1093/screen/39.4.331
• Marks, Laura U. 2000. The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses. Duke University Press.
• Marks, Laura U. 2002. Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media. University of Minnesota Press.
• Marks, Laura U. 2004. “Haptic Visuality: Touching with the Eyes”. Framework: The Finnish Art Review 2. Framework.
• Marks, Laura U. 2010. Enfoldment and Infinity: An Islamic Genealogy of New Media Art. MIT Press.
• Marks, Laura U. 2015. Hanan al-Cinema: Affections for the Moving Image. MIT Press.
• Marks, Laura U. 2024. The Fold: From Your Body to the Cosmos. Duke University Press.
• Moreno Pellejero, Ariadna. 2024. “Silencios hápticos, ecos de la salmodia y retratos sonoros. Exploraciones del sonido en el cine de Chantal Akerman”. Comparative Cinema XII (22): 52-72. https://doi.org/10.31009/cc.2024.v12.i22.04
• Morrisey, Priska, and Emmanuel Siety. 2017. Filmer la peau. Presses Universitaires des Rennes.
• Pethő, Ágnes, ed. 2015. The Cinema of Sensations. Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
• Ross, Miriam. 2015. 3D Cinema. Optical Illusions and Tactile Experiences. Palgrave Macmillan.
• Saether, Susanne A. 2020. Touch/Space: The Haptic in 21^st Century Video Art. In Screen Space Reconfigured, edited by Susanne A. Saether and Synne T. Bull, 201-230. Amsterdam University Press.  https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv12pnt9c.12
• Sobchack, Vivian. 1992. The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience. Princeton University Press.
• Sobchack, Vivian. 2004. Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture. University of California Press.
• Vázquez Rodríguez, Lucía Gloria. 2022. “Miradas torcidas: una aproximación queer al cine desde el análisis háptico y la fenomenología”. Communication & Methods – Comunicación y Métodos 4 (2): 26-39. https://doi.org/10.35951/v4i2.163

ABOUT THE JOURNAL

Comparative Cinema (ISSN 2604-9821) is an open-access publication by Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Barcelona, Spain) that analyzes film from a comparative perspective. The journal follows a double blind peer review process and does not charge any submission or processing fees to its authors.