Change has traditionally been perceived as something to be avoided in favor of stability. This can be witnessed in both individual and organizational approaches to change. In this paper, change as a process of becoming is analyzed. The author relates change to seduction to introduce new perspectives to the concept. The principal idea is that the process of change is a seductive experience. This assumption highlights the positive aspects of becoming, growing, and changing. In doing so, reference is made to (...) the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, as well as the humanistic psychology of Carl Rogers, to analyze seduction, as presented in The Seducer’s Diary by the philosopher Søren Kierkegaard. The qualification of this claim is based on this reading. Finally, a conclusion is offered through brief comments on the relationship between seduction, personal growth, and self-actualization. (shrink)

Traditionally, kairos has been seen as a “timely” concept, and so invention is said to emerge fromthe timeliness of a cultural and historical situation. But what if invention was thought of as thepotential to shift historical courses through the injection of something new or alien into a situation?This essay argues that kairos has not been able to free itself from its historical constraints becauseit has been bound to a human sense of temporality. By evolving along patterns different from print,the apparatus (...) of the cinema developed in a way where it was not bound to illustrating movement ortimeas it occurs in human-centered experience. Following the work of Gilles Deleuze on cinema,this article argues that the outside of a human sense of time is an untapped source of invention,already present yet dormant within kairos. (shrink)

This article uses Deleuze's three-part theory of the movement-image as a way to investigate the potential importance of his unexplored claim about the casting of Beckett's Film. In “The Greatest Irish Film” Deleuze writes that the starring role in Film “could only have been played by Buster Keaton” 23), but he does not explain why. Here, I return to the Bergsonian basis of Deleuze's film theory, as well as to early responses to Beckett's Film, in order to complicate our understanding (...) of Deleuze's perception-image, action-image, and especially his affection-image. (shrink)

Video data has now become the most common form of data for educational researchers studying classroom interaction and school culture. Software protocols for analysing vast archives of video data are deployed regularly, allowing researchers to annotate, code and sort images. These protocols are often applied by researchers without reflection or reference to the extensive philosophical work in film and media studies. Without exception, this research treats the video image as movement-image or picture, a recording of ‘raw data’, indexical of a (...) given time-space relationship. In this article I situate this kind of research within the history of scientific cinema, drawing on Deleuze's books on cinema, as well as his ideas on colour and figure from The Logic of Sensation, to propose an alternative way of analysing video data. One of the central claims of Deleuze in Cinema 2 is that the time-image reconfigures bodies as expressions of force – the body becomes a ‘shock of forces’. I argue that such an approach allows us to study the student body as less a phenomenological organism with built-in ‘I can’ cognitive and motor capacities, and more an indeterminate crystalline contraction and expansion of intensity. I present an example of how to study classroom video data as time-image, and explore the implications of such work for education research. (shrink)

This article addresses how it is possible to view Damien Hirst as a brand name. It argues that the brand name is not the mark of an originary relation between producer and product but of a set of highly mediated relations between products. In a discussion of the spot paintings, the process of mediation is seen to contribute to the open-endedness of the relations between products or works established in Hirst’s practice. This open-endedness contributes to the distinctiveness of the Hirst (...) brand name as ‘life as it is lived’ or living-ness. This characterization of the distinctiveness of the Hirst brand name draws attention to the ways in which his practice may be seen as a commentary on contemporary science, in particular the bio-sciences. It is further argued that Hirst does not merely represent himself as a scientist, but as a pharmacist, thus drawing attention to the role of branding in shifts in the processes of creativity, invention and discovery across the arts and sciences. (shrink)

Spaces of Geographical Thought examines key ideas like space and place - which inform the geographic imagination. The text: discusses the core conceptual vocabulary of human geography: agency: structure; state: society; culture: economy; space: place; black: white; man: woman; nature: culture; local: global; and time: space; explains the significance of these binaries in the constitution of geographic thought; and shows how many of these binaries have been interrogated and re-imagined in more recent geographical thinking. A consideration of these binaries will (...) define the concepts and situate students in the most current geographical arguments and debates. The text will be required reading for all modules on the philosophy of geography and on geographical theory. (shrink)

ArgumentIn 1895 when the Lumière brothers unveiled their cinematographic camera, many scientists were elated. Scientists hoped that the machine would fulfill a desire that had driven research for nearly half a century: that of capturing the world in its own image. But their elation was surprisingly short-lived, and many researchers quickly distanced themselves from the new medium. The cinematographic camera was soon split into two machines, one for recording and one for projecting, enabling it to further escape from the laboratory. (...) The philosopher Henri Bergson joined scientists, such as Etienne-Jules Marey, who found problems with the new cinematographic order. Those who had worked to make the dream come true found that their efforts had been subverted. This essay focuses on the desire to build a cinematographic camera, with the purpose of elucidating how dreams and reality mix in the development of science and technology. It is about desired machines and their often unexpected results. The interplay between what “is” (the technical), what “ought” (the ethical), and what “could” be (the fantastical) drives scientific research. (shrink)

Media are surely central to Western societies of the past several centuries and to the emerging global societies of the contemporary era and the future. There is a thickening, an intensification and an increasing complexity to the use of information machines, technologies that are necessary in the production, reproduction, storing and distribution of texts, images and sounds, the constituent elements of culture. The phenomenon has been termed a “media ecology,” adding a new layer to the ecologies of animal, vegetable and (...) mineral. It behooves anyone engaged in critical discourse to take serious account of media. I argue they offer a key to understanding the process of globalization in relation to a new configuration of interaction between humans and machines. (shrink)

Film critics and theorists often refer to the ‘worlds’ that films create, present, or embody,e.g. the world of Eraserhead or the world in Fanny and Alexander. Like the world of a novel or painting, the world of a film in thisprevalent use of the term denotes its represented content or setting, or whatever formaland thematic aspects distinguish it from other films in a pronounced and oftenimmediately recognisable way. Yet there is much more to be said in philosophical termsabout films as, (...) or as containing, worlds. This paper will argue that pursuing this subjectentails a needed re-evaluation of multi-faceted issues that are of concern to bothcontemporary film theorists and philosophers of film, including the relation betweencinematic representation and expression, reflexivity, the nature of film style andauthorship, and cinema’s relation to, and direct interaction with, other art forms. (shrink)

The collection Virtual Mathematics: the logic of difference brings together a range of new philosophical engagements with mathematics, using the work of French philosopher Gilles Deleuze as its focus. Deleuze’s engagements with mathematics rely upon the construction of alternative lineages in the history of mathematics in order to reconfigure particular philosophical problems and to develop new concepts. These alternative conceptual histories also challenge some of the self-imposed limits of the discipline of mathematics, and suggest the possibility of forging new connections (...) between philosophy and more recent developments in mathematics. This component of Deleuze’s work has, to date, been rather neglected by commentators working in the field of Deleuze studies. One of the aims of this collection is to address this critical deficit by providing a philosophical presentation of Deleuze’s relation to mathematics; one that is adequate to his project of constructing a philosophy of difference and to the exploration of some of its applications. This project developed as a result of encounters with an increasing number of researchers who have been working on the mathematical aspects of Deleuze’s work and the key role that these play in his philosophy. By bringing this work together for the first time, this collection makes an important contribution to the emerging body of work that endeavours to explore the broad range of Deleuze’s philosophy. (shrink)

In What Is Philosophy? we find philosophy devised as that power of thinking and creating which, in a division of labour with science and art, creates the concept. This division of labour points to the free interplay of Reason, Understanding and Imagination in Kant's Critique of Judgement and enables us to affirm, without obliterating the differences in kind, the non-hierarchical relationship between the three forms of thought that is asserted by Deleuze and Guattari. However, as powers of thinking and creating, (...) philosophy, science and art do not inscribe themselves in a transcendental subject. Rather, Deleuze and Guattari conceive of them, following Spinoza's ‘creating nature’, as powers that express themselves in an attribute in which every thinking subject participates. (shrink)

Film, Samuel Beckett's 1964 short starring Buster Keaton, dubbed by Deleuze as ‘The Greatest Irish Film’, is a seminal text in the latter's cinematic canon as it helps us to extrapolate the transition from the Bergson-based movement-image of Cinema 1 to the Nietzschean time-image of Cinema 2. Film is unique insofar as its narrative traverses and progressively destroys the action-, perception- and affection-images that constitute the movement-image as a whole, using Keaton's body, and more importantly his face, as a means (...) of attaining a pure intensity or Entity abstracted from all spatio-temporal coordinates, a condition of exhaustion/saturation that Deleuze and Guattari call, ‘non-human becoming’. Beckett's film is predicated on Bishop Berkeley's fundamental philosophical principle, esse est percipi (to be is to be perceived) and, using Keaton as its protagonist, raises the question of whether it is possible to escape perception, not only by a third party, but also by oneself. The latter is ‘played’ by the camera itself, which ‘stalks’ Keaton from behind, taking great pains not to exceed a 45-degree ‘angle of immunity’ (lest Buster experience percipi or the anguish of perceivedness) until the film's final close-up when he comes face to face with his own self-perception and affective annihilation. Film's denouement thus deconstructs the very nature of conventional cinematic language, whereby filmic suture – the enfolding of character, camera and spectatorial ‘viewing-views’ into a unified field of vision – gives way to a perspective where, at the very moment that the perceptive/affective body dies, the work of filmic art gives birth to itself as a being of pure sensation, exceeding lived experience. (shrink)

Throughout his cinema studies, Deleuze tends to define and to praise the cinematic in opposition to the theatrical. Cinema, for Deleuze, retains the potential to automate our perception of its images. Further, this capacity allows the cinema to profoundly disrupt the habitual patterns of its audience's thought. This article asks, however, whether Beckett's theatrical practice can be productively analysed through concepts derived from Deleuze's work on the cinema. In Beckett's Play and Not I, we see theatrical productions that strive for (...) and attain an automation of their audience's perception. While this theatrical experience is not identical to the ‘camera-consciousness’ that Deleuze observes in film, it can be understood through Deleuze's (Bergsonian) processes of habitual and attentive recognition, their failure and their subsequent transformation into passages of crystalline description. Finally, we can begin to elaborate the novel idea of a ‘crystal-theatre’; a theatre where the audience are entrapped within its construction, caught in a loop or circuit that runs between and complicates the realms of reality and illusion, immediately lived experience and artistic representation, the actual and the virtual. (shrink)

In Essays Critical and Clinical, Deleuze argues that Beckettian characters usually strive towards becoming imperceptible. This statement immediately poses another question: what is becoming imperceptible and where does it lead? How can we rid ourselves of ourselves? Paradoxically enough, Deleuze states that becoming imperceptible is life. The literal and self-evident meaning of life seems somehow incompatible with the image of dissolving and decaying characters in Beckett's works. Contrary to this self-evidence, the notion of life in Deleuze and Beckett should be (...) interpreted as pure potentiality which opens both the potential to be (or do) and the potential not to be (or do). Beckettian characters together with other figures, such as Bartleby, let us think of a life in its potential not to be. The life of the individual gives way to impersonal and singular life: a life of pure immanence. Such a life can be immanent to a man who no longer has a name, though he can be mistaken for no other: the Beckettian Unnamable. (shrink)

This essay begins by considering Samuel Fuller's 1963 film Shock Corridor as a model of schizo-violence – a disorganised violence that eludes the Oedipal, moralising binary of action and reaction, and instead opens up the violent action to multiple becomings outside Oedipal and nationalistic framings. Through the de-Oedipalisation of the violent events punctuating American history, Shock Corridor performs a schizoanalytic model of desire capable of giving free rein to the force of traumatic affections. The latter part of the discussion situates (...) Fuller's film and the contemporary US military machine as diametrically opposed in their approaches to what we might call ‘the affective politics of war’. Several contemporary scenarios revolving around both actual war violence and Kathryn Bigelow's film The Hurt Locker (2008) serve to show how the schizophrenising operations of the brain itself constitute the greatest obstacle in the military's efforts to contain or repress the traumatic affections generated by violence and war. (shrink)

If a machine is something that cuts into a continuous flow, schizoanalysis can be read, quite literally, as an analysis of cuts. In cinematic registers, it is an analysis of montage. Looking closely at a number of modes and moments of montage in the work of Alfred Hitchcock, this paper shows how his strategies of ‘reciprocally presupposing’ actual image and virtual montage relate to a Deleuzian poetics and politics of the cinema.

Taking a schizoanalytic approach to audio-visual images, this article explores some of the radical potentia for deterritorialisation found within David Fincher's Fight Club (1999). The film's potential for deterritorialisation is initially located in an exploration of the film's form and content, which appear designed to interrogate and transcend a series of false binaries between mind and body, inside and outside, male and female. Paying attention to the construction of photorealistic digital spaces and composited images, we examine the actual (and possible) (...) ways viewers relate to the film, both during and after screenings. Recognising the film as an affective force performing within our world, we also investigate some of the real-world effects the film catalysed. Finally, we propose that schizoanalysis, when applied to a Hollywood film, suggests that Deleuze underestimated the deterritorialising potential of contemporary, special effects-driven cinema. If schizoanalysis has thus been reterritorialised by mainstream products, we argue that new, ‘post-Deleuzian’ lines of flight are required to disrupt this ‘de-re-territorialisation’. (shrink)

This essay presents some thoughts on schizoanalysis and visual culture around the proposition that cinema survives in the digital age as a type of image that, after the movement-image and the time-image, could be called the neuro-image. By considering clinical schizophrenia as ‘degree zero’ of schizoanalysis in a more critical sense, a reading of The Butterfly Effect unfolds the temporal dimensions of schizoanalysis as typical for a definition of ‘the neuro-image’. The argument is that the neuro-image speaks from the (always (...) speculative) future. (shrink)

Deleuze and Whitehead are both centrally concerned with the problem of how to reconcile the emergence of the New with the evident continuity and uniformity of the world through time. They resolve this problem through the logic of what Deleuze calls ‘double causality’, and Whitehead the difference between efficient and final causes. For both thinkers, linear cause-and-effect coexists with a vital capacity for desire and decision, guaranteeing that the future is not just a function of the past. The role of (...) desire and decision can be seen in recent developments in biology. (shrink)

When writing about cinema does Deleuze have a conception of cinema spectatorship? In New Philosophy for New Media, Mark Hansen argues that Deleuze does have a conception of cinema spectatorship but that the subjectivity central to that spectatorship is weak and impoverished. This article argues against Hansen's reductive interpretation of Deleuze. In doing so, it relies on the three syntheses of time developed in Difference and Repetition alongside an elaboration of Deleuze's notion of a ‘cinematographic Cogito’. In this way, the (...) article offers a way of understanding the processes of cinema spectatorship from a Deleuzian perspective. (shrink)

The paper discusses Deleuze's concept of the feminine through exploration of the questions of eating, cooking, and specifically anorexia, as well as an ‘anorexic relation’ to fashion and dressing. It argues that anorexia should be understood as a micro-political experimentation in fashioning one's own body on its flight to becoming woman. In accordance with Deleuze's ontology of the surface, the anorexic body can be seen as the invention of the BWO that forms an assemblage with clothes and, in so becoming (...) different, invents for itself different desires. (shrink)

The insistence on knowledge accumulation in modern educational discourses has led to the formation of exclusive dichotomies in various forms, most tangibly observable in the division of people into ‘knowledgeable’ and ‘unknowledgeable’. What underlies this dichotomy is a conception of rationality based on which knowledge is seen as an ‘instrument’ which must necessarily result in a usable, profitable product. From a Levinasian perspective, the latter situation inevitably, if not purposefully, leads to the formation of the Other being located at the (...) side of irrationality, hence an unnecessary entity within the knowledge economy. Analysing Werner Herzog’s film, The Enigma of Kasper Hauser’s (1974), this paper aims to show how irrationality, contrary to the belief of dominant educational/pedagogical discourses, can act as a source for creative thinking. The paper argues that by accepting the Other as the unknowable, we allow them to resort to their singularity as a source for imaginative thinking. (shrink)

Stemming from a general study of rhythm in the work of Gilles Deleuze, we propose a distribution of this concept throughout three levels: a topic level, in which we place rhythm between chaos and measure; a dynamic level, in which we analyse the formation of rhythm towards its stabilisation as a spatio-temporal dynamism; and an unfolding, in which these dynamisms take on the form of rhythmic machines applied in music (refrain), in painting (sensation) and in cinema (montage and time crystals). (...) In this last phase, the rhythmic devices of various arts lead to a genesis of time. We are thus driven to think and elaborate on the link between these two concepts, rhythm and time, in the writings of Deleuze. Bearing this purpose in mind, we turn to the schema of the three syntheses of time in Difference and Repetition. These syntheses show how time emerges from different ways of understanding repetition, in the place of which rhythm will then appear. We will compare this schema with the argument articulated by Deleuze in Logic of Sensation regarding rhythm in its pictorial form. This comparison will enable us to deduce that both concepts follow a parallel path arising from the same series of processes: vibration, coupling, resonance and forced movement. We will conclude that the schema proposed in Difference and Repetition and its aesthetic purpose delineate the ways in which rhythms unfold creatively. These three syntheses of rhythm are implicated in artistic processes. (shrink)

The films and live cinema of Vincent Moon are considered in this chapter as ‘psychedelic’: a form of filmmaking and film performances that can open the doors of perception to invisible realms of percepts, affects and durations that are beyond or below ordinary human perception. According to Paul Schrader, films can evoke such spiritual dimensions, in particular through what he called the transcendental style of film, and what Gilles Deleuze termed the time-image. As an audio-visual ethnographer of world religions who (...) is distinctly influenced by shamanic and animistic traditions, Moon brings the transcendental style back to its plane of immanence. His live cinema performances have a ritualistic and ecstatic aspect that recalls the esoteric history of haunted media. Moon's enthralling film performances induce altered states of mind, tap into spiritual realities and immerse the audience in magic. (shrink)

With its minimalist narrative and long durational recordings of a family living on the margins of modern society and drifting around deserted urban spaces in Taiwan, Stray Dogs ( Jiaoyou, Tsai Ming-liang, 2013) provides a productive reading of cinematic slowness and a critique of the globalising domination of capitalism and neoliberalism in a locally and culturally specific context. This article examines how the representation of cinematic slowness in Stray Dogs encompasses both a narrative that requires the audience’s sympathetic and intellectual (...) understanding and a durational perception of time that calls for empathy and intuition. Moreover, this article aims to reveal how the film’s temporal illegibility, resulting from its radical use of long takes and unresolved differentiation between the past and the present, transforms a prolonged hesitant moment into an act of resistance against the ongoing capitalist and neoliberal standardisation, rationalisation and homogenisation of time’s, or more specifically duration’s, heterogenous nature. By exploring the potential of ethical hesitation and political resistance, underscored by slow aesthetics such as the use of long takes, this article aims to make the case for a specific and unique understanding of slowness as a philosophical signifier of empathy. (shrink)

This article interprets David Lynch's Mulholland Drive (2001) to argue for the morphological influence cinematic images have on modernity's monstrous identity. It shows how Lynch's tactic of interweaving apparently discrete spaces of dream and reality – one often inverting or uncannily ironising the other – relies on the virtual space of cinema, which leaves a mark on understanding, irrespective of its apparent truth. To do so, I employ Peter Sloterdijk's philosophy of space – especially the spherology developed in his Spheres (...) trilogy – and Bernard Stiegler's approach to cinematic phenomenology to consider the transferential force of cinema, and its power to cultivate and shape popular consciousness. Mulholland Drive is acutely aware of this force, and its interplay with the expectations and disappointments of Hollywood monstrosity inserts itself into the sphere-forming traffic of modern meaning-making. In doing so, I argue, the film takes up Lynch's familiar approach to irony and the weird to unwind the destructive uniformity of Hollywood hegemony. The productive bifurcations that result, inscribed in between cinema and consciousness, and forgettable as the very spheric intimacy of memory, gesture to what might live beyond discrete forms. (shrink)

This article contributes to a theory of the lyric essay film by bringing studies of the essay film and lyricism to bear on Pietro Marcello’s Lost and Beautiful (2015). We argue that the lyric essay film delivers its argument by leveraging the tension between words and images, narrative and counter-narrative components, and the (non)human subjectivities (i.e. the director’s, characters’ and camera’s) its text embodies and enacts. These tensions generate interstitial sites from which the ethics and politics of the lyric essay (...) film emerge. Insofar as the lyric essay film is marked by the intrusion of subjectivity in the genre’s argumentative structure, the polyvocality that this intrusion allows in terms of both critical and affective contribution to the film’s argument is what enables the lyric essay film to undermine ideological homogenisation and the naturalisation of situated subjective positions. Moreover, the felt participation of the subjectivity of the camera in the rendering of reciprocal processes of subjectivation becomes ethically meaningful as it embodies a conception of subjectivity as co-determined by otherness. The ethical significance of this interaction is also relevant to contemporary environmental thought, as it maintains that human subjectivities are co-determined by human and nonhuman others. (shrink)

This article analyses an important category from Deleuze's philosophy – the notion of intensity – and explores its significance for Deleuze and the ways it can be used to think about poetic cinema. I use the concept of the intensive-image to define a cinematic style that dissipates narrative action in favour of more contemplative and sensory experiences, hence films that are able to turn onscreen reality into purely affective phenomena. The notion of intensity, I argue, does not allow us to (...) reply easily to the question about representation (i.e., “what is the film about?”), mainly because its images are indeterminate and flowing, combined in a multiple manner that excludes any simple reduction to signification. The general argument that follows, illustrated by a careful reading of key poetic texts, is that the focus on the intensive-image inspires readers to reconsider Deleuze's classification of the cinema into two separate periods as well as to understand the ways in which intensity finds expression in films that produce problems, displacements and provocations. In the words of Pasolini, this is the poetic film tradition which must be placed diachronically in relation to the language of the film narrative, a diachronism that, he says, would appear destined to be always more pronounced. In the last section of this article, I look at Luis Buñuel's Un Chien Andalou (1929) as an early case of the poetic image and draw on key theorists and filmmakers who have discussed the cinema's power of affection and intensity. (shrink)

This article considers film as a form of artificial intelligence (AI). This non-anthropocentric hypothesis was first formulated in 1946 by filmmaker and theorist Jean Epstein and regards film as the thinking performance of a technical apparatus, the cinematograph, which is a manifestation of machine thinking based on the holistic entanglement of thought and world, film and philosophy. The article pursues an enquiry into ‘thinking’: one of the most prominent and oldest topics considered in philosophy, and also essential to art and (...) film. Thinking is not only characterised as a sense (like sight or taste) but as a creative and, ultimately, intra-active act. The possibility of film as AI is approached not only from a Deleuzian angle, long appraised by film-philosophy, but also through questions recently raised by theories of artistic research and the speculative-materialist turn in contemporary philosophy. The latter have as a common denominator a strong critique of anthropocentrism in Western philosophy; the article enquires into this criticism from different angles and applies it to the main hypothesis of this analysis – to regard film as a form of AI. (shrink)

Harun Farocki's films make use of a category of images the director calls “operational”, a term describing images, either photographic or computer-generated, that perform or participate in tasks, usually in military or industrial settings. Treatments of Farocki's films have frequently used the notion of the operational image uncritically, and without comparing Farocki's definition of these images with existing semiotic categories. This article seeks to situate Farocki's operational imagery within a theory of visual communication, and to explore the implications of automated (...) and instrumental imagery for theories of communication in general. Abandoning the focus in much Farocki scholarship on the representative properties of operational imagery, this article focuses on the world-shaping abilities of images that are integral to war and labour. Drawing primarily on Farocki's Eye / Machine I–III series ( Auge / Maschine, 2000–2003) the article then elaborates on the ways in which the world-shaping capacity of operational images conditions human perception and action. In particular, the limitations imposed by operational images upon human actors who interact with them, or live in environments orchestrated by them, reduce the essential role played by indeterminacy and interpretation in communication. (shrink)

Why does Deleuze rely so heavily on Spinoza and Leibniz? At first glance, his critique of representation and the traditional ‘image of thought’ seems to oppose him to rationalism. However, Deleuze says that when the ‘cry of rationalism’ is pursued until the end, rationalism becomes ‘delirious’. In such a state, it undermines the model of representation. This delirium is found in Spinoza and Leibniz's critique of generality and their conflation of essence and existence, through which they ruin the traditional mediation (...) of difference by identity and generality. However, for this rationalism to completely break with representationalism it must undergo some Deleuzian corrections. (shrink)

This article explores the role of filmic objects within the romantic relationships featured in Ernst Lubitsch’s silent The Marriage Circle (1924) and the comedy Trouble in Paradise (1932). I argue that these objects reflect a unique engagement with the materiality of film décor, which makes use of the strong presence of objects to portray intimacy as the site of inconclusive meaning. By examining both films together, I demonstrate how the world of inanimate objects brings erotic undertones to the surface while (...) challenging the material conditions of the erotic itself. In order to do so, I examine the ways in which Lubitsch relies on material details not only as functional narrative devices, but as elements that challenge and complicate our interpretations of familiar things. While the underacknowledged use of objects in The Marriage Circle illustrates the logic of displacement that stands at the center of the director’s style, Trouble in Paradise provides a framework for recognizing the critical role of objects in the structure of desire in his films. This article sets up a new reading of tactility and materiality in Lubitsch’s use of mise en scéne and seeks to give objects a prominent role in the analysis of his style. (shrink)

This article discusses Michel Serres's topological thinking and his approach to space and time from a film studies perspective, specifically looking at connections between Serresian philosophy and the work of Christopher Nolan, using Dunkirk (2017) as an example of folded time. The article provides a selective overview of Serres's topological thinking, which opposes a geometrical approach to space and time, as well as indicating connections between Serresian thought and film studies more broadly. Serres makes frequent use of visual metaphors that (...) rely upon motion, which means discussing Serres's philosophy in relation to film can be a purposeful way to make sense of his topological thinking about spatialized time. Serresian philosophy can bring new ideas to film studies while discussion of Serres's thinking from a film studies perspective can help to visualize some of his philosophical ideas. The article considers similarities with, and distinctions from, Gilles Deleuze's understanding of time in cinema, which is modelled on the work of Henri Bergson. One essential difference is that Serres approaches topological time in relation to space whereas Deleuze only considers topological aspects to time through the virtual qualities of the non-spatialized time-image. Key aims of the article are to contribute to film studies through the application of Serresian thinking in relation to Dunkirk as well as offering a new approach to the recurrent themes of space and time in Nolan's work. The main objective is to present Serresian topological thinking as an alternative approach to space and time in film studies, which includes the capability to potentially complement or enhance ideas developed by Deleuze and Bergson. In keeping with Serresian philosophy this article pursues a new way of thinking about folded time in relation to film, based upon exploring new territory and synthesizing ideas rather than attempting to present a universal argument. (shrink)

Developed through a series of conceptual analyses (Edmund Husserl, Vilém Flusser, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Walter Benjamin) and case studies (Fernando Lopes’s Belarmino and Jeff Wall’s Mimic), this article delves into the relationship between gesture, attunement and atmosphere and how it unfolds in photographic works dealing with urban space. The first section focuses on the role played by photography in the film Belarmino, which raises questions about both the representation of urban phenomena and issues related to expression and gesture in boxing. (...) The second section discusses Husserl’s thinking on image consciousness and his surprising reference to a “photograph” of a boxer, which reveals the relevance of his phenomenological approach when it comes to defining the aesthetic properties of gesture-images. The third section examines the principles of Flusser’s philosophy of gestures, focusing on the semantic field of attunement and its connection with various elements related to photography, gesture, moods and affects. The question of gesture in photography—both the gestures of the photographed and those of the photographer—can be articulated with the notions of attunement and atmosphere, which go beyond semiological, psychological and communicational approaches and are important for our understanding of aesthetic and artistic experiences. Finally, if photography is a privileged way of studying atmospheres and gestures (as suggested by the Benjaminian notion of optical unconscious) and their connection with the inner life of the subject, in relation to urban space this study often acquires an intersubjective, social and political dimension, as in Jeff Wall’s Mimic. (shrink)

Within the philosophy of language, contextualists typically hold (and semantic minimalists deny) that pragmatic elements of an utterance can affect its semantic content. This paper concretizes this debate by analogizing both positions to different kinds of time-travel stories: contextualism is akin to Ludovician narratives that deny the possibility of temporal editing (or “the changing of past events”) while semantic minimalism is aligned with stories that allow the past to be literally altered. By focusing particularly on Denis Villeneuve’s 2016 film Arrival, (...) which portrays a Ludovician model of temporality that firmly denies the possibility of temporal editing, this paper defends the strength of the contextualist position. (shrink)

The global pandemic has pushed many of us to online streaming services. A particular genre in these services is the ‘end of the world’ science fiction film, in and through which the speculated results of processes such as climate change are depicted. CGI technology is frequently deployed to create images of the end of the world, which is a backdrop to the narrative of, ‘saving ourselves amidst the ruins’. This philosophy of education essay will critically examine ten films in order (...) to:Explain how ‘the end of the world’ images connected to processes such as climate change, obscures and displaces attention from the real, scientifically proven processes that are not so entertaining, but are still deadly. The images are created by capital and its machines for audience attention and have little to do with real social change. Science sits in an ambiguous position in this paper in that the real processes of climate change proven by science may be funded by capitalist mechanisms that can also be their cause.Introduce a reformulated notion of ecosophy from the work of Félix Guattari, Murray Bookchin, Arne Næss and Andre Gorz. This essay will suggest that ecosophy has the potential to teach the underlying split between depictions of the end of the world through the capitalist machine and the real social change necessary under climate change. Ecosophy is in the context of this essay a specific conceptual construction designed for teaching about climate change through cinema. (shrink)

In a conference from 1987 on ‘What is the Creative Act?’, Deleuze argues that a fundamental and mysterious affinity subsists between the work of art and the act of resistance. Starting from this statement, Agamben in his echoing text ‘What is the Act of Creation?’ presents an idea of resistance co-essential to power itself. Each power, in other words each possibility for human beings of doing something, is connected to their impotence, not necessarily understood as total absence of power, but (...) as potential to not-do. Therefore, in the very creative act one detects something that resists and opposes the critical possibility of a retreat, of an emptiness that is itself a form of potentiality. The essay picks things up from here. The act of resistance, described in terms of dynamis, as power which is always in contact with its power-not-to, is identified as the core element of modern cinema images, notably in Italian neorealism. (shrink)

This article draws upon work by Gilles Deleuze, Sanford Meisner, and William Connolly to argue that the practice of acting helps citizens to encounter unsettling circumstances in daily life; respond to and connect with others in more open, interactive ways; and expand the relatively stable repertoire of selves each person cultivates through life. Considering scenes from the films of Anna Magnani, Ronald Reagan, and Joan Crawford, I argue that acting spaces can be sites where an exploration and decentring of subjectivity (...) can proceed and new modes of democratic interaction and togetherness can be enacted. (shrink)

The essay reads as a moment of alliance – a moment of reading of two disparate things together. The event of alliance remains inspired by Gilles Deleuze's theorisations of becoming. This marks the coming together of unrelated things – one into the fold of another – without being subordinated in the process. It reads an anime, Kiki's Delivery Service, with Deleuze and Guattari's writings on ‘the girl’ – where the girl represented as ‘real’ in a fantasy meets the girl written (...) as a metaphor in a theoretical intervention. This inflicts a sense of violence, of abstraction, to both the figures of ‘girl’. On the one hand, Miyazaki's work, removed from the discourse of anime, is placed under a feminist scrutiny, while on the other hand, Deleuze and Guattari's notion of the ‘girl’, extracted from the logic of the original texts, is reinserted into feminist renditions. The two readings are coordinated by a specific intention. This is to imagine the feminist potential of the ‘girl’. Occasionally the two works appear to talk to each other, yet sometimes they stand incommensurable. The texts animate each other without being subsumed by each other – inhabiting and following the movements to trace the other as fields of singularities which cannot be reduced to fixed identities or parallels. This transversal act of reading does not aim at coercing the Deleuzian notion of the girl upon Kiki, but rather looks forward to the conversations generated between the two narratives. (shrink)