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Archive for the ‘Cinema’ Category

Post-Cinematic Affect in the era of plasticity

Posted in Cinema, Philosophy, tagged , , , , , , , , on January 19, 2011 | 1 Comment »

It’s probably inappropriate to review a book about four films when one has only seen one, and by far the shortest (it’s a music video), of the four. So this isn’t a review so much as an appreciation of Steven Shaviro’s Post-Cinematic Affect, along with some half-digested notes I made while reading it, but which […]

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The tree of life, in pieces

Posted in Cinema, tagged , on December 21, 2010 | 3 Comments »

If you haven’t seen the trailer for Terence Malick’s forthcoming film The Tree of Life, you’re just not a real cineaste, are you? What’s better than burrowing analytically into the Heideggerian ecophilosophical themes of Malick’s films (Badlands, Days of Heaven, The Thin Red Line, The New World — before making any of them he was […]

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the model (Peirce+Whitehead): films, dogs, worlds

Posted in Cinema, Philosophy, Process-relational thought, tagged , , , , on December 2, 2010 | 4 Comments »

Here’s a version of the theoretical model I develop in Ecologies of the Moving Image. (An earlier version can be found here.) Following Peircian phenomenology (or “phaneroscopy”) and Whiteheadian ontology, that model is process-relational and triadic. (*See Note at bottom for more on the relationship between Peirce, Whitehead, and their leading synthesist, Hartshorne.)

This means:

Everything is three. Or, everything there is can be thought of in terms of three relational processes:

(1) The thing itself, which is a qualitatively distinctive phenomenon. Let’s call it the thing-world, since it is an unfolding of a particular kind, which sets up a formal structure of internal relations and (externally) interactive potentials as it unfolds, and since our relationship to it is generally from its ‘outside,’ though we can enter into a relationship with it.

(2) The interaction of that thing with another. Let’s call this the thing-experience, since we (or others) experience it from the ‘inside.’ This experience is what happens with us when we enter into the relationship with (1). (Other things may be happening with us simultaneously; this thing-experience doesn’t exhaust us. It’s just what we’re trying to understand here.)

(3) The relating of the thing-world and thing-experience with the whole world. To keep things simple, we can call this the thing-world/extra-thing-world relation (with the thing-experience being a subset of this whole relation, and the only piece of it that is distinctly “ours”). Or we can call it the world-earth relation, or the world-universe relation, with the ‘world’ being the thing-world and the ‘earth’ or ‘universe’ being the unencompassable ground (considered either in its earthbound or its cosmic aspect) within which all thing-worlds have their being/becoming. This relation is the full set of connections and interdependencies within which the thing has its action. To map out this relation in its entirety is impossible, but to understand the more proximal and direct parts of it is possible and useful. It is, in effect, the thing come into its fullness: both its full glory and its full dispersion into (other) things.

[. . .]

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cinema as Prospero’s organic machine

Posted in Cinema, Philosophy, Process-relational thought, tagged on November 28, 2010 | 3 Comments »

Here’s a fragment from Chapter 3 of Ecologies of the Moving Image. This chapter covers cinema’s “geomorphism,” by which I mean the part of cinema’s world-making capacity, its becoming-world-ness, that presents us with an objectscape, a territory within which things happen and action occurs. This is in contrast to cinema’s “anthropomorphism” (a subset of “subjectomorphism”), which refers to the cinematic production and distribution of agency, the capacity to act (which is the film-world’s subjectscape). Between these two poles is the “biomorphic field,” the interactive liveliness within which subjectivation and objectivation are distinguished and separated from each other, moment to moment. [. . .]

It is here, in the factory -– the central production site of modernity, but here in its double aspect as organic-mechanical construction site and as imagistic and imaginal production workshop, the center from which images are produced and disseminated — that Prospero’s Books most literally takes place. Here is Jonathan Beller’s ‘cinematic mode of production,’ turned to the deconstructive ends of staging modernity’s own unraveling.

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manuscript update

Posted in Cinema, Media ecology, Philosophy, tagged on November 24, 2010 | 3 Comments »

I’m recovering from a hard drive crash that occurred late last week. The only significant part of Ecologies of the Moving Image that I’ve completely lost are some fairly substantial recent revisions and additions to Chapter Six. I can reconstruct other pieces from earlier saves and from revisions made on hard copy print-outs. The crash […]

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inside job

Posted in Cinema, Politics, tagged , , , , on November 13, 2010 | Leave a Comment »

It’s not as good a film as I would have liked — there are too many talking heads, and director/interviewer Charles Ferguson (who remains conveniently invisible throughout) has an annoying tendency to look for “gotcha” moments, when his interview subjects hesitate and stumble in answering his questions, as if these provide the smoking gun that […]

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shooting it green

Posted in Cinema, Eco-culture, tagged on September 17, 2010 | 1 Comment »

Since I write about film from an ecocritical perspective, I feel obliged to share information about the greening of filmmaking practice. Transforming Cultures has a post about that. Here’s the trailer for Lauren Selman’s/Real Green Media‘s Greenlit, a film that, like No Impact Man, appears to fall into the “it’s the right thing to do, […]

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field of dreams

Posted in Cinema, Eco-culture, Spirit matter, tagged , , , , on September 13, 2010 | Leave a Comment »

I just watched Amy Hardie’s recent film The Edge of Dreaming, a documentary about a year in her life during which this science documentarian and self-proclaimed skeptic becomes haunted by a series of dreams that appear to foretell her own death before the year is over. The film becomes an exploration of neuroscience, the meaning […]

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psychogeographic landscape cinema

Posted in Cinema, Visual culture, tagged , , on September 11, 2010 | 1 Comment »

Andrew Ray over at Some Landscapes has been posting about experimental landscape films, including Chris Welsby‘s Wind Vane, Tree, and other “landscape-generated landscape films”; Sarah Turner’s Perestroika; the “Land Art for the landless” films/performances of Francis Alÿs; and others. Catherine Grant writes about Turner’s hypnotic and haunting Perestroika at filmanalytical. “Films think,” Turner says, “they […]

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assemblages, species, genres, & cinema

Posted in Cinema, Philosophy, Process-relational thought, tagged , , , , on September 11, 2010 | 2 Comments »

(Warning: This is a long and involved post.) In reposting Steven Shaviro’s critique of DeLanda’s A New Philosophy of Society, Levi Bryant has reminded me of one of the impetuses (impeti?) that moved me to a Whiteheadian perspective. Steven’s review is excellent, and it prefigured what eventually became his book Without Criteria, which I think […]

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low impact movie?

Posted in Cinema, Eco-culture, tagged on September 5, 2010 | Leave a Comment »

<a href="Level Ground has an excellent review by Another Green World‘s Derek Wall of the eco-doc No Impact Man (you can click the title to watch the whole thing, apparently). We can’t collect bottles and line them up until we get to a sustainable world. Structural change rather than individual action is essential. Take transport, […]

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Inception: the anti-Matrix?

Posted in Cinema, Process-relational thought, Visual culture, tagged , on August 6, 2010 | 8 Comments »

I’ve been studiously avoiding reviews of Inception, Christopher Nolan’s new metaphysical heist thriller, wanting to see it for myself (intrigued by its premise) before I start to see it through other people’s eyes. Today I saw it, and I’ve now scanned some of the reviews and a bit of blog commentary (see links at bottom). […]

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