Eliza Steinbock
Introduction: Cinematic/Trans*/Bodies Now (and Then, and to Come)
– Somatechnics
Journal special issue 2018

About

Cinematic bodies. Cinema captures bodies, their sounds and their appearances, and transmutes them to ones and zeroes, to emulsion, to magnetized tape. It cuts them up and pastes them together, and presents them, on screens and speakers large and small, to other bodies – bodies that stand, sit, walk, or lie, alone and in crowds, in private and in public, bodies that gaze, that look away, that cringe, that laugh, desire, imagine, dream. Where does one body stop and another end? How do these various bodies touch each other, constitute each other? Cinema shows bodies and solicits bodies, it buys and sells bodies, it has a body of its own, or many bodies, or does it?