This article analyses the gazes, looks, stares and glares in Laurence Anyways (Xavier Dolan, 2012), and examines their affective, interpretive, and symbolic qualities, and their potential to create viewer empathy through affect. The cinematic gaze can produce sensations of shame and fear, by offering a sequence of varied “encounters” to which viewers can react, before we have been given a character onto which we can deflect them, thus bypassing the representational, narrative and even the sympathetic power of the medium to create “raw”, apparently unmediated sensations. Through the point-of-view shot and direct address, the viewer is the object of the gazes it receives, and experiences their hate and rejection before actually being presented with the film's narrative object of the gaze – the film's protagonist, a transgender woman named Laurence. It examines how the viewer, after being affected, interprets and misinterprets the emotions behind the gazes, and then cognitively attaches the gazes' importance to the narrative. It analyses how the gazes not only create viewer empathy for Laurence, but also create a shared experience between Laurence and the viewer that enhances this empathic connection. It concludes by considering the symbolic importance of the gaze, and Laurence's desire for the gaze as a marker of agency and acknowledgement.

This article analyses two interactive exhibits -The National Holocaust Centre and Museum's 'The Forever Project' and the Shoah Foundation's 'New Dimensions in Technology'which have created digital versions of Holocaust survivors who will respond to visitors' questions, with the intention of creating meaningful 'interactions' with these survivors long after the 'biological' witnesses have passed away. It argues that the formal qualities of these 'virtual witnesses' have cognitive and emotional associations that inhibit viewer empathy: first, since the digital avatar is a form normally associated with games and play, participants may consciously or subconsciously 'test' the limits of this interactive technology; second, people use vocal commands to interact with the avatar, much like 'virtual assistants' found on personal digital devices; and third, their 'uncanny valley' appearance is affectively disturbing. It concludes by querying as to the use of these and other technologies for memorial exhibits.

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Ruin in the films of Jia Zhangke China is being remade. Economic reforms begun by Deng Xiaoping in1978 have gathered momentum and are now at a pace and scale that has never previously been witnessed, and, as a result of this, China has become the world's fastest growing economy. These reforms, which initiated the advent of what became known as the Reform era, were initially projected as a (final) cure to China's endemic problems of poverty and delayed technological and economic development, but this optimistic outlook has since waned. Several films by the Chinese director Jia Zhangke (b. 1970), such as Xiao Wu (1997),

This article analyzes the moving portraits and the gazes of a female lowland gorilla named Triska in the film Visitors (Godfrey Reggio, 2013). By examining the formal qualities of her filmic portrayal and the biological and emotional affects portraits and gazes potentially have on the human viewer, I propose that Triska's gazes create a 'cinema of sentience' that not only represent Triska as a sentient being, but affect an awareness of her sentience and subjectivity. I argue that Reggio's filmic portraits of Triska do not position the viewer as superior to her -our gazes do not conquer or consumer her, and they do not sentimentalize her -rather, her gazes serve to equalize her for the viewer at the level of representation as well as affect, by encouraging the audience to experience a sense of affective empathy for the gorilla and her subjectivity, and to feel the sentience of the non-human Other. In the filmic encounters with Triska, humans become aware of both their humanity and their animality, producing affective moments where biology and philosophy collide -an affective encounter that questions our cognitive philosophical assumptions about what it means to be human and what it means to be animal and simian. KEYWORDSAffect; gaze; film phenomenology; cinema of sentience; portraits; subjectivity.