School of Culture and Communication - Theses
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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.
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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.
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ItemRepetition and the temporal double in cinema: a theory of critical cinematic time-travel( 2017)This thesis explores the filmic figure of the double and its relationship to temporality and repetition in cinema. I trace its evolution—extending upon and contributing to the discourse on the trope of the double—by reconceptualising the figure in relation to the function of repetition and manipulation of temporality in film. I consider the dual perspectives of characters and the spectator/scholar, as well as repetition within the individual film, and repetitions forging intertextual connections between films. I posit an original term: the ‘temporal double.’ I define it as a cinematic body/being multiplied by temporal processes, emerging via both narrative and cinematographic techniques. It is characterised by its complex relationship with time, operating as a self-reflexive tool, drawing attention to and deconstructing the function of repetition and temporal manipulations in film. In this thesis, I ask: what is the temporal double’s relationship to patterns of repetition and images of time, and how does this figure continue to be produced and repeated with difference in cinema? To answer these questions, I engage with Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy of time on two connected levels by cross-reading Cinema II with Difference and Repetition. I examine how the images comprising a film speak to each other and understand a film as a synthesis of these repeated images that, in turn, speaks to other films. In my close analysis of three films, I investigate how they extend and complicate Deleuzian conceptualisations of temporality and repetition as elements of both cinema in the form of film as a text, and of film scholarship and discourse. This Deleuzian approach allows me to posit and mobilise another original concept, ‘critical cinematic time-travel’. Critical cinematic time-travel invites contemplation not only by the spectator but also by the film critic/scholar, and occurs within broader cultural and academic contexts of film reception. Critical cinematic time-travel allows the spectator/scholar to alter not only the present and future, but the past, as they re-turn to texts such as Vertigo, which can be re-read through the lens of subsequent films including La Jetée and Primer. Tracing the progression of the temporal double, I demonstrate how this figure becomes increasingly sophisticated in its destabilisation of chronology: the figure’s manifestation renders visible the multiplicities constituting time and the self, drawing attention to and deconstructing the functions of repetition and temporality in and across cinema.
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ItemThe syntax of difference: Gilles Deleuze, media theory, and the problem of representation( 2015)This thesis examines the work of philosopher Gilles Deleuze in relation to contemporary media theory, arguing that the compatibility between metaphysics and media studies should not be taken for granted. Following the ‘non-philosophical’ approach of François Laruelle, it is argued that Deleuze’s project is defined by a disjunctive synthesis between his metaphysics and metaphilosophy, and that when his ontological concepts are introduced into media theory, they tend to ossify, gaining an unintended and problematic descriptive or explanatory power.
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ItemSimCity: text, space, culture( 2015)Critiques in the humanities and social sciences of the SimCity games have often stressed the restrictive and mystifying aspects of its underlying ideology. From this point of view, the ways in which these games work to encourage certain player-behaviours and discourage others serves to reinforce certain hegemonic values in urban management and planning. Other writers have contended that players possessed far greater levels of agency in challenging these ideas. This contention in critiques of SimCity is but one expression of a much wider problem in game studies. This problem is, how do we reconcile the multitude of play experiences implied by instances of player agency, with the restrictiveness implied by game structure? This thesis will strive to answer this question using the philosophical terminology of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's 'A Thousand Plateaus' (2003, trans. Massumi).
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ItemMichael Haneke: the intermedial void( 2014)Michael Haneke has achieved international recognition and notoriety with films that stylistically and thematically explore the negative influence of media saturation upon contemporary western society. Hence, a significant, but still largely unexplored, aspect of his work has been the way in which non-filmic media have been directly incorporated into his films in an innovative and productive manner. This thesis examines the way in which video, television, photography, literary voice and other media are introduced into Haneke’s films not only at the representational level, but also as modes of expression which oppose the film medium itself as fundamental perceptual and affective phenomena. Each chapter examines a different intermedial relationship between one or more of Haneke’s films and a non-cinematic medium. The theoretical and thematic repercussions of these relationships are then explored in via close readings of Haneke’s films, with reference to a wide array critical studies of the director, combined with detailed analyses of the nature of these non-cinematic media and their transformations of the film image and of the nature of film spectatorship. The primary theoretical model employed in this project is the emerging concept of intermediality, a meta-discursive approach to media studies that has received a great deal of attention in German and French scholarship and is gaining currency in English-language academia as well. The author’s own approach to intermediality departs from most others, however, in that he does not use the term solely to designate the processes of exchange, communication and appropriation between different forms of contemporary and new media. Instead, it is argued that the theoretical advantage offered by intermediality over other concepts of media is that it also indexes the absolute difference and incommensurability between disparate media forms, an “intermedial void” that is signified especially well in Haneke’s work. In order to account for these differences, the thesis draws upon an array of philosophical and theoretical definitions of media – and cinematic and post-cinematic media in particular – by thinkers such as Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Stanley Cavell, Marshall McLuhan, André Bazin, Fredric Jameson, and Jean Baudrillard.
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ItemOf conceptual deserts: a Deleuzian approach to Aboriginal art( 2013)This thesis departs from the belief that Australian Aboriginal art can be understood on the basis of Western epistemology. Yet since traditional forms of knowledge are denied to the non-initiated individual, how can one approach this art? We argue that it is the very synapses and gaps in our knowledge of Aboriginal art that need to be marshalled towards the creation of a non-representational ‘thought without image.’ In this sense, Aboriginal art is conceived at the limits of what can be known, yet it constitutes a threshold for ushering forth a secular form of knowledge in which the ‘unthought’ forms a basis for the ‘thought.’ The task of this thesis is to dismantle a discursive hermeneutics that would propose to conceptualise this art. It detects a non-dialogical current that draws us into a highly solipsistic (non)relation with the art. Solipsism is the precondition for an encounter with an art and socius that is always-already ‘missed,’ or ‘eclipsed.’ Using Deleuzian and Deleuzo-Guattarian philosophies, we forge uncharted ways of ‘disarticulating’ our knowledge of Aboriginal art. This is not done through a direct encounter with Aboriginal art, but rather through the works of two artists, Albert Namatjira and contemporary artist Rod Moss – both of whom register the epiphenomenal conditions of an indigeneity that has undergone a becoming-Aboriginal. This becoming is triggered once an imperceptible difference-in-itself is exerted in Namatjira’s oeuvre – where the very inability to establish a visual ‘difference’ between his art and the pastoral genre is precisely how the indigenous character of his work is elicited. In Moss’s case, the pure repetition of the Aboriginal stereotype in his art is not couched within social critique. Rather, his faithful repetition of the stereotype eclipses our ability to recognise hereafter what lies before us in a Moss painting. The repetition of the stereotype for itself cloaks and withdraws it from our episteme. In the application of Deleuzian and Deleuzo-Guattarian philosophies to these two artists’ work, we are far removed from any means of accessing Aboriginal art through the paradigm of the known. Yet the sense of its power is intensely magnified.
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ItemBecoming worthy of the event: Left Bank trauma cinema, 1945-1962( 2012)Asking the question, ‘How can we articulate the conditions that make possible the catastrophic event without referring to any form of identity?’ this thesis considers the trauma cinema of three Rive Gauche filmmakers: Georges Franju, Chris Marker and Alain Resnais. The argument of the thesis is predicated on taking up and insisting upon the explosive and disorganising power of the traumatic event, made manifest in Le Sang des bêtes (Franju, 1949), Les Yeux sans visage (Franju, 1959), Les Statues meurent aussi (Marker and Resnais, 1953) and Muriel, ou le temps d’un retour (Resnais, 1963). The Lazarean characters that haunt these films bear witness to a radical temporal and ontological ‘ungrounding’; an ‘ungrounding’ that shatters identity and characterises catastrophe. This thesis argues that it is only in commencing with the difference that announces itself in the dissolution of identity and permanence that we can hope to create an adequate theorisation of the traumatic event. The transcendental empiricism of Gilles Deleuze provides the kernel for an in-depth analysis of catastrophe that presents an alternative to ‘deconstructive trauma studies,’ the dominant trauma paradigm within the humanities. The thesis returns to the epoch in which this methodology has its roots, the period between the end of the Second World War and the end of the Algerian War of Independence (1945-1962). It takes leave, however, from deconstructive trauma studies’ attempts to tether the traumatic event to systems of identity. Working within a Deleuzian paradigm, the thesis examines transcendental structure alongside empirical manifestation: virtual ‘becomings’ alongside actual history. Deleuze’s concepts of ‘difference-in-itself,’ ‘repetition-for-itself’ and ‘the event’ are drawn upon and extended into the field of trauma studies. The conditions of true genesis for the actual traumatic event, it is argued, are to be discovered not in identity, but in the incorporeal events and self-differentiating differences that emerge from the transcendental field of the virtual. During the event of catastrophe, these imperceptible forces inscribe themselves - via intensity or pure difference - in the flesh. The traumatic event illuminates in calamity the eruption of Deleuze’s ultimate form of repetition, which repeats only a force of pure difference. Through an intersection of Rive Gauche trauma cinema and Deleuzian philosophy, this thesis seeks to consider the differential changes that ground catastrophe, thus deepening our comprehension of the traumatic event and ethical responses to such occurrences.
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ItemI am, myself, sovereign: the attraction of simulacra in Bataille's sovereignty( 2011)The importance of Bataille’s sovereignty to the future of philosophy should not be underestimated. While the term is obscure and its advocate only partially revived, the sovereign holds the potential for activism and creativity beyond the grey miasma of contemporary existence. In this thesis, I offer the beginnings of an exploration of this position and suggest a number of ways in which it can be useful to a discussion of film and interactive new media art. Georges Bataille’s sovereignty, as he most clearly described it in the third volume of The Accursed Share (1976) is a state of sensual experience outside the mediatory consideration of time. It is produced by physically disruptive and immersive events that undermine the seeming clarity of linguistic interaction. The confusion of Bataille’s sovereignty lies in his adoring frustration with Friedrich Nietzsche’s eternal return, and the tense paradox which exists between sovereign thought and physical communication. My use of Bataille’s sovereignty is largely tempered by the philosophical framework of Gilles Deleuze, making particular reference to the simulacrum as it appears in The Logic of Sense (1969). While I am aware of the ironies of using Deleuze for his structure, the meticulousness of his work perfectly counterbalances the poetically suggestive and unfinished attitude carried by the bulk of Georges Bataille’s writing. I will demonstrate that sovereignty is produced by an experience akin to a physical encounter with Gilles Deleuze’s simulacrum. The first chapter of this thesis explores the production of personal and punk sovereignty with reference to the film Joe Strummer: The Future is Unwritten (Julien Temple, 2007) which loosely chronicles the life of The Clash’s deceased frontman, Joe Strummer. In the second chapter, the simulacrum is implicated in the production of sovereign experience, as it occurs in participation with two new media artworks, Play with Me (Van Sowerwine, 2002) and Shadow Monsters (Philip Worthington, 2005). The third chapter addresses sovereignty as it contributes to an alienation from social bondage in the film Dead Man (Jim Jarmusch, 1995).