SENSORIAL EXPERIMENTATION IN O IS FOR ORGASM (AND ITS SPECTATOR) David Evan Richard Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani explain that their modus operandi is to tell stories “in a sensual, physical way,” ensuring that they are enjoyed “as an experience” by its spectator. 1 Rather than being concerned with narrative coherence or overt intellectualisation of their films’ content, Cattet and Forzani foreground the sensual and the affective as the primary source of meaning. Perhaps the filmmakers say it best when they categorise their films as forms of “sensorial experimentation”. 2 Inspired by the baroque pleasures of Italian giallo horror, Cattet and Forzani bathe their images in iridescent coloured lights that snare the eye, while textured soundscapes and dynamic camerawork – often altering between floating, spectral movements and choking close-ups – demand an embodied response from its spectator. In doing so, Cattet and Forzani’s films form particularly apposite case studies for phenomenological film criticism. The most useful forms of film-phenomenology are those influenced by Maurice Merleau- Ponty’s treatise on perception and language, a philosophy and research methodology that demands critical reflection on lived experience. 3 As Vivian Sobchack explains, film-phenomenology is predicated on the “phenomenological reduction,” a systematic process of description that “focuses attention on the conscious experience of phenomena as it is immediately given”. 4 In doing so, the critic sets asides or “brackets” any presuppositions one may have (such as expectations regarding film 28