This book offers a close study of how film produces sensory-affective experience for the
spectator. It argues that we must explore this affective dimension if we want to understand how
cinema takes up cultural or thematic issues. Examining cinematic affect through close readings
of how affective immersion in cinema works to engage viewers with history memory and cultural
specificity it deals with both fiction film and documentary. Taking an international
perspective it includes case studies of Korean detective film classical Japanese cinema
modern Greek cinema independent American cinema Indian documentary Australian television
documentary Indonesian political docudrama avantgarde French documentary and Australian
Indigenous film. Rutherford draws on the analysis of embodied affect to revise many of the
foundational concepts of film studies. Drawing on Miriam Hansen's readings of Walter Benjamin
and Siegfried Kracauer the book explores the capacity of film to produce experiences in which
the boundaries between the spectator and the film become porous and the viewer is transported
in a heightened way into the film.
