Abstract
This paper brings Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological approach to Sasha
Waltz’s dance film S, which focuses on the relation between sexuality and
language. Maintaining that movement in cinema takes place in the viewers
and not the film, the paper considers how the visual can be deepened to
include the ways we move and are moved. Saussure’s insights into language
are brought to the sensible, which is here understood in terms of divergences
from norms. Though film would seem to privilege vision, viewing this film
helps to elucidate Merleau-Ponty’s claim that a film succeeds when it engages
the viewer’s embodied understanding, and shifts the norms of the corporeal
schema.