This book has emerged partly as a response to developments in film theory that offer new ways of thinking about cinema's affective and sensory potential. Theories of embodiment and affect particularly invite us to return to films that were consistently seen as cold and distancing, such as L'Avventura, and to a lesser extent, the Decalogue series, giving us a new vocabulary which we can use to write about them. As Stern has written, affect in cinema derives its force not merely from the immediacy of touch but from the capacity of the object to elude our grasp. The movement of the image ‘invests the delineation of things with a particular affectivity … a relation obtains between temporality and affectivity’. Throughout this book, I have attempted to understand cinema's affective and sensory appeal as intertwined with the thematic concerns of particular films. I have seen the relationship between affect, sense and texture, meaning, and theme as interpenetrating through duration. The concept of interpenetration was inspired by a Bergsonian view of duration as made up of variegated rhythms and in which psychical states modulate and transform, bleed into each other, rather than forming discrete units that can be neatly separated. In my analysis of each film, I have attempted to trace the gradual modulation of particular elements: movements between surface and depth in L'Avventura, corporeal materiality and its destabilisation in Mirror, and the unfolding and dissolution of meaning in the Decalogue.