Raindrops keep falling on the screen. Resonance in sensory disability cinema, following the path of Jean-Luc Nancy Chapitre d’ouvrage - Novembre 2025

This chapter examines the resonances between contemporary films depicting sensory disa-bilities, including Sokout (The Silence, Makhmalbaf, 1998), Touch the Sound (Riedelsheimer, 2004), Notes on Blindness (Middleton and Spinney, 2016) and The Reason I Jump (Rothwell, 2020), and the writings of Jean-Luc Nancy on listening as a space-time (2007), the image as presentation of the absence (2005) and the corpus as both the organic body and a body of works (2008). Following Francesca Minnie Hardy’s 2021 study of contemporary cinema from the prism of Nancy’s writings, the latter are also set against recent publications on film phenomenology (Marks 2000 ; Barker 2009). Attention is more specifically paid to the spatial and auditory motif of rainfall that runs through these films and Nancy’s writings ; it sheds light on the experience of liquid resonance (building on Janus ; Giunta 2016 ; Hardy 2023) as a soundscape at the intersection of sound, image and touch, superseding any auditory setting (Chattopadhyay 2017) and shared both by handi-capped characters and the audience, making the space vibrate and creating a virtual commu-nity rather than attempting to produce a mimetic approximation of the impaired sight, hear-ing and sensitivity. The films analyzed in this chapter convey multiple sensory configura-tions of the aesthetic body, starting with extreme cases, by positing that the differentiated or atypical activation of the parameters of image and sound embodies a vibrant relation to the handicapped, which goes beyond the usual limits of viewers’ own perception, bordering ec-stasy.