A few minutes into Grandrieux's La Vie nouvelle, there is an image that lasts but an instant - the blurred shape of a human silhouette, running forward, as if trying to emerge from the sticky, engulfing matter that surrounds it. It is like a stain on the celluloid, moving to a distant humming sound, its distorting contours on the brink of dissolving in the trembling, snowy texture that fills the screen.

To foreground the materiality of the film medium is to unsettle the frontier between subject and object, figure and ground - the basis of our conception and representation of the self as a separate entity. ‘Hapticity’ and the denial of perspective perturb the visual hierarchy that tends to designate the human figure as a self-standing, autonomous entity at the centre of the representation. Not all the films discussed here give precedence to haptic visuality, but all include key moments at least where the establishment of a detached and objectifying gaze merely intent on making sense of the representational content of a shot is precluded and gives way to a different viewing experience.