Screen production can be much more than a representational mode; it can be a powerful tool to investigate subjects that are difficult to represent or pin down. It has been theorised that an important feature of the intercultural film is to move beyond the seeable and sayable towards a more haptic experience of the moving image. This paper takes my PhD, an investigation into the body's relationship to landscape, as a case study to discuss how this practice is not only about stylistic or formal exigencies but that it is also a methodological imperative. I will discuss ways in which the instrument itself, the apparatus (the camera, the moving image, sound) allowed me to venture into intercultural spaces that are marked by experiences of dislocation and by disjunctions in time and space. It was a crisis with image and language that called for knowledges of the body and affective spaces. In this movement beyond what can be shown in clear images or spoken directly, the work required space, physical space outside of the screen. I will discuss how this spatialisation into an audiovisual setting extends the notion of the haptic space of the screen and opens out into the dark and haptic space housing the body of the audience. In this setting the screen becomes a sculptural object, the moving image becomes a body with which other bodies can interrelate in affective ways. This is a mode that can make a condition such that the audience may know 'what it feels like' to enact the making and unmaking of boundaries between self and space, self and language and self and image, and what it feels like to be displaced in this act.
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