Smelling out another cinema.

Abstract

What is an olfactory cinema? How can one benefit from an olfactory cinema? Why should one welcome an olfactory cinema? These questions are essential to the exploration of another approach to cinema where the audio-visual senses have been ostensibly favoured. This essay addresses the uncertainties raised towards an olfactory cinema by close analyses of two films which draw our focus to smells: Perfume: The Story of a Murderer (2006), directed by Tom Tykwer, and Polyester (1981), directed by John Waters to suggest that even without the physicality of smells, smell has never been a sensorial experience that was out of reach in cinema. An openness in spectators towards accepting an olfactory cinema—one which uses the sense of smell in our response to cinema, opens up one's cinematic experience to multiple possibilities of investigation—aesthetics, social, political, technological, psychological, physiological, philosophical and epistemological, inviting a multiplicity of interpretations and understandings within any film and cinema.