La Vision haptique cruelle, cruauté et sensualité dans Trouble Every Day de Claire Denis
The Cruel Haptic Vision, Cruelty and Sensuality in Trouble Every Day by Claire Denis

Summary/Abstract: This article about cruel haptic vision in the cinema will discuss film language, its text, even its texture, where tactility is difficult to transmit in a filmic text. Trouble Every Day (2001), as medium for these transmissions, addresses itself to the spectator’s senses, but contrary to what we can expect from an audiovisual medium, not to vision and hearing. In Trouble Every Day Claire Denis elaborates cinematic pictures which can make us feel, taste and touch the film. Initially, it was the philosopher Gilles Deleuze who formulated the concept of haptic vision with reference to the artist Francis Bacon and his painting of bodies. If Bacon’s paintings are haptic, they are more precisely cruelly haptic. But, as analysed later by Laura U. Marks, haptic vision is not a cruel process by nature. We speak about haptic vision when our vision reveals unsuspected connections with our other senses. With Denis, haptic vision is imbued with cruelty: we feel it in ourselves when forms become vague and objects and environment begin to merge.

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