Smelling out another cinema.

What is an olfactory cinema? How can one benefit from an olfactory cinema? Why should one welcome an olfactory cinema? These questions are essential to the exploration of another approach to cinema where the audio-visual senses have been ostensibly favoured. This essay addresses the uncertainties ra...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Sim, Jiaying.
Other Authors: Brian Keith Bergen-Aurand
Format: Final Year Project
Language:English
Published: 2011
Subjects:
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/10356/45124
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Institution: Nanyang Technological University
Language: English
Description
Summary:What is an olfactory cinema? How can one benefit from an olfactory cinema? Why should one welcome an olfactory cinema? These questions are essential to the exploration of another approach to cinema where the audio-visual senses have been ostensibly favoured. This essay addresses the uncertainties raised towards an olfactory cinema by close analyses of two films which draw our focus to smells: Perfume: The Story of a Murderer (2006), directed by Tom Tykwer, and Polyester (1981), directed by John Waters to suggest that even without the physicality of smells, smell has never been a sensorial experience that was out of reach in cinema. An openness in spectators towards accepting an olfactory cinema—one which uses the sense of smell in our response to cinema, opens up one's cinematic experience to multiple possibilities of investigation—aesthetics, social, political, technological, psychological, physiological, philosophical and epistemological, inviting a multiplicity of interpretations and understandings within any film and cinema.