| Summary: | Baroque is a word that often conjures the idea of artworks excessive and overripe to the point of meaninglessness, so purposefully extravagant and fanciful that semantics become ancillary to sensation. Exhaustively researched and full of scholarly rigour, Saige Walton’s Cinema’s Baroque Flesh: Film, Phenomenology and the Art of Entanglement attempts to rehabilitate, or at least resituate, the baroque within fine art and, especially, cinema. This goal is achieved by painstakingly drawing a suitably circuitous line between seventeenth-century visual art and poetics through to the twentieth-century phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and pioneering studies on affect and embodiment in film aesthetics published by scholars such as Vivian Sobchack and Laura U. Marks.
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