Deleuze and Film

Also available from Continuum

Cinema After Deleuze, Richard Rushton

Cinema I, Gilles Deleuze
Cinema II, Gilles Deleuze
Deleuze and the Schizoanalysis of Cinema, Edited by Patricia MacCormack
and Ian Buchanan
Deleuze and World Cinemas, David Martin-Jones
Deleuze and Film
A feminist introduction

Teresa Rizzo
 Continuum International Publishing Group
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© Teresa Rizzo 2012

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any
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any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the
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Teresa Rizzo has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to
be identified as Author of this work.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN: HB: 978-1-4411-7928-9

e-ISBN: 978-14411-5562-7

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Rizzo, Teresa.
Deleuze and film : a feminist introduction/Teresa Rizzo.
  p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.
ISBN 978-1-4411-1340-5 (pbk.) – ISBN 978-1-4411-7928-9 (hardcover)
1. Feminism and m
­ otion pictures. 2. Feminist film criticism. 3. Deleuze, Gilles, 1925–1995.
4. Motion pictures–Philosophy. I. Title.
PN1995.9.W6R4955 2011
791.43’6522–dc23
2011038241

Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India

 Contents

Acknowledgements  vii

Introduction  1
1 The cinematic apparatus and the transcendental subject  15
2 Re-thinking representation: New lines
of thought in feminist philosophy  37
3 Cinematic assemblages: An ethological
approach to film viewing  57
4 The slasher film: A Deleuzian feminist analysis  81
5 The Alien series: Alien-becomings, human-becomings.  107
6 The molecular poetics of the assemblage: Before Night Falls  133
Conclusion: A feminist cinematic assemblage  155

Notes  163
Bibliography  183
Index  191
vi
 Acknowledgements

T he support of many colleagues, friends and family over the years has made
it possible for me to complete this book. I want to first and foremost thank
Steven Maras who fits into all of these categories. As a colleague and media
scholar he has generously given his time to discuss my ideas on Deleuze
and feminist film theory. As a friend and partner he has given me invaluable
emotional and practical support. I want to thank Jodi Brooks who has also
given me an exceptional amount of support over the years. First as my PhD
supervisor, second by encouraging me in my research more generally and
finally as a friend.
An earlier and highly condensed version of Chapter 5 titled The Alien Series:
A Deleuzian Perspective was published in Women a Cultural Review 15.3
(2004/5). An earlier and shorter version of Chapter 6 appeared in Rhizomes:
Cultural Studies in Emerging Knowledge 11/12 (2005/2006).
My sincere thanks to the editorial team at Continuum Publishing, in
particular Sarah Campbell for supporting this project and making the process
smooth and stress free. I would like to thank Ian Buchanan for introducing
me to Continuum Publishing and encouraging me to pursue this project.
I  would also like to thank Richard Smith, Colin Chua, Chris Danta and John
Golder who generously took the time to read different chapters and offered
invaluable suggestions. Finally, I want to thank my good friends Linda Soo,
Lesley Bluett and Cathie Payne for their emotional and practical support over
the years. Without their help writing would have been a much more difficult
task as they were always there when I needed babysitting, a walking buddy
and encouragement to keep going.
I dedicate this book to my beautiful son Luc-Xuhao Maras who has brought
joy and light into my life.
viii
 Introduction

O ne of the central motifs of the work of Gilles Deleuze is a refusal to make

any rigid separation of subject and object, in either form or content. For
instance, in his interviews with Claire Parnet, the distinction between subject
and object, questioner and respondent, is problematized in such a way that
the separation between interviewer as subject and interviewee becomes
blurred.1 This aspect of Deleuze’s philosophy presents a challenge for anyone
writing an introduction to his work, since it is the function of an introductory
text to establish a relationship between the commentary and the object. This
relationship is often one of subservience, situating the master text in a position
of authority. Introductory texts typically interpret, comment on and explicate
the master text. However, as well as inviting dissection and commentary,
Deleuze’s work, more so than that of many philosophers, calls for an active
and inventive approach to both content and form. Deleuze and Film: A Feminist
Introduction responds to this by imagining the relationship between Deleuze,
film and feminist perspectives – not along the lines of subject and object,
but along the lines of an assemblage that fosters connections in multiple
directions. An assemblage for Deleuze and Félix Guattari is made up of various
connections. However, it is not a fixed entity, since the relationship between
these connections – indeed, the connections themselves – are constantly
changing. This means that the assemblage has the potential to produce
new kinds of interactions between terms, ideas, discourses, institutions and
bodies.
Deleuze’s work is expansive, covering a wide range of concepts, topics,
philosophies and theories. It has also been taken up, interpreted and deployed
in a vast number of ways by philosophers, anthropologists, architects, femi-
nists, scientists, sociologists, artists, media theorists and gender theorists.
As a result we might say that there are a number of Deleuzes. So, which one
does the present book address? It focuses primarily on three Deleuzes. The
first is the cinematic Deleuze that emerges from a meeting of philosophy
and film in Cinema 1: The Movement-Image and Cinema 2: The Time-Image
(hereafter Cinema 1 and Cinema 2, or the Cinema books).2 What is remarkable
about this work is that in it we find an eminent philosopher examining cinema
seriously as a conceptual practice. What is special about cinema for Deleuze
is that it is intrinsically tied to thought and modes of thinking. He states, ‘[T]
he essence of cinema . . . has thought as its higher purpose, nothing but
2 Deleuze and Film

thought and its functioning’.3 As a form of art based on automated movement,

rather than still or frozen pictures, cinema has the potential to provoke us into
thinking in inventive modes. It jolts us into thinking in a manner we are unac-
customed to and that challenges pre-established ways of ordering the world:
‘It is as if cinema were telling us: with me, with the movement-image, you
can’t escape the shock which arouses the thinker in you’.4 By provoking new
modes of thinking cinema has the potential to challenge traditional Western
binary thinking that orders sexual difference according to a binary logic. For
feminist film theory, this is an invitation to explore those aspects of cinema
that encourage thought beyond reductive binary structures and that give us
new ways of thinking about sexual difference.
The second Deleuze this book deals with is the one that arises from his
collaborative work with Félix Guattari. While Deleuze’s Cinema books are
significant reference points, the present volume will attach as much, if not
more, importance to Deleuze’s philosophical collaborations with Guattari – in
particular, their rethinking of the body, identity and subjectivity through the
concepts of affect, becoming and assemblages in A Thousand Plateaus: Capi-
talism and Schizophrenia.5 This is not without precedence, as much of the work
that addresses issues important to feminist film theory privileges Deleuze’s
philosophical work over his Cinema books. For example, books by Patricia Pis-
ters (2003),6 Barbara Kennedy (2000),7 Patricia MacCormack (2008),8 Elena del
Rio (2009)9 and to a lesser extent Anna Powell (2007),10 all draw on Deleuze’s
philosophical work rather than on his Cinema books. This is not surprising, as
Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts of the body, affect and becoming, in conjunc-
tion with Deleuze’s rethinking of the concept of difference, easily lend them-
selves to feminist appropriations. As Elizabeth Grosz writes:

[T]here seems to be an evident allegiance between Deleuze and Guattari’s

notions of political struggle, decentered, molecular, multiple struggles,
diversified, non-aligned, or aligned in only provisional or temporary
networks, in non-hierarchical, rhizomatic connections, taking place at those
sites where repression or antiproduction is most intense—and feminist
conceptions of, and practices surrounding political struggle.11

That said, there has been some reluctance to appropriate the Cinema books
for feminist film theory – perhaps because they do not address issues to do
with sexual difference or spectating positions. Vivian Sobchack argues that in
these books Deleuze ‘ignores the embodied situation of the spectator and of
the film’,12 a point echoed by David N. Rodowick, for whom Deleuze,

[a]lhough . . . the most sophisticated twentieth-century philosopher of

difference, . . . seems to have little to offer on the problem of difference in
 Introduction 3

spectatorship. Despite some powerful pages on cinemas of decolonialization,

he has little to say specifically on questions of sexual, racial, and class
differences.13

If feminist film theory has been slow to take up Deleuze’s Cinema books, it
is precisely because they lack any serious engagement with spectatorship,
which is the very foundation of psychoanalytic feminist film theory. Certainly
there is a sense in which the books imply a viewer, not only through the differ-
ent models of perception that Deleuze identifies in relation to the movement-
image and the time-image, but also through the way these produce different
images of thought. Nonetheless, neither volume addresses spectatorship
directly.
The third and final Deleuze to be found in these pages will be the one that
emerges from feminist readings of his work. This book will place particular
emphasis on the way in which feminist philosophy has engaged with his work
on representation, difference and the body. No serious attempt at a Deleuzian
approach to feminism and spectatorship can afford to ignore this important
deployment of the philosopher’s work. Just as psychoanalytic feminist film
theorists drew not only on the work of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan, but
also on feminist philosophers and critics such as Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray,
Juliett Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose, Deleuze and Film: A Feminist Introduc-
tion draws on important feminist appropriations of Deleuze’s work by contem-
porary feminist thinkers such as Elizabeth Grosz, Claire Colebrook, Dorothea
Olkowski, Rosi Braidotti and, in particular, Moira Gatens, who have mobilized
Deleuze’s work on difference and the body in order to think about sexual differ-
ence in new ways. What is exciting about the work of these feminist scholars
is that it goes beyond questions of representation in order to explore the ways
in which sexuality, the body, identity and subjectivity are decomposed and
recomposed with different encounters and according to different kinds of con-
nections.14 According to Colebrook, by refuting the existence of a body prior
to representation, third-generation feminist philosophers have moved beyond
questions of women’s essential sameness or difference, and in so doing, they
foreground the way the body is continually changing according to the different
connections it forms with other bodies, institutions and discourses.15
This third Deleuze is also present in the emerging area of a Deleuzian
feminist film theory, one that draws on both Deleuze’s ideas and also femi-
nist philosophy’s reworking of his concepts. This book builds on this work,
which includes Pisters’ application of Deleuze’s concepts of assemblages,
affect, forces and rhizomatic images of thought, and Powell’s Deleuzian analy-
sis of the horror genre as an embodied event. Kennedy challenges the lin-
guistic and psychoanalytic model of film theory in favour of film as an art
form that engages the senses. MacCormack turns to Deleuze to develop
4 Deleuze and Film

her ­understanding of spectatorship as a queer engagement that undoes the

­binaries of ­heterosexuality and homosexuality. Finally, Elena del Rio focuses
on the affective aspects of film images. Del Rio’s theorization of the seductive
powers of film images highlights the porousness of the border between the
film and the viewer.
These intersections between Deleuze and film form the first two aspects of
this book assemblage. The third aspect is indicated by the subtitle ‘A feminist
introduction’. Deleuze’s questioning of identity, difference, representation and
categories presents a real challenge to any ‘feminist’ introduction, as it calls
into question the concepts of ‘the feminine’, ‘the female spectator’, ‘female
spectating positions’, as well as the very category of ‘Woman’. Is it even pos-
sible to construct a feminist film theory if these categories are undermined?
This book’s response to the challenge is to go along with Deleuze’s disruption
of categories in order to see what else emerges. One of the central problems
with theories of female spectatorship is that they tend to understand ‘Woman’
and the ‘female spectator’ as universal categories that do not recognize differ-
ence. This means that not only is the difference between women ignored in
the dynamics of spectatorship, but so is the way the concept of woman is not
fixed but in a process of becoming. The concept of woman changes over time
as well as in relation to the different assemblages it comes into contact with.
By shifting the focus from universal categories and the denial of difference to
an exploration of the positive potential of difference, Deleuze offers a way of
overcoming the problems historically associated with the essentializing of the
concept of the female spectator. Contemporary feminist philosophers have
made it their central aim to redefine difference as change and transformation.
According to Braidotti, we need to radically rethink the concept of difference
outside a dualistic dynamic in order to reveal its positive potential:

One of the aims of feminist practice is to overthrow the pejorative, oppressive

connotations that are built not only into the notion of difference, but also
into the dialectics of Self and Other. This transmutation of values could lead
to a re-assertion of the positivity of difference by enabling a collective re-
appraisal of the singularity of each subject in their complexity.16

For Braidotti, one of the tasks of feminist thinkers is to theorize new radi-
cal forms of difference that are enabling rather than restrictive. A feminist
introduction to Deleuze and film begins with a rethinking of the dynamics of
spectatorship, moving away from universal concepts and fixed categories to
an exploration of the potential of difference.
A Deleuzian approach is not necessarily anxious to dismiss or to supersede
psychoanalytic feminist film theory. Rather it is an attempt to take up where
psychoanalytic feminist film theory left off. This book is a genuine attempt
 Introduction 5

at creating a dialogue with psychoanalytic feminist film theory. It returns to

one of the central preoccupations of feminist film theory – spectatorship and
sexual difference. As I will discuss in more detail, during the 1980s and 1990s
feminist film theory was dominated by theories of spectatorship. This raised
interesting questions to do with sexual difference as well as with the con-
cept of difference itself. However, instead of producing new ways of think-
ing about sexual difference, the dominant psychoanalytic approach to these
questions reinforced traditional binary ways of thinking that privileged phal-
locentric constructions of sexual difference. While psychoanalytic approaches
have exhausted themselves, questions to do with sexual difference, images
and film viewing are as pertinent today as they were then. Deleuze and Film:
A Feminist Introduction returns to some of the key debates around film spec-
tatorship and sexual difference that have been central to feminist film theory
and provides fresh insights by addressing them through a Deleuzian frame-
work.

From Lacan to lacuna

This book offers a feminist perspective on Deleuze and film theory, but at
the same time it is also about two moments in the history of film theory. The
1970s, 1980s and early 1990s saw the publication of an extraordinary amount
of scholarship on feminist film theory and spectatorship, work that sought to
make sexual difference, female representation and spectatorship crucial issues
in film theory. What is interesting is that this work, far from being marginal to
psychoanalytic film theory, was central to an emerging discipline. It is difficult
today to look back and imagine the impact that these feminist debates had on
the structure of undergraduate courses in film. Not only did courses in film
and screen studies unashamedly address psychoanalytic feminist film theory
head on, but there were also entire courses dedicated to feminist debates
around theories of spectatorship. The prescribed readings for a film course in
the 1990s could hardly have failed to include essays by the likes of Constance
Penley, Mary Ann Doane, Claire Johnston, Annette Kuhn or, of course, Laura
Mulvey. By contrast, however, the last decade has seen feminist approaches
to film theory disappear from the programme: a week or two at most might
suffice to deal with feminist issues. And today one looks in vain for new work
published in the area of spectatorship and feminist film theory. The psycho-
analytic approaches to these debates, having worn themselves out, seem to
have left a vacuum in their wake.
This book returns to the central preoccupations of the feminist project in
order to examine the problems with the model of sexual difference adopted
6 Deleuze and Film

by psychoanalytic feminist film theory. It is not my intention, in focusing on

these problems, to denigrate earlier conceptual work, but rather to look for a
way out of the impasse. In his analysis of the way sexual difference has been
constructed in psychoanalytic feminist film theory, Rodowick suggests that
questions of sexual difference and spectatorship have reached an impasse
caused by the influence of a binary structure.17 According to Doane, feminist
film theory inherited this binary logic through its deployment of the concept
of the cinematic apparatus.18 What becomes clear in Doane’s analysis of the
cinematic apparatus is that it is a binary machine. The problem with binary
structures is that they produce an impoverished and limited understanding of
difference, in which one side invariably dominates or negates the other. For
feminist film theory this has meant that the strategy of asserting a female
spectator has had the unfortunate effect of situating the female spectator on
the subordinate and negative side of the binary. An additional problem is that
‘[t]he binary machine always pretends to totality and universality’.19 Because
the two opposites of the binary express the division of a prior unity or total-
ity, true differences are eliminated. This binary model of sexual difference has
proved exhaustive for a feminist intervention into spectatorship.
A critique of binaries has long been associated with Deleuze’s work, begin-
ning with Difference and Repetition in  1968. Deleuze’s long-term project of
re-conceptualizing difference as change and transformation rather than in rela-
tion to a primary idea produces a means of thinking about difference beyond a
binary system. Understood as a process of change, difference expresses the
way in which bodies, identities or subjectivities are always becoming different
from themselves rather than in opposition to another term. What this offers
feminist film theory is an avenue for thinking about sexual difference outside a
binary logic, where woman is no longer positioned as the opposite of man or
as an aspect of man. Deleuze and Film: A Feminist Introduction will examine
Deleuze’s writings with a view to rethinking a feminist approach to spectator-
ship beyond a binary logic. In so doing it aims to construct a dialogue between
psychoanalytic feminist approaches to spectatorship on the one hand, and
Deleuze’s work, and feminist appropriations of that work, on the other hand.
While the problems of a binary model of sexual difference have been taken
up by several feminist film theorists and may seem well-worn, this book will
look at the problem from an entirely fresh perspective. In order to shed new
light on the problem of binary thought, it will deploy Deleuze’s critique of the
concept of difference within a system of representation and feminist appro-
priations of this work.
Plagued by so many problems, the term ‘spectator’ is now seriously com-
promised; to use it in a productive way is virtually impossible. Therefore, to
develop a theory of film viewing free of these associations, I propose to
abandon the terms ‘spectator’ and ‘spectatorship’ at the end of Chapter 1
 Introduction 7

and replace them with ‘film viewing’, ‘film–viewer’ and ‘body of the viewer’.
I do so in the hope of suggesting an understanding of the film-viewer as
fully embodied.20 Dispensing with the term ‘spectator’ also means no longer
understanding the film viewing experience as primarily about processes of
identification. Not that issues of identification are abandoned entirely; rather
they are re-approached through an idea of affective connections between
the film and the viewer. In this sense, this book approaches questions of
film viewing by investigating and arguing for the place of affect in various
film-viewer relations. I argue that, while some films produce a coherent sub-
ject position with which to identify, others – or particular moments in others –
privilege bodily affects and sensations that disrupt any sense of wholeness
and unity. For this reason, this book does not retread the well-trodden ground
of modes of cinematic address and spectator positioning in terms of subjec-
tivity and identity. Rather it will look to explore the ways in which affective con-
nections between the film and the viewer might have the potential to undo
subjectivity and identity. In addition, rather than focus on cinematic vision or
forms of looking, I focus on perception. Psychoanalytic film theory’s focus on
the look and the gaze seemed to miss the embodied experience of watching
films. The concept of perception offers a more holistic means of thinking about
film viewing as it not only takes into account the body and all the senses but
also relates to ways of understanding and modes of thinking.

From the cinematic apparatus

to cinematic assemblages
In its exploration of affective connections between the film and the viewer,
this book will concern itself first and foremost with Deleuze and Guattari’s
concept of the assemblage. In order to understand how the concept of the
assemblage relates to film viewing, it is useful to first turn to their related con-
cept of machines. In Anti-Oedipus (1972), Deleuze and Guattari discuss differ-
ent kinds of connections between bodies, institutions and discourses through
the concept of machines.21 In A Thousand Plateaus they refine their concept
of machines through the concept of the assemblage. If we understand cin-
ema to be a kind of machine that is made up of different kinds of connections,
we can begin to account for the way it may be seen as a machine that takes
the form of a cinematic apparatus; one that produces a cinematic subject with
which to identify. However, it can also be a machine that produces certain
kinds of affective and intensive connections that destabilize subjectivity and
identity, and that disrupt a binary construction of sexual difference. In addi-
tion, numerous other types of cinematic machines are possible (for example,
8 Deleuze and Film

celebrity machines, merchandizing machines and ‘machines of the visible’22).

My focus in these pages, however, will be on the affective dimensions of film
viewing. As Deleuze and Guattari argue in A Thousand Plateaus, although the
assemblage is a system, it is an open system that is made up of connections
between different bodies, discourses and institutions, not only in the present
but also across time. An assemblage is never fixed because a change in the
relationship between any of these bodies, discourses or institutions reverber-
ates throughout the whole assemblage, and in so doing changes the nature of
that assemblage. Paul Patton, for whom the assemblage is the central concept
in A Thousand Plateaus, notes that, far from being stable and homogenous,
the concept of assemblages undergoes continual transformation through-
out the book. Patton observes that not only is A Thousand Plateaus itself an
assemblage but that:

successive plateaus [chapters] describe a variety of assemblages in relation

to different fields of content: machinic assemblages of desire, collective
assemblages of enunciation, nomadic assemblages and apparatuses of
capture, ideational, pictorial and musical assemblages. A Thousand Plateaus
might be described as a reiterated theory of assemblages in which the
concept of assemblages provides formal continuity across the analyses of
very different contents in each plateau. At the same time, those analyses
transform and deform the concept of assemblage in such a manner that it
exemplifies the continuous variation which Deleuze and Guattari ascribe to
philosophical concepts.23

This ‘continuous variation’ manifests itself in different articulations of the

assemblage. Deleuze refers to the assemblage as a ‘multiplicity’.24 Elsewhere,
Deleuze and Guattari discuss the assemblage as ‘complexes of lines’ that
interact (molar, molecular and the line of flight).25 Some of these lines territori-
alize the assemblage, over-coding it, while others open it up and deterritorial-
ize it, producing becomings and reterritorializations that undo its codification.26
Deleuze and Guattari also develop the concept in the context of the machinic
phylum: ‘We will call an assemblage every constellation of singularities and
traits deducted from the flow—selected, organized, stratified—in such a way
as to converge (consistency) artificially and naturally; an assemblage, in this
sense, is a veritable invention’.27 These different understandings of the assem-
blage are not identical to one another.
An especially prominent construction of the assemblage is in terms of a
tetravalent or quadripartite structure. As Deleuze and Guattari explain:

On a first, horizontal axis, an assemblage comprises two segments, one

of content, the other of expression. On the one hand it is a machinic
 Introduction 9

assemblage of bodies, of actions and passions, an intermingling of bodies

reacting to one another; on the other hand it is a collective assemblage
of enunciation, of acts and statements, of incorporeal transformations
attributed to bodies. Then on a vertical axis, the assemblage has both
territorial sides, or reterritorialized sides, which stabilise it, and cutting
edges of deterritorialization, which carry it away.28

It is possible to produce an account of cinema using the tetravalent model of

the assemblage; Pisters, for example, applies it to analyze the action on the
screen rather than the film-viewer relationship. Her analyses focus on how the
different lines of the assemblage are represented on screen through character
actions, plot and narrative. There are, however, two problems with the tetrava-
lent model of the assemblage that make it difficult to apply to the film viewing
situation without some modification. First, Deleuze and Guattari link expres-
sion to a collective assemblage of enunciation. By means of order-words, and
particular kinds of speech acts, the assemblage produces incorporeal transfor-
mations. But cinema is not clearly a set of statements. In Cinema 2, Deleuze
objects to the imposition upon cinema of linguistic models by theorists of the
cinematic apparatus such as Christian Metz: ‘The root of the difficulty is the
assimilation of the cinematic image to an utterance’.29 Thus, while the Cinema
books explore the way in which cinema functions as a unique and complex
regime of signs, or semiotic, Deleuze problematizes the idea of cinema as a
system of enunciation. The second problem with the tetravalent model of the
assemblage in this context is that, while it is a highly codified understanding
of the assemblage that may be appropriate for linguistics, it cannot account
for either the temporal aspect of cinema, or the constant embodied and affec-
tive interactions between the film and the viewer. This has implications for
applying notions of content and expression to cinema. Deleuze and Guattari
write:

Even though there is a real distinction between them, content and

expression are relative terms . . .. Even though it is capable of invariance,
expression is just as much a variable as content. Content and expression
are two variables of a function of stratification. They not only vary from one
stratum to another, but intermingle, and within the same stratum multiply
and divide ad infinitum.30

In other words, the distinction between different forms of content and differ-
ent forms of expression operates within particular signifying regimes. Against
the tendency to fix and codify the distinction between content and expres-
sion, however, Deleuze and Guattari highlight the inseparability of forms of
content, expression and deterritorialization.31
10 Deleuze and Film

This ‘continuous variation’ of the assemblage produces certain methodo-

logical difficulties for anyone who wants to appropriate the concept. If the
assemblage can be used in a variety of ways, then it is a question of knowing
which version is the most appropriate to a particular context: film viewing,
for example. In addition, it would appear that to remain true to Deleuze and
Guattari’s application of the assemblage, it would be necessary to apply their
practice of continually reinventing the concept for particular contexts. Further-
more, to fix the concept in a single form would go against a key feature of the
assemblage, that of mutation and metamorphosis. The understanding of the
assemblage constructed within this book is indebted to different aspects of
Deleuze and Guattari’s deployment of the concept. The assemblage will be
considered as a complex of lines, but will also draw on Deleuze and Guat-
tari’s understanding of the machinic assemblage as an arrangement of bodies,
actions and passions and the intermingling of bodies reacting to one another.
This has special application in the context of film-viewer relations, the affec-
tive interaction between the film body and the viewing body. Throughout the
book, the concept of the assemblage will be closely linked to that of becom-
ing. The film-viewer assemblage thus becomes the site for processes of ter-
ritorialization, deterritorialization and reterritorialization, molar orderings and
molecular metamorphoses. In relation to the distinction between content and
expression, this book affirms the inseparability of forms of content, expres-
sion and deterritorialization by examining the ways in which film style and film
technique produce affective qualities and transformations.

Towards a feminist approach

to the film–viewer assemblage
Feminist thinkers such as Gatens, Grosz, Olkowski and Colebrook have
focused on this latter aspect of their work,32 as have contemporary female
film theorists who address feminist concerns such as Pisters, Kennedy, Mac-
Cormack, del Rio, Powell, Amy Herzog and Felicity Coleman. The understand-
ing of the assemblage developed in this book is informed by these feminist
appropriations, in particular by Gatens’ deployment of Deleuze and Guattari’s
understanding of an ethological body.33 My aim is not to define a new
object of analysis or textual system but rather to approach the film text and
film–viewer relationship through a new framework or logic. While the concept
of the assemblage could be applied to many aspects of a film, or many kinds
of cinematic assemblages – for example, the way in which a film connects
with other media events, or even the ‘apparatus’ of the projector and of the
 Introduction 11

cinema space – my focus will be solely on the film–viewer assemblage. This is

because, within film theory, the film–viewer relationship has been central to
the way cinema has been understood as an ideological institution that ­produces
gendered subjects. Moreover, it is the way this system has constructed the
production of gendered subjects that has resulted in a binary construction of
sexual difference. It is for this reason that my work returns to familiar debates
in film theory – such as spectatorship in mainstream Hollywood films  – as
a way of highlighting points in earlier understandings of spectatorship that
resonate with Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the assemblage. For exam-
ple, Carol Clover’s views on spectatorship, while steeped in psychoanalytic
theory, nonetheless resonate with aspects of Deleuze and Guattari’s work.34
By revealing how the modern horror genre privileges a masochistic male gaze,
Clover challenges the idea that cinema is dominated by a sadistic voyeuristic
male gaze. In addition, her understanding of the masochistic male gaze fore-
grounds affect and the body.
What is most important about the film–viewer assemblage for the present
project is the way in which particular experiences of film viewing highlight the
processual nature of the body. In this respect, the type of feminist interven-
tion attempted here is not based on the assertion of identity politics, nor does
it argue for female subjectivity. It is a form of feminist intervention that is inter-
ested in the possibility of a non-binary understanding of sexual difference,
where sexual difference is always in a process of becoming, and is therefore
molecular. With this aim in mind it explores the possibility that certain kinds
of films produce affects that encourage a form of difference that does not rely
on negation.

The films
In Deleuze and Film: A Feminist Introduction, films are not treated as texts to
be analyzed for a hidden meaning or for their signification. Nor are they simply
used to illustrate Deleuzian concepts. Their two-fold aim is to investigate, first,
how affective connections between the film and the viewer produce becom-
ings that challenge fixed notions of the subject, identity and the body, and,
second, how certain film practices connect to particular Deleuzian concepts.
This requires a close analysis of scenes that exemplify these practices, includ-
ing the uses to which editing, framing, sound and mise en scène, for exam-
ple, are put. The film analyses are a genuine attempt to locate what is useful
for a feminist project through the concepts they articulate and the affective
­embodied connections they produce.
12 Deleuze and Film

This book is divided into six chapters, the first three of which are
philosophically oriented and deal with questions of difference, ­representation,
theories of the cinematic apparatus among others. However, they do entail
some  discussion of films such as La Signora di Tutti (Max Ophüls, 1934),
­Elephant (Gus Van Sant, 2003), I’m Not There (Todd Haynes, 2007), and they
serve as a bridge between earlier psychoanalytic feminist film theory and
­philosophy and my own Deleuzian approach. As well as putting the ­Deleuzian
approach, film and feminist film theory into a complex assemblage as described,
the first three chapters set the conceptual scene for the analysis of specific
films in Chapters 4 to 6.
Many kinds of films could be considered in terms of the theory of cin-
ematic assemblage, so why choose these? My response is that the films
and genres I have chosen lend themselves to a feminist reading, while at
the same time connecting with particular Deleuzoguattarian concepts that
play a key part in their theorization of the assemblage. They are, in the main,
contemporary Hollywood films, such as the slasher films of the 1970s and
1980s (a sub-genre of the modern B-grade horror film), and the Alien series,
both of which have received extensive treatment in feminist film studies.
I shall also discuss Julian Schnabel’s film about Cuban poet Reinaldo Arenas,
Before Night Falls (2002), which, although an art-house film and screened in
art-house cinemas, was nominated for an Academy award – so it cannot be
said to fall too far outside the mainstream. In addressing these films I shall be
returning to some of the genres and films that have been central to psycho-
analytic feminist film theory, and, unavoidably, revisiting some of the debates
that they engendered. The slasher genre, discussed in Chapter 4, connects
with Deleuze’s concept of duration, which is crucial to an understanding of dif-
ference as change and alteration. Chapter 5 examines the Alien series’ articu-
lation of Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of becoming. Not only are the films
replete with images of non-human and monstrous becomings, but the affects
and sensations they produce encourage non-human becomings in the viewer.
Finally, the focus of Chapter 6, Before Night Falls, is a perfect expression of
Deleuze and Guattari’s understanding of ‘life’ as a series of connections and
relations of speed.
Chapter 1 revisits theories of the cinematic apparatus and psychoanalytic
feminist film theory in order to examine how sexual difference has been under-
stood and constructed by these two related fields. It does so because, in order
to cast issues of sexual difference and film viewing in a new light, it is first nec-
essary to understand the problems and blocks that have emerged from the way
sexual difference has been previously theorized. It also examines the problems
to do with the privileged place held by the transcendental subject – an ahistorical
and atemporal cinematic subject – within theories of the cinematic apparatus.
Finally, Chapter 1 considers Deleuze’s concept of ­cinematic consciousness,
 Introduction 13

particularly in relation to perception, as an a­lternative to the transcendental sub-

ject of cinema.
Chapter 2 engages with Deleuze’s critique of difference within representa-
tional thought, as well as feminist appropriations of this critique. It does so in
order to consider the impact of these critiques for theories of the cinematic
apparatus and psychoanalytic feminist film theory. It also draws on Gatens’
ethological understanding of the body as something that continually changes
with every encounter. The chapter deploys this understanding of the body by
considering film viewing as one of the many encounters that affects the body.
The analysis of difference in Chapter 2 acts as the basis for a rethinking of
sexual difference and film viewing throughout the rest of the book.
Chapter 3 lays down the foundation of a theory of cinematic assemblages
and its usefulness for a feminist project. It defines Deleuze and Guattari’s con-
cept of assemblages and related concepts such as the body, affect, difference
as duration, the molar and molecular planes and becoming. It turns to the Cin-
ema books as a way of further developing the concept of a cinematic assem-
blage based on affective connections between the film and the viewer.
The detailed analysis of several horror films in Chapter 4 marks a shift away
from a philosophical engagement with Deleuze’s work towards a more con-
crete engagement with the film–viewer relationship. This chapter, in which
Clover’s work on horror films and Henri Bergson’s theory of intuition both
feature centrally, explores the means by which the modern horror genre pro-
duces an affective perception that connects with a notion of difference as
transformation or difference in itself. The importance of the horror genre for
feminist film theory cannot be overstated. It has been an extensively debated
genre in which female characters have been analyzed as both victims and
active agents. The horror genre provides an excellent illustration of some of
the basic ideas of a cinematic assemblage and the embodied dimensions of
film viewing.
The films in the Alien series are some of the most discussed films in femi-
nist film theory – yet these discussions tend to focus on the bodies on screen
and ignore the body of the viewer. In revisiting these films Chapter 5 further
explores the proposition that certain modes of film viewing operate as molec-
ular assemblages that encourage a non-binary understanding of sexual dif-
ference. These films undermine any idea of subjectivity and identity as fixed,
by showing the body to be in a constant state of mutation, hybridization and
becoming that blurs the boundary between human and non-human, and pro-
motes an existence in the in-between of categories.
In Chapter 6 an examination of the means by which Before Night Falls
engages the body of the viewer through spatio-temporal relations brings to
an end my discussion of the cinematic assemblage and affective embodied
viewing. My analysis explores the ability of these connections to create an
14 Deleuze and Film

attunement between the film and the viewer whereby the film’s energies and
rhythms are felt throughout the body. The spatio-temporal connection is par-
ticularly interesting in relation to Before Night Falls, because the film’s poetic
style, a febrile energy generated by the camera work, editing, sound and col-
ours, contrives to express an idea of ‘life’ as something made up of relations
of movements and intensive affects.
 1

The cinematic
apparatus and the
transcendental
subject

P sychoanalytic feminist film theory offers a detailed examination of film

spectatorship and of its implication for sexual difference. The concept
of the cinematic apparatus has been central to this work. However, this
has brought with it certain difficulties. Mary Ann Doane speaks of an
‘exhaustion’ and ‘impasse’ for psychoanalytic film theory, closely linked to
‘its activation of the metaphor of the apparatus or dispositif’.1 The reasons
why the concept of the cinematic apparatus might have caused an impasse
are complex and they will be addressed presently. First, however, the main
problems need to be briefly outlined. The manner in which film theorists such
as Christian Metz and Jean-Louis Baudry theorized the cinematic apparatus
as a spatial structure based on monocular perspective and the topography
of Plato’s cave has been one of the primary causes of the impasse. By doing
so they were able to argue that the cinematic apparatus is based on an
identification with an all-seeing transcendental subject. The problem with
this kind of identification is that the transcendental subject is ahistorical,
atemporal and disembodied – causing cinema’s temporal qualities to
be overlooked. Moreover, by privileging space over time, the cinematic
apparatus produces only one mode of viewing, because the movement that
is so central to cinema is ignored in favour of an identification with a point in
16 Deleuze and Film

space. Without movement and without temporality the cinematic apparatus

not only produces the same mode of viewing but also the same kind of
spectating position over and over.
Gilles Deleuze’s approach to cinema provides useful tools with which to
explore previously under-examined dimensions of this apparatus. In contrast
to the cinematic apparatus, Deleuze’s distinction between the movement-
image and the time-image offers the potential to distinguish different kinds
of viewing arrangements, not simply between the movement-image and the
time-image, but also in relation to the many possibilities that emerge from his
large taxonomy of images within the movement-image and the time-image.
Interestingly, although his books on cinema were written at a time when theo-
ries of the cinematic apparatus were extremely influential in film theory gener-
ally, Deleuze makes no reference to them. In fact, the Cinema books say very
little about spectatorship and the role of the spectator.
Nonetheless, although not addressed directly, forms of spectatorship are
implied and Deleuze certainly discusses a cinematic subject. The perception-
image, for example, produces a cinematographic consciousness that is able
to articulate a subjective and objective perception simultaneously. For Deleuze
this introduces the viewer to a non-human, specifically cinematographic,
form of perception. While this is not a spectating position, as psychoanalytic
film theory understands it, it is certainly a means of engaging the viewer. In
addition, some of the types of images, such as the affection-image and the
time-image, can readily be examined in terms of how they engage viewers.
The final section of the chapter will examine in detail how Deleuze’s camera
consciousness challenges some of the fundamental aspects of the cinematic
apparatus and connects with the viewer in new ways.
Deleuze’s focus on cinema’s qualities of movement and temporality also
offers a very different idea of transcendence and the transcendental subject
from that proposed by theorists of the cinematic apparatus. His notion of
transcendental empiricism is based on experimentation, on change, and is
open to the new. It takes into account sensations and the materiality of life.
A transcendental field, he writes, is ‘a pure stream of a-subjective conscious-
ness, a pre-reflexive impersonal consciousness without a self’.2 Transcenden-
tal empiricism is beyond the conventional understanding of a straightforward
sensation or ‘simple empiricism’, because it relates to the passage from one
sensation to another. Through affective engagements cinema continually pro-
duces passages of sensations or becomings.
Furthermore, according to John Rachman, ‘[t]ranscendental empiricism
may then be said to be the experimental relation we have to that element in
sensation that precedes the self as well as any “we”, through which is attained,
in the materiality of living, the powers of “a life”’.3 The ‘we’ and the type of
 The cinematic apparatus and the transcendental subject 17

‘life’ Deleuze invokes are not ego-centred, but impersonal. Life is unique not
because an ego-centred self experiences it, but because it relates to the
moment of becoming or the moment different connections produce some-
thing new and singular. Cinema articulates Deleuze’s notion of transcendental
empiricism because, unlike the cinematic apparatus, it is based on movement
and temporality.
Re-thinking the cinematic experience through movement and temporality
represents an important project for Deleuzian film theory. However, it also
represents a crucial project for feminist film theory to get beyond the impasse
created by the deployment of the cinematic apparatus. A critique of the cin-
ematic apparatus and the means by which it produces a transcendental sub-
ject is a crucial step in this process. In order to work through some of the
problems that have led to the decline in feminist engagement with spectator-
ship theory, the first section of this chapter undertakes a detailed analysis of
the cinematic apparatus and feminist responses. The second section outlines
the problems with the transcendental cinematic subject as understood
by theories of the cinematic apparatus. This analysis is followed by a discussion
of Deleuze’s concept of the perception-image as a means of confronting the
problems inherent in the transcendental cinematic subject, in particular in
relation to difference.

Section 1: The cinematic apparatus

Within theories of cinematic apparatus and psychoanalytic feminist film theory,
an understanding of how cinematic identification operates varies from theo-
rist to theorist, as well as within the work of the same theorist in different peri-
ods. For example, as Doane has pointed out, 4 there is a significant difference
between Baudry’s theorization of looking, identification and spectatorship in
his first essay on the cinematic apparatus, published in 1970,5 and his second,
published a few years later.6 This shifting ground shows how dangerous it can
be to generalize when discussing the problems inherited from theories of the
cinematic apparatus. For all that, one thing remains constant: the difficulty
these processes pose for difference. Theories of the cinematic apparatus tend
to produce a generalized, universal subject, be it male or female. In order to
understand why this occurs, we need to outline the main theoretical compo-
nents that make up the framework of the cinematic apparatus.
The concept of the cinematic apparatus takes into account various mecha-
nisms and processes that constitute the cinematic experience, including the
narrative structure, the ideological nature of the apparatus, the technology
18 Deleuze and Film

involved, as well as the psychological aspects of the process. Theories of the

cinematic apparatus do not see these various aspects as separate, but are
interested in how they work together. Central to this argument is a process of
identification that is activated by a system of looking, one that brings together
the various components of the cinematic apparatus to produce both meaning
and a cinematic subject. The link between looking and cinematic identifica-
tion is a complex one, comprising a variety of theories and discourses: Sig-
mund Freud’s work on the development of the ego and his theory of voyeur-
ism; Jacques Lacan’s theory of subject formation (in particular, his theory of
the mirror stage); Louis Althusser’s theory of ideology, a powerful analogy
between the cinema and the allegory of Plato’s cave; and, finally, the concept
of monocular perspective, a geometrical arrangement of space inherited from
Renaissance perspective.
Theorists of the cinematic apparatus argue that a film requires the uncon-
scious work of the spectator in order to be able to generate meaning, and
furthermore, that this unconscious work also produces a cinematic subject.
Robert Stam, Robert Burgonyne and Sandy Flitterman-Lewis argue that a
psychoanalytic approach understands film viewing and subject formation
as reciprocal processes: that ‘something about our unconscious identity as
subjects is reinforced in film viewing, and film viewing is effective because
of our unconscious participation’.7 Crucial to this process is Lacan’s proposi-
tion that the subject exists in language.8 Lacan emphasizes the importance
of certain structures of language in subject formation and meaning mak-
ing. He argues that language is structured around certain subject positions
that are waiting to be filled. By taking up these positions, an individual is
constituted as a subject. More specifically, the personal pronouns ‘I’ and
‘you’ already exist in language and when an individual makes use of these
pre-existing positions s/he is constituted as a subject. It is through the act
of saying ‘I’ that one becomes a subject. Furthermore, language also posi-
tions us as ‘“he” or “she”; it constructs us even as we assert ourselves as
subjects within it’.9
David N. Rodowick observes that Lacan’s work on subject formation was
taken up primarily from Althusser’s ideological application of it. For Althusser,
institutions contain similar structures of subject formation to those found in
language. They contain pre-existing subject positions for individuals to take up,
and, in the process of taking up these positions, individuals become subjects.
By becoming subjects of the institution, however, they also become imbri-
cated in its ideology. Althusser argues that ‘all ideology hails or interpellates
concrete individuals as concrete subjects’.10 While Althusser’s work on subject
formation may be useful in understanding cinema’s potential for producing
ideological positions with which to identify, it does not explain exactly how
the scopic system found in cinema participates in this process. For this pur-
 The cinematic apparatus and the transcendental subject 19

pose apparatus theorists deploy another aspect of Lacan’s theories of ­subject

­formation – the mirror stage.
For Lacan, while subjectivity is the result of language acquisition or entry
into the Symbolic, the process of subject formation actually begins at a previ-
ous stage, which is dominated by the visual and which he calls the Imaginary.
A central mechanism of the Imaginary is the mirror stage.11 It is a process that
occurs in children between the ages of 6 and 18 months. The infant recog-
nizes its image in the mirror and identifies with it. It also becomes aware of
its separateness from the adult holding it and therefore also its separateness
from all other people. This recognition of the self as a distinct entity marks the
beginning of the formation of the ego. However, this process is complicated
in two ways. First, the image of itself in the mirror, with which the child identi-
fies, is an idealized image. This is because, at this stage of their development,
the child’s visual capacities are far more developed than their motor capacities.
While the infant still feels itself to be fragmented and uncoordinated, it per-
ceives the image of itself in the mirror as more coordinated and unified. Lacan
says of the image of the self in the mirror, ‘in relation to the still very profound
lack of co-ordination of his own motility, it represents an ideal unity, a salutary
imago’.12 Identification therefore is not based solely on recognition, but also on
misrecognition. In addition, identification with the image in the mirror is also
identification with the self as other, or with the self as elsewhere.13 As a result,
the self that emerges from this process of recognition is split and alienated.
If the emergence of a separate and unified identity is dependent on another,
then the self also has the potential to be its own other.
For theorists of the cinematic apparatus such as Baudry and Metz, Lacan’s
mirror stage forms the basis for a theory of cinematic identification. The cin-
ema screen is likened to the mirror, except for one striking difference: as Metz
has observed, unlike a mirror the film does not reflect back our own image
for us to identify with.14 Who or what do we then identify with? According to
Baudry and Metz, while we may identify with certain characters on the screen,
this identification is only secondary. Our primary identification occurs with the
camera and the act of looking itself. This is because the other on the screen
cannot see us, yet, because the camera has looked and recorded for us, we
are positioned in a way that invites us to look. Metz suggests that at ‘the cin-
ema, it is always the other who is on the screen; as for me, I am there to look
at him. I take no part in the perceived, on the contrary, I am all-perceiving’.15
This implies that there is a significant difference between the operation of
identification in Lacan’s mirror phase and in Metz’s cinematic primary identi-
fication. In Lacan’s mirror phase a sense of a unified and separate identity is
dependent on the other in the mirror, whereas for Metz a unified identity is
the result of an identification with the camera and therefore with the act of
seeing. It appears then that theorists of the cinematic apparatus ignore the
20 Deleuze and Film

role of the other in the mirror phase. Metz’s transition, from an identification
with the self as other in the mirror to an identification with the self as pure per-
ception, is quite radical. It is the view of both Doane and Joan Copjec that he
achieves this by melding Lacan’s theory of the mirror stage with Renaissance
monocular perspective, and in so doing distorts and misrepresents Lacan’s
theory of the gaze. 16 This shift is central to cinematic identification’s creation
of a transcendental subject that is both ahistorical and unchanging.
Metz also endows looking with mastery and control by connecting cin-
ematic looking to Freud’s concept of scopophilia – the drive to look and the
pleasures derived from it. He distinguishes between two kinds of look associ-
ated with scopophilia – active voyeurism and narcissistic identification. Active
voyeurism coincides with primary identification, that is, with the camera and
with the self as all-perceiving and associated with mastery. Narcissistic identi-
fication coincides with secondary identification, and as such with an identifica-
tion with the protagonist as a more perfect self. According to Metz, this form
of identification parallels the dynamic found in Lacan’s mirror stage, in which,
by means of a process of misrecognition, the infant identifies with a more
unified and perfect self.17
Metz argues that one of the major sources of cinematic pleasure is pro-
duced because the spectator is positioned at a distance from the images
on the screen in two ways. First, s/he is physically distant. More impor-
tantly, however, s/he is temporally distant, as the events on the screen were
recorded elsewhere and at an earlier time. Because of this double distancing,
the spectator is able to indulge in the act of looking without fear of reprisal.
According to Freud, scopophilia, the compulsion to look, relates to libidinal
drives that operate through an oscillation of pleasure and unpleasure. This
dynamic relies on a distancing or an absence of the desired object in order to
produce pleasure. Annette Kuhn, for whom this is the key to understanding
the pleasure we derive from film viewing, writes, ‘Given that in cinema the
object of the spectator’s look is indeed both distant and absent – “primordial
elsewhere,” as Metz says – the filmic state must be particularly prone to
evoking the pleasurable aspects of looking’.18 Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window
(1945) is an excellent example of a film that encourages pleasure through
identification with the main character Jeff (James Stewart). Confined to his
apartment because of a broken leg, Jeff spends his days compulsively looking
out his window into the apartments of his neighbours. His pleasure from look-
ing is fundamentally tied up with distance and anonymity. This is particularly
the case when he sees his girlfriend in the apartment of one of his neigh-
bours, a man whom he suspects is a murderer. As he watches her escape
from danger, he might be watching a character in a film; his desire for her is
activated by distance and absence.
 The cinematic apparatus and the transcendental subject 21

Feminist responses
The concept of the cinematic apparatus has been particularly difficult for
feminist film theorists because the grand theory of cinematic identification
introduced by Baudry and Metz assumes a masculine spectating position in
which no consideration is given to the possibility of either female spectator-
ship or pleasure. Hence, while cinematic identification is readily available to
the male spectator, it is a difficult, if not impossible, process for the female
spectator, let alone the queer spectator. Feminist film theory is left to invent a
theory of female spectatorship out of a theory of identification that does not
recognize sexual difference. This project has proved to be productive and at
the same time full of pitfalls.
The most productive feature of theories of the cinematic apparatus for
feminist film theory is that they focus on the ability of film viewing to produce
a subject as an effect of a specific system of representation, and furthermore,
the ability of this subject effect to contribute to the film’s meaning. The appeal
of this approach is that it opens up an avenue through which female subjec-
tivity and female spectatorship can be theorized. This was especially relevant
in the 1970s and 1980s, when feminist theory was concerned with the fact
that women did not exist as subjects. As Patricia Mellencamp has pointed out,
‘[T]o add female subjectivity to the agenda, along with noticing the absence
of women from so many texts, were great and brilliant moves’.19 At the same
time, however, Mellencamp suggests that although many women sought
answers in psychoanalysis and theories of male subjectivity, these were inad-
equate.20 First, because connecting female subjectivity solely to questions of
sexuality blinded feminist film theory to more interesting and empowering
possibilities. Second, psychoanalytic accounts of female sexuality and subjec-
tivity are fraught with difficulties and construct female sexuality as ‘an enigma,
or a mystery’.21 As a consequence of adopting psychoanalytic accounts of the
subject, feminist film theory is bedevilled by these problems.
While the advent of psychoanalytic theory revolutionized film studies, femi-
nists argued that this new form of analysis failed to address questions of sex-
ual difference. In view of psychoanalytic film theory’s emphasis on processes
of subject formation, this was a serious oversight. As editors Janet Bergstrom
and Doane say in their introduction to the special issue of Camera Obscura
devoted to female spectatorship:

[S]ubjectivity was theorized as a textual effect fully bound up with

processes of looking and hearing which were peculiar to film as a medium.
Such an emphasis upon subjectivity and processes of looking and image
formation would inevitably seem to raise questions of sexual difference.
22 Deleuze and Film

Nevertheless, these issues were markedly absent from the work of Metz
and semiotic theoreticians.22

It was this absence that prompted Mulvey to put questions of sexual differ-
ence and spectatorship firmly on the agenda in 1975 with her much discussed
essay ‘Visual pleasure and narrative cinema’. Ever since then questions about
sexual difference and spectatorial identification have been of major concern to
feminist film theory. Indeed, they dominated the field throughout the 1970s,
1980s and well into the 1990s.23
Mulvey’s project in the essay is to identify the role played by sexual dif-
ference in the structure of the classic Hollywood film. Central to this enquiry
is an exploration of spectator identification, which, in Rodowick’s view, she
undertakes with two aims in mind:

[T]o target and examine codes and mechanisms through which the
classical cinema has traditionally exploited sexual difference as a function
of its narrative and representational forms . . . [and to determine] the
effects these mechanisms might inspire in the spectatorial experience of
sexed individuals as well as their role within the more general ideological
machinery of patriarchal culture.24

But Mulvey has, I believe, a third aim in mind. By using the very same psy-
choanalytic concepts as Baudry and Metz – a system of looking, theories of
identification and subject formation – she is endeavouring to show that the
omission of questions of sexual difference is not a problem with psychoana-
lytic theory per se, but with the way it is deployed and understood by psycho-
analytic film theorists.
Applying the same system of looking and identification to an exploration
of classic Hollywood films’ handling of sexual difference, Mulvey discovers
that in them women are regularly associated with castration. This association
results in a state of anxiety in the male viewer that threatens his pursuit of
pleasure.25 She urges that, in order to avoid the anxiety that the female body
invokes, classic narrative cinema is structured to enable the male viewer to
turn the possibility of displeasure into pleasure by means of an identification
with the two kinds of look associated with scopophilia: the active voyeuristic,
sadistic and controlling gaze, which objectifies, and the narcissistic construc-
tion of the ego, which arises from an identification with the protagonist on
the screen. Identification with the controlling sadistic look avoids discomfort
by witnessing female characters punished. Narcissistic identification with the
protagonist on the screen avoids discomfort by fetishizing the female form
and hence rendering her harmless.
 The cinematic apparatus and the transcendental subject 23

Mulvey’s essay also proposes an investigation of filmmaking practices that

disrupt the male pleasure produced by narrative films that objectify and deni-
grate the image of the female. She argues for the destruction of this form of
cinematic pleasure. Yet, and it has been said repeatedly, while Mulvey’s essay
put questions of sexual difference on the agenda, it makes no mention of a
female spectating position. Bergstrom and Doane again:

In ‘Visual pleasure,’ there is no trace of the female spectator. Indeed,

spectatorship is incontrovertibly masculine, as evidenced by the frequently
noted use of the pronoun ‘he’ in the essay. What was so overwhelmingly
recognizable in ‘Visual pleasure’ was our own absence. Thus, one of the
questions raised about Mulvey’s psychoanalytical framework was inevitably,
‘What about the female spectator?’ 26

Mulvey’s oversight prompted further work on the female spectator. As Kuhn

observed in 1994, in the second edition of her book Women’s Pictures: Femi-
nism and Cinema, the special issue of Camera Obscura, five years earlier,
‘appeared to have become preoccupied by the female spectatorship debate
to the virtual exclusion of all else’.27 The debates around female spectatorship
are diverse, ranging from discussions of how classic Hollywood cinema repro-
duces the sexual imbalance found in everyday social relations, to explorations
of the kinds of cinematic pleasure that might be available to female viewers.
This is particularly pertinent when we consider just how many cinemagoers
are female: clearly, women enjoy watching films.28
As revolutionary as psychoanalytic feminist film theory is, attempts to
define a female spectating position have been plagued with problems. When
feminist film theory looks to account for such a position there are only three
avenues by which to do it: it can identify masochistically with the image of
the castrated woman; identify with a male spectating position; or appropriate
and adapt the processes of identification central to theories of the cinematic
apparatus in order to develop a unique female spectating position. The first
assumes that the only kind of female pleasure cinema can afford women is
a debilitating masochistic pleasure. This is an impoverished version of spec-
tatorship compared to male spectatorship, which is based on mastery and
control. While Raymond Bellour suggests that this is indeed the main form of
cinematic pleasure for women, the kinds of feminist interventions discussed
earlier show that this is not the case.29 The second avenue, identification with
a masculine position, denies difference and assumes that women are the
same as men. The last choice positions the female spectator in opposition
to the male. The failure of theories of the cinematic apparatus to account for
sexual difference by assuming the primacy of a unified and universal male
24 Deleuze and Film

spectating position means that the female spectator had no option but to
emerge in opposition to it.30
Although feminist critique of the cinematic apparatus aimed to challenge
notions of the unified male subject and introduce questions of sexual differ-
ence, it also inherited the problems of that arrangement. Even when modified
to account for female spectatorship, difference is still a problem. For exam-
ple, theories of female spectatorship tend to ignore the differences between
women and reproduce the kind of universalism found in theories of spectator-
ship in general. Another consequence of this arrangement is the implication
that the female spectator has always existed in opposition to the male.
This logic has had two constraining effects. As I discussed earlier, the first
is that the female spectator will always be positioned in opposition to the
male. The second, and perhaps more problematic, is that the concept of the
female spectator – like that of the spectator in general – quickly becomes a
monolithic and general category that cannot account for differences between
women. Theories that try to account for a female spectating position tend
to produce a generalized female subject and ignore issues of race, ethnicity,
class and queer sexualities. The female spectator turns out to look very much
like a white, middle-class and heterosexual subject.31 At the same time, one
of the more productive consequences of exploring the concept of the female
spectator has been a re-examination of the structure of the cinematic appa-
ratus and how it has contributed to the problem of difference. As a result,
feminist interventions have been foremost in rigorously examining some of
the basic assumptions of, and problems with, theories of the cinematic appa-
ratus.
With all this work on female spectatorship, questions about how psychoan-
alytic feminist film theory understands and constructs sexual difference began
to emerge. Rodowick suggests that psychoanalytic feminist film theory has
primarily constructed sexual difference on a binary model.32 Ever since 1975,
when Mulvey made the provocative assertion that ‘[i]n a world ordered by
sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and
passive/female’,33 psychoanalytic feminist film theory’s exploration of sexual
difference has tended to reinforce this binary opposition. Moreover, as Rodo-
wick notes, even theories whose specific aim is to identify an exclusively
female viewing pleasure rely on the binary of male/female. For him the con-
cept of the female spectator is always positioned in opposition to what it is
not – the male spectator. And he contends that ‘even when carefully deployed
as critiques of biological essentialism, the current attempts to define the self-
identity of female spectators through psychoanalytic theory are nonetheless
based on ontological arguments’.34 Indebted to the work of Jacques Derrida,
Elizabeth Grosz argues that the fundamental problem with a binary structure
is that one side of the binary is always privileged over the other:
 The cinematic apparatus and the transcendental subject 25

Within such a conceptual order, one of the two terms necessarily occupies
the position of dominace [sic], and the other, placed as its opposite or ‘other’
is necessarily positioned as subordinate. The two terms are hierarchically
structured so that the dominant term is accorded both temporal and logical
priority.35

Grosz goes on to explain that, in a binary structure, the dominant set of terms
is always and absolutely dependent on the degradation of the opposite set.
There can be no doubt that many films operate according to a binary structure
in which the dominance of the male protagonist is assured by the degradation
of the female characters. On one level, this was the message of ­Mulvey’s
essay, ‘Visual pleasure and narrative cinema’, thirty-five years ago, yet, extraor-
dinarily and to its own detriment, feminist film theory has perpetuated and
remained caught up in this binary logic through the concept of the female
spectator.

Section 2: The transcendental subject

One of the difficulties of the cinematic apparatus for feminist film theory is
that it produces an all-seeing, all-knowing, transcendental subject with which
to identify. Moreover, as an ahistorical subject, it does not change over time.
It is fixed and does not take into account the temporal aspects of subjectivity,
the body or cinema. Metz and Baudry extol the liberating virtues of primary
cinematic identification when they suggest that it offers an all-powerful omni-
present vision akin to seeing through the eyes of God, but this identification
comes at the cost of forgetting the body. The appeal of this kind of identifica-
tion is obvious: by discarding the limitations of the body and becoming pure
vision the world becomes ones playground. However, bodies are not that eas-
ily discarded and cannot easily be separated from the mind. For feminism,
the disembodied qualities of the cinematic apparatus, together with its lack
of temporality have serious ramifications. Without temporality difference is
trapped in a binary dynamic. An important means of introducing questions
of temporality is through the body, since the body is constantly changing. In
theories of the cinematic apparatus, monocular perspective, lack of temporal-
ity and lack of embodiment are inseparable characteristics.

Monocular perspective
In developing the theory of cinematic identification, both Baudry and Metz draw
on the principles of monocular perspective, which is a geometrical ­arrangement
26 Deleuze and Film

of space that produces a point in space for the viewer to occupy and that
­corresponds to the vanishing point in a painting. By occupying this point,
­monocular perspective creates the illusion that the scene on the canvas is seen
from the point of view of the viewer. In this respect, monocular perspective res-
onates with Lacan’s proposition that language contains subject positions waiting
to be occupied. So too do films according to Baudry and Metz: in framing shots
the camera adheres to the principles of monocular perspective. As it records, the
camera also inscribes a spectating position ready to be filled. In the cinema this
process is aided by the projector, which during the screening takes the place of
the camera. Positioned above and behind the head of the spectator, it projects
the images onto the screen, and by identifying with this position the action on
the screen seems almost to be emanating from the spectator.36 Together these
devices produce a central point of view, or a privileged spectating position.
Moreover, in the cinematic apparatus this position is arguably more power-
ful than it is in Renaissance art, because the mobility of the camera, combined
with continuity editing, gives the images a seamless quality. Although monoc-
ular perspective is a system based on single-point perspective, by aligning it
with a camera, this perspective is given limitless mobility and complete free-
dom. Accordingly, the kind of subject produced is all-seeing, all-knowing and
transcendental. In Baudry’s words:

And if the eye which moves is no longer fettered by a body, by the laws of
matter and time, if there are no more assignable limits to its displacement
– conditions fulfilled by the possibilities of shooting and of film – the world
will be constituted not only by this eye but for it. The mobility of the camera
seems to fulfill the most favorable conditions for the manifestation of the
‘transcendental subject’.37

Identifying with the transcendental subject creates the illusion for the spec-
tator that s/he is at the centre of the narrative and in control not only of the
action on the screen, but also of vision itself.38
Much more than story, narrative and characters, for Baudry, the cinematic
apparatus is defined by the inscription of a particular viewing position to be
occupied by the spectator by means of a process of identification. He sug-
gests as much when he states, ‘Ultimately, the forms of narrative adopted,
the “contents” of the images, are of little importance so long as an identifica-
tion remains possible’.39 Because this subject emerges entirely from a system
of vision, it is a disembodied subject. With its focus on the eye, the viewing
body plays no role in the cinematic experience. Bodily sensations and affects
are given no consideration.
For critics of the cinematic apparatus, such as Doane and Copjec, the
deployment of monocular perspective for the cinema is highly problematic.
They argue that the reduction of the gaze to a single point in space, where the
 The cinematic apparatus and the transcendental subject 27

spectator and the camera/projector coincide, results in the elimination of the

other in Lacan’s mirror. In so doing both alterity and difference are eliminated.40
Copjec suggests that the cinematic experience may very well be one that can
account for differences, but an exploration of how this might occur has been
hampered by underplaying the role of the other in the mirror and insisting that
the spectator’s primary identification occurs with the camera or the transcen-
dental subject. For Copjec, to insist that the cinema always produces the same
kind of identification leaves no room for any other form of engagement.
Cinema may very well produce a transcendental subject with which to iden-
tify. However, it is incorrect to insist, as theorists of the cinematic apparatus
do, that it is the only mode of film viewing. Certain films do privilege identifi-
cation with the gaze as transcendental and all-powerful, but it is unlikely that
this kind of gaze can be sustained throughout the course of the film. There
are moments when other kinds of dynamic are privileged. Films that centre
what Deleuze calls the action-image, for example, may adhere in the main
to the principles of the cinematic apparatus through the use of an all-seeing,
all-knowing gaze, but there are also moments when, by means of fast edit-
ing, rapidly alternating multiple camera angles and surround sound, explosive
action produces a kind of visual, aural and bodily confusion. Moreover, some
films privilege other kinds of arrangements than that of the cinematic appara-
tus. In the horror genre, for example, vision is anything but disembodied as it
engages the viewer on the visceral level by means of affects of terror, horror
and suspense. Moreover, horror films frequently focus on what is unknow-
able, incomprehensible and events that are so horrifying that they produce an
ambivalent relationship to knowledge. Vision is frequently compromised, mak-
ing the attainment of knowledge difficult as scenes are frequently dark, the
camera is shaky and unstable, and psycho killers wear masks.
Modular-narrative or database-narrative films are yet another example of
films that do not adhere to the system of vision found in the cinematic appa-
ratus. Many modular-narrative films disorient vision by the use of irrational
cuts rather than continuity editing, or by using strange camera angles, or vio-
lent and frenetic camera movements. In addition, time is often privileged over
space. For example, Memento (Christopher Nolan, 2000) is structured around
a non-linear time-frame that produces an uncertain relationship to knowledge.
Not only is the story told backwards, but the main narrator, the film’s narrator,
having lost his short-term memory, is rendered an unreliable witness.

Section 3: Deleuzian possibilities

Feminist film theory offers a detailed critique of the cinematic apparatus, par-
ticularly the work of Doane and Copjec. In so doing, it has done the groundwork
necessary for a re-thinking of film viewing that moves beyond the structure
28 Deleuze and Film

of the cinematic apparatus and beyond the dominance of the transcendental

subject. But this does not answer the vital question: How might Deleuze’s
work on the cinema contribute to the project of re-thinking film viewing?
In addressing this question, we have three key challenges to face. First,
while his Cinema books make no direct engagement with theories of the cine-
matic apparatus, it would be a mistake to conclude that Deleuze has nothing to
say about either the apparatus or spectatorship. As I want to argue presently,
a response to these issues is implicit in his concept of the perception image.
And I will develop this in later chapters, when I consider the concept of the
cinematic assemblage. Secondly, Deleuze draws on conceptions of linguistics
and the subject that diverge markedly from those of apparatus theorists such
as Metz. Whereas apparatus theorists draw on Ferdinand de Saussure, Lacan
and Althusser, Deleuze turns to Louis Hjelmslev, Charles Sanders Peirce and
Pier Paolo Pasolini. This is most evident in his discussion of cinematic con-
sciousness and the perception-image.
Thirdly, an assessment of the contribution made by Deleuze’s work on
cinema to a project of re-thinking film viewing necessitates an engage-
ment with an on-going issue in Deleuzian film studies, which is whether or
not the Cinema books contain any notion of spectatorship or a cinematic
spectator. Most commentators see little in these books of relevance to
spectatorship. Mark Hansen, for example, argues that because the dis-
tinction between the film and the viewer is blurred, the spectator loses
any defining features. Accordingly, he cannot easily imagine a Deleuzian
form of spectatorship.41 ‘Deleuzian cinematic philosophy is not a theory of
spectatorship’, asserts Laura Marks, who goes on to contend that, while
Deleuze may be interested in bodies on the screen, he is not interested in
embodied spectatorship.42 Vivian Sochack agrees,43 and in Patricia MacCor-
mack’s view, the Cinema books focus more on film content than processes
of spectatorship.44
Two theorists who have given more consideration to the issue of spec-
tatorship are Louis-Georges Schwarts and Richard Rushton. Both address
the question of Deleuze and spectatorship through the perception-image.
Particularly, the possibility that the perception-image produces a cinematic
subject or specific cinematic consciousness that invites the viewer to con-
nect with it. Schwarts, for whom the perception-image enables the spectator
to adopt the view of the camera,45 draws our attention to Deleuze’s deploy-
ment of Jean Mitry’s semi-subjective shot that directly links the viewer with
the perception-image: ‘Because the camera shows what the character sees
and the character seeing it, the spectators become aware of the character’s
reaction at the same time as the character, so that their empathy is strongly
solicited.’46
 The cinematic apparatus and the transcendental subject 29

Rushton likewise extends the dynamic of the perception-image to include

the spectator. For him, the oscillation between objective and subjective per-
spectives means that:

spectatorship in the cinema is always doubled, such that there is a dividing-

in-two of the cinematic experience, so that one part of the spectator
receives and responds to images automatically, while another aspect of
the spectator monitors these automatic responses.47

In my own view, although Deleuze does not confront the issue of specta-
torship directly, the perception-image implies a film–viewer. This is particu-
larly the case when considering that according to Deleuze the perception-
image is endowed with a felt quality and gives the impression of ‘being-with’
characters. It is worth noting that while the perception-image gives rise to a
specific cinematic consciousness it is an embodied consciousness. Having
attended to these three challenges we can now explore how the perception-
image presents new possibilities for re-thinking film viewing beyond a binary
model.

The perception-image
The perception-image holds a special place in Deleuze’s taxonomy of
images. It is not just one kind of image, but it conveys the essence of
a cinematic consciousness or a ‘camera-self-consciousness’.48 ‘[T]he sole
cinematographic consciousness is not us, the spectator, nor the hero’,
he says. ‘[I]t is the camera – sometimes human, sometimes inhuman or
superhuman’.49 This cinematic consciousness emerges from the camera’s
ability to express both an objective and subjective point of view in the same
shot. The cinematic consciousness that emerges from this dynamic is very
different from the transcendental subject of the cinematic apparatus, which
is always the same and is based on one kind of perception. The perception-
image gives birth to a cinematic consciousness that is able to accommo-
date the existence of different voices and perspectives. This radical new
form of consciousness has the potential to introduce us to new kinds of
perspectives and therefore to challenge conventional and predicable ways
of thinking. This is a particularly provocative idea for feminist film theory
as a cinematic consciousness that accommodates multiple perspectives at
the same time challenges binary thinking. For this reason it is necessary to
take a closer look at the perception-image and what it offers feminist film
theory.
30 Deleuze and Film

Deleuze develops his theory of the perception-image primarily by drawing

on the work of Pasolini and Mitry, both of whom discuss cinema’s unique abil-
ity to express a subjective and objective perspective within a single shot and
how this engenders a felt quality. Pasolini labels this phenomenon ‘free indi-
rect image’ or ‘free indirect camera’, whereas Mitry calls it a ‘semi-subjective
shot’. Beginning with Pasolini, I want to discuss the influence of these two
theorists on Deleuze’s concept of the perception-image.
In order to account for the camera’s ability to express a subjective and objec-
tive perspective simultaneously, Pasolini employs the concept of free indirect
discourse, a linguistic style that oscillates between the subjective voice of a
character and the objective voice of the narrator. For him, this means that a
single utterance can be polyvocal, because, in the process of reanimating the
language of a character, the author must adopt his or her way of speaking,
dialect or slang. In so doing, the author is adopting the style of the character,
in addition to his or her own narrating voice, which continues to be heard.50 In
other words, both voices are co-existent in the same utterance. For Pasolini,
free indirect discourse is a matter of style. As a result of being immersed in
the language and culture of the character, the writer adopts his or her style.
Consequently, even what would normally pass for direct discourse (the nar-
ration generally) is inflected with the style of the character. Once inflected
with the style of the character, it is difficult to refer to the narration as purely
indirect discourse. At the same time, it is also clearly neither dialogue nor
monologue, so not direct discourse.
Adapting free indirect discourse for cinema is not a straightforward proc-
ess for Pasolini. Rather than focus on the speech of the characters or even on
the narration, he links free indirect discourse to particular types of shots and
images. He translates the oscillation of voices found in free indirect discourse
into images that contain a number of perspectives. Far from being purely
linguistic, style refers to cinematography, editing, composition and music. He
associates it with a cinematic aesthetic found in the work of directors like
Michelangelo Antonioni, Jean-Luc Goddard and Bernardo Bertolucci, whose
films all acknowledge the presence of the camera. Pasolini discusses a range
of cinematic techniques that produce the ‘felt’ quality of the camera. One of
these is obsessive framing, referring to a set-up whereby characters are made
to enter, say something or do something, and then leave the frame.
These are techniques that Pasolini frequently uses himself. For example,
in Mamma Roma (1962) characters are constantly positioned in the centre of
the frame as they say or do something, and then, when they have finished,
are made to walk away, leaving the viewer with an empty frame. Pasolini also
discusses the sequential juxtaposition of different points of view of the same
scene as a means of producing a kind of free indirect camera. A sequence
may consist of two shots that frame the same scene ‘first from nearby, then
 The cinematic apparatus and the transcendental subject 31

from a bit further, or frontally and then a bit more obliquely; or finally actually
on the same axis but with two different lenses’.51 In these techniques Pasolini
sees the contamination of two voices or two perspectives, that of the director
and that of the character. What is interesting is that for Pasolini, the  more
images reflect the co-existence of different perspectives, the more style
asserts itself: just as free indirect discourse is inflected with the voices of
the characters, so the free indirect camera is contaminated by the perspec-
tives of the characters, thereby drawing attention to itself and its own style.
Deleuze seizes upon Pasolini’s notion of free indirect images and uses it
as evidence of a unique cinematic subject or consciousness. According to
Schwarts, whereas a free indirect cinematographic discourse enables Pasolini
to understand how a character’s voice and perspective can be respected by
the author/director, for Deleuze it becomes the essence of cinema and the
key to a purely cinematic consciousness: ‘By making Pasolini identify free indi-
rect images with the essence of cinema, Deleuze forges an ontological link
between cinema and subjectivity.’52 For Deleuze, this cinematic conscious-
ness emerges from the oscillation of subjective and objective perspectives in
the same shot.
Deleuze reminds us that shots filmed from the point of view of a character
are subjective, whereas those that are omniscient or seem to originate out-
side the set are objective. However, the distinction between the two can blur
as the camera moves about, and processes of re-framing can render subjec-
tive and objective perspectives merely provisional. For example, shots that
appear to be objective can turn out to represent a character’s point of view. At
other times, shots that appear to be subjective turn out to be objective. Other
shots can shift perspective almost seamlessly.53
Following Pasolini, though appropriating the concept slightly differently,
Deleuze also turns to free indirect discourse in order to understand how cin-
ema produces a cinematographic presence. He focuses on how free indi-
rect discourse demonstrates the social nature of language and subjectivity.
Particularly, as according to Deleuze it ‘consists of an enunciation [énoncia-
tion] taken within an utterance [énoncé], which itself depends on another
enunciation’.54 This dynamic produces a circuitry of exchange in which one
enunciation is dependent on another and therefore intertwined with it and
born from it. From this process of exchange emerges a cinematic conscious-
ness or cinematic subject that is defined by difference, as it is composed and
recomposed according to the interweaving of various statements. Deleuze
relates these productive statements, and the possibility that they bring forth
subjects, to assemblages of enunciation:

[I]t is rather a case of an assemblage of enunciation, carrying out two

inseparable acts of subjectivation simultaneously, one of which constitutes
32 Deleuze and Film

a character in the first person, but the other of which is itself present at
his birth and brings him on to the scene. There is no mixture or average
of two subjects, each belonging to a system, but a differentiation of two
correlative subjects in a system which is itself heterogeneous.55

Unlike the transcendental subject, the act of differentiation central to the percep-
tion-image implies a subject that is in a state of becoming. Rather than marking
its difference in opposition to another subject, as it does in a binary system, the
circuitry of enunciations produce subjects whose impact on each other promote
change. The kind of difference produced is rhizomatic in nature and relates to
processes of transformation, or of metamorphosis. Difference in this instance
is not what differs from something else, but a continual unfolding.
Deleuze argues that the perception-image has no ‘equivalent in natural
perception’ because, human perception is either objective or subjective, but
never both at the same time.56 Cinema, on the other hand, he argues, has the
ability to contain both perspectives in the same shot, so that the perspec-
tive of one is reflected in the other without merging with it: ‘Objective and
subjective images lose their distinction, but also their identification, in favour
of a new circuit where they are wholly replaced, or contaminate each other,
or are decomposed and recomposed’.57 While Deleuze recognizes cinema’s
ability to produce a transcendental subject, unlike theorists of the cinematic
apparatus, he does not equate it with the cinematic subject. He aligns the
transcendental subject with the objective camera, however, because in the
perception-image it co-exists with a subjective perspective, it is not the domi-
nant mode of vision.
This process can occur in a number of ways. In Mamma Roma the attentive
camera gives the impression of being contaminated by the perspective of the
main characters. This is particularly so in the case of Mamma Roma (Anna Mag-
nani), the main character, as the objective camera somehow appears to respect
her view of the world. In Antonioni’s The Passenger (1975) it is more a case of
decomposition and recomposition. In one scene, set in a hotel, David Locke
(Jack Nicholson) looks up at a ceiling fan. We see this from his point of view, and
therefore assume it to be a subjective shot. The camera then pans very slowly
around the room until it stops on a long shot of Locke standing in the middle of
the room. At this point the shot is an objective one, its point of view belonging
to no specific character. The subjective becomes the objective seamlessly and
in the process the vision of one perspective is reflected in the other.

Being-with
Most significantly for feminist film theory, Deleuze’s concept of the perception-
image opens up an avenue for discussing an embodied form of film viewing.
 The cinematic apparatus and the transcendental subject 33

This is because Deleuze discusses the perception-image as producing a sense

of being-with the characters. These are moments in a film when the viewer
senses a cinematographic presence that is with the character. This means
that viewers feel themselves to be with a character or to empathize with him
or her. This is not the same as identifying with a character (as in psychoana-
lytic film theory’s concept of secondary identification), but it does enable the
viewer to be in alliance with a character.
Whereas the transcendental subject of the cinematic apparatus sees
everything from a distance, being-with a character engenders a felt quality.
Apparatus theory focuses on cinema’s ability to hide its traces of production,
particularly the work of the camera. By disavowing the presence of the cam-
era, the viewer is able to indulge in the fantasy that they have control of the
images on the screen and that they know everything. The perception-image
disrupts this fantasy. While the camera itself may not be visible, the viewer is
nonetheless made aware of its presence. The all-seeing, all-knowing camera
is always accompanied by a camera vision that is subjective. This oscillation
between the two perspectives produces a sense of being-with a character
that opens up a way of thinking about subjectivity as occurring with others
rather than against another.
In order to understand this sense of being-with a character, Deleuze draws
on Mitry’s concept of the ‘semi-subjective’. For Mitry, the semi-subjective
image describes the camera’s passage between objectivity and subjectivity,
at which time the camera creates the impression of being-with the characters
and so creates a kind of felt presence. Deleuze pursues this idea further by
suggesting that the circuitry of objective and subjective perspectives produces
a sense of an anonymous point of view or an independent consciousness. At
moments like this the camera’s perspective is unique: ‘[I]t no longer mingles
with the character, nor is it outside: it is with him. It is a kind of truly cinemato-
graphic Mitsein – or what Dos Passos aptly called “the eye of the camera”.The
anonymous viewpoint of someone unidentified amongst the characters.’58 The
camera appears to have a real presence all of its own, to be looking with a
gaze that is independent of either a character or from an objective viewpoint.
It is significant for Schwartz that, no sooner has Deleuze borrowed the
term being-with from Mitry, than he immediately translates it into Martin
Heidegger’s term Mitsein.59 Mitsein always implicates others in one’s exist-
ence. For Heidegger, Dasein (human existence) is always already connected
to others because in our daily lives we use objects that constantly reference
the existence of others. By reading the quality of being-with in relation to
the concept of Mitsein, Deleuze accentuates the way free indirect images
overcome any clear distinction between subjects in favour of a dynamic of
exchange, a co-existence of perspectives and an assemblage of enunciation.
For him, the sense of being-with produced by the oscillation of different
34 Deleuze and Film

perspectives points to a subjectivity that is always in motion, always becoming

and always differing from itself. Subjectivity decomposes and recomposes
according to the different perspectives that co-mingle because ‘the camera
does not simply give us the vision of the character and of his world; it imposes
another vision in which the first is transformed and reflected’.60
Significantly, Deleuze acknowledges the role of the transcendental subject
in this oscillating cinematic consciousness. However, he does not suggest
any form of spectator identification with it. Instead he identifies the tran-
scendental subject as an important component of the circuitry of exchange
that gives birth to a cinematic consciousness, not cinematic consciousness
itself:

It is the Cogito: an empirical subject cannot be borne into the world without
simultaneously being reflected in a transcendental subject which thinks it
and in which it thinks itself. And the Cogito of art: there is no subject which
acts without another which watches it act, and which grasps it as acted,
itself assuming the freedom of which it deprives the former. “Thus two
different egos [moi], one of which, conscious of its freedom, sets itself
up as independent spectator of a scene which the other would play in a
mechanical fashion. But this dividing-in-two never goes to the limit. It is
rather an oscillation of the person between two points of view on himself,
a hither-and-thither of the spirit . . ..” a being-with.61

What is extraordinary about the ‘hither-and-thither dynamic of the spirit’ is

that it retains different points of view. Rather than producing a transcendental
subject for the viewer to identify with, as psychoanalytic film theory insists,
it produces a subject that is in a constant process of becoming. The constant
oscillation between points of view poses a challenge to the binary logic found
in cinematic apparatus as it produces a form of subjectivity that is always dif-
fering from itself.

Implications for feminist film theory

Deleuze’s focus on cinema’s felt qualities and its ability to articulate differ-
ent perspectives shifts the focus of film viewing away from the all-seeing
transcendental subject towards a notion of transcendental empiricism that
privileges experimentation and change. This is because the perception-image
takes us away from a centred universal form of human subjectivity to a cin-
ematic experience based on interaction, variation and change. Deleuze insists
that the model of cinematic perception is not a natural subjective perception
‘because the mobility of its centres and the variability of its framings always
 The cinematic apparatus and the transcendental subject 35

lead it to restore vast acentred and deframed zones’.62 In so doing he argues

the perception-image returns to ‘the first regime of the movement-image;
universal variation’.63 Based on the principles of universal variation, the cinema
becomes a machine for the production of difference. This is a vast shift from
the tendency of the cinematic apparatus to produce sameness and universal
subjects. For feminist film theory the exploration of cinema as a differential
machine is an important means of overcoming the impasse in spectatorship
theory.
In addition, the perception-image presents us with a means of discussing
embodiment as an important aspect of film viewing. Because the sense of
being-with a character is associated with a felt quality, film viewing neces-
sarily becomes an embodied experience. Although Deleuze discusses this
felt quality primarily with reference to the presence of a specific cinemato-
graphic consciousness, the tactile implications of this for the experience of
film viewing cannot be ignored. Deleuze may not discuss spectatorship
or the experience of the film-viewer in as many words, but the felt quality of
the perception-image is a clear example of how his taxonomy of images can
be appropriated for the exploration of embodied modes of film viewing. For
feminist film theory this means a shift in focus away from the bodies on the
screen to the body of the viewer. As the body is always changing, unavoidably
it also introduces us to issues of temporality. A focus on the body inevitably
brings into play questions to do with cinema’s temporal aspects and therefore
its relationship to difference.
36
 2

Re-thinking
representation: New
lines of thought in
feminist philosophy

R epresentation is a key concept for feminist philosophy, film theory and

Deleuze studies. What gives this shared concern particular complexity
is that, while feminist philosophers have taken great inspiration from
Deleuze’s work on the subject, feminist film theory has yet to fully engage
with its implications. For many contemporary feminist thinkers, one of the
most productive aspects of Deleuze’s work on difference is that it reveals
the ways in which representational thought produces an impoverished and
limited concept of difference. In 1999, for example, Dorothea Olkowski used
this work in her analysis of the construction of sexual difference in Western
thought.1 What was of particular significance for feminism, she believed, was
that Deleuze had discovered that within a system of representation difference
was not a concept in its own right. Rather it was that which deviated from a
primary and original Idea. As a result, all differences derived their core meaning
from a primary concept rather than from their own specificities.
The importance of this idea for feminism is that it demonstrates the extent
to which the feminine subject is understood through her relationship to the
masculine subject and not through her own specificities. Deleuze argues
that within representational thought, difference is reduced to the negation
of a primary Idea or concept. As a result difference is that which modifies an
Idea and is not a concept in its own right: ‘Difference then can be no more
than a predicate in the comprehension of a concept.’2 These same problems
38 Deleuze and Film

of representational thought can be identified in psychoanalytic feminist

film theory. This is particularly through its engagement with the concept of
the cinematic apparatus. In deploying Plato’s allegory of the cave, theories
of the cinematic apparatus also inherited a system of representation that
denies difference. In order to discover how Deleuze’s work on representa-
tion and difference might be useful for feminist film theory, I propose to
consider the uses made of Plato’s cave in theories of the cinematic appa-
ratus. Central to this is feminist philosophy’s engagement with Deleuze’s
critique of difference.

Section 1: Plato’s Cave

The first way in which theories of the cinematic apparatus invoke a transcen-
dental subject is through the introduction of monocular perspective. The
second is by inscribing the topography found in the cave allegory over the
film viewing situation. Theorists of the cinematic apparatus deploy Plato as
a means of understanding how films tend to produce an impression of real-
ity. They argue that the sense of realism in film viewing is produced by two
related means: first, by concealing the film’s means of production and sec-
ondly, by producing a subject position for the viewer to occupy. Concealing
the means of production creates a sense of realism because, despite the fact
that film production is a highly technical process requiring a vast amount of
money and an immense effort on the part of hundreds of workers, the images
on the screen appear as if by magic. As the film’s narrative unfolds, audiences
are drawn in and lose themselves in the screen world. Film theorists, such as
Jean-Louis Baudry, discovered that both tendencies, the concealment of the
means of production and a pre-existing subject position waiting to be filled,
were already evident in the cave allegory.
The underground cave makes its appearance in Book VII of The ­Republic.
It is a place, says Plato, where prisoners are chained from birth and made
to look at shadows of animals and people created by the light of a fire
on a raised platform hidden behind them and projected on to a wall in
front of them. The cave’s acoustics are such that the voices of the people
involved in the production of the shadows appear to be those of the shad-
ows themselves. Having never experienced anything else, the prisoners
take the shadows for reality. The illusion of reality is further enhanced by
the prisoners’ inability to turn around and see how the shadows are being
produced.
Baudry likens the immobility of the prisoners to that of the spectator in
the darkness of the cinema, the fixed seat faces the screen and denies them
 New lines of thought in feminist philosophy 39

any sight of the source of the images before them. For Baudry, Plato’s cave
exemplifies a spatial arrangement that tricks the spectator into thinking s/he is
in a position of knowledge and control when in fact they are at the centre of an
illusion. Significantly, identification with this place is, for Baudry, an ideological
mechanism found in idealism:

[The cinema] constitutes the ‘subject’ by the illusory delimitation of a

central location—whether this be that of a god or of any other substitute.
It is an apparatus destined to obtain a precise ideological effect, necessary
to the dominant ideology: creating a phantasmatization of the subject, it
collaborates with a marked efficacy in the maintenance of idealism.3

In fact, for Baudry, the cinema is the perfect machine of idealism, the film
viewing situation of the cinema having refined to perfection the arrange-
ments in Plato’s cave. Baudry does not critique the idealism found in the
allegory in relation to Plato’s theory of forms, rather he relates the cave’s
idealist tendencies to a spatial arrangement that produces a subject effect.
In short, it is his contention that the cinema is the perfect machine for the
fulfilment of an individual’s desire that is willing to submit to an impression of
reality in order that s/he might occupy the space of the all-seeing, all-knowing
unified transcendental subject. Mary-Ann Doane suggests that by appealing
to Plato’s allegory Baudry is looking, in fact, to critique the idealist ­tendencies
of cinema.4 In this regard, Baudry can be seen to be interested not only in
how the cinema works, but how it works as an apparatus that re-activates
idealism.
In developing his critique, Baudry draws an analogy between Plato’s
cave and Freud’s theory of hallucination, according to which belief in the
hallucination is total and it is pointless trying to convince the person who
is hallucinating otherwise. Once Baudry has revealed the cinema’s idealist
tendencies, he attempts to find a crack in this system that might offer a
way out of idealism. He points out that while the prisoners mistake illu-
sion for reality, there is also a philosopher in the story who ventures out of
the cave and uncovers the illusion. When the philosopher tries to convince
the prisoners that the shadows are mere illusions, they refuse to believe
him. After all, from where they sit they can only see the shadows and
can see nothing of the fire behind them. For Baudry, this is similar to the
situation of the analyst who tries to convince the hallucinator that his/her
hallucination is not real. The position of knowledge that the philosopher,
or analyst, holds, allowing him/her to distinguish between reality and illu-
sion, gives Baudry an opportunity to develop a ­position from which to cri-
tique the cinema’s idealist tendencies. Doane points out that when Baudry
‘defines the apparatus it is as a unique spatial arrangement which explains
40 Deleuze and Film

the ­production of “truth”, giving the analyst knowledge of a differentiation

between real and illusion’.5 Yet, as Doane discovers, by insisting that the
apparatus explains the truth, Baudry reinscribes the dichotomy between
the Real and the Copy.
By suggesting that the analyst/philosopher is able to distinguish between
reality and illusion, Baudry gives this distinction legitimacy. As a result the
cinematic apparatus has never truly been able to escape the idealist logic of
duping the spectator into believing that s/he is ‘all-seeing’ when in actual fact
what the spectator takes for reality is only an impression. As Doane points
out, while it may be Baudry’s aim to critique idealism, he nonetheless remains
within a philosophy of idealism:

Baudry’s apparatus theory, critical as it may be of idealism’s dichotomy

between surface and depth, appearance and reality, reinscribes the
dichotomy through a recourse to Plato’s allegory of the cave. Idealism is
the only guide to the spectator’s apprehension of the image.6

By insisting that the cinema is the perfection of idealism’s desire to deceive

the spectator into mistaking illusions for reality, Baudry fails to account for the
capacity of certain films to disrupt or operate outside this idealist logic and as
a result constructs a monolithic version of the cinematic apparatus and the
cinematic experience.
Psychoanalytic film theory and theories of the cinematic apparatus, devel-
oped according to the model of Plato’s cave allegory, have inherited many of
the limitations and problems of idealism. In a poignant statement, Doane sig-
nals the kind of negative impact that referring to Plato has had on film theory:
‘In psychoanalytic film theory, the cinema seems inevitably to become the
perfect machine for the incarnation or institutionalization of the wrong idea
– here it is Platonic idealism.’7 This idealist facet of theories of the cinematic
apparatus is concretized through the melding of Renaissance perspective to
Plato’s topography of the cave. Film theory has deployed both of these in
order to demonstrate how cinema produces an impression of reality as well
as a spectating position that believes it is all-powerful and controlling. By main-
taining that cinema operates within the limits of idealism, film theory closes
off a host of other potential understandings of the cinematic experience. In
particular, it closes off any serious consideration of film viewing as an affective
experience that engages the senses.
Baudry insists that the topography of the cave is reproduced in the cinematic
apparatus and focuses on it in order to demonstrate how this arrangement
produces a subject effect that is designed to cause illusion to be ­mistaken
for reality. Yet, while the topography of the cave, and the means by which it
 New lines of thought in feminist philosophy 41

produces a subject effect, certainly plays an important part in the allegory, it

is not the focus of the story. Plato’s cave is primarily about a system of repre-
sentation based on his theory of ideal Forms. The topography of the cave is an
aid to understanding it, but it is certainly not the crux of it. The analogy Baudry
draws between the cave and the cinema is absolutely insightful and cannot
be underestimated or ignored. However, while it offers the means whereby
a specific mode of film viewing may be understood, Baudry’s insistence that
this arrangement defines spectatorship, thereby denying the existence of dif-
ferent modes of film viewing, has created a real problem.
Plato’s allegory sets out a system of representation based on ideal Forms
in order to distinguish between an original, true version and its copies. For
Plato, all that really exists is the Form or the Idea of something, which is
always ideal and perfect. For example, the Idea of a table – that is, the con-
cept of a table – is the real table; all physical tables are copies of this Idea.
The table as an Idea is perfect and ideal, whereas copies of it are degraded
and imperfect. However, Plato is quick to point out that we constantly mis-
take the imperfect copies for the real. In this sense, idealism is founded on
the belief that reality and truth reside in the mind and cannot be compre-
hended by the senses. In the cave allegory the distinction made between
reality and illusion corresponds to Plato’s distinction between the Idea and
the Copy.
Feminist film critics such as Doane and Joan Copjec have addressed the
problems with representation in terms of its subject effect. However, the
relationship between representational thought and ideal Forms, and issues
of identity and difference, has not been the focus of their analyses. This is
significant because Plato’s system of representation has had a substantial
impact on how difference has been understood in Western thought. In the
last decade, several feminist thinkers have turned to Deleuze’s work on repre-
sentational thought and applied it to a critique of sexual difference. I want to
outline some of this work in the next section, as it has much to offer a critique
of sexual difference within psychoanalytic feminist film theory.

Difference and representation

According to Deleuze, while this problem emerged with Plato’s system of
representation, Aristotle linked difference even more closely to a primary
Idea by introducing an organic system of representation based on four cat-
egories of difference, or four ways of differing from an Idea: ‘Difference is
“mediated” to the extent that it is subjected to the fourfold root of identity,
opposition, analogy and resemblance.’8 What results from this process of
42 Deleuze and Film

mediation is a system of representation in which everything fits neatly into

categories and all the various categories only make sense within a hierarchy.
Of these four modes of differing, opposition is considered the most signifi-
cant for feminism because the two things that differ also have the most in
common. As Deleuze writes, ‘Contrariety alone expresses the capacity of a
subject to bear opposites while remaining substantially the same (in matter
or in genus)’.9 According to this reasoning, because the female subject is
situated in opposition to the male, she must also be the same as man. From
a feminist perspective this also means that privileging identity over differ-
ence produces a standard in relation to which all things are understood. As
Olkowski argues:

The system of representation, whether in the realm of philosophy,

psychology, social and political theory, ethics or aesthetics, operates by
establishing a fixed standard as the norm or model. The very meaning of
minority is associated with falling below the standard of that norm, failing
to represent that standard in all its perfection and completeness.10

A further problem with standards is that attempts to be ‘like’, to be ‘similar to’

or to ‘represent’ the original will always risk being regarded as degraded forms
of the original ‘for the copy is never a perfect “equal” of the original’.11 Within
this system, if the standard of the human is defined as the white hetero-
sexual, middle-class man, then all that do not match up are considered copies.
Moreover, as copies, they are also based on the original and so, to a degree,
are the same as it. To be different then is to differ to some degree from the
original. For women this has serious ramifications, because in a patriarchal
society they are constantly situated in opposition to men and do not exist in
their own right. To think of the body, identity and sexual difference in a new
light will inevitably reveal the limitations of this traditional way of understand-
ing difference.
Abigail Bray and Claire Colebrook also draw on Deleuze for their work on the
construction of the body and sexual difference within a system of representa-
tion. This work is important because it can be deployed to reveal how a rep-
resentational system produces a very limited and disabling idea of the female
body. If representation is central to our understanding of the body, then it fol-
lows that an Idea of the body will precede and define any representation of it,
an ideal female body against which women are measured and from which they
will differ. For Bray and Colebrook, Deleuze’s re-evaluation of difference offers
feminism affirmative and active ethics because it challenges the distinction
that Plato draws between the Idea and the Copy, and which lies at the very
foundation of representational logic. They argue that Deleuze challenges the
 New lines of thought in feminist philosophy 43

long-standing idea that reason can be opposed to ‘some pre-representational

matter or presence’.12 To dispense with the notion of ­pre-representational
matter is to say that there can be no ideal body to be represented. For Bray
and Colebrook it is not enough for feminism to construct new representations
of the female body that counter phallocentric representation, because this
approach does not escape the problems of representation. A new representa-
tion of the female body is still a representation and therefore remains within
the dualistic logic that operates through a process of negation. Feminism,
Bray and Colebrook believe, must dispel the notion that there is a body prior
to representation and instead think of the body as an event, or in other words
in terms of its becomings, connections and activities.13
What is particularly problematic for feminist film theory is that representa-
tional logic produces concepts in general rather than a focus on what is unique
about differences. Deleuze explains it as follows:

Specific difference . . . in no way represents a universal concept (that is to

say, an Idea) encompassing all the singularities and turnings of difference,
but rather refers to a particular moment in which difference is merely
reconciled with the concept in general.14

The problem of subsuming difference within a universal concept is particu-

larly pertinent to the notion of the female spectator, who tends to be defined
in terms of generalizations and universalizations thereby overlooking specific
differences between women and between different modes of film viewing.
Interestingly, Doane notes that when adapted to account for female specta-
torship the cinematic apparatus produces woman as a generalizable category,
which does not recognize differences between women. While Doane does not
deploy Deleuze’s critique of difference within a representational system, her
discussion of the cinematic apparatus’ production of a generalizable concept
of Woman resonates loudly with Deleuze’s notion that systems of representa-
tion overlook specific differences in the production of a concept in general.
I now want to briefly look at Doane’s critique in relation to the feminist turn
towards Deleuze discussed earlier.

The female spectator: A concept in general

It is in her 1990 essay ‘Remembering women: Psychical and historical con-
structions in film theory’ that Doane develops a multilayered analogy between
the cinematic apparatus and Max Ophüls’ film, La Signora di Tutti. She proposes
that in the same way that the narrative trajectory of the film produces a
44 Deleuze and Film

monolithic and generalized category of Woman, so too does the cinematic

apparatus. In support of her contention, she points to several features of the
film. First, although the protagonist Gaby may be at the centre of the narrative,
she has no tangible identity or agency. Instead, her purpose is solely to be the
object of a non-specific desire. Her presence may make the story happen, but
she is not conscious of it and has no control over it.
Throughout the film men are prepared to ruin their lives in order to pos-
sess her, yet she has no idea of the effect she has, nor that this effect fre-
quently results in disaster. Doane argues that Gaby is, indeed, Everybody’s
Lady because, as the star of the film within the film, also entitled La Signora
di Tutti, ‘she is the signifier of a generalized desire’.15 As such she belongs at
the same time to everyone and to no one. Secondly, says Doane, Woman is
represented in the film as a mechanical construction through a disembodied
voice and constructed images. This is particularly so as Gaby is repeatedly
represented as a technological construction. She is introduced into the narra-
tive through a scene in which her disembodied voice accompanies an image
of a spinning record. In another scene, she is represented in the form of
images of posters rolling off a printing press. And, finally, the shutting down of
the press as it is reproducing her image signifies her death. Doane suggests
that the frequency with which the mechanical production of Gaby’s image is
used creates a generalized figure of Woman: a construction, a product of the
apparatus.
Most importantly, Gaby’s status as the epitome of femininity is established
by means of the emphasis placed throughout the film on the fact that she
is no ordinary woman and not like other women. For Doane, this lends sub-
stance to the idea of Woman as a generalized and monolithic category, made
to represent all women. She argues that this generalized category of Woman
is not some sort of average distilled from concrete women, but a subtraction,
or a distancing. It is a process that eliminates women’s differences so as to
produce a singular generalized category or an ideal Woman. As a result, this
ideal is not actually accessible to women. Ultimately, Doane sees a parallel
between the inaccessible category of Woman, produced by Ophüls’ film and
the way theories of the cinematic apparatus and psychoanalytic feminist film
theory are also caught up within this logic:

This is not only the process of the narrative trajectory of La Signora di Tutti
but of the cinematic institution as well – in its narratives, its star system, its
spectacle. But, further, it specifies something of the process of feminist film
theory which, in a way, mimics the cinematic construction of the Woman,
reinscribing her abstraction. It is not only the apparatus which produces
Woman but apparatus theory, in strange complicity with its object.16
 New lines of thought in feminist philosophy 45

As this quote makes clear, the problem does not only lie in the tendency of the
cinematic apparatus itself to abstract and generalize the category of Woman,
but – and this is more important – in psychoanalytic feminist film theory’s
adoption of this mode of theorizing. Despite the fact that Doane does not
discuss the problem of difference associated with the figure of a generalizable
Woman in relation to Plato’s theory of ideal Forms or representational thought,
her analysis of difference has a number of parallels with feminist critiques of
the concept of difference within representational thought.
First, Doane’s notion of the universal figure of Woman is typical of a repre-
sentational system that erases differences in order to produce an Ideal. Her
description of the process of abstraction neatly sums up the tendency of rep-
resentational thought to reduce differences to an aspect of Identity. As we
noted above, the cinematic apparatus produces a general concept of Woman
by erasing the differences between the experiences, histories, cultures and
bodies etc., of individual women. It is the very process by which represen-
tational logic subsumes differences into a unified Idea by ignoring those fea-
tures and qualities that are unique to individual women. Furthermore, feminist
film theory inherits this problem when it adopts the structure of the cinematic
apparatus. Ironically, when this happens, difference becomes a problem for
feminist film theory. Rather than highlighting difference or evoking new under-
standings of it, feminist film theory replicates the structure of the cinematic
apparatus:

In focusing upon the task of delineating in great detail the attributes of the
woman as effect of the apparatus, feminist film theory participates in the
abstraction of women. The concept of ‘Woman’ effaces the differences
between women in specific-historical contexts.17

This implies that woman as an Idea or a general concept acts as a standard

against which all women are measured. In representational logic differences
are only understood in relation to distances from an ideal. The fewer the dif-
ferences, the closer the copy is to the ideal Form; the more extensive the
differences, the more degraded the copy. In attempting to define a female
spectator by drawing on theories of the cinematic apparatus, feminist film
theory engages in the same kind of logic. What occurs when the female spec-
tator is constructed as ideal is not so much a case of different groups being
totally excluded from identification, but rather of their being understood as
modifications of her. The differences between women are not recognized as
true differences, but as aspects of a monolithic category of Woman. Those
who fail to match up to the ideal Form either differ from it to a certain degree,
or else are a degraded copy of it. Once the entity of the female spectator is
46 Deleuze and Film

produced, a hierarchical structure is established that values most highly those

who compare most favourably to the monolithic idea of the female spectator,
followed by those who differ slightly, and so on.
What this demonstrates is the impossible situation feminist film theory is
faced with when attempting to carve out a place for itself within theories of
the cinematic apparatus. This is due largely to the fact that theories of the cin-
ematic apparatus reinforce a representational logic. What is interesting about
Baudry’s deployment of allegory cave is that even though he focuses on the
topography of Plato’s cave rather than his theory of ideal Forms, the cinematic
apparatus is nonetheless emblematic of a representational system based on
the primacy of identity. Plato’s theory of ideal Forms, and not just the subject
effect discussed by Baudry, has permeated theories of the cinematic appara-
tus and by default psychoanalytical feminist film theory.
Finally, the intense focus on Plato’s cave topography has led to a serious
dearth of discussion about cinema’s temporal aspects within theories of the
cinematic apparatus. As the cinematic apparatus is a spatial arrangement of
vision, achieved by melding monocular perspective to the cave topography,
temporality plays no part in this arrangement. It is no wonder then that the
body is also excluded, since it is grounded in temporality. Indeed, the body is
the very essence of temporality because it is always changing. For example, it
is in a constant process of change, as it ages, grows strong, falls sick, withers
and dies. It is differently imagined and differently inscribed both culturally and
socially during its life-cycle. However, by ignoring the body, theories of the cin-
ematic apparatus are able to produce not only an ideal male cinematic subject,
but also a transcendental subject with which the viewer can identify.
If the embodied aspects of subjectivity are taken into account, then tempo-
rality cannot be ignored. The transcendental subject can only exist at the cost
of ignoring the body and temporality. Hence, by discounting temporality and
the body, Metz and Baudry are able to generalize and universalize the subject
of cinema – but at the cost of effacing differences. The lack of temporality is
typical of representational thought and the problem of difference. If temporal-
ity were to be taken into account, then a system of fixed hierarchical catego-
ries could not exist, since change would be the key term.
The main problem that has hindered feminist film theory is one of trying to
adapt a theory of spectatorship that operates within a system of representa-
tion that only understands difference as an aspect of identity. The problem to
be solved for feminist film theory is not how to account for female spectator-
ship in a system that can only produce identity and denies true differences,
but rather to develop a theory of film viewing that can account for differences
outside identity. This would require a paradigm shift that goes beyond adapting
theories of the cinematic apparatus. Any consideration of the temporality of the
body would pose a challenge to the way a representational logic understands
 New lines of thought in feminist philosophy 47

difference through a process of negation. This is because a temporal body is

also, as we have seen, a body in process or always becoming different from
itself. Such an understanding of the body would allow spectatorship to be
redefined so that it is able to account for differences rather than exclusivity of
identity and sameness.
In asking whether ‘sexual difference [is] a problem’, Colebrook suggests
that questions of a metaphysical nature have become central to feminist
study. Feminist enquiries into questions of sexual difference have undergone
a significant shift, she asserts, a shift that has brought questions of metaphys-
ics to the foreground:

While liberal or Marxist feminists could accept the working philosophy of

their ‘host’ theories and ask the question of woman within a given paradigm,
the question of sexual difference starts to question the character and limits
of the theoretical paradigm itself.18

Colebrook attempts to reorient the feminist critique of sexual difference, away

from questions to do with the condition of the subject within a given paradigm,
towards not only a critique of the given paradigm, but also an exploration of
new possible paradigms. Feminist film theory is in serious need of this kind
of shift. To continue to ask questions about female spectatorship of a system
that does not recognize difference is restrictive. What has to be implemented
is a reorientation of spectatorship studies in order to locate understandings of
cinematic viewing. In order to examine the role of the body in film viewing, a
detailed investigation of the concept of the body as temporal and affective is
essential.

Section 2: The body becoming

In the following quote Colebrook neatly maps out the different understand-
ings of the body across different stages of feminist philosophy. Although the
quote may be lengthy it is worth including in full as it highlights the central
place the body has had in feminist philosophy over the years.

While the first wave of feminism demanded equality, and second wave
feminism demanded difference, the body emerged in the third wave as a
means of deconstructing the sameness/difference opposition. The appeal
to equality assumes that gender differences are imposed on otherwise
equal beings, and thereby precludes the possibility that different types of
bodies might demand different forms of political recognition. In the second
48 Deleuze and Film

wave assertion of difference and specificity, the body is still seen as that
which precedes social construction. But for feminists of the second wave,
different bodies demand different forms of articulation. In the third wave,
both these arguments are attacked for having an unproblematic appeal to
the pre-representational body. Women are neither the same nor essentially
different; to decide such an argument one would have to appeal to a body
from which social representation derives or upon which representation
is imposed. But if we were to argue that the very notion of the pre-
representational body is effected through representation, we would have to
move beyond discussions of women’s essential sameness or difference.19

The work of Elizabeth Grosz, Colebrook and, in particular, Moira Gatens is

not only situated within the third wave of feminism, referred to earlier by Cole-
brook, but has been seminal to it. With reference to these thinkers, I want
now to attempt a definition of the body beyond representational logic. In order
to consider film viewing as an affective embodied experience from a feminist
perspective, it is necessary to understand how contemporary feminist thinkers
have re-thought the body and difference beyond the dualistic logic of repre-
sentation. Gatens is at the forefront here. In fact, if anything, she could be
described as working towards a philosophy of the body. For this reason, her
work on the body forms the backbone of this re-definition of the body.
Gatens’ work shows a longstanding commitment to the project of redefin-
ing the concepts of the body, subjectivity and identity from a feminist perspec-
tive using social, political, philosophical and psychoanalytic approaches. What
makes her work particularly interesting is her redefinition of these concepts
utilizing many of the same psychoanalytic texts and concepts as theories of
the cinematic apparatus. She offers an alternative reading of Freud and Lacan
on identity, subjectivity and the body, which can be juxtaposed with how theo-
ries of the cinematic apparatus have deployed this same work. Furthermore,
even though her early work approaches the concepts of the body, subjectivity
and identity through psychoanalytic theory, it continues to resonate with her
more recent Deleuzian approach to these concepts. For this reason, her work
acts as a bridge between earlier feminist work on embodiment and contem-
porary work that deploys Deleuze.
For Gatens the body is neither biological nor physical, static nor ahistorical,
but lived and situated, changing and culturally constructed. For example, she
argues that

the human body is not . . . external to culture or part of an unchanging nature.

The human body is always lived in culture, understandings of its workings
are themselves cultural productions, and the values and assumptions of
culture inevitably find their way into our theorizations.20
 New lines of thought in feminist philosophy 49

In other words, the image of a particular body or how it is perceived, its power
to affect and the way in which it is affected, is constantly changing not only
through time, but also as a result of its encounters with different institutions
and discourses. An important aspect of Gatens’ work on the body is the con-
cept of the ‘imaginary body’. She uses the concept of the imaginary body as
a means of understanding how ideas about the body are not neutral, but have
social, cultural and historical meanings:

The imaginary body is socially and historically specific in that it is constructed

by: a shared language; the shared psychical significance and privileging of
various zones of the body (for example the mouth, the anus, the genitals);
and common institutional practices and discourses (for example, medical,
juridical and educational) which act on and through the body.21

Crucial to the idea of the imaginary body is the manner in which individuals
develop an emotional investment in the body as constructed through these
social, cultural and historical meanings. These ideas and meanings are lived
and experienced. As such, they belong to neither the mind nor the body.
Important to Gatens’ concept of the imaginary body is the work of both Freud
and Lacan. She finds in both thinkers a challenge to the mind/body split because
of the kinds of emotional and libidinal investments the subject has to her or his
body.22 Gatens discovers that Freud’s early work on hysteria reveals the inter-
relatedness of the body and mind. She points out how Freud even described
the phenomena of hysteria as a ‘mysterious leap from the mind to the body’.23
Most significant for feminist film theory is the attention Gatens draws to Freud’s
insistence, from his earliest papers, that perception is an active process that
cannot be solely attributed to consciousness. In other words, for Freud percep-
tion does not belong to a mind separated from the body, but rather that it occurs
through a union between mind and body. ‘Perception’, Gatens contends, ‘can be
reduced to neither the body nor consciousness but must be seen as an activity
of the subject’.24 It is worth noting that, in contrast to theories of the cinematic
apparatus, for Gatens the subject overcomes a mind and body split through the
very act of perception. This understanding of the dynamics of perception high-
lights the problem with Baudry and Metz’s construction of primary cinematic
identification as a kind of pure vision that excludes the body. Linda Williams, for
example, notes that theories that align spectatorship with voyeurism rely on an
idea of distance and objectification that results in a mind/body split:

Despite its focus on the visual pleasures of cinema, psychoanalytic film theory’s
preoccupation with the visual ‘senses at a distance’ has perpetuated this
mind/body dualism by privileging the disembodied, centered gaze at an absent
object over the embodied, decentred sensations of present observers.25
50 Deleuze and Film

By ignoring the importance of affects and sensations across and throughout

the body through acts of perception, psychoanalytic feminist film theory and
theories of the cinematic apparatus participate in the construction of a mind/
body split.
Turning to Lacan, Gatens again finds no clear separation of mind from body.
This is particularly the case in Lacan’s theory of the mirror phase – a notion
that has been central to film theory. She argues that Lacan’s essays on the
genesis of the ego point to the importance of the mirror stage to both the
imaginary body and hysteria. Grosz makes a similar point, suggesting that
the mirror phase is important in creating a ‘projection of the body, a kind of
map of the body’s psycho-social meaning’.26 In addition, because at this stage
the child still feels itself to be fragmented and uncoordinated, the body image
that emerges in the mirror gives the child a set of coordinates, a map which
is organized through familial and cultural fantasies about the body. Grosz
writes:

Bound up within parental fantasies long before the child is even born,
the child’s body is divided along lines of special meaning or significance,
independent of biology. The body is lived in accordance with an individual’s
and a culture’s concepts of biology.27

The idea of the body as lived within a pre-existing set of coordinates reveals
the extent to which even personal experiences of our bodies are culturally and
socially influenced. The body, as lived and experienced, is always shadowed
and informed by an imaginary body. Gatens’ and Grosz’s reading of Lacan’s
mirror stage demonstrates that the subject has an emotional and libidinal
investment in the body image.
Gatens’ and Grosz’s understanding of the operation of vision and percep-
tion in the mirror phase challenges how the theories of the cinematic appara-
tus and feminist film theory have deployed the mirror phase. They emphasize
the way the apprehension of the body as whole and unified is central to the
formation of identity. First, it is important for the child to grasp the image of
the other as a whole, as a Gestalt, in order to develop a separate identity from
the other. This sense of wholeness and separateness is what allows us to be
agents in the world and to have a perspective on ourselves. ‘The mirror stage’,
Grosz argues, ‘relies on and in turn provides a condition for the body-image
or imaginary anatomy, which in turn helps distinguish the subject from its
world.’28 What is more, for Lacan, vision plays an important part in this proc-
ess. Gatens make this clear when she says that ‘the child sees its wholeness
before it feels its wholeness, and this seeing is actually constituent of its
future identity as a distinct and whole being’.29 Therefore, unlike theories of
the cinematic apparatus that ignore the role of the other in the mirror, Gatens
 New lines of thought in feminist philosophy 51

emphasizes the fact that this image of the self, as whole, has its genesis in
an identification with another. Because the kind of identity that emerges from
Lacan’s mirror stage is, first and foremost, dependent on the image of the
other, it must therefore always be understood through an engagement and
exchange with others.
Furthermore, for Gatens, this process is repeated with different encoun-
ters. In other words, because we are always defining ourselves through inter-
actions with others, institutions and discourses, identity is always open to
change:

This psychical image of the body is necessary in order for us to have

motility in the world, without which we could not be intentional subjects.
The imaginary body is developed, learnt, connected to the body image of
others, and is not static.30

The body as whole and separate from the other may be apprehended through
vision, ironically, however, this image of the self as whole and separate is
dependent on the image of the other. Therefore, while vision is responsible
for a sense of separateness, it also creates an important connection between
bodies. The self can never be totally independent of, or free from, the other.
Perception operates as a kind of affective link with other bodies, institutions
and discourses. This understanding of the mirror phase addresses the sorts
of criticism that Doane and Copjec identify with how it is deployed by theo-
rists of the cinematic apparatus. In particular, as apparatus theorists substitute
an identification with the other in Lacan’s mirror, for an identification with an
omniscient camera-vision, and in doing so eliminate the possibility of differ-
ence. Attention to the importance played by the other in perception reintro-
duces difference into the debate. Moreover, it does so without falling back
onto a binary notion of difference, because in Gatens’ and Grosz’s reading of
the mirror phase, the self is not understood in opposition to the other, but by
means of an affective connection with the other that results in transformation
or change. This process is then repeated through different encounters with
the others. Difference here can be understood as a process of transformation,
change or alteration because the self is always becoming different from itself
as a result of encounters with others.
Gatens’ concept of the body is also important because it avoids the real/
representation binary: not simply an image that can be opposed to an idea
of the physical body as the ‘real’ body, it intersects between the ‘real’ and
its representations. Hence, the imaginary body does not recognize the real/
representation dichotomy. The body can be understood as a series of connec-
tions that come together at various moments and determine what that body
can do:
52 Deleuze and Film

The theory of the body image shows that our bodies are lived and
constituted as part of a network of bodies; and these bodies have depth
and are dynamic. The dynamism of this network is crucial to actualizing
potentials and possibilities for changing our understandings of bodies and
the way we ‘live’ our bodies.31

In this understanding of the body there is no recognition of the body prior to

representation or of the body as a representation. Instead, the body, identity
and subjectivity decompose and recompose according to different encounters
and through different connections. Film viewing could be understood as one
of these encounters that produces connections that decompose and recom-
pose the body, identity and subjectivity.
Related to this motile idea of the body is Deleuze’s understanding of a
form of difference that does not rely on a primary concept. Difference can be
understood as alteration or change, rather than in relation to identity. Differ-
ence is the condition of change and therefore always becoming different from
itself rather than a primary concept or an external idea. Paul Patton explains
it as follows:

Deleuze seeks a concept of pure difference or difference ‘in itself’ that

would not be subject to the structure of representation first laid down
in Platonism. The production of a concept of difference ‘in itself’ goes
hand in hand with the elaboration of an ontology in which disparity of
difference is the fundamental principle and the identity of objects is
understood as something produced from the differences of which they
are composed.32

A consideration of how subjectivity is always changing and becoming as a

result of various connections is one means of grasping the idea of this pure
difference. The subject is not fixed through time, but changing constantly, not
simply in relation to an external Idea, but also because it is affected by differ-
ent encounters and environments. For example, when women won the right
to vote, a transformation took place in the female subject. Her capacities to
affect her political and social conditions improved, as did her status in society.
Although it is tempting to understand this shift in through the politics of rep-
resentation as a moment when the female subject gained equality this would
be missing the real difference this shift made. What the shift demonstrates
is the subject’s ongoing capacity to become different from itself as a result
of different encounters. The true difference here is that subjectivity is open to
change and change is the condition of the subject.
 New lines of thought in feminist philosophy 53

Ethology and the body

Although her early work engages with psychoanalysis, more recently Gatens
has looked to Spinoza and to Deleuze and Guattari for a redefinition of the
body. Turning to Deleuze and Guattari for a genealogical analysis of the con-
cepts of sex, gender and sexuality, Gatens argues that the discourse of sexual
equality has hindered a more adventurous understanding of these concepts. In
her view, once modified for the agenda of sexual equality, these concepts are
inadequate to the task of addressing present political demands that emerge
from the differences among women such as race, class and sexual prefer-
ence, among others. The problem, as she sees it, stems from the way the
discourse of equality is tied up with the juridical system. For example, legally
equal rights require that differences should be ignored rather than acknowl-
edged: ‘That which citizens share in common – rights to life, liberty, and prop-
erty, the right to develop their freedom and individuality – should be blind to
differences of sex, race, age, or ethnicity.’33 This dynamic is characteristic of
representational thought, where differences are subsumed within a concept
in general. In this case, however, the concept of the citizen is representative
of a range of different subjects. However, in order to represent them it must
ignore the differences between them and produce an overarching concept.
By ignoring differences in favour of a unified concept, this juridical model
cannot help but devalue the body, as it is the site of differences of sex, race
and ethnicity. It must also posit the body as fixed and unchanging in order to
transcend the limitations of the body. Gatens proposes that the framework
of sexual equality is committed to a dualist plane model that understands the
body as unchanging and part of nature:

[I]t is apparent that the sex/gender/sexuality framework of sexual equality is

committed to a dualist metaphysics . . ., which posits first, a plane of nature
or immanence, and second, a plane of transcendence that progressively
organizes and dominates the first. On this view, culture, civilization, reason,
or knowledge progressively control and order mere nature, including the
body, which are conceived as inert or passive. . . . [D]ual plane models are
always juridical models – they always assume an ahistorical plane of nature
and a historical plane that transcends and normatively reconstructs the
natural plane.34

Revealing the body’s devalued status within a juridical logic is important

because traditionally women have been associated with the body and as part
of an unchanging nature.35
54 Deleuze and Film

Counter to juridical thought, Gatens identifies a type of thought that is

committed to an anti-juridical perspective found in the work of Spinoza and
Deleuze and Guattari. Since an anti-juridical perspective does not recognize
dualisms, there is no presumption of mind and body, or culture and nature, as
separate entities. Instead they are understood as ‘one thing whose qualitative
differences are captured by different denotations’.36 Experiences, for example,
belong neither solely to the mind nor the body, but operate across them. A
subject may express these experiences differently or through different deno-
tations that could be said to be more cognitive or embodied, but there is no
clear separation. Even the most cognitively demanding films, for example,
engage the body affectively and render it processual, offering a way out of
representational thought. Bray and Colebrook argue that Deleuze gives us a
means of thinking beyond a representational logic by considering the body
as an event, or as something that is in a constant dynamic of exchange. This
understanding of the body enables a positive form of difference that does not
require a process of negation. ‘Deleuze’s “transcendental empiricism”, they
write,

posits a univocality whereby bodies, consciousness, actions, events,

signs, and entities are specific intensities – each with its own modality
and difference. They do not need their ‘difference from’ each other in
order to be (conceptual difference); in their specific singularity beings are
positively different. Deleuze’s univocal conception of being is also dynamic.
Meaning and concepts of consciousness are events within a general field
of intensities, and no particular event—neither mind nor body—can be
posited as the origin or meaning of any other. On this account, difference is
not a question of negation.37

What does this challenge to the primacy of the representational system imply
for the cinematic apparatus? First, it means a challenge to the disembodied
transcendental subject in favour of an embodied viewing experience. It also
implies an affective connection between the film and the viewer rather than
a subject/object distinction. Finally, for a feminist intervention it means a shift
away from the Idea of the female spectator as a concept in general, towards
an exploration of the way affective modes of film viewing enable an escape
from a binary notion of difference.
Anti-juridical thought is central to this shift, because it challenges the notion
that the body is ahistorical, passive, waiting to be organized and inscribed with
meaning by culture. Nature/culture, body/mind and sex/gender are not per-
ceived as binary opposites, in which one is presumed to organize and control
the other in a linear successive fashion, but rather as the nexus of different
encounters with other bodies. Gatens states:
 New lines of thought in feminist philosophy 55

On this model the human body is understood as a complex individual, made

up of a number of other bodies. Its identity cannot be viewed as static or
inert since it is a body that is in constant interchange with its environment.
This is to understand the body as a nexus of variable interconnections, a
multiplicity within a web of other multiplicities.38

This view of the body understands individuality, subjectivity and identity all
as processual, continually decomposing and recomposing according to their
environment. Understood in this manner, the body is a true example of pure
difference or difference in itself. Reading difference through a processual
understanding of the body is one means that the positive potential of differ-
ence can be mobilized. This is why a consideration of embodied modes of film
viewing is vital for feminist film theory.
Important to an anti-juridical mode of thinking is the concept of ethology.
Ethology draws similarities between bodies according to capability, not
according to resemblances of appearance or filial relations. In this sense,
Deleuze suggests that a workhorse has more in common with an ox than a
racehorse, because the two animals have similar capabilities.39 Deleuze and
Claire Parnet explain the ethological understanding of the body in the following
simple terms:

Bodies are not defined by their genus or species, by their organs or

functions, but by what they can do, by the affects of which they are capable
– in passion as well as in action. You have not defined an animal until you
have listed its affects.40

Ethology is therefore interested in what bodies can do – not in what they

are. Gatens explains that ‘ethology distinguishes between one thing and the
next according to its powers and capacities rather than its form or species’.41
An important difference between a transcendent rule-based morality and an
ethological ethics is that transcendence evokes what Deleuze calls ‘molar
subjects’, whereas ethology addresses the molecular. Molar identities and
subjects are pre-existing, ready-made identities and subjectivities which are
then imposed on to bodies. Brian Massumi explains how the plane of tran-
scendence produces molar subjects:

Bodies that fall prey to transcendence are reduced to what seems to

persist across their alterations. Their very corporeality is stripped from
them, in favour of a supposed substrate – soul, subjectivity, personality,
identity – which in fact is no foundation at all, but an end effect, the
infolding of a forcibly regularized outside. Transcendence is the
glorification of habit.
56 Deleuze and Film

Ethology, on the other hand, is committed to an ethics of motion and exchange.

Identities and subjectivities are the result of mobile and dynamic, extensive
and intensive, relations, and therefore are not fixed. An ethics of ethology is
not interested in an organizational plane, but the complexity and randomness
of the plane of immanence that allows for decompositions and recomposi-
tions. This dynamic mode of exchange produces an infinite number of possi-
bilities, including hybrids and cross-fertilizations. Ethology does not recognize
identities and subjectivities as fixed and despotic, but rather as effects, end-
points that are open to change and experimentation. An ethological idea of
the body can be useful for exploring different modes of film viewing. Instead
of focusing on a film’s meaning or on what certain images represent, an etho-
logical approach would consider the affects, qualities and intensities gener-
ated by the film.
In a similar vein, Grosz argues, it is ‘no longer appropriate to ask what a text
means, what it says, what is the structure of its interiority, how to interpret or
decipher it. Instead, one must ask what it does, how it connects with other
things’.42 This ethological perspective applies equally to film and to the analysis
of film viewing. It is no longer enough to enquire about a film’s meaning or
textual structure unless it is in order to understand how it connects to bodies,
ideas, institutions, discourses and practices. In analyzing these connections,
it is important to draw out what they enable and what they hinder. One of
the tasks for a Deleuzian feminist film theory is to investigate how certain
modes of film viewing open up the possibility for thinking the body and dif-
ference beyond the strictures of representational logic. Exploring a film text
for meaning is not adequate to this task, because the act of interpretation is
a representational device. By opening up a way of understanding the relation-
ship between the film and the viewer as a series of connections, an etho-
logical understanding of the body bypasses the representation/real distinction
found in theories of the cinematic apparatus. A consideration of the body in
film viewing would necessarily pose a challenge to the central role of the all-
seeing, all-knowing transcendental subject, and therefore of a disembodied
primary identification. The key to understanding how the film viewing experi-
ence might produce difference in itself, rather than as an aspect of identity,
is through a consideration of the role of the body in this process. Considering
film viewing as an embodied experience would enable the consideration of
difference in itself, rather than an understanding of difference within the con-
cept of identity.
 3

Cinematic
assemblages:
An ethological
approach to
film viewing

T here can be no doubt that the concept of the cinematic apparatus

revolutionized film studies. For the first time, the role of the spectator
was pivotal in understanding how films make meaning and produce pleasure.
However, because theorists of the cinematic apparatus insist that all films
encourage a primary identification with an all-seeing, all-knowing cinematic
subject, it has also been a problematic concept. The possibility that some
films are capable of different modes of film viewing or other kinds of viewing
experiences is not considered. In addition, because the cinematic apparatus
is structured around a male spectating position, cinematic identification is not
directly available to women. Difference therefore is extremely problematic in
theories of the cinematic apparatus and psychoanalytic film theory.
The problem of difference manifests itself in two significant ways. First,
because the cinematic apparatus is based on the male spectator, female
spectatorship can only emerge in opposition. Theories of the cinematic appa-
ratus also overlook the fact that films work in a variety of ways, producing dif-
ferent kinds of viewing experience. Secondly, by focusing on an identification
with a disembodied all-seeing vision, no consideration is given to affective,
embodied modes of film viewing. This is no small omission as the body of the
58 Deleuze and Film

viewer plays an important role in the cinematic experience. Films are not just
experienced through unconscious processes that enable the viewer to feel
in control of the narrative, they also connect with and operate through the
senses. This is particularly the case with what Linda Williams calls the ‘body
genres’ which include horror, pornography, melodrama and science fiction,1
genres that centre on embodied modes of film viewing that do not privilege
seeing over affective intensities. To this list I would add time-image films, as
Gilles Deleuze understands them. Time-image films disturb non-linear thought,
confuse the senses and in doing so produce an affective embodied viewing
experience. They also produce embodied affective experiences by putting the
viewer in contact with different temporalities and durations.
It is in this context that Deleuze’s books on cinema, as well as his philo-
sophical work with Félix Guattari, offer unique tools for re-thinking the film-
viewer encounter. In order to introduce the body and difference as key
components of the film-viewer relationship, in this chapter I want to examine
the encounter using Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of assemblages. Applied
to cinema, the concept of assemblages enables us to consider film viewing
as an encounter that is embodied and open to new kinds of connections and
durations that differ from our own, and new kinds of thought that challenge
binary and hierarchical logic. While Deleuze’s Cinema books say little about
the embodied experience of film viewing, they do shed new light on cine-
ma’s temporal qualities and the cinematic subject. For this reason many of
the types of images described in the books, such as the perception-image
and any-space-whatever are useful in developing the concept of the cinematic
assemblage.
Exploring film viewing as an embodied encounter brings an ethological
approach into play. This is because ethology is interested not in what a body
is, but rather in the body’s capacity to affect and be affected – with the result
that an ethological approach to film viewing is less interested in subjects and
identities than cinematic connections and affects. This approach, to which
Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the assemblage is central, is not meant
solely as a critique in philosophical terms, or a meta-critique of feminist film
theory, but a genuine attempt to develop a new understanding of film viewing
within film studies. Addressing the problem in this way will involve a shift in
the mode of my argument, away from a philosophical engagement with film
theory, towards a more ‘practical’ engagement with the film-viewer relation-
ship. I shall do this in two steps. In the first I shall outline Deleuze and Guat-
tari’s concept of the assemblage as well as important related concepts includ-
ing the molar and the molecular planes, affect, duration and becoming. In so
doing I shall show how the concept of the assemblage applies to film viewing.
In the second step I shall use some of the images in the Cinema books to
further develop the concept of cinematic assemblages.
 An ethological approach to film viewing 59

Section 1: The assemblage

The first significant aspect of Deleuze and Guattari’s thinking that I would like
to consider in relation to film viewing is that they do not recognize an ‘outside’,
or in other words a universe that exists prior to representation, which can
then be represented: they only understand connections that make up vari-
ous assemblages. Because assemblages are open, they connect with other
assemblages to form what we might call an inter-assemblage assemblage. I
would go on to suggest that film does not represent the outside: it is not an
image of the outside, but an assemblage with the outside.2 In A Thousand
Plateaus Deleuze and Guattari write:

We are no more familiar with scientificity than we are with ideology; all
we know are assemblages. . . . .No significance, no subjectification. . . . .
An assemblage, in its multiplicity, necessarily acts on semiotic flows, and
social flows simultaneously (independently of any recapitulation that may be
made of it in a scientific or theoretical corpus). There is no longer a tripartite
division between a field of reality (the world) and a field of representation
(the book) and a field of subjectivity (the author). Rather an assemblage
establishes connections between certain multiplicities drawn from each of
the orders.3

The concept of assemblages seems to be especially relevant to film when

we consider that from the outset a film connects with so many other assem-
blages, such as economic, political, legal, medical, academic, social, techno-
logical, industrial and cultural. In this sense, while film can be understood as
an assemblage with its own system, such as frames, shots, sequences, mon-
tages, soundtracks and so on, it also connects with other assemblages to pro-
duce inter-assemblage assemblages. Therefore, cinematic assemblages can
vary according to their intrinsic qualities (how they are organized and work),
but they can also vary in their extrinsic relations (what they come into contact
with).
In order to further understand the concept of the assemblage, we might
turn to the concept of the map, which, according to Deleuze and Guattari,
is made up of a complex series of interconnecting and varying lines. ‘What
we call a “map” or sometimes a “diagram”’, say Deleuze and Guattari, ‘is
a set of various interacting lines (thus the lines in a hand are a map)’.4 In
order to emphasize the dynamic aspect of these connections, he and Guat-
tari point out that a map is not a fixed entity: at different times different lines
cross and connect, transforming the map. Their idea is unlike the common
idea of a map as a fixed spatial representation of something. For them it is a
­spatio-temporal entity that, through various intersecting connections, is in a
60 Deleuze and Film

process of continual transformation. In this sense, it operates according to the

logic of ethology, through which it is understood not as a representation, or
by what it is, but rather through its powers, qualities and affects. Deleuze and
Guattari argue that the map ‘is open and connectable in all of its dimensions;
it is detachable, reversible, susceptible to constant modification’.5 The film as
assemblage is not only an assemblage of parts that produce a whole, but an
open whole that connects with other assemblages to form a kind of map, or,
as I suggested earlier, an inter-assemblage assemblage.
The assemblage on which this book focuses is the film-viewer assemblage.
Film viewing could be understood as an assemblage between the film and the
viewer. The film-viewer assemblage is a kind of map comprising various inter-
acting lines and connections. The film is an assemblage made up of parts, but
it also forms an assemblage with the viewing body. Understood as such, the
relationship between the film and the viewer offers a genuine escape from
the object/subject distinction, which assumes that the viewer identifies with
an objectifying voyeuristic gaze. An understanding of the film as an assem-
blage with the viewer allows us to consider the impact of different kinds of
cinematic affects that flow between the film and the viewer. In particular, it
allows us to consider the impact of connections with cinematic movements
and temporalities on the body.

Molar and molecular assemblages

What is particularly interesting about the concept of assemblages in relation
to the cinema is that it operates on two planes, a molecular and a molar one.
According to Paul Patton, ‘There are two kinds of assemblages: extensive,
molar multiplicities, that are divisible, unifiable, totalisable and organisable:
and molecular, intensive multiplicities that are not unifiable or totalisable and
that do not divide without changing in nature.’6 While the molecular plane con-
sists of yet to be organized elements, the molar is an organizing plane that
freezes movement, codifies and organizes elements from the molecular plane.
This molar, or organizational, plane fixes everything into hierarchical categories
and produces identities and subjectivities. The molecular plane, on the other
hand, produces becomings, favours change, movement and processes, and as
such, it continually threatens to disrupt hierarchical orderings. This makes the
concept of assemblages particularly open to different modes of film viewing,
as the two planes are not polar opposites, but interact with each other to pro-
duce endless possible articulations.
As a means of clarifying the difference between them, Patton suggests we
consider the difference between molar and molecular assemblages in terms
 An ethological approach to film viewing 61

of the distinction drawn by Deleuze and Guattari between arborescent and

rhizomatic multiplicities: ‘Arborescent systems are hierarchical systems with
centres of significance and subjectification’.7 Patton defines molar assem-
blages as ‘“unifiable” objects in the sense that their boundaries can be clearly
defined and their parts connected according to an invariant principle of unity’.8
In this sense, we might consider the way a film operates on the molar plane
by ordering shots in such a way as to produce an internal logic that is coherent
and unifying. One way this coherent logic could be achieved is by ordering a
film’s shots according to a cause and effect logic that leads to a unifying con-
clusion. Another way might be to produce a coherent and stable point of view
with which the film-viewer can identify.
By contrast to arborescent systems, rhizomes are not structured accord-
ing to principles of unity and are not determined by invariant elements with
a central point. They are more flexible, open and indeterminate. As Deleuze
and Guattari argue, they are defined by ‘the outside: by the abstract line, the
line of flight or deterritorialization according to which they change in nature
(metamorphose into something else) and connect with other multiplicities’.9
Rhizomes are systems that open to the outside and are therefore also open
to change. As Ronald Bogue observes, ‘Deleuze has indicated [that] there is
nothing wrong with systems as long as they are open systems (indeed, what
Deleuze and Guattari call “a rhizome is precisely an open system”)’.10 In this
respect, we might think about the way particular films continually form new
connections with the outside. With body genres, this occurs because they
solicit the body of the viewer. Connections might also occur by ordering shots
in a non-linear fashion and disrupting the cause and effect logic. Both instances
produce a rhizomatic structure that forms non-unifying connections.
Turning to Cinema 1, it appears that the perception-image facilitates a mole­
cular film-viewer assemblage. Deleuze links the perception-image to the mole­
cular plane by bringing into play a Bergsonian understanding of perception:

a subjective perception is one in which the images vary in relation to a

central and privileged image; an objective perception is one where, as in
things, all the images vary in relation to one another, on all their facets and
in all their parts.11

This shifting ground implies that, although privileged, subjective perception is

nonetheless only provisional as it enters into a relationship of movement. The
more ‘the privileged centre’ enters into a dynamic of movement, ‘the more
it will tend towards an acentred system where the images vary in relation to
one another and tend to become like the reciprocal action and vibrations of
pure matter’.12
62 Deleuze and Film

Deleuze gives several examples of the way the ‘privileged centre’ is put
into movement. German Expressionism and the French school of filmmaking
both privilege a subjective shot that is not anchored, but is kept in motion.
This is achieved by linking subjective perception to hallucinations, dreams or
delirium. The French school’s extensive use of shots of moving water gives us
‘a molecular perception’ that is unique to a camera vision. By connecting with
this camera vision the viewer is drawn into a form of perception in which there
is no clear separation between subjectivity and objectivity. This has interesting
implications for spectatorship theories, as they are generally founded on the
separation of subject and object. As an object of art, the film exists in order to
be viewed and contemplated. However, one of the consequences of coming
into contact with the molecular dynamic of the perception-image must be that
the distinction between the film as object and the viewer as subject is also
disrupted. The perception-image is an example of the way in which particular
cinematic practices are geared towards a molecular film-viewer assemblage.
Furthermore, according to Deleuze, the constant oscillation of subjective
and objective points of view means that the perception-image is ‘split into two
states, one molecular and the other molar, one liquid and the other solid, one
drawing along and effacing the other’.13 This dynamic of ‘drawing along and
effacing [each] other’ echoes A Thousand Plateaus, where Deleuze and Guattari
discuss the relationship between the molar and the molecular plane in terms
of a constant process of territorializing, deterritorializing and reterritorializing.
The molecular plane constantly undoes or deterritorializes molar orderings, and
the molar plane continually reterritorializes molecular movements. The prob-
lem arises when the process of reterritorialization captures and over-codes the
molecular plane to such a degree that this codification is oppressive and highly
restrictive. In relation to cinematic perception, we might say that when subjec-
tive perception is anchored to a centre of signification, by replicating human
vision, for example, and thereby erasing any trace of a cinematographic vision,
it has been over-coded and territorialized. However, when a unique cinemato-
graphic perception is allowed to emerge through the fluctuation of objective
and subjective perspectives, in other words between the molar and the molec-
ular plane, a process of deterritorialization comes into play.
As part of the assemblage Deleuze and Guattari also discuss the line of
flight as an extreme form of deterritorialization. The molecular plane undoes
molar orderings to varying degrees and the most extreme form of deterritori-
alization is considered the line of flight. However, even the line of flight can be
reterritorialized and recoded, as they themselves say:

Every rhizome contains lines of segmentarity according to which it is

stratified, territorialized, organised, signified, attributed, etc., as well as
lines of deterritorialization down which it constantly flees. There is a rupture
 An ethological approach to film viewing 63

in the rhizome whenever segmentary lines explode into a line of flight, but
the line of flight is part of the rhizome. These lines always tie back to one
another. That is why one can never posit a dualism or a dichotomy, even in
the rudimentary form of the good and the bad. You may make a rupture,
draw a line of flight, yet there is still a danger that you will reencounter
organisations that restratify everything, formations that restore power to
a signifier, attributions that reconstitute a subject—anything you like, from
Oedipal resurgences to fascist concretions.14

In terms of film viewing we might consider the way a film can produce a line of
flight through a montage sequence that is surreal or seems disconnected, but
then is reintegrated into the internal logic of the film. The Salvador Dali dream
sequence in Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound (1945) may produce a line of flight
that opens thought up to a non-linear logic through a set of loosely connected
images, but the sequence is then reintegrated into the cause and effect logic
of the film’s narrative. Spellbound nicely expresses the kind of deterritorializa-
tion and reterritorialization that can occur in the play between the molar and
the molecular planes. Like Spellbound many films generate both molar orders
and molecular becomings that disrupt and reorder each other.
What is important when considering the concept of assemblages in rela-
tion to the cinematic experience is that they can operate not only as extensive,
molar orderings, which tend to organize according to hierarchies and fixed cat-
egories, but also as molecular intensive multiplicities, which produce becom-
ings and bodies in process. In this respect we can say that different modes of
film viewing encourage different kinds of connections between the film and
the viewer, resulting in different kinds of cinematic assemblages. Some modes
of film viewing encourage intensive connections and others encourage exten-
sive connections. Furthermore, all cinematic assemblages articulate a certain
tension between the molar and the molecular, but some are geared more
towards the production of one than the other. Certain modes of film viewing
reinforce identity and subjectivity as fixed within a hierarchy and therefore
produce molar subjects and operate mainly on the transcendent plane. Others
work to disrupt molar subjects and enable becomings and therefore operate
on the immanent plane. And some articulate a tension between the two.
Both the molar and the molecular systems are useful for feminist film the-
ory. Psychoanalytic feminist film theory’s mobilization of the power of signify-
ing structures, for example, has enabled us to explore female spectatorship
and female viewing pleasures. This is one means by which the molar order can
be put to productive use. Yet, the codifying power of the molar order can also
be limiting for feminist film theory, as it tends to produce Woman as a concept
in general. By doing so, however, it fails to account for variations in political
positions and differences between women. Moreover, it is also incapable of
64 Deleuze and Film

taking into account the instability and changing aspects of the category of
Woman.
Deterritorializations, or lines of flight, can also be mobilized for a feminist
intervention but in a different way. Rather than focusing on Woman as subject,
molecular politics would focus on the potential of affective connections that
promote processes of change that undo restrictive categories and hierarchies.
In this way, deterritorializations enable new kinds of connections that not only
undo molar ordering, but also produce the possibility of something new. While
many films operate primarily on the molar plane by producing a unified subject
position and an internal logic with which to identify, other films function as
deterritorializing forces that undo hierarchies and binaries by disrupting proc-
esses of identification.
Thinking about the film-viewer encounter as a cinematic assemblage does
not necessarily negate the framework of the cinematic apparatus. Nor does it
refute the fact that certain films are structured around cinematic ­identification
and a unified transcendental subject position. Rather it recognizes the cin-
ematic apparatus as just one kind of viewing arrangement, not the sole or
primary one, and the production of a unified transcendental subject position
as only one point of intensity among others. By concentrating on processes
of identification and subject positions, theories of the cinematic apparatus
have primarily focused on the molar level of film viewing. Moreover, with such
a focus on signification and subjectification, the cinematic apparatus itself
appears to be a molar assemblage. Therefore, the concept of the cinematic
assemblage that I am proposing does not deny the structure of the cinematic
apparatus, but rather recognizes it as a molar articulation of the assemblage.
I now want to examine some terms that are central to the concept of the
assemblage and how they relate to film viewing.

Key terms in the cinematic assemblage

Affect and the body
‘Affect’ and ‘the body’ are crucial to an understanding of how molecular con-
nections form between the film and the viewer. As employed by Deleuze and
Guattari, they have become popular among contemporary feminist film theo-
rists and Deleuzian feminist film theorists, probably because of the frequent
connection made between them:

A body is not defined by the form that determines it nor as a determinate

substance or subject nor by the organs it possesses or the functions it
 An ethological approach to film viewing 65

fulfils. On the plane of consistency, a body is defined only by a longitude

and a latitude: in other words the sum total of the material elements
belonging to it under given relations of movement and rest, speed and
slowness (longitude); the sum total of the intensive affects it is capable of
at a given power or degree of potential (latitude). Nothing but affects and
local movements, differential speeds.15

In contrast to theories of the cinematic apparatus, understanding film viewing

as an assemblage is not simply another way of looking at a film as a text to be
mined for meaning. Attention to its molecular articulations takes into consid-
eration the fact that film viewing is an embodied affective encounter.
The term ‘affect’ in Deleuze and Guattari does not refer to an emotional
state or personal feeling, but to a kind of force that either enhances or dimin-
ishes the body’s capacity. In Brian Massumi’s words, it denotes ‘a preper-
sonal intensity corresponding to the passage from one experiential state of
the body to another and implying an augmentation or diminution in that body’s
capacity to act’.16 Affectivity, then, implies a transformation whereby one body
is affected and can affect another body. However, different kinds of relations
form different kinds of assemblages that determine what a body can do.
According to Deleuze and Guattari, an individual is made up of intensive and
extensive relations that determine its power and capacity:

To every relation of movement and rest, speed and slowness grouping

together an infinity of parts, there corresponds a degree of power. To
the relations composing, decomposing, or modifying an individual there
correspond intensities that affect it, augmenting or diminishing its power
to act; these intensity come from external parts or from the individual’s
own parts.17

Hence, while a body may be powerful as a result of certain relations, it may at

the same time be ineffectual through other relations that recompose it in ways
that diminish its power to be affective.
Made up of extensive and intensive relations, the body may be understood
as the sum total of its affects, which are many and varied according to its
encounters. A film’s ‘speed’ and ‘slowness’ may be determined by any number
of cinematic techniques including editing, rhythm, camera movements and
how these relate to ideas, modes of thinking, affects and perception. These
relations connect with the viewing body, decomposing and recomposing it
through intensive affects that augment or diminish its power and capacity
to be affective. This idea is particularly useful for feminism, as women have
historically been associated with a fixed notion of the body rather than affects
and powers. Encounters that reveal the affective transformative powers of the
66 Deleuze and Film

body call these assumptions into question and open up new ways of under-
standing the body and its capacities.
Furthermore, if we think about the body as affective and processual, we
must also consider the way our subjectivity and individuality is formed in rela-
tion to it. If the body is continually transforming through a process of deter-
ritorialization and reterritorialization, then so too are subjectivity and identity.
Deleuze and Guattari suggest that the individual itself is a kind of assemblage
that operates on both the molar and the molecular levels:

Every society, and every individual, are thus plied by both segmentarities
simultaneously: one molar, the other molecular. If they are distinct, it is
because they do not have the same terms or the same relations or the
same nature or even the same type of multiplicity. If they are inseparable,
it is because they coexist and cross over into each other.18

As these words make clear, the molar and the molecular are not simply binary
opposites, they are different articulations of the same arrangement. They coex-
ist within a dynamic in which one continually erupts into the other. The molar
plane is continually organizing and territorializing the molecular plane into cat-
egories and hierarchies, and the molecular plane, by continually disrupting the
molar plane, disorganizes and deterritorializes order and enables becomings.
The body as an assemblage is an interplay between these two planes: it
is congealed and stratified through encounters with molar institutions and
discourses that are based on organizing principles with centres of ­signification
and subjectification. However, it also changes in nature, metamorphosing into
something else and becoming other than what it is through encounters that
operate affectively and intensively. Different filmic encounters affect the body
in different ways, producing different kinds of film-viewer assemblages. Some
encounters are geared towards the molar plane, over-coding and subjectifying
the body into fixed and rigid categories. Other encounters are highly affec-
tive and produce molecular assemblages that set off becomings causing the
body to go through changes from one state to another. Rather than producing
conscious responses, affects create bodily responses. In other words, affects
produce qualitative changes from one body state to another.
The idea that film viewing is defined by affective connections between the
film and the viewer prompts the question: can the film also be affected by
this encounter? Under what conditions can a film be affected in the process
of its screening and viewing? While a full discussion of this topic is beyond
the scope of this book, it is worth addressing briefly. While film viewing may
be an arrangement that is geared towards the production of cinematic affects
and perception, there is no guarantee that these will succeed or that a film will
communicate what it is designed to communicate. A time-image film such as
 An ethological approach to film viewing 67

Last Year at Marienbad (Alain Resnais, 1961), for example, may express a kind
of thought that is open by going beyond a closed and predictable logic. How-
ever, what this means in the context of film viewing is uncertain. While some
viewers may connect with its rhizomatic logic, others may not be affected at
all, or else may be affected in a different way. This does not necessarily mean
that the film does not express a logic that is open, rather that, because it
articulates a new form of thinking, it is not always understood or else does not
yet have the power to be affective.
I also want to point out that the viewing body is not a passive body wait-
ing to be affected and unable to affect. Different cinematic encounters may
affect a film, either diminishing it, intensifying it or aggrandizing it. Audiences
may form a collective viewing body and produce affects that diminish a film’s
power through ridicule and dismissal. Yet the same film may be received with
enthusiasm by a different audience, producing affects that increase its power.
Political films, such as those of left-wing journalist John Pilger, may be viewed
seriously by some audiences and dismissed by others. A feminist film may be
viewed with respect and interest by some women and derided by others. A
film may be given a very different reception at an international festival from
that given to it in a university classroom, or even in a multiplex theatre. Films
affect different individual and collective audiences in different ways, but a col-
lective audience may also greatly affect a film, even though that film’s formal
system and content remain the same.

Difference and duration

The significance of the distinction between molar arborescent and molecular
rhizomatic systems for feminist film theory is that they articulate divergent
concepts of difference. Arborescent systems produce multiplicities that are
extensive and, as Patton argues, divide ‘by differences in degree and where
the process of division does not involve changes in kind’.19 On the other hand,
rhizomatic structures produce multiplicities that are intensive and in which dif-
ference is understood as a process of transformation or of metamorphosing
into something else and, therefore, involving differences in kind. This qualita-
tive idea of difference poses a genuine challenge to the way difference is
subsumed by identity in representational thought. Qualitative difference or
difference as duration is not what differs from something else, but what dif-
fers from itself, because it is a continual unfolding or a continual process of
transformation.
For their understanding of difference as transformation Deleuze and Guat-
tari owe much to Henri Bergson’s concepts of difference and duration. As
Deleuze puts it, everything Bergson ‘says about duration always comes back to
68 Deleuze and Film

this: duration is what differs from itself’.20 Furthermore, he asserts, Bergson’s

concept of difference is non-dialectical. It negates nothing and is opposed or
contrasted to nothing. Difference, for Bergson, is internal and not external and
therefore it does not relate to a degree of difference from something else.
‘Internal differences’, Deleuze writes,

will have to be distinguished from contradiction, alterity, negation. This is

where the Bergsonian theory and method of difference is opposed to that
other method, to that other theory of difference that is called the dialectic,
as much as Plato’s dialectic of alterity.21

In addition, Deleuze argues, although we continually position quantitative and

qualitative differences in opposition to each other, for Bergson they constantly
interact with each other and in doing so produce difference as duration (durée).
Every quantitative change must also produce qualitative change. Increments
in the sensation of joy or sadness, for example, will produce different qualita-
tive states or different qualities of feeling. In the next chapter I shall address in
greater detail the interaction between the quantitative and qualitative through
an analysis of sexual difference in the modern horror film.
A concept of difference that escapes binary logic and is understood as
transformation opens up a new way of understanding film viewing or different
modes of spectatorship for feminist film theorists. In particular, a concept of
difference as transformation enables us to explore how film and film viewing
give us new configurations of the body and sexual difference. As a medium in
which the imagination plays an important role, film seems to be an excellent
site for the exploration of all sorts of possible bodies. It can, and often does,
imagine bodies and identities outside binaries, hierarchies and fixed catego-
ries. This approach has the potential to go beyond the discussion of bodies on
the screen to that of the relationship between the body and the screen. Within
an ethological perspectives differences between race, class or sex, and the
power that each of these is able to exercise, cannot be read in a void, but only
according to the complex and multiple assemblages and networks to which they
are linked. According to Moira Gatens, bodies are always entwined within the
assemblages of ‘law, medicine, enunciation, sexuality and so on’.22 I would add
cinema to her list, and it is these connections that determine what a body can
do, say and think – in other words, what a body’s total affective power can be.

Becoming
In the course of his Cinema books Deleuze refers to the process of becom-
ing several times, primarily in relation to duration. However, since he never
 An ethological approach to film viewing 69

explains or develops the concept in any detail, the reader is required to have a
certain familiarity with the concept from his earlier writings. Within the frame-
work of the assemblage an understanding of difference as transformation or
duration is intrinsically tied to the concept of becoming, which for Deleuze and
Guattari is an alternative to fixed categories and subjectivities. In particular,
the concept of becoming challenges the concept of being. Becomings do
not produce anything: one does not become something; rather what matters
is the process of becoming itself or the movement in-between categories.
Deleuze and Guattari state:

What is real is the becoming itself, the block of becoming, not the supposedly
fixed terms through which that which becomes passes. . . . . This is the
point to clarify: that a becoming lacks a subject distinct from itself; but
also that it has no term, since its term in turn exists only as taken up in
another becoming of which it is the subject, and which coexists, forms a
block, with the first. This is the principle according to which there is a reality
specific to becoming (the Bergsonian idea of a coexistence of very different
‘durations,’ superior or inferior to ‘ours,’ all of them in communication).23

From a feminist perspective the idea that different durations coexist and com-
municate with each other is very powerful, as it challenges the logic of nega-
tion found in binary logic. The coexistence and communication of different
durations reveals the ways in which these terms are always becoming and
changing with each other through processes of exchange. Changes in one of
these terms must necessarily cause changes and becomings in the other. For
example, if the feminine is no longer understood in opposition to the mascu-
line, then not only is our understanding of the feminine altered but so too is
our understanding of the masculine. Both feminine and masculine must be
imagined in new ways.
For Deleuze and Guattari the concept of being implies a fixed entity that
remains the same regardless of its encounters and interactions, whereas
becoming is defined by transformations in conjunction with something else.
Becoming operates as a continual process of transformation because what one
comes into contact with is not a fixed subject or category but other becom-
ings or durations. In this respect becomings can be understood to operate in
much the same way that Deleuze and Guattari discuss the body as decompos-
ing and recomposing with every encounter. The body is always becoming with
the thing, institution, discourse and others with which it comes into contact.
Becoming should not be mistaken for resemblance, imitation or identifica-
tion, nor is it a process with an end or an aim: ‘Becoming is a verb with a con-
sistency all its own; it does not reduce to, or lead back to, “appearing”, “being”,
“equalling”, or “producing”.’24
70 Deleuze and Film

The temporal and transformative powers of becoming challenge not only

the static notion of being, but also the static categories of the human being
and the way the human is organized into fixed gender, race, age, ability and
ethnicity. It is not that these identities do not exist, but that they are nei-
ther fixed nor end points: they are open to change. They are molar orderings,
which are always susceptible to molecular deterritorializations. If becoming
always involves a becoming with something else, there can be no concept of
a distinct and pure human that can be categorized into types. The process of
becoming is an undoing of human organization and categorization.

Section 2: The cinematic assemblage

and the Cinema books
Deleuze’s cinema books offer a means of further understanding how the film
viewing encounter creates a cinematic assemblage. In this section I want to
give some concrete examples of how particular types of images described in
the Cinema books help to support the concept of a cinematic assemblage.
These examples also include discussion of several films.
As I discussed in Chapter 1, the Cinema books do not address issues of
spectatorship or film viewing directly. However, they do imply a spectator. For
example, Deleuze argues that by giving us automatic movement the ­cinema
produces ‘a shock to thought, communicating vibrations to the cortex, touch-
ing the nervous and cerebral system directly’.25 This reference to the ­nervous
and cerebral system suggests an affective connection between the film
and the viewer. Furthermore, Deleuze’s description of the many types of
images he outlines, such as the perception-image, the time-image and any-
space-whatever, frequently focus on affects, perception, bodies and thought.
With such a focus it is not difficult to imagine that the kind of film viewing
experience implied by the Cinema books resonates with the idea of a cin-
ematic assemblage. Many of the images described in these books can be
readily applied to an exploration of affective connections between the film
and the viewer. That being the case, the Cinema books become an important
means of developing a Deleuzian feminist film theory based on the concept
of the cinematic assemblage.
What is particularly interesting about the kinds of cinematic images that
Deleuze proposes is that they have the potential to produce becomings with
the viewer blurring the distinction between the object and the subject, the
film and the viewer. This is particularly the case when cinema deviates from
the rules of everyday human-centred vision and experiments with new forms
of perception. Through film practices such as framing, camera movement
 An ethological approach to film viewing 71

and the order in which shots are edited together, cinema offers an endless
number of choices in the creation of images and ideas. Filmmakers do not
need to arrange shots in order to create a unifying structure or narrative. They
can follow a rhizomatic logic that has neither centres of signification nor unify-
ing logic. For Deleuze, this endless choice and the possibilities it offers makes
cinema a privileged site for the production of new ideas. In doing so it puts us
in touch with a pure form of difference that is not bound by binary structures
or representational logic.
Deleuze continually suggests that cinema gives us new ways of ­thinking.
According to Bogue, this is particularly the case for modern filmmakers.
By linking images in new ways, films generate new modes of thinking that
­challenge conventional patterns of thought:

For modern film directors, thinking differently, at its most fundamental level,
is a matter of disconnecting and reconnecting images. . . . The first task of
thinking differently in images is to ‘disenchain’ the chains, to dissolve the
links of habitual association that tie images to one another (all of which
links are embedded in the commonsense schema).26

For Bogue, the second task is to link two images together so that they pro-
duce an interstice or gap between them. Linking images in such a way as to
highlight the interstice has the effect of also highlighting the endless possible
ways in which images can be linked, revealing the artifice of linking images in a
natural and progressive manner. Films that highlight the interstices remind us
of the possibility of experimentation in thought through the endless choices
available. On a basic level, Deleuze is indicating the extent to which conven-
tional linear storytelling restricts thinking and keeps it bound to a particular
logic. Films that disrupt this logic not only reveal the limitations of conven-
tional thought, but also enable us to think beyond these limitations.

The time-image: Three examples

Deleuze’s concept of the time-image is a means by which the film-viewer
assemblage operates on the molecular affective plane. The time-image high-
lights the fact that certain films privilege duration and temporality over spatial-
ity. Deleuze draws a distinction between the movement-image and the time-
image: while the former is associated with the classical narrative films that
were predominant before the Second World War, the latter is associated with
a temporal style of film that emerged after the war. Movement-image films
operate through a logic of cause and effect, the action progressing in a linear
fashion. Each shot relates to the previous one in a logical order, seemingly in
72 Deleuze and Film

imitation of natural human perception. These films are based on what Deleuze
calls the ‘sensory motor schema’, whereby characters act in response to situa-
tions they find themselves in. Deleuze argues that the movement-image gives
an indirect image of time because time follows movement: it is subordinated
to movement. This is how David N. Rodowick explains it:

The indirect image of time restricts itself to the sensorimotor schema.

Movements are represented as actions prolonging themselves in space as
reactions, thus generating chains of narrative cause and effect in the form
of linear succession. Ultimately, the sensorimotor schema implies a world
apprehensible in an image of Truth as totality and identity. The movements
of thought are exhausted in the dialectical image of an ever-expanding spiral
and in the belief of a world mastered by action.27

In time-image films, characters no longer respond to situations, but instead

seem overwhelmed by them. Montage is no longer used to produce coher-
ence and order, as shots no longer follow a logical progression. In the time-
image, the use of irrational cuts destroys any sense of order and produces a
disorienting sensation. Because time does not follow movement but is given
directly, nothing is fixed into a structured place: there is no narrative order and
action appears unmotivated.28
Mulholland Drive (David Lynch, 2001) is a time-image film that challenges
human perception and logic by creating an affective viewing experience. In
Elena del Rio’s view, ‘Lynch reconfigures cinematic ontology and the ontology
of the unconscious in terms of affect rather than representation’.29 Experi-
menting with the use of lighting, music, mise en scène and surreal perform-
ances, Mulholland Drive is a highly cinematic film. Lynch uses irrational cuts,
contriving inexplicable jumps between different time zones, places, events
and different dimensions, such as from dream worlds to strange realities. Dif-
fering perspectives are created by the use of unusual camera angles. Char-
acters transform or undergo metamorphoses. Irrational story lines are made
to interconnect, as are seemingly unrelated events and scenes. Mulholland
Drive creates no common or central viewing position, thus destroying any
idea of a unified viewing subject position. The film makes an all-out assault on
the senses, in order to create a menacing and anxiety-filled atmosphere, but
not by trying to mimic reality, rather by stretching to the utmost the limits of
cinema’s capacities.
Because the time-image privileges temporality over spatiality, it calls into
question the kind of spatialized subject position so central to theories of the
cinematic apparatus. By privileging irrational cuts over continuity, the time-
image makes it impossible for a stable point of view to emerge. The disorienting
 An ethological approach to film viewing 73

effect of such cuts also undermines any notion that cinema is invariably based
on an identification with an all-seeing, all-knowing transcendental cinematic
subject. Given the continual change in perspective that results from privileg-
ing the temporal over the spatial, the viewer is constantly disoriented and left
in a state of flux. For this reason, the time-image film is affective and intensive
rather than signifying and representational.
I’m Not There (Todd Haynes, 2007) is another contemporary example of a
time-image film and an affective viewing experience. It confuses the senses
by undoing normal human perception and human organization. The film is
comprised of six Bob Dylan becomings, played by six different actors. Dylan,
his music and his transformations are expressed through a series of affec-
tive encounters. In one of these Dylan is performed by an 11-year-old African-
American boy who calls himself Woody Guthrie (Marcus Carl Franklin). Here
we have a series of becomings made up of a complex network of connections
that exemplify the affective processual nature of the body. There is a child
becoming, an African-American becoming, a Woody Guthrie becoming and a
Dylan becoming.
Another Dylan becoming emerges from the confusion of gender catego-
ries, as Cate Blanchett also plays Dylan. The different Dylans seem to exist
simultaneously in different time-periods across the twentieth century, thereby
making any attempt to construct a linear history impossible. Made up of inter-
cutting non-linear storylines, jumping in-between different moments in the
twentieth century, I’m Not There is an expression of non-human durations and
ways of seeing. It is a dizzying experience that challenges fixed categories and
orderings by employing and confusing different film styles and genres such
as documentary, musical, biopic, drama, western, colour and black and white.
Like Mulholland Drive, I’m Not There pushes the boundaries of the aesthetics
of cinema and in so doing offers an affective viewing experience that produces
non-human forms of perception.
Another way in which certain films escape representational logic and the
organizational plane, and operate on the intensive molecular plane, is by sub-
verting monocular perspective. Time Code (Mike Figgis, 2000), for example,
does this overtly by dividing the screen up into four segments, each with its
own scene. As a result, the viewer’s eye is forced to move continually from
one segment to another. At the same time, however, her/his peripheral vision
is activated to a greater degree than usual. While at times audio cues tell the
viewer which screen is most relevant at a particular moment, at other times
they are used to create a dizzying effect by mixing sounds from the action on
one screen segment with the action from one or more of the others. Hence,
rather than creating a unifying effect, this practice tends to disperse or frag-
ment subjectivity.
74 Deleuze and Film

The movement-image: La Signora di Tutti

Although the time-image film produces a molecular cinematic assemblage,
this in no way means that there is a simple division between time-image
films, as molecular articulations, and movement-image films as molar articula-
tions of the assemblage. There is no simple separation between movement-
image films and time-image films. Indeed, many films contain aspects of
both. Marie-Claire Ropars-Wuilleumier directs our attention to the fact that
in both of Deleuze’s Cinema books a range of modern filmmakers are men-
tioned alongside the greats of the silent era.30 In addition, Deleuze points out
that although the time-image gives a direct image of time, aberrant time was
always present in cinema, even if it did not predominate. It is simply that mod-
ern cinema brought it to the foreground:

We can choose between emphasizing the continuity of cinema as a whole,

or emphasizing the difference between the classical and the modern. It
took the modern cinema to re-read the whole of cinema as already made
up of aberrant movements and false continuity shots. The direct time-image
is the phantom which has always haunted the cinema, but it took modern
cinema to give a body to this phantom.31

Modern cinema may highlight aberrant time, but it always existed in one form
or another in classical cinema. Although films may have a linear narrative,
there are invariably moments of excess that disrupt such a structure, even if
only momentarily. These moments gesture towards time as affective and non-
linear. Therefore, there are many movement-image films that enable molecular
becomings over and above molar orderings. Many films that primarily operate
on the organizational plane and adhere to the arrangement of vision found in
the cinematic apparatus often also contain scenes that disrupt this arrange-
ment of vision as a point in space.
For Deleuze, Max Ophüls is one of the first filmmakers whose work contains
aspects of the time-image.32 His film La Signora di Tutti, which was discussed
in the last chapter, sits between the movement-image and the time-image.
Its narrative, for example, contains what Deleuze describes as a ‘slackening
of the sensory motor connections’, by which he means that the characters
are unable to take action when it is required, or else do not respond to situa-
tions through action.33 In short, they are ineffectual. One such moment occurs
when, after the death of Leonard’s wife, the lovers wander around, unable
to take action or to make things happen. They do not respond to situations
through action, but instead are overwhelmed by them.
The sense of being overwhelmed is often expressed in scenes in which time
is distorted and vision has a hallucinatory quality. For example, in one montage
 An ethological approach to film viewing 75

sequence travel is implied by overlapping images of moving trains, different

towns and faces. The images do far more than indicate travel, however; they
create a sense of unease, desperation and anxiety that produces an affective
connection with the viewer. The sequence opens with an extreme close-up
of Gaby (Isa Miranda) and her lover, Leonardo (Memo Benassi), desperately
embracing. They are on a train and both have just had a hysterical outburst
about their shared guilt at the death of Leonardo’s wife. As they face the cam-
era, cheek to cheek, they mutter softly about forgetting the past and getting
away. Over the close-up of their worried faces various images are superim-
posed, the first of a railway track, shot from the front of a moving train, so that
the viewer sees not only the track rushing towards him/her, but also the image
of the lovers’ trance-like stare. The sound of the train rushing over the tracks
and their crazed mutterings are a most disturbing combination. Several other
images are superimposed over their faces: passports, train stations and planes.
The layering of superimposed images makes it difficult for the viewer to dis-
tinguish the lovers’ faces from everything else. In this respect, there is neither
background nor foreground, only a dizzying decoupage of images, some still,
some moving. The layering effect, of both the images and the sounds, ampli-
fies the desperation and confusion felt by the lovers, disorienting the senses
and creating affects that are felt throughout the viewer’s body. Because the
sequence of images has a disturbing, surreal quality that disorients the eye, it
operates through affect and sensation rather than representation.
There is another scene that is similarly affective and intensive rather than
signifying, shot and constructed in such a way so as to disturb any sense of
unified perspective. The scene takes place in Gaby’s dressing room, where
she sits at her dressing table. Several men are also in the room, all trying to
work out how to counteract a damaging newspaper story. By means of light-
ing and camera effects, the dressing-room appears vast, the space infinite.
Sitting in front of her mirror, Gaby alone is illuminated, while the rest the room
is dim. At first there seem only to be a couple of others in the room with her.
The shot cuts from Gaby to her manager, who walks around the room talking.
As the camera follows him, at least fifteen other men are revealed in the end-
less room, most of them reading newspapers. They are dimly shot except for
a gentle spotlight on the side of their heads. The manager is shot in close-up
through a wide-angle lens, which produces an immense depth of field. By
means of the lighting and the wide-angle lens, the distance created between
the manager in the foreground and the other men behind him seems enor-
mous, indeed impossible in a tiny dressing-room.
Towards the end of the scene the action becomes frenetic, as the camera
pans violently to the left, stopping for a moment on one of the men who
comments on the situation, then pans violently to the right as another of the
men speaks. This occurs several times, producing a confusing sensation that
76 Deleuze and Film

makes any mastery of the image impossible. Instead, the image seems to
be intensely affective, to the point of depriving the viewer of control of her/
his vision. Vision is not grounded, but disorganized. The scene has no edits,
having been shot in a single, long take, the movement of the camera has a
giddying effect. As in the previous scene described, there is a surreal quality
to this one. It appears incredibly staged and disrupts any impression that cin-
ematic vision has sought to imitate natural vision and is ordered as a point in
space. These disorienting sensations engage the viewer corporeally, forming
a molecular cinematic assemblage.

Any-space-whatever: Lulu and Suspiria

Deleuze’s concept of any-space-whatever is another example of the way
movement-image films can disrupt conventional human vision and logic.
By subverting human vision, any-space-whatever produces an affective
embodied experience. In fact, Deleuze suggests that any-space-whatever
is even more affective than the close-up of the face.34 Cutting together
shots that have not been grounded by either a close-up of the face or an
establishing long shot creates a space that is devoid of context, not a par-
ticular space, but rather an any-space-whatever. Deprived of context, the
shot is given an openness that allows it to be linked to any number of
other shots in any number of ways. What this also demonstrates is the
singularity of the shot; that is, the fact that it does not rely for its meaning
on a concept in general, but is infinitely connectable. Any-space-whatever
is an image of pure potentiality, and depending on the connections the
sequence forms, that potential can be either limited or vast. ‘Any-space-
whatever’, says Deleuze,

is not an abstract universal, in all times, in all places. It is a perfectly singular

space, which has merely lost its homogeneity, that is the principle of its
metric relations or connection of its own parts, so that the linkages can be
made in an infinite number of ways.35

In addition, unlike the cinematic apparatus, the arrangement of any-space-

whatever does not contain a place for the subject to occupy. While, for appara-
tus theorists, the different points of view produced by editing are held together
by a fixed point in space that reconfirms human subjectivity, Deleuze’s notion
of ‘any-space-whatever’ produces affects or intensities that disrupt the idea
of a unified self.
Another aspect of any-space-whatever is that it frequently exceeds nar-
rative justification and, in so doing, creates an intensive viewing experience.
 An ethological approach to film viewing 77

Deleuze points to scenes in many movement-image films in which affects do

not serve the narrative, but refer only to themselves. One of his examples is
Georges Wilhelm Pabst’s Pandora’s Box (1929):

There are Lulu, the lamp, the bread-knife, Jack the Ripper: people who
are assumed to be real with individual characters and social roles, objects
with uses, real connections between these objects and these people – in
short, a whole actual state of things. But there are also the brightness of
the light on the knife, the blade of the knife under the light, Jack’s terror and
resignation, Lulu’s compassionate look. These are pure singular qualities or
potentialities – as it were, pure ‘possibles’.36

These close-up shots of a face, the knife, the blade under the light and Lulu’s
face exist as pure affect. They are self-contained and exceed narrative logic, or,
as Deleuze puts it, ‘they already are the event’.37 These moments of pure sin-
gular qualities abound in the body genres proposed by Linda Williams such as
horror and melodrama. Horror films, for example, are full of disconnected and
extended close-ups of the eyes, especially eyes expressing fear. Italian horror
director Dario Argento frequently uses close-ups of body parts and objects in
excess of the narrative’s requirements. They almost appear out of nowhere,
rupturing narrative continuity and normal human-centred perception. In his
Suspiria (1977), for example, there is a sudden close-up of a knife entering a
body. It adds little to the development of the narrative, other than telling us
that a woman has been stabbed. The same information could have been con-
veyed by a mid-shot or a long-shot. In this instance the close-up is designed
to be affective. It is used to similar effect elsewhere in the film, when a pair of
faceless eyes appear suddenly at a window, followed by a disembodied arm
that smashes through. These shots exceed the requirements of the narrative
and foreground their power to be affective by creating shock and fear.
In the horror film, editing, lighting, music, sound, camera movement and
framing are all used to create affects over and above the demands of the nar-
rative, which in the case of horror films have a tendency to be weak and pale
by comparison to their affective qualities. The same techniques are all used
to create bodily states such as suspense, terror and dread in the viewer. On
the surface, horror films seem to conform to the kind of controlling vision
at the centre of the cinematic apparatus, where the viewer identifies with
an all-seeing camera, however, what is not seen is generally more impor-
tant than what is seen. The identity of the killer, for example, is hidden from
sight until the end of the film. Suspense and fear often rely on not being able
to see properly. Films that generate highly affective states, such as horror
films, blur the boundary between the film and the viewer because they make
themselves felt through images that cut, slice and stab. They present us with
78 Deleuze and Film

images of mutilation and decay that affect us viscerally. They also produce
sonic shocks that confuse the senses, indeed, that are able to shake the very
core of the unified body.

The perception-image: Elephant

The perception-image is a key way in which cinema produces an affective
viewing experience and a molecular cinematic assemblage. As discussed in
Chapter 1, the perception-image introduces a new mode of thinking because
it is able to accommodate the existence of both a subjective and an objec-
tive perspective in the same shot, thereby drawing attention to the presence
of the camera or to a specific cinematographic consciousness. Deleuze also
describes this camera presence as a kind of being-with the character. We have
the sense that the camera is not looking at the character in an objective way
and yet, because the shot is not from the point of view of the character, it
appears to be with him or her. Gus Van Sant’s Elephant (2003) is an excellent
example of a contemporary film that makes extensive use of the perception-
image in order to produce a sense of being-with a character as well as a cam-
era consciousness that is able to accommodate a subjective and an objective
perspective.
The film comprises, in the main, of extremely long tracking shots that fol-
low different students across the sports fields and up and down the halls of a
large high school. There are very few shots that capture a character face-on.
In most shots the camera follows from behind, so we see the back of the
characters. Then perhaps it will sweep alongside a character in a smooth flow-
ing motion, finally stopping in front, but at a distance. The camera is virtually
in a state of perpetual motion, gliding sometimes from one student’s journey
to another’s. As this is achieved without edits, it is difficult not to be aware of
the camera. It most certainly has a felt quality, particularly through its gliding
movements, however, even on the few occasions when the camera comes
to rest, its presence is overwhelming, because of its absolute stillness. In the
first third of the film, there is an extremely long take of students practising
football. The camera is locked off. The students move in and out of the shot,
drawing our attention to the frame. They also move in-between the foreground
and the background, emphasizing the stillness of the camera.
Although we join the camera in watching the students, it is not an objec-
tive, all-seeing camera held at a distance. The camera’s presence endows the
image with a degree of empathy not found in an objective camera. If anything,
there is a sense of being close to the characters, even though we are not
given any insight into their psychology. None of them seem to motivate any
story. In spite of the fact that we are following the characters, we are not
 An ethological approach to film viewing 79

given any reason why this should be until the last few scenes of the film.
There is nothing odd or extraordinary about their movements and actions;
they are not geared towards the construction of a cause and effect narrative
trajectory. Their conversations reveal very little about them. We are not invited
to identify with them, as there are very few shot reverse shots in the film.
This results in the absence of any anchoring subjective shots that enable us to
adopt their perspective or their viewpoint.
Not only is perception unable to be anchored in space, but it is also dis-
lodged from linear time. It becomes apparent at a certain moment that what
we are watching is the same moment in the lives of different students. How-
ever, because of the continual movement of the camera, it is impossible to
create any map of the space or to make sense of the timeframe: the viewer
remains disoriented in both time and space. Elephant illustrates cinema’s
ability to accommodate the coexistence of multiple perspectives and mul-
tiple durations. In so doing it also expresses a camera consciousness that
privileges difference as duration. This is a non-dialectical form of difference, in
which difference is understood as what differs from itself. A life, a moment, a
day is what differs from itself in Elephant and, as such, each is made to reveal
its own uniqueness. It is all the more shocking, therefore, when, after end-
lessly following the different students on their mundane daily journeys, we
are confronted with a high-school massacre. Elephant produces a molecular
articulation of the cinematic assemblage. It privileges affects over and above
signification and representation. It decentres vision and unhinges time from a
linear trajectory, producing a rhizomatic mode of thought.
Thinking about the cinematic experience in terms of an assemblage per-
mits an exploration of molecular modes of film viewing that produce a non-
binary qualitative understanding of difference. This enables us to come into
contact with the positive potential of difference. For feminist film theory, this
leads to new understandings of sexual difference outside a binary model. It
also means a shift away from a focus on the female spectator towards an
exploration of the capacity of a film’s affective quality to break down fixed cat-
egories and hierarchies. Most importantly, the idea of the cinematic assem-
blage enables us to extend our understanding of the human as it puts us into
contact with non-human cinematic durations and thinking patterns. As a molar
and molecular construct, film viewing gives us the opportunity to consider the
many ways in which individuals and their capacities are affected through their
participation in larger assemblages.
80
 4

The slasher film: A

Deleuzian feminist
analysis

I t is little wonder that, with its staple diet of female victims who are pursued,
tortured, mutilated and murdered, the horror genre has been a popular
and contested area of study for feminist film theory. While some readings,
such as those of Barbara Creed and the early work of Linda Williams, argue
that the genre is based on a sadistic male gaze that punishes women, other
theorists, such as Carol Clover, claim that it is based on a male masochistic
identification. In this chapter I want to revisit these debates in order to rethink
the role of sexual difference in the horror genre. I am particularly anxious to
open a dialogue on the modern horror genre with Clover and her theories of
‘fluid gender identity’ and ‘painful seeing’, both of which gesture towards an
affective embodied mode of film viewing. The chapter will extend the concept
of the cinematic assemblage through an analysis of the ‘slasher’ genre – a
sub-genre of the modern horror film. By encouraging an affective embodied
perception in both the female protagonist of the genre and the film–viewer,
the slasher genre produces a series of connections that blur the film–viewer
distinction, forming a cinematic assemblage.
By clearly articulating the relationship between the molar transcendental
and molecular immanent planes of the assemblage, slasher films readily lend
themselves to a Deleuzian feminist analysis. On the molar plane, they operate
within the terms laid down by theories of the cinematic apparatus by encour-
aging both a primary identification, with an all-seeing camera, and a secondary
narcissistic identification with the protagonist. In this respect, the viewer is
encouraged to feel that he or she controls the narrative and the images on the
screen. On the molecular level, slasher films continually undermine this sense
of mastery and control by creating an affective embodied viewing experience.
82 Deleuze and Film

For example, in most slasher films the all-seeing objective camera does not
see very well and is frequently unreliable. In addition, the kinds of cinematic
techniques employed tend to create a menacing atmosphere that produces
states of anxiety and terror in the viewing body.
Following Clover’s definition, as outlined in her book Men, Women, and
Chain Saws,1 I understand the modern horror genre as a type of ‘B grade hor-
ror film’ that emerged in the 1970s and was far more violent and terrifying than
anything that had gone before. Examples include slasher films like The Texas
Chain Saw Massacre (Tobe Hooper, 1974) and Halloween (John Carpenter,
1979), rape revenge films such as I Spit on Your Grave (Meir Zarchi, 1978) and
Ms. 45 (Abel Ferrara, 1981), and finally occult or possession films exemplified
by The Exorcist (William Friedkin, 1973) and Poltergeist (Tobe Hooper, 1982).
While the classic horror genre had undergone intensive feminist analysis prior
to Clover’s work, the modern horror genre had not been considered worthy of
serious scholarly analysis and was either read as exploitative, sadistic and too
violent, or simply ignored.
Clover’s work is interesting from a Deleuzian perspective because, while
some aspects of her work may conform to the framework of the cinematic
apparatus, others pose a challenge to it. For example, Clover challenges cin-
ematic identification along gendered lines by proposing that the genre encour-
ages a fluid gender identification, according to which male audiences identify
masochistically with the female victim, or ‘Final Girl’, as she calls her. She
thereby challenges the traditional reading of the horror genre as one that pro-
duces a sadistic male pleasure by punishing the female victim. In addition,
she argues that the modern horror genre produces a reactive, introjective and
painful vision rather than a projective and sadistic gaze. As a form of painful
vision it engages the body and therefore operates on the intensive molecular
plane of the assemblage. At the same time, other aspects of Clover’s work
conform to the framework of the cinematic apparatus. For example, her theory
of male masochistic identification relies on the very processes of cinematic
identification central to theories of the cinematic apparatus.
Henri Bergson’s philosophical method of intuition, developed in his Mat-
ter and Memory,2 offers a useful means of exploring the affective embodied
perception generated by the slasher genre. Intuition is foregrounded in Berg-
son’s discussion of perception. It begins with an immediate affective form
of perception that occurs prior to any attempt to organize it for the purpose
of communication. In the slasher film, affective perception operates on two
levels. First, it is an essential attribute of the Final Girl; it is what enables her
to survive – in contrast to her friends, whose perception is habitual. Secondly,
the many kinds of visceral sensations produced by the genre put the viewer
in a heightened state of awareness, akin to a form of affective perception,
foreground the film–viewer assemblage. On both levels, Bergson’s concept of
 The slasher film: A Deleuzian feminist analysis 83

intuition is a useful tool for understanding how the slasher genre encourages
molecular connections between the film and the viewer.
This chapter is divided into three sections. The first section critiques Clo-
ver’s concept of the Final Girl, the challenge it poses to previous feminist
readings of the modern horror genre and the constraints placed upon it by the
framework of the cinematic apparatus. The second section extends the con-
cept of the Final Girl by deploying Bergson’s method of intuition. This includes
a discussion of several slasher films. It also broadens Clover’s analysis of
the genre beyond a psychoanalytic framework towards an embodied form of
spectatorship that undoes binary sexuality. The third and final section explores
the film–viewer relationship as an affective molecular cinematic assemblage,
examining the genre’s encouragement of affective intuitive perception in the
film–viewer through visceral sounds and images with a detailed analysis of
scenes from The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.

Section 1: Carol Clover and

the modern horror genre
When Men, Women, and Chain Saws was published in  1991, it challenged
the way in which feminist film theory, film theory in general and popular film
criticism understood processes of identification in the horror genre. Clover
re-envisaged the genre by re-thinking processes of cinematic identification.
Up until that point the horror genre had been theorized mainly as promoting
a sadistic male identification. Under the influence of Laura Mulvey’s seminal
essay ‘Visual pleasure and narrative cinema’, feminist analyses had focused
on the genre’s construction of sexual difference, spectatorial identification and
the importance of the look. Accordingly horror films were seen to position the
woman as the object of male desire and/or the object of male horror: men
possess the look and women exist to be looked at, refused any desires of
their own. If the woman does express desire and appropriates the look for
herself, then she has to be punished.
For example, Linda Williams draws a parallel between the woman as the
object of desire and the monster as the object of horror. The horror film, she
says, is one in which women do look, but not as desiring subjects. Rather they
are punished for adopting the look, as upon encountering the monster, they
recognize their own status as the representation of difference in the monster.
In 1984 she wrote:

The female look – a look given preeminent position in the horror film –
shares the male fear of the monster’s freakishness, but also recognizes
84 Deleuze and Film

the sense in which this freakishness is similar to her own difference. For
she too has been constituted as exhibitionist-object by the desiring look of
the male. There is not much difference between an object of desire and an
object of horror as far as the male look is concerned.3

In this respect, although women do look in the horror genre, it is not as agents
of the look, but with a look that participates in their own objectification. Influ-
enced by Clover, a decade or so later Williams wrote ‘When women look: A
sequel’,4 in which she sought to revise her assumption in her earlier essay that
horror films offered no avenues of pleasure for female viewers and the too
easy alignment of female characters with female viewers.
In the 1980s Barbara Creed had taken the association of woman with mon-
ster somewhat further: in the modern horror film, she contended, the woman
is the source of horror; she is the monstrous. This is particularly as she is
associated with castration:

The horror film’s obsession with blood, particularly the bleeding body of
woman, where her body is transformed into the ‘gaping wound’, suggests
that castration anxiety is a central concern of the horror film – particularly
the slasher sub-genre. Woman’s body is slashed and mutilated, not only to
signify her own castrated state, but also the possibility of castration for the
male.5

In ‘Horror and the monstrous-feminine: An imaginary abjection’,6 the essay

from which the above quotation is taken, Creed deploys Julia Kristeva’s theory
of the abject in order to show how the female body is associated with that
which is abject and needs to be expelled. She takes The Exorcist and Alien
(Ridley Scott, 1979) to be excellent examples of the monstrous-feminine.7 In
The Exorcist, Regan (Linda Blair), the young girl who is possessed by the
devil, is slowly transformed into a putrid body full of filth and waste matter
such as pus, vomit, excrement and menstrual blood. And Alien, says Creed,
is full of negative images of maternity and monstrous births. Underpinning
both these forms of analysis is an understanding of sexual difference on a
binary model, where femininity is perceived as the negative of masculinity.
­Spectatorial identification is assumed to mirror this model with male spec-
tators seen as identifying with male characters and female spectators with
female characters. There is no doubt that these forms of analysis accomplish
much in revealing an imbalance in the representation of sexual difference in
the horror genre, but they do so at the risk of investing in heterosexist and
rigid notions of sexual difference and sexual identity.
It is against this background that Clover questions feminist film theory’s
assumption that spectatorial identification is clearly delineated along the binary
 The slasher film: A Deleuzian feminist analysis 85

opposites of masculine/feminine, active/passive and sadistic/masochistic. She

suggests that the modern horror film combines and confuses these oppo-
sitions, reconfiguring sexuality and identification as a complex process that
tends to shift and slide. While she acknowledges that horror cinema does offer
a degree of sadistic pleasure, she does not believe that ‘sadistic voyeurism is
the first cause of horror. Nor . . . that real-life women and feminist politics have
been entirely well served by the astonishingly insistent claim that horror’s sat-
isfactions begin and end in sadism.’8 By contrast, it is Clover’s contention that
the modern horror genre encourages a male masochistic identification with
the female protagonist: ‘[M]ale viewers are quite prepared to identify not just
with screen females, but with screen females in the horror-film world, screen
females in fear and pain.’9

The Final Girl

Clover’s analysis of the slasher film centres on the male spectator’s masochis-
tic identification with the Final Girl, a term she coins to describe the fact that
she is usually the last to survive a series of gruesome murders, often manag-
ing to avenge herself and the death of her friends by killing the assailant. The
Final Girl is both victim and hero of the story: she is frightened, she screams
and she cowers, but she also actively defends herself and aggressively seeks
out the assailant. By identifying with her, male viewers are able to indulge in
a feminized subject position and submit to the thrills and horror of being vic-
timized, knowing full-well that this same character will eventually turn out to
be the hero of the story. The male spectator’s identification with the Final Girl
overturns the view that the cinematic apparatus is invariably based on a sadis-
tic controlling voyeurism, asserting instead that it may sometimes be based on
a masochistic cross-gender male identification. By theorizing a cross-gender
identification, Clover is not dismissing the framework of the cinematic appara-
tus entirely, but modifying and extending it. For example, she does not aban-
don the central mechanisms of primary and secondary identification, rather
she deploys them to reveal how these identifications are not solely at the
service of sadistic gazing and gendered identification.
Clover’s primary source for her theory of male cross-gender masochistic
identification is Freud’s essay, ‘A child is being beaten’,10 the importance of
which lies in the fact that it contradicts standard fixed gender identifications
through an idea of oscillating subject positions.11 In Freud’s theory of male
masochistic fantasy, the man imagines himself to be a girl who is being physi-
cally punished by an authority figure. The authority figure represents the father
and the beating is read as a substitute for love. The man imagines himself as
a girl as a way of dealing with the forbidden homosexual desire for the father.
86 Deleuze and Film

As a result of this identification, the fantasy gives rise to gender confusion.

Following Freud, Clover calls this kind of masochism ‘female masochism’, not
because it belongs to women, but because in Freud’s terms male masochism
always manifests itself through the guise of femininity. Just as the female
body is used as a defensive cover in ‘A child is being beaten’, Clover argues
that, for a male masochistic identification to occur in the horror film, the role of
the victim/hero must be played by a Final Girl and not a Final Boy. It is through
a process of displacement, or the use of a girl victim/hero as a front, that the
male spectator can ‘simultaneously experience forbidden desires and disa-
vow them on the grounds that the visible actor is, after all, a girl’.12
In order for men to be able to identify with her, Clover believes, the Final Girl
must be recognizably masculine from the start of the film. While she may have
a girl’s physical appearance, by comparison with that of her female friends,
her behaviour must be coded masculine: ‘[S]he is not fully feminine – not, in
any case, feminine in the ways of her friends . . . Lest we miss the point, it is
spelled out in her name: Stevie, Marty, Terry, Laurie, Stretch, Will, Joey, Max’.13
Having recognized the Final Girl as masculine, the male spectator is able to
deny her physicality so as to submit easily to a feminized masochistic identi-
fication with her through her degrading ordeal as she is terrorized, attacked,
threatened and even raped.
Moreover, according to Clover, although the protagonist in the slasher film
is most often played by a young woman and the antagonist by a male, the
gender of these two characters is often confused. Each has both feminine and
masculine qualities, but the degree to which these qualities are an overriding
feature of the character is dependent on the function they perform, and that
function shifts throughout the film. In the case of the protagonist, the role
has two functions, victim and hero. Although in the first part of the film she
runs and cries in fear as she is pursued, at a certain point in the narrative she
transforms into the hero by adopting the investigative gaze, tracking down and
disposing of the killer. The antagonist’s sexuality is similarly confused. While
this role may assume any number of forms – monster, psycho-killer, animal, or
deranged child – it is generally coded male, though not necessarily masculine.
The antagonist’s masculinity is questionable, as he is often feminized, sexu-
ally immature or he may have an unusual attachment to his mother.14 Clover’s
schema allows for shifting combinations of gender traits, as the feminine male
or the masculine female, to varying degrees.
It is frequently difficult to identify with male characters in slasher films, as
they are often underdeveloped and generally die early in the narrative. The
antagonist too is an unlikely candidate for empathy and emotional investment.
While the use of the first person ‘I camera to represent the killer’s point of
view’ (often used at the start of the film), momentarily encourages spectator
identification with this character, this identification does not last very long
 The slasher film: A Deleuzian feminist analysis 87

because of his extreme sadism.15 Once the Final Girl is established as the
protagonist, the us e of the I-camera, although it may switch back and forth at
times, tends to be transferred to her. Generally speaking, however, the further
the narrative progresses the more it belongs to the Final Girl.
The film Halloween clearly demonstrates this shift. From the very first shot
we see through the eyes of the killer as he stalks his victim, looks through
the screen door, enters the house and picks up the knife. We hear what he
hears as he follows the humming sounds of his victim to her room and finally
attacks and kills her. This identification is reinforced by the use of the hand-
held camera, which, with its fluid movement and particularly when used in
the first person, gives the impression of human movement. Yet, by the end of
the film, after the camera’s point of view has shifted a number of times, the
audience identifies with the Final Girl: she becomes an active observer and
we see what she sees. As Clover puts it, ‘Our closeness to him wanes as our
closeness to the Final Girl waxes – a shift underwritten by story line as well as
camera position. By the end, point of view is hers.’16
The importance of Clover’s theory of male identification in the modern horror
film is twofold. First, it is fluid and cross-gendered, and secondly, it produces
a female character who is allowed to look without being punished. Clover has
been responsible for a significant shift in film theory’s understanding and theo-
rizing of the modern horror film, and has inspired a considerable body of work
on the genre. However, while male identification with the Final Girl renders
cinematic looking masochistic rather than sadistic, processes of identification
at the centre of the cinematic apparatus remain the central mechanism for
exploring the genre’s textual system. Therefore the framework of the cine-
matic apparatus remains intact and difference is still situated within a binary
system. While this does not diminish the importance of Clover’s framework
for feminist film theory, what it implies is that it attends to the molar aspects
of the genre. Clover’s exploration of a fluid and cross-gendered identification
is a powerful way attention to the molar aspects of an assemblage can be put
to productive use for a feminist project.
I now want to extend Clover’s work by considering the molecular aspects
of the genre. It is first necessary, however, to briefly address two limitations
of Clover’s understanding of the modern horror film. First, her theory of shift-
ing and sliding gender identifications focuses solely on the male viewer’s
investment in the genre. Secondly, by focusing on the Final Girl’s gender the
body and sexuality are devalued. When Clover questions the kinds of viewing
positions possible within the modern horror genre, she states explicitly that
her sole, at least primary, concern is with the male viewer:

My interest in the male viewer’s stake in horror spectatorship is such that

I have consigned to virtual invisibility all other members of the audience,
88 Deleuze and Film

despite the fact that their loyalty and engagement can be just as ardent and
their stake in the genre just as deserving of attention.17

While her decision to focus on male spectatorship stems from an interest

in overturning the long-standing association of male spectator identification
with mastery, control and a sadistic voyeurism, her consigning of every other
viewer to ‘virtual invisibility’ is hard to ignore. Therefore, while she suggests
that the male spectator is enjoying shifting and complex gender identifica-
tions, little consideration is given to any possible female stake in the genre, or
in the figure of the Final Girl.18 The decision not to theorize female engage-
ment with the genre might be a means of avoiding the difficulty in accounting for
a masochistic female pleasure. Commenting on how most studies of maso-
chism – such as those by Deleuze, Kaja Silverman and Gaylyn Studlar19 – have
all focused exclusively on male masochism, Williams writes, ‘Masochistic
pleasure for women has paradoxically seemed either normal – too much the
normal, yet intolerable, condition of women – or too perverse to be taken seri-
ously as pleasure.’20 There is a real need, she says, to be clearer about what
masochistic pleasures might offer women.
I would argue that the genre’s formulaic nature offers a safe means of
exploring a masochistic pleasure for women. The modern horror genre tends
to tell the same story over and over, so the audience is never in any doubt as
to how things will end. It should be relatively straightforward to consider a
female masochistic identification with the Final Girl knowing full-well that later
in the film she will be transformed into an avenging hero who takes control of
the narrative, adopts the investigative gaze, actively hunts down the assailant
and survives the ordeal.
One reason why Clover plays down female identification with the active
investigative gaze may be that it would complicate her argument that the
genre is primarily structured around a male masochistic identification. It might
also raise interesting questions, such as, do men identify with the Final Girl
masochistically, and do women identify with her at the point when she adopts
the look and becomes an active agent? Problems of this kind seem to me to
signal the limitations of tying vision to processes of identification. Identifica-
tion seems to evoke an either/or logic, according to which the viewer is asked
to identify either with a character of their own gender, or with the opposite
gender. Even a radical male cross-gender identification does not fully address
the problems of a hierarchal binary system. Identifying with the opposite gen-
der does not so much undo binary opposition as highlight it. As Deleuze and
Guattari assert:

It is no more adequate to say that each sex contains the other and must
develop the opposite pole in itself. Bisexuality is no better a concept than the
 The slasher film: A Deleuzian feminist analysis 89

separateness of the sexes. It is as deplorable to miniaturize, internalise the

binary machine as it is to exacerbate it; it does not extricate us from it.21

Considering Deleuze and Guattari’s argument that bisexuality only exacer-

bates the problems of the binary machine, a theory of shifting and sliding male
identification cannot be said to fully address the problems of sexual difference
on a binary model.
The second limitation relates to a sex/gender, mind/body split resulting
from Clover’s insistence that the Final Girl is gendered masculine. Clover con-
tinually points out that the Final Girl should be read as masculine because she
possesses masculine qualities, yet, the kind of qualities offered as evidence,
such as ‘smartness, gravity, competence in mechanical and other practical
matters and sexual reluctance’, are as readily attributable to adolescent girls
as boys.22 From the start of the film, she argues the Final Girl is the obvious
choice for males to identify with, because she is ‘intelligent, watchful, level-
headed’.23 But these are not exclusively male-protagonist qualities. By insist-
ing that they are gendered masculine, Clover privileges gender and the mind
over the sexed body. Moreover, gender is discussed in quantitative rather
than qualitative terms, because for Clover, the killer and the Final Girl oscillate
between genders to varying degrees throughout the film:

It is not that these films show us gender and sex in free variation; it is that
they fix on the irregular combinations, of which the combination masculine
female repeatedly prevails over the combination feminine male.24

As much as Clover’s analysis of male-to-female identification disrupts the

assumption that male viewers identify with males on screen, it does not
pose a genuine challenge to the binary logic inherent in the framework of the
cinematic apparatus. Yet, as I shall argue presently, because the Final Girl is
endowed with an affective embodied perception, she escapes binary sexual-
ity and is in a constant state of transformation and becoming. While Clover’s
work demonstrates how the molar plane can be mobilized for a feminist read-
ing, it is also important to address how the slasher genre connects with the
viewer on the molecular plane: that is, how it produces becomings that liber-
ate sexual difference from a binary logic.

Section 2: Affective perception:

An ethological approach
This section explores the possibilities that an ethological understanding of
the Final Girl might offer feminist film theory. As I discussed in Chapter 2,
90 Deleuze and Film

­ethology is not interested in what a body is – that is, it does not ­classify ­bodies
according to fixed categories – but rather it understands bodies through their
capacities as well as their powers to affect and be affected. Therefore, rather
than ask what kind of identifications the character of the Final Girl solicits, an
ethological perspective would be interested in the kinds of connections, trans-
formations and becomings that are produced and what these enable. I want
to argue that the Final Girl’s ability to survive resides not in her ­masculinity,
but in a form of affective perception that enables her to enter into a ­process of
becoming. Affective perception is immediate and acts on the body to encour-
age processes of transformation or becomings. The Final Girl exemplifies
­Gatens’ as well as Deleuze and Guattari’s proposition that the body, identity
and subjectivity are continually decomposing and recomposing with every
encounter. In relation to the viewing experience, the slasher film produces
real bodily responses: it produces changes from one bodily state to another.
This kind of affective perception is not only a central mechanism of the Final
Girl’s survival, it also defines the film–viewer relationship.
The difference between the Final Girl’s perception of the world and that of
her friends might be understood through two kinds of perception discussed
by Bergson. The first is a kind of pure perception that can be understood as an
immediate affective awareness of an object or experience. Bergson calls this
‘intuition’. The second is a kind of mediated perception that tries to account
for, or explain, the first. In attempting to understand the initial pure perception,
this second level interprets the first through a formed set of ideas or through
previous perceptions. According to Bergson, in the initial perception we are
confronted with a world of images, but we filter only those that interest us, or
that serve our purposes:

The images which surround us will appear to turn towards our body the
side, emphasized by the light upon it, which interests our body. They will
detach from themselves that which we have arrested on its way, that which
we are capable of influencing.25

This implies that we not only filter those images that interest us and fail to per-
ceive the rest, but by organizing them in such a way as to communicate them,
we impose certain meanings and values on to them. The more mediated the
initial perception is through our own interests, the further it is reduced and
the more its affectivity diminishes. This is an important point in relation to the
Final Girl, because, according to Bergson, intuition plays an important role in
the ability to act. In other words, the ability to act requires a certain openness
to experiences or immediate perception.
Furthermore, for Bergson, affective perception or intuition cannot be attrib-
uted solely to the mind: it operates between mind and body. This is because
 The slasher film: A Deleuzian feminist analysis 91

he understands immediate and unmediated experiences as images or affec-

tive impressions. It is through the processes of classifying and analysing our
experiences that we gain detachment from them. Bergson argues that we
are surrounded by images and our body is one of these. However, because
our body is a constant, while other images come and go, it begins to occupy
a privileged place. It is through the privileging of the body as the centre of all
images (experiences), or as the centre of perception, that the notions of exte-
riority and interiority emerge. Bergson writes:

But if, on the contrary, all images are posited at the outset, my body will
necessarily end by standing out in the midst of them as a distinct thing,
since they change unceasingly, and it does not vary. The distinction between
the inside and the outside will then be only a distinction between the part
and the whole. There is first of all, the aggregate of images; and then, in
this aggregate, there are ‘centres of action’, from which the interesting
images appear to be reflected: thus perceptions are born and actions made
ready. My body is that which stands out as the centre of the perceptions;
my personality is the being to which these actions must be referred.26

In his essay on the philosopher’s ‘concept of a person’, Eric Matthews argues

that Bergson’s emphasis on ‘my body’ and ‘my personality’ in relation to per-
ception is proof that, for him, mind and body are one. This emphasis indicates
that my body is not ‘distinct from me, from my personality: it is me, to the
extent that I am an active being’.27 Because it is my body that is the centre of
action and it is my personality that is the being to which these actions must
be referred, then the way we experience ourselves must necessarily be as
embodied beings.
When Bergson states that the body is a constant among other images,
he is not implying that the body does not change, but rather that the body
is always there. It is the centre of our perceptions, whereas other images
or experiences continually move towards and away from it. Although other
images may come and go, they are never totally separate from the body
image: Bergson emphasizes that the difference between interior and exterior
is simply the difference between the part and the whole. The body at the
centre of perception is nonetheless always part of the whole and is affected
by changes in the whole. This is a point echoed by Deleuze and Guattari in A
Thousand Plateaus when they insist that there is no clear distinction between
interior and exterior, between ‘a field of reality (the world) and a field of repre-
sentation (the book) and a field of subjectivity (the author)’.28
This distinction between the part and the whole relates to the way in which
the slasher genre forms a cinematic assemblage with the viewer through the
immediacy of affective images. During the activity of watching a film my body
92 Deleuze and Film

may be at the centre of all the other images, however, the distinction between
my body and the film’s images is constantly blurred through the almost
unmediated affects of terror, suspense, horror and anxiety. These shocking
and horrifying affects are too quick to be rationalized and organized. My body,
as image, and the film as a series of images, are part of a whole, of which
the component parts interact and affect each other. The slasher produces a
viewing experience that brings us close to the kinds of unmediated experi-
ences that Bergson calls intuition. It is an intuitive experience full of immedi-
ate impressions that connect with the viewing body, closing the gap between
the film and the viewer and forming a cinematic assemblage.

The Final Girl and affective perception

This embodied and affective form of perception is what gives the Final Girl an
acute awareness of the dangers around her and enables her to act accord-
ingly. Her survival depends on intuitive perception. She is in tune with the
world and the events around her. Even before any of the killings occur, she
appears hyper-observant and attentive in a way that her friends do not. Then,
when she discovers the bodies of her friends, she is immediately affected and
catapulted into action, whereas her peers are rendered numb and immobile
by these events. Even when her aim is solely to flee from danger, rather than
kill the assailant, as is the case in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, she none-
theless has an acute awareness of her surroundings and her situation, and so
is able to find a way of escaping.
Films in the slasher genre generally contain a few scenes early in the nar-
rative that reveal the Final Girl’s finely tuned sensory perception. For example,
very early on in Halloween, in a scene set in a classroom, 17-year-old Laurie
(Jamie Lee Curtis) senses something strange and dangerous lurking outside.
The scene opens with a wide shot of the students sitting at their desks, listen-
ing to the teacher. The shot is taken from the front of the class and Laurie is
sitting towards the back of the room. The camera moves slowly past the other
students and zooms to a close-up of Laurie’s face. Coinciding with the cam-
era’s movement, the theme music fades up and the voice of the teacher fades
away. There is a circularity to the music, a simple repetitive 2-3, 2-3, 2-3 beat
played on a piano. This gentle, repetitive rhythm has a dreamy, yet unsettling,
lullaby quality about it. As the camera stops on a close-up of Laurie’s face, a
low menacing drone is added to the gentle piano music. The young woman
has a pensive, far-away expression as she looks towards the window almost
in a trance-like state, as though in response to someone or something beckon-
ing her.29 Through the use of a shot reverse-shot we see, from Laurie’s point of
view, the street outside. It is empty of people. The menacing drone increases
 The slasher film: A Deleuzian feminist analysis 93

in intensity and volume generating a tension and suspense that indicates a

dangerous presence is near at hand. As the camera cuts back to Laurie, still
in a hypnotic state, she looks down at her desk. The music cuts out and the
teacher’s voice is heard asking her a question. Without missing a beat, Laurie
answers intelligently.
This scene not only presents Laurie as sensorially aware, but the filmic
techniques used to do this create a certain tension between the organizing
molar plane and the affective molecular plane of the assemblage. For exam-
ple, on the molar plane the camera invites a primary identification with itself
and a secondary identification with Laurie. It does this as we adopt the cam-
era’s point of view when it zooms into Laurie’s face and then when we adopt
Laurie’s point of view through the use of the shot reverse-shot. Yet, on the
molecular plane, these shots work to create a tense, palpable atmosphere
that produces bodily responses that draw the viewer into its affective world.
The slow zoom into Laurie’s face may invite identification with her and the
camera, but when considered alongside the eerie lullaby music, it contrives
to draw the viewer into an almost hypnotic state of anticipation. The use of
soft lighting and colours adds to the dreamy, hypnotic atmosphere. While the
low drone gives the scene a menacing edge, soft colours, a slow deliberate
camera movement, piano music and Curtis’s mesmerizing performance cre-
ate a gentle, inviting atmosphere that draws the viewer into Laurie’s affective
world.
Like Clover, I understand the Final Girl to differ from her girlfriends. How-
ever, rather than insist that she is gendered masculine, I would argue that her
femininity is qualitatively different from that of her girlfriends because of her
affective connection to the world, which renders her a body in process. This
means that her femininity is not defined in opposition to the masculine, but
rather that it exists in relation to a multiplicity of connections. The Final Girl’s
sexuality is constantly decomposing and recomposing, according to the con-
nections it forms. In this respect, the slasher genre articulates two models
of sexuality, a molar sexuality that operates on the plane of organization and
a molecular sexuality that exists on the affective intensive plane. As I out-
lined in Chapter 3, according to Deleuze and Guattari, molar subjectivities are
pre-existing and imposed from above. They are fixed and structured through
binaries and hierarchical categories. Molecular becomings on the other hand,
because they are always metamorphosing, do not recognize binaries and cat-
egories. Therefore, rather than defining the Final Girl’s sexuality in relation to
degrees of femininity and masculinity as a molecular construct it is defined by
qualitative shifts. This does not mean that she is never subjected to forces that
organize and over-code her body through gendered terms. However, these
molar constructs are only temporary points of subjectification that are con-
tinually undone through an affective perception that encourages becomings.
94 Deleuze and Film

Defined as a body in constant transition, the Final Girl exists primarily in-
between these categories. This space is not simply a matter of degree, but
of intensity or quality. It is also a potential space, where outcomes are uncer-
tain. It is this that distinguishes her from her peers, who fit neatly into fixed
and rigid categories that offer far more limited possibilities. In this regard it is
not so much that the Final Girl is masculine by comparison to her girlfriends,
but rather that their bodies are totally captured and territorialized by a hyper-
real version of teenage femininity as represented by the commercial imagery
of advertising, television, magazines and pornography. As fixed and ordered
molar subjects, they fulfil all the myths about teenage girls: obsessed with
clothes, make-up, grooming, sex, boys and their bodies. Their discussions
revolve around sex, physical appearances and boyfriends. The Final Girl’s teen-
age male friends are equally captured and territorialized by a set of very limited
commercial images of teenage masculinity. Because of this, their perception
of the world is very limited and mediated, with the result that they have a
restricted capacity to be affective agents in the wider world.30
According to Bergson, the further we get away from an immediate aware-
ness of experiences and things, the more we limit our affective perception.
Dorothea Olkowski expands on this in her discussion of Bergson: ‘The degree
to which habit dominates affective perception will turn out to be of great rele-
vance in the relations between the organism and the world’.31 In other words,
when perception is reduced to habit we cease to be affective in the world.
I would argue that the Final Girl’s friends are limited to the second kind of
mediated habitual perception. By mediating all perceptions through a narrow
filter, they have distanced themselves from their immediate perceptions of
the world, and hence from an affective relationship with the world, thus imply-
ing that they are unable to change or transform. In the world of the slasher film
this is a dangerous situation to be in, because without affective perception a
character simply cannot perceive the gravity of the situation and cannot know,
therefore, how to respond. These characters are unaware of the danger that
surrounds them until it is too late.32
In a hospital scene in Halloween II (Rick Rosenthal, 1981), for example,
a young nurse is taking a spa with her boyfriend. He leaves momentarily, at
which point the killer Mike Myers/The Shape (Dick Warlock) enters the room,
stands behind the nurse and begins to massage her shoulders. She thinks,
of course, that it is her boyfriend. The viewer can see that it is Myers, but the
nurse remains blissfully ignorant until seconds before she dies. While Laurie
(in Halloween), sitting at her desk, was able to sense Myers’ ominous pres-
ence, even at a distance, the nurse’s perception is so limited and directed that
she is unable to sense him even through physical contact. It is a trope of the
genre, of course, for a character to be unaware of her or his situation until the
last minute.
 The slasher film: A Deleuzian feminist analysis 95

A similar lack of affective perception is evident in the Final Girl’s best

friend Tatum (Rose McGowan) in Scream (Wes Craven, 1996). Tatum goes
downstairs to the garage to fetch some beer for her friends, who are watch-
ing horror films upstairs. After collecting the beer, she discovers the door is
locked and is confronted by the killer. However, like the nurse in Halloween
II, she mistakes the killer for her boyfriend and fails to understand the grav-
ity of her predicament. It is not until the killer takes out a knife and attacks
her that she realizes the danger she is in, but by this time it is too late and
there is no escape. Once again the contrast between her limited unaffected
perception and that of the Final Girl, Sidney (Neve Campbell) is dramatic.
Like Laurie, Sidney senses something is awry from the first moments of
the film.

The Final Girl and temporality

The Final Girl’s affective relationship to the world means that she is con-
stantly changing, so her body, identity and subjectivity are endowed with
temporality. What this foregrounding of temporality offers feminist film the-
ory is a means of exploring a non-binary model of sexual difference, because
when a body is constantly changing, it cannot be fixed into a relationship of
opposition. A significant aspect of affective intuitive perception is that it oper-
ates through the breakdown of the external/internal, subject/object distinc-
tions. In addition, the blurring of these distinctions is an essential element
of transformation or becoming. For Bergson, the breakdown of external and
internal, subject and object can be understood as what he calls an ‘undivided
continuity’:

That which is called a fact is not reality as it appears to immediate intuition,

but an adaptation of the real to the interests of practice and to the
exigencies of social life. Pure intuition, external or internal, is that of an
undivided continuity.33

Bergson’s way of understanding reality as an undivided continuity, where no

clear separation exists between external and internal, subject and object,
implies a kind of subject that is not fixed or stable, but temporal. In this sense,
changes are not impositions on the subject from the outside: they take place
with the outside:

‘There are changes but not, under the change, things that change: change
has no need of a support. There are movements, but there is not an inert,
invariable, object that moves: movement does not imply a mobile.’34
96 Deleuze and Film

This means that no changes are imposed on a subject, but rather that the
natural state of the subject is change or what Bergson calls ‘duration’.
Like Deleuze and Guattari, Bergson is suggesting an ontology of becoming,
rather than of being. This does not mean that there is no continuing or endur-
ing subject, but that the condition of the subject is primarily one of transition.
For Bergson, and also for Deleuze and Guattari, the subject endures precisely
because it is always becoming with the world. It is an embodied subject that
forms assemblages with other bodies, discourses, institutions and assem-
blages. As Matthews explains, ‘If we are not, in intuition, detached from what
we experience, then we are “coinciding with” it; and if we do not regard it
as a member of a general class, then we coincide with “what is unique in
it.”’35 To coincide with what is unique about an experience is to transform or
become with it. What is more, a body in process, or a body becoming, implies
a body that is always becoming different from itself. This idea of becoming
with the world overturns the representational logic that conceives of differ-
ence in relation to a privileged term. Writing about Bergson’s concept of dif-
ference, Deleuze says:

Duration is what differs, and what differs is no longer what differs from
something else, but what differs from itself. What differs has become itself
a thing, a substance. Bergson’s thesis could be expressed this way: real
time is alteration, and alteration is substance.36

As a body becoming with the world, the Final Girl exemplifies a notion of dif-
ference that is understood as alteration, or as duration, rather than a concept
of difference that is only understood in relation to a privileged term such as
masculinity. If we take this logic further, we can say that highly visceral films,
like the slasher film, cause the viewing body to become with the film and
therefore put the viewer into contact with duration or difference in itself.
The Final Girl embodies difference as duration not only because she is
constantly becoming with the world, but also because her past experiences
seem to permeate her present. The undivided continuity Bergson discusses
takes into account not only a becoming with the world in the present, but also
across time. In the slasher film, the Final Girl’s sensorial awareness seems to
be linked to a traumatic event in the past that has opened her up to a wider
affective world than the one her friends inhabit. As a result she is more sen-
sitive, insightful and wiser than they are. For example, in Prom Night (Paul
Lynch, 1980) the impact on Kim (Jamie Lee Curtis) of her sister’s murder as a
child has given her a serious disposition, strength and a sense of responsibil-
ity that none of her friends possess. She is attentive to her mother’s feelings
on the anniversary of her sister’s death and is very protective of her younger
brother at school.
 The slasher film: A Deleuzian feminist analysis 97

In Wes Craven’s Scream, Sidney (Neve Campbell) is traumatized by the

rape and murder of her mother, which occurred a year before the film opens.
She carries the mark of this event with her into the present, as it seems to
affect her whole relationship to the world. She is vulnerable and serious, but
has an inner-strength that enables her to make difficult decisions and face
her fears. She possesses acute powers of observation and deduction – she
works out the killer’s identity early on in the narrative, although she is subse-
quently persuaded to change her mind. Marti (Linda Blair) in Hell Night (Tom
DeSimone, 1982) is a sensitive, serious and perceptive woman who has been
greatly affected by the death of her mother. She has learnt to be resourceful
and has taken on the mother/wife role at home. She works at her father’s
garage where she has acquired mechanical skills. She may scream and cry
throughout the film, but it is her perceptiveness and resourcefulness that
allows her and her boyfriend to escape, as she quickly hotwires the getaway
car. Nancy (Heather Lankenkamp) in A Nightmare on Elm Street (Wes Craven,
1984), has been traumatized by her parents’ bitter divorce and her mother’s
alcoholism. Frequently during the course of the film she is forced to make
adult decisions for her parents, both of whom are ineffectual and incapable.
Because she is observant and insightful, she sees what her friends and par-
ents miss. She is the only one who is able to unravel the mystery of how
the murders occur. Her courage and insightfulness enable her to survive the
deadly nightmares, while her friends, who lack the intuition to understand
what is happening, are easily killed off. These positive qualities are not the
result of a masculine gender, as Clover has claimed, but of a sexuality that is
open to change.
The Final Girl’s affective relationship to the world and her ability to exist in
duration stem from the way in which the memory of a past trauma is carried
into her present. It is as if the impact of the past has not only broadened her
affective perception, but has also given her an awareness of her own ability
to be affective in the world. According to Bergson, ‘there is no perception
which is not full of memories. With the immediate and present data of our
senses we mingle a thousand details out of our past experience.’37 Olkowski
elaborates on this with reference to Bergson’s example of the time on a clock
by explaining that if we exclude the memory of the previous beat of the clock
when counting out the 60 beats we will always remain in the present, but it is
a static present because each beat has no relation to the previous or the next.
This form of memory understands the past as having occurred, but does not
recognize its relationship to the present: the past is elsewhere. If we imagine
all 60 beats at once, we construct a homogeneous representation, but we
still do not recognize the fact that one moment bleeds into the next through
duration. In both instances we have relinquished duration: ‘But if we retain
the recollection of the preceding beat along with the current one, perceiving
98 Deleuze and Film

each permeating the other like the notes of a tune, they form a “quantitative
multiplicity”, the image of pure duration.’38
Quantitative multiplicity can be understood as qualitative changes because
the recollection of the previous beat into the next produces continuity between
the beats, as well as an unfolding or a becoming. These unfolding quantita-
tive differences exist in continuity with unfolding qualitative differences. Every
quantitative change results in a qualitative change. For example, an incremen-
tal change in the colour red is not simply a matter of quantity; it is also a mat-
ter of either quality or intensity. For the Final Girl this means that she is in a
process of unfolding change or becoming that generates qualitative changes
and not just degrees of masculinity and femininity. Yet, although traumatized
by her past, the Final Girl does not exist in the past, nor is she rendered immo-
bile because of it, but rather her trauma opens her up to perceptions in the
present. Like the beats of the clock, the Final Girl’s traumatic past bleeds into
the present.
While the Final Girl exists through duration, absorbing the past into her
present, her friends exist in a present that has no affective link to the past.
By contrast, her friends are like the static arrangement of Bergson’s clock,
in which the present bears no relation to the past. It is not that they have
no past, nor any memories, simply that their past makes no impact on their
present. In other words, her friends have a past, but they are not affected
by it. Nancy’s boyfriend, Glen (Johnny Depp), in A Nightmare on Elm Street
exemplifies this kind of unaffected memory. When Nancy realizes that the
hideously disfigured Freddy Krueger (Robert Englund) possesses special
powers that enable him to invade their dreams in order to terrorize and kill
them, she makes Glen promise not to fall asleep. He agrees, though he
cannot fully understand the danger he is in. Unfortunately, he succumbs
to sleep and is viciously murdered. Moreover, it appears that in these films
characters with no affective link to the past inevitably have no future. Sur-
vival depends on having an affective link to the past. Characters whose
present is totally overshadowed by the past are also ineffectual. Unlike
Glen, Nancy’s mother seems to totally inhabit the past and is barely in the
present. She is haunted by her participation in the vigilante killing of child
murderer Freddy.
In fact, her past has so taken over her present that she self-medicates to
dull her memories. Like Bergson’s second clock, on which all the beats are
imagined at once rather than bleeding into each other, Nancy’s mother cannot
make sense of the world, because for her it is almost as if all the events of her
life seem to be coinciding. Hence, she too lacks duration and does not change
or transform through time. What enables the Final Girl to endure the horror
and survive in circumstances in which her friends and the adults around her
cannot, is that for her the past permeates the present, but is not overshad-
owed by it. Hence, as well as continually decomposing and recomposing with
 The slasher film: A Deleuzian feminist analysis 99

every encounter, life for her is a continual opening up in which each moment
connects to the next and then to the one following and so on.

Section 3: The film–viewer and

affective perception
What is significant about the slasher film in relation to theories of spectator-
ship is that affective perception does not simply occur on screen to the Final
Girl, it extends out to include the viewer and the viewing experience. Camera
movement, music, sound effects and framing are marshalled together to gen-
erate bodily responses such as shock, apprehension, fear and horror that put
the viewer in a heightened state of awareness akin to intuition or affective
perception. In this final section of the chapter I want to explore the dynam-
ics of this relationship between the film and the viewer and to ask what they
might offer feminist film theory. It argues that affective perception engenders
a viewing body that is in a process of becoming and in a state of duration,
thereby realizing a non-binary understanding of difference. Slasher films could
be said to operate with a concept of difference as a continual unfolding or a
becoming different from itself, thereby encouraging a molecular viewing expe-
rience in which the viewer becomes with the film.
Clover’s book not only revolutionized feminist readings of the horror genre
through the concept of the Final Girl but also because of her concept of the
reactive gaze. The reactive gaze is a visceral and painful form of vision adopted
by the film–viewer and it therefore shares some similarities with affective per-
ception. I want to begin my discussion of affective perception and the view-
ing experience with a discussion of Clover’s notion of the reactive gaze as a
means of creating a dialogue between psychoanalytic feminist film theory and
Deleuzian feminist film theory.

The reactive gaze

Clover maintains that the modern horror film contains a scopic regime that is
split into two kinds of gaze with which male audiences are able to identify:
the assaultive projective gaze and the reactive introjective gaze. The assaultive
gaze is that of the killer and at certain points in the narrative, in particular early
on, audiences are invited to identify with it. Gendered male, the assaultive
gaze, is an extreme version of the controlling sadistic voyeuristic gaze put
forward by psychoanalytic film theory. Yet, according to Clover, this type of
identification is secondary in the modern horror film as identification with the
reactive gaze, which is that of the victim, is far more prevalent; it structures
the basic relationship of the audience to the genre.
100 Deleuze and Film

Although Clover may not discuss the modern horror film directly in terms
of an affective embodied viewing experience, her concept of the reactive
gaze, as a painful form of seeing, can be interpreted as an embodied form of
vision:

[O]f course, horror films do attack their audiences, the attack is palpable; we
take it in the eye. For just as the audience eye can be invited by the camera
to assault, so it can be physically assaulted by the projected image – by
sudden flashes of light, violent movement (of images plunging outward,
for example), fast-cut or exploded images . . . These are calculated assaults
on the part of the film; they are aimed at the audience, and they hurt in the
most literal, physiological sense.39

Although Clover focuses on the eye, her description does not conjure up
a disembodied eye, but a kind of vision that engages the entire body. The
suggestion that images can hurt us in the ‘most literal, physiological sense’
can only implicate the viewer as embodied. However, as much as Clover
foregrounds the impact of cinematic techniques such as sudden flashes of
light, violent camera movements and editing, she offers no detailed analysis
of them. She tends to attribute painful seeing to processes of identification
either with the Final Girl or with audiences represented on the screen. None-
theless, her discussion of primary and secondary identification goes beyond
the disembodied processes usually associated with theories of the cinematic
apparatus.40
For Clover, Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom (1960) exemplifies the dynamic
of the reactive gaze. Indeed, the film offers an illustration of both the assault-
ive projective gaze and the reactive introjective gaze. When the main char-
acter, Mark (Karlheinz Böhm), films his victims’ expressions of terror as he
kills them, his gaze is assaultive and sadistic. It is a gaze inherited from his
father’s cruel and obsessive filming of him as a child and the psychological
experiments he captured on film. Yet, when Mark reviews his own footage,
his gaze is not sadistic or assaultive, but reactive and introjective. He does
not identify with his father or as the aggressor but identifies masochistically
with the victim as he relates to her pain and fear. The images assault him; he
is reminded of his own painful childhood experiences. As Clover states, ‘This
second gaze – the horrified gaze of the victim, or more complexly, one’s gaze
at surrogates for one’s own past victimized self – I shall, for want of a better
term, call “reactive”.’41
Clover’s reading of Peeping Tom contradicts previous, sadistic, analyses of
the film. This is, she argues, because the film shows the murder of the first
victim twice – first from the camera’s point of view and then from Mark’s as
 The slasher film: A Deleuzian feminist analysis 101

spectator – and because more critical attention has been paid to the former
than the latter. To arrive at a balanced reading Clover insists that the repeat
showing of the murder, from Mark’s masochistic viewpoint, is vital:

As a horror spectator Mark is more than a failed voyeur; he is a positively

successful masochist. If, in his capacity as horror filmmaker, Mark is fighting
for voyeuristic distance from the victim, he is in his capacity as horror
spectator not only failing to resist her embrace, but hurling himself into it.
Uniting with the victim position seems to be the point of his spectatorial
enterprise, the shameful fantasy his home-studio has been constructed to
fulfill.42

What is most interesting about Clover’s reactive gaze is that it extends this
visual dynamic to the relationship between the film and the viewer. For her,
Mark’s role as horror spectator demonstrates and even encourages in audi-
ences a gaze that is turned in on itself. Mark’s attempt to distance himself
from the painful images and control them fails for both him and the audience,
and instead the pain of the image is introjected and brings about masochistic
identification. Like Mark, who watches the footage of his victims in order to
relive his own pain and suffering, the reactive gaze allows the audience to
indulge in the pain and suffering on the screen and relive any past suffering
they themselves may have felt. It is Clover’s contention that all horror films,
work on the spectator in this way.
As a form of affective perception, the reactive gaze closes the distance
between the images on screen and the viewer by means of a type of pain-
ful seeing. Both the reactive gaze and affective perception are tied to pain-
ful memories of the past: for both, the past permeates and impacts on the
present. At the same time, while painful memories impact on the present,
they do so in very different ways. Like the Final Girl, Mark carries the trauma
of his past with him, but, unlike her, he cannot rid himself of this trauma and
move beyond his past. As Clover points out, in an attempt to move beyond
the trauma of the past Mark compulsively repeats it in an effort to get it right.
However, he never does; he can neither put his painful past to rest nor move
on. Bergson’s discussion of memory highlights the way in which the present
is saturated with memories of the past, not a memory of the past. It is every
moment that bleeds into the next carrying something of the previous one with
it and causing change and transformation.43 Mark is so stuck in the past that
new experiences do not affect him so he is incapable of change and doomed
to die. Unlike the Final Girl, he cannot change his present or future through
his violent destructive actions. Indeed, as Clover says, they serve merely to
anchor him more immovably in the past.
102 Deleuze and Film

Embodied viewing
At first glance the slasher genre seems to abide by the system of viewing put
forward by theories of the cinematic apparatus which is based on the dominance
of monocular perspective and primary and secondary identification. However, on
closer inspection, the slasher genre constantly undermines this model of spec-
tatorship because it is so heavily reliant on affects and sensations that are felt
somatically. The immediate bodily responses of fear, anxiety, horror, revulsion,
suspense and, at times, nervous laughter engender an affective perception.
These kinds of states are not simply psychological: they are embodied. The Texas
Chain Saw Massacre is an excellent example of a film in which, from its very
first shot, a palpable atmosphere of dread, discomfort and suspense is created.
This is partly because the film is presented as a quasi-authentic ­re-enactment
of actual events, even though these are modified considerably. The suggestion
that the extremely violent and grotesque murders depicted are even remotely
connected to actuality makes them all the more horrific and affective.
The film opens with a warning, both written and spoken, of the shocking
events to come. The inter-title, spoken by a sombre male voice, contrives to
generate anticipation of the ‘mad and macabre nightmare’ to which a party of
young people was subjected. Then the screen goes black, and we remain in
complete darkness for ten, excruciatingly long, seconds. Able to discern only
the odd, barely audible sound, we wait in a state of trepidation, fearful of the
horrors to which we too are to be subjected. Then, suddenly, a nauseating
image flashes before our eyes, a close-up of a decaying human hand, caught
in a camera’s flashlight. Again the screen goes black, then another nauseat-
ing flash, this time a different, decaying body part. The sound of the flashbulb
going off, in combination with the sudden appearance of the decaying body
parts, creates the sensation that we are being assaulted. This happens several
more times: a gruesome image flashes before us, followed by darkness and
silence. We wonder what the next horror can possibly be.
These close-ups of body parts act as a macabre version of what Deleuze
calls affection-images: close-ups that express either a quality or a power.44 In
the case of the close-ups of the body parts, the quality expressed is one of
horror and disgust. From these first images the film generates affects that
seem to threaten our bodily integrity because they invade that sense of our
body as separate from other images. That sense that our body is a privileged
image among other images, that Bergson argues results from a process of
distancing, begins to become eroded as the images and sounds touch us and
invade our bodies, thereby dissolving the subject/object, film–viewer distinc-
tion. Just as the Final Girl is continually becoming with the world through her
affective connection with it, so the viewer becomes with the film as a result of
a series of affective connections forming a molecular cinematic assemblage.
 The slasher film: A Deleuzian feminist analysis 103

Beneath the last few images of decaying human body parts a radio news
report about a recent defilement of graves is heard. The shot cuts abruptly
to very bright daylight with an extreme close-up of a decaying face. The sud-
den change in light acts as a shock to the senses and momentarily disorients
vision. The expression on the decaying face is also arresting. With its mouth
wide open and its lidless eyes staring at us, it looks like a face screaming in
fear. This shot acts as a grotesque reflection of our own heightened state of
fear and anticipation. Deleuze discusses the close-up of the face as an impor-
tant means of achieving an affection-image: ‘It is the face – or the equivalent
– which gathers and expresses the affect as a complex entity.’45 As the camera
zooms away from the face, to a wide shot, the rest of the corpse is revealed.
It is attached to a stone monument in an almost ritualistic way. Then finally the
opening titles appear. However, they do not offer any relief from the build-up
of tension. The credits appear over a background of moving red fluid, evocative
of blood. This is accompanied by a tense resonating sound similar to two large
cymbals being rubbed together. The vibrations are felt throughout the whole
body as pure tension.
This opening scene operates on the molecular level of the assemblage over
and above the molar level, because it is an affective and intensive experience
rather than one that privileges systems of representation. This is not to sug-
gest that it contains no representational qualities or does not operate on the
molar plane to some degree. In fact, this scene demonstrates how difficult it
can be to separate a film’s affective qualities from its representational ones,
and how the two aspects tend to act in constant tension. For example, the
flashlight effect is used to reveal the decaying body parts in an almost clinical
manner by evoking the seriousness of a police investigation. But, in combina-
tion with the other effects in this scene – such as the editing, which plunges
us into complete darkness, and the exploding sound of the flashbulb – the rep-
resentational quality of these images is undermined because of their highly
affective quality. This scene gives information that allows the viewer to orient
him/herself in relation to the narrative, but it also produces unsettling palpable
effects. It also demonstrates the importance of mise-en-scène to intangible
affective qualities such as mood and atmosphere in the horror film.
The mise-en-scène is heavily directed towards the creation of an atmos-
phere of dread, suspense and horror. Deleuze’s concept of the tactisign – a
type of image that engenders a tactile vision – is a useful means of under-
standing how the mise-en-scène contributes to this embodied viewing experi-
ence. This is particularly the case because for Deleuze ‘it is the tactile which
can constitute a pure sensory image’.46 However, while he discusses the tac-
tisign briefly in relation to filmmakers such as Werner Herzog, Deleuze does
not elaborate in any detail on how this tactile quality is brought about. The
few hints he gives relate, first to shots in which the ‘hand relinquishes
104 Deleuze and Film

its prehensile and motor functions to content itself with touching’ second
to shots that beckon the eye to adopt a grabbing or haptic function and third
in relation to any-space-whatevers.47 The brevity of Deleuze’s comments on
such a provocative concept poses a challenge to anyone hoping to make use
of it. For all that, in a genre that lays such emphasis on the tactile, horror
would seem to be ideal for applying, even extending, the concept of tactisign.
Because mise-en-scène relates to the composition of shots and scenes, it
is extremely important to the horror film. Framing, camera movement, set
design, performances, lighting and sound are central mechanisms for creating
the atmosphere, mood and sensations that are crucial to body genres.
In Deleuze and the Horror film, Anna Powell adopts the concept of the tac-
tisign in order to explore that tactile quality of the mise-en-scène:

The tactisign is pivotal in scenes of sensory horror and enhances the

potency of their virtual presence. As well as terrifying sights and sounds, we
perceive affective textures of a repellent nature, such as the wet stickiness
of human blood, or the slimy trail of a monster.48

The mise-en-scène is central to embodied perception in The Texas Chain Saw

Massacre, throughout which set design is used to create an alienating and dis-
turbing quality. For example, when the group of teenagers stop at a gas station
for petrol, the town is desolate, oppressive and nothing works properly. The
buildings are dilapidated and unwelcoming. The gas station is falling apart and
has run out of petrol. The residents are hostile and appear disturbed. The old
family house the teenagers visit is a labyrinth of decrepit dark rooms. Framing,
too, is used as a device to generate a sense of alienation and imminent dan-
ger. There are very few close-ups in the first half of the film. The teenagers are
framed in wide shot against either an uninhabitable and hostile environment
of rotting buildings or a harsh barren landscape that appears to have a sinister
personality of its own.49 This use of wide framing adds to the sense of dread
and anxiety, an atmosphere in which at any moment something unspeakable
might suddenly happen. Like Laurie in Halloween, we are made sensorially
aware as a result of the continual build-up of tension and anticipation: some-
thing is awry, even though we are unsure what it is.
The use of sound is vital to the creation of a disturbing and affective mise-
en-scène in the modern horror film. In many slasher films like The Texas Chain
Saw Massacre the soundtrack in the first part of the film is eerily quiet and
full of everyday sounds that emphasize the normality of life. This is occasion-
ally suddenly interrupted by amplified everyday sounds that are designed to
startle and disorient the viewer. However, the soundtrack to the second half
of the film is very different, an extremely noisy affair, full of unfamiliar threat-
ening sounds. According to Philip Brophy, the first half of The Exorcist, for
 The slasher film: A Deleuzian feminist analysis 105

example, unsettles the audience primarily because of the use of sound rather
than vision:

Repeatedly, incisive aural rupture is caused by inordinately loud and

disproportionately banal sound edits: a cup smashes, a phone rings, a car
horn beeps, a door slams shut. Stretched between each sonic shock, one
can hear the soundscape slowly nullify the New England calm.50

In the second half of the film, this ‘New England calm’ gives way to disturbing,
even nauseating sounds, primarily the diabolic ranting of Regan, the possessed
child: ‘Through her, the voice of female pubescence is rendered by a hellish
chorus of effects and transmogrifications, and it is here that the soundtrack
becomes aberrant and vilifying.’51 For Brophy, as the demonic voice takes con-
trol of Regan’s mouth, using it to spout vile dialogue, vomit and phlegm, it
‘conjures an audiovisual imagining of the loss of one’s own voice’.52 The Exor-
cist demonstrates how the soundtrack can act as a tactisign by shattering the
nerves and creating visceral sensations in the body of the viewer.
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre also follows this convention as the sound-
track in the first part of the film is relatively quiet and has a very natural quality.
Even the first murder is conducted almost in silence. While Pam (Teri McMinn)
is waiting in the yard for Kirk (William Vail) who has gone to the old house to
look for mechanical assistance, a metal door quickly and almost silently slides
open to reveal Leatherface (Gunnar Hansen), a huge man wearing a butcher’s
apron and a mask made of human skin. Without making a sound, he hits Kirk
over the head with a sledgehammer. Kirk drops to the ground, silently convuls-
ing. Leatherface hits him violently several more times about the head, killing
him. He quietly drags the body, carcass-like, into a slaughter room and closes
the sliding door. However, once the chainsaw is introduced in the following
scene the soundtrack is crammed with extremely loud, terrifying sounds and
music that confuse the senses. This tactile assault on the viewer’s ears is all
the more affective and intense for having been juxtaposed with quasi-silence
and quotidian quiet of the first half of the film.
Like most films, the slasher genre operates on the molar plane produc-
ing representations and identifications, and on another, it operates on the
molecular plane. However, these two planes are always in a relationship of
tension that cannot easily be separated. In the slasher film a combination of
filmic techniques are employed to orchestrate a highly affective quality that
is far more powerful than the film’s representational qualities. As suggested
earlier, the slasher film articulates a tension between the territorializing and
­organizing molar plane and the deterritorializing and intensive molecular
plane of the assemblage. On the molar plane the slasher genre territorializes
the body, subjectivity and identity by encouraging a primary and secondary
106 Deleuze and Film

identification. At the same time, the molecular plane continually deterritori-

alizes the body, subjectivity and identity by disrupting the organizing molar
plane that results from an emphasis on visceral images and sounds that
invade the body of the viewer and encourage changes from one body state
to another.
In this respect, the slasher genre could be said to emphasize the temporal-
ity of the body and therefore bring about durational bodies. This is particularly
the case as affective perception encourages a body becoming in both the
Final Girl and the viewer. The creation of affects such as fear, suspense and
anxiety encourage a form of affective intuitive perception that operates by
way of a union of mind and body and as a result encourages a becoming with
the film’s images, sounds and temporalities and reduces the gap between
the film and the viewer. These connections between the film and the viewer
cause transformations or becomings in the viewing body that result in a state
of duration. Because duration is a state in which change is always becoming
different from what one is, rather than in relation to identity, the way the body
is classified in terms of gender and sexuality is undermined. For if a body is
always becoming other than what it is, then it is impossible to classify it into
fixed categories.
 5

The Alien series:

Alien-becomings,
human-becomings

In Deleuze and Guattari’s work, the subject is not an “entity” or thing, or

relation between mind (interior) and body (exterior). Instead, it must be
understood as a series of flows, energies, movements and capacities, a
series of fragments or segments capable of being linked together in ways
other than those that congeal it into an identity.1

C ertain films have a way of calling into question and destabilizing any fixed
notion of identity and subjectivity both on screen and between the film
and the viewer. The films that make up the Alien series have this propensity.2
These films do not privilege a sense of wholeness, completeness or unity,
either through their narratives or through engagement with the viewer.
On the contrary, they present the idea of fixed and stable identities as
undesirable, constraining and dangerously unproductive. They offer an
understanding of subjectivity and identity as being in a constant state of flux
and transformation, susceptible to fragmentations, movements, changes
and mutations. Through an emphasis on mutation and transition, these
films lend themselves to a Deleuzoguattarian understanding of ‘becoming’
where the body, subjectivity and identity are all understood as continually
changing, full of possibilities and unable to be fixed into stable categories.
This is because in the Alien series identity and subjectivity are tied to the
body; and bodies in these films are mutable and open to change. These films
suggest an ethological understanding of the body where bodies are not
fixed and static but constantly changing with their environment and other
108 Deleuze and Film

bodies. As such, they could be understood as assemblages that continually

connect with various other assemblages.
As outlined in Chapter 3, while some films operate primarily on the organi-
zational molar plane of the assemblage others operate more on the molecular,
affective plane; yet most films contain elements of both sides of the assem-
blage. There is no doubt that the Alien films operate on the molar plane through
their organization of space and time around a linear story, however, they also
operate on the molecular plane in a number of ways. First, while the films
may be narrative based, they focus on processual bodies that are in a constant
dynamic of exchange with other bodies. For example, both Ripley (Sigourney
Weaver) and the alien creature have continually metamorphosed throughout
the series. In Alien Resurrection Ripley is no longer purely Ripley; she is now
Ripley Clone number 8. Although she resembles the Ripley of the previous
three films, Ripley Clone number 8 is a product of science, she has never had
a human birth and furthermore her genetic material has been tainted with
alien DNA. She is an amalgamation of human, alien and technology and has
inherited memories and traits from both Ripley and the alien queen. The alien
too has gone through different transformations. In Alien3 it cross-fertilized with
a dog and in Alien Resurrection it is an alien–human hybrid.
Second, the cinematic techniques employed to convey the themes of muta-
tion and hybridity are often highly visceral soliciting bodily responses in the
viewer that cause changes from one body state to another, or in other words
becomings. One of the primary pleasures in watching the films in the Alien
series lies in the intense sensations they produce throughout the body. They
make us uncomfortably aware of the ability of our body, identity and subjectiv-
ity to constantly decompose and recompose with different ­encounters. As a
result the processual body is not just something that is represented on screen
but is also something that is experienced by the viewing body. By privileging
visceral images and sounds the Alien films encourage a type of perception
that is felt in and throughout the viewer’s body.
This chapter is divided into two sections. The first section addresses how
the Alien films deal with bodily transformation, mutation and hybridity through
their narratives, characters and themes. While the focus of analysis here is
on the representational aspects of the films, these representations nonethe-
less have a molecular dimension to them not only because they represent
the body as affective and open to change but also because they do so in the
most visceral ways. The second section explores the film–viewer relationship.
In particular, it explores how the themes of hybridity, mutation and transfor-
mation are expressed through particular cinematic techniques that produce
uncomfortable sensations in the viewing body and undermine any sense of
bodily distinctiveness and integrity. Although grouped together the films are
not identical or do not all work in the same way. However, while they might
 THE ALIEN SERIES: ALIEN-BECOMINGS, HUMAN-BECOMINGS 109

adopt different visual styles and draw on different genres, they all share the
themes of mutation and transformation and they all convey these themes
viscerally and somatically. The first section, which is primarily concerned with
textual readings of the films, should be considered as a platform from which
to begin to explore the film–viewer relationship in the second section. By
extending the reading of these films from the action on screen to the relation-
ship between the film and the viewer, this chapter goes beyond what can be
considered a Deleuzoguattarian textual reading of these films.

Section 1: On screen transformations

Hybrid bodies on screen
In a similar way that the modern horror film privileges affective perception
and processual bodies, the Alien series privileges characters that enter into
processes of becoming. In order to survive a character must escape rigid
classifications and exist in the space of the in-between. This is particularly
as becomings always occur with something else and in doing so put us in
contact with durations that are different to our own. Becomings enable us
to inhabit new non-human durations that liberate us from the restrictions of
human classifications. The concept of becoming is a means of escaping the
rigid notion of being and the human being. The self as pure becoming is full of
possibilities, whereas the self as a being is complete and has no further poten-
tial. Becoming, therefore, is an act of deterritorialization precisely because it
dismantles fixed and stable categories and hierarchies by privileging the in-
between and the intermingling of these categories. The liberating power of
becoming resides in its ability to reveal that categories and hierarchies are
never as stable as they appear to be and can always be crossed and set in
motion. Deleuze and Guattari clarify that:

a becoming lacks a subject distinct from itself; but also that it has no term,
since its term in turn exists only as taken up in another becoming of which
it is the subject, and which coexists, forms a block, with the first. This is
the principle according to which here is a reality specific to becoming (the
Bergsonian idea of a coexistence of very different “duration,” superior or
inferior to “ours,” all of them in communication).3

Bergson’s concept of duration enables Deleuze and Guattari to clarify how

becoming operates as a continual process of transformation because what
one comes into contact with is not a fixed subject or category but other
110 Deleuze and Film

becomings or durations. In the Alien films Ripley’s alien becoming does not
mean that she is imitating the alien, or identifying with it. She is not like the
alien: through a series of encounters, she enters into a process of transfor-
mation with the alien who is itself in a process of transformation. From a
Bergsonian stance Ripley’s becoming-alien is a form of coexistence with a
non-human duration. Her becoming-alien results in a dismantling of human
organizations and territorializations or what Deleuze and Guattari at times refer
to as a line of flight.
Through a focus on bodies that exist in the in-between of categories
and undergo transformations in Alien Resurrection, the human is no longer
quite human. Instead, there is a mingling of alien and human. The idea of the
human as something pure, in a category of its own, separated clearly from
other categories, is undermined. This deterritorialization of the body and of
the human is exemplified in a scene in Alien Resurrection where the sur-
viving characters need to swim through a section of the spaceship that is
completely ­submerged in water, in order to reach their space ship ‘The Betty’.
Vriess (Dominique Pinon), who has no feeling or movement in his legs, needs
to abandon his wheelchair. Until this point in the film his identity has been
totally enmeshed with his wheelchair. As often happens with prosthetics the
wheelchair has become an integral part of Vriess’ body and his identity. In this
sense, he can already be understood as crossing boundaries, and existing in
the in-between of the human and machine.
Unable to swim on his own, his friend Christie (Gary Dourdan) harnesses
Vriess to his back. As they submerge and swim under water they appear
somewhat like a two-headed mythical creature. Between them there is an
intermingling of bodies, subjectivities and identities. Their survival depends on
an interconnection of their identities and subjectivities. They do not operate
as two people where one gives the orders and the other follows, rather they
function through a becoming with the other that requires a blurring of bodies,
identities and subjectivities. In this respect, they are not quite one body but
neither are they two: they form an assemblage.
In the Alien films ideas of hybridization and mutation are dealt with
through different kinds of bodies. Chapter 4 explored how the slasher film
presents two models of sexual difference, one that operates on the molar
organizational plane and the other that operates on the molecular intensive
plane. Alien Resurrection extends this dynamic to include an exploration of
hybrid bodies and the deterritorialization of the category of the human. In
Alien Resurrection those characters whose bodies and identities are open to
change and transformation survive, whereas those characters whose bodies
and identities are fixed and stable die easily. By privileging ideas of motion,
change, multiplicity and malleability Alien Resurrection challenges fixed
notions of what a body is.
 THE ALIEN SERIES: ALIEN-BECOMINGS, HUMAN-BECOMINGS 111

For example, General Perez (Dan Hedaya) conforms to classic notions

of the patriarchal male. While this position is often highly valued, connoting
power and agency in many genres such as the action film, the western and
the thriller, in Alien Resurrection, it is a marker of this character’s inevitable
demise. To survive a character must be on the outside of rigid human classifi-
cations that determine the power and capacity of a body. Deleuze and Guattari
tell us that it is impossible to fully know what a body can do, what its capacity
to act is. We may believe we know what a body is capable of but this is only
because we perceive it as static or as something that is unchanging. How-
ever, if we consider the body as something that changes according to affec-
tive encounters then there is always the possibility that something new will
emerge. That is, new powers to affect, new temporalities, even new bodies.
They write:

We know nothing about a body until we know what it can do, in other
words, what its affects are, how they can or cannot enter into composition
with other affects, with the affects of another body, either to destroy that
body or to be destroyed by it, either to exchange actions and passions with
it or to join with it in composing a more powerful body.4

In Alien Resurrection, all of the surviving crew members exist in the in-­
between of categories because their bodies, subjectivities and identities are
fluid and open to change. It is impossible to predict what they are capable of
at the beginning of the film as they are continually changing and becoming
according to their encounters.
The four characters that survive are all hybrid bodies in one way or another.
Ripley has continually changed with every new film in the series, but none
more so than in the fourth where she is a human–alien hybrid. Although physi-
cally she looks like Ripley, her becoming with the alien has put her in contact
with non-human durations that have increased her power and ability to act.
Her blood is acidic and she has super human strength, speed and agility. More
important though, her attitude and relationship to rigid institutions and moral
codes has changed. Unlike the previous three films where she appeared to be
a victim of corporate and military power, in Alien Resurrection she is indiffer-
ent to it. In fact she is stronger than the corporate body and the military body,
which appear ineffectual in her presence. Although they may have subjected
her to scientific experiments Ripley is indifferent to them and even mocks
them. In the end, along with the android Call (Winona Ryder) she destroys
them.
Call, the most sensitive character in Alien Resurrection is discovered,
towards the end of the film, to be an android programmed to have human
emotions. Initially she despises her hybrid body and pretends to be human.
112 Deleuze and Film

Her desire to come into contact with human durations has introduced her to
human subjectivity, ego, moral codes and organizations diminishing her capac-
ity to act. She mistrusts anything and anyone that exists in the in-between of
categories, particularly Ripley. She perceives Ripley’s in-between status as
a threat to humanity and attempts to assassinate her. When this fails she
attempts to enlist the rest of the crew warning them that she is not the real
Ripley but a human–alien hybrid. However, she does not succeed on either
count. It is not until she has accepted her hybrid body that she is able to be
affective. Once doing so, she realizes that the real threat comes from human
organizations like the military and the corporation whose hierarchical structure
is designed to destroy or incorporate other bodies in order to increase their
power. Call then uses her affective connections to technology by tapping into
the mainframe to destroy the military.
As I discussed earlier, Vriess too exists in the in-between of categories. His
wheelchair has become an essential part of his body and identity. While not
overtly a hybrid, Johner (Ron Pearlman) exists in the in-between of categories
in several ways. Although human, he has never been to earth. He also has no
institutional ties or human loyalties. He challenges human hierarchies or rank
by questioning authority, snubbing social conventions and disregarding laws.
In addition, as Patricia Linton points out, along with his ‘size and unusual facial
contours’, he also instantly evokes a human–animal hybrid through association
with many of the actor’s previous roles.5
The four characters that survive in Alien Resurrection all exist in the in-
between of categories where the distinction between subject and object is
disrupted. They exemplify what Deleuze and Guattari refer to as becoming-
imperceptible. Becoming-imperceptible is the immanent end of becoming:
it is a state of not being able to be recognized within any single category.
Becoming-imperceptible is change that cannot be perceived. ‘Perception’ they
write, ‘will no longer reside in the relation between a subject and an object,
but rather in the movement serving as the limit of that relation, in the period
associated with the subject and object’.6 Call’s becoming-machine, for exam-
ple, is indistinguishable from her becoming-human: she is neither human nor
machine but exists in the movement between these states. In one of the final
scenes, once the rest of the crew discover that she is an android they suggest
that she tap into the ship’s main computer ‘Father’ in order to activate its self-
destruct mode. Not wanting to be reduced to a machine she initially refuses.
However, when her friend Vriess appeals to her humanity she agrees to
perform this machinic task. Using a port in her arm she plugs in a lead from
the ship’s computer: she is now in direct communication with the computer
forming an assemblage with it, as well as with her human friends. The com-
puter’s male voice and hers are synthesized together as she verbalizes its
processes. Wren is about to escape when Call interfaces with the ship’s com-
 THE ALIEN SERIES: ALIEN-BECOMINGS, HUMAN-BECOMINGS 113

puter. Thinking he has control of ‘Father’, Wren commands the computer to

open the hatch to ‘The Betty’. The conjoined voice of Father and Call responds,
‘Father’s dead asshole’. Call’s survival and the survival of the other crew mem-
bers rests on her ability to exist in the in-between of human and machine.
Because of this in-between state, she not only survives the aliens but also
manages to bring down one of the most hierarchical and patriarchal institu-
tions: the military. She may appear to be an emotionally frail young woman,
but like the slasher genre’s Final Girl, she does not conform to any normative
ideas of femininity.

The abject as border

The Alien films have been the subject of intense interest in film theory, and in
particular, feminist film theory since the first film, Alien, was released in 1979.7
They have been discussed in a number of ways but most significantly in ­relation
to monstrous representations of the feminine and the maternal. Seminal to
this work is Barbara Creed’s reading of Alien through Julia Kristeva’s theory
of abjection.8 The importance of this work to the field of feminist film theory
cannot be ignored, therefore it is useful to briefly revisit Creed’s essay.
Creed argues that within patriarchal ideology the concept of the monstrous
feminine is closely associated with the problem of sexual difference. She
draws on Kristeva’s concept of abjection in order to situate the ‘monstrous
feminine in the horror film in relation to the maternal figure’.9 Creed defines
abjection as ‘that which does not “respect borders, positions, rules. . .” and
that which “disturbs identity, system, order”’. 10 Furthermore, as a form of hor-
ror, abjection functions to separate the human from the non-human and fully
formed subjects from partially formed subjects. In order to maintain these
borders the abject must be expelled. For Kristeva, ritual is a key means in
which the borders between the human and the non-human, subject and non-
subject, are defined and strengthened.
Creed proposes that the horror film operates as a form of ritual that articu-
lates and maintains this border. She states, ‘the horror film brings about a
confrontation with the abject (the corpse, bodily wastes, the monstrous femi-
nine) in order, finally, to eject the abject and re-draw the boundaries between
the human and the non-human.’11 Central to Creed’s work on the horror film,
including Alien, is an understanding that in a patriarchal system the maternal is
aligned with the abject, inspiring both fascination and horror. This view of the
maternal stems from the special bond the mother has with the child. A border
between mother and child is absent in the pre-Oedipal stage as they exist
in a space of shared identity. The mother must be rejected in order for this
border to be drawn up and for the child to become a fully formed independ-
114 Deleuze and Film

ent subject. Yet, even once this border is demarcated, the maternal always
threatens to overpower the child or reincorporate the child into this borderless
relationship. For Creed, the horror film articulates both the lure of the initial
borderless maternal space and the threat this space presents to the subject.
The maternal space constantly threatens to annihilate the subject through its
re-incorporation.
For Creed, the maintenance of positions, rules, identity, systems and order
depends on the elimination of difference. Read within this focus Alien appears
to be operating primarily on the organizing, molar side of the assemblage
because it functions to preserve a hierarchical system. However, there is
much about the Alien films that indicates that these hierarchical positions are
not maintained but rather traversed and eroded through an elevation of differ-
ence. While the monstrous feminine is expelled at the end of Alien, for the
majority of screen time the film explores the different ways these borders are
crossed, blurred and defiled. This indicates that the Alien series is not solely
interested in the maintenance of borders and hierarchies, but also in exploring
spaces where these borders are blurred and hierarchies are disrupted. In fact,
through the many scenes that deal with the breakdown of the human–alien
distinction an explicit preoccupation with the defiling of borders is expressed
that far outweighs the elimination of the abject at the end of the film. In this
sense, while Creed’s work is interested in exploring how Alien works to
redraw and maintain the border between the human and non-human, I am
interested in exploring the different ways the Alien series crosses and disrupts
these borders and what this implies for feminist film theory and indeed for
feminism in general.
One possible reason why Creed’s work focuses so strongly on the elimi-
nation of the monstrous feminine might be that at the time the essay was
written, none of the sequels had been released. By the end of the first film it
appeared that the alien had indeed been eliminated, however, as with most
horror films the monster is never truly eliminated and always manages to sur-
vive to reappear in the sequel. The fact that the monster’s elimination is only a
short-lived illusion has interesting implications for the horror genre’s relation-
ship to difference. I would suggest that rather than focusing on the elimination
of difference, horror’s fascination with sequels indicates a fascination with
exploring difference. In addition, while all four films explore the defilement of
borders to different degrees, as the series has progressed the fascination with
border crossings has increased, and the focus on maintaining borders has
diminished. This is particularly obvious in Alien Resurrection – the fourth film in
the series – where the border between human and non-human is completely
blurred as Ripley and the alien now share genetic material. Furthermore, in
psychoanalytic terms the re-emergence of the alien might be theorized as the
return of the repressed. However, a Deleuzoguattarian reading would consider
 THE ALIEN SERIES: ALIEN-BECOMINGS, HUMAN-BECOMINGS 115

how a body can be at one time captured and over coded by molar categories
that reduce its power to affect, marginalizing it, and at other times enter into
molecular becomings that increase its power to affect.
Developments in theories of abjection and horror films, such as Catherine
Constable’s analyses of the Alien series, focus less on the abject as border
and more on the limits of the border. In her essay, ‘Becoming the Monster’s
Mother: Morphologies of Identity in the Alien Series’,12 Constable argues that
while Kristeva’s model of abjection applies to the representation of the mater-
nal in the first two films, it cannot be applied to the second two films, in
particular Alien Resurrection. Constable further argues that, ‘the traditional
psychoanalytic model of opposition and subjugation is rendered defunct by
the re/presentation of Ripley in Alien Resurrection as a clone who has given
birth to the alien queen’.13 Furthermore, because Ripley now appears to be the
mother of the monster, traditional models of identity cannot be maintained.
She argues that this complex structure of intersecting identities ‘corresponds
to a new and different model of subjectivity’.14
Constable relies on Christine Battersby’s reading of Irigaray’s theory of the
formation of the subject as a means of exploring this new model of subjectiv-
ity. As quoted by Constable, according to Battersby, ‘the formation of a self
which can be permeated by otherness, and in which the boundary between
the inside and the outside, between self and not-self, has to operate not
antagonistically . . . but in terms of patterns of flow’.15 This account of sub-
ject formation is very different to Kristeva’s model of abjection and is more in
tune with Moira Gatens’ understanding of subject formation as embodied and
relational. Like Gatens, Battersby emphasizes the importance of the ‘other’
in subject formation. Most importantly for Constable’s argument, Battersby
challenges psychoanalytic models where the mother functions as something
that needs to be rejected/abjected. She gives several examples from Alien
Resurrection that challenge the idea that the maternal functions as that which
needs to be abjected in order to redraw boundaries and maintain identity. For
example, in relation to the final scene where Ripley reluctantly kills the baby
alien that contains her DNA, Constable writes:

The final monster cannot be abjected in one swift movement because its
appearance emphasises its links to Ripley. Moreover, the blood relation
between the child and its (grand)mother means that the destruction of the
monster is an act of infanticide.16

Constable’s hypothesis that Ripley’s reluctance to kill the baby alien is enlight-
ening, as it calls into question the theory that in the horror film boundaries are
redrawn and identities maintained through the abjection of the maternal. At
the same time, its proposition that blood relations and similarities of appear-
116 Deleuze and Film

ance must be in place to enable a border crossing that does not result in
abjection, does not go far enough to account for an ethological understanding
of the body.
For Deleuze and Guattari borders are crossed and bodies form connections
through affects and qualities rather than resemblances or blood relations. A
focus on resemblances appeals to a logic of representation that relies on iden-
tity, opposition, analogy and resemblance. Following an ethological approach
to the study of bodies Deleuze and Guattari state, ‘In the same way we avoid
defining a body by its organs and functions, we will avoid defining it by Species
or Genus characteristics; instead we will seek to count its affects’.17 Deleuze
and Guattari are especially careful to disassociate becoming from filial organiza-
tions. They state, ‘Becoming produces nothing by filiation; all filiation is imagi-
nary. Becoming is always of a different order than filiation. It concerns alliance’.18
Ripley and the baby alien may be blood related but this has occurred through
contamination not through lineage or filial connections. The border between
human and alien is crossed not simply because of appearances or blood rela-
tion but because of shared affects and qualities. It is by entering into composi-
tion with the alien’s affects that Ripley is able to destroy it, albeit reluctantly.
Returning then to the question of why Ripley ejects the baby alien from
the space ship and why she hesitates, it is worth enquiring briefly into the
significance of heterogeneous connections in relation to this act. Constable
argues that Ripley finds it difficult to eject the baby alien because of a filial
connection. In addition, the fact that this connection is a cross-species one
demonstrates the permeability of boundaries. Nonetheless, although Ripley
hesitates and it causes her obvious distress she does eject it. While Consta-
ble focuses on Ripley’s hesitation at ejecting the baby alien, the question that
begs to be asked is why is it ejected? A psychoanalytic account would focus
on the maternal as the site of difference that needs to be abjected. However,
a consideration of the film’s privileging of molecular becomings offers a differ-
ent explanation.
The baby alien may be a hybrid but unlike the previous aliens its processes
of becoming have been stultified through its insertion into an Oedipal system.
While Ripley’s alien becoming liberates her from the oppressive constraints
of a system of representation that is structured through fixed categories, the
baby alien’s becoming is captured by the molar categories of Oedipal family
relations. The infant alien mistakes Ripley to be its mother and in order to pro-
tect her kills the alien queen that gave birth to her. By doing so the alien spe-
cies is captured by the hierarchical system of familial relations. It is plunged
into a representational system that reconstructs its difference along a binary
model and does not tolerate imperfect copies. It is like the human but differ-
ent to it to a degree. It is a poor copy of a human and therefore it must be
rejected and expelled.
 THE ALIEN SERIES: ALIEN-BECOMINGS, HUMAN-BECOMINGS 117

Classification and contagion

In A Thousand Plateaus Deleuze and Guattari are critical of two types of clas-
sifications that originate from natural history and that have come to dominate
our understanding of relationships between different species: they are ‘series’
and ‘structure’. Series uses a classification of resemblance where, for exam-
ple, ‘a resembles b, b resembles c, etc.; all of these terms conform in varying
degrees to a single eminent term, perfection. . .’.19 The second type of clas-
sification structure operates where relations are understood to correspond
according to the pattern, ‘a is to b as c is to d; and each of these relation-
ships realizes after its fashion their perfection under consideration: gills are
to breathing underwater as lungs are to breathing air’.20 These systems of
classification correlate to an understanding of difference in relation to identity,
because central to these forms of classification is a concept of ‘a perfect ideal’
that renders all other forms as copies. The further away something is from
this ideal the poorer the copy is considered. Deleuze and Guattari reject these
two types of classification systems because they ignore the dynamic nature
of all forms and force everything into fixed categories that operate either as
a resemblance of, or in relation to, ‘a perfect ideal’. To put it another way, the
classifications of series and structure are systems in which molecular becom-
ings are captured by the molar and ordered according to fixed hierarchical
categories.
The classification systems of series and structure are based on the perfec-
tion and purity of a species and do not tolerate contaminations, mutants and
hybrids. By privileging mutant and hybrid bodies that cross borders and exist
in the in-between of categories, Alien Resurrection explores the human–-
alien and human–animal connection outside the parameters of series and
structure. It undermines classification systems that privilege a perfect ideal
by depicting the purity and perfection of a species as untenable, dangerous
and destructive. Alien Resurrection in particular presents the desire to neatly
group things into categories as a doomed project that leads to destruction
and disaster.
For example, the military go to great lengths to bring the extinct alien
species back to life because they are obsessed with the idea that it repre-
sents a perfect and pure species. Its supposed perfection is expected to yield
many marvels. In an attempt to convince the sceptical Ripley, Chief Scientist
Dr. Wren (J.E. Freeman) explains:

The potential benefits of this race go way beyond urban pacification. New
alloys, new vaccines. . .there’s nothing like this in any worlds we’ve seen . . .
And the animal itself—wondrous. And the potential—unbelievable, once
we’ve tamed them.21
118 Deleuze and Film

However, the perfection Wren seeks is an illusion. This alien knows no bound-
aries, it cannot be tamed and neatly squeezed into a fixed category. For exam-
ple, while the military have deemed a cargo of prisoners ideal hosts for the
alien, the alien does not discriminate between the kinds of hierarchies humans
have created. For the alien one human is just as valuable a potential host as
another; the boundaries of social rank have no significance. The notion of an
original that is pure cannot be imposed on it when it is continually transform-
ing according to its encounters. The alien’s survival depends on interminglings
with other bodies and not separate and fixed categories. The borders between
species are crossed not simply by inhabiting hosts but more so by literally
transforming and mutating through cross-fertilizations with other species. For
example in Alien3 it cross-fertilizes with a dog and in Alien Resurrection it
contains human DNA.
For Deleuze and Guattari, the dynamic of contagion is important because
it enables becomings to operate outside the hierarchical structures estab-
lished through series and structure. Through contagion connections are
formed between terms that are incongruous. Series and structure both
operate according to filiations and heredity but contagion operates across
­categories. Deleuze and Guattari write, ‘The difference is that contagion, epi-
demic, involves terms that are entirely heterogeneous: for example, a human
being, an animal, and a bacterium, a virus, a molecule, a microorganism’.22
Their idea of becoming as contagion, allows for assemblages to be formed
between heterogeneous terms. In fact, throughout the whole of the Alien
series there is a sub-narrative of contagion. In the first film, Ripley refuses
to let the crew bring the infected Kane on board for fear of contagion. Alien3
is full of references to contagions. First, Ripley is isolated due to fear that
she might have brought a disease into the colony. Second, she insists an
autopsy is performed on Nute’s (Danielle Edmond) body to make sure she
did not die of a ‘contagious disease’. The contagious disease Ripley is afraid
of is the alien – although she keeps this a secret. Ripley’s hair is also shaven
short, like all the men on the colony, as a way of preventing her from con-
tracting lice.
Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of becoming, read through contagion, chal-
lenges hierarchical forms of classification as it allows for an intermingling
between species and categories. When the alien cross-fertilizes with a dog
in Alien3 it goes through a dog becoming. Its becoming-dog allows it to tap
into new temporalities and durations. It may not ‘look’ like a dog but its move-
ments, its speed and its agility are indicators of its dog-becoming. It chases
its victims through the tunnel system, bounding like a hungry dog on a hunt.
Using its new canine olfactory senses it sniffs Ripley’s body and determines
that there is an alien foetus gestating in her chest. In Alien Resurrection the
alien may have a human becoming but this is also intermingled with its dog
 THE ALIEN SERIES: ALIEN-BECOMINGS, HUMAN-BECOMINGS 119

becoming, as the ship has been populated with tens of aliens operating as a
pack, roaming and hunting together.
For feminist film debates, the idea that becomings operate like a conta-
gion, forming connections between heterogeneous terms, is a powerful one
because as Deleuze and Guattari argue this process produces not two sexes,
but instead an unlimited number of sexes:

These combinations are neither genetic nor structural; they are interkingdoms,
unnatural participations. That is the only way Nature operates—against itself.
This is a far cry from filiative production or hereditary reproduction, in which
the only differences retained are a simple duality between sexes within the
same species, and small modifications across generations. For us on the
other hand, there are as many sexes as there are terms in symbiosis, as
many differences as elements contributing to a process of contagion.23

Therefore, the process of becoming undoes a binary model of sexual differ-

ence because becomings are not about ordering species into a genus that
then branches out to categories such as man, woman, black, white etc.
What is intriguing, from a feminist perspective, about the breakdown of
the human species, is that if the category of the human as something stable
and clearly delineated from other categories no longer makes sense, then nor
can the idea of stable and fixed subcategories. Without a fixed notion of the
human, there can be no fixed notion of categories such as sexuality, gender,
race and ethnicity. It is not that these categories do not exist, or that the poli-
tics associated with them can be solved in a purely conceptual way, but their
parameters are not fixed in time. This further implies that if the categories of
male and female are unstable and open to change, then they cannot be set
up as binary opposites. Interestingly, Deleuze and Guattari’s challenge to the
male/female binary emerges from their discussion of becoming as operating
like a contagion and not through their concept of ‘becoming woman.’ For this
reason I find it more useful to explore the notion of a non-binary sexuality
through the concept of becoming as contagion rather than through the con-
cept of becoming woman.24
The four films in the Alien series span over three decades and therefore have
not only held the interest of the first generation of audiences but also engaged
audiences from different generations. The films’ foregrounding of strange and
unusual cross-fertilizations and mutations are central to this intense fascina-
tion with difference as heterogeneity. In the Alien series the monster always
survives because it manages to form connections with different kinds of bod-
ies that enable it to enter into a process of transformation and becoming.
Taking this into consideration we can conclude that the kind of sexual differ-
ence that emerges from processes of becoming is always ­monstrous even
120 Deleuze and Film

when there is no literal monster as one of the terms. Molecular assemblages

are always already monstrous because they involve the crossing and defil-
ing of boundaries and affective connections between heterogeneous terms.
­Dorothea Olkowski clarifies this when she states,

‘Turned towards lines of flight that are movements of “deterritorialization”

and “destratification,” that is, of destabilization, the assemblage is
dismantled as an organism.This means that it is not an organic representation
attributable to a subject; it is the monstrosity.’25

The monstrous in the Alien films is a molecular privileging of the assemblage

that will always manage to disrupt and deterritorialize molar orderings even if
it is at times captured by the molar order.
Ripley’s and the alien queen’s state of becoming operate like a contagion,
undoing the duality of sexual difference that places the maternal figure on the
negative side of the binary. Both may indeed be associated with the mater-
nal but the maternal in the films is connected to such incongruous terms as
science, the military, animal and technology as well as the monstrous. The
Alien series demonstrates that, emerging from the intersection of an unlimited
number of terms, sexuality cannot be restricted to male and female, masculine
and feminine but is made up of limitless combinations. Through this non-binary
model of sexuality the maternal may be a site of difference but its multiplicities
means it is not opposed to anything, it is not different in relation to a privileged
term but rather self-differentiating. Difference then becomes a key term for
survival and calls into question a focus on the maternal as abjection.

Section 2: The film–viewer assemblage

Creed’s reading of Alien through the concept of the abject focuses mainly on
the representations of the monstrous feminine. She also extends her theory
of cinematic abjection to the border between the film and the viewer. Accord-
ing to Creed, the horror film works at redefining a border between the film and
the viewer as the images on the screen encourage the viewer to look away.
Creed argues that the horror film operates in contrast to ‘conventional viewing
structures’ found in the classic text because it does not ‘suture the spectator
into the viewing processes’ but rather ‘challenges the viewer to run the risk of
continuing to look’.26 She states:

Strategies of identification are temporarily broken, as the spectator is

constructed in the place of horror, the place where the sight/site can no
 THE ALIEN SERIES: ALIEN-BECOMINGS, HUMAN-BECOMINGS 121

longer be endured, the place where pleasure in looking is transformed into

pain and the spectator is punished for his/her voyeuristic desires.27

Here the border between the film and the viewer is redrawn because film
viewing is understood primarily through processes of identification that are
severed. When identification with images of horror becomes too strong or too
affective the viewer looks away, redrawing the border between the film and
the viewer.
However, a film’s affective qualities do not simply disappear through the act
of looking away. The body cannot be disengaged so easily, as images remain
with us long after we look away. In addition, the act of looking away does not
dampen the affects caused by the sounds of horror. In the Alien films images
and sounds invade the viewing body, making the separation between the film
and the viewer almost impossible. This second half of the chapter explores
how these affective qualities operate as a kind of contagion that forms mon-
strous connections between the incongruous terms of film and viewer. The
themes of hybridity, mutation and transformation are not confined to the rep-
resentational domain, they are also explored through filmic techniques that
produce uncomfortable sensations that undermine any sense of bodily dis-
tinctiveness and integrity.

Hybrid viewing bodies

Films that explore the body, subjectivity and identity as open, permeable and
receptive to processes of becoming can solicit a sense of freedom and excite-
ment, however, they also express some of our deepest fears and anxieties
about our bodies and their motility. In an age where dependence on technol-
ogy, genetic modification and cloning are realities, the traditional category of
the human is under stress. Science fiction has known this for a long time
using it as one of its central themes and playing with the combination of anxi-
ety and excitement, attraction and repulsion that this possibility brings. Alien
Resurrection taps into this generic tradition by exploring the dismantling of the
category of the human in the most visceral of ways, so that it is experienced
not rationally but somatically. It is abundant with sounds and images that pro-
duce a mixture of anticipation and dread. From the opening title sequence it is
apparent that a system of clear delineated categories no longer makes sense.
Categories have been defiled and messed up in a frightening and fascinating
way.
The opening sequence is made up of a moving, fluid image of skin, flesh,
hair, bones, eyes, mouths and teeth all blending together to form a liquid
honeycomb-like mass. The body parts that make up this mixture resemble
122 Deleuze and Film

parts of the human anatomy, but they are not quite human. They seem to
be a monstrous mixture of human and animal. The idea that the human can
be something other, something more than just human is both alluring and
dreadful. It is alluring because it signals possibilities of freedom from rigid
categories and hierarchies, but dreadful because possibilities can also turn
out to be monstrous, if not deadly. The ambiguity of these images is mesmer-
izing despite and because of their repulsiveness. Their uncertainty makes us
look harder and deeper into them. As they draw us in, and as we begin to
lose ourselves in them, the boundary between the film and the viewer starts
to dissolve. Full of dread, the music is also captivating and permeates the
viewing body. It rises and falls in hypnotic waves of loudness and softness. It
has an enveloping pull like a strong current of water. This opening scene cre-
ates such strong sensations of anxiety, suspense, fascination and excitement
across and through the body of the viewer that it is difficult to know where
the film ends and the viewing body begins. However, it is not that the film
and the viewer become one body, rather they form an affective cinematic
assemblage.
This opening sequence demonstrates how difficult it is for the viewer to
escape the kind of corporeal affects that some films produce. Turning away
from the screen does not guarantee an escape from the film’s powerful
affects. In a discussion about the visceral impact of horrific scenes, Lesley
Stern argues that even when she turns away from the screen the images
still seem to seep into her imagination and imprint themselves on her retina.
She recounts how every time she screens Stan Brakhage’s film The Act of
Seeing With Ones Own Eyes (1971) for her students she is forced to turn
away but is nevertheless intensely affected by the film. In order to com-
prehend the impact of what Stern describes it is necessary to quote her at
length:

There’s a moment of blackness when the lights in the room are switched
off, then for a moment, the beam from the projector illuminates the screen
and I hold my breath. Then there is redness, flesh, butchered corpses. Or
so it seems. I try, every time, to watch. Part of me, indeed, is fascinated
and attracted by these images, but they also repel. I have to look away,
close my eyes. Sometimes I have to leave the room. Later they say: how
can you talk about this film, how can you claim to have seen it, presume
to teach it, when your eyes are closed? ‘But I am watching,’ I say. And it’s
true the images are insistent, even when my eyes are closed the images
seem somehow imprinted on my retina. And although I tell myself, ‘These
are only images of bloody bodies, only images embalmed that you are
seeing; you aren’t seeing—with your own eyes, for yourself—real bodies
truly bleeding,’ it makes no difference.28
 THE ALIEN SERIES: ALIEN-BECOMINGS, HUMAN-BECOMINGS 123

The Alien films operate in a similar mode, particularly the scenes that contain
the alien bursting through the chest of its human host. Although these scenes
may be unwatchable (to some), they nonetheless imprint themselves on
the retina and make themselves felt through the body. With such a focus on
images of mutating bodies, dismembered bodies and even monstrous bodies
that imprint themselves on the retina and produce sensations across the body
that make us lose our sense of bodily integrity, vision takes on a particular cor-
porealized quality. These films solicit the eye in a fully embodied manner and a
theorist who is useful for understanding this kind of vision is Jonathan Crary,
who himself draws upon Deleuze and Guattari’s account of assemblages.
There are two important ways in which Crary’s work is useful for under-
standing how the Alien films blur the boundaries between the film and the
viewer through a corporealized vision. The first is through his concept of ‘ocu-
lar possession’ – a kind of vision where the viewer feels they can almost reach
out and touch the images presented to them. The second way is through
Crary’s argument that modernist vision depends on an intermingling between
an embodied observer and optical devices. The first concept is useful because
it resonates with the way the films in the Alien series produce a sense of
palpability. The second concept is useful because it clearly shows how the
viewing situation can be understood as a molecular assemblage that is based
on a series of affective connections between the film and the viewer. Obvi-
ously, the two points are intrinsically linked as the palpable quality of the films
is what encourages affective connections between the film and the viewer.

Crary and corporeal vision

In his book, Techniques of the Observer, Jonathan Crary draws on Deleuze
and Guattari’s concept of assemblages as a means of understanding how
modernist vision has emerged from a series of connections between different
disciplines and social fields. He proposes that a new arrangement of vision
emerged in the early nineteenth century that challenged the camera obscura
model of vision that had dominated until then. He argues that, unlike the cam-
era obscura model of vision, this new model of vision is tied to bodily affects
and sensations and therefore intersects between mind and body. Crary’s
idea of a corporealized vision also poses a challenge to the understanding of
perception as grounded in a distinction between external and internal, and
object and subject, where the viewer objectively contemplates a vision of the
world ‘out there’. Although Crary focuses on the kinds of viewing devices that
emerged in the nineteenth century for his analysis of perception, his work is
nonetheless useful in trying to understand embodied forms of film viewing.
This is because he always considers the important role of bodily affects in
124 Deleuze and Film

perception, and secondly because he challenges the common assumption

that photographic technologies – which include moving images – are an evo-
lutionary progression of the camera obscura model of vision. This is important
because following the camera obscura line would mean that the cinema must
produce a disembodied form of viewing. In order to grasp how his study of
vision might be useful for understanding an embodied cinematic experience it
is necessary first to summarize his main argument.
Contrary to most historical accounts Crary argues that the camera obscura
and the photographic camera belong to two different models of vision that facil-
itate two different types of observers.29 The first model is the camera obscura
model of vision that Crary identifies as being prevalent from the late sixteenth
century to the end of the eighteenth century. The second is a modernization of
vision that begins in the early nineteenth century. Because Crary’s analysis is
genealogical, the parameters of vision are not tied to, or the result of, one disci-
pline or technology, or a single moment of invention. Crary dismisses determin-
ist understandings of the technologies of vision, preferring to consider vision
within a dynamic that includes philosophical ideas, social uses and aesthetics,
and focuses on the phenomenon of the observer. He states, ‘Vision and its
effects are always inseparable from the possibilities of an observing subject
who is both the historical product and the site of certain practices, techniques,
institutions, and procedures of subjectification’.30 Crary’s genealogical approach
understands the subject as a historically constructed subject that changes
according to the constitution of knowledge, discourses and technologies in
time. In this sense, the subject is an effect of ‘an irreducibly heterogeneous
system of discursive, social, technological, and institutional relations’.31
According to Crary, technologically determinist approaches are ones in
which ‘an independent dynamic of mechanical invention, modification, and
perfection imposes itself onto a social field, transforming it from the outside’.32
To counter this approach Crary turns to the work of Deleuze and Guattari for
whom there is no outside of a social field: they make no distinction between
interior and exterior. Rather they are interested in the exchanges, amalgama-
tions and transformation that make up assemblages. For Crary, the observer
is understood to be part of this dynamic and to explain this he uses this quote
from Deleuze and Guattari, ‘A society is defined by its amalgamations, not by
its tools . . . tools exist only in relation to the interminglings they make pos-
sible or that make them possible’.33 In this approach, the observer is part of a
dynamic or assemblage, and not outside of it waiting to be inscribed by it.
In her essay, ‘Corporealized Observers: Visual Pornographies and the “Car-
nal Density of Vision”’, Linda Williams further outlines the difference between
the two models of vision.34 She points out that in the camera obscura as light
passes through a small hole in a wall of a darkened chamber an inverted image
of the outside world appears on the opposite wall. The observer standing
 THE ALIEN SERIES: ALIEN-BECOMINGS, HUMAN-BECOMINGS 125

inside the chamber is given a view of a projected image of the world to

contemplate. In this schema, the camera obscura is central to a model of
vision, or an arrangement, that situates human subjectivity at the centre of
the world. Furthermore, it creates a decorporealized observer. As Williams
suggests:

With its model of a singular, centered point of view located inside a room
contemplating the projected images of an exterior world, the camera
obscura. . . was an act of idealized seeing whose ideality depended upon
being sundered from the physical body of the observer.35

From this position all the things in the world are on offer to be contemplated
by this centred observer. It is not difficult to see that the kind of centralized
viewing position the camera obscura model of vision entails shares many sim-
ilarities with the spectator of the cinematic apparatus. Both have an all-seeing
and all-knowing centralized subject position that denies embodiment. Hence,
the understanding of film viewing put forward by theories of the cinematic
apparatus adheres to the camera obscura model of vision.
Crary argues that in the early nineteenth century a modernization of vision
occurred that entailed a very different arrangement to that of the camera
obscura. In this new model of vision subjectivity is fragmented, decentred
and corporealized. This is because unlike the camera obscura model this new
modernized vision did not rely on a system of representation. Perception
was based on an illusion that sprung from the body’s interaction with optical
devices. For example, the stereoscope – an immensely popular optical toy of
the nineteenth century – encourages an embodied form of vision by exploiting
binocular vision. It operates by placing two slightly differing images next to one
another and then viewing them through lenses that superimpose them onto
each other. This gives the image viewed the appearance of three-dimensional-
ity. Although the stereoscope has generally been understood as a perfection
of the realism of the camera obscura, for Crary the stereoscope plunges the
observer ‘into a dis-unified field of different subjective intensities’.36 The stere-
oscope produces a sense of nearness in a way that gives the viewer a feeling
that they can almost touch the scene before them. Some objects appear to be
in front of the three-dimensional space while others appear to be at the back
of it. This kind of ‘in front of’ and ‘behind’ is very different to the kind of repre-
sentational space found in monocular perceptive paintings that use vanishing
points to create depth of field. Crary states:

Our eyes follow a choppy and erratic path into its depth: it is an assemblage of
local zones of three-dimensionality, zones imbued with a hallucinatory clarity,
but which when taken together never coalesce into a homogeneous field.37
126 Deleuze and Film

In the stereoscope there appears to be a space between the objects in the

front and the objects in the back that gives the viewer the sense that they
could reach behind each object, or view each object from different angles.
The three-dimensionality of the stereoscope produces a sense of immediate
closeness. Crary describes this sensation as a form of ‘ocular possession’.38
This characteristic brings to mind Deleuze’s notion of the tactisign as a type
of image that provokes a tactile vision. As a consequence of the tactisign
Deleuze says that ‘it is the whole eye which doubles its optical function by a
specifically “grabbing”’ quality.39
The feeling of palpable nearness created by these devices depends on a
series of planes that made the objects in the image look like cut-outs arranged
either in the foreground or background. Furthermore, these organizational
planes, unlike vanishing point perspective, do not give a sense of unified
smooth graduation but of disconnection. What becomes central in the stere-
oscope is the sensation of palpability caused by the illusion of three-dimen-
sionality. In this model of vision it appears that the observer can be affected by
sensations that are not necessarily always linked to a real referent. Perception
is subjective; what the observer sees is not an object ‘out there’ as in the cam-
era obscura but an illusion produced by the body in response to the machi-
nations of an optical device.40 As Williams elucidates, ‘external objects were
not observed; rather, the bodies of spectator-observers produced illusions of
depth or movement’.41 While the camera obscura model of vision unifies and
centres the viewer, the stereoscope plunges the viewer into a fragmented
and corporeal condition.
While they are not the same, Crary’s new corporealized observer resonates
with both Gatens’ theory of embodied subjectivity and Deleuze and Guattari’s
understanding of the body as a kind of map made up of affective connections.
Neither recognizes dualities and each rejects the idea of an ahistorical tran-
scendental subject. All understand the body as historically constructed and the
subject as an effect of power relations. Furthermore, they take into account
the body’s capacity to be affected and to affect. In Crary’s new model of vision,
‘the boundary between body and world on the one hand and body and machine
for viewing on the other begin to blur’.42 Therefore, the body can no long be
understood as fixed and stable or clearly delineated. Most importantly, Crary,
Gatens and Deleuze and Guattari share the idea that the body, through its
encounters with other bodies and institutions, forms assemblages.

Filmic techniques and corporeal perception

Obviously, there is a difference between the kinds of visual devices Crary
investigates and the cinema, yet the Alien films engage the body just as
 THE ALIEN SERIES: ALIEN-BECOMINGS, HUMAN-BECOMINGS 127

intensely as the philosophical devices. One way the Alien films encourage a
corporeal vision that creates a connection between the film and the viewer
and undermines the mind/body distinction is through affects generated
through their relentless build-up of suspense. Suspense works on the level
of the body by creating physical responses, like making the heart beat faster,
the muscles tense up and the hair on the back of the neck stand up. In scenes
of suspense, representation and story are secondary to embodied percep-
tion. Different elements within the films aim to keep the viewer in a state of
anxious anticipation for much of the time. The lighting is often dim or diffused
in such a way that the viewer is often waiting for something horrible to jump
out of the shadows. Characters are frequently shot with empty spaces behind
them or to the side of them giving the sense that the alien might suddenly
jump into frame. Music intensifies suspense with either a repetitive beat or a
beat that slowly accelerates. Unidentifiable sounds in the background, infre-
quent clanging and echoing are also used to create anxiety and dread about
the unknown.
The anxiety and tension caused by these techniques is palpable, further
closing the distance between the viewer and the film, subject and object.
Furthermore, in these scenes of anticipation and suspense there is a potential
for fixed categories to also be suspended. Scenes of anticipation and sus-
pense generate uncertainty: in this state familiar categories can be put on
hold and their status is called into question. In the Alien films, the categories
of human, animal, machine and their subcategories like sex, gender and race
are in a sense suspended momentarily and what takes over is the potential of
a movement across these boundaries and an intermingling of them. While we
are holding our breath waiting to see what happens next the unexpected can
happen: humans turn out to be machines, aliens turn out to be part human,
would-be macho heroes die without a fight while women and children survive
to slay the beast.
Another example of how certain cinematic techniques are employed to
produce a kind of corporealized vision can be seen in Aliens, the second film
in the series. There is a dream sequence early in the film that uses a host of
filmic techniques that engage the body and produce the kind of ­palpability
Crary discusses. The scene is affective because it distorts visual and aural
perception rather than mimic human perception. In the scene Ripley is
lying on a hospital bed. The sound of her breathing suddenly dominates the
­soundtrack and the conversation fades into the background. Added to the
sound of her laboured breathing is the sound of her heart beating faster and
faster. The amplification and distortion of Ripley’s internal bodily sounds not
only serves to create tension and anxiety but also disorients perception as
the sounds work to undermine the representational quality of the image in
favour of affectivity.
128 Deleuze and Film

Close-up shots of her terrified face are inter-cut with an extreme close-up of
Jones, the cat, hissing. The scene is shot in slow motion exaggerating every
small action and disrupting normal human vision. Ripley clutches her chest
and convulses in pain and fear, knocking over a glass of water. The crashing
glass is shot in such extreme close-up that it almost seems divorced from the
action in the room giving us an any-space-whatever. The sound of the glass
and a metal tray crashing to the floor is distorted and echoes loudly, further
confusing normal perception. Loud music stabs and screeches over the top of
Ripley’s muted screams for help. Finally, she looks down at her stomach and
we see an infant alien trying to burst its way out.
The scene is more surreal than real: it is menacing and uncomfortable
because perception is distorted. The use of distorted sounds and images, as
well as the slow motion and extreme close-ups, all work to confuse normal
vision and create an extremely tense and anxious scene that engages the
viewer somatically. Unlike Crary’s stereoscope the scene may not appear to
be within hands reach but the affects of this scene are certainly felt throughout
the body of the viewer. This scene also relies on narrative anticipation – and
specifically on the viewer’s previous knowledge of the alien births – to create
a sense of anticipation, suspense and horror in the viewer. It is necessary
to have seen (or at least read or heard about) the first film to recognize that
what is taking place in this scene is the possibility of an alien ‘birth’: having
witnessed the horror of an alien ‘birth’ in the first film, the viewer anticipates
that one will occur in this film. This knowledge in itself is enough to generate
suspense before anything actually happens.
The alien ‘birth’ scenes produce immediate affects on the body of the
viewer because of their visceral nature. In these scenes the collapse of the
human–alien distinction is understood because its violence is felt through
the viewing body. This is why, in  all their nauseating discomfort, they hold
the viewer captive and fascinated. It is these scenes that the Alien films are
famous for. These are the most talked about, the most memorable and the
ones that audiences come to experience. In this captive and fascinated state,
where the viewer feels these affects on the body, perception can be said to
be corporealized. In these scenes what is felt and understood is the loss of
the body as something separate from other categories. This is conveyed and
understood through bodily sensations. In contrast to theories of represen-
tation that require an objective distance between the viewer and its object
to make meaning, meaning in the Alien films is intermingled with the films’
affects and hence it is palpable. Unlike the camera obscura model of vision,
the films in the Alien series produce a cinematic assemblage that does not
operate according to a subject/object or mind/body distinction. The Alien films
are films where both understandings of the word sense – that is, meaning
 THE ALIEN SERIES: ALIEN-BECOMINGS, HUMAN-BECOMINGS 129

and feeling – come together. These films are full of images that make meaning
because they affect the viewer somatically.
The concept of hybridization is important because it makes clear how
meaning and affects come together through cinematic affects that produce
bodily sensations. Hybridization is much more than just one of the central
themes of these films, it is also a central part of the dynamic that defines the
relationship between the film and the viewer. Through a kind of corporealized
vision these films encourage a kind of film–viewer assemblage or hybrid. By
exploring the themes of mutation, hybridity and transformation in a highly vis-
ceral and affective manner these films produce bodily sensations that make
the viewer aware of the way the human body is always part of larger assem-
blages and not something totally distinct. The visceral way images and sounds
are put together produce sensations in the viewing body that undermine any
sense of bodily integrity and distinctiveness and instead highlight the body’s
motility through its connections with other bodies. The cinematic medium’s
capacity for engaging the viewer corporeally is doubled as the theme of these
films echoes this dynamic.

Ocular entanglement
The opening sequence of Alien Resurrection, which I referred to earlier, is
an excellent example of how a film can draw on a host of filmic techniques
to produce vision as a form of ocular possession or through the production
of tactisigns that engage the viewer corporeally. Like the visual toys Crary
discusses, this scene operates primarily by producing bodily affects rather
than representations. Perception, in this scene, is linked to a series of special
effects that have no real referent.43 This scene may be made up of shots of
monstrous body parts, but the images are not in the order of representation,
rather they operate through a series of visual effects that break with normal
human perception introducing us to non-human cinematic durations. Like the
stereoscope, perception in this scene springs from the body’s engagement
with visual effects. Whereas for Crary the stereoscope produces a form of
ocular possession because it gives the viewer the sense that they could reach
out and touch the images, the effects used in this scene produce more of a
kind of ocular entanglement or immersion because the effects themselves
have an ocular quality to them and tend to be felt in and behind the viewer’s
eyes. To understand how this occurs I will describe in detail the effects used
in this scene.
On one level, the special effects used in this scene are based on the kinds
of effects produced when looking at an object immersed in a jar full of water
130 Deleuze and Film

or fish swimming around in a fish bowl. In these circumstances, as an object

moves to the front of the jar or bowl it seems to bulge out, distorting and
becoming grotesquely large; as it moves away it quickly shrinks into the back-
ground almost appearing to drain away. This distortion gives solid objects a
fluid and elastic appearance as they continually change shape by bulging out
and shrinking away. The title sequence in Alien Resurrection repeatedly plays
with this kind of distortion. The alien/human body parts appear to be almost
liquid as they expand and bulge out, then shrink and drain away. In addition,
unlike in natural vision where the expansion and retraction of the fish bowl
effect happens quickly, here the effect is slowed down to such a degree that
the movement of bulging out and shrinking back has a deliberate and laboured
quality. This slow laboured quality gives the liquid mass a kind of viscosity that
produces the sensation that it is travelling over a bulging spherical surface.
For example, when a set of long canine teeth appear, they not only take up
the entire screen space but also seem to be expanding over a large sphere,
stretching out and distorting. What is even more disturbing about this effect
is that, as the image bulges out it takes on the shape of an eyeball giving the
impression that the image is travelling over the surface of a large eye. This
effect is so palpable that it is felt on the surface of the viewer’s eyes. The
scene is also shot in extreme close-up exaggerating every detail of the gro-
tesque elastic body parts and their movement. The combination of the slow
motion fishbowl effect and the use of extreme close-ups gives the image an
almost three-dimensional quality that makes it feel uncomfortably close: it
seems to invade the eyes and travel through the body.
The images in this sequence also work on the level of affect rather than
representation through the use of seamless dissolves. Editing the sequence
of shots together through the use of seamless dissolves instead of cuts adds
to the way the fluidity of the sequence draws our vision into the pool of liquid
body parts. The slow, deliberate flow of images is mesmerizing and it is dif-
ficult to look away. In addition, the images are shot in such extreme close-up
that there is no relief from the effect of distorted body parts. This effect diso-
rients the eye making normal perception impossible. Because these affects
engage the body of the viewer in such a way that they are felt across the eye,
the boundary between interior and exterior is confused. It is difficult to know
where the image ends and the viewer begins.
This confusion of inside and outside is also explored overtly through the
images of the body parts themselves. While some of the body parts, like the
eye, the set of teeth, the hair and some of the skin-like tissue can be said to
belong to the outside of a body, there are many images that cross the bound-
ary between internal and external. For example, there are rib-like parts that
could either belong to the interior of the body or be a kind of exoskeleton;
there is also a fleshy tissue that could belong to the interior of the body or
 THE ALIEN SERIES: ALIEN-BECOMINGS, HUMAN-BECOMINGS 131

could be a kind of slimy exterior. Because the special effects described previ-
ously already produce a confusion between interior and exterior, as well as
between the film and the viewer, the images of these ambiguous body parts
are all the more affective. They draw attention to our own internal make up,
of our blood, organs and flesh. It is as if we begin to feel our insides on the
surface of our skin.
The most affective of the moving liquid body parts is an eye that suddenly
appears and slides over the convex shape. It bulges out, stares intensely at
us and into us. As we stare back at it our lines of vision meet and cross paths,
confusing the borders between what it sees and what we see. Our vision
doubles back on us and for one moment it is as if our eyes are replaced by
this monstrous bulging eye. As vision is directed at us we no longer stare
outward but rather inward and inside ourselves through this grotesque alien
eye. We now have the sensation of seeing through an inverted eye. The mass
of fluid moving tissue on the screen feels to be our own and momentarily we
appear to be seeing inside of our own bodies. It is a sensation that begins in
the back of the eye but is also felt throughout the body, making vision truly
corporeal. The alien and monstrous body parts seem to be, for a moment,
our own. But this confusion between monster vision and body, and human
vision and body, is not the same as identifying with the monster. Nor is it the
same as the monstrous feminine, rather it is a becoming-monster, becoming-
alien, becoming film and becoming cinematic vision that all lead back to a
dismantling of human organization and hierarchies. It is a becoming through
contagion where heterogeneous elements like alien monstrous body parts,
cinematic vision and sound and the human body all connect producing a kind
of monstrous difference that does not conform to a binary logic. It is also a
sensation that is felt across the body and even, for a moment, changes that
body; it becomes other than what it is. The border between what is film body
and viewer body is confused and becomes monstrous as they mingle with
each other.
This sensation, of feeling the images at the back of the eyes reoccurs in
another scene when Call fails to assassinate Ripley 8. When Call sees the scar
on Ripley 8’s chest she states in horror, ‘They brought it out of you’. Ripley 8
takes Call’s hand and starring blankly places it to the side of her right eye and
replies, ‘Not all the way out. I can feel it, behind my eyes. I can hear it moving’.
Ripley may have had the embryonic alien physically removed from her body
but its affects cannot be removed so easily.
This scene reawakens in us the sensations felt at the back of the eyes
in the opening credits where the images touch us, creating a film–viewer
assemblage and making us alien to ourselves. In this respect, the opening
scene is important in setting a type of vision that is felt on the body and inter-
sects between the mind and the body, the film and the viewer, for the rest
132 Deleuze and Film

of the film. It immediately plunges the viewer into an affective and intensive
experience that opens the body up to sensations.
In the Alien films movement across categories is essential for survival:
fixed categories signal death. These crossings of boundaries signal new kinds
of bodies or new ways of understanding the body. As something that has the
potential to change, to become other than what it is, the body is full of pos-
sibilities. From a feminist perspective, the idea that certain films loosen up the
rigid categories that produce subjectivity and identity as fixed is an empower-
ing one. It means a move away from a binary understanding of sexual differ-
ence where man is the privileged term.
Understanding the body, subjectivity and identity as processual, opens
up new ways of understanding relations between the sexes that does not
rely on opposition or negation. In fact, it opens up new ways of understand-
ing sexuality itself as something in constant transition rather than something
fixed. In particular, if affective connections between the film and the viewer
operate like a contagion forming connections between heterogeneous terms,
this signals the possibility of what Deleuze and Guattari call ‘a thousand tiny
sexes’ instead of two. This affective mode of film viewing offers a means
of overcoming certain hierarchical categories that have haunted feminist film
theory such as the male/female binary and the subject/object distinction. It
also offers a means of thinking what Rosi Braidotti refers to as the positive
potential of difference. Braidotti asserts that the feminist subject ‘is commit-
ted to asserting diversity and difference in a positive and alternative value’.44
This is instructive for a feminist engagement with film theory as it is a means
of not only acknowledging but also asserting it through an analysis of films
that foreground a positive notion of difference.
 6

The molecular poetics

of the assemblage:
Before Night Falls
The alternative cinema provides a space for a cinema to be born which
is radical in both a political and an aesthetic sense and challenges the
basic assumptions of the mainstream film. This is not to reject the latter
moralistically, but to highlight the ways in which its formal preoccupations
reflect the psychical obsessions of the society. . .and, further, to stress
that the alternative cinema must start specifically by reacting against these
obsessions and assumptions.1

W hen Laura Mulvey’s seminal essay ‘Visual pleasure and narrative

cinema’ is discussed it is generally in terms of a theory of cinematic
identification that positions women as the object of a sadistic male gaze.
However, as the above quote demonstrates, the same essay also suggests
that the specific pleasure produced by narrative films can be disrupted by film
techniques that offer different forms of engagement. A Deleuzian feminist
film theory offers a not too distant version of this by proposing that particular
formal experiments engender different kinds of cinematic affects, as well as
new cinematic forms of perception. This chapter maps out the impact of this
argument in relation to a molecular idea of ‘life’ and of sexuality through an
analysis of Julian Schnabel’s film Before Night Falls (2000) about Cuban writer/
poet Reinaldo Arenas (Javier Bardem). Following Mulvey, with a focus on the
film’s style, it explores cinema’s potential to be ‘radical in both a political and
an aesthetic sense’ and how this connects with unconventional and radical
modes of thinking. In a Deleuzian sense this means a focus on how Before
134 Deleuze and Film

Night Falls adopts a style that expresses a rhizomatic logic that challenges the
conventions of representational thought.
Before Night Falls is an exceptional example of a film that encourages
molecular modes of film viewing through the foregrounding of a poetic style
that resonates with the poetry of Reinaldo Arenas. The formal elements of the
film function on the affective and intensive molecular plane more than they do
on the molar plane. This is achieved through the use of a range of cinematic
techniques that challenge a linear logic and a stable point of view, such as
canted framing, the moving camera, jump cuts and editing that works to fore-
ground movement, the use of non-synchronous sound that disorients percep-
tion and the interruption of the narrative by a voiceover reading Arenas’ work.
The film may not deal with bodies that transform or metamorphose through
monstrous or scientific encounters as we found in horror or science fiction
films, but its style is highly affective, causing the viewing body to become
attuned to the film’s rhythms and energies and poetic sensibilities.
Through an analysis on the formal elements of the film, this chapter offers a
third example of a molecular film–viewer assemblage. If the focus in Chapter 4
was duration and Chapter 5 becomings, in this chapter the focus is life and
sexuality as molecular constructs. It broadens the concept of the cinematic
assemblage and affective modes of film viewing beyond the parameters of
feminist film theory to include a queering of the film–viewer assemblage. In
Before Night Falls sexuality is intrinsically tied to an idea of life as something
that is in constant motion and defined through multiple connections. This is
conveyed not just through narrative events, but also through the film’s formal
elements. In other words, this chapter focuses on how the film’s poetic style
disrupts normative binary understandings of sexual difference and sexuality
and privilege, what Deleuze and Guattari call a ‘thousand tiny sexes’. By this
they mean a form of sexuality that emerges from an inexhaustible number of
combinations. They write:

If we consider the great binary aggregates, such as the sexes or classes,

it is evident that they also cross over into molecular assemblages of a
different nature, and that there is a double reciprocal dependency between
them. For the two sexes imply a multiplicity of molecular combinations
bringing into play not only the man in the woman and the woman in the
man, but the relation of each to the animal, the plant, etc.: a thousand tiny
sexes.2

Before Night Falls embodies the idea that the sexes can ‘imply a multiplicity
of molecular combinations’ by adopting Arenas’ molecular poetic style of writ-
ing or what Francesco Soto refers to as ‘carnival sense of the world’.3 Arenas’
writing expresses an exuberant and positive energy that ‘is able to portray
 The Molecular Poetics of the Assemblage 135

life in its full immediacy and brilliance; it is not merely a recording of life, but
a vivid form or life itself’.4 By doing so it puts the viewer in contact with a
molecular understanding of life and sexuality. This is particularly true as his
writings are full of sexual transgressions that include people of all ages and
gender as well as animals, plants and vegetables.
In Before Night Falls movements and connections are not exclusive to the
human body or human life. They also define political bodies, military bodies and
intellectual bodies, even bodies of water. In fact, all bodies seem to exist on
the plane of immanence and appear to be made up only of relations of move-
ments, and affective connections. It is by treating life and bodies as relations
of movements and affective connections that the film creates a contagious
energy that affects the viewer. Sometimes this energy is loud and ­chaotic,
at other times it is rhythmical and harmonious, but it is never particularly still
or quiet. In most scenes this energy is produced by privileging movement,
be it loud and frenzied movements, like bands of revolutionaries waving their
rifles and shouting while riding on the back of a fast moving truck, or deliri-
ous and drunk men and women dancing on tables, or soldiers storming in on
everyday events and shooting and arresting people. The film is also full of
gentle and ethereal movements such as the graceful rise of a hot air balloon,
or the euphoric movement of riding around in a convertible on a hot day, or the
­fluttering of snow filmed in slow motion as it gently falls onto the face.
As a means of examining the molecular poetics of Before Night Falls this
chapter is divided into three sections. The first section takes into consideration
how the film’s molecular energy connects with Deleuze and Guattari’s under-
standing of life on the plane of immanence. Important to this examination is
Deleuze and Guattari’s understanding of life as an event or as a haecceity. The
second section turns to Daniel Stern’s concepts of ‘vitality affects’ and ‘attune-
ment behaviours’ as a way of exploring how Before Night Falls produces a
rhythm and energy that connects with the viewing body to form a molecular
assemblage. The third section explores how the film’s poetic style articulates
a molecular queer sexuality. It also examines how the film situates Fidel Cas-
tro’s political revolution as a deterritorializing force that unleashes not only a
molecular energy, but also a sexual revolution.

Section 1: Life as molecular,

individuality as haeccaity
On one level, Before Night Falls is a biographical film or what is commonly
called a ‘biopic’ because it chronicles Arenas’ life from his birth to his
death. It includes his escape from a poverty stricken childhood by joining
136 Deleuze and Film

an army of rebels at the age of fourteen, his introduction into intellectual

society at university, his discovery of his gay sexuality, his ascent as one
of Cuba’s best writers, his arrest and prison sentence as a political pris-
oner, his exile to the USA, his battle with HIV and finally his suicide. While
Arenas’ life might be just the kind of story that would suit the Hollywood
biopic, the film is very different in style. Hollywood biopics – such as Brave-
heart (Mel Gibson, 1995), Amadeus (Milos Forman, 1984), A Beautiful Mind
(Ron Howard, 2001) and Gandhi (Richard Attenborough, 1982), to name but
a few – tend to be overly sentimental, sometimes heroic and often focus
on the psychology of the main character. These films operate primarily on
the representational level by producing a psychological character for the
viewer to identify with.

Haecceity
Before Night Falls is neither sentimental nor psychological. While the narrative
may revolve around Arenas’ life story it is more than simply a biopic dealing
with the life of one man, it is, above all, about the movements and connec-
tions of life itself. The film expresses a form of life that does not rely on a
centred and defined subjectivity but rather as a subjectivity that is impersonal.
It is this kind of non-sentimental and non-egocentric style of life that Deleuze
explores in his essay ‘Immanence: A Life’.5 Deleuze uses Charles Dickens’
novel Our Mutual Friend to explain this idea of life:

The life of the individual gives way to an impersonal and yet singular life
that releases a pure event freed from the accidents of internal and external
life, that is, from the subjectivity and objectivity of what happens: a “Homo
tantum” with which everyone sympathizes and who attains a sort of
beatitude. It is a haecceity no longer of individuation but of singularization:
a life of pure immanence, neutral and beyond good and evil.6

Although Arenas may face numerous challenges in the film the viewer is not
asked to sympathize with him, as his life is not personalized. By adopting Are-
nas’ literary style in Before Night Falls his life is expressed precisely as what
Deleuze and Guattari refer to as a haecceity. That is, a form of individuation
that exists prior to subjectivity and personality and is therefore still open to
experimentation and change. Arenas is not a character with a defined subjec-
tivity even though he narrates much of the film. His narration focuses on and
explores the multiple connections he has to everything around him. There-
fore, it is not a matter of Arenas being at the centre of these connections but
rather what is important are the connections themselves and the possible
 The Molecular Poetics of the Assemblage 137

outcomes – what they enable and what they foreclose. Because of this, the
viewer is not so much required to identify with him but to enter into a space
of experimentation with him.
Deleuze and Guattari elaborate further by suggesting that a haecceity
is defined by a thisness or an event.7 They argue that all individuation is a
happening or an event before it is a subject or form. Central to this idea of
an impersonal form of individuality are the spatio-temporal relations that it
emerges from. They write:

A season, a winter, a summer, an hour, a date have a perfect individuality

lacking nothing, even though this individuality is different from that of a
thing or a subject. They are haecceities in that they consist entirely of
relations of movement and rest between molecules or particles, capacities
to affect and be affected.8

The difference between life and individuality can also be understood through
their related concepts of the molar transcendental plane and the molecular
immanent plane. For Deleuze and Guattari we are all events primarily because
we become with the movements, speeds and affects we come into contact
with. As they assert:

For you will yield nothing to haecceities unless you realize that that is what
you are, and that you are nothing but that…. You are longitude and latitude,
a set of speeds and slownesses between unformed particles, a set of
nonsubjectified affects.9

It is not that subjects and forms do not exist, but rather, that they exist on the
plane of transcendence. Whereas the plane of transcendence understands
individuation in terms of subjects and forms, the plane of immanence under-
stands individuations as events or haecceities. Moreover, the plane of tran-
scendence is deceptive in a way because it covers over or hides the plane
of immanence, making it difficult to see the fluxes and becomings that are
always there. It tends to stratify and congeal movements and becomings into
forms and subjectivities. As Deleuze and Guattari say:

It is the entire assemblage in its individuated aggregate that is a haecceity;

it is this assemblage that is defined by a longitude and a latitude, by speeds
and affects, independently of forms and subjects, which belong to another
plane. It is the wolf itself, and the horse, and the child, that cease to be
subjects to become events, assemblages that are inseparable from an
hour, a season, an atmosphere, an air, a life.10
138 Deleuze and Film

Hence, as a haecceity, a body, or a life, is nothing more than its connections and
movements across other assemblages. In other words, haecceities are becom-
ings with other assemblages – they are inter-assemblage assemblages. It is for
this reason that Deleuze and Guattari insist that there is no distinction between
the haecceity of an hour, a wind or season and that of animals and people. To
explain this idea further they offer these examples. In the first example they
state, ‘the animal-stalks-at five-o’clock. Five o’clock is this animal! This animal is
this place!’11 They borrow the second example from Virginia Wolf, ‘The thin dog
is running in the road, this dog is the road’.12 In these two examples, an integral
aspect of the dog assemblage is the time and space it comes into contact with.
It is a becoming five-o’clock–dog assemblage: it is a road–dog assemblage,
event or a haecceity. The dog is understood through its connection to a specific
time and space. Deleuze and Guattari assert that, ‘Spatio-temporal relations,
determinations, are not predicates of the thing but dimensions of multiplici-
ties’.13 A body or a life then, is the multiplicity of its spatio-temporal relations.
We can see this idea in operation in Reinaldo Arenas’ writing:

I will never tire of discovering that the tree of six o’clock in the morning is
not the tree of noon, nor that tree whose soughing brings us consolation
at evening. And that breeze that springs up at night, can it possibly be
the same breeze as at morning? And that ocean water the swimmer cuts
through at sunset as though it were meringue, are those the choppy waters
of midday?14

What is clear in this passage is that Arenas’ experience of life is intrinsically

tied to the unique singularity of each moment. The description of the tree,
for example, demonstrates that different spatio-temporal relations engender
different becomings: the morning tree, the evening tree, the night breeze,
the morning breeze, the sunset ocean and the midday ocean all contain their
own unique individuation. In focusing on these singularities Arenas draws the
reader into a morning tree, night breeze or midday ocean assemblage putting
us into contact with what is unique in them. The reader enters into the world
of the tree or breeze and as a result connects with non-human durations.
Likewise, the film invites the viewer to enter into a world of pure singularities
through a style that emphasizes the uniqueness of spatio-temporal relations.

Film style as relations of movements and

affective connections
It is life as haecceity or as an event that Before Night Falls expresses
through its subject matter and style. The idea of life as molecular permeates
 The Molecular Poetics of the Assemblage 139

every aspect of the film including the camera work, dialogue, soundtrack,
­performances, colours used, film stock chosen, the use of lighting, editing
and every other filmic technique. All scenes, even the most serious – like
those that deal with Arenas’ persecution as a gay man, or even his death –
express a contagious exuberance about life as change and movement. Given
that life is expressed as an event or a haecceity in Before Night Falls the
question that remains is; what are the formal elements that support and
enable this to occur?
One way Before Night Falls generates a sensation of a world in perpetual
motion is through extensive use of what Deleuze terms an ‘any-space-what-
ever’. As discussed in Chapter 3, an any-space-whatever is produced by edit-
ing shots together that have not been initially grounded by either a close-up
of the face or an establishing long shot. Without the close-up of the face or
an establishing shot, causality is lost as these shots are necessary to the pro-
gression of a linear narrative. Furthermore, without a causal chain of events an
overwhelming number of possible narrative trajectories emerge. Laura Marks
suggests that because of this infinite number of possibilities, an any-space-
whatever ‘constitutes images that arouse an emotional or visceral response,
that is, affection-images’.15 In Before Night Falls these ungrounded, free-­floating
images produce a sense of continual movement beginning with the first shot
in the film. This is significant because opening scenes have a special function,
not simply because they introduce the story, but more so because they set up
a film’s style and its specific mode of engaging with the viewer.
The opening scene in Before Night Falls is made up of a series of shots
that operate as an any-space-whatever, particularly as it fails to produce an
establishing shot that orients the viewer in either space or in relation to a
causal chain of events. Instead, the opening scene invites the viewer to par-
ticipate in a sensual experience full of tactile images, sounds, movements and
rhythms. The film begins with a montage sequence of very tall trees shot with
a hand-held camera from the ground looking straight up. As the tops of their
huge trunks sway in the wind the trees almost appear to be breathing. The
movement of the trees and of the camera produces a sensation that vision
is unmoored from any stable point of view. This is further intensified as the
camera suddenly pans left in a disorienting circular motion. There is a sharp
cut and the camera pans right in a circular motion. The effect of the two circu-
lar movements in opposite directions engages the body through sensations
of movement and rhythm. It is almost as if we are being picked up and carried
along with the breeze to the tops of the trees. The music has a swooning and
swaying quality adding to this sense of motion. Bardem’s voiceover states,
‘Trees have a secret life that is only revealed to those who are willing to climb
them’. This opening statement should be understood as an invitation into a
sensual and affective world. By telling us that trees reveal secrets to those
140 Deleuze and Film

who are willing to climb them, the film is also telling us that to experience the
film we need to be willing to engage with it on its own terms, that is through
the senses, the body, poetry and spatio-temporal relations.
The disorienting movement of the camera, in conjunction with an editing
style that continually cuts on movement, without prioritizing continuity, robs
the viewer of a stable point of view. From a series of shots that produce a dis-
orienting affective experience associated with the use of any-space-whatever,
the camera style also begins to give rise to a perception-image that invites
the viewer to adopt a camera consciousness that is subjective and objective
at the same time. Still in continual motion, the camera descends to the bot-
tom of the forest and, through the use of an extended tracking shot, travels
in-between the dark trunks.
Suddenly, a woman carrying a small child walks into frame and past the
camera and us. At first, we only see her from behind as she walks with deter-
mination towards the light at the end of the forest. The camera finally cuts
to a shot of her front on. As she walks in-between the trees Bardem’s voice-
over casually says, ‘I do not remember when I was born, but when I was
three months old my mother returned to my grandparents’ home with me as
the proof of her failure’. Although this might be a highly charged statement,
because the perception-image produces a sense of being-with the character
the viewer is not asked to judge her. While not giving us her point of view, or
that of the child’s, the camera is nonetheless inflected with their voices or their
perspectives. This is reinforced as Arenas’ words accompany the images. This
sense that the camera is with the characters rather than objectively watching
them continues as the woman walks out of the forest into the light and the
shot dissolves to a shot of the child, sitting naked in a ditch playing with a
stone and a bottle. The camera tracks past him out of the ditch and glides over
the rich brown earth. As the camera travels across the dirt the shot widens
until, from a distance, we realize that the ditch is a kind of playpen designed
to keep the child in. Bardem’s voiceover reads, ‘The splendour of my child-
hood was unique, because of its absolute poverty and because of its absolute
freedom. Out in the open, surrounded by trees, animals and people who were
indifferent towards me’.
There are several important ways that this scene sets up a style and mode
of film viewing for the rest of the film. Firstly, the continual movement of the
camera dislodges vision from a stable subjective point of view, or in other
words from a human-centred vision. It foregrounds a specific cinematic per-
ception through the use of swooping crane shots, swish pans, smooth tracking
shots and edits that emphasize movement. By undermining a stable human
subjectivity in favour of a decentred and affective cinematic perception, the
style of the film connects with an understanding of life and individuality as a
series of connections and relative speeds. It also resonates with Deleuze’s
 The Molecular Poetics of the Assemblage 141

idea of an impersonal and non-ego centred individuality.16 This is emphasized

through Arenas’ explanation that his childhood was defined through an indif-
ference that afforded him freedom. In this scene the child Arenas is not repre-
sented as an ego-centred individual but in a series of connections with nature,
trees and the earth. By refusing an ego-centred idea of life, Before Night Falls
produces a strong sense that what is more important are the movements in
which a body is caught up in and defined by. Beyond psychology this indif-
ference produces true differences; differences that emerge from the relative
speeds of a body and the connections it forms.
Secondly, this molecular understanding of life is reinforced through the fre-
quent use of the perception-image. The perception-image is antithetical to
an ego-centred identity because it engenders a camera consciousness that
accommodates multiple perspectives at the same time. It does not privilege
any one perspective but rather draws out the interconnectedness of the dif-
ferent perspectives and the way they constantly contaminate each other in a
circularity of exchange. In addition, I would argue that the multiple perspec-
tives contained in the perception-image also bring into play a non-judgemental
ethics of life. Unlike an ego-based consciousness, which is subjective, the
commingling of different perspectives makes any straightforward judgement
difficult because no pure subjective or objective position dominates. Instead
the perception-image produces a sense of being-with a character that puts us
in an alliance with them. Because we are with them we cannot judge them at
a distance, however, nor are we being encouraged to identify with them and
adopt their point of view. A life of pure immanence, for Deleuze, is free from
judgement and exists ‘beyond good and evil’.17
According to Pier Paolo Pasolini free indirect images provoke aesthetic
questions to do with a cinema of poetry, but they also raise political and ethi-
cal concerns. A prosaic cinema, he asserts, reinforces the authority of the
author/director by dividing vision into objective and subjective perspectives
and naturalizing vision. A cinema of poetry, on the other hand, draws our
attention to the artifice of cinema and in doing so reveals the privileged posi-
tion of the author/director as the architect of the story. However, free indirect
cinematographic discourse disrupts this position of authority by adopting the
voice, language, culture and perspective of the characters. As the vision of the
author/director is contaminated with that of the character, an ethics of cinema
begins to emerge where the co-existence of multiple voices and perspectives
is far more important than a single point of view from a fully-formed subject.
The privileging of multiple perspectives, over that of the individual, gestures
towards an immanent ethics that does not recognize moral judgements.
Pasolini asserts that free indirect cinematographic discourse, which is the
basic form of the perception-image, is the essence of a cinema of poetry and
further that it emerges from the foregrounding of style.18 While the tracking
142 Deleuze and Film

shot is one means through which it emerges, according to Pasolini free ­indirect
cinematographic discourse cannot be identified by a single technique but by
the assertion of style itself.19 Different filmmakers may achieve this through
different techniques, but what is certain is that for this camera conscious-
ness to emerge a filmmaker’s style must be an obvious aspect of the film.
By adopting Arenas’ poetic style and translating it into filmmaking practices,
such as certain types of camera movements and editing techniques, Schnabel
makes style a significant aspect of Before Night Falls.
The idea that in free indirect images the filmmaker’s voice is tainted with
that of the characters’ is particularly pertinent to Before Night Falls as the film
script is based on Arenas’ autobiography. What occurs as a result of this is an
inexhaustible circuitry of perspectives, where one perspective is born from
another and in turn gives birth to yet another perspective. Arenas’ voice and
his poetic style influences Schnabel’s film style which in turn contaminates
the voice of Arenas the main character, which is reflected in the perspec-
tive of the viewer through a poetic style of cinema that encompasses both
the perspective of Arenas and Schnabel. This emphasis on style produces a
becoming between the filmmaker and the character Arenas and by producing
a felt quality that is experienced as a being-with the character, introduces the
viewer to this poly-perception.20

Liquid perception
Of great importance to an idea of life on the immanent plane in Before Night
Falls is the central place of water, such as shots of rain running down gutters
and trees, torrents of water sweeping away everything in its path, trees sway-
ing in the wind and the many shots of the ocean with its eternal movements.
For Deleuze, the extensive use of shots of moving water is particularly affective
and gives rise to ‘a molecular perception, peculiar to a “cine-eye”’21 that de-
emphasizes human subjectivity. Close-up shots of running water diffuse and
abstract subjective perception and highlight molecular movements. For Deleuze
‘water is the most perfect environment in which movement can be extracted
from the thing moved, or mobility from movement itself’.22 For this reason he
argues that shots of water are intrinsically tied to the creation of a film’s rhythm.
There are many scenes in Before Night Falls that capture the wonderment and
connection Arenas felt towards nature and particularly water.
For example, a scene at the beginning of the film recounts the sense of
wonder and excitement experienced by Arenas the child, during storms. The
scene begins with close-up shots of rain drops dripping down dense leaves,
followed by water running down gutters and then cascading and bouncing off
the ground like thousands of molecules. Streams of heavy raindrops falling
 The Molecular Poetics of the Assemblage 143

from the sky are slowed down, emphasizing the force of their unstoppable
movements. This is followed by a montage of larger bodies of water cascad-
ing down and across rocks, torrents of water forming rivers and finally rivers
of water forming paths of destruction. No diegetic sound is used with these
images, instead, they are accompanied by ethereal music and Bardem reading
one of Arenas’ poems that states:

The most extraordinary event of my childhood was provided by the

heavens. Water rushed down gutters, reverberating over the tin roofs
like campfire. A massive army marching across the trees. Overflowing,
cascading, thundering into burrows, a concert of drums. Water falling on
water, drenched and whistling and out of control. And under the spell of
violence let loose that which would sweep away almost everything in its
path, trees, stones, animals, houses. It was the mystery of destruction: the
law of life. As I saw it, the currents were roaring my name.

The most extraordinary event of Arenas’ childhood is a sensual experience

where he comes into contact with the movements, speeds and affects of
nature and the currents roar his name. As the currents roar his name he
becomes attuned to the movements and energies of this event. It is through
this kind of sensuality and molecular energy that Before Night Falls expresses
beautifully an idea of life as something in a state of flux on the plane of imma-
nence.
If Before Night Falls produces any kind of individuation it is as a haecce-
ity, not as a subject and this is the case, both in the film itself (its diegesis)
and between the film and the viewer.23 Bodies in Before Night Falls are hae-
cceities because they only make sense through their spatio-temporal rela-
tions. In the film, all forms of life – in particular Arenas’ life – are expressed as
events or haecceities. Arenas is not represented as a fully formed subject or
a psychological character but as a haecceity that is always becoming with the
assemblages he comes into contact with. He is continually caught up in, and
part of, the movements, the speeds and the slownesses of the world around
him. When he describes how he is affected by storms – that is, as he puts
it, how the ‘current roars his name’ – he is becoming-current. The speeds,
affects and movements of this current of energy that Arenas connects with
also run through the film, generating an infectious energy that in turn affects
the viewer. The film’s currents run through the viewer, calling their name and
forming a becoming with the film, a becoming-Arenas and a becoming cur-
rent. What is produced is an individuation without subject, an event or a hae-
cceity. Using Deleuze and Guattari’s terms we could say that as the viewer
comes into contact with the film’s spatio-temporal relations, the viewer is
becoming with the film.
144 Deleuze and Film

Section 2: Vitality affects and

attunement behaviour
In the same way that different films connect with different modes of think-
ing not all films produce the same kinds of affects. The affects produced in
Before Night Falls are different to the type discussed in relation to the slasher
film and the Alien films, which relate to visceral sensations and sensations
of dread and suspense. In Before Night Falls affects are linked to movement,
rhythm and a molecular energy. The formal element of the film enables us to
understand how these affects are created, however they do not tell us exactly
how they are played out on the body of the viewer. This section explores
the specific forms of affective engagement between film and viewer through
a consideration of Daniel Stern’s concepts of vitality affects and attunement
behaviour. It also draws on Gregory Seigworth’s Deleuzian reading of Stern’s
work.24
In earlier chapters of this book the concept of affect has been discussed in
several ways: in relation to bodies and assemblages in Chapter 3, in relation to
perception and duration in Chapter 4 and in relation to non-human becomings
in Chapter 5. In addition, this book draws on theorists such as Moira ­Gatens,
Henri Bergson, Deleuze and Guattari and Jonathan Crary who all share a
­similar understanding of this concept. They all have a particular understanding
of the concept of affect, not just as a personal feeling but also as a change
from one body state to another. Stern’s work on affect resonates with both
the way affect operates in Crary’s notion of corporealized vision, and the way
affect is central to Gatens’ and Deleuze and Guattari’s understanding of the
body, subjectivity and identity. However, Stern’s understanding of affect is
specifically relevant to Before Night Falls because it gives us insight into how
affects of movement and rhythm are transmitted from one body to another.
What is interesting about Stern’s use of the concept of affect is that it is not
attributable to one or a combination of the senses but instead operates across
the senses and throughout the body. ‘[A]n affect experience’, he writes, ‘is not
bound to any one modality of perception. All of us engage in “feeling percep-
tion” but is it frequent, continuous or otherwise? It is likely to be a compo-
nent (though usually unconscious), of every act of perception’.25 Furthermore,
Stern distinguishes between two types of affects that encompass a ‘feeling
perception’: categorical affects and vitality affect. The difference between the
two according to Seigworth is that categorical affects ‘encompass the ability
to perceive, categorize, and thereby correspond with discrete emotional per-
ceptions’ whereas ‘vitality affects’ ‘are not locatable in or across any of the
particular sense apparatus but are, rather, dispersed across and throughout
the entire body’.26 Because vitality affects engage the whole body, they are
 The Molecular Poetics of the Assemblage 145

not experienced as sights, sounds and touch but rather shapes, intensities
and temporal patterns: ‘the more global qualities of experience’.27 These global
qualities also include constant conditions that act upon the body such as tem-
perature, movement and rhythm and, hence, none of these vitality affects can
be said to belong to one or even several of the body’s senses.
Vitality affects, for Stern, are experienced as rushes such as, ‘a “rush” of
anger or joy, a perceived flooding of light, an accelerating sequence of thoughts,
an unmeasurable wave of feeling evoked by music, and a shot of narcotics can
all feel like, “rushes.”’28 In addition, Stern argues that these intangible quali-
ties are best ‘captured by dynamic, kinetic terms, such as “surging,” “fading
away,” “fleeting,” “explosive,” “crescendo,” and “decrescendo,” “bursting,”
“drawn out,” and so on’.29 These sensations cannot be located in one particular
part of the body but are felt across and through the body. Seigworth believes
that what stands out in Stern’s description of vitality affects is the transitional
quality they possess and the sensations they produce. He suggests that
vitality affects ‘are founded upon passages of intensity; they are not discrete
moments of becoming, but continuous becomings’.30 In this respect, Stern’s
understanding of vitality affects resonates with the way Deleuze describes
affect as a transitional state.31
Central to the way vitality affects are transmitted from one body to another
is what Stern calls attunement behaviour. This process is learnt in the early
stages of childhood and is maintained for life. For Stern, attunement is an
important aspect of child development, particularly in the development of the
relationship between the child and others. He stresses that attunement is
not the same as imitation because what is being transmitted is a feeling not
a behaviour:

The reason attunement behaviors are so important as separate phenomena

is that true imitation does not permit the partners to refer to the internal
state. It maintains the focus of attention upon the forms of external
behaviours. Attunement behaviors, on the other hand, recast the event and
shift the focus of attention to what is behind the behavior, to the quality of
feeling that is being shared. It is for the same reasons that imitation is the
predominant way to teach external forms and attunement the predominant
way to commune with or indicate sharing of internal states. Imitation
renders form; attunement renders feeling.32

Through attunement behaviours it is almost as if one affect solicits a cor-

responding affect. Attunement behaviour could be understood as a form
of becoming because it functions as the transmission of affect, rhythm or
duration from one body to another. This concept provides us with a way of
understanding how a film’s rhythm, energy and intensity are felt throughout
146 Deleuze and Film

the viewer’s body. It also offers a means to understand film viewing as an

­affective experience rather than through a system of representation.
Before Night Falls invites the viewer to enter into a world of movements
and becomings through formal elements that encourage an attunement
between the film and the viewer. Attunement behaviours offer a means of
understanding how the film and the viewer connect through differential veloci-
ties that encourage a becoming. The foregrounding of rhythm and energy that
results from particular camera and editing techniques is felt in the very terms
that Stern describes as vitality affects. These sensations could be described
in dynamic and kinetic terms, like surging, explosive, crescendo and decre-
scendo, bursting and drawn out. Moreover, it is precisely these vitality affects
that facilitate spatio-temporal connections between the film and the viewer,
where the viewer emerges, not as a subject but as a haecceity or an indi-
viduation without subjectivity. Before Night Falls continually encourages
an ­attunement between film and viewer by producing a series of intensive
affects, somewhere between space and duration that work as a force on the
viewing body. In fact, the film as a whole has a kind of musicality in that it is
made up of differential velocities that produce sensations of rushing, explo-
siveness, swooning and soaring that all contribute to the production of the
film’s exuberant energy.
For example, in a scene towards the end of the film, certain filmic tech-
niques produce vitality affects that attune the viewer to sensations of soaring,
drifting and falling. In this scene, Arenas’ ex-boyfriend Pepe (Andrea Di ­Stefano)
steals a hot air balloon that was being kept as a means of escaping from Cuba.
As the balloon passes through a hole in the roof of the building, Pepe, hysteri-
cal with laughter, shouts out ‘see you in Times Square suckers’. This cuts to a
shot of the building getting further away. However, it is not solely the image of
the balloon taking off and drifting away that produces affects across the body
of the viewer, but a combination of cinematic techniques that produce a series
of any-space-whatevers and affection images.
Once the balloon takes off all diegetic sound is eliminated except Pepe’s
hysterical and contagious laughter. Music with a soaring quality is added to
the soundtrack. We cut to an extreme close-up of Pepe’s head. Because of the
extreme close-up of the shot, every small movement is exaggerated. As he
laughs hysterically his head bobs across and in and out of the frame produc-
ing a giddy, almost vertiginous, sensation. There is a cut to a long shot of the
balloon against the clear blue sky. Inter-cut with the close-up shots of Pepe,
and the long shots of the balloon, are upside down wide angle shots of the
horizon that produce a distorted world floating in the air. Most of the edits
of Pepe in the balloon are jump cuts, adding to the vertiginous feel of the
scene. The many camera effects – such as the tight framing of Pepe’s face,
the wide angle upside down shots of the world in conjunction with the jump
 The Molecular Poetics of the Assemblage 147

cuts and unusual combinations of extreme close-ups and long shots – give
this sequence an ungrounded or an unhinged quality that disrupts the way
vision is ordered in everyday life.
The way this sequence is shot and edited together acts to deterritorialize
human forms of perception. This cinematic non-human perception produces
vitality affects or ‘feeling perceptions’ across the body of the viewer, produc-
ing an attunement with the film or a kind of non-human becoming. By disrupt-
ing any sense of a privileged or central viewing spectating position this scene
operates on the affective molecular level over and above the representational
level.33 The important aspect of vitality affects and attunement is that they
operate by producing a qualitative change from one body state to another.
Schnabel admits that he never intended his film to be a chronological account
of Arenas’ life but instead wanted the viewer to get to know Arenas through
an affective experience. He states:

I feel like Reinaldo Arenas wrote the script to the movie. . . . When you make
a movie you want to make the movie interesting you want to make the movie
filmically emotional and you want to affect some kind of change in your
viewer so things are done just physically with sound or editing or images
or words that have to do with rhythm more than just a literal translation of
somebody else’s work so it’s sort of an impressionistic view in a sense.34

I would suggest that Schnabel is talking about vitality affects when he dis-
cusses his intention of wanting to effect a change in the viewer through a
rhythm, through sound, editing, images and words. Moreover, this is exactly
what the style or the molecular poetics of the film does. The next section
addresses the way the film’s molecular style connects with a rhizomatic image
of thought and the implications this might have for feminist film theory.

Section 3: The time-image and

molecular sexuality
Drawing on earlier discussions in Chapters 1 and 3, I would argue that Before
Night Falls operates between the movement-image and the time-image.
It operates as a time-image as the film style and rhythm create a sense of
chance and unpredictability. This is particularly so in relation to the particular
kind of molecular energy it produces. It takes on the pretext of a biographical
film – in that its overall structure on the surface appears to have a beginning,
a middle and an end – that gives us the sense of a unified logic, however,
this is continually undermined as scenes within the film frequently play with
non-linear time. Before Night Falls is made up of a collection of scenes that
148 Deleuze and Film

sometimes produce a sense that there is a progressive narrative flow, even

though it may be loose, and at other times it radically departs from a cohesive
narrative structure. For example, scenes that deal with Arenas’ life in prison
are inter-cut directly with scenes from after his life in prison in a very abrupt
manner. The latter scenes are not presented as a flash-forward that helps us
to make sense of the present. There seems to be no logical reason for them
being inserted into the prison scenes. The logic of thought the film produces
is one that is based on relations of movements and affective connections
rather than one that conforms to an idea of totality and rationality. It is a kind
of thought where life is no longer ordered in a predictable or habitual way but
instead acts as a multiplicity. This refusal of an internal logic that resolves in
a unified and stable whole is also a feature of Arenas’ writing. In a discussion
of Arenas’ Celestino antes del alba, Soto claims that in the novel ‘we find a
magical and poetic time-space where dreams, hallucinations, and memory
crisscross in a non-sequential time. The novel lacks a conventional story line,
chronology, and clear delineation of characters’.35
The style of editing adopted in Before Night Falls is central to the logic of
thought it produces as well as its connection with the viewer through the
production of vitality affects and attunement. An important way the film does
this is through editing techniques that disrupt linear time and place us at differ-
ent points in the story at the same time. The way the prison scene is inter-cut
with later events is one example of how non-linear time is explored, but other
techniques also produce this effect. For example, some scenes seem to slide
into each other, making it difficult to know when one scene ends and another
begins. This is partly because two connecting scenes often share the same
soundtrack.
For example, in one scene Arenas escapes from the police station by jump-
ing into the ocean at the back of the building and swimming away. Walking
out of the ocean he comes across a friend. He asks his friend to help him
leave Cuba. What occurs next is a conflation of two scenes as the sound-
track does not match the images. While the soundtrack continues to play the
conversation between Arenas and his friend on the beach, the images show
Arenas arriving home tired and frightened. There is a disjunction between the
soundtrack and the visual track of the film that is disorienting, as it disrupts
a sense of temporal placement. As Arenas’ approaches his home, the sound
and images come together momentarily as he cautiously greets his landlady.
However, once he enters the house, sound and image track are skewed again
as the conversation with his friend replaces the sound that belongs to the
image track. Visually the scene exudes a frantic energy as Arenas desper-
ately prepares for his escape. Through the use of jump cuts, the scene has a
frenetic feel. The desperation of the scene is all the more palpable because
of the disembodied conversation with his friend. It is as if two scenes are
 The Molecular Poetics of the Assemblage 149

playing at the same time, because we hear the audio from one scene but see
the images of the next. Like the previous scene, this one also manages to
confound the senses and produce an intensive felt quality.
Another example of this sliding of scenes occurs when Arenas has just
given his novel to an acquaintance at the airport to smuggle to Paris for publi-
cation. As he leaves the airport, the scene is devoid of any diegetic sound and
instead is accompanied by a melodic Cuban song. It is a hot day and everyone
looks tired. The camera pans up to the sky to reveal a kite twirling against the
blue sky. As the camera pans down the kite, we see Arenas at the beach lying
on the sand. The first scene slides into the next through the use of the kite and
the Cuban song, as well as through the way the diegetic sound is repressed
from the end of the first scene and the beginning of the second. This sliding
effect disrupts a sense of perception as grounded and progressive in favour
of an open whole that expresses a rhizomatic image of thought. Becoming
attuned with the film through affects produced by the open style and structure
of Before Night Falls must also mean an attunement with a logic of thought
that is based on openness and connections. D. N. Rodowick argues that, ‘the
primary question for Deleuze is how can thought be kept moving, not toward
a predetermined end, but toward the new and unforeseen in terms of what
Bergson calls the Open or ‘creative evolution’.36

Molecular sexuality
What is particularly pertinent for feminist and queer theory about the idea that
the time-image relates to a form of thought that is open is that it enables us
to conceive of sexuality as open and multiple. A central part of the narrative of
Before Night Falls deals with the impact of Castro’s revolution on sexuality. In
the film Castro’s regime does not tolerate homosexuality. Arenas himself was
imprisoned for several years for homosexuality. Nevertheless, this relationship
is not a straightforward one of repression as there is a kind of exuberant sexual
energy throughout the film. Moreover, this molecular sexual energy emerges
not in contrast to or despite the revolution, but precisely because of it. In the
film it is almost as if the revolution itself creates a molecular energy that is far
stronger than any form of law and order it attempts to impose. However, the
revolution does attempt to over-code this process. Although it may be curious
to link the Cuban revolution with capitalist processes, this dynamic has similari-
ties to the relationship between capitalism and a deterritorializing schizophrenic
process that Deleuze and Guattari describe in Anti-Oedipus. They write:

Capitalism therefore liberates the flows of desire, but under the social
conditions that define its limit and the possibility of its own dissolution, so
150 Deleuze and Film

that it is constantly opposing with all its exasperated strength the movement
that drives it toward this limit. At capitalism’s limit the deterritorialized
socius gives way to the body without organs, and the decoded flows throw
themselves into desiring production.37

Before Night Falls is not a study in the body without organs but rather in the
disruption of molar organizations of the body. Through this disruption what
emerges are a molecular body and a molecular poetics that challenges the
heterosexual/homosexual binary. The environment of upheaval and change
generated by the revolution affects everything it comes into contact with.38
Hence, in Before Night Falls there is a sense in which the revolution is not
defined by its laws and hierarchy but by a contagious energy that works
to undo order and hierarchy despite itself. Like everything else in the film,
the revolution is not dealt with either in a factual or a didactic manner but
as an unstoppable irrational or deterritorializing force where anything can
happen.
Even the military body is caught up in this molecular sexual revolution.
There is an extraordinary sequence in the middle of the film that exemplifies
the connections between the revolutionary energy and a molecular sexuality.
This sequence begins with a scene of Arenas and a group of male friends
driving to the country in an open convertible. The scene is imbued with a
vibrant energy. The young men are joking and laughing. They wear open shirts
that flap in the rushing wind. The colours are all incredibly vivid and saturated.
Cool jazz music with a breezy melody adds to the free and happy feeling of
the scene. The camera work also creates a carefree euphoric atmosphere
with gliding canted shots, smooth pans and subtle jump cuts. The convert-
ible speeds up and recklessly overtakes an open truck full of soldiers and in a
friendly gesture Arenas and his friends throw packets of cigarettes up at them.
Catching the packets the soldiers cheer and wave back at them. The framing
of the shots of soldiers catching the cigarettes also conveys excitement as
the foreground features a mass of waving arms through which we see Arenas
and his friends standing up in the convertible and throwing the cigarettes.
This scene cuts to a scene of Arenas and his friends reading poetry around a
campfire that night. Suddenly a truck full of soldiers screeches to a halt near
them. The scene takes on a menacing atmosphere, as the young men look
up frightened. A group of soldiers emerge out of the dark, moving quickly and
aggressively towards them. They fire their rifles into the sky all at once. The
Captain then questions Arenas in a hostile tone. However, Arenas replies pro-
vocatively by making jokes about the Captain’s sexuality. The Captain in return
tries to intimidate Arenas with stories about prison camps for homosexuals.
Smiling at the captain, Arenas asks him for his cigarette. Taking the cigarette
from the captain, he inhales and then exhales the smoke into the captain’s
 The Molecular Poetics of the Assemblage 151

mouth kissing him. The risk of this action is palpable. The frame momentarily
goes black and we are left contemplating the worst, but then suddenly our
senses are thrown into confusion as we cut to a wide shot of the soldiers and
Arenas’ friends running hysterically around the campfire naked and waving
rifles in orgiastic excitement.
The building up of tension in the previous shot is not used as expected
to repress sexuality, but to explode it out in  all directions, or to molecu-
larize it. The very force intended to repress sexuality is caught up in its
own revolutionary energy. Through the molecular sexuality produced in this
scene, and throughout the whole of the film, the notion of a binary sexu-
ality, where heterosexuality and homosexuality are understood as oppo-
sites, ceases to make sense. Here sexuality can be thought of in terms of
becomings rather than fixed. Of great importance to the way a molecular
sexuality is liberated in the final shot of this scene is the exuberant energy
and carefree atmosphere created in the previous scene. Because the previ-
ous scene created an atmosphere of excitement and freedom through an
exchange between the young men and the soldiers, this scene is able to
pick up on this energy and turn order and repression into a kind of molecu-
lar sexual energy. This molecular energy is central to the particular poetics
of the film and to how it solicits a particular kind of viewer response that is
attentive to velocities, speeds and intensities rather than its meaning and
signification.
Over the last images of the naked men running around in the scene
described previously, Bardem’s voice is heard saying, ‘There was also a sexual
revolution going on that came along with the excitement of the official revolu-
tion. But the drums of militarism were still trying to beat down the rhythm of
poetry and life’. This statement encapsulates a sentiment and a feeling that is
expressed throughout the film where poetry is linked to a style of living and a
style of sexuality that is open and unpredictable.
This open and unpredictable logic of thought poses a threat to the restric-
tive order and hierarchy imposed by the military regime. For example, poetry
is seen as such a threat to order that in one scene a poet is brought to trial for
hosting a poetry meeting. In another scene Arenas is forced to smuggle his
poetry out of the country to get it published. In the film writer José Lezama
Lima (Manuel Gonzalez) clearly expresses the threat poetry poses to a dicta-
torship when he states:

People that make art are dangerous to any dictatorship. They create
beauty and beauty is the enemy. Artists are escapists, artists are counter-
revolutionary and so you are a counter-revolutionary Reinaldo Arenas. And
do you know why? Because there is a man that wants to govern the terrain
called beauty, but he can’t, so he wants to eliminate it.
152 Deleuze and Film

Poetry, like molecular sexuality, is perceived as a threat to the regime and

therefore must be governed and policed because its sensuality and affectiv-
ity, its movements and speeds can amount to an explosive force that has
the potential to undo order and destabilize the State, opening up a space of
chance and unpredictability that is impossible to control. This is what the poet-
ics of Before Night Falls achieves as its affects, movements and differential
speeds slip in and connect with the viewing body, encouraging a becoming
with the film. This is an important point for feminist theory and queer theory
because it creates a logic of thought that privileges movement, change and
connections rather than fixed subjectivities and identities.39
Before Night Falls is an example of the way some films challenge a repre-
sentational logic that orders everything into binaries and hierarchies by privi-
leging identity as a key term. Rodowick says of the different logic of thought
expressed by the movement-image and the time-image, ‘The former is the
discovery of concepts through negation, repetition, and identity toward ever
more self-identical Being; for the latter it is the creation of concepts through
difference and non-identity in a continually open Becoming’.40 The logic of
thought Before Night Falls articulates and connects with resonates with a
molecular sexuality that does not recognize binaries and hierarchies. Its affec-
tive and dynamic style emphasizes the way bodies are always part of larger
assemblages, and the way connections with, and movements across, these
assemblages decompose and recompose bodies. Before Night Falls does not
just show us this relationship in representational terms on the screen but pro-
duces a cinematic assemblage with the viewing body through affects, move-
ments and speeds.
The way Before Night Falls presents life and bodies as endless becomings
is interesting for feminist and queer theory because it connects with an under-
standing of difference as difference in itself. Before Night Falls articulates this
becoming in the way it treats life and bodies. It expresses the way bodies have
a temporality and this temporality is conveyed through the endless becom-
ings or changes bodies go through. By connecting and articulating a rhizo-
matic logic of thought based on openness, movement and change, bodies are
always understood through their connections and affects rather than through
fixed categories. In this environment sexuality too cannot be ordered into hier-
archies and binaries but must be understood as a constant becoming or what
Deleuze and Guattari call a ‘thousand tiny sexes’.41 Elizabeth Grosz draws on
this notion of a thousand tiny sexes in her essay of the same name in an effort
to demonstrate the usefulness of Deleuze and Guattari’s work for feminist and
queer theory. She takes up the idea of a non-binary notion of difference in rela-
tion to temporality and duration in her book The Nick of Time. Grosz writes,
‘Sexual difference is not a measurable difference between two given, discern-
ible, different things—men and women, for example but an incalculable and
 The Molecular Poetics of the Assemblage 153

continuous process, not something produced but something in the process of

production’.42 In Before Night Falls this process of production or of becoming
extends to the viewer through affects and intensities that produce a molecular
film–viewer assemblage. What occurs in this process is a form of queering the
viewer where sexuality, as Grosz suggests, is in a state of continuous produc-
tion that cannot be reduced to a difference between the two.
154
Conclusion: A feminist
cinematic assemblage
The question of representation

R epresentation has been a fundamental aspect of feminist film theory,

not simply in terms of the representation of women but more so
in relation to how cinema produces a subject as an effect of a system of
representation. For example, in 1978 Christine Gledhill wrote, ‘A crucial issue
for feminist film criticism is the argument that “women as women” are not
represented in the cinema, that they do not have a voice, that the female
point of view is not heard’.1 This sentiment has been echoed so many times
in the intervening years that issues of representation have almost become
fetishized. Representation has also been a central concern for Deleuzian
philosophy, and one of Deleuze’s aims was to overturn Plato and the system
of representation he put in place. Inspired by this work we have seen feminist
philosophers and film theorists challenging the structure of representation.
For example, Dorothea Olkowski calls for the ruin of representation, and
film theorist Barbara Kennedy argues for a move ‘away from the politics of
representation, to a concern with how the visual experience of the cinematic
encounter impinges upon the materiality of the viewer, and how affect and
sensation are part of that material engagement’.2 What this demonstrates is
the central place issues of representation hold in feminist film criticism and
feminist philosophy. Because representation is such an important concept
within film theory the question that arises is: how does representation figure
in a theory of cinematic assemblages?
Throughout Deleuze and Film: A Feminist Introduction I have argued that
film viewing can be understood as an assemblage between the film and
the viewer. Furthermore, that a cinematic assemblage can either be geared
towards the molar plane, which is dominated by a system of representation
that produces binaries and categories that encourages fixed subjects and
identities or the molecular plane, which favours becomings or bodies, subjec-
tivities and identities in a process of transformation. While this book focuses
on the molecular plane it does not negate the molar plane or diminish its
importance. If psychoanalytic feminist film theory has focused primarily on the
156 Deleuze and Film

molar aspects of the assemblage it is because this has been necessary. It is

important to remember that early theories of spectatorship excluded women
and assumed a masculine cinematic subject.
Psychoanalytic feminist film theory’s inquiry into cinema as a system of
representation literally put issues of sexual difference at the forefront of film
theory for at least two decades. This work also made film theory in the 1970s,
1980s and 1990s an exciting and productive discipline at the vanguard of post-
structuralist theories of the subject and of identity. This necessarily implies that
the representational aspects of a cinematic assemblage have been, and are
still, important to feminist film theory. However, rather than rely on represen-
tation as a strategy for thinking through issues to do with sexual difference,
what is now required is a thorough inquiry into that system of representation
in relation to feminist film theory. Mary Ann Doane and Joan Copjec have led
the way in this enquiry through a detailed critique of the cinematic appara-
tus and opened up an avenue for addressing the problems of representation.
Other feminist film theorists have turned away from psychoanalytic theory and
questioned feminist film theory’s ardent investment in it. Patricia Mellencamp,
for example, makes the astonishing claim that ‘Many women, even [Claire]
Johnston, thought that psychoanalysis or other theories of male subjectivity
would provide the answers for women. They were dead wrong’.3 However, in
the rush to close the door on Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan, important
debates about spectatorship and feminism have been left behind. It is almost
as if the baby has been thrown out with the bath water. Yet, the issues raised
by psychoanalytic feminist film theory and spectatorship or film viewing have
not been fully addressed and many questions have been left unanswered.
Deleuze and Film: A Feminist Introduction takes up where this inquiry left
off by introducing a critique of cinema as a system of representation through
the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, and feminist philosophy’s
engagement with this work. The book also lays out the foundations of a con-
cept of cinematic assemblage that enables an exploration of film viewing from
a feminist perspective that goes beyond issues to do with representation. This
is not without its problems as a Deleuzian approach necessarily puts fixed
categories and subjectivities into question, including the category of woman
and the female subject. We might ask how can feminist film theory even exist
or be productive without these important categories?
A short answer to this question is that feminist film theory remains produc-
tive precisely because the problems and issues raised by feminist film scholar-
ship remain powerful. A second response is that a Deleuzian approach does
not necessarily negate the categories of woman or the female subject but
shifts the focus to the numerous ways in which individuals and their capacities
are affected through their connection to different assemblages. The appeal of
this Deleuzian model for feminist film theory is that it understands subjectivity
 Conclusion: A feminist cinematic assemblage 157

as an effect produced through the intersection of different power relations,

and while these may produce fixed categories at particular moments, it also
reveals that they are not fixed forever. These categories are continually ruptured
and open to change. Fixed subjectivities may be politically useful for feminism
at times, but they can also be debilitating if they leave feminist theory trapped
in a binary concept of difference and a transcendental approach to the subject.
When this occurs the female subject is understood solely in relation to the
male subject, as different to him and, therefore, also an aspect of him, as dif-
ference is reduced to that which deviates from an original concept. Therefore,
while exploring film as a representational system is at times useful, it is also
necessary to explore film viewing from a feminist perspective against repre-
sentation. By doing so, we can begin to imagine new ways of understanding
relations between the sexes, as well as between different forms of life.
By focusing on the concept of the cinematic assemblage Deleuze and Film:
A Feminist Introduction has argued for an exploration of the affective aspects
of film viewing. This shift has also meant a move away from the framework
of the cinematic apparatus. The latter’s insistence that cinema is based on a
primary identification with an all-seeing pure vision has hindered an enquiry
into the embodied and affective aspects of film viewing. The exploration of
film viewing through the framework of the assemblage enables several pos-
sibilities for a feminist intervention into spectatorship debates. First, it enables
us to think about how film viewing can be an embodied experience. In doing
so, it reveals the way the viewing body is not fixed and unchanging but rather
continually decomposing and recomposing according to the different kinds of
affective connections between the film and the viewer. In addition, because
the viewing body is processual, then so too are identity and subjectivity. More-
over, the type of difference that emerges from this process of becoming, or
continual change, is a kind of difference that is understood as a difference in
itself, rather than a difference in relation to a privileged term. When difference
is understood as always becoming different to itself, sexual difference cannot
be fixed into a binary structure where one side of the binary is subordinate to
the other. This is not to suggest that all film viewing experiences encourage
the production of difference in itself, rather this book has attempted to identify
films or moments in films that encourage states of becomings where this
kind of difference emerges.
Cinema is a particularly important area for anyone interested in questions
of difference, not simply because of the way difference is represented, but
because of its potential to enable states of becoming that produce differ-
ence in itself. Cinema puts us into contact with non-human durations and
non-human ways of seeing that disrupt ordinary human organizations. It does
so through editing practices that break with an ordered progressive logic,
through camera movements and angles that disrupt a centred view of the
158 Deleuze and Film

world, through soundscapes that encourage an attunement between the film

and the viewer and through affects that cause changes from one bodily state
to another and make us aware of the temporal aspect of the body. Attention to
these affective aspects of film viewing has the potential to offer feminist film
theory a way of going beyond issues of representation.
An important question that arises from the proposition that cinema has the
potential to undo human organizations is whether this liberation from a binary
structure and the production of a difference in itself is a temporary state that
dissipates once we step out of the cinema theatre, or whether it has further,
more permanent, implications? This is an important question as bodies are
never solely cinematic bodies, but social, ethnic, gendered and political bod-
ies as well. In response, what is important about the way particular modes of
film viewing encourage becomings and enable difference in itself, is that they
reveal the way the body is always open to change and always a part of larger
assemblages, even outside the cinema theatre. By revealing the way the body
is always part of larger assemblages these cinematic experiences allow us to
understand how the body (and therefore, identity and subjectivity) is continu-
ally reshaped according to the different assemblages it is a part of.
Within different assemblages, cinematic and otherwise, the body is under-
stood in different ways and therefore has different capacities to affect. In this
site of corporeality, affective cinematic encounters challenge long standing
assumptions about the body that regard it as fixed and unchanging because
it is an aspect of nature. By doing so they make us aware of what the body
can become and allow us to imagine new kinds of bodies. This does not just
mean that the ‘representation’ of cyborgs or alien–human hybrids on the
screen enable us to imagine new kinds of bodies: affective cinematic encoun-
ters do more than this. They enable us to understand the potential of bodies
because they solicit bodily responses that undermine our sense of bodily dis-
tinctiveness through the way we feel connected to the film and attuned with
its temporality. Furthermore, as we feel connected to the film, through the
affects it generates, we become with the film and therefore form a cinematic
assemblage with it. Films that produce affects and intensity reveal the way
the body is continually decomposing and recomposing with every encounter.
Film viewing is not just one of those encounters, but one in which the motile
aspect of the body is exaggerated and therefore brought to our attention. Cin-
ema thus functions for the actualization of different kinds of bodies.

Image 0f thought
Different images of thought are just as important to cinema as affects. This is
not to privilege philosophy over cinema or the experience of viewing. It is my
 Conclusion: A feminist cinematic assemblage 159

hope that this book not be taken solely as a work of film philosophy but also
as a serious exploration of cinema as a conceptual practice. The notion that
film can connect to images of thought is a provocative idea as it elevates film
practice to the level of philosophy. We could say that a film does not repre-
sent a type of thought: a film articulates a type of thought. Deleuze’s Cinema
books highlight not only that different cinematic practices connect with con-
cepts in unique ways, but also that they relate to different images of thought.
Applied to cinema the concept of the assemblage enables us to consider
how a film articulates and connects to a rhizomatic image of thought. When
a film does so its logic is not just internal but extends out and connects with
other assemblages. When Deleuze speaks of an image of thought, he is not
referring to the representation of a form of thought or the method of thought
but ‘something deeper that’s always taken for granted, a system of coordi-
nates, dynamics, orientations: what it means to think, and to “orient oneself
in thought”’.4 Films that operate through a rhizomatic image of thought do
not just express a point of view or an idea by representing it. Rather, thought
emerges in the process of forming assemblages with other assemblages, and
the film–viewer connection is one of these assemblages. In other words, the
film as an open whole is nothing other than its connections to other assem-
blages and this expresses a logic of thought that is always moving, always
dynamic and therefore open to the new.
In his book, Gilles Deleuze’s Time Machine, D. N. Rodowick suggests that
what is important for Deleuze is not the meaning of an image, but rather the
way images are put together, or interconnect with one another and the kinds of
affects produced by these interconnections. Furthermore, the sequencing of
images or how they are edited together tells us something about the image
of thought a film articulates and connects with.5 Rodowick argues that for
Deleuze, not only are different eras ‘defined philosophically by their images
of thought’6 but also that the movement-image and the time-image reflect
two different images of thought. The movement-image, for example, tends to
order shots through an idea of continuity and a relation of cause and effect.
While the arrangement of shots changes the logic of film as a whole, it is
nonetheless oriented towards an idea of a unified stable whole. Deleuze sug-
gests that by constructing a film through the association of images this idea
of the film as a whole is continually made ‘by internalising the images and
externalising itself in the image’.7 This produces an image of thought repre-
sented through the internal workings of the film as a kind of inner monologue.
Hence, as a unified whole, it expresses a kind of thought that is also unified
and based on continuity.8
But as Deleuze points out, ‘Cinema doesn’t just operate by linking things
through rational cuts, but by relinking them through irrational cuts too: this
gives two different images of thought’.9 ‘What counts’, Deleuze argues, is ‘the
160 Deleuze and Film

interstice between images, between two images: a spacing which means that
each image is plucked from the void and falls back into it’.10 For Deleuze, the
interstice counts because it offers the possibility of infinite variation and differ-
ence. Because the time-image foregrounds the interstice or gap between the
images, what emerges is the potential to produce something new through a
process of differentiation. The time-image breaks with any idea of an internal
logic and instead becomes an outside because it emphasizes the interstice.
In the time-image then, the whole becomes a force because it is open to an
infinite number of possibilities. It liberates thought from a rational, coherent
logic and instead opens it up to new modes of thinking.
However, I am uncomfortable with an easy distinction between the time-
image as radical and the movement-image as conservative, as it is my conten-
tion that many films contain elements of both, although some may favour one
over the other. As I have argued throughout this book, the perception-image
and any-space-whatever, which are both highly affective and foreground a
unique cinematic consciousness, can be found in both time-image and move-
ment-image films. In addition, there are many films, like Before Night Falls
which was discussed in Chapter 6, that might have a clear beginning and end,
however, the middle is disjointed and non-linear and uses editing techniques
that play with time. In these instances although the film exists in-between the
movement-image and the time-image, it nonetheless expresses a rhizomatic
image of thought that connects with the outside through the way shots are
linked together. In particular, I have argued that films produce affects that blur
the distinction between the film and the viewer forming an assemblage and
producing becomings. A becoming with the film is a non-human becoming
and this can occur through numerous cinematic practices. Therefore, cinema
has the ability to break with conventional binary thinking not only by choosing
to link images together that challenge simple association, but also through
affects that blur the distinction between the film and the viewer. Many films
contain moments where molecular affective connections break through molar
orderings and produce an uneasiness in the representational logic of the
film.
La Signora di Tutti, which I discussed in Chapters 2 and 3, is an example of
this kind of rupture. The film contains two scenes that disrupt the construc-
tion of a centred and unified vision through filmic techniques that undermine
the representational logic of the film. The first does so by employing camera
and lighting techniques that create a surreal space in Gaby’s dressing room
– where the boundaries of the room seem endless – perspective is distorted
in such a way that it disrupts representational logic. In addition, the way spot-
lights are used to reveal and then conceal characters in this vast space gives
the scene a delirious quality. The film revisits this sense of delirium in a later
scene where Gaby and Leonardo are almost driven insane by their guilt at
 Conclusion: A feminist cinematic assemblage 161

the death of Leonardo’s wife. These two surreal scenes have such an impact
that they seem to change the logic of the whole film. They make us rethink the
cause and effect logic of the film up until this point and also from this point
on. These two scenes put in doubt the credibility of the cause and effect logic
as they bring to the foreground the sensations of strangeness that at first
had seemed to be secondary. Through the inclusion of these two highly sur-
real scenes, the film, as a whole, starts to take on a hallucinatory quality that
is not quite logical. The film now seems to open out and connect with the
viewer through affects, rather than containing an internal logic for the viewer
to identify with. In La Signora di Tutti affect undermines representational logic
and pushes the film towards a logic of the open whole.
One means of exploring films from a feminist perspective is to locate and
analyze films that offer a genuine escape from restrictive images of thought.
The challenge here is that traditionally feminist film theory has concerned
itself with films that focus on women, female subjectivity, the female specta-
tor or in films that are made by women, whereas a focus on a film’s image of
thought does not necessarily imply this. Abstract and experimental films, for
example, frequently connect with a rhizomatic image of thought, but may not
have very much to say about sexual difference or gender relations. As a means
of addressing this concern I wish to return to a point I made at the start of this
conclusion. I would like to re-emphasize that the molar and molecular sides
of the assemblage are not binary opposites but continually interact with each
other. Just as form and expression cross over and interact, so to do the two
sides of the assemblage. For this reason it is important to pay attention to the
interaction between the molar and the molecular and what they each offer.
In film analysis, this means the interaction between film style and form
as well as narrative trajectories and issues of representations. On one level,
this has always been the task of feminist film theory and film theory in gen-
eral. Psychoanalytic feminist film theory has thoroughly explored film style,
narrative structure and issues of representation in relation to meaning and
signification, it is now time to extend this analysis to include affect, the body,
perception and images of thought. In this respect this book is not so much a
departure from psychoanalytic feminist film theory but an engagement with
it. One of the aims of this book is to build a bridge between psychoanalytic
feminist film theory and a Deleuzian feminist film theory in order to maintain
feminist film scholarship relevant. The concept of cinematic assemblages is a
means of keeping an open dialogue on the topic of film viewing, sexual dif-
ference and feminism and it is my hope that this discussion is taken up and
the concept of the cinematic assemblage is extended and rethought in new
ways.
162
 Notes

Introduction
1 Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogues. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson
and Barbara Habberjam. New York: Columbia University Press, 1987.
2 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, Translated by Hugh Tom-
linson and Barbara Habberjam. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1986 and Cinema 2: The Time-Image. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Rob-
ert Galeta, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989.
3 Deleuze, Cinema 2, 1989, p. 168.
4 Ibid., p. 156.
5 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schiz-
ophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minne-
sota Press, 1980.
6 Patricia Pisters, The Matrix of Visual Culture: Working with Deleuze in Film
Theory. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003.
7 Barbara Kennedy, Deleuze and Cinema: The Aesthetics of Sensation. Edin-
burgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000.
8 Patricia MacCormack, Cinesexuality: Queer Interventions. Aldershot: Ash-
gate, 2008.
9 Elena del Rio, Deleuze and the Cinemas of Performance: Powers of Affec-
tion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. 2009.
10 Anna Powell, Deleuze and Horror Film. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
Press. 2005.
11 Elizabeth Grosz, ‘A thousand tiny sexes: Feminism and rhizomatics’, in Con-
stantin V. Boundas and Dorothea Olkowski (eds), Gilles Deleuze and the
Theater of Philosophy. New York: Routledge, 1994, p. 193.
12 Vivian Sobchack, The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experi-
ence. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992.
13 David Norman Rodowick, Gilles Deleuze’s Time Machine. Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 1997, p. xiv.
14 Moira Gatens, Imaginary Bodies: Ethics, Power and Corporeality. Lon-
don: Routledge, 1996; Elizabeth Grosz, ‘A thousand tiny sexes’; Dorothea
Olkowski, Gilles Deleuze and the Ruin of Representation. Berkeley: Univer-
sity of California Press, 1999.
15 Claire Colebrook, ‘From radical representations to corporeal becomings: The
feminist philosophy of Lloyd, Grosz, and Gatens’, Hypatia: A Journal of Femi-
nist Philosophy, 15:12 (2000), pp. 76–7.
164 Notes

16 Rosi Braidotti, Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming.

Cambridge: Polity, 2002, p. 11.
17 David Norman Rodowick, Difficulty of Difference: Psychoanalysis Sexual Dif-
ference and Film Theory. New York: Routledge, 1991.
18 Mary Ann Doane, ‘Remembering women: Psychical and historical construc-
tions in film theory’, in Ann Kaplan (ed.), Psychoanalysis & Cinema. New York:
Routledge, 1990, p. 49.
19 Rodowick, Difficulty of Difference, p. 2.
20 At the same time, by employing the term ‘film–viewer’, I do not intend to
engage with audience studies. The book will not focus on empirical or statis-
tical data.
21 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophre-
nia. Translated by Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane. New York:
Viking, 1977.
22 Jean-Louis Comolli, ‘Machines of the visible’, in Teresa de Lauretis and
Stephen Heath (eds), Cinematic Apparatus. London: Macmillan, 1980,
pp. 121–42.
23 Paul Patton, Deleuze and the Political. London: Routledge, 2000, p. 42.
24 Deleuze and Parnet, Dialogues, p. 131.
25 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 505.
26 Ibid., pp. 504–5.
27 Ibid., p. 406. For example, Deleuze and Guattari distinguish between the iron
sword, descended from the dagger, and the steel sabre, descended from
the knife: ‘Each phylum has its own singularities and operations, its own
qualities and traits, which determine the relation of desire to the technical
element.’
28 Ibid., p. 88, original emphasis. For further discussion of the tetravalent
assemblage, see p.85–92 and 504–5.
29 Deleuze, Cinema 2, p. 27.
30 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 44.
31 Ibid., p. 87.
32 For discussion of the assemblage and bodies, see Moira Gatens, ‘Sex, gen-
der, sexuality: Can ethologists practice genealogy?’, Southern Journal of
Philosophy, 34, Supplement (1996),pp. 1–20 and ‘Through a Spinozist lens:
Ethology, difference, power’, in Paul Patton (ed.), Deleuze: A Critical Reader.
Cambridge: Blackwell, 1996, pp. 162–87, Dorothea Olkowski, Gilles Deleuze
and the Ruin of Representation. Berkeley: University of California Press,
1999, pp. 26–31, Grosz, ‘A thousand tiny sexes’ pp. 187–210.
33 In addition, this book turns to the chapters of A Thousand Plateaus that focus
on the relationship of the assemblage to bodies, subjectivity, identity, affect
and becoming (in particular Chapters 1–6, 10–11 & 15), rather than those that
focus on technology and means of production.
34 Carol J. Clover, Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror
Film. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1992. See the discussion in
Chapter 3.
 Notes 165

Chapter 1
1 Mary Ann Doane, ‘Remembering women: Psychical and historical construc-
tions in film theory’, in E. Ann Kaplan (ed.), Psychoanalysis & Cinema. New
York: Routledge, 1990, p. 49.
2 Gilles Deleuze, Pure Immanence: Essay on A Life. Translated by Anne
­Boyman. New York: Zone, 2005, p. 25.
3 John Rachman, ‘Introduction’, in Gilles Deleuze, Pure Immanence: Essay on
A Life, p. 11.
4 Doane, ‘Remembering women’, pp. 46–63.
5 Jean-Louis Baudry, ‘Ideological effects of the basic cinematographic appara-
tus’, in Philip Rosen (ed.), Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology. New York: Columbia
University Press, 1986, pp. 286–9.
6 Jean-Louis Baudry, ‘The apparatus: Metapsychological approaches to the
impression of reality in the cinema’, in Philip Rosen (ed.), Narrative, Appara-
tus, Ideology, pp. 299–318.
7 Robert Stam, Robert Burgonyne and Sandy Flitterman-Lewis, New Vocabular-
ies in Film Semiotics: Structuralism, Post-structuralism and Beyond. ­London:
Routledge, 1992, p. 124.
8 For a more detailed discussion of how film theory takes up Lacan’s notion
that the subject exists in language, see Sue Thornham, Passionate Detach-
ments: An Introduction to Feminist Film Theory. L ­ ondon: Arnold, 1997.
9 Thornham, Passionate Detachments, p. 36 (author’s emphasis).
10 Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. Edited by Ben
Brewster. New York and London: Monthly Review Press, 1972), p. 173
(author’s emphasis). Rejecting the definition of ideology as propaganda, false
consciousness or something that is forced upon us from above, Althusser
instead believes that it is disseminated, reproduced and maintained through
our willing participation in the everyday rituals and practices associated with
the institutions we belong to and engage with. He argues that an individual’s
belief is not simply a matter of intellect because ‘his ideas are his material
actions inserted into material practices governed by material rituals which are
themselves defined by the material ideological apparatus from which derive
the ideas of that subject.’ What is more, for Althusser ideology is reproduced
and maintained by identifying with the representations produced by the insti-
tutions to which individuals belong. By being part of in an institution’s repre-
sentations, myths, rituals and assigned sets of behaviours, an individual not
only becomes a subject of these institutions, but also ensures its continua-
tion and regeneration. The structure of ideology as conceived by Althusser is
not unlike that of a traditional narrative.
11 Jacques Lacan, Ecrits: A Selection. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York:
Norton, 1977. My discussion of the mirror stage is also informed by Laura
Mulvey’s essay, ‘Visual pleasure and narrative cinema’, Screen, 16:3 (1975),
pp. 6–18.
12 Ibid., pp. 18–9.
13 In psychoanalytic theory, the other is sometimes capitalized to indicate the
Symbolic Other, and at other times, when it does not indicate the Symbolic
166 Notes

other, it is not. When discussing the other in the mirror (during the Imaginary
phase), Lacan, Ecrits, pp. 1–29, does not capitalize the other. When discuss-
ing the gaze as belonging to the Symbolic Other, he does. See Lacan, The
Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis. Edited by Jacques-Allain
Miller and translated by Alan Sheridan (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977). In
this book I shall follow Lacan’s practice.
14 Christian Metz, The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema.
Translated by Celia Britton, Annwyl Williams, Ben Brewster and Alfred
Guzzetti. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982, p. 45.
15 Ibid., p. 48 (author’s emphasis).
16 Doane, ‘Remembering women’, and Joan Copjec, ‘The delirium of clinical
perfection’, Oxford Literary Review, 8:1–2 (1986), pp. 56–65.
17 Metz, The Imaginary Signifier, pp. 42–66.
18 Kuhn, Women’s Pictures, p. 58.
19 Patricia Mellencamp, ‘Five ages of film feminism’, in Laleen Jayamanne (ed.),
Kiss Me Deadly: Feminism and Cinema for the Moment. Sydney: Power
Institute, 1995, pp. 23–4.
20 Ibid.
21 Ibid., p. 24.
22 Janet Bergstrom and Doane Mary Ann, ‘The female spectator: contexts and
directions’, Camera Obscura: A Journal of Feminism and Film Theory, 20/21
(1989), p. 6.
23 For example, Judith Mayne, ‘Feminist film theory and criticism’, Signs: Jour-
nal of Women in Culture and Society, 11:11 (1985), p. 83, thought that it was
‘only a slight exaggeration to say that most feminist film theory and criticism
of the [previous] decade ha[d] been a response, implicit or explicit, to the
issues raised in Laura Mulvey’s essay: the centrality of the look, cinema as
spectacle and narrative, psychoanalysis as a critical tool’.
24 Rodowick, Difficulty of Difference, p. 4.
25 Laura Mulvey, ‘Visual pleasure and narrative cinema’, Screen, 16:3 (1975),
pp. 6–18.
26 Bergstrom and Doane, ‘Female spectator’, p. 7.
27 Annette Kuhn, Women’s Pictures: Feminism and Cinema, 2nd edn, London
and New York, Verso, 1994, p. 208.
28 Of course, feminist film scholarship is not restricted to spectatorship. It
includes diverse strategies, including reading against the grain, which is an
effort to recoup a feminist (or, at least, a feminine) position that emerges
through the cracks in the patriarchal system. This approach is particularly use-
ful in the analysis of the ‘Women’s film’ and has been developed by theorists
such as Tania Modleski and Linda Williams. For example see, Tania Modleski,
‘Time and desire in the woman’s film’, Cinema Journal, 23:3 (Spring 1984),
pp. 19–30. Another strategy is the exploration of psychoanalytic theories of
fantasy as an alternative understanding of the operations of cinematic look-
ing and identification. Theorists such as Constance Penley have used the
concept of fantasy to develop theories of multiple spectating positions: see
her ‘Feminism, psychoanalysis, and the study of popular culture’, in Law-
rence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula A. Treichler (eds), Cultural Stud-
 Notes 167

ies, New York: Routledge, 1992, pp. 479–500. Female spectatorship has also
been of concern to audience studies, which bypassed psychoanalytic film
theory in favour of empirical research. Several books and a host of articles
have been dedicated to female spectatorship; see, for example, the double
issue of Camera Obscura (1989) and Lorraine Gamman and Margaret Marsh-
ment (eds), The Female Gaze: Women as Viewers of Popular Culture. Lon-
don: Women’s Press, 1988. What needs to be said, however, is that these
approaches did not emerge solely in response to Mulvey’s lack of attention to
issues of female spectatorship, but as a reaction to the monolithic qualities
of theories of the cinematic apparatus.
29 When Janet Bergstrom asked Raymond Bellour, in an interview, to account
for women’s viewing pleasure and the their love of Hollywood cinema,
­Bellour’s response was ‘I think that a woman can love, accept and give posi-
tive value to these films only from her own masochism, and from a certain
sadism that she can exercise in return on the masculine subject, within a
system loaded with traps.’ See Janet Bergstrom, ‘Alternation, segmentation,
hypnosis: Interview with Raymond Bellour’, Camera Obscura: A Journal of
Feminism and Film Theory, 3–4 (1979), p. 97.
30 This binary logic is not exclusive to feminist film theory. The production of
binaries is a dominant feature of the ideological/psychoanalytic film theory
dominant in the 1970s and 1980s. Apart from the male and female spectator
binary distinction, theories of the cinematic apparatus have generated a host
of others, such as narrative/non narrative cinema, popular cinema/art cinema,
passive/aggressive, looker/to be looked at and sadism/masochism. For a dis-
cussion of this binary logic as a dominant aspect of ideological/psychoana-
lytical film theory, see Dana Polan, ‘Brief encounters: Mass culture and the
evacuation of sense’, in Tania Modleski (ed.), Studies in Entertainment: Critical
Approaches to Mass Culture. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986,
pp. 167–87.
31 Mayne, ‘Feminist film theory and criticism’, p. 99.
32 Rodowick, Difficulty of Difference, pp. 1–17.
33 Mulvey, ‘Visual pleasure’, p. 11.
34 Rodowick, Difficulty of Difference, p. ix.
35 Elizabeth Grosz, ‘Derrida, Irigaray and deconstruction’, Intervention, 20
(1986), pp. 70–81.
36 The projector also makes this appear like a scene from Plato’s cave, to which
I shall turn in Chapter 2.
37 Baudry, ‘Ideological effects’, p. 292.
38 Metz, The Imaginary Signifier, p. 49 (author’s emphasis).
39 Baudry, ‘Ideological effects’, p. 295.
40 Copjec, ‘The delirium of clinical perfection’, p. 63.
41 Mark B. N. Hansen, New Philosophy for New Media, Cambridge, Mass. and
London: MIT Press, 2004.
42 Laura U. Marks, The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and
the Senses. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000, p. 150.
168 Notes

43 Vivian Sobchack, The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experi-

ence. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1992, p. 31.
44 MacCormack, Cinesexuality, p. 8.
45 Louis-Georges Schwartz, ‘Typewriter: Free indirect discourse in Deleuze’s
Cinema’, Substance, 34:3 (2005), p. 125.
46 Ibid., p. 110.
47 Richard Rushton, ‘Passions and actions: Deleuze’s cinematographic cogito’,
Deleuze Studies, 2:2 (2008), p. 127.
48 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, Translated by Hugh Tom-
linson and Barbara Habberjam. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1986, p. 76.
49 Ibid., p. 20.
50 Pier-Paolo Pasolini, Heretical Empiricism. Translated by Ben Lawton and Lou-
ise K. Barnett. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988, p. 175.
51 Ibid., p. 179.
52 Schwartz, ‘Typewriter’, p. 122.
53 Deleuze gives several film examples that employ this technique including
La Roue (Gance, 1923), The White Sheik (Fellini, 1952) and Pandora and The
Flying Dutchman (Lewin, 1951); see Deleuze, Cinema 1, p. 71.
54 Ibid., p. 73.
55 Ibid.
56 Ibid., p. 72.
57 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and
Robert Galeta, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989, p. 149.
58 Deleuze, Cinema 1, p. 72.
59 Schwartz, ‘Typewriter’, p. 122.
60 Deleuze, Cinema 1, p. 74.
61 Ibid., p. 73–4.
62 Deleuze, Cinema 1, p. 64.
63 Ibid.

Chapter 2
1 Dorothea Olkowski, Gilles Deleuze and the Ruin of Representation. Berke-
ley: University of California Press, 1999.
2 Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition. Translated by Paul Patton. New
York: Columbia University Press, 1994, p. 32.
3 Jean-Louis Baudry, ‘Ideological effects of the basic cinematographic appara-
tus’, in Philip Rosen (ed.), Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology. New York: Columbia
University Press, 1986, p. 295.
4 Mary Ann Doane, ‘Remembering women: Psychical and historical construc-
tions in film theory’, in E. Ann Kaplan (ed.), Psychoanalysis & Cinema. New
York: Routledge, 1990, p. 51.
 Notes 169

5 Ibid., p. 50–1.
6 Ibid., p. 52.
7 Ibid., p. 51.
8 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 38.
9 Ibid., pp. 30–1.
10 Olkowski, Deleuze and the Ruin of Representation, p. 2.
11 Ibid., p. 6.
12 Abigail Bray and Colebrook Claire, ‘The haunted flesh: Corporeal feminism
and the politics of (dis)embodiment’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and
Society, 24:1 (1998), p. 36.
13 Ibid.
14 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, pp. 31–2.
15 Doane, ‘Remembering women’, p. 46.
16 Ibid., p. 47 (my emphasis).
17 Ibid., p. 47–8.
18 Claire Colebrook, ‘Is sexual difference a problem?’, in Ian Buchanan and
Claire Colebrook (eds), Deleuze and Feminist Theory. Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press, 2000, p. 110.
19 Claire Colebrook, ‘From radical representations to corporeal becomings: The
feminist philosophy of Lloyd, Grosz, and Gatens,’ Hypatia: A Journal of Femi-
nist Philosophy, 15:12 (2000), pp. 76–7.
20 Moira Gatens, Imaginary Bodies: Ethics, Power and Corporeality. London:
Routledge, 1996, p. 31.
21 Ibid., p. 12.
22 Ibid., p. 11.
23 Ibid., p. 8.
24 Ibid.
25 Linda Williams, ‘Corporealized observers: Visual pornographies and the “car-
nal density of vision”’, in Patrice Petro (ed.), Fugitive Images: From Photogra-
phy to Video. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995, p. 15.
26 Elizabeth Grosz, Jacques Lacan: A Feminist Introduction. London: Routledge,
1990, p. 43.
27 Ibid., p. 44.
28 Ibid., p. 37–8.
29 Gatens, Imaginary Bodies, p. 33.
30 Ibid., p. 12.
31 Ibid., p. 41.
32 Paul Patton, Deleuze and the Political. London: Routledge, 2000, p. 34.
33 Moira Gatens, ‘Sex, gender, sexuality: Can ethologists practice genealogy?’,
Southern Journal of Philosophy, 34, Supplement (1996), p. 4.
34 Ibid., p. 5–6.
35 Gatens points out that social and political theorists, for example, have argued
that women’s emancipation depends on their ability to overcome the limita-
tions of their bodies and instead focus on culture, reason and the mind. This
170 Notes

understanding is built on a transcendent differentiation between nature and

culture and has certain problems attached to it. First, it relies on a mind/body,
culture/nature dichotomy that understands the body and nature as unchanging,
passive and in need of organization through reason. As a result, this dichotomy
situates woman within the realm of the body and nature, where her emanci-
pation is dependent on her ability to overcome these restrictions. For social
theorists these restrictions are overcome and her social status improves when
a society ceases to focus on her body in favour of her mental capacities.
36 Ibid., p. 7.
37 Bray and Colebrook, ‘The haunted flesh’, p. 56.
38 Gatens, ‘Sex, gender, sexuality’, p. 7.
39 Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogues. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson
and Barbara Habberjam. New York: Columbia University Press, 1987, p. 60.
40 Ibid.
41 Gatens, ‘Sex, gender, sexuality’, p. 9.
42 Elizabeth Grosz, ‘A thousand tiny sexes: Feminism and rhizomatics’, in Con-
stantin V. Boundas and Dorothea Olkowski (eds), Gilles Deleuze and the
Theater of Philosophy. New York: Routledge, 1994, p. 199.

Chapter 3
1 Linda Williams, ‘Film bodies, gender, genre and excess’, in Barry Keith
Grant (ed.), Film Genre Reader II. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995,
p. 140–58.
2 Deleuze and Guattari evoke the notion of the outside, yet at the same time
also suggest that there is no outside. This contradiction emerges from their
attempt to explain how assemblages are made up of a series of connections.
It is false to say that assemblages connect with the outside when they are
made up of connections and what we generally understand to be the outside
makes up some of those connections. Yet in suggesting that assemblages
are made up of nothing but connections, the distinction between inside and
outside inevitably collapses. While I too occasionally evoke the outside in this
chapter, I only do so provisionally, as a way of elaborating Deleuze and Guat-
tari’s ideas.
3 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schiz-
ophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minne-
sota Press, 1980, pp. 22–3.
4 Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations: 1972–1990. Translated by Martin Joughin. New
York: Columbia University Press, 1995, p. 33.
5 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 12.
6 Paul Patton, Deleuze and the Political. London: Routledge, 2000, p. 42.
7 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 16.
8 Patton, Deleuze and the Political, p. 43.
9 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 9.
 Notes 171

10 Ronald Bogue, ‘Gilles Deleuze: The aesthetics of force’, in Paul Patton (ed.),
Deleuze: A Critical Reader. Oxford: Blackwell, 1996, p. 257.
11 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, Translated by Hugh Tom-
linson and Barbara Habberjam. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1986, p. 76.
12 Ibid.
13 Ibid., p. 80.
14 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 9.
15 Ibid., p. 260.
16 Brian Massumi, ‘Notes on the translation and acknowledgments’, in Deleuze
and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. xvi.
17 Ibid., p. 256.
18 Ibid., p. 213 (author’s emphasis).
19 Patton, Deleuze and the Political, p. 35.
20 Deleuze, ‘Bergson’s conception of difference’, translated by Melissa McMa-
hon, in John Mullarkey (ed.), The New Bergson. Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 1999, p. 48.
21 Ibid., p. 49.
22 Moira Gatens, ‘Sex, gender, sexuality: Can ethologists practice genealogy?’,
Southern Journal of Philosophy, 34, Supplement (1996), p. 10.
23 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 238.
24 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, pp. 237–9.
25 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and
Robert Galeta, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989, p. 156.
26 Ronald Bogue, ‘To choose to choose – to believe in this world’, in D. N. Rodo-
wick (ed.), Afterimages of Gilles Deleuze’s Film Philosophy. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2009, p. 122.
27 David Norman Rodowick, Gilles Deleuze’s Time Machine. Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 1997, pp. 84–5.
28 But, as Rodowick notes in Gilles Deleuze’s Time Machine, p. 173, there are
very few examples of pure time-image films: ‘Examples of the direct time-
image are as rare as genuine philosophical concepts’.
29 Elena del Rio, Deleuze and the Cinemas of Performance: Powers of Affec-
tion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008, p. 180.
30 Marie-Claire Ropars-Wuilleumier, ‘Image or time?: The thought of the outside
in the time-image (Deleuze and Blachot)’, in David N. Rodowick (ed.), Afterim-
ages of Gilles Deleuze’s Film Philosophy, p. 15.
31 Deleuze, Cinema 2, p. 41.
32 Deleuze, Negotiations, p. 52.
33 Deleuze, Cinema 2, p. 3.
34 Deleuze, Cinema 1, pp. 102–11.
35 Ibid., p. 109.
36 Ibid., p. 102.
37 Ibid.
172 Notes

Chapter 4
1 Carol J., Clover, Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Hor-
ror Film. New Jersey: Princeton UP, 1992, pp. 3–20.
2 Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory. Translated by Nancy Margaret Paul and
W. Scott Palmer. London: Allen & Unwin, 1978.
3 Linda Williams, ‘When the woman looks’, in Barry Keith Grant (ed.), The
Dread of Difference: Gender and the Horror Film. Austin: University of Texas
Press, 1996, p. 21.
4 In ‘When women look: A sequel’, Senses of Cinema, 15 (2001). URL: http://
www.sensesofcinema.com/2001/15/horror_women/ (original emphasis)
(accessed 24 August 2011), Williams says that her earlier essay ‘fails entirely
to address the issue that now seems to me most crucial in any discussion
of women and horror: the pleasures, however problematic, women viewers
may take in this genre. In addition, the essay slides too quickly from a hypo-
thetical woman looking at the film to the experience of women looking in the
film, suggesting that what is true of the woman in the film is also true of the
spectator – both are punished’.
5 Barbara Creed, ‘Horror and the monstrous-feminine: An imaginary abjection’,
Screen, 27:1 (1986), p. 52.
6 Ibid., pp. 44–71.
7 Creed’s work on Alien will be discussed in greater detail in Chapter Five.
8 Clover, Men, Women, and Chain Saws, p. 19.
9 Ibid., p. 5.
10 Sigmund Freud, On Psychopathology: Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety
and Other Works. Translated by James Strachey and edited by Angela Rich-
ards, The Penguin Freud Library, London: Penguin, 1979, Vol. 10.
11 David N. Rodowick, Difficulty of Difference: Psychoanalysis Sexual Differ-
ence and Film Theory, New York: Routledge, 1991, p. 82, writes: ‘What must
be stressed in Freud’s essay is the structural complexity and fluidity of spec-
tatorial activity, which may combine different mechanisms of defence (disa-
vowal and repression) with intricate transactions between activity-passivity,
sadism-masochism, and masculine or feminine identification in both men
and women’.
12 Clover, Men, Women, and Chain Saws, p. 18.
13 Ibid., p. 40.
14 This trait can be seen as far back as 1960, when the character of Norman
Bates in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho takes on his mother’s personality in order
to kill.
15 Clover, Men, Women, and Chain Saws, p. 45. Furthermore, the assailant’s
identity is not generally revealed until very late in the narrative. In Halloween
and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, the assailants are masked throughout
the film.
16 Ibid., p. 45.
17 Ibid., p. 7.
 Notes 173

18 Williams, ‘When women look: A sequel’, also objects to Clover’s exclusive

focus on male viewers: ‘Unfortunately however, Clover confines herself to
addressing the masochistic pleasure of contemporary horror viewing for the
genre’s supposedly targeted male viewers. (She herself claims to have seen
her first horror film on a dare, as if a woman viewer was anomalous, not in
the natural order of viewing pleasures)’.
19 Gilles Deleuze, Masochism Coldness and Cruelty. New York: Zone, 1991;
Kaja Silverman, Male Subjectivity at the Margins. New York: Routledge,
1992; Gaylyn Studlar, In the Realm of Pleasure: Von Sternberg, Dietrich, and
the Masochistic Aesthetic. New York: University of Columbia Press, 1988.
20 Linda Williams, ‘Film bodies, gender, genre and excess’, in Barry Keith Grant
(ed.), Film Genre Reader II. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995 p. 149.
21 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schiz-
ophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minne-
sota Press, 1980, p. 276.
22 Clover, Men, Women, and Chain Saws, p. 40.
23 Ibid., p. 44.
24 Ibid., p. 63.
25 Bergson, Matter and Memory, p. 29.
26 Ibid., p. 44 (author’s emphasis) To this Matthews adds, ‘And although, in vir-
tue of the reality of the human spirit, I am more than my body (more than
the possibility of action), it remains true that it is central to how I actually
experience myself that I experience myself as embodied, and so as active’
pp. 126–7. He goes on to suggest that because my body is one of the images
that we understand as a material object it is logical that our experience of
ourselves must, to some degree, be as a material thing that we know as a
living organism.
27 Eric Matthews, ‘Bergson’s concept of a person’, in John Mullarkey (ed.) The
New Bergson. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000, pp. 118–34.
28 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, pp. 22–3.
29 This kind of trance-like state mixed in with an awareness of a presence that
no one else can sense is reminiscent of the scene in Nosferatu (F.W. Murnau,
1922), in which Ellen (Greta Schröder) stares out of her window because she
senses the presence of the Vampire summoning her.
30 The Final Girl’s affective perception is also much greater than that of the
adults in the genre. They are often unaware of what is going on or otherwise
ineffectual in their efforts to stop the rampage of horrific murders.
31 Dorothea Olkowski, Gilles Deleuze and the Ruin of Representation. Berke-
ley: University of California Press, 1999, p. 98.
32 Williams, ‘Film bodies’, p. 155, suggests that the temporal structure of the
slasher film is not unlike that of fantasies surrounding the discovery of sexual
difference. The genre, she says, is made up of surprise encounters in which
those who die do so because they are inadequately prepared to confront the
killer: ‘The female victims who are not ready for the [psycho-killer-monster’s]
attack die. This surprise encounter, too early, often takes place at a moment
of sexual anticipation, when the female victim thinks she is about to meet
174 Notes

her boyfriend or lover’. I would argue that this idea of encounters happening
too early is a result of the character lacking in affective perception or being
sensorially unaware.
33 Bergson, Matter and Memory, p. 239.
34 Henri Bergson, The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics. Translated
by Mabelle L. Andison. New York: Carol, 1992, p. 147 (author’s emphasis). To
further explain this notion Bergson points out that because this state of con-
stant change is not always easily perceptible the consistency and endurance
of the object, or the subject is mistaken as something that remains the same
through time. In other words, it is mistaken for a materiality that has a fixed
quality. Bergson suggests that if we watch something that changes slowly
over time we cannot observe the changes and therefore believe it remains
the same. Yet, if we turn away from it when we return we become aware of
its changes. Change and transformation were always its condition, it is what
was always there but we did not see it. Hence, change, transformation and
becoming are often imperceptible.
35 Matthews, ‘Bergson’s concept of a person’, p. 121.
36 Gilles Deleuze, ‘Bergson’s conception of difference’, in John Mullarkey (ed.),
The New Bergson. Translated by Melissa McMahon. Manchester: Manches-
ter University Press, 1999, p. 48.
37 Bergson, Matter and Memory, p. 24.
38 Olkowski, Ruin of Representation, p. 105.
39 Clover, Men, Women, and Chain Saws, pp. 202–3.
40 In fact, her discussions of identification resonates more with Gatens and Eliz-
abeth Grosz discussion of the psychoanalytic concept of identification as an
affective embodied process. In this sense, her concept of the reactive gaze
shares some similarities with the notion of affective, intuitive perception
41 Clover, Men, Women, and Chain Saws, p. 175.
42 Ibid., p. 179.
43 Bergson, Matter and Memory, p. 24.
44 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, Translated by Hugh Tom-
linson and Barbara Habberjam. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1986, pp. 102–3.
45 Deleuze, Cinema 1, p. 103.
46 Gilles Deleuze Cinema 2: The Time-Image. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and
Robert Galeta, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989, p. 12.
47 Ibid., pp. 12–13.
48 Anna Powell, Deleuze and the Horror Film. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
Press, 2005, p. 142.
49 Italian horror filmmaker Dario Argento takes this technique to the nth
degree, treating buildings and landscapes in much the same way as charac-
ters through the use of framing, lighting and camera angles that make them
seem alive and active.
50 Philip Brophy, 100 Modern Soundtracks. London: BFI, 2004, p. 101.
51 Ibid.
52 Ibid., p. 102.
 Notes 175

Chapter 5
1 Elizabeth Grosz, ‘A thousand tiny sexes: Feminism and rhizomatics’, in Con-
stantin V. Boundas and Dorothea Olkowski (eds), Gilles Deleuze and the
Theater of Philosophy. New York: Routledge, 1994, pp. 197–8.
2 At present, there are four films in the Alien series, Alien (Ridley Scott, 1979),
Aliens (James Cameron, 1986), Alien3 (David Fincher, 1992) and Alien Resur-
rection (Jean-Pierre Jeunet, 1997).
3 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schiz-
ophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minne-
sota Press, 1980, p. 238.
4 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 257.
5 Patricia Linton, ‘Aliens, (M)Others, Cyborgs: The Emerging Ideology of Hybrid-
ity’ Alien Identities: Exploring Difference in Film and Fiction, (eds), Deborah
Cartmell, I.Q. Hunter, Heidi Kaye and Imelda Whelehan. London: Pluto Press,
1999, pp. 172–86. Linton points to roles such as Vincent the noble man/beast
in the American television series Beauty and the Beast (1987–90), as well
as the Sayer of the Law in the film The Island of Dr. Moreau (John Franken-
heimer, 1996). I would add to this list his role as Salvatore, the monk who
was burnt at the stake for his transgressions, and spoke all languages but
none, in The Name of The Rose (Jean-Jacques Annaud, 1986) and Hellboy in
Hellboy (Guillermo del Toro, 2004). Interestingly Perlman admits to feelings
of monstrosity. He is quoted as saying ‘I’ve always felt there were aspects of
me that were monstrous, and you can either hide from it or confront it, ….
So that life became a question of either dealing with this monstrousness in
one-way or another …. One finds a way to understand and make friends with
that monster and understand that that’s the very thing that makes you who
you are.’ Internet Movie Data Base, URL: Accessed 1 September 2011 http://
www.imdb.com/name/nm0000579/bio.
6 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 282.
7 The Alien films have been discussed in relation to ideas of generic hybridity,
lesbian desire, cultural analyses and most frequently through psychoanalytic
concepts. The following texts address the Alien films: Martin Flanagan, ‘The
Alien Series and Generic Hybridity,’ in Deborah Cartmell, I.Q. Hunter, Heidi
Kaye and Imelda Whelehan (eds), Alien Identities: Exploring Differences in Film
and Fiction. London: Pluto Press, 1999, pp. 156–71. Ros Jennings, ‘Desire and
Design: Ripley Undressed,’ in Tamsin Wilton (ed.), Immortal, Invisible: Lesbi-
ans and the Moving Image. London. New York: Routledge, 1995, pp. 193–206.
Judith Newton, ‘Feminism and Anxiety in  Alien,’ and James H. Kavanagh,
‘Feminism, Humanism, and Science in Alien,’ in Annette Kuhn (ed.) Alien Zone:
Cultural Theory and Contemporary Science Fiction Cinema. London: Verso,
1990. Stephen Scobie, ‘What’s the Story, Mother?: The Mourning of the Alien,’
Science Fiction Studies, 20.1 (1993) pp. 80–93. Lynda K. Bundtzen, ‘Monstrous
mothers: Medusa, Grendel, and now Alien,’ Film Quarterly, 40 (1987): p. 11–17.
Jane R Goodall, ‘Aliens,’ Southern Review, 23.1 (1990) p. 73–82.
8 Barbara Creed, ‘Horror and the Monstrous-Feminine: An Imaginary Abjec-
tion,’ Screen, 27.1 (1986) pp. 44–71.
176 Notes

9 Barbara Creed, ‘Horror and the monstrous-feminine: An imaginary abjection’,

Screen, 27:1 (1986), p. 45.
10 Ibid.
11 Ibid., p. 53.
12 Catherine Constable, in Annette Kuhn (ed.), ‘Becoming the Monster’s Mother:
Morphologies of Identity in the Alien Series,’ Alien Zones II: The Spaces of
Science Fiction in the Cinema. London: Verso, 1999, pp. 173–202.
13 Constable, ‘Becoming the Monster’s Mother’, p. 174. I am uncomfortable
with Constable’s reading of Ripley as having given birth to the Alien queen.
Giving birth is an act, whereas Ripley had a surgical procedure where she
had the alien removed from her chest. While this procedure has connota-
tions of a caesarean section, it also has connotations of removing a deadly
parasite or tumour. I believe Ripley’s comment ‘I’m the monster’s mother’,
relates to her having been the host for the alien, not giving birth to it. She
also says it in an ironic tone.
14 Ibid.
15 Ibid., p. 191.
16 Ibid., p. 197.
17 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 257.
18 Ibid., p. 238.
19 Ibid., p. 234 (Emphasis mine).
20 Ibid. (Emphasis mine).
21 This idea that the alien is a pure and perfect species runs through the whole
series dating back to the first film, Alien, in which the android Ash expresses
similar views. He states, ‘I admire its purity; a survivor unclouded by con-
science, remorse or delusions of morality’.
22 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 242.
23 Ibid.
24 Deleuze and Guattari argue that all becomings begin and pass through
woman. There can be no becoming man because man ‘is the subject: the
point of view or ground from which all other beings or becomings are sup-
posedly determined’. Clare Colebrook, Gilles Deleuze. London: Routledge,
2002, p. 139. Initial feminist response to the concept of becoming woman
was quite hostile, as the concept was seen to dismiss woman as a subject.
See Alice Jardine, Gynesis: Configurations of Woman and Modernity. Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1985 and Rosi Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects: Gender
and Culture. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. However, recently
there has been a more open feminist engagement with the concept of
becoming woman. See Patricia Pisters, ‘Cyborg Alice: or Becoming-Woman
in an Audiovisual World’, Iris, 23 (1997): pp. 148–63, Dorothea Olkowski,
‘Nietzsche’s Dice Throw: Tragedy, Nihilism, and the Body Without Organs’, in
Constantin V. Boundas and Dorothea Olkowski (eds) Gilles Deleuze and the
Theater of Philosophy. New York: Routledge, 1994, Camilla Benolirao Grig-
gers, Becoming-Woman. Minneapolis: University Press of Minnesota, 1997.
Verena Andermatt Conley, ‘Becoming-Woman Now,’ and Jerry Aline Flieger,
‘Becoming-Woman: Deleuze, Schreber and Molecular Identification,’ in Ian
 Notes 177

Buchanan and Claire Colebrook (eds), Deleuze and Feminist Theory. Edin-
burgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000, pp. 18–38 and pp. 38–63.
25 Dorothea Olkowski, Gilles Deleuze and the Ruin of Representation. Berke-
ley: University of California Press, 1999, p. 27.
26 Creed, ‘Horror and the Monstrous-Feminine’, p. 80.
27 Ibid., p. 81.
28 Lesley Stern, The Scorsese Connection. Bloomington: Indiana University
Press. 1995, pp. 11–12.
29 Crary uses the term observer rather than the more familiar term spectator in
order to move away from connotations of passivity associated with the term
spectator. As Crary argues, the term spectator implies to look at, or to be a
passive onlooker of a spectacle, whereas the term observer implies complic-
ity, as in observing codes and practices. Crary states that an observer is ‘one
who sees within a prescribed set of possibilities, one who is embedded in
a system of conventions and limitations’. Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the
Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge,
Mass.: MIT Press, 1991, p. 6.
30 Crary, Techniques of the Observer p. 5.
31 Ibid., p. 6.
32 Ibid., p. 8.
33 Ibid., p. 90.
34 Linda Williams, ‘Corporealized observers: Visual pornographies and the ‘car-
nal Density of Vision,’ in Patrice Petro (ed.) Fugitive Images: From Photogra-
phy to Video, Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1995, pp. 3–42.
35 Williams, ‘Corporealized Observers’, p. 7.
36 Ibid., p. 12.
37 Crary, Techniques of the Observer, p. 126.
38 Ibid., p. 127.
39 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson
and Robert Galeta, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989,
pp. 12–13.
40 In relation to the stereoscope Crary argues that ‘the Wheatstone model left
the hallucinatory and fabricated nature of the experience undisguised. It did
not support what Roland Bathes called ‘the referential illusion’. There simply
was nothing ‘out there’. The illusion of relief of depth was thus a subjective
event and the observer coupled with the apparatus was the agent of synthe-
sis of fusion’. Crary, Techniques of the Observer, p. 129.
41 Williams, ‘Corporealized Observers’, p. 13.
42 Ibid., p. 7.
43 Whereas special effects are often used for purposes of verisimilitude, such
as dinosaurs that are made to look as real as possible, in this scene special
effects are used to abstract the images shot, making recognition very dif-
ficult.
44 Rosi Braidotti, Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming.
Cambridge: Polity, 2002, p. 22.
178 Notes

Chapter 6
1 Laura Mulvey, ‘Visual pleasure and narrative cinema’, Screen, 16:3, 1975,
pp. 8–9.
2 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schiz-
ophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minne-
sota Press, 1980, p. 235.
3 Francisco Soto, Reinaldo Arenas: The Pentagonia. Gainseville: University
Press of Florida, 1994, p. 8.
4 Ibid., p. 7.
5 Gilles Deleuze, Pure Immanence: Essay on A Life. Translated by Anne Boy-
man. New York: Zone, 2005, pp. 25–33.
6 Deleuze, Pure Immanence, pp. 28–9.
7 My understanding of haecceity is informed by two discussions; Gilles
Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogues. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Bar-
bara Habberjam. New York: Columbia University Press, 1987, pp. 90–3 and
Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, pp. 260–72.
8 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 261.
9 Ibid., p. 262.
10 Ibid.
11 Ibid., p. 263.
12 Ibid.
13 Ibid.
14 Reinaldo Arenas, as quoted in Soto, Reinaldo Arenas, p. 148.
15 Laura U. Marks, The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and
the Senses. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000, p. 28.
16 Deleuze, Pure Immanence, p. 25.
17 Ibid.
18 Pier Paolo Pasolini, “The Cinema of Poetry,” in Heretical Empiricism, trans-
lated by Ben Lawton and Louise K. Barnett. Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1988, p. 175.
19 Ibid., p. 178–9.
20 In discussing his writing style with Francisco Soto Arenas admits that his
writing is not only experimental but that it is inflected with the voice of oth-
ers. He says, ‘I believe that from a linguistic and structural point of view a
novel has to be an innovative text, contradictory and conflictive, that inces-
santly provides multiple interpretations. … I don’t only question time and
structure in the novel, but I also question my role as author. … [A] novel like
El porter … is not written by Reinaldo Arenas but by a million anonymous
individuals. Soto, Reinaldo Arenas, p. 147
21 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, Translated by Hugh Tom-
linson and Barbara Habberjam. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1986, p. 80.
22 Ibid., p. 77.
 Notes 179

23 Deleuze uses the idea of individuation as an event or haecceity to emphasize

the way an individual is always made of connections. Speaking about the
way he experiences himself as an individual without subjectivity, through
the connections he comes into contact with through the writing process,
Deleuze states: ‘Félix and I, and many others like us, don’t feel like we’re
persons exactly. Our individuality is rather that of events, which isn’t mak-
ing any grand claim, given that haecceities can be modest and microscopic.
I’ve tried in all my books to discover the nature of events; it’s a philosophical
concept, the only one capable of ousting the verb ‘to be’ and attributes. From
this viewpoint, writing with someone else becomes completely natural. It’s
just a question of something passing through you, a current, which alone
has a proper name’. Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations: 1972–1990. Translated by
Martin Joughin. New York: Columbia University Press, 1995, p. 141.
24 Gregory J. Seigworth, ‘Fashioning a stave, or, singing Life,’ Animations (of
Deleuze and Guattari), in Jennifer Daryl Slack (ed.), New York: Peter Lang
Publishing, 2003.
25 Daniel N. Stern, The Interpersonal World of the Infant: A View from Psychoa-
nalysis and Developmental Psychology. New York: Basic Books, 1985, p. 53.
26 Seigworth, ‘Fashioning a stave’, p. 82.
27 Ibid.
28 Stern, Interpersonal World of the Infant, p. 55.
29 Ibid., p. 54.
30 Seigworth, ‘Fashioning a stave’, p. 83.
31 Deleuze says of this aspect of affect: ‘it is not confined to the image or idea:
it is of another nature, being purely transitive, and not indicative or represent-
ative, since it is experienced in a lived duration that involves the ­difference
between two states.’ Gilles, Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy. Trans-
lated by Robert Hurley. San Francisco: City Lights, 1988.
32 Stern, The Interpersonal World of the Infant, p. 142.
33 What needs to be pointed out is that while scenes like the one described
here produce vitality affects that are felt as a kind of soaring, dizziness, light-
less and heaviness in the viewing body this does not mean that these sensa-
tions replicate those of flying and crashing in a balloon. Nor is the experience
of watching this film the same as the experience of participating in the new
kinds virtual reality rides that try to approximate the experience of motion.
The affective force of cinema is not one that can imitate the exact experi-
ence of flying a balloon, yet the techniques used in this scene operate as a
force on the body that nonetheless produce intensive affects in the body in
a similar that way music does.
34 ‘Before Night Falls,’ Showtime Movie News, Interviewer Andrew Warne,
Producer Teresa Rizzo, Showtime Australia, from 25 August 2001 to 2
September 2001.
35 Francisco Soto, ‘Celestino antes del alba, El palacio de las blanquísimas
mofetas, and Otra vez el mar: The Struggle for Self-Expression’, Hispanis,
(75:1) 1992, p. 60.
36 David Norman Rodowick, Gilles Deleuze’s Time Machine. Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 1997, p. 85.
180 Notes

37 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophre-

nia. Translated by Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane, New York:
The Viking Press, 1977, pp. 139–41.
38 It does not draw a distinction between the social and the individual just as in
Deleuze and Guattari’s account of desire ‘there is no such thing as the social
production of reality on the one hand, and a desiring production that is mere
fantasy on the other (28)
39 It should also be pointed out that this molecular sexuality is not solely the
result of Arenas’ homosexuality but emerges from the kinds of connections
and affects the film produces. Filmic representations of homosexuality are
not in themselves necessarily molecular. For example, Strawberry and Choc-
olate (Tomás Gutiérrez Alea and Juan Carlos Tabío, 1994) is also a story about
a homosexual man in Cuba, but it operates mainly on the representational
molar plane. While it certainly contains scenes that are highly affective, struc-
turally it adopts a classical narrative style with a focus on the exploration of
psychological characters. The images are grounded through an adherence to
monocular perspective, the editing links each scene with the next in a pro-
gressive fashion and all scenes use diegetic synchronized sound. Like Before
Night Falls the film deals with the revolution and its intolerance of homo-
sexuality, but it does so in a very different way. It may ask the audience to
identify and empathize with the main character’s struggle as a homosexual in
Castro’s Cuba but structurally the film does not challenge the ordered, hierar-
chical structure of life, it only manages to lodge a complaint against it. While
a wonderful and challenging film in its own way, it maintains and utilizes the
dominant way of thinking about the world and life as ordered and progres-
sive.
40 Rodowick, Time Machine, 85.
41 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 213.
42 Elizabeth Grosz, The Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution and the Untimely. Crows
Nest: Allen & Unwin, 2004, p. 160.

Conclusion
1 Christine Gledhill, ‘Developments in Film Criticism’, in ReVision: Essays in
Feminist Film Criticism. The American Film Institute Monograph Series, Fre-
derick M. D.: University Publication of America and the American Film Insti-
tute, 1984, p. 18.
2 Barbara Kennedy, Deleuze and Cinema: The Aesthetics of Sensation. Edin-
burgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000, p. 16.
3 Patricia Mellencamp, in Laleen Jayamanne (ed.), ‘Five Ages of Film Femi-
nism’, Kiss Me Deadly: Feminism and Cinema for the Moment. Sydney:
Power Institute, 1995, p. 22.
4 Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations: 1972–1990. Translated by Martin Joughin. New
York: Columbia University Press, 1995, p. 148.
 Notes 181

5 David Norman Rodowick, Gilles Deleuze’s Time Machine. Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 1997, p. 172.
6 Ibid.
7 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and
Robert Galeta, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989, p. 179.
8 Rodowick, Time Machine, p. 177.
9 Deleuze, Negotiations, p. 149.
10 Deleuze, Cinema 2, p. 179.
182
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Films cited
A Beautiful Mind, dir. Ron Howard, 2001.
A Nightmare on Elm Street, dir. Wes Craven, 1984.
Alien 3, dir. David Fincher, 1992.
Alien, dir. Ridley Scott, 1979.
Aliens, dir. James Cameron, 1986.
Alien Resurrection, dir. Jean-Pierre Jeunet, 1997.
Amadeus, dir. Milos Forman, 1984.
Before Night Falls, dir. Julian Schnabel, 2000.
Braveheart, dir. Mel Gibson, 1995.
Elephant, dir. Gus Van Sant, 2003.
Gandhi, dir. Richard Attenborough, 1982.
Halloween, dir. John Carpenter, 1979.
Halloween II, dir. Rick Rosenthal, 1981.
Hell Night, dir. Tom DeSimone, 1982.
I’m Not There, dir. Todd Haynes, 2007.
I Spit on Your Grave, dir. Meir Zarchi, 1978.
La Signora di Tutti, dir. Max Ophüls, 1934.
Last Year at Marienbad, dir. Alain Resnais, 1961.
 Bibliography 189

Mamma Roma, dir. Pier-Paolo Pasolini, 1962.

Ms.45, dir. Abel Ferrara, 1981.
Mulholland Drive, dir. David Lynch, 2001.
Nosferatu, dir. F.W. Murnau, 1922.
Pandora’s Box, dir. Georges Wilhelm Pabst, 1929.
Patton, dir. Franklin J. Schaffner, 1970.
Peeping Tom, dir. Michael Powell, 1960.
Poltergeist, dir. Tobe Hooper, 1982.
Prom Night, dir. Paul Lynch, 1980.
Saving Private Ryan, dir. Steven Spielberg, 1998.
Scream, dir. Wes Craven, 1996.
Strawberry and Chocolate, dir. Tomás Gutiérrez Alea and Juan Carlos Tabío, 1994.
Suspiria, dir. Dario Argent, 1977.
The Exorcist, dir. William Friedkin, 1973.
The Passenger, dir. Michelangelo Antonioni, 1975.
The Chain Saw Massacre, dir. Tobe Hooper, 1974.
Time Code, dir. Mike Figgis, 2000.
190
 Index
abstract and experimental films  161
The Act of Seeing With Ones
Own Eyes  122
affect  64–7
Alien series,
alien–human hybridies  108–13
becoming  116
cinematic techniques  108
classification and contagion  117–20
Constable’s analyses  115
Crary’s work  123–6
Creed’s work  113–14
ethological approach  116
film–viewer assemblage  120–1
filmic techniques and corporeal
perception  126–9
hybrid viewing bodies  121–3
Irigaray’s theory of subject
­formation  115
Kristeva’s theory of abjection  113
ocular entanglement  129–32
oppressive constraints  116
subjectivity and identity  107
allegory of Plato’s cave  18
Baudry and idealism  38–9
cave allegory  41
cinematic apparatus and
­focuses  40–1
Doane, Mary Ann ­suggestions  A Beautiful Mind  136
39–40
feminist film critics  41
film theory  38, 40
and Freud’s theory of
­hallucination  39
idealist facet of theories  40
prisoners mistake illusion for
­reality  39
psychoanalytic film theory  40
reality, illusion  38
The Republic  38
theories of cinematic apparatus  40
topography  40–1
Amadeus  136
Anti-Oedipus  7, 149
any-space-whatever  58, 76–8, 104,
128, 139–40, 146, 160
apparatus theory  33, 40, 44
arborescent systems  61, 67–8
assemblages  3–4
cinematic apparatus  7–10
construction of  8–9
continuous variation  10
Deleuze and Guattari concept 
59–60
of enunciation  31–2
film-viewer  60
incorporeal transformations  9
inter-assemblage  59
kinds of  60
tetravalent model of  9
theorization  12
attunement behaviour  145–6
Baudry, Jean-Louis,
apparatus theory  39–40
cinema’s idealist tendencies  39
Doane’s view  39–40
ideological mechanism  38–9
becomings  68–70, 109–10, 118–19,
138, 146, 152
Before Night Falls  12
any-space-whatever  139, 160
Arenas’ work  134, 138
Bardem’s voice  151
biographical film  135–6
camera movement  140–1
ego-centred idea of  141
feeling perceptions  147
feminist and queer theory  152
192
five-o’clock–dog assemblage  138
haecceity  136–8
life and individuality  137
liquid perception  142–3
molecular poetics of  135
molecular sexuality  149–53
molecular understanding  141
movements and connections  135
Mulvey’s work  133
opening scene in  139–40
perception-image  141–2, 160
perpetual motion  139
prosaic cinema  141
rhythmical and harmonious  135
Schnabel’s film style  142
sexuality  134–5
spatio-temporal relations  137
Stern’s concepts  135
style  138–9
time-image  147–9
vitality affects and attunement
behaviour  144–7
Bergson’s, Henri philosophical method
Matter and Memory  82
binary model of sexual
­difference  6, 24
the body  2–3, 7, 11, 13, 25, 35, 42–3,
46–61, 64–7
Bogue, Ronald  61
Bradotti, Rosi  3, 132
Braveheart  136
Camera Obscura  21–2
camera-self-consciousness  29
cinema,
camera quality  30
cinematic apparatus see
­psychoanalytic film theory
consciousness  35
constraining effects  24
Deleuze’s approach  16
for female pleasure  23–4
film theory  17
images of thought  158–61
indirect discourse for  30
monocular perspective for  25–7
qualities of movement and
­temporality  16
see also feminist film theory
Index
cinematic apparatus  6–10, 17–20, 25,
33, 40–1, 64
codification  8
Colebrook, Claire  3, 42
concept of machines  7–8
Crary, Jonathan  123–4, 144
Del Rio, Elena,
theorization of seductive powers of
film images  3–4
Deleuze, Gilles,
Cinema books  2–3, 9, 13, 16, 28,
58, 68–71, 74, 159
cinematic apparatus  6
collaborative work with Guattari,
Félix  2
philosophy  1
Pisters’ application of  3–4
Time Machine  159
deterritorialization  62–3
difference in itself  13, 55–6, 96, 152,
157–8
Difference and Repetition  6
Doane, Mary Ann  5, 15, 39, 156
Elephant  12, 79
ethology  53–6
The Exorcist  82, 104–5
expression and deterritorialization  9
female spectatorship theories  4–5
feminism and spectatorship  3
feminist film theory  2, 4
according to Doane  6
approaches  5
cinematic apparatus for  21
emerging area  3–4
exploration of cinema  34–5
female spectatorship  21
implications for  34–5
meta-critique of  58
A Feminist Introduction  3
cinematic assemblage  157
critique of cinema  156
Deleuze’s writings
about  6, 11
film spectatorship and sexual
­difference  5
film viewing  155–6
 Index
feminist philosophy,
anti-juridical perspective  54–5
apparatus theorists  51
appeal to equality  47
assertion of difference and
­specificity  47
Colebrook quote  47–8
and Deleuze’s,
approach  48
film theory  37, 56
transcendental empiricism  54
understanding of  52
difference and representation  41–3
ethics  55–6
ethology and body  53–6
female spectator  43–7
film viewing  52
Gatens, Moira work  48–9, 51,
54–5
Grosz, Elizabeth work  48, 50
idea of body  50
Lacan’s theory of mirror phase  filmic techniques use  93
50–2
Massumi, Brain  55
in mirror phase, operation of vision
and perception  50
Patton, Paul  52
Plato’s allegory  38–41
psychical image  51
psychoanalytic film theory’s  49–50
representation  37
rule-based morality  55
sexual equality  53
wave of  47–8
film viewing, ethological approach,
‘affect’ and ‘the body’  65–7
any-space-whatever  76–8
assemblage see assemblages
concepts
becoming  68–70
cinematic apparatus  57
cinematic assemblage and Cinema
books  70–1
difference and duration  67–8
exploring film viewing  58
molar and molecular a­ ssemblages
see molar and molecular
­assemblages
movement-image  74–6
193
perception-image  78–9
time-image  71–3
films and viewer  92
assemblage concept  10–11
connections between  7, 9
feminist approach  10–11
perception-image  29
sexual difference  11
Final Girl  89
and affective perception  92–5
antagonist’s sexuality  86
Bergson’s concept of intuition 
90–1, 95–6
camera’s movement  92
Clover theory  86–7
cross-gender identification  85
Deleuze and Guattari  88–90
embodied viewing  102–6
ethological perspective  90
film–viewer and affective
­perception  99
films  92
Freud’s essay  85
Jamie Lee Curtis  93
Laurie’s point of view  93
males,
characters in  86–8
cross-gender identification  88
and female identification,
­analysis  89
spectator’s identification
with  85
menacing drone  92–3
oscillation between genders  89
perceptions  94
quantitative multiplicity  98
reactive gaze  99–101
relationship to world  97–9
reverse-shot, use  92–3
sexuality  93
slasher film see slasher films
soft lighting and colours,
use  93
teenage femininity  94
temporality  95
undivided continuity  95
virtual invisibility  88
Williams, views  88
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free indirect discourse  30–1
free indirect images  31, 33, 141–2
Freud, Sigmund  3, 18, 156
Gandhi  136
haecceity  136–8
Halloween  92, 94
Hell Night  97
horror films  27
heterosexist and rigid notions  84
and monstrous-feminine  84
movement and framing  77
spectatorial identification  84
Williams, views  83–4
hybridization  13, 110, 129
I Spit on Your Grave  82
I’m Not There  12
ideology, Althusser’s theory  18
images of thought  158–61
intuition  90–1, 95–6
La Signora di Tutti  12
movement-image and
­time-image  74–6
Lacan, Jacques  3, 18, 156
Last Year at Marienbad  66–7
liquid perception  142–3
male masochistic fantasy, Freud’s
theory  85
Mamma Roma  30–2
Matter and Memory  82
Memento  27
Men, Women, and Chain Saws  A Nightmare on Elm Street  97–8
82–3
Metz, Christian  9, 15
Mitsein concept  33–4
modern cinema  74
modern horror genre,
Clover 84–5
ethological approach  89–92
feminist film theory  83
Final Girl  85–9
male masochistic identification
with  85
Mulvey’s, essay  83
Williams, views  83–4
Index
modular-narrative or database-narrative
films  27
molar  8, 10, 13, 55, 58, 60–4
molar and molecular assemblages,
‘affect’ and ‘the body’  65
arborescent and rhizomatic
­multiplicities  61
Bergsonian perception  61
cinematic apparatus  64
deterritorialization  64
difference between  60–1
feminism  65–6
for feminist film theory  63–4
film viewing  66–7
flight/deterritorialization  61, 66
hierarchies and fixed
­categories  63
identities and subjectivities  60
intensive and extensive
­relations  65
Patton defined  61
subjective and objective
view  62, 66
molecular  8, 10, 13, 55, 58, 60–4
molecular sexuality  93, 147–53
The Movement-Image
(Cinema 1)  1–2
movement-image  74–6
Ms. 45  82
Mulholland Drive, I’m Not There  73
multiplicity  8
Mulvey, Laura  5, 83, 133–4
negotiations  170
The Nick of Time  152
ocular entanglement  129–32
see also Alien series
Oedipal system  116
Olkowski, Dorothea  3, 37, 94,
120, 155
Our Mutual Friend  136
Pandora’s Box  77
Pasolini, Pier Paolo  28, 141
The Passenger  32
Patton, Paul  8, 52, 60
Peeping Tom  100–1
 Index
perception-image,
characters  31
Deleuze’s concept of  30, 33
embodiment  35
feminist film theory  29
human perception  32
language and subjectivity  31
Mitry’s concept of
­‘semi-subjective’  33
work of Pasolini and Mitry  30
Pisters, Patricia  2
political films  67
Poltergeist  82
Prom Night  96
psychoanalysis and theories of male
subjectivity  21
psychoanalytic film theory  5
cinematic apparatus  17–20
‘exhaustion’ and ‘impasse’ for  15
experience of watching films  7
sexual difference  6
binary model  24
reactive gaze  99–101
Rear Window  20
Renaissance perspective  18
representation  3–6, 12, 21, 37–8,
41–3, 46–8, 51–4, 56, 59–60,
72–5, 79, 97, 103, 105, 113,
115–16, 120–1, 125, 127–30,
146, 152, 155–61
Rodowick, David N.  2–3, 18–19, 72
science fiction  121
scopophilia, Freud’s concept  20
Scream  95, 97
semi-subjective image  33
sexual difference, film and viewer  11
Hollywood films’ handling of  22
Mulvey’s project  22–3
psychoanalytic theory  22
slasher films,
Bergson’s philosophical
­method  82–3
195
Clover’s concept  83
Deleuzian feminist
analysis  81–2
ethological approach  89–92
film–viewer,
affective perception  99–106
film–viewer assemblage  82
Final Girl see Final Girl
spectator and spectatorship  7
Carol Clover’s views on  11
females  24
issue of  28
Spellbound  63
Stern, Daniel  135, 144
subject formation,
Lacan’s theory  18–19
process of  19
subjectivity  33–4
Suspiria  77
tetravalent model of assemblage  9
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre  92
third-generation feminist
­philosophers  3
A Thousand Plateaus  2, 7–8, 59, 62,
91, 117
Time Code  73
The Time-Image (Cinema 2), 1–2
Deleuze views  9
time-image  58, 71–3
transcendental empiricism  16–17
transcendental subject,
Baudry’s views  26
cinematic apparatus for feminist
film theory  25, 33
illusion for spectator  26
monocular perspective  25–7
voyeurism, Freud’s work on  18
Williams, Linda  49–50, 58, 77, 81,
83, 124
Women’s Pictures: Feminism and
Cinema  23
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