Latest issue
Edited by Justine Dorval, Sendy-Loo Emmanuel et Maxime Michaud
This thematic issue of Cinémas, entitled Sensorialités: diversité capacitaire et cinéma, explores how cinema opens up multiple modes of perception, sensation, and being in the world. Examining perception not as a mere reception of stimuli but as an embodied and situated act, it questions the ways in which cinema—an inherently sensory art—can make perceptual experiences stemming from ability diversity visible and shareable.
The contributions gathered here aim to rethink the links between perception, creation, and accessibility through approaches shaped by experience and direct engagement. From a phenomenological and political perspective, Tyson Wils revisits Werner Herzog’s cinema through the notions of Umwelt and perceptual realism, framing cinema as a space of coexistence between sensory environments. Véro Leduc offers a self-reflexive text drawing from a research-creation process around deafhood, where signed music and sign language become visual forms of listening and sharing the sensible. Alice Guilbert and Santiago Hidalgo, for their part, examine the phenomenon of ASMR as an aesthetic device with therapeutic potential: their analyses combine cognitive sciences and media studies to explore the possibility of a true cine-therapy, where the body becomes an instrument of listening and resonance. Floriane Bardini demonstrates that audio description, far from being a mere technical tool, can become a creative and interpretive gesture capable of conveying a film’s emotional and stylistic charge. Lisa Mélinand reflects on the promise of universally accessible streaming, questioning the technical, social, and ecological obstacles linked to digital platforms. Finally, this issue includes, for the first time in Cinémas, an audio piece: an interview with filmmaker-researcher Steven Eastwood. In dialogue with him, Justine Dorval and Maxime Michaud explore the collaborative genesis of the film The Stimming Pool (2024) and the notion of an “autistic camera” that it advances, reconfiguring the relationship between gaze, rhythm, and sensoriality.
To reduce accessibility barriers for the dossier Sensorialités : diversité capacitaire et cinéma, this issue complies with the WCAG 2.1 standard and provides alternative descriptions for tables and illustrations.
Combining film studies, research-creation, and capacity-based approaches, this issue opens a critical and poetic space where cinema becomes both a laboratory of the sensible and a field of perceptual emancipation—an art of difference, contact, and shared resonance.
With contributions by
Tyson Wils, Véro Leduc, Alice Guilbert, Santiago Hidalgo, Floriane Bardini, Lisa Mélinand, Steven Eastwood, Justine Dorval et Maxime Michaud
Miscellaneous
Marie Pascal, Alkım Erol, Mustafa Erol et Camille Bui