My book manuscript in progress titled Aqueous Image: Cinema and the Rhetoric of Water at the End of the World examines images of water across an eclectic mix of narrative, documentary, and experimental films.

In describing his concept of the “flesh” of the world, Maurice Merleau-Ponty uses the phrase “aqueous power” to highlight an intercorporeal sense evoked by the fluid and shimmering tactility of water. Drawing from Merleau-Ponty, I use the term “aqueous image” to identify and index images of water and other hydrophilic matter, and/or images that reflect through film form an aesthetics of water.

I argue that inherent in the ontology of the moving image and forming in the history of world cinema is an epistemology and rhetoric of water that outlines the relation between the figure of the liberal human and its impact on global ecological and racial imaginaries. I suggest that media representations of water function as a multisensory perceptual technology that offer alternative imaginations of life that respond to the latest developments in ecocriticism, radical Black thought and Oceanic worldviews, and narratives of posthuman bodies.