School of Culture and Communication - Theses
Permanent URI for this collection
Search Results
1 - 2 of 2
-
ItemFilm and the Ontology of Sense: The Dialectic of Meaning and Sensation in French Film Theory and Philosophy( 2023-08)This thesis employs the concept of sense to measure the way a handful of texts devoted to cinema by French philosophers have looked to build upon, and depart from, prevailing understandings of cinematic meaning, thereby transforming film theory’s conception of how cinema makes sense. Building on Thomas Elsaesser’s classification of the present epoch of film theory as ‘post-epistemological ontology’, which understands cinema not as a representation of the external world but part of reality, I argue that the written works on cinema by Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Ranciere and Jean-Luc Nancy form a discrete tradition in contemporary philosophical film theory that I call the ‘ontology of sense’. By adopting an ontological approach, I argue, their work is characterised by a shift away from semiotic questions relating to the structure of cinematic meaning and towards questions of the genesis and ends of meanings. Through extensive commentaries on the philosophical and film critical works of each of the above thinkers, I demonstrate that Deleuze, Ranciere and Nancy each approach cinematic meaning as a dialectical negotiation between cinema’s sensible (i.e. perceptual and affective) and intelligible (i.e. meaningful) registers, teasing out important differences in their approaches to cinematic meaning along the way. I contrast this recent theoretical tradition with two antecedent movements in French film theory: phenomenology and structuralist semiotics, each of which, I maintain, prioritised one register of sense at the expense of the other. I suggest that, in maintaining an opposition or tension between sensibility and intelligibility, the ontology of sense provides valuable way of thinking through the dynamic nature of the affects and concepts that are put into motion by film. Furthermore, I suggest that by diverging from what came to be known as the ‘politics of representation’, Deleuze, Nancy and Ranciere demand a new politics and ethics of the cinematic image that is commensurate with film’s new ontology.
-
ItemThe Intensive-Image: Re-thinking Deleuze´s Film-Philosophy( 2021)This thesis argues that the concept of an intensive-image constitutes an important cinematic category hitherto neglected in Deleuze’s writings on the cinema in his two books, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image and Cinema 2: The Time-Image. This thesis will explore the proposition that the concept of intensity, which comes from Deleuze’s differential philosophy and a branch of physics called thermodynamics, has the potential to change the way in which we think about his classification of the cinema as signifying two separate periods. I will examine the different ways in which the intensive-image runs through both of Deleuze’s cinematic periods, the classical period of the movement-image and the modern period of the time-image, thereby bringing them together and overcoming the separation that Deleuze’s film-philosophy creates. I will also explore the ways in which the intensive-image varies and differentiates itself from other images. The concept of intensity, which is so important for Deleuze’s philosophy and which he links directly to difference and variability, is strangely not accounted for in his cinema books where he presents a taxonomy of all the major images and signs central to the cinema. He writes at length about ‘intensity’ but not about the ‘intensive-image’. This is the reason why I plan to investigate the presence of the intensive-image across both of his film periods in order to see whether or not its representation necessitates a re-thinking of his argument and how central it is to a fuller understanding of the nature of the cinematic image. The meanings and properties of this image will be established through a close analysis of film texts, including a range of avant-garde, popular, ethnographic and poetic films stretching from the classical to the modern and the contemporary periods. Properties central to the intensive-image will include techniques that bring together, or create continuities, between the classical and the modern such as: processes of subtraction and de-visualisation; poetic displacements; narrative withdrawals; images of difference and becoming; free-indirect-discourse [discorso indiretto libero]; bodily perspectivism; and the empty space and dead time of an eventless form of cinema. Having explored the occurrence of the intensive-image across Deleuze’s two periods, in the final section, I will focus on new forms and expressions of this image in contemporary films.