The war film as moral space

In Cinematic Corpographies: Re-mapping the War Film through the Body, Eileen Rositzka critically examines and interrogates audiovisual and tactile representations of war cinema through semiotic and phenomenological frameworks in an effort to historically ground the spatial production of somatic and aesthetic experience. She uses the term ‘corpography’, coined by geographer Derek Gregory, in order to foreground the relationship between war, cinema and the body and to trace the intersubjectivity of experience. She begins her analysis by arguing that corpography, which establishes a direct link between cartography (the study of maps) and corporeality, allows us to ‘articulate the missing link between already established theories of cartographic film narration and ideas of (neo) phenomenological film experience,’ since they also entail ‘the involvement of the spectator’s body in sensuously grasping what is staged as a mediated experience of war’ (Rositzka 2018: 3). In other words, the audience or spectator is viscerally and actively imbricated in a kind of participatory and/or affective interaction with the signifying qualities of the audiovisual images of war presented in film. Rositzka’s reconceptualization of filmic space as an expressive space of intersubjective or transformative embodiment and perception is indebted to Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology. By deploying Gregory’s and Merleau-Ponty’s theories she succeeds in foregrounding the incorporation of the spectatorial other in film and media studies and in reframing film from a visual genre to one which is both embodied and embedded in socio-historical and phenomenological contexts. According to Merleau-Ponty, perception is prior to being. In The Visible and the Invisible he posits a universal or ‘anonymous visibility’ that inhabits all of us, a vision or visibility of the flesh in the here and now which ‘radiat[es] everywhere and forever’ (1968:142). This flesh of