Through an engagement with film phenomenology and phenomenologists, this paper establishes the empathy of the lived body as a tool to rehabilitate the image of Woman from objectification in film. In a comparative analysis of Charles Vidor’s Gilda and Jane Campion’s The Piano under the aspect of allowing sensual intrusion of the viewer into the film’s fabric and the categories of the hardness and softness of the material of a film’s body, this paper concludes that the identification of the viewer’s body and the experience of the film in alignment with its sensual rhythms generates knowledge drawn from the body. By comparing the cinematic techniques used to portray the protagonists Gilda and Ada and the relationship established between their bodies and the viewers’ bodies, the creation of the ‘image of Woman’ and her objectification is outlined. The tactile can serve as a subversive strategy which may forego this objectification and rehabilitate self-understanding from its fragmentation.