The Aesthetics of Displacement: Sensory Experience and Cultural Translation in Transnational Cinema

Abstract

This article examines how cultural displacement is sensorially tangible in two transnational films: Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Memoria (2021) and Olivier Assayas's Irma Vep (1996). While existing scholarship on transnational cinema tends to foreground narrative representations of dislocation or industrial analyses of cross-border production, this essay develops the original concept of ‘sensory disorientation’ to argue that such approaches overlook the corporeal dimensions of film form, which are the ways of sensing; the disoriented body becomes the primary site through which cultural displacement is corporeally inhabited and communicated. Drawing on this framework, I trace how sonic estrangement in Memoria and visual transgression in Irma Vep transform abstract experiences of cultural dislocation into embodied encounters for viewers. The article further examines how the transnational production context, including funding structures, star personae, and distribution strategies materialise as an aesthetic form. These films propose a model of sensory transnationalism in which bodily engagement beyond linguistic comprehension becomes the primary medium of cross-cultural translation.