Above, the first of five videos documenting the “Post-Cinema and/as Speculative Media Theory” panel I chaired on March 27, 2015 at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies annual conference in Montreal.
The room was jam-packed with people (as you can see in the images here), and the panel was equally jam-packed with dense theoretical discussions of post-cinema. These videos are meant to compensate for the limited space and the limited time (and cognitive capacity) to process these thinkers’ ideas on the spot, preserving and opening their presentations to a wider audience.
This, the shortest of the videos, contains my introductory remarks outlining my overall rationale for organizing the panel.
Stay tuned for videos of talks by Steven Shaviro, Patricia Pisters, Adrian Ivakhiv, and Mark B. N. Hansen, which will be appearing here in the coming weeks (if you like, you can subscribe to the blog to make sure you don’t miss them; see the link on the upper right-hand side of the screen). In the meantime, you can read their abstracts here:
Finally, you can look forward to contributions by all four speakers (and many more as well) to the open-access collection Post-Cinema: Theorizing 21st-Century Film, which I am currently co-editing with Julia Leyda for REFRAME Books (and which will be coming out later this year).
Here are a few images, all taken from Twitter, from the “Post-Cinema and/as Speculative Media Theory” panel that I chaired this morning, bright and early at 9am.
Finally, if you couldn’t make it, couldn’t see the speakers, couldn’t hear them, or couldn’t follow all the intricacies of their very rich and theoretically dense papers this morning, you may be interested to know that the entire panel was videotaped and will be available here soon!
Sketch for a multi-screen video installation, which I’ll be presenting and discussing alongside some people doing amazing work in connection with John Supko & Bill Seaman’s Emergence Lab and their Generative Media seminar — next Thursday, February 26, 2015 at the Duke Media Arts + Sciences Rendezvous.
In some ways, the digital glitch might be seen as the paradigmatic art form of our convergence culture — where “convergence” is understood more in the sense theorized by Friedrich Kittler than that proposed by Henry Jenkins. That is, glitches speak directly to the interchangeability of media channels in a digital media ecology, where all phenomenal forms float atop an infrastructural stream of zeroes and ones. They thrive upon this interchangeability, while they also point out to us its limits. Indeed, such glitches are most commonly generated by feeding a given data format into the “wrong” system — into a piece of software that wasn’t designed to handle it, for example — and observing the results. Thus, such “databending” practices (knowledge of which circulates among networks of actors constituting a highly “participatory culture” of their own) expose the incompleteness of convergence, the instability of apparently “fixed” data infrastructures as they migrate between various programs and systems for making that data manifest.
As a result, the practice of making glitches provides an excellent praxis-based propaedeutic to a materialist understanding of post-cinematic affect. They magnify the “discorrelations” that I have suggested constitute the heart of post-cinematic moving images, providing a hands-on approach to phenomena that must seem abstract and theoretical. For example, I have claimed:
CGI and digital cameras do not just sever the ties of indexicality that characterized analogue cinematography (an epistemological or phenomenological claim); they also render images themselves fundamentally processual, thus displacing the film-as-object-of-perception and uprooting the spectator-as-perceiving-subject – in effect, enveloping both in an epistemologically indeterminate but materially quite real and concrete field of affective relation. Mediation, I suggest, can no longer be situated neatly between the poles of subject and object, as it swells with processual affectivity to engulf both.
Now, I still stand behind this description, but I acknowledge that it can be hard to get one’s head around it and to understand why such a claim makes sense (or makes a difference). It probably doesn’t help (unless you’re already into that sort of thing) that I have had recourse to Bergsonian metaphysics to explain the idea:
The mediating technology itself becomes an active locus of molecular change: a Bergsonian body qua center of indetermination, a gap of affectivity between passive receptivity and its passage into action. The camera imitates the process by which our own pre-personal bodies synthesize the passage from molecular to molar, replicating the very process by which signal patterns are selected from the flux and made to coalesce into determinate images that can be incorporated into an emergent subjectivity. This dilation of affect, which characterizes not only video but also computational processes like the rendering of digital images (which is always done on the fly), marks the basic condition of the post-cinematic camera, the positive underside of what presents itself externally as a discorrelating incommensurability with respect to molar perception. As Mark Hansen has argued, the microtemporal scale at which computational media operate enables them to modulate the temporal and affective flows of life and to affect us directly at the level of our pre-personal embodiment. In this respect, properly post-cinematic cameras, which include video and digital imaging devices of all sorts, have a direct line to our innermost processes of becoming-in-time […].
I have, to be sure, pointed to examples (such as the Paranormal Activity and Transformers series of films) that illustrate or embody these ideas in a more palpable, accessible form. And I have indicated some of the concrete spaces of transformation — for example, in the so-called “smart TV”:
today the conception of the camera should perhaps be expanded: consider how all processes of digital image rendering, whether in digital film production or simply in computer-based playback, are involved in the same on-the-fly molecular processes through which the video camera can be seen to trace the affective synthesis of images from flux. Unhinged from traditional conceptions and instantiations, post-cinematic cameras are defined precisely by the confusion or indistinction of recording, rendering, and screening devices or instances. In this respect, the “smart TV” becomes the exemplary post-cinematic camera (an uncanny domestic “room” composed of smooth, computational space): it executes microtemporal processes ranging from compression/decompression, artifact suppression, resolution upscaling, aspect-ratio transformation, motion-smoothing image interpolation, and on-the-fly 2D to 3D conversion. Marking a further expansion of the video camera’s artificial affect-gap, the smart TV and the computational processes of image modulation that it performs bring the perceptual and actional capacities of cinema – its receptive camera and projective screening apparatuses – back together in a post-cinematic counterpart to the early Cinématographe, equipped now with an affective density that uncannily parallels our own. We don’t usually think of our screens as cameras, but that’s precisely what smart TVs and computational display devices in fact are: each screening of a (digital or digitized) “film” becomes in fact a re-filming of it, as the smart TV generates millions of original images, more than the original film itself – images unanticipated by the filmmaker and not contained in the source material. To “render” the film computationally is in fact to offer an original rendition of it, never before performed, and hence to re-produce the film through a decidedly post-cinematic camera. This production of unanticipated and unanticipatable images renders such devices strangely vibrant, uncanny […].
Recent news about Samsung’s smart TVs eavesdropping on our conversations may have made those devices seem even more uncanny than when I first wrote the lines above, but this, I have to admit, is still a long way from impressing the theory of post-cinematic transformation on my readers in anything like a materially robust or embodied manner — though I am supposedly describing changes in the affective, embodied parameters of life itself.
Hence my recourse to the glitch, and to the practice of making glitches as a means for gaining first-hand knowledge of the transformations I associate with post-cinema. In lieu of another argument, then, I will simply describe the process of making the video at the top of this blog post. It is my belief that going through this process gave me a deeper understanding of what, exactly, I was pointing to in those arguments; by way of extension, furthermore, I suggest that following these steps on your own will similarly provide insight into the mechanisms and materialities of what, following Steven Shaviro, I have come to refer to as post-cinematic affect.
The process starts with a picture — in this case, a jpeg image taken by my wife on an iPhone 4S:
Following this “Glitch Primer” on editing images with text editors, I began experimenting with ImageGlitch, a nice little program that opens the image as editable text in one pane and immediately updates visual changes to the image in another. (The changes themselves can be made with any normal plain-text editor, but ImageGlitch gives you a little more control, i.e. immediate feedback.)
I began inserting the word “postnaturalism” into the text at random places, thus modifying the image’s data infrastructure. By continually breaking and unbreaking the image, I began to get a feel for the picture’s underlying structure. Finally, when I had destroyed the image to my liking, I decided that it would be more interesting to capture the process of destruction/deformation, as opposed to a static product resulting from it. Thus, I used ScreenFlow to capture a video of my screen as I undid (using CMD-Z) all the changes I had just made.
Because I had made an inordinately large number of edits, this step-wise process of reversing the edits took 8:30 minutes, resulting in a rather long and boring video. So, in Final Cut Pro, I decided to speed things up a little — by 2000%, to be exact. (I also cropped the frame to show only the image, not the text.) I then copied the resulting 24-second video, pasted it back in after the original, and set it to play in reverse (so that the visible image goes from a deformed to a restored state and back again).
This was a little better, but still a bit boring. What else could I do with it? One thing that was clearly missing was a soundtrack, so I next considered how I might generate one with databending techniques.
Through blog posts by Paul Hertz and Antonio Roberts, I became aware of the possibility to use the open source audio editing program Audacity to open image files as raw data, thereby converting them into sound files for the purposes of further transformation. Instead of going through with this process of glitching, however, I experimented with opening my original jpeg image in a format that would produce recognizable sound (and not just static). The answer was to open the file with GSM encoding, which gave me an almost musical soundtrack — but a little high-pitched for my taste. (To be honest, it sounded pretty cool for about 2 seconds, and then it was annoying to the point of almost hurting). So I exported the sound as an mp3 file, which I imported into my Final Cut Pro project and applied a pitch-shifting filter (turning it down 2400 cents or 2 octaves).
At this point, I could have exported the video and been done with it, but while discovering the wonders of image databending, I ran across some people doing wonderful things with Audacity and video files as well. A tutorial at quart-avant-poing.com was especially helpful, while videos like the following demonstrate the range of possibilities:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eoCvP6mrKQw
So after exporting my video, complete with soundtrack, from Final Cut Pro, I imported the whole thing into Audacity (using A-Law encoding) and exported it back out (again using A-Law encoding), thereby glitching the video further — simply by the act of importing and exporting, i.e. without any intentional act of modification!
I opened the video in VLC and was relatively happy with the results; but then I noticed that other video players, such as QuickTime, QuickTime Player 7, and video editing software like Final Cut and Premiere Pro were all showing something different in their rendering of “the same” data! It was at this point that the connection to my theoretical musings on post-cinematic cameras, smart TVs, and the “fundamentally processual” nature of on-the-fly computational playback began to hit home in a very practical way.
As the author of the quart-avant-poing tutorial put it:
For some reasons (cause players work in different ways) you’ll get sometimes differents results while opening your glitched file into VLC or MPC etc… so If you like what you get into VLC and not what you see in MPC, then export it again directly from VLC for example, which will give a solid video file of what you saw in it, and if VLC can open it but crash while re-exporting it in a solid file, don’t hesitate to use video capture program like FRAPS to record what VLC is showing, because sometimes, capturing a glitch in clean file can be seen as the main part of the job cause glitches are like wild animals in a certain way, you can see them, but putting them into a clean video file structure is a mess.
Thus, I experimented with a variety of ways (and codecs) for exporting (or “capturing”) the video I had seen, but which proved elusive to my attempts to make repeatable (and hence visible to others). I went through several iterations of video and audio tracks until I was able to approximate what I thought I had seen and heard. At the end of the process, when I had arrived at the version embedded at the top of this post, I felt like I had more thoroughly probed (though without fully “knowing”) the relations between the data infrastructure and the manifest images — relations that I now saw as more thoroughly material than before. And I came, particularly, to appreciate the idea that “glitches are like wild animals.”
Strange beasts indeed! And when you consider that all digital video files are something like latent glitches — or temporarily domesticated animals — you begin to understand what I mean about the instability and revisability of post-cinematic images: in effect, glitches merely show us the truth about digital video as an essentially generative system, magnifying the interstitial spaces that post-cinematic machineries fill in with their own affective materialities, so that though a string of zeroes and ones remains unchanged as it streams through these systems, we can yet never cross the same stream twice…
The 2015 Annual C21 Conference (April 30 – May 2, 2015 at the Center for 21st Century Studies, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee) will be devoted to the theme “After Extinction,” which can be thought from a variety of related perspectives. As the conference CFP put it:
C21’s conference After Extinction will pursue the question of what it means to come “after” extinction in three different but related senses.
1) In temporal terms, what comes after extinction, not only the event of extinction but also the concept? After we think extinction what comes next? Are there historical models or examples of what comes after? Can these past extinctions measure up to present day events, or do the possible scales on which extinction might operate today make such comparisons incompatible? Is extinction something that only happens belatedly, after there are already species or forms or practices in place, or does extinction work prior to the emergence of species, as generative of the evolution or emergence of any form of life or being? Is extinction terminal or can species return, a la Jurassic Park or European projects to restore the auroch or Przewalski’s horse? Can dead or dying languages be revitalized?
2) In an epistemological sense, what does it mean for an image, graphic, text, video or film to “take after” the concept of extinction, to mediate it in such a way as to resemble or be mimetic of extinction. What is “after extinction” in the sense that a painting is “after O’Keeffe” or a child “takes after” its parent? In order to be recognized as coming after extinction an event or occasion must be seen as being related to extinction, to have been consequent or emergent from the event of extinction. Thus we mean to explore the premediation of future extinctions in a variety of formal and informal, print, audiovisual, and networked media. What forms of knowledge emerge in such anticipatory pursuits?
3) In spatial terms, what will remain physically after extinction? Extinction is not simply death or absence but a geophysical event that occurs in space. What does it mean to pursue extinction, to go “after” it with technologies and scientific techniques of making extinction legible by premediating its possible occurrence through climate change modeling or pandemic forecasting? How should one act “after extinction” in order to plan for, prevent, or preempt the end of crucial life forms, for example, by establishing seed banks or stockpiling DNA? How does the extinction of one species threaten the lifeblood of the entire biosphere (e.g., the impact of bee colony collapse on particular flora and fauna as well as on human practices like agriculture)? Have new artifacts surfaced either as sentinels or fossils of extinction (e.g., animal carcasses washed up on shore filled with plastic, or mutant plants in irradiated nuclear test fields)? Even if extinction has always been thought of as impacting a larger ecology, has the scale of risk changed in light of the accelerated networks of the 21st century?
I am very happy to have the opportunity to return to Milwaukee this year in order to pursue these questions at what promises to be another great C21 event! My own paper, which was just accepted, will focus on questions of extinction in relation to the concept of post-cinema.
Here is my abstract:
Post-Cinema after Extinction
Shane Denson
In this presentation, I argue that contemporary, digital moving-image media – what some critics have come to see as properly “post-cinematic” media – are related materially, culturally, and conceptually to extinction as their experiential horizon. Materially and technologically, post-cinema emerges as a set of aesthetic responses to the real or imagined extinction of film qua celluloid or to the death of cinema qua institution of shared reception. Significantly, however, such animating visions of technocultural transformation in the wake of the demise of a formerly dominant media regime are linked in complex ways to another experience of extinction: that of the human. That is, post-cinema is involved centrally in the (pre-)mediation of an experience of the world without us – both thematically, e.g. in films about impending or actual extinction events, and formally, in terms of a general “discorrelation” of moving images from the norms of human embodiment that governed classical cinema. Such discorrelation is evidenced in violations of classical continuity principles, for example, but it is anchored more fundamentally in a disruption of phenomenological relations established by the analogue camera. Digital cameras and algorithmic image-processing technologies confront us with images that are no longer calibrated to our embodied senses, and that therefore must partially elude or remain invisible to the human. Anticipating and intimating the eradication of human perception, post-cinema is therefore “after extinction” even before extinction takes place: it envisions and transmits affective clues about a world without us, a world beyond “correlationism,” that arises at the other end of the Anthropocene – or that we inhabit already.
Bibliography:
Denson, Shane, and Julia Leyda, eds. Post-Cinema: Theorizing 21st-Century Film. Sussex: REFRAME Books, forthcoming.
Kara, Selmin. “Beasts of the Digital Wild: Primordigital Cinema and the Question of Origins.” Sequence 1.4 (2014).
Shaviro, Steven. Post-Cinematic Affect. Winchester: Zero Books, 2009.
Sobchack, Vivian. The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1992.
_____. “The Scene of the Screen: Envisioning Photographic, Cinematic, and Electronic Presence.” Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture. Berkeley and Los Angeles: U of California P, 2004. 135-162.
I am very happy to announce that the panel I will be chairing at this year’s SCMS conference, “Post-Cinema and/as Speculative Media Theory,” has been chosen as one of eight panels to be officially sponsored by the Media and the Environment Special Interest Group. The group, of which I am proud to be a member, defines its mission thus:
The Media and the Environment Scholarly Interest Group (MESIG) aims to provide a forum for shared discussion of research and pedagogy at the intersections of media and environment. We believe that nearly every aspect of film and media practice and studies–from materials manufacturing and physical infrastructures, to filming locations and resources, to audiovisual aspects and themes, and beyond to marketing, preservation, obsolescence, and also scholarly discourse–touches matters of the environment and sustainability. Various approaches from an environmentalist perspective have been taken and more are still being developed to investigate how our mediated cultural practices have, do, and will position humans in relation to physical and natural worlds. How can we further film and media studies as a global–read planetary–concern, focused on dire changes and issues affecting the Earth and our natural surroundings? We believe our field has much to contribute to discussions and findings more frequently held in and attributed to science disciplines and Environmental Studies. With this Scholarly Interest Group, we seek to cultivate the study of significant matters of media and the environment within our field and through the representative collective that is SCMS.
I am honored that our panel — which includes one explicitly environmental film/media theorist (Adrian Ivakhiv) but also three others (Steven Shaviro, Patricia Pisters, and Mark Hansen) who are helping to define the subject of post-cinema in broadly ecological terms — has been chosen for sponsorship by the Media and the Environment SIG, and I am grateful for their recognition of the topic’s relevance for our ongoing attempts to rethink the relations between humans, our media technologies, and the environments that we inhabit, access, and transform with and through them.
Here, finally, is a list of all eight panels sponsored by the SIG:
A23: Ecocriticism
F8: Fossils, Films, and Sedimentation: Ecocritical Approaches to Archival Moving Images
G4: Media Waste: Technological Systems and the Environment
H22: Excess Hollywood: Economies of Waste in Media Industries
J12: Engaging Ecocinema: The Affects and Effects of Environmental Documentaries
The preliminary schedule for the Society of Cinema and Media Studies 2015 conference in Montreal is now online (here). As I posted recently, I will be involved in two separate panels:
First, I will be chairing the panel on “Post-Cinema and/as Speculative Media Theory” (panel K7, Friday, March 27, 2015, 9:00-10:45am) — with presenters Steven Shaviro, Patricia Pisters, Adrian Ivakhiv, and Mark B. N. Hansen. You can find the complete panel description, as well as individual abstracts, here. Note also that all participants on this panel are contributors to the forthcoming Post-Cinema: Theorizing 21st-Century Film, which I am co-editing with Julia Leyda.
Second, I will be participating in a panel on “Digital Seriality” (panel Q20, Saturday, March 28, 2015, 3:00-4:45pm) — along with Andreas Jahn-Sudmann, Scott Higgins, Dominik Maeder, and Daniela Wentz. Panel description and abstracts can be found here. And, as with the other panel, this one too has a tie-in with a publication: all the participants on this panel were contributors to the special issue of Eludamos: Journal for Computer Game Culturethat Andreas Jahn-Sudmann and I edited on the topic of “Digital Seriality.”
[UPDATE: Full video of the complete panel is now online:here.]
At the upcoming conference of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies (March 25-29, 2015 in Montréal), I will be chairing a panel on “Post-Cinema and/as Speculative Media Theory,” which brings together four of the most significant voices in the ongoing attempt to theorize our current media situation: Steven Shaviro, Patricia Pisters, Adrian Ivakhiv, and Mark B. N. Hansen.
(Not quite incidentally, all four speakers are also contributors to the forthcoming volume Post-Cinema: Theorizing 21st-Century Film, which I am co-editing with Julia Leyda.)
Here is the panel description, along with links (below) to the abstracts for the various papers:
Post-Cinema and/as Speculative Media Theory
Following debates over “the end” of film and/or cinema in the wake of the massive digitalization of moving-image media, recent film theory has begun considering the emergence of a new, properly “post-cinematic” media regime (cf. Shaviro 2010; Denson and Leyda, forthcoming). The notion of post-cinema takes up the problematic prefix “post-,” which debates over postmodernism and postmodernity taught us to treat not as a marker of definitive beginnings and ends, but as indicative of a more subtle shift or transformation in the realm of culturally dominant aesthetic and experiential forms (cf. Jameson 1991). In the context of post-cinema, this suggests not so much a clear-cut break with traditional media forms but a transitional movement taking place along an uncertain timeline, following an indeterminate trajectory, and characterized by juxtapositions and overlaps between the techniques, technologies, and aesthetic conventions of “old” and “new” moving-image media.
The ambiguous temporality of the “post-,” which intimates a feeling both of being “after” something and of being “in the middle of” uncertain changes – hence speaking to the closure of a certain past as much as a radical opening of futurity – necessitates a speculative form of thinking that is tuned to experiences of contingency and limited knowledge. With respect to twenty-first century media, theories of post-cinema inherit this disposition, relating it to concrete media transformations while speculating more broadly about the effects they might have on us, our cognitive and aesthetic sensibilities, our agency, or our sense of history.
Bringing together several key figures in the theoretical discussions of post-cinema, this panel seeks to explore and expand this speculative dimension. Steven Shaviro looks at a recent FKA twigs music video as an encapsulation of the post-cinematic media regime at large, theorizing the speculative theoretical work done by the video itself. Patricia Pisters argues that post-cinematic appropriations of archival materials lead to a necessarily speculative revision of history. Adrian Ivakhiv brings the discussion into contact with pressing issues of ecological change. Finally, Mark B. N. Hansen offers a media-philosophical perspective on post-cinema as a future-oriented mode of experience. Together, these interventions articulate post-cinema’s media-technical, aesthetic, ecological, and philosophical vectors in order to develop an emphatically speculative media theory.
Bibliography:
Denson, Shane, and Julia Leyda. Post-Cinema: Theorizing 21st-Century Film. Sussex: REFRAME Books, forthcoming.
Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke UP, 1991.
Shaviro, Steven. Post-Cinematic Affect. Winchester: Zero Books, 2010.
Chair Bio:
Shane Denson is a DAAD postdoctoral fellow at Duke University and a member of the research unit “Popular Seriality—Aesthetics and Practice.” He is the author of Postnaturalism: Frankenstein, Film, and the Anthropotechnical Interface (Transcript 2014) and co-editor of several collections: Transnational Perspectives on Graphic Narratives (Bloomsbury, 2013), Digital Seriality (special issue of Eludamos, forthcoming), and Post-Cinema: Theorizing 21st Century Film (REFRAME, forthcoming).
Finally, here are links to the individual abstracts:
FKA twigs has made a series of mesmerizing music videos over the last three years. My talk will concentrate on one of these, “Papi Pacify” (directed by FKA twigs and Tom Beard). The video deals starkly, but also obliquely, with issues of intimacy, trust, sexuality, and violence. The video is shot in continually shifting black and white, with glitter and flash effects, and composed entirely of close-ups of the faces and upper bodies of the artist (often staring directly at the camera) and her partner. The video’s editing rhythms are complex and nonlinear, involving looping via animated GIF effects, together with quick inserts and apparent slow motion. The music combines trip hop and r&b; it is floating and ambient, sung in a breathless near-whisper, with periods of instrumental intensification but no tonal shift or climax. Overall, the video disconcertingly reorders human sexuality, by means of its novel articulation of spacetime relations, of the sensorium, and of the relation between viewer/listener and work. In this way, “Papi Pacify,” and FKA twigs’ audiovisual work more generally, itself functions as a speculative revision of media theory.
Steven Shaviro is the DeRoy Professor of English at Wayne State University. He is the author of The Cinematic Body, Post-Cinematic Affect, and Melancholia, Or, The Romantic Anti-Sublime.
The Filmmaker as Metallurgist: Post-Cinema’s Commitment to Radical Contingency
Patricia Pisters (University of Amsterdam)
Contemporary film, television series, and visual arts have a particular temporal and narrative aesthetics that show how the future, always speculative and multiple, has become the dominant time for thinking. I propose calling this aesthetic mode of the digital age “the neuro-image” (Pisters 2012). Following Gilles Deleuze’s movement-images and time-images, neuro-images increasingly present us time as multiple feedback loops from possible futures, parallel worlds, and complex narrations where subtle differences can cause a world of (micropolitical) variations, different pasts for different futures.
This presentation will look at the ways in which contemporary artists and filmmakers are committed to the radical contingency of the audio-visual archive – committed to revealing hidden dimensions of history and/in our collective audio-visual archive, in order to revive new perspectives and reveal new versions of the past that seem necessary for the future of “a people to come.” In her project The Archival Fourth Dimension, for example, artist Sarah Pierce revisits newsreel archives and proposes to uncover “a different past” in Irish and colonial history. In his installation homage to Stuart Hall, The Unfinished Conversation (2012), John Akomfrah shows how personal and collective archival footage are in a perpetual dialogue where poetry and politics form an intractable bond and history becomes a speculative world of alternative histories. Silvia Kolbowski resurrects Ulrike Meinhoff in A Few Howls Again (2010) and speaks up for her corps, giving a voice to haunting questions of war, violence, and terrorism. And in Zandj Revolution (2013), filmmaker Tariq Teguia makes a journey from Algeria, to Lebanon, Palestine, Iraq, and Greece to find inspiration not only in a past revolution – the ninth-century revolution of the Zandj slaves in Iraq – but also in a rebellious and migratory cinematographic style that captures and foreshadows the spirit of the Arab revolution.
Looking at examples such as these, the presentation aims to show how filmmakers become “metallurgists” (Deleuze and Guattari 1994) following the matter-flows of the archive, bending it in concrete forms that can escape from the mnemonic depths and take on a new life, an afterlife. As a politics and a cinematic aesthetics, this undertaking becomes a never-ending story of “trying again, failing again, failing better” with a radical and speculative commitment to the contingencies of history.
Bibliography:
Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guatttari. A Thousand Plateaus. London: The Athlone Press, 1994.
Eisenstein, Sergei. The Film Sense. Trans. Jay Leyda. San Diego, New York & London: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1947.
Shaviro, Steven. Post Cinematic Affect. Winchester, UK: Zero Books, 2010.
Pisters, Patricia. The Neuro-Image: A Deleuzian Film-Philosophy for Digital Screen Culture. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012.
Author Bio:
Patricia Pisters is professor of film studies in the department of Media Studies at the University of Amsterdam. She is one of the founding editors of Necsus: European Journal of Media Studies. Publications include The Matrix of Visual Culture: Working with Deleuze in Film Theory (Stanford University Press, 2003) and The Neuro-Image: A Deleuzian Film-Philosophy of Digital Screen Culture (Stanford University Press, 2012).
