Keeping the concept of cinematic affect “in play”

Following a groundswell of paradigm-shifting works over the last few decades, that have challenged the elision of the body in film studies, sensory-affective experience has become a core concept in much of contemporary cinema studies. Three key considerations—the corporeality of spectatorship, the temporality of the moment and film as an event, an encounter—have been pivotal in reframing understandings of cinematic experience to emphasise the centrality of affect. This paradigm shift has seen a proliferation of new studies, many of which apply or illustrate one of the critical frameworks of affect in ever-more diverse contexts. However, much of this recent work takes the concept as a “found object,” whose parameters are pre-defined and known, and simply “replays” it without further investigation or interrogation. This dossier seeks to keep the concept of affect “in play,” exploring some of the cutting edges of how scholars are currently thinking about cinematic affect