This chapter fleshes out my vision of baroque flesh by examining how the baroque knots sensation together with a deliberate breaching of borders, frames, and surfaces. To adopt a neologism of Sobchack, in this chapter I will examine how baroque cinema is porous in its spatiality and ‘cinesthetic’ in its texturing of sensation (Carnal Thoughts, p. 67). Not only does this concept endow the film's body with a deeper and more luscious sensuality than has heretofore been described, it helps establish how cinema ‘uses our dominant senses of vision and hearing to speak comprehensibly to our senses’, and how we as viewers ‘do not only experience any movie through only our eyes’ (Sobchack, Carnal Thoughts, pp. 67, 63). A cinema of baroque flesh is not limited to sight and sound, although it is channelled and expressed through those senses.

For Sobchack, cinesthesia speaks to the doubled embodiment and doubled spatiality of cinema such that the viewer feels themselves to be ‘ambiguously located both “here” off-screen and “there” onscreen’ (Carnal Thoughts, p. 72). This doubled spatiality accords well with the baroque. Following on from Eco, Ndalianis, and others, we have already identified one of the defining features of the baroque to be its enduringly ‘open’ attitude towards the viewer and towards the representational frame of the work. Historically, baroque art harnessed bodily gestures, direct looks, and face-to-face frontal positioning as well as various perspectival techniques, illusionistic optics, and trompe l’oeil effects in its ceiling, dome, and vault decorations to effect what Ndalianis calls a perceptual ‘collapse of the frame’ (Neo-Baroque, p. 28).