This dissertation aims to rearticulate the cinematic body as a critical and historical object. I clarify what the cinematic body is by illustrating the phenomenological and ethical relationship between the represented bodies and the audience’s body. Historically speaking, the representation of the human body is most pronounced in the so-called body cinema. I retrace its emergence—what I call corporeal modernism—back to 1960s cinematic modernism and work through its evolution in different national contexts.