In an age dominated by screens, algorithms, and the flattening of our sensory worlds into the two-dimensional realm of mobile phones and digital interfaces, how do we experience time and space? How can cinema and other arts help us reimagine our connections to the tactile, the temporal, and the embodied dimensions of perception that are increasingly marginalized?
Embodied Temporality explores these questions through the lens of a novel concept that redefines sensory engagement—a multisensory, embodied way of engaging with the world. Rooted in cinema studies, visual culture, and phenomenology, it repositions the experience of "embodied temporality" as central to understanding how the arts can restore depth to our experiences of time and space.
Nostalghia’s pre-credit scene a Russian landscape in black and white.
Top picture: Domenico’s house, frontal view of the inside (Nostalghia)
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At its heart is the argument that while modern architecture, media, and culture are increasingly "ocularcentric" and speed-driven, the arts, especially cinema, hold the potential to recover slower, richer, and more meaningful ways of engaging with the world.
To demonstrate the relevance of these theoretical hypotheses, the book provides detailed and unique analyses of two films by Russian film director Andrei Tarkovsky (1932–1986): Solaris (1972) and Nostalghia (1983).
The haptic quality of color in Nostalghia’s (1983) hotel room sequences.
The slow mode (now commonly referred to as “slow cinema”) of his films triggers a sense of time, memory, and history by appealing to haptic experiences.
Our analyses combine phenomenological argument with close formal readings of architectural images in film. We attend to mise-en-scène, texture, sound, light and shadow, camera movement, shot length, and rhythm. We include frame captures with figure numbers and timestamps and, where relevant, architectural drawings and photographs to anchor sensory description.
Kris’s journey from Earth to Solaris, the camera moves in slow motion and in a sort of acute angle to the right or left.2
The image of the dead child (a doll) is gradually illuminated (Nostalghia)
The word “contemplation” carries spatial and architectural resonance: it derives from the Latin templum, a marked-out precinct set aside for observation. To contemplate, in its original sense, is to enter a dedicated space and attend to what appears within it.
The collage of the wall of Domenico’s house created from the film shot–the frontal perspective brings our attention to details.
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Water and nature imagery in the Solaris prologue.
To explore how Tarkovsky immerses us in the image of his films, we compare Solaris with Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) to highlight the distinction between haptic and optical space.
2001: A Space Odyssey
Solaris offers architectural spaces in which one tends to perceive time as a form of simultaneity of different moments of life. With its erosion and pale color, the space station has a quality of a dream image in which one has a contradictory feeling of being in a futuristic space, however, experienced through the chamber of memory—thanks to the uncanny work of alien intelligence.
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Solaris Space Station
The central architectural element in both the Solaris space station and Discovery spaceship is that of “corridor.” One never lives in a corridor – one just moves through it.
Solaris space station consists of an architectural plan that resembles David Lynch’s model of pathways in which we use our mental imagination to move through, whereas Discovery evolves around an architectural plan that looks a lot like Le Corbusier’s model of gridded architecture in which we use our visual means alone to apprehend the space. The Solaris space station makes us feel that we are inside the space,