What Love Smells Like: Olfactory Cinema

Viewing options Perfume: The Story of a Murderer (2006) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XMbAc6gpFok Scent of a Woman / Profumo di donna (1974) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tjfmIFmSsOw This is Dino Risi’s Italian original, later remade in Hollywood with Al Pacino. The Five Senses (1999) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3DsEljD1CAw This month we explore cinema’s most elusive sense: smell. In Perfume, an extraordinary sense of smell becomes an obsession with capturing beauty and human essence. In The Five Senses, smell becomes a way of recognizing intimacy and even love. In Scent of a Woman, a blind former army captain navigates the presence and attraction of others through scent. Together, the films ask: Can we know another person through smell? What can scent reveal that sight cannot? And how does cinema make us imagine a sense it cannot actually transmit? And bring your favorite perfume to the meeting. We may put our own noses to the test.