Avant-garde cinema and pornography both court a 'corporealized observer', one who is returned, via the sensual address of the text, to his or her sensing body. This essay explores three works of experimental cinema which provoke the spectator through the mobilization of excesses of light: Gunvor Nelson's 1972 Take Off/The Stripper, Naomi Uman's 1999 Removed, and Sally Golding's 2011/12 expanded cinema performance. The affective-intellectual operation of the distinct, 'desirable' image (in Jean-Luc Nancy's formulation) by these works suggests that their 'real' material is not the onscreen image, but the sensual response of the spectator.