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The question that animates this essay is, quite simply, what is the relation between bodies in an audience and bodies onscreen?1 And while I will not arrive at a categorical answer here (how could you?), I am proposing to trace the contours not only of the question but also of one possible set of answers. Obviously, we might think of a whole variegated field of different kinds of responses: desire, disgust, sympathy, empathy, hatred, love, care, indifference. But we might pose this question a bit more broadly. This question, several variations of it, and the whole messy field of possible resonances, intensities, and antimonies that we may or may not have with onscreen bodies have seen two major theoretical articulations in the history of film theory and cinema studies: identification and mimesis.2 The first of these is démodé these days, while the latter is still in fashion. And so, this essay has two main aspirations. The first is to show that an untimely attention to identification really is necessary to properly address problems that have recently seemed more pressing (or at least interesting) to film scholars - to wit, embodiment and affect. The second is to show that thinking with one of these terms entails thinking with the other.
The force and salience of this question arises in the context of recent theorizing about the cinema in terms of embodiment and affect: such theorizing has yet to sufficiently pose the problem of identification in particular. This body of thought frequently makes recourse to some version of identification - for example, in any number of articulations of the confusion between a body in the audience and a body onscreen3 - but without making it an explicit problem. And so, my aspirations are supported by a more concrete agenda. This agenda is twofold: to articulate identification as an explicit problem for theorizing about the cinema in an idiom consonant with contemporary theories of the cinema that stress embodiment and affect and to show the importance, and indeed the necessity, of such an articulation for embodiment-oriented theorizing about the cinema. In short, we overlook crucial aspects of our embodied encounter with the cinema if we aren't able to grasp identification as a problem.
The case at hand comes...