Film

The Matrix of Visual Culture: Working with Deleuze in Film Theory (Cultural Memory in the Present)

The Matrix of Visual Culture: Working with Deleuze in Film Theory (Cultural Memory in the Present)

Patricia Pisters

Language: English

Pages: 288

ISBN: 0804740283

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


This book explores Gilles Deleuze's contribution to film theory. According to Deleuze, we have come to live in a universe that could be described as metacinematic. His conception of images implies a new kind of camera consciousness, one that determines our perceptions and sense of selves: aspects of our subjectivities are formed in, for instance, action-images, affection-images and time-images. We live in a matrix of visual culture that is always moving and changing. Each image is always connected to an assemblage of affects and forces. This book presents a model, as well as many concrete examples, of how to work with Deleuze in film theory. It asks questions about the universe as metacinema, subjectivity, violence, feminism, monstrosity, and music. Among the contemporary films it discusses within a Deleuzian framework are Strange Days, Fight Club, and Dancer in the Dark.

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Spinoza believes furthermore that just as extension is determined by no {apriori) limits, so also thought has no limits: Therefore, just as the human body is not extension absolutely, but only an extension determined in a certain way, according to the laws of extended nature, by motion and rest, so also the human mind, or soul, is not thought absolutely, but only a thought determined in a certain way, according to the laws of thinking nature, by ideas, a thought which, one infers, must exist when

affect of love in terms of joy: not the union with the loved object, but joy, accompanied by the idea of an external cause. Spinoza gives a whole list of possible affects that follow from these basic ones. Ultimately, however, the subject's desire is the striving to persist in being (conatus). This striving is closely related to Deleuze's idea of body politics, which is elaborated in the Material Aspects of Subjectivity 57 next section. Clearly, Spinoza's body philosophy also implies an

self will remain in existence as long as it manages to keep external to it all those forces that can destroy it. The point is, on the contrary, that it needs to join forces with other things that can enhance its conatus. Once more, it becomes clear that, for Spinoza, to protect oneself does not mean to withdraw behind the secure borders of a stable identity. It is by opening out to the rest of nature that we become ourselves. As we already saw in the previous chapter, the borders of the Spinozian

whom we could take objective distance. The film opens with Daiga, a Lithuanian girl who comes to visit her aunt in Paris, and ends when she leaves town; we do not, however, see everything from her point of view. The film presents a free, indirect discourse by sometimes letting the camera follow a character's viewpoint and at other times wander off on its own. Many possible worlds are presented in this way: the street cleaners in the beginning of the film are given as much emphasis as the

how the gaze and the voice are two objets petit a that can give us the uncanny impression of the Real.22 He warns us, however, that "hearing with ones eyes' is not the same as "seeing with ones ears." The gaze is far more mortifying than the voice. Voice and gaze relate to each other as life and death: voice vivifies, whereas gaze mortifies, says Zizek. He gives the example of Munch s "silent scream," which is an ultimate expression of an encounter with the Real. When even the voice fails, death

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