Techniques of the Body

"Media show up wherever we humans face the unmanageable mortality of our material existence: the melancholy facts that memory cannot hold up and body cannot last, that time is, at base, the merciless and generous habitat for humans and things.” — John Durham Peters, The Marvelous Clouds The body is the essence of all infrastructure, dictating all cultural practices, human relations, and sensorial perceptions. French Sociologist Marcel Mauss inferred that the body and its techniques transfer to cultural techniques, and therefore media. Yet, as bodily existence faces inevitable mortality, only media (as archive, as documentation, as memory, as institution) can withstand the fate of death and time. The body may therefore submit instead to media for the sake of immortality. Though, not without memorializing its own existence in the process. Corporality is an inherent presence throughout the history of film. Bodies and their movement endure long past their initial existence. The cinema therefore not only elicits immorality as a medial byproduct of bodily processes, but forever documents its corporeal techniques on screen. Below are Avant-garde films, spanning across generations, that emphasize, record, and preserve the intrinsic bodily existence.