Saige Walton
I am a Senior Lecturer in Screen Studies at the University of South Australia, where I also help lead the Creative People, Products and Places (CP3) research centre. My research is based in American, European and World Cinema contexts. I am particularly interested in the relationship between screen aesthetics and the body, drawing upon phenomenological philosophy, art history, media archaeology and other film-philosophical frameworks to help make 'sense' of art and film. I also research and teach in film genres, experimental film/media, horror and intermediality.
My first scholarly monograph - Cinema's Baroque Flesh: Film, Phenomenology and the Art of Entanglement - was published by Amsterdam University Press (2016). In this book, I draw on the philosophy of Maurice Merleau-Ponty to argue for its parallels with baroque form and thought and to develop a sensuous account of the historic and cinematic baroque. My current book project explores the embodied and ethical appeals of a contemporary cinema of poetry.
Endorsements for CINEMA'S BAROQUE FLESH: "Walton speaks to a splendid array of theoretical and practical objects, producing a radical reading of cinema in, of and as baroque embodiment. The analyses of individual films are generative devices for testing and contesting phenomenology and cultural history, producing startling readings of films and intriguing avenues for understanding what occurs when we watch them" - Sean Cubitt, Professor of Film and Television at Goldsmiths, University of London
“Cinema enables us to look back, in a productive anachronism, to the radical way baroque thought and aesthetics refused to consider the mind on its own. Through detailed analyses, Saige Walton discovers Merleau-Ponty as a baroque thinker. But to make that discovery, cinema’s fundamental baroqueness need(s) uncovering as well. Walton stages a sparkling encounter between three moments, aesthetics, and modes of looking.” - Mieke Bal, Professor of theory of literature and founding director of the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis
“In the tradition of scholarship devoted to cinema as embodied and sensorial experience, Saige Walton’s book distinguishes itself as a truly original and passionate work. In a bold move, Walton’s exploration of the baroque finds inspiration in a felicitous connection with Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of flesh. Cinema’s Baroque Flesh is essential reading for all film students and scholars seeking to feel the thoughtful and sensuous entanglements of cinema.” - Elena del Río, Professor of film studies, University of Alberta, and author of The Grace of Destruction: A Vital Ethology of Extreme Cinemas
Address: UniSA Creative - Magill campus
University of South Australia
My first scholarly monograph - Cinema's Baroque Flesh: Film, Phenomenology and the Art of Entanglement - was published by Amsterdam University Press (2016). In this book, I draw on the philosophy of Maurice Merleau-Ponty to argue for its parallels with baroque form and thought and to develop a sensuous account of the historic and cinematic baroque. My current book project explores the embodied and ethical appeals of a contemporary cinema of poetry.
Endorsements for CINEMA'S BAROQUE FLESH: "Walton speaks to a splendid array of theoretical and practical objects, producing a radical reading of cinema in, of and as baroque embodiment. The analyses of individual films are generative devices for testing and contesting phenomenology and cultural history, producing startling readings of films and intriguing avenues for understanding what occurs when we watch them" - Sean Cubitt, Professor of Film and Television at Goldsmiths, University of London
“Cinema enables us to look back, in a productive anachronism, to the radical way baroque thought and aesthetics refused to consider the mind on its own. Through detailed analyses, Saige Walton discovers Merleau-Ponty as a baroque thinker. But to make that discovery, cinema’s fundamental baroqueness need(s) uncovering as well. Walton stages a sparkling encounter between three moments, aesthetics, and modes of looking.” - Mieke Bal, Professor of theory of literature and founding director of the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis
“In the tradition of scholarship devoted to cinema as embodied and sensorial experience, Saige Walton’s book distinguishes itself as a truly original and passionate work. In a bold move, Walton’s exploration of the baroque finds inspiration in a felicitous connection with Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of flesh. Cinema’s Baroque Flesh is essential reading for all film students and scholars seeking to feel the thoughtful and sensuous entanglements of cinema.” - Elena del Río, Professor of film studies, University of Alberta, and author of The Grace of Destruction: A Vital Ethology of Extreme Cinemas
Address: UniSA Creative - Magill campus
University of South Australia
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Books by Saige Walton
Walton pursues previously unexplored connections between film, the baroque, and the body, opening up new avenues of embodied film theory that can make room for structure, signification, and thought, as well as the aesthetics of sensation.
In Cinema’s Baroque Flesh, Saige Walton draws on the philosophy of Maurice Merleau-Ponty to argue for a distinct aesthetic category of film and a unique cinema of the senses: baroque cinema. Combining media archaeological work with art history, phenomenology, and film studies, the book offers close analyses of a range of historic baroque artworks and films, including Caché, Strange Days, the films of Buster Keaton, and many more. Walton pursues previously unexplored connections between film, the baroque, and the body, opening up new avenues of embodied film theory that can make room for structure, signification, and thought, as well as the aesthetics of sensation.
Edited Journal Issues by Saige Walton
Journal Articles by Saige Walton
Concentrating my analysis on Ildikó Enyedi's Testről és lélekről/On Body and Soul (2017) — a film that alternates between doubled worlds, depictions of human and animal life — I draw out the temporality and the diversity of Bachelard's imagined images. Bringing Bachelard's instant, vertical time and the crystalline to bear on Enyedi's film, I argue that, under the pretext of sleep, rest and dreaming, On Body and Soul engages the temporality and attentiveness of the Bachelardian imagination, together with its poetic effects.
Bringing together accounts of lived and cinematic rhythm, the article develops an alternative account of film and the body that includes the sensing of distance, spatiality and dissonance. Returning to Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s interest in rhythm and the cinema, the article broadens touch-based accounts of film beyond that of a shared and/or proximate encounter. Drawing attention to the sensuality of bodies in space and to the connections between touch, rhythm and film style, the article reconsiders Jennifer M. Barker’s tactile account of cinematic ‘apprehension’. As it solicits our embodied apprehension and is organised by a fatal arrhythmia, Stranger by the Lake highlights the gaps and the spaces, the felt distances and the conflicts that also shape filmic corporeality (including that of film and viewer).
Through an analysis of Robert Eggers’ The VVitch: A New England Folktale (2015), this article examines how the materiality of earth and air has a special role to play in folk horror. My contention is that mood in the cinema often involves a making visible of the air and that The VVitch is particularly invested in moody, imaginative interminglings between air, atmosphere and the environment.
Inspired by Giuliana Bruno’s call for cinematic materiality to be re-thought through the substance of material relations rather than through technological definitions, this article examines how the baroque endures in the post-cinematic. Concentrating my analysis on Birdman: Or, The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance (Alejandro González Iñárritu, 2014) as one instance of the post-cinematic baroque, it argues for the baroque as being organised by particular vectors of movement that move between the horizontal and the vertical and the inner and the outer, often giving rise to composite and/or highly spatialized displays.
Taking inspiration from Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy of the fold, art history, media archaeology and film studies, I argue for Iñárritu’s film as enacting baroque configurations of body, space, movement and environment. As with the formal and affective uplift of the musical and superhero film genres as well as the movement in historic baroque forms, Birdman defies the horizontal plane. As I argue it, Birdman reprises the longstanding baroque desire to become space in every direction.
While Bastards shocks or stirs the body through its moral darkness, its sexualised violence and its corporeal extremes, the affective force of this film also stirs our own ethical and thoughtful deliberation. As with Deleuze’s concept of the baroque fold, aesthetic form, affective impact and thought combine. Taking its inspiration from Deleuze’s work in The Fold (1993) together with the history of 'dark baroque' forms, the article opens up the formal, affective and thoughtful possibilities of a baroque cinema.
Bringing together film-phenomenological scholarship with art history, Paul Schrader's concept of the 'transcendental style' in film and Nathaniel Dorksy on 'devotional cinema', it argues for Dumont's sixth feature film - Outside Satan - as fostering embodied and reflective experiences of what I call film and/as devotion.
Book Chapters by Saige Walton
Building on what Charles and Mirella Jona Affron call “design intensities,” I harness what they call “punctuation” to approach the nonverbal expressivity of feeling and the depiction of luxury-as-boredom in Lost in Translation (2003) and Somewhere (2010). In the final section, I draw on the Affrons’ ideas of design “embellishment” and “artifice” to frame Coppola’s restaging of “Versailles” and the presentation of luxury as pleasure, power, and surface-based display in Marie Antoinette (2006) and The Bling Ring (2013).