Unbecoming Cinema

Front matter

UNBECOMING

EMA

NCOUNTERS WITH

Part I: Exposing and Revealing

Chapter One: Death 24X A Haecceity: Or Deleuze, Life and the Ethico-Aesthetics of Documenting Suicide in (and off) The Bridge

Chapter Two: Cinema and/as Autism: Disorder-ing Movements from the Intellect to Intuition, Ego to the Eco, and ‘Pre-chunked’ Perception to In-forming Haecceitic ‘Shapes’ (via Deligny and Guattari)

Part Il: Distorting and Perverting

Chapter Three: Head Cinema as Body without Organs: On Jodorowsky’s Bitter Pill Films and Their Spinozian Parallels

Chapter Four: That’s ‘Really’ Sick: Pervert Horror, Torture Porn(ology), Bad-Taste and Emetic Affect in Lucifer Valentine’s Unbecoming ‘Cinema of Repulsions’

Exits Works Cited

183 187 207

Acknowledgements

I cannot express enough thanks to all those who directly or indirectly made the completion of this book possible. First and foremost I must extend an immeasurable debt of gratitude to David Martin-Jones and William Brown for their unbending support, counsel and benevolence. The book has been enhanced beyond measure by their willingness to read and comment upon different chapters and drafts over the years, on which they characteristically offered their usual acute insights and invaluable suggestions. A special thanks must also be extended to Melissa Shani Brown for agreeing to read various chapters of this book later in the process, and for gifting me with her usual perceptive ideas, and for dragging so many forgotten histories and etymologies back out into the light. I must also thank here Paul Coates, Janet Stewart, Simon Ward, David Hewitt and Dina Iordanova, whose guidance and mentorship earlier in my career have also inexorably led to my writing of this book. This book is also dedicated to the memory of Mark Brownrigg, the music man.

Over the years many other people have also inspired with their thoughts, ideas, jokes, kindness and laughter. I owe you all. Amongst them a special debt of gratitude goes out to Clifton Evers, Simon Harrison, Adrian Hadland, Adam Knee, Filippo Gilardi, Paul Martin, Bjarke Liboriussen, Canan Balan, Serazer Peckerman, Yun-hua Chen, Vlastimir Sudar, Lars Kristensen, Anna Powell, David Sorfa, Teresa Rizzo, Ruby Cheung and the members of The Cinematic Thinking Network, particularly Robert Sinnerbrink and Lisa Trahair. Thanks also to Geraint Evans, in memorandum.

My eternal thanks as always goes to the Fleming Clan, and to Moira and David, Ruth and Kenny in particular, for reasons I can't even begin to go into here. I must also thank Michael and Ellen, and my other wonderful in-laws for their warmth and hospitality all around the world. A massive thanks to the outlaws too, who know who they are. In loving memory of Hamilton, Carrie, Isobel, Joyce, Bob and Colin.

I must also thank Jelena Stanovnik, Matt Greenfield and the Intellect team for their patience and guidance. Finally, a very special thanks to my beautiful wife Mira, whose love and support is everything to me.

Some sections of chapter three appeared in an earlier form in Cinemas, Identities and Beyond. All errors and deficiencies are my own.

Misfortune, sickness, madness, even the approach of death have two aspects: in one sense, they separate me from my power, in another sense, they endow me with a strange power, as though I possessed a dangerous means of exploration, which is also a terrifying realm to explore.

Gilles Deleuze

Introduction

On Ethics and Evental Encounters

How does one become conscious of oneself, of God, and of things? (Deleuze 1988: 28)

Antonin Artaud, thinking through, or with, stimulating works of art offered one of the

few ameliorations from the smothering drudgery of so-called ‘normal (or normalized) life. The other came from the emancipatory embrace of madness, delirium and disorder. Imprimis, Unbecoming Cinema sets out to synthesize both, for today we arguably need disruptive encounters evermore, to help defamiliarize, disorganize and destabilize the systems that everywhere deform and distort life. Although admittedly exploring a range of mad and maddening films and ‘non-cinema (see Brown 2016; Nagib 2016) from diverse sectors, times and places - aimed at a broad spectrum of demographics including film festival audiences, art gallery visitors, YouTube viewers, ‘head audiences’ and niche ‘gore whore’ fangirls - the works explored throughout Unbecoming Cinema appear arranged together courtesy of a shared desire to construct new conceptual dimensions for thought, and think or impart difference.

More specifically, the book sets out to explore, survey, map and reconnoitre a diverse range of ethico-political films that work to communicate! what it is ‘we are up against, and raise ethical questions about “how best to proceed. Or to put it more plainly, the book dives into expressive screen projects that desire or aspire to make a real difference in the world, by plugging themselves into, and operating upon, the nerves, brains, bodies and milieus they encounter. Unbecoming Cinema is primarily about moving encounters, then, and is itself a product of these moving encounters with thinking films: of being touched by artistic bodies that communicate difference, or agitated to feel-think alterity. As such, we maintain that the ‘delirious’ (Seem 2004) ethical philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, both with and without his erstwhile collaborator Félix Guattari, appears best suited for approaching such forms of film; not only for its capacity to conceptualize becomings, events and the thinking of difference, but also because against any narrow conception of ivory tower intellectualism, Deleuze and Guattari insist that philosophy be inseparable from a lived way of life, and address itself to the real-world problems that confront us (otherwise it would be of absolutely no use).

What remains true of philosophy also extends to our understanding of ethical art throughout this project, for this too is comprehended in terms of addressing itself to real-world problems, or operating as a productive agent or force for change. This is to say, the unorthodox films of this project are not principally explored as stable texts to be laid out and

F or both the philosopher-cum-artist Friedrich Nietzsche and the artist-cum-philosopher hermeneutically deciphered or interpreted. Rather, and contra to such negative approaches to media, we view these ‘unsettling’ and ‘unbecoming’ films as active agents, dynamic forces, machinic bodies or immanent modalities that display a positive ability to modify viewer's senses and thoughts, and generate actual movements of world. The ethical or evental encounter stemming thereof becomes a primary focus of this book, particularly with regard to how such encounters potentially increase an individual or collective body’s range of ‘affections, their ‘power of action; or else aid them in coming into ‘full possession of that power (see Deleuze 1992: 269).

Our opening epigraph, which appears in Deleuze’s writing on Benedict Spinozas Ethics, relates comparable notions to the formation of adequate ideas. That is, empowering forms of knowing that increase one’s ability to live, act and be affected. Of particular relevance to this project is how this three-fold question can also broadly account for the forms of ‘philosophical’ enquiry raised by the various audio-visual projects explored throughout this book; or the forms of questions the films prompt their viewers to think about, or become conscious of, during and after the screening event. For good or bad, however, and as the title of the book suggests, the types of encounter explored throughout Unbecoming Cinema: Unsettling Encounters with Ethical Event Films are rarely customary or run-of-the-mill, and can be understood using their form and content to provoke and agitate their viewers. As such, we must here temper an early warning to our prospective readers. Note, the films explored hereafter undeniably encroach upon contentious, troubling, shocking, provocative, disgusting, transgressive and taboo topics and themes that are likely to offend or upset certain sensibilities. In addressing our subtitle first, readers would do well to recall that in everyday parlance, to feel ‘unsettled’ or suffer from ‘unsettling’ means to be disturbed by something: to be made to feel uneasy, anxious or worried. Being unsettled simultaneously implies a sense of being inconstant, though, of being altered or disrupted: like the unsettling of the riverbed or the ocean floor by dynamic movements of water. Many chapters in this book accordingly explore filmic encounters that are unsettling in both these senses of the term: being at once moving emotional encounters, which concomitantly disturb sedimentalized modes of perceiving, feeling or thinking. For across all four chapters we necessarily dive into the unsettling: disturbing documentaries that record and display actual suicides; disrobing art installations, art therapy films, and art brut videos that positively portray autism, “brain disorders’ and ‘machinic animism; distorting drug cinemas that promote spiritual and physical revolt; and revolting pervert(ing) torture-porn designed to turn our stomachs and instil feelings of disgust. Albeit in an ethical way.

By foregrounding the ethical potentials bound up in such encounters, Unbecoming Cinema necessarily finds itself allied with a tranche of recent works that appear to reject dipping once more into the cinematic ‘canon of joy’ (Culp 2016: 1), and instead confront works that patently do not leave their viewers happy, cathartically soothed, or even necessarily entertained. Indeed, in titles such as Mikita Brottman’s Offensive Films (2005), and more recently Nocolaj Litbecker’s The Feel-Bad Film (2015), we can locate scholars gauging the political importance of films that appear deliberately antagonistic, assaultive, boring, confusing, despairing, frustrating, humiliating, irritating, irksome, misfortunate, sickening, traumatic or worrying. Lübecker critically foregrounds the importance of films by directors - such as Lars von Trier and Harmony Korine - who deliberately deploy negative affects to unground viewers, as a means of stimulating valuable ethico-political thought patterns (2015: 171). Film here surfaces a privileged medium for making us aware of the role non-positive feelings play in modern life, particularly by operating in a cruel fashion upon our bodies and minds. Accordingly, as Lübecker puts it, these feel-bad films help highlight ‘the Artaudian dimension of going via the body of the spectator to her metaphysics, in an unpleasant operation that we know ‘the patient will survive’ (Lübecker 2015: 169).

Such ethical impulses and gestures might also be recognized as part of a wider reappraisal and critique of what, after Slavoj Zizek, we might call the political factor of enjoyment (2008). And in this sense Unbecoming Cinema, like these aforementioned titles, might also be thought in relation to a broader spread of works that include Lauren Berlant’s Cruel Optimism (2011), Sarah Ahmed’s The Promise of Happiness (2010), Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism (2009) and the blazing political manifestoes by The Institute for Precarious Consciousness (2014) and The Invisible Committee (2005), which confront dead-on the circulation of so many negative affects, sad passions and bad feelings that increasingly impact life within so-many modern societies.

Because the majority of the films explored in this book are also peripheral personal-political projects emerging from the shadowy margins of the commercial industry or the military-entertainment complex,’ we also often encounter emancipating experimentation with film form, format, content and expression, which further disturb or unsettle what it is we might traditionally think of as cinema, either as a mode or practice. Such fluid approaches are again best accommodated by Deleuze and Guattari’s immanent schizoanalytic paradigms, wherein any nominal notion of ‘cinema’ is recast to account for its contingent borderings, while recognizing it as a dynamic living assemblage caught cross-pollinating with other fecund bodies, forces and ‘desiring machines, which ignite ongoing processes of de- and reterritorialization, qua becoming different. In the same vein, recent standout ‘intermedia, ‘transmedia’ and media-archaeology projects such as Sean Cubitt’s The Cinema Effect (2004), Thomas Elsaesser’s “The New Film History as Media Archaeology’ (2004), Pavle Levi's Cinema By Other Means (2012), Jefferey Geiger and Karin Littau’s edited collection on Cinematicity (2013) as well as Steven Shaviros work on ‘Post-cinematic affect’ (2010) display fruitful parallels with the unsettled forms of film we engage with throughout this project. For in all these what we often encounter is the familiar image of mainstream cinema in its absence, or difference. That is, in unfamiliar or hybrid forms that appear to ‘do’ film differently, and as such contingently interfere with any stable notions we might have of a particular genre, its viewing practices, or even what we should experience with cinema. Accordingly, many of the films explored henceforth can be understood as making palpable Elsaesser’s conceptualization of the cinema as a ‘philosophical perpetuum mobile’ (Elsaesser 2008: 239); a notion that forces us to restlessly interrogate the hyper-plastic medium cinema always-already is, and pay heed to how it becomes modified, deformed and detoured in its distorting and perverting encounters with its ‘outside’ (changing industries, technologies, politics, economics, social practices, and the nature of the real).

We can locate a geopolitical iteration of this self-same deterritorializing impulse in Victor Fan’s Cinema Approaching Reality (2015). Characteristically, Fan there invites readers to reinterrogate and re-perceive ‘traditional’ occidental film theory’s thinking of the aporia between art and the real; first by considering it from the perspective of its oriental ‘outside’ and then by passing these ontological and epistemological considerations through a defamiliarizing eastern prism. With this reorienting gesture, the cinematic writing of philosophers of film such as André Bazin and Deleuze are literally and metaphorically shanghaied,* becoming estranged and made alien as they are re-read and re-imagined through the lenses of Chinese critical theory and Buddhist thought. At the very end of his mind-bending book-length enquiry, Fan finally unbuttons Bazin’s famous ontological question of “What is cinema?’ by inviting readers to ponder instead the more enigmatic Zen-like problem of: “What is not cinema?’ (Fan 2015: 222). The making strange of the cinema bound up in this gesture ethically and politically resonates with our investigation into what we are conceptually calling ‘unbecoming’ cinema here, and which at this stage I must confess to not being the sole offender in fashioning. Indeed, an earlier iteration of ‘unbecoming cinema was forwarded by William Brown and I in our reading of Gaspar Noé’s Enter the Void (2009), which was published in 2015 in Film-Philosophy as “Voiding cinema: Subjectivity beside itself, or unbecoming cinema in Enter the Void. There, we highlighted the extent to which digital imaging technologies ostensibly allowed the cinema as we knew it to stand outside and beside itself - in a manner metonymically mirrored by the dying and reborn character Oscar (Nathaniel Brown) within the narrative - so that the film and viewer could better ponder or prehend the non-fixity of being alongside notions of death and re-birth relevant to cinema's digital becomings (Brown and Fleming 2015).

Brown’s subsequent writing on Supercinema and ‘non-cinema’ has since served to bifurcate or vacillate these earlier discussions, branching them off in two distinct yet complimentary directions. In Supercinema (2015), for example, Brown explores Hollywood blockbuster manifestations of digital cinematic expression, while foregrounding the novel becomings and new ontologies opened up by the wider digital event. Echoing Jonathan Beller (2006), Brown remains aware that these particular manifestations of cinema are ideologically co-extensive and synonymous with capitalism. Thus, if in this project Brown shows that there can be philosophical profundity in even ‘vapid’ Hollywood blockbusters, in his later work he encourages us to see that there is likewise philosophical value ‘in even the “worst” films in the world’ (Brown forthcoming). Indeed, in ‘Non-cinema: Digital, ethics, multitude, which he expands in his forthcoming monograph of the same title, Brown takes us down an altogether different ethical path, away from the centres of commercial film-making, towards the digitally enabled democratic peripheries and margins - and the weedy peripheries within those margins — of the lo-fi non-commercial underbelly of global digital screen culture. In his search for alternative (Dusselean) ‘barbarian’ philosophies and non-cinema expressions, which become reminiscent of François Laruelle’s ‘non-philosophy’ and ‘non-photography’ models (2011, 2012),* Brown investigates the work of amateur/ alternative USA directors such as Giuseppe Andrews, that find clear parallels with the sick and perverse independent films we explore in chapter four here. Certainly, the “Vomit Gore’ work of Lucifer Valentine, like the marginal bad taste work of Andrews and certain so-called ‘mumblecore’ directors, is celebrated for its clear sense of ‘thinking outside the box office’ and for its truly thought-provoking and unbecoming nature (more on which later). Of course, these off course and outlandish forays into the offensive and trashy margins also recall an already long line of critical and philosophical engagements with alternative screen cultures, tastes, practices and politico-aesthetics, which include, but are not limited to, realizations and/or conceptualizations of a ‘counter-cinema’ (Wollen), ‘imperfect-cinema (Garcia Espinosa), ‘third cinema (Solanis and Getino), ‘amateur cinema’ (Zimmerman) or ‘bad cinema (Sconce) (see Brown 2016: 116).

Perhaps demonstrating the timely nature of such enquiries, in the very same edition of Film-Philosophy that Brown’s introduction is published in, we can also discover Lucia Nagib’s own slightly different take on what ‘non-cinema means today. Nagib’s notion of non-cinema is more precisely informed by her critical engagement with Jean-Francois Lyotard’s concept of ‘acinema, André Bazin’s description of the ‘impure cinema, and Alain Badiou’s theorization of the parasitic arts bastard ‘inaesthetics:

As this latter critical coordinate also becomes significant for our larger investigation, we might minimally unpack it a little before proceeding. Worth recalling here is that throughout his writing Badiou maintains that philosophy and cinema are both impure arts and practices, which reveal a dissimilar and asymmetrical relationship with regard to how they ‘think (or provoke thinking). On the one hand, an art form like cinema offers itself up as one of the fundamental ‘conditions’ for philosophy, which is itself a ‘truthless’ medium that needs the cinema to vampirically feed upon and ‘re-think (cinema as an object for philosophy). On the other hand, the cinema is an art form that functions perfectly well without philosophy. It is this realization that ultimately leads Badiou to coin his neologistic term ‘inaesthetics, which is designed to draw a distinction between the way in which art thinks and the manner in which philosophy re-thinks art (qua aesthetics). Or, as Badiou renders it in the preface to his Handbook of Inaesthetics (2005):

By ‘inaesthetics’ I understand a relation of philosophy to art that, maintaining that art is itself a producer of truths, makes no claim to turn art into an object for philosophy. Against aesthetic speculation, inaesthetics describes the strictly intraphilosophical effects produced by the independent existence of some works of art.

(Badiou 2005: i)

Badiou also understands the cinema to be an impure art at its core, outlining it as a parasitical art form that synthesizes and democratizes all the other arts, without for all that actually presenting them. Picking up on such ideas witnesses scholars such as Brown and Nagib expanding on the important role that ‘non-cinematic’ forces (from artistic, political and technological fields) have upon the changing nature of film (and by extension the real). Together, such forays into the realms of the non-philosophical and the non-cinematic become indicative of a larger swell of titles that increasingly demand that those who study film and/or philosophy ‘zoom out; as such, and pay heed to the broader landscape, or historical events, while recognizing the complex entanglements and intermingling of other technologies, practices, institutions, movements, artworks, thoughts and non-human forces, actors and factors that directly or indirectly interfere with and impact how and what philosophy and film can think today. In the wake of such ideas, Unbecoming Cinema remains politically alert to the in-forming historical, artistic and non-cinematic formations that impact the unsettling of cinema as a heteroclite and dynamic (inter)medium or apparatus, with several chapters touching upon how film - as an audio-visual mode and social practice - becomes and unbecomes, or reterritorializes and deterritorializes, as it forges transforming articulations with its outside.

Here, the unsettling and emancipatory drives reified by the form and expression of many of the films necessarily dovetail into our notion of ‘unbecoming cinema; which is reshaped here to be more than just another polysemous portmanteau tactically deployed to defamiliarize or disturb our habitual thinking of the cinema as a technosocial medium and practice. To spell it out, beyond highlighting how film becomes and unbecomes as it makes assemblages with other bodies and forces (as the second half of the book makes abundantly clear), the specific notion of an unbecoming cinema mobilized here also performs a spiralling return to reconnect us to notions of disturbing and unsettling films - particularly with regard to our encounters with taboo transgressing drug films and Vomit Gore BDSM? horror porn that often stand accused of being ‘unbecoming’ in the more vernacular sense of the term: being deemed too disturbing, disgusting, unseemly, immoral, pretentious, unflattering or unpalatable for conservative tastes. As we will soon discover, though, these choices are often adopted as part of a broader tactic to help promote the ethical perception of alternative conceptual dimensions, and provoke the thinking of difference.

Thinking Ethically with Films (and Deleuze)

Of late, many have commented that the study of film, and in particular ‘film-philosophy’ - which constitutes a host of practices that David Martin-Jones broadly defines as being concerned with ‘how films philosophise’ or ‘do philosophy’ (2016a: 6) - has undergone something of an ‘ethical turr (see e.g. Nagib 2011: 10, Choi and Frey 2014: 1, Sinnerbrink 2016: 5). Certainly, if one were to construct an extensive catalogue of recent titles that contain a conjugated nominal clustering of ‘film/cinema’ and/as ‘ethics; it would easily plug several pages, even if printed in size ten font. A by no means exhaustive smattering of book-length specimens in this grain would have to contain stand-out monographs such as Lisa Downing and Libby Saxton’s Film and Ethics (2010), Lúcia Nagib’s World Cinema and the Ethics of Realism (2011), Joseph Kupfer’s Feminist Ethics in Film (2012), David Leiwei Lis Economy Emotion and Ethics in Chinese Cinema (2016), Robert Sinnerbrink’s Cinematic Ethics (2016) and the far-reaching edited collections such as Ward E. Jones and Samantha Vice’s Ethics at The Cinema (2011), Jacqui Miller’s Film and Ethics (2013) and Jinhee Choi and Mattias Frey’s Cine-Ethics (2014). Collectively, if not individually, this expanding cluster of titles draw on a diverse range of movies plucked from the ‘polycentric ‘world of cinemas’ (see Nagib 2011: 1; Martin-Jones 2016b: 69), while putting them into productive dialogue with a legion of eminent thinkers and philosophers such as Jacques Lacan, Emmanuel Lévinas, Laura Mulvey, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Jacques Ranciére, Stanley Cavell, André Bazin, Enrique Dussel and Alain Badiou, to name just a few.

To speak generally, we might note that this growing field characteristically betrays a collective movement away from any quest for grand unifying theories, and instead, to hijack Choi and Frey’s observations, discloses a preference for ‘singularity over universality, affectivity over rationality, and ethics of the particular over ethics of moral imperatives’ (2014: 2). Nonetheless, if we were to try to pick a guiding line through this ever-expanding labyrinth, we might note how much of this scholarship places emphasis on the way in which films specifically affect their viewers, while allowing them to emote and evaluate, relate to and empathize with others, or else gain new perspectives and understandings upon pressing real-world issues. Also common to many of these enquiries is their taking cognizance of a complex entanglement and immingling of politics, aesthetics and ethics bound up in in our reception and understanding of film: as text, praxis, politico-economic product or as a social practice. To channel Sinnerbrink’s recent summation of the turf, in order to fully appreciate cinema as a ‘medium of ethical experience’ (2016: x), these studies variously pay heed to three separate, yet interconnected, levels or dimensions that we can adumbrate here as the ethics within cinematic representations, the ethics of cinematic representation and the ethics and politics of cinema as a symptomatic expression of broader cultural-historical or ideological perspectives. Towards the end of his book, Sinnerbrink also points forward to an important fourth dimension that he sees as being specifically linked to ‘how it is films do what they do when they express or evoke ethical experiences in their viewers.

In recognizing the importance of all these dimensions, Unbecoming Cinema takes time in each and every chapter to explore the intersections of context, politics, aesthetics and form with regard to audio-visual expression and evocations of film-thinking, and how these different dimensions help create or configure ‘a particular philosophical view’ (Kupfer 2012: 1), or else allow a film and its viewer to ‘do’ ethics (Downing and Saxton 2010: 3; Sinnerbrink 2016: xi). Unbecoming Cinema also shares with many of these existing enquiries an understanding of film as an important and prioritized site/sight of ‘ethico-political’ thinking or thought. In working to unpack this concept somewhat, though, we might first take pause to reflect on the meanings of each of these terms, as well as the role of the hyphen in inter-connecting ethics and politics under the canopy of film aesthetics (or ‘inaesthetics’). As a starting point, we might return to Downing and Saxton’s assertion that while ethics and politics always remain ‘irreducible to one another’, consideration of cinema makes us intensely aware of how the two terms are ‘mutually implicated and enabling’ (2010: 11). Accordingly, for Downing and Saxton, cinema makes tangible the Levinasian notion that ‘ethics is an optics through which we habitually view and conceptualize [the world]’ (2010: 2). Echoes of D.N. Rodowick’s assertion here too, that all aesthetic questions of medium specificity eventually ‘turn into ethical questions’ (Rodowick 2007: 73). Of course, in the broader context of the academy’s so-called ‘affective turn, many scholars conscious of the film-optics as ethics position take pains to account for the embodied nature of film viewing. Vivian Sobchack’s Carnal Thoughts (2004), to take but one example, remains a landmark in this field, augustly foregrounding the extent to which film aesthetics materially impact the viewer's sensorium, by eliciting feeling and emotional responses as the human body and ‘the film’s body’ become experientially enfolded during the act of screening. In her explication of such experiences and emotional reactions, Sobchack demonstrates how, aesthetics as ethics ultimately emerges ‘first and corporeally as sense-ability and responseability’ (2004: 310).

The aforementioned explosion of works on ethics and film no doubt also overlap with another fanning spread of titles fashioned under the ‘Deleuzian Film Studies banner. At the time of writing, the website Deleuzecinema.com reliably informs its users that there are between twenty to thirty monographs penned in this particular film-philosophy style, not to mention the ever-growing catalogue of edited collections, special journal issues, articles, book chapters and talks that collectively institute this sprawling rhizomatic field. Of course, it could be argued that the turn to Deleuze is in and of itself simply symptomatic of film-philosophy’s wider ethical (and affective) turn: if not the reverse. For sure, the conflation of Deleuze’s thought models (both with and without Guattari) with ethics boasts a well-furnished history. We might recall that in the preface to Deleuze and Guattari’s first co-authored collaboration, Michel Foucault notes: ‘I would say that Anti- Oedipus (may the authors forgive me) is a book of ethics’ (2004a: xv). Ronald Bogue goes further still, suggesting that in a sense, ‘all of Deleuze’s work is concerned with ethics, in that ethical principles inform his basic conception of thought and what it means to think (Bogue 2012: 7). Or as D.N. Rodowick renders it, with regard to Deleuze’s thought models more broadly, ‘the fundamental ethical choice is to believe in this world and its powers of transformation (Rodowick 2009: 99). It is precisely for such reasons that many, such as J.H. Müller and William Brown, discuss Deleuzian thought in terms of being a ‘difference machine’ (see Brown 2015: 4), or else (in my own preferred variant) a ‘difference engine’

It is no secret here that Deleuze (and Guattari) took inspiration from Nietzsche, picking up his arrows and furthering his conviction that truly ethical ‘thought is creation, not will to truth (Deleuze and Guattari 2011: 54). At its heart, then, a Deleuzian ethics is associated with an immanent political search for a ‘new health; which often only arrives alongside a new

‘art’ or ‘style’ of thinking/living. Deleuze famously earmarked the cinema as a particularly privileged site/sight for achieving this, not only because cinemas psychomechanics ‘makes thought immanent to the image’ (168), but as Bogue elucidates, because ‘learning to think otherwise is a manner of learning to see in a new way (Bogue 2012: 4). Accordingly, for many Deleuzian scholars, the two Cinema books are best understood - like Deleuze’s other forays into painting, literature, architecture and music - as ethical exercises that are principally concerned with the alternative ‘ways of being that art provokes in us’ (Rodowick 2009: 99; see also Bogue 2009, 2012). In a chapter in Cinema 2 entitled “Thought and cinema Deleuze posits that because cinema literally puts movement into the image, it should be understood as a transversal spiritual automaton that is capable of engineering a shock to thought by ‘communicating vibrations to the cortex, touching the nervous and cerebral system directly’ (Deleuze 2005b: 151).

Let us recall here that Deleuze’s original models of cinematic thinking were based upon his Spinozian (immanent) and Bergsonian (temporal) take on the medium, which demanded we first believe in this world, and then make ourselves open to becoming with it (Rodowick 2009: 100). Deleuze’s models of cinematic thinking were also mapped over two distinct historical moments (predominantly effecting Europe and the United States) that nurtured a shift from a classical pre-war modality (Cinema 1’s movement-image) to a modernist post-war one (Cinema 2’s time-image). In Rodowick’s reading of Deleuze’s two Cinema books, these distinct regimes are described offering viewers different ethical paths across the plane of immanence (2009: 109). In the first instance, the movement-image, as it was expressed through the work of directors such as Sergei Eisenstein and D.W. Griffith, made a belief in the possible transformation of the world tangible. In difference to these, the post-war time-image shaped by modernist directors such as Orson Welles and Jean-Luc Godard appeared to disclose an alternative intuition of an interior, deeper world, ‘before man, as it were, produced from a shock to thought or by thought’s confrontation with what is unthinkable. This is a confrontation with a time that is not that of Being, identity, or teleology, but rather, an anticipatory time - of contingency, the purely conditional, the nondetermined or not yet.

To make a parenthetical comment on such issues here, it is interesting to note that several chapters in Annie van den Oever’s recent edited collection on Viktor Shklovsky’s notion of ostranenie (variously translated as ‘making strange, ‘deautomatizing’ or ‘defamiliarizing’) make overt links to Deleuze’s film-thinking models. In a section revisiting cognitive and evolutionary-cognitive perspectives, for example, Lazlé Tarnay notes significant overlaps between Deleuze’s concept of ‘deterritorializatio and Shklovsky’s notion of ‘defamiliarization: There, Deleuze’s Bergsonian view that ‘the radically new, a radically new experience, can only come through the senses and not through some rearrangement of the already known’ finds significant resonances with Shklovsky’s formalist view of arts defamiliarizing cognitive potentialities (2010: 155). Crucial to both models, Tarnay maintains, ‘is that deautomatizing perception is tantamount to constituting a challenge to the intellect which “normally” can only classify’ (2010: 147). In another chapter Miklós Kiss harnesses Godard’s Pierrot le Fou (1965) to help further Shklovsky’s idea that the main ‘purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known’ (2010: 165). Kiss thus queries how Godard’s film disrupts our habitual cognitive modes of perceiving and knowing in both a ‘bottom-up and ‘top-down’ manner. By so doing, his exploration forges significant parallels with Deleuze’s earlier discussions of Godard’s cinema as ‘a pedagogy of the image’ (2005a: 14) and his outline more generally of a deterritorializing ‘“Godardian pedagogy’ (2005b: 258).