Immersive Cinema: Affectivity and Mimicry in 'Polyester' (1981)

(Essay written January, 2019)

(Still from 'Polyester')

Immersive cinema, as I use the term in this essay, constitutes a type of cinematic practices that accentuate the already engrossing experience of film viewing. From early stereoscopic cinema, to the proliferation of 3-D and 4-D exhibition in contemporary cinema, these are all defined by their attempts to bring the viewer closer to the moving image through an intense bodily experience, to give the expression of “losing yourself in the cinema” a greater significance. These practices accentuate the tactility of the moving image and appeal to the mimetic faculty of the observer through profound sensorial contact. Although the sporadic experiments of immersive cinema in the past usually resulted in financial failure, their existence testifies to a historical tendency of an overtly haptic cinema that has, since the turn of twenty first century, become an ever-growing trend in the film industry.

I aim to explore how the use of Odorama in Polyester constitutes a greater genealogy of immersive, mimetic, and profound sensorial film experiences enacted through haptic cinematic practices. There is a distinct lack of scholarship on the evidently haptic qualities of this cinema so, through the works of Laura U. Marks and Vivian Sobchack, I aim to define the affectivity of immersive cinema. This tendency not only testifies to an embodied spectatorship, but also offers an insight into the future of cinema-going. Moreover, Polyester is a doorway through which we can contemplate how hapticity may shape the future of cinema and the twenty-first century observer. Responding to over the past decade cinemas have sought to keep dwindling audiences going to the cinema, mostly through offering immersive cinematic experiences. With the inevitable mass availability of VR (virtual reality), cinema appears to be going back to the haptic, embodied roots of the medium in response to the pressures of having a more individuated and technologically equipped consumer.

However, in being able to approach this discussion, I will begin by closely examining Marks’ ‘Video Haptics and Erotic Cinema’[1] along with Sobchack’s ‘What My Fingers New: The Cinesthetic Subject, or Vision in the Flesh’[2]. Then, I will be investigating the precursors of immersive cinema in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, discussing how they reflect Marks’ and Sobchack’s embodied spectator and consequently form a genealogy of the senses. After, I shall reflect upon my embodied experience of Polyester, drawing on haptic criticism to help define the affectivity of immersive cinema. Finally, I will consider the implications of an ever-changing relationship in modern cinema between body and screen; sensorium and cinema.

Since ‘the Affective Turn’ that took place during the 1980s, discourse on film spectatorship has shifted from a structuralist approach that espoused distance and “objectivity”, to a film theory that aims to reclaim the corporeal as a fundamental component of the film experience. Steven Shaviro summarises the approach of affective theorists, and their distrust of “objective” theory, “Such a “scientific” attempt to distance oneself is especially problematic in the case of film theory, whose “object” is not just particular films, but the very process of film viewing itself”[3]. This challenge to the cultural hegemony of psychoanalysis and structural linguistics has emanated a multitude of phenomenological writing on the experience of film viewing, of which scholars like Marks and Sobchak have been at the forefront of.

In Video Haptics and Erotics, Marks’ central argument is that video is an inherently tactile, haptic medium that elicits an erotic experience within the embodied spectator. This intense, erotic experience oozes out of the language Marks uses too, becoming a piece of erotic, haptic criticism itself as well as searching for this quality in a critical investigation. Her subjective experience of certain experimental video, reaching for the very roots of it and making sense of her haptic encounters through intense descriptive pieces, is the core of her approach. She opens her essay in this manner, and goes on an unrestricted journey from the start to the end of the first paragraph:

"Yet watching the tape feels like going on a journey into states of erotic being…being drawn into a rapport with the other where I lose the sense of my own boundaries; and the uncanny loss of proportion where big things slip beyond the horizon of my awareness while small events are arenas for a universe of feeling"[4].

Here, Marks pens a continual theme of this erotic viewing experience and the essay, that is, the act of giving oneself up to the screen and the sensory affects it elicits. Marks argues that the visual character of video, as used by some avant-garde video artists, accentuates the medium’s haptic visuality[5]. This haptic visuality, as opposed to optical visuality, is a multisensory mode of perception that engages with all of the senses:

"The term haptic visuality emphasizes the viewer’s inclination to perceive haptically, but a work itself may offer haptic images. Haptic images do not invite identification with a figure so much as they encourage a bodily relationship between the viewer and the image. Thus, it is less appropriate to speak of the object of a haptic look than to speak of a dynamic subjectivity between looker and image"[6].

Marks argues that this visuality is doubly erotic, in that it forces the viewer’s gaze to the image’s surface and, by bringing attention to this surface, the viewer interacts with the image as if it were another skin, another body[7]. Video, then, is the perfect medium for this because its lo-fi and grainy quality creates a flat, textured, incomplete image which instigates the viewer to explore it as if it were another skin. Furthermore, it is this “limited visibility and the viewer’s lack of mastery over the image”[8] that gives the haptic encounter its eroticism.

Fundamentally, Marks’ juxtaposition of optical and haptic visuality opens a discussion of alternative ways of theorising the film experience, but it is also is a direct attack on the hegemony of optical perception. Grounded in the work of Alois Riegl, Marks outlines a genealogy of haptic perception and visuality that has historically been marginalised by the dominance of the optical. From the transition of tactile Egyptian art to the optical Roman style, there was a general shift towards an ideal of abstraction, later resulting in the ascendancy of the Renaissance perspective[9]. According to Marks, whereas haptic representation brought the viewer’s engagement to the tactile plane, the optical style “makes possible a greater distance between beholder and object that allows the beholder to imaginatively project him/herself into or onto the object.”[10]. From this perspective then, Marks believes that the haptic is an art tradition that appeals to feminism, or feminist strategy, because it is inherently underground, marginalised. This, then, is why Marks believes the haptic videos she analyses are made by feminist or lesbians, because haptic visuality offers an alternative mode of expression[11]. Continuing this idea of going back to the roots of the haptic, to uncover the embodied observer, Marks argues that cinema has been a site of battle between different modes of observation. Going back to the “cinema of attractions”, Marks points out that these films aroused an embodied response with viewers. However, the introduction of narrative cinema marked the beginning of the domination of voyeurism, thus again the hegemony of optical viewing over haptics persisted[12]. In addition, she sees this being played out in film theory too, with criticism that was concerned with embodied viewing continually overshadowed by linguistic theories of spectatorship[13].

Ultimately, Marks is concerned with mediums that accentuate the haptic potential of art, creating experiences where the boundary between viewer and its object disintegrates to reveal a circular, constantly evolving mutual exchange between the two. Furthermore, in an oscillation between the closeness of this exchange, and the recurring feeling of separation from the image, it reveals an erotic relationship that toys with distance and closeness. What this demonstrates is that spectatorship should not be viewed as principally optical or haptic, but both because they each constitute the multisensory experience of film viewing.

Whereas Marks tends to focus on tracing the marginalisation of haptic mediums, only touching upon the theoretical and critical discourse on embodied spectatorship, Sobchack is concerned with unearthing this disregarded scholarship and the biases underlying this. She begins her essay with an analysis of the salient language used in descriptions of the cinema experience in critical writing, which ultimately contradicts the optical and linguistic approach of theoretical discourse on spectatorship. With these reviews laden with multisensory descriptions of the film experience that brush up against a bodily spectatorship, Sobchack asks “What have we, as contemporary media theorists, do with such tactile, kinetic, redolent, resonant, and sometimes even taste-full descriptions of the film experience?”[14].

She tracks discourse throughout cinema history that was concerned with the relation between the cinema and the sensorium, a marginalised discourse that challenges the linguistical structures enforced upon spectatorship. Citing the work of Walter Benjamin, Siegfried Kracauer, and Sergei Eisenstein, she demonstrates how their writings form a chain of discourse that tries to make sense of cinema through the senses. However, aptly summarising the lack of theoretical discourse on the subject, “if we read across the field, there is very little sustained work in English to be found on the carnal sensuality of the film experience and what - and how - it constitutes meaning”[15]. Sobchack argues that the bodily, carnal experience of film-going is essentially misunderstood:

"For the most part then, carnal responses to the cinema have been regarded as too crude to incite extensive elaboration beyond aligning them – for their easy thrills, commercial impact, and cultural associations – with other more “kinetic” forms of amusement such as theme park rides or with Tom Gunning’s once historically grounded but now catch-all designation, “cinema of attractions”" [16].

Along with these suspicions of affectivity, Sobchack also argues that there is also an underlying discomfort among critics and theorists about their inability to explain these sensual experiences[17]. Thus, explanations of spectatorship grounded in psychoanalysis become comforting in that they stabilise the carnal. Like Marks, she criticises the lack of articulation of this erotic, and carnal sensory experience that cinema elicits. Sobchack calls to reclaim the corporeal, “In sum, the film experience is meaningful not to the side of our bodies but because of our bodies. Which is to say that movies provoke in us the “carnal thoughts” that ground and inform more conscious analysis”[18].

In her essay, Sobchack attempts to define the affectivity of film viewing and the sensorial relationship between body and screen. Her desire is to explore what she calls the “body’s prereflective but reflexive comprehension of the seen (and, hence, the scene)”[19]. By this, Sobchack is referring to the moment we comprehend the film through all of our senses, the moment we make contact with the scene and the space before conscious, reflective thought on that contact. According to Sobchack, “We see and comprehend and feel films with our entire bodily being, informed by the full history and carnal knowledge of our acculturated sensorium”[20]. Essentially, in the process film viewing, all our senses are activated.

Sobchack, as does Marks, attempts to describe and theorise the pleasures created from embodied film experiences. Although Marks exemplifies the erotic qualities of video, they both describe a sensation of simultaneously being in two places at once, and subsequently inflecting this description with sensuality and eroticism. In this moment, Sobchack “had a carnal interest and investment in being both “here” and “there”, in being able both to sense and to be sensible, to be both the subject and the object of tactile desire” [21]. There is a symbiotic relationship between body and screen where meaning emerges in the conjunction of the two. Like Marks, Sobchack emphasises this pleasure of subversively transcending fixed boundaries and positions as central to embodied viewing. Sobchack defines this body as the cinesthetic subject:

"Thus, the cinesthetic subject both touches and is touched by the screen – able to communicate seeing to touching and back again without a thought and, through sensual and cross modal activity, able to experience the movie as both here and there rather than clearly locating the site of cinematic experience as onscreen and offscreen" [22].

In this term, Sobchack blends synaesthesia (senses traversing boundaries in the process of sense making) and coenaesthesia (the feeling of being in a lived body). To Sobchack then, the cinema is a space where we enact our cross modal perceptual capabilities, and also generates the pleasure of being able to sense and experience the world.

In summary, both Marks and Sobchack articulate important ideas about the tactile relationship between viewer and screen. The act of going back to the root, the pure essence of something, almost like reflecting upon a haptic encounter itself, drives both scholars. In addition, these reflections form vital concepts that help define aspects of the embodied experience of the spectator. However, in both works there is an absence of a discussion about overtly haptic and sensorially immersive cinematic practices such as 3-D and 4-D cinema. Furthermore, both Marks and Sobchack prefer to focus on the purely pleasurable aspects of embodied viewing. The affective approaches of both could inform an interesting discussion about alternative modes of bodily experience in the cinema that are not inherently pleasurable, and in fact create meaning by disrupting the viewer through their body.

Through my discussions of immersive cinema and my analysis of Polyester, I aim to use Sobchack and Marks as well as build upon their work as I attempt to define the affectivity of immersive cinema.

Historically, the affectivity of immersive cinema stretches back into the pre-cinema period of the late eighteenth and the nineteenth century. This period of industrialisation and rapid technological change saw the proliferation of several visual technologies and popular, commercial entertainments that appealed to an embodied experience for the viewer. These new experiences sought to engage with the observer in a bodily way, activating the sensorium. Furthermore, the affectivity that Marks and Sobchack theorise is reflected and accentuated in these mediums.

The end of the eighteenth century saw the growth of popular attractions such as the circus, vaudeville, and magic shows[23]. As Andrew Darley points out, these were based upon spectacle, to initiate “intense and instantaneous visual pleasure; the production of imagery and action which would excite, astound and astonish the audience”[24]. As well as being a precursor of the cinema of attractions, these entertainments produced a visceral, bodily response within the observer. In the early 1800s, the ‘panorama’ and ‘diorama’ existed alongside these entertainments[25]. Placed in large, expansive places and rooms Panoramas consisted of a large, circular painting of a landscape that was spread against a wall. The observer would go onto a platform that was positioned at a certain distance to the image. From this distance, the spectator would experience the sensation of feeling immersed within the image itself. It would produce an uncanny feeling of being both within this world, and outside of it. Echoing a core tenet of Marks’ and Sobchack’s embodied spectatorship, the pleasure of the panorama was that of transcending fixed subject positions and becoming at one with the image. The diorama had the same affect upon the observer, as its illusion of three-dimensional space would jar the viewer into feeling both “here” and “there”, with the spectator becoming the site of meaning themselves. Furthermore, 3-D, 4-D and VR technologies elicit the same affectivity within the observer.

The 1800s also saw the development of stereoscopy, an “optical process whereby two-dimensional images are designed to be perceived as having three-dimensional depth’”[26]. Based on theories of stereoscopic vision, this illusion of space relied on the design of the human eyes for it to work. Like the diorama and panorama, the observer became a site of meaning. In addition, the stereoscopic vision was exhibited in two forms; a hand-held device, and a projection upon a screen. The former reveals both its link to modern VR in its affect upon the observer, as well as how it was consumed. But, in between the creation of these two technologies, the 4-D experiment of Polyester forms a component in the tradition of immersive cinema.

For Polyester, John Waters was inspired by ‘Smell-O-Vision’, a mode of exhibition used during the presentation of Scent of Mystery (1960) that released certain scents into the theatre that synchronised with the aromas on screen[27]. For the theatrical run of Polyester, audiences were presented with ‘scratch-and-sniff’ cards that aimed to synchronise filmic reality with the spectator’s through direct sensorial engagement. Branded Odorama, this was a parody of Hollywood’s immersive cinematic practices of the 1950s such as Cinerama.

(The Odorama card that accompanied Polyester)

Burning with a child-like anticipation, ‘Odorama’ card at hand, I began Polyester. After a mock lecture reminding me of my ability to sense the world through my nose, “Dr. Arnold Quackenshaw” instructed me on how and when I should use the Odorama. After number “1” flashed upon the screen, I copied my guide and scratched the card with my fingernail and lifted it to my nostrils. A wondrously soft, congenial fragrance entered my nostrils and triggered a grin of sheer delight that spread across my cheeks. I returned my focus back to the screen to the doctor who, in a state of elation not unlike my own, began sniffing a rose and then returning to smell the card. I realised I had noticed this rose in the background moments earlier, my eyes most likely processing it as just a constituent of the cinematic space. So, after realising its importance, I imitated the doctor and absorbed the scent. It was not just the smell of roses, but also that of the singular rose that was presented to me. Upon instant reflection, I knew that this what not the same scent, but somewhere within the process of me making sense of what my eyes and nose knew before me, between my inhalation and subsequent realisation, the sensorial world of the film flowed into mine. In this moment, I was simultaneously within the screen and outside of it.

As the film progressed, I awaited my next que. Francine (Divine), laying in bed next to her husband Elmer (David Samson), becomes focused on an odour that permeates from her husband’s body. “2” blinked upon the screen, and even though I had slight reservations about the outcome, I inevitably sniffed from the card. What greeted my nostrils this time was the rotten, revolting stench of Elmer’s flatulence. I recoiled with disgust in a gagging frenzy as I felt the contents of my stomach move up an unwelcome inch. The polarity between my earlier direct sensory experience and this one caused me to revisit the first scent in the hope of vanquishing it from my memory.

Here, and throughout the entire film, Waters uses 4-D to shock, repulse, and deceive me. This approach to myself, the viewer, is one that is antithesis to the conventions of classical Hollywood narrative and spectatorship. However, this film experience also challenges the optical hegemony of narrative cinema by overtly engaging with me through multiple senses. It explicitly appeals to what is, up to the 1980s, an alternative and subversive cinematic experience that openly engages the viewer through the body and immerses them within film. In this respect, Polyester is an anomaly of American cinema during this period. But, in the context of immersive cinema, it forms a link in a chain of films and practices that aim to fully exploit the haptic potential of film.

Like the immersive experiences of the panorama, diorama, stereoscopy, and virtual reality technology, Polyester creates a momentarily convincing illusion of another reality that muddles our perception of our own. This is most prominent with VR as, like that, Polyester creates an overpowering sensation of crossing the threshold between the position of the spectator and the object of the look. At the moment I put on a virtual reality headset, and at that moment when I smell from the card, my senses are convinced that I have entered a alternate reality. The jarring, uncanny affect of this reflects how I am at first duped into believing this but then remember my boundaries through reflection, and also testifies to the fact that I sense it first and think about it after. Of course, with the superior technology VR is ultimately a far more powerful encounter with my senses that instigates a more significant bodily response. However, how I process this experience through my senses, and the subsequent immersion into another realm, runs parallel with Polyester. In summary, the affectivity of certain nineteenth century visual technologies, the 4-D experience of Polyester, and the immersion of virtual reality, testifies to a genealogy of the senses in immersive cinema. Furthermore, overtime the power of these immersive sensorial experiences only grows and develops as technology also improves. Ultimately, this suggests that the twenty-first century will perhaps be dominated by a haptic visuality within media, and therefore cinema too.

In Polyester, the direct sensory experience of imitating what is on the screen activates my mimetic faculty and brings it to the surface of my perception. As Benjamin theorises, the mimetic faculty is an essential characteristic of human behaviour that has formed an integral part of evolution and the development of language[28]. As he also speculated, this is also integral to how we comprehend cinema. But Polyester and the 4-D cinema experience amplifies these latent, hidden affects through direct sensory engagement. This sensorial mimicry becomes a clear pleasure itself for the spectator, producing a mirror of the sensorial world on the screen, allowing us to reflect upon our mimetic capabilities as human beings. Like our senses, the mimetic faculty is a primordial aspect of human nature that is at the very root of how we comprehend the world. In this respect, 4-D cinema is an avenue for the embodied viewer to not just indulge in the sensorial possibilities of cinema, but to also reflect upon their ability to sense as a human being. Moreover, this mimesis in 4-D cinema accentuates the sensorium so as to provide the sensation of a pure, lived experience in a far more prominent and powerful way than conventional cinema.

Considering the ways that Polyester affected me, there is a clear consistency with how Marks and Sobchack describe the embodied relationship between film and viewer. By matching the sensorial reality of the film with my own, I become “both the subject and the object of tactile desire”[29]. Even more so, I clearly traverse the boundaries between two separate positions, in a way that is arguably more literal and bodily than that of a conventional film. I, the cinesthetic subject, am fully reminded of my ability to sense the world through a living body. However, for the most part this response is by no means erotic or pleasurable. Whereas Marks and Sobchack theorise the embodied film experience as one that oozes pleasure, a unique film like Polyester demands an approach that considers a potentially detached, inharmonious viewing experience. The foul odours that I am subjected to are an attack upon my senses, feeling intrusive, abrupt, and ultimately pulling me away from the screen. The immersive experience of that first fragrant encounter is lost. This demonstrates certain idiosyncrasies of 4-D cinema, that it requires one to fully let go of the command of their senses. This can be a pleasurable, erotic mode of film-viewing, but the form it takes in Polyester aligns the film with other discussions of embodied spectatorship that are essentially different to Sobchack’s and Marks’. In cinema that has the potential to elicit intense bodily shock and disgust within the spectator, such as the horror genre as well as 4-D, this is a powerful affectivity that offers an alternative to normative modes of film-viewing.

Within the context of the film itself, the affect of repulsive smells is imbedded into the narrative and contributes to an overall message that Waters aims to convey. Smell is the primary motif of the film and the main driving force of the narrative, as Francine’s supreme sense of smell leads us into different events. Furthermore, the irony of Francine’s keen sense of smell is that she is ignorant to her morally repulsive family and the rot at the core of it. Constantly repulsed by odours within the film, I am continually reminded of dirty odours that reflect not just my own viewing experience, but are also integral to the films overall message, that the “normality” of the white, middle-class American family is rotten in itself. The communication of this through immersive, sensory engagement demonstrates the possibilities of 4-D cinema in the unique and diverse ways that meaning can be made.

In conclusion, the work of Marks and Sobchack has provided me with vital concepts and ideas that has helped me to describe and define the affectivity of immersive cinema. 4-D films such as Polyester interact with the spectator through direct, sensorial mimicry that dissolves any notion of the boundaries between “screen” and “body”. Although, the power of this mimesis upon the spectator is significantly less in Polyester in comparison to the technologically advanced, modern 4-D, the mechanisms of affectivity are the same. Furthermore, Polyester holds a significant place in the genealogy of immersive, sensorial cinema. It is an advancement of visual technologies and popular entertainments that existed before cinema, and a precursor to modern technologies such as VR. This evolution of affectivity and embodied perception constitutes a significant shift towards a more immersed, haptic observer in the twenty-first century. Moreover, as the cinema of attractions demonstrated, the novelty of new technology that elicits an embodied response has immense economic potential. There has been a shift in recent years towards a more immersive, sensorially engaging cinematic experience with the proliferation of 3-D and 4-D cinema. In addition, the individuated observer of modern life, with instantly streamed television and films at their fingertips, will also inevitably have easier access to VR as it becomes a more affordable, better technology. Ultimately, a widely available virtual reality cinematic experience is on the horizon, and as the modern observer shifts towards more haptic mediums, so will cinema have to go back to its tactile toots.

Citations [1] Laura U. Marks, Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001) [2] Vivian Sobchack, Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture, (London: University of California Press, 2004). [3] Steven Shaviro, The Cinematic Body, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 10 [4] Laura U. Marks, Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 1. [5] Marks, Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media, 2. [6] Marks, Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media, 3. [7] Marks, Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media, 4. [8] Marks, Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media, 13. [9] Laura U. Marks, Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 5. [10] Idib. [11] Marks, Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media, 16. [12] Marks, Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media, 7. [13] Idib. [14] Vivian Sobchack, Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture, (London: University of California Press, 2004), 54. [15] Vivian Sobchack, Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture, (London: University of California Press, 2004), 56. [16] Sobchack, Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture, 57. [17] Sobchack, Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture, 58. [18] Sobchack, Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture, 60. [19] Sobchack, Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture, 63. [20] Idib. [21] Sobchack, Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture, 66. [22] Vivian Sobchack, Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture, (London: University of California Press, 2004), 71. [23] Andrew Darley, Visual Digital Culture: Surface Play and Spectacle in New Media, (London: Routledge, 2000), 39. [24] Idib. [25] Darley, Visual Digital Culture: Surface Play and Spectacle in New Media, 41. [26] Michael Wede, “Sculpting with Light: Early Film Style, Stereoscopic Vision and the Idea of a ‘Plastic Art in Motion’” in Film 1900: Technology, Perception, Culture, ed. Annemone Ligensa and Klaus Kreimeier. (USA: Indiana University Press, 2015), 202. [27] Briana Phelps, “Odorama - John Waters’ “Polyester””, Interactive Media Archive. [28] Walter Benjamin, Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, (New York: Schocken Books, 1986), 333-336. [29] Vivian Sobchack, Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture, (London: University of California Press, 2004), 66.

Bibliography

Books

Benjamin, Walter. Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings. New York: Schocken Books, 1986. Darley, Andrew. Visual Digital Culture: Surface Play and Spectacle in New Media. London: Routledge, 2000. Marks, U. Laura. Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001. Shaviro, Steven. The Cinematic Body. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993 Sobchack, Vivian. Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture. London: University of California Press, 2004. Wede, Michael. “Sculpting with Light: Early Film Style, Stereoscopic Vision and the Idea of a ‘Plastic Art In Motion’”. Chap. 16 in Film 1900: Technology, Perception, Culture. Edited by Annemone Ligensa and Klaus Kreimeier. USA: Indiana University Press, 2015.

Websites

Phelps, Briana. “Odorama - John Waters’ “Polyester””. Interactive Media Archive. https://interactivemediaarchive.wordpress.com/odorama-john-waters-polyester/ (06 January, 2019)

Filmography

Polyester, John Waters, USA: 1981. Scent of Mystery, Jack Cardiff, USA: 1960.