A Pedagogy of Cinema

A Pedagogy of Cinema

Foreword by Michael A. Peters

David R. Cole
Western Sydney University, Australia

and

Joff P.N. Bradley

Teikyo University, Japan
A C.I.P. record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

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 PRAISE FOR
A PEDAGOGY OF CINEMA

“A Pedagogy of Cinema builds upon Deleuze’s emphasis on ‘cinema-thinking’

to provide new approaches to enhancing and articulating the role of affect and
movement in thinking with images, and to map these transversal relations onto
the context of education. Creative, inventive and generative, this book provides an
accessible introduction to Deleuze’s ideas and draws attention to the ethico-political
dimensions of learning.”
– Stephanie Springgay, School of Education, The University of Toronto, Canada

“Rather than offering a set of guidelines or a programmatic sketch of a new approach

to teaching film, this book enacts its pedagogy of cinema, taking the reader on a
strange, exhilarating trip through fascinating analyses of cinematic images. Cole and
Bradley’s book works on you at a level that cannot be called simply conscious, re-
orienting your perception of the cinematic image and its affects. Once you’ve read
it, there is simply no way to go back to teaching film as it has been institutionalized
in schools.”
– Nathan Snaza, School of Education, University of Richmond, USA

“This outstanding new book asks a vital question for our time. How can we educate
effectively in a digitalized, corporatized, Orwellian-surveillance-controlled,
globalized world? This question is equally a challenge asked of our ability to think
outside of the limiting parameters of the control society, and the forces which daily
propel us ever-quicker towards worldwide homogenization. With great lucidity, Cole
and Bradley offer us profound hope in Gilles Deleuze’s increasingly popular notion
of ‘cine-thinking’. They explore and explain the potential that this sophisticated
idea holds for learning, in an easy going and accessible way, and with a range of
fantastic films: from ‘Suspiria’ and ‘Performance’ through to ‘Under the Skin’ and
‘Snowpiercer’. This extremely engaging and compelling text is likely to enliven
scholars and students everywhere.
– David Martin-Jones, Film and Television Studies, University of Glasgow, UK

“Bradley and Cole’s new book uses cinema as an affective tool to think outside
the control systems that seek to hem us in. For teachers and scholars of film
studies, it offers an engaging way to use films themselves as desiring-machines to
undermine the globalised images of late capitalism and the passive, institutionalised
modes of response encouraged in young people. Deleuze and Guattari’s method of
schizoanalysis is presented not as another method of writing about cinema but as a
method of using the medium to change the way we think, feel and act.
 Cole and Bradley’s innovative project demonstrates how the mental relations
of film work on us through affective formations. Their well-chosen case-studies
range from generic ‘classics’ (Hitchcock, horror films) to the avant-garde. The
authors’ perspectives, informed by passionately engaged experience of teaching in
international institutions, make compelling reading. Ample images from film and
video are provided to illustrate their methodology. A memorable discussion of Arthur
Lipsett’s short films of urban life both validates an original but little-known auteur
and shows how a delirious scrambling of the codes enables us to think the world anew
through movement and time. Experimental documentaries on the theme of war are
deployed to assert that the flux of time-matter encourages more direct participation
than a ‘representation’ based approach. Bradley and Cole’s commendable foray
into subversive thinking-through-film uses the affect of this familiar but powerful
medium as a counter force to globalisation. Their film-philosophical intervention
into the pedagogy of cinema has never been so urgently needed as now.”
– Anna Powell, Reader in film and philosophy, Manchester Metro University,
UK

“A Pedagogy of Cinema manages to do what so many works fail to – elide the over-
worked gap between theory and practice to come up with a genuinely useful and
nuanced approach to teaching film amid the complexities of contemporary academia.
Packed with excellent suggestions about how to keep the forces of consumer culture
at bay, this series of insightful articles presents the teacher and researcher with a
stable, sensible grounding in how to work with film in the classroom and, more
importantly, why. The central concept of ‘cinema-thinking,’ amply developed here
as a unique and important way of thinking about, through and with film, will prove
invaluable for researchers, theorists, teachers and students.”
– Michael Pronko, Professor, Meiji Gakuin University, Tokyo, Japan
 TABLE OF CONTENTS

Foreword: A Pedagogy of Perception xi

Michael A. Peters

Acknowledgementsxvii

List of Illustrations xix

Chapter 1: Introduction to ‘A Pedagogy of Cinema’ 1

Introduction1
Why Deleuze? 3
‘A Pedagogy of Cinema’: Beyond ‘1, 2, 3’ Cinemas 7
Cinema-Thinking, ‘A Pedagogy of Cinema’ and Education 8
Chapters of the Book 11

Chapter 2: The Fundamentals of Horror and Learning 17

Introduction17
‘Suspiria’ – The Logic of Entrapment 19
Cronenberg – What Can a Body Do? 23
What Is ‘Under the Skin’? 29
Conclusion32

Chapter 3: Decoding through Cinema: The Case of Arthur Lipsett 35

Introduction35
Part 1 36
‘21–87’38
Force Field 41
Youth and the Pedagogy of Cinema 41
Collage as a Scrambling of Codes (Decoding) 44
BwO48
Lipsett, Time and Utopia 50
Les Puissances Du Faux52
Part 2 53
Breakdown53
Celebration of Man Who Builds ‘Controlled Hysteria out of Abstract
Images’56
Conclusion56

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Chapter 4: Bohemianism and Pedagogy [in and out] of the Cinema 59

Introduction59
What Can We Do with an East End Gangster? The Teaching and Learning
of ‘Performance’ 60
Towards a Fabulation in/of Image: Greenaway and the Invention of New
Cinema66
God is Dead: The Image Has Killed Him … Russell and ‘The Devils’ 71
Conclusion75

Chapter 5: Semio-Materialism and the Master of Relations 79

A 1,2; A 1,2,3,4: Peirce’s ‘Thirdness’ and Zeroness 87
H2O 93
Conclusion94

Chapter 6: Congruent Theories of Time, Image and Education 99

Introduction99
‘Brazil’: One Step Forward, Two Steps Back to the Image of the Future 100
Thinking Time with Memory: Multiple Ways to Distort the Passage of
Time (‘Memento’) 104
Flight through a Frozen Landscape: ‘Snowpiercer’ and Revolution 108
The Image of Impending Collision: ‘Melancholia’ and the End of the
World113
Conclusion117

Chapter 7: The Cinema of a ‘New Real’: Learning from within Images 121
Introduction121
The Crisis of Mental Images 123
The Light of Logos 124
From Any-Space-Whatevers to Any-Warzones-Whatever 126
Virilio and Cinema 127
The Promise of Pharmacological Cinema 129
Super-8136
Lazzarato and Video Philosophy 137
Cave Philosophy and the Troglodyte within 138
Conclusion140

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 TABLE OF CONTENTS

Chapter 8: Conclusion to ‘A Pedagogy of Cinema’ 145

Introduction145
Non-Place and Any-Space-Whatever 145
The Chapters of This Book and the Value of ‘a Pedagogy of Cinema’ 147
Conclusion155

Index157

ix
 FOREWORD
A Pedagogy of Perception

At last a book on cinema and pedagogy! And one that takes its critical orientation
from Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy of cinema. David R. Cole and Joff P.N. Bradley’s
A Pedagogy of Cinema certainly fills a gap, one might say a rather large and gaping
hole. While there have been some studies of pedagogy of cinema they are few in
number and relatively under-theorised. In an age of visual culture, YouTube with
over a billion users reaches more 18–34 and 18–49 year-olds than any cable network
in the U.S. Some 4 billion videos are viewed every day. Film and media education,
long part of the British education system is not yet established as a subfield in its
own right, and while media studies has been established in universities and schools
in many Western countries, a cinema for transformation and social change in our
schools is a long way off. In the coming age of visual culture, the book as a printed
form takes second place to the moving image—to video, film and TV—a pedagogy
of cinema ought to provide some guides to critical and transformative practice.
In “An Anthropological Introduction to YouTube” Michael Wesch (2008)
indicates that YouTube produced more hours of broadcasting in six months than
ABC has since it began broadcasting in 1948, that is, YouTube adds 9232 hours
every day, the equivalent of 200,000 three-minute videos, without producers and
most of the material is new. YouTube was launched in 2005.
We now live in a world of ‘visual cultures’, in a world of remediation and cross-
mediation in which experience of content both appears in multiple forms and
migrates from one form to another (Bolter, 2001). Reality is mediated as are social
relations. The language of the new social media is easily programmable given its
algorithmic character and its numerical coding allows for the automation of many of
its functions including media creation. New media are variable and interactive, and
no longer tied to technologies of exact reproduction such as copying (Manovitch,
2000). They are part of a wider paradigm and system that Castells (2000) calls
‘informational capitalism’ which is a new technological paradigm and mode of
development characterized by information generation, processing, and transmission
that have become the fundamental sources of productivity and power. More and
more of this information is increasingly either image-based or comes to us in the
form of moving images.
We now live also in a socially networked universe in which the material
conditions for the formation, circulation, and utilization of knowledge and learning
are rapidly changing from an industrial to information and media-based economy.
Increasingly, the emphasis has fallen on knowledge, learning and media systems,
and networks that depend upon the acquisition of new skills of image manipulation
and understanding as a central aspect of development considered in personal,

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FOREWORD

community, regional, national and global contexts. These mega-trends signal both
changes in the production and consumption of symbolic visual goods, and also
associated changes in their contexts of use.
The radical concordance of image, text and sound, and development of new
information/knowledge infrastructures have encouraged the emergence of a global
media networks, linked with telecommunications that signal the emergence of a
Euro-American consumer culture based on the rise of edutainment media, and a
set of information utility conglomerates. What new subjectivities are constituted
through social media and what role does image control play in this process? What
new possibilities do the new media afford students for educational autonomy? What
distinctive forms of immaterial labor and affect do social and image-based media
create? And what is the transformational potential of new image-based media that
link education to its radical historical mission? Cinema has a special place in this
media constellation as a critical medium linked to avant-garde, the documentary and
pedagogical agendas.
Cinema is also a popular medium that powerfully shapes the production of
meaning, reflecting back to us moving images that create visual experience and
influence the public memory. Those in the field of critical pedagogy and cultural
studies mights argue that cinema as a site of cultural politics, has the power to mask
and negate current realities or to challenge them. Cole and Bradley’s analysis raises
questions about simple opposition or ideology-critique. While they agree with a view
in critical media studies dating from Adorno and developed strongly by Habermas
that the fundamental means of communication in a capitalist society are distorted;
by contrast, a ‘pedagogy of cinema’ is an affirmative praxis of ‘cinema-thinking’
considered as a world political task to rethink the future of education in ‘societies of
control’ (Deleuze, 1995a).
Deleuze (1995b) provides an analysis of the cinematic image according to a
threefold periodization: What is there to see behind the image? What is there to see
on the surface of the image? And, what can we see at all when the background of any
image is always another image? Corresponding to each question, is a stage of cinema
based upon the changing function of the image. The first period characterized by
the art of montage ascribes a depth to the image in a universal scenography, where
filmmakers in the critical tradition, still buoyed by a metaphysical optimism of the
new medium, sought to forge a link between the new Art and a new Thought that was
capable of providing an encyclopedia of the world. In the second age, characterized
by the ‘sequence shot’ and new forms of composition, the new function of the image
was “a pedagogy of perception, taking the place of an encyclopedia of the world that
had fallen apart” (p. 70). As Deleuze notes “Depth was condemned as ‘deceptive,’
and the image took on the flatness of a ‘surface without depth”’ (pp. 60–70); and:
Images were no longer linked in an unambiguous order of cuts and continuities
but became subject to relinkings, constantly revised and reworked across cuts
and false continuities…

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 FOREWORD

The emergence of the third period reflects a change in the function of the image
and a third set of relations where it is no longer what is there to see behind the
image, nor how we can see the image itself – it’s how we can find a way into
it, how we can slip in, because each image now slips across other images, ‘the
background in any image is always another image,’ and the vacant gaze is a
contact lens. (pp. 70–71)
Deleuze mentions two different factors in the new relation between images. The
internal development of cinema which seeks new audio-visual combinations and
pedagogies, and; the internal development of television which takes on a social
function and, therefore, operates on a different level. Just as the critical impulse of
the first great age of cinema was manipulated by the authoritarian power of fascism,
so too, “the new social power of the postwar period, one of surveillance or control,
threatened to kill the second form of cinema” (p. 71). The threat this time comes
from “the way that all images present the single image of my vacant gaze contacting
a non-nature, a privileged spectator allowed into the wings, in contact with the
image, entering into the image” (p. 72).
Thus, the studio audience is one of the most highly rated forms of entertainment
and the zoom has become television’s standard technique. As Deleuze argues:
“The encyclopedia of the world and the pedagogy of perception collapse to
make room for a professional training of the eye, a world of controllers and
controlled communing in their admiration for technology, mere technology.
The contact lens everywhere. This is where your critical optimism turns into
critical pessimism” (p. 72). Television threatens the second death of critical
cinema because it is ‘the form in which the new powers of ‘control’ become
immediate and direct’ (p. 75). Deleuze continues:
To get to the heart of the confrontation you’d almost have to ask whether this
control might be reversed, harnessed by the supplementary function opposed
to power; whether one could develop an art of control that would be a kind
of new form of resistance. Taking the battle to the heart of cinema, making
cinema see it as its problem instead of coming upon it from the outside; that’s
what Burroughs did in literature, by substituting the viewpoint of control and
controllers for that of authors and authority. (p. 75)
According to Deleuze, we now live in a universe that could be described as
metacinematic and his classification of images implies a new kind of camera
consciousness that determines our subjectivities and perceptions selves. We live
in a visual culture that is always moving and changing and each image is always
connected to an assemblage of affects and forces. There are three types of cinematic
movement-images: perception images (that focus on what is seen), affection images
(that focus on expressions of feeling) and action images (that focus on the duration
of action), each type associated with long shots, close-ups and medium shots.

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FOREWORD

Deleuze’s work on cinema is not a history of cinema, but rather, a taxonomy, an

attempt at the classifications of images and signs by means of Bergson and Peirce.
It is a great relief to have a serious account of Deleuze’s philosophy of cinema made
available to educational theorists and to teachers. Cole and Bradley have done a
great service.
Consider the way in which the philosophy of cinema is tied to ‘old-fashioned’
representational notions of epistemology—of knowledge as accurate representation—
and the significance of making Deleuze’s (1989a, 1989b) philosophy of cinema
available and accessible takes on a crucial dimension in the development of a
‘pedagogy of cinema.’ In Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature Rorty (1979)
discusses the ancient conceit that the mind has an eye with which it inspects the
mirror to argue that the notion of knowledge as accurate representation is optional
and arbitrary. Philosophy has for too long been dominated by Greek ocular metaphors
that makes a separation between contemplation and action. Rorty wants to replaces
this vocabulary with a pragmatist conception that eliminates this contrast:
The notion of knowledge as the assemblage of accurate representations is
optional—that it may be replaced by a pragmatist conception of knowledge
which eliminates the Greek contrast between contemplation and action,
between representing the world and coping with it. A historical epoch
dominated by Greek ocular metaphors may, I suggest, yield to one in which
the philosophical vocabulary incorporating these metaphors seems as quaint as
the animistic vocabulary of pre-classical. (p. 11)
In his now classic work Downcast Eyes the critical philosopher Martin Jay (1993)
takes it upon himself to demonstrate the ubiquity of visual metaphors that permeate
Western languages often in occluded and dormant forms and imbue our cultural and
social practices (see also Jay, 2005). He comments that exosomatic technologies
(the telescope and microscope) have extended the scope and range of vision to
encourage an occularcentric science. And he cites the philosopher Mark Wartofsky
who provides a radical cultural reading of vision, arguing all perception is a result
of changes in representation. Jay’s argument is that contemporary French thought is
“imbued with a profound suspicion of vision and its hegemonic role in the modern
era” (p. 14).
The pervasiveness of metaphors of light and sight in classical Greek works can
be readily seen in Homer and Plato who uses the sun as a metaphor for ‘illumination’
and indicates that the eye is peculiar among sense organs in that it needs light to
operate. The classical Greeks have been called ‘people of the eye,’ because they
favoured the visual sense that extended to their most fundamental concepts such
as the distinction between knowing (being seen) and contemplation. Heidegger
was influential in providing an account of the metaphysics underlying Greek
philosophy in terms of vision and visibility. As Jussi Backman (2015) explains
Heidegger’s account of Western metaphysics “is rooted in a metaphysics of
presence” (p. 16). Being means presence and ‘seeing’ is a means of grasping what

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 FOREWORD

is there to paraphrase Heidegger. Backman explains: “Seeing is the paradigmatic

metaphysical sense because it affords a particular kind of access to being as
present” (p. 16).
Why is it that after almost 150 years of the history of film and the development
of motion-picture technology that the ‘pedagogy of cinema’ has lagged behind?
Hopefully Cole and Bradley’s book will begin to change this situation.

REFERENCES
Backman, J. (2015). Towards a genealogy of the metaphysics of sight; seeing, hearing and thinking
in Heraclitus. In A. Cimino & P. Kontos (Eds.), Phenomenology and the metaphysics of sight
(pp. 11–34). Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill.
Bolter, J. (2001). Writing space: Computers, hypertext, and the remediation of print. Oxford: Routledge.
Castells, M. (1996). The rise of the networked society. Oxford: Blackwell.
Deleuze, G. (1989a). Cinema: The movement image (H. Tomlinson & B. Habberjam, Trans.). Minnesota,
MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Deleuze, G. (1989b). The time image (H. Tomlinson & R. Galeta, Trans.). Minnesota, MN: University of
Minnesota Press.
Deleuze, G. (1995a). Postscript on control societies. In Negotiations, 1972–1990 (M. Joughin, Trans.,
pp. 177–182). New York, NY: Columbia University Press.
Deleuze, G. (1995b). Letter to Serge Daney: Optimism, pessimism, and travel. In Negotiations,
1972–1990 (M. Joughin, Trans., pp. 68–80). New York: Columbia University Press.
Jay, M. (1993). Downcast eyes: The denigration of vision in 20th-century French thought. Berkeley, CA:
University of California Press
Jay, M. (Ed.). (2005, August). The state of visual culture studies. Themed issue of Journal of Visual
Culture, 4(2).
Manovich, L. (2000). The language of new media. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Rorty, R. (1979). Philosophy and the mirror of nature. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Wesch, M. (2008). An anthropological introduction to YouTube. Retrieved from http://mediatedcultures.net/
youtube/an-anthropological-introduction-to-youtube-presented-at-the-library-of-congress/

Michael A. Peters
University of Waikato

xv
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

David R. Cole would like to thank Dr Karin Mackay (Western Sydney University)
for collaborating on Figure 1 of this book. He would also like to thank Professor
Margaret Somerville, Associate Professor Susanne Gannon and Dr Roberto Parada
for their respective comments on various aspect of ‘a pedagogy of cinema’.
Discussions with the UNSW theory/reading group have also helped to crystallise
the ideas in this book.
There are a large number of figures in the following pages. These figures are
taken from films that are integral to ‘a pedagogy of cinema’. Every reasonable effort
has been made to make sure that the copyright rules have not been infringed in any
way. The authors would like to thank the copyright holders who have responded
positively to having their images used in this academic book as an important aspect
of the argument. However, if you are a copyright holder for any of the images
used here, and you object to their use, please let us know, and your images will be
withdrawn from this publication immediately.
The idea of A Pedagogy of Cinema began to take shape at the top of Osaka castle
in June, 2014. Our conversation that hot day that was not on the famous landmark
and its historical role in uniting Japan but on the significance of films – famous
or otherwise – which think. Looking to the vast metropolis in the distance, our
ideas that pleasant afternoon were not fortress-like, paranoid or sedentary but flew,
danced, zigzagged, spiralled and schizzed: they connected with all manner of strange
becomings. We felt our ideas were engaged and free and so, as Deleuze says, nothing
was compromised.
Special thanks from Joff P.N. Bradley to Michael Dancsok, the number one ‘go
to’ man on Lipsett, who stirred Bradley’s interest in collage film at Meiji Gakuin
University in Tokyo.

xvii
 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Figure 1. © Karin Mackay (2016). ‘A Pedagogy of Cinema’. Selected

films put to work alongside continental theory – that revolve
around the locus of Deleuze’s Cinema books – and the concept
of cinema. ‘A pedagogy of cinema’ is not an imposition on
cinema or pedagogy, but emerges as a result of the process of
‘cinema-thinking’. The process of cinema-thinking is akin to
an ethology of images, in that the choice of films, or, empirical
instances of image, provide evidence for claims about
‘a pedagogy of cinema’ without blurring the cinema-thinking
in the films, but rather by enhancing and articulating it. 4
Figure 2. Illustration of A Thousand Plateaus, chapter 1, paragraph 6
(Ngui, 2012): “Any point of a rhizome can be connected
to anything other, and must be;” and, “A rhizome ceaselessly
establishes connections between semiotic chains, organizations
of power, and circumstances relative to the arts, sciences,
and social struggles”. (Deleuze & Guattari, 1988, p. 7 emphasis
added)10
Figure 3. Suzy Bannon in the cityscape room 21
Figure 4. Dead bodies in a hall 21
Figure 5. Suzy Bannon exiting a corridor 21
Figure 6. Suzy Bannon meeting the governess on her arrival
at the academy 21
Figure 7. (i) The ‘Mugwumps’ secrete an addictive fluid that is ‘milked’ 27
Figure 8. (ii) Dr. Helen Remington and Gabriella ‘coupling’
in the back of Vaughan’s wrecked car 27
Figure 9. (iii) The gun coming out of the TV screen 27
Figure 10. (iii) The video insertion pocket in Max Renn’s torso 27
Figure 11. The alien and disfigured man in the ‘dark place’ 31
Figure 12. Close up of iris in abstract sequence at beginning of film 31
Figure 13. Red laser light coming from a slit in abstract sequence
after the blue man has been absorbed 31
Figure 14. Floating blue man after being picked up by the alien and
taken to the ‘dark place’ 31
Figure 15. A semiotic questioning of the direction of society 37
Figure 16. Eyes often look up or elsewhere, beyond the camera’s reach 37
Figure 17. Images of eyes and teeth signifying health and happiness 37
Figure 18. ‘Happiness’ is juxtaposed with images of nuclear bomb tests 37
Figure 19. America is at a crossroads. Keep moving right ahead, please 37

xix
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Figure 20. Images of contorted faces as death hovers above 37

Figure 21. Technology as a panacea for social ills? 38
Figure 22. The face says it all. A concern for the present and future 38
Figure 23. Passage from becoming-robot of man to robotic society as such 39
Figure 24. Lipsett mounts a critique of technology 39
Figure 25. ‘21–87’ shows the paranoid eyes of those caught by the camera 39
Figure 26. Lipsett thinks the cruelty of US civil society by observing a monkey 39
Figure 27. Simulacrum of beauty juxtaposed with contorted inhuman images 40
Figure 28. A concern with the fate and future of a society hell bent on
technological determinism 40
Figure 29. Frenetic movement exposes the inhuman, animality and
negative capacity of jazz 40
Figure 30. The finale of ‘21–87’ is the circus and spectacle 40
Figure 31. Searching for ‘the Force’ AND for all manner of secret codes 45
Figure 32. The detective finds a Latin dictionary to uncover the
meaning of words 45
Figure 33. An abstract chakra to diagram the madness of civilisation 45
Figure 34. A play of masks and identities 45
Figure 35. Deconstruction of identity and a process of becoming-other 46
Figure 36. A concern with decodification 46
Figure 37. Linguistic codes are assessed for what they may reveal 46
Figure 38. The audience witnesses the finale of the process of
scrambling the codes 46
Figure 39. Chas (James Fox) an East End gangster 62
Figure 40. The clutter and detail of the bohemian hideaway 62
Figure 41. ‘Extreme’ hoodlum behaviour, killing victims for extortion
money in gangsterland 63
Figure 42. Pherber (Pallenberg) and Turner (Jagger) face each other
across a mirror with Chas watching 63
Figure 43. The Deuce twins laugh with Alba in bed while her daughter
βeta makes a puzzle of the world and plays a record in the
foreground ‘Z00’ 69
Figure 44. The Deuce twins submit to an army of snails crawling
over their bodies whilst recording the results in ‘Z00’ 69
Figure 45. A bicycle-cow collision, and deaths numbers 78 & 79
from ‘Drowning by Numbers’ 69
Figure 46. The 3 women called ‘Cissie Colpitts’ in ‘Drowning by
Numbers’ relax with sheep and Madgett. Death 91 is
marked on the tree 69
Figure 47. The nuns ‘worshipping’ in the white convent in Loudun
with the hunchback Jeannes de Anges at the front 73
Figure 48. Jeannes des Anges hallucinates that Urbain Grandier is
Christ, and she ‘attends’ to his wounds 73

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 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Figure 49. Louis XIII stages ‘the dance of Venus’ to his delighted courtiers 73
Figure 50. The ‘witch hunter’ Father Pierre Barre clutching ‘holy’ remains
between the King (in disguise) and de Anges 73
Figure 51. The face reveals all 80
Figure 52. The distorted, increasingly amplified voice of the
nosey neighbour 80
Figure 53. We read the guilt-ridden face with panicking eyes 81
Figure 54. The camera focuses on the eyes, as they dart from left to right 81
Figure 55. The camera moves from the eyes to the knife 81
Figure 56. The tension builds through the distortion of the voice
until the knife is thrown 81
Figure 57. Seconds pass to let the intensity build 81
Figure 58. The shrieking of the word ‘knife’ leads to the knife’s release 81
Figure 59. Momentum builds: no words but the camera speaks volumes 86
Figure 60. Repetitive, violent sound. Mental relations create
meaning – passing from shower to murdered body 86
Figure 61. From multiple perspectives, liquid expressivity of
inhuman affect 86
Figure 62. Surrealist and German expressionistic influence. The passage
from plug hole to eye 86
Figure 63. The eye watches on 86
Figure 64. Meaning is passed from the eye to the object at hand 86
Figure 65. Hitchcock moves the camera from the eye to the newspaper
to the Bates home 87
Figure 66. Moments later Norman Bates runs back to the scene
of the crime 87
Figure 67. Lint in a mask, psychologically tortures Lowry 101
Figure 68. Welcome to the Ministry of Information! 101
Figure 69. Lowry exiting his vehicle on the street 102
Figure 70. Lowry using the information machines to track a
bureaucratic error with Kurtzman waiting anxiously 102
Figure 71. Leonard and the ‘map’ of tattoos on his body to help
him remember the past 106
Figure 72. Leonard confronts Teddy about his wife’s disappearance
with a gun 106
Figure 73. Leonard and Natalie ‘read’ Leonard’s tattoos in the mirror 106
Figure 74. Advertising poster for ‘Memento’ showing mock
polaroid ‘memory’ images 106
Figure 75. Exterior shot of the train and the frozen environment 111
Figure 76. Curtis Everett stands up at the back of the train and
begins the revolt 111
Figure 77. The engine at the front of the train and the dwelling of Wilford 111
Figure 78. Everett’s mentor and mastermind behind the revolt, Gilliam 111

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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Figure 79. Image of the bride Justine strolling past some trees
with trailing reeds 115
Figure 80. Justine senses power surging through her as
‘Melancholia’ approaches 115
Figure 81. Justine, Claire and Leo (Claire’s son) wait for the collision
between planets in their ‘magic hut’ 115
Figure 82. The new planet ‘‘Melancholia’’ dominates the night sky as
it approaches the Earth 115
Figure 83. Post-war Kosovo, any-warzone-whatever 125
Figure 84. Homeless families in Jakarta, Indonesia 125
Figure 85. Cinematic exploration of a-signifying rupture 125
Figure 86. Any-space-whatever merging with non-places 125
Figure 87. Ramallah, the West Bank 125
Figure 88. Tear gas and bullets: precarious subjectivity 125
Figure 89. The photographer and viewer have no time for reflection
but must engage the flow of images 125
Figure 90. A sulphur mine at Ijen in East Java, Indonesia 125
Figure 91. First-person shooter Call of Duty –
technology-mediated atrocities 130
Figure 92. ‘Collateral Murder’ represents the confusion of reality,
fiction and entertainment 130
Figure 93. Tomb Raider sets the precedent many will follow 130
Figure 94. Gus Van Sant’s ‘Elephant’, depicts the events of the
Columbine High School massacre in 1999. The spectator
is paralysed, a mere ‘seer’ 130
Figure 95. German Concentration Camps Factual Study (‘Night Will Fall’) 131
Figure 96. Paralysed witnesses to man’s inhumanity to man.
What is left is but to bear witness 131
Figure 97. The images of hell in Belsen, Buchenwald, Dachau,
Auschwitz must be seen 131
Figure 98. A long lens to ward off claims that Hitchcock is
manipulating the desires of his audience 131
Figure 99. Representation of the immobility of the movement image 132
Figure 100. Jeffries must watch on mentally as his body is paralysed 132
Figure 101. Again, Hitchcock masterfully generates meaning from
the movement of the camera 133
Figure 102. The eye watches on: from past life to present stasis 133
Figure 103. The photographer is paralysed physically and mentally.
Hitchcock shows the trauma of both the viewer and
the photographer 133
Figure 104. The covetous gaze becomes the gaze of the camera lens 133
Figure 105. Psychosomatic irritation of the male gaze 133
Figure 106. Scopophilia is not limited to the male gaze 133

xxii
 CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION TO ‘A PEDAGOGY OF CINEMA’

INTRODUCTION

This book will explore the concept of cinema (Figure 1) through ‘a pedagogy of
cinema’ by drawing on images from specific films, and by applying, reconfiguring
and redirecting continental philosophy, especially with reference to the work of
Gilles Deleuze. The context for this discussion is the intoxicatingly parlous state of
education systems across the planet – a point which was obliquely recognised during
the 1970s by Ivan Illich and Etienne Verne:
The institutionalization of permanent education will transform society into an
enormous planet sized classroom watched over by a few satellites. Only the
labels will enable one to distinguish it from an enormous hospital ward, from
a planetary mental home and from a penitentiary universe, where education,
punishment, medical care and imprisonment are synonymous. The industrial
method of teaching will be replaced by an even more destructive post-industrial
conditioning. (Illich & Verne, 1976, p. 20)
Of course, Illich and Verne could not have predicted all the ways that digital systems,
automatic cybernetic programming and invasive corporate management strategies
have conspired under the regime of financial capitalism since the 1970s. In many
ways, the situation is worse than could have been imagined. The basic problematic
and premise for this book is therefore: How can one begin to chart an outside to the
imagistic conditioning of the present educational system? One may surmise that ‘a
pedagogy of cinema’ is not a straightforward or conclusive answer to this question.
In fact, one could state that ‘a pedagogy of cinema’ raises more questions than it
answers, in that it requires a fundamental rethinking of pedagogy and cinema as
separate problematics, taken alongside a consideration of the requisite minor notions
of spectatorship, representation, complicity with images and learning. The context
for this study is mediated by the ways in which the myriad contemporary systems
of education are continuing to mesh together at an extraordinary pace and intensity
through the evolution of mobile digital technology.
As such, visual phenomena could be said to dominate the senses, for example,
through the attention-directedness in new mobile technologies, such as the Samsung
Galaxy G4, which allows one to manipulate technical devices with the blink of an
eye; yet the machine attracts and redirects the eye involuntarily back to the screen

1
Chapter 1

through Smart Scroll technology (Szendy, 2014). Faced with this new phenomenon,
one could argue that it is vital to find a definite, robust mode of thinking of the
educational outside to these image dominant modes of control. Consider, for
example, how students must ward off the demands of advertisers in order to study,
think and feel for themselves. Questions simultaneously arise as to why teachers
sometimes unthinkingly accept the invasiveness of the communication industries
in their classrooms. Parallel to the advertising envisaged in the 2002 neo-noir, sci-fi
film ‘Minority Report’, contemporary modes of attention-grabbing are increasingly
more insidious and invasive, as they are permanently in the hand, centimetres away
from our eyes, seemingly tracking every want and appetite.
The most pressing outside to the globalised educational system is ‘nature’, and
everything ‘not-human’ or non-human, and possessing a non-constructed image.
This outside has been previously referred to as ‘educational life-forms’ (Cole,
2011). These lifeforms flow through contemporary educational practice, though
are rarely utilised or worked into the daily routines of teachers and students, due to
the strict alignment of education with normative, humanist, sedentary, rational and
market-driven mores. Market-driven education encourages competition on all levels
between individuals through continuous assessment, and henceforth reconfigures
all bodies in the system, including: schools, universities, students, teachers and
administrators, and turns them into what Deleuze (1992a) designates as ‘dividuals’
(p. 5), or individuals who have recoded themselves and have been recoded to
function efficiently in the contemporary, global, mega-corporate situation, or what
Guattari (1989) refers to as Integrated World Capitalism (IWC). ‘Dividuals’ are
also mentioned by Deleuze (1992b) in his first Cinema book in terms of what
happens when a shot in film is framed (p. 14). There is therefore a synchronicity
and parallel that underlies this book between the ways in which individuals are
recoded and remade according to the dictates of the ‘Societies of Control’ and the
dynamic framing of cinema culture. ‘A pedagogy of cinema’ works through the
relationships between recoding and image to explore the societal, psychical and
political ramifications for education.
To a greater or lesser extent, these processes of ‘dividualisation’ are happening
chaotically, unconsciously and subliminally throughout education, or through what
Deleuze and Guattari refer to in their earlier work, Anti-Oedipus, as ‘anti-production’
(see Cole, 2013a). Anti-production is important for appreciating the workings of ‘a
pedagogy of cinema’ because of the multiple ways in which production, consumerism
and education are currently aligned, or as Guattari expressed it: “It is impossible
to separate the production of any consumer commodity from the institution that
supports that production. The same can be said of teaching, training and research.
The State machine and the machine of repression produce anti-production, that is
to say signifiers that exist to block and prevent the emergence of any subjective
process” (Guattari, 1984, p. 34). In other words, ‘a pedagogy of cinema’ contests
the ways anti-production nestles and insinuates itself in the forces of production

2
 Introduction to ‘A Pedagogy of Cinema’

‘in thought’ per se, and in ways that subtly align and realign thinking with the
smooth functioning of capitalism. ‘A pedagogy of cinema’ recognises that desire
is conditioned and sanctioned through the unconscious enforcement procedures in
education institutions, and looks to cinema as a means to address and counter this
process. Furthermore, ‘a pedagogy of cinema’ understands that there is no easily
reached ‘outside’ to the processes which we wish to counter. There is no pre-
fabricated utopia beckoning on the horizon or readily obtainable panacea for the
ills of Integrated World Capitalism. Indeed, the outside is in many ways always-
already co-opted, marketed and recuperated to function as a buttress to sustain
system dynamics. Rather, the possibility of this writing is a careful theorisation and
empirical choice of films to constitute a robust and compelling case for ‘a pedagogy
of cinema’ as an activity in the world that releases the concept of cinema from any
one overly determined fixture or narrow point of view (Figure 1).

WHY DELEUZE?

Amongst the panoply of continental thinkers that have seriously considered cinema
as a fully developed concept, and able to be used in this book, Gilles Deleuze (1992b,
2005), and his two books on film, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image and Cinema 2:
The Time-Image, stands out as conspicuous examples of ‘cinema-thinking’. In
contrast, thinkers in the critical theory tradition, such as Henry Giroux (2001),
have predominantly used film to represent or illustrate a particular take on critical
pedagogy. In other words, critical theorists, with a pre-formed and dogmatic sense
of what pedagogy is, tend to overlay cinema with pedagogy, in the case of Giroux,
to enable understanding of the rampant social effects of capitalism. Whilst there is
nothing inherently wrong with this approach, especially if handled sensitively, and
with the effects of capitalism not perniciously augmented; ‘a pedagogy of cinema’
suggests that to overlay cinema with critical pedagogy can lead to banal, repetitious
and clichéd forms of analysis, that can fail to consider cinema as a concept in itself or
evolve the type of cinema-thinking that ‘a pedagogy of cinema’ demands. Pieter-Jan
Decoster and Nancy Vansieleghem (2013) are similarly critical of Giroux’s approach
to film studies. They argue that critical pedagogy approaches to film are insufficiently
subtle to grasp the many ways in which cinema could be used in education. From
their point of view and following Jameson, Deleuze’s Cinema books are suggestive of
modes of new cinema thinking because: “Deleuze’s cinema philosophy has nothing
whatsoever to do with film illustrating a philosophical concept, because concepts of
cinema for Deleuze ‘are filmic concepts, and not ideational or linguistic’ (Jameson,
1991, p. 125)” (Decoster & Vansieleghem, 2013, p. 10). In other words, cinema-
thinking and ‘a pedagogy of cinema’ actually reside within the films themselves and
within the ways in which specific films, continental theory focusing on Deleuze, and
the concept of cinema (Figure 1) operate together. The basic organizational diagram
for this book can be expressed thus:

3
Chapter 1

Figure 1. © Karin Mackay (2016). ‘A Pedagogy of Cinema’. Selected films put to work
alongside continental theory – that revolve around the locus of Deleuze’s Cinema books –
and the concept of cinema. ‘A pedagogy of cinema’ is not an imposition on cinema or
pedagogy, but emerges as a result of the process of ‘cinema-thinking’. The process of
cinema-thinking is akin to an ethology of images, in that the choice of films, or, empirical
instances of image, provide evidence for claims about ‘a pedagogy of cinema’ without
blurring the cinema-thinking in the films, but rather by enhancing and articulating it.

Two questions may be raised with respect to the diagram above and the overall
plan of this book: (1) What is continental theory in this context, and is it entirely
dependent on Deleuze’s work? (2) Does ‘a pedagogy of cinema’ apply only to certain
types of films, i.e. art-house, alternative or experimental, so-called Second Cinema
or auteur theory, or can cinema-thinking come about due to any type of cinematic
representation, Hollywood or otherwise?
In response to the first question, Deleuze’s (1992b, 2005) unique synthesis of
thinkers such as the philosopher Henry Bergson, the film-maker Sergei Eisenstein
and the semiotician and mathematician C.S. Peirce in his Cinema books, directly
lends itself to further explication/elaboration. Deleuze worked in the continental
mindset in the sense that his thinking and philosophical projects were resolutely non-
reductionist. Yet his ideas simultaneously give themselves to empirical verification,
in the analytic-empiricist mode of thought, which can be highly critical of any
continental ‘bloatedness’ with respect to the application and development of theory
for its own sake. In contrast to thinkers such as Alan Badiou and Jacques Rancière,

4
 Introduction to ‘A Pedagogy of Cinema’

who have written about cinema in a more traditionally continental mode, wherein the
film examples serve to colour and fill out their critical-humanist theories on cinema
or social-aesthetic processes, in a similar manner to Henry Giroux with respect
to critical pedagogy – Deleuze inhabits a hybrid, transversal, trans-disciplinary
position, with one foot seemingly in the continental camp and the other tentatively
hovering around an oddly analytical-continental position.
If for Deleuze, à la Benjamin, continental theory positions the spectator as a
distracted critic, who thinks through and from within moving images; then ‘a
pedagogy of cinema’ as constructed in this book is a praxis of images and signs,
because it encourages the teacher and student to respond to the images intellectually
and affectively, and to consider in what respect cinema can be emancipatory.
However, ‘cinema-thinking’ is more than this, because of the role affect and the
unconscious play in Deleuze’s thought. It is event engineering or “a shock to thought,
communicating vibrations to the cortex, touching the nervous and cerebral system
directly” (Deleuze, 2005, p. 151). For Deleuze, cinema possesses a transformatory
aspect through the thought and affect-provoking effects of montage – a view
derived from Sergei Eisenstein – in a particular sense that it engineers the non-
dialectical ‘powers of the false’. In other words, cinema thinks otherwise than the
everyday, otherwise than the ‘un-world’ or immonde as it currently is. Contemporary
intellectuals such as Paulo Virilio and Bernard Stiegler have similarly attempted to
think cinema outside of the everyday and in the context of today’s mediated splurge
of digital devices and consequent pixelated forms to represent reality, owing much
in their approaches to the 1970s theorisations of Jean Baudrillard and Guy Debord.
In sum, and in response to question one, the ‘outside’ to the current educational
situation that this book will attempt to construct through a ‘pedagogy of cinema’
revolves around Deleuze’s Cinema books, yet recognises that there is parallel work
that has taken seriously the imperative to develop cinema-thinking.
With respect to question number 2, while it is interesting to note how Deleuze’s
Cinema books have been taken up, interpreted and critiqued in academic circles,
and this is not the place for a full exegesis of all the commentaries and the uses that
have been made of Deleuze’s concept of Cinema, it is correct to say that they have
not only been applied to art-house or alternative media. One of the problems with
the Cinema books is that they do seemingly imply an elite or restrictive audience
through the density of the theorisation and Deleuze’s sometimes obscure choice of
films. To remedy this potentially narrowing start-point to ‘a pedagogy of cinema’,
other theorists such as, Claire Colebrook, Felicity Colman, Patricia MacCormack,
Anna Powell and Ian Buchanan have undertaken a schizoanalysis of cinema.
Schizoanalysis as a materialist psychiatry built upon the work R. D. Laing, is
Deleuze and Guattari’s alternative to psychoanalysis, and Buchanan (2006) in
particular argues that it can be readily applied to the analysis of film. To do this,
he suggests that delirium could be the most significant aspect of film to analyse,
replacing the dreams and fantasy of psychoanalysis with a strategic deployment of
Deleuze’s and Guattari’s key concepts such as ‘the Body without Organs’ or BwO,

5
Chapter 1

‘the abstract machine’ and ‘assemblage’. Following this argument, schizoanalysis

could become an important method of film analysis if ‘BwOs’, ‘abstract machines’
and ‘assemblages’ are recognised, understood and discussed in film, as Deleuze and
Guattari (1988) had begun to do in A Thousand Plateaus. However, what exactly
the application of the BwO, abstract machines and assemblage would look like, how
these concepts may be applied together, and what a schizoanalysis of cinema means
is not at all clear, given that the delirium in cinematic examples, often portrayed as a
mode of social madness, would have different consequences in each film context in
terms of plot, character development and atmosphere.
While the discovery and attribution of delirium in film is thought-provoking – and
Slavoj Žižek’s work is exemplary in this respect – it could lead to a kind of conceptual
absolutism or self-fulfilling prophecy in terms of transforming and describing what
is seen in film to fit in with the over-coding schema of delirium identification; i.e.
creating ‘overly-determined nodes of delirium’ as film analysis. Moreover, there
appears little room in Deleuze studies for talk of the role ideology as delirium plays
in cinema à la Žižek, because what is primary is affect and unconscious, rather
than false consciousness. Schizoanalysis is a vital method for understanding how
capitalism affects us, and it is certainly a part of cinema-thinking, but one cannot
claim that it acts as a defining a priori assumption of ‘a pedagogy of cinema’. What,
in effect, ‘a pedagogy of cinema’ is then is a schizoanalysis by cinema rather than a
schizoanalysis of cinema.
As Deleuze’s Cinema books concern images and the ‘image of thought’, one
may assert that they construct ‘pedagogies of image’ – a term taken from the French
film critic, Serge Daney (Dowd, 2010). The image is the basic conceptual unit that
Deleuze deals with throughout his writing on cinema. The struggle and distinction
that Deleuze tries to reach and work throughout both Cinema books pivots on how
to dislodge the idea that the images in film are only tied to specific directorial and
editorial processes, or to the human agency that works behind the construction of the
images. Rather, the denotation and assignation of types of cinematic images signals
what Felicity Colman (2011) has called ‘ciné-system’ (pp. 9–25). In other words,
there is a ubiquitous yet processual and systematic manner in which images function
in cinema according to Deleuze, and this process can give rise to the cinema-thinking
that we are looking for in ‘a pedagogy of cinema’. There is an open-mindedness and
connectivity to the ways in which Deleuze thinks about images in film, and such a
method makes itself likely and appropriate to be used in the creation of ‘new thought’.
One could directly link the type of thinking that Deleuze displays about image
in the Cinema books back to ‘the image of thought’ chapter in Difference and
Repetition (Deleuze, 1994, pp. 129–168). In this chapter, Deleuze attempts to create
an outside to the dogmatic elements of philosophical thought, as they had previously
been conceived through his eight postulates. One could argue that he tried to do
something similar in his Cinema books; i.e. there is a questioning of the image of
thought as presented by cinema, and this leads one to think beyond the orthodox
categories of First (the Hollywood machine), Second (auteur cinema) and Third

6
 Introduction to ‘A Pedagogy of Cinema’

Cinema (revolutionary), to consider cinema in another way, in terms of processual

development, or an imaginary ‘yet to come’. To do this, one requires a non-dogmatic
approach to thought, and to not overlay cinema with models of pedagogy regarding
what lessons various films teach us, or what/how we can learn as a result of a certain
cinematic experience. The cinema-thinking that one derives from Deleuze’s analysis
of images in the Cinema books can thus be applied to other media, and because of
this, it reveals something profound about the current situation of globalisation where
screen culture and the multiplication of modes of image production and reproduction
hurtles onwards in an accelerated state of augmentation through IWC.

‘A PEDAGOGY OF CINEMA’: BEYOND ‘1, 2, 3’ CINEMAS

As a new film style, Third Cinema or national cinema rose up to prominence in the
1960s, most notably in the Argentinean cinema of Fernando Solanas and Octavio
Getino, whose manifesto, Towards a Third Cinema was highly influential (see
MacKenzie, 2014). In this genre, film is coded deliberately and conspicuously as
political and revolutionary. Such a cinema does not interpret the world through the
aesthetic that auteur or Second Cinema promises, but intends to transform the reality
of spectatorship, to liberate, instil change, to disrupt and to meddle with the order of
things. Such a take on cinema is at odds with Marxist and Frankfurt school critical
theorists, who viewed cinema watching sceptically. One example of this recalcitrant
stance is Theodor Adorno, who bemoans in Minima Moralia (1974, p. 25): “Every
visit to the cinema leaves me, against all my vigilance, stupider and worse”. In
contrast, one of the central principles of this book and ‘a pedagogy of cinema’ is that
cinema is more than a machine propagating axioms of stupidity. This book affirms
that cinema watching does not signify the implicit giving of consent to make us
dumb, because the concept of cinema that this book develops and uses is more than
the affirmation of the status quo.
‘A pedagogy of cinema’ crucially turns on how negativity may function in a
Deleuzian philosophy of affirmation; or, how cinema can set forth a new utopia
within the context of the world as it is. Therefore, one of the central questions
for ‘a pedagogy of cinema’ is: How can cinema, as a cracked mirror, promise
something other than affirmation of the pre-formatted or banal? ‘A pedagogy of
cinema’ reprograms cinema as a machine for thinking, rendering it more subtle,
less dogmatic and less prescriptive than the Marxist super-structure model, or even
the Third Cinema approach, which does consider the spectacular effects of cinema,
and how such effects are engineered in the hearts and minds of its viewers, but fails
to systematically reprogram thought. Furthermore, the treatise of ‘a pedagogy of
cinema’ aims at thinking otherwise than Second Cinema or auteur film which, for
example, may look to understand how cinema is a special kind of film thinking in
and of itself, and how images connect and convey meaning in their movement.
The authors of this book aim to rethink cinema as an affirmative form of praxis,
a praxis of thinking, showing how students may appreciate the cinema-thinking

7
Chapter 1

operable in the film. While Deleuze and Guattari share common ground with Adorno
in their attack on the very notion of modern communication, because thinking is
under assault from modern communication as such – in the authors’ view, ‘a
pedagogy of cinema’ may be used as a tool to inspire socio-political transformation
in a very specific educational manner that goes beyond Third Cinema. So while
Solanas and Getino (1973) view Third Cinema as not solely focussed passively on the
object of representation, because Third Cinema is not testimonial or reconciliatory
but ‘interventionary’ – such intervention does not release the necessary thought
mechanisms to power ‘a pedagogy of cinema’. Third cinema has no outside as
articulated in terms of ‘a pedagogy of cinema’. While the political aspect of Third
Cinema does not pertain to the form of expressions in films per se, but rather
addresses transformative effects in a given milieu of contested liberation, the authors
of this book take from Third Cinema the view that the transformative aspect must be
considered not only in terms of the relationship between the film and the spectator,
but in precisely in the way pedagogy and the social semiotic of dissonant images –
montage, collage, pastiche, film stills – jolts and jars the spectator out from his or
her stupor or entrapped gaze to enhance thought itself beyond extant images of itself.

CINEMA-THINKING, ‘A PEDAGOGY OF CINEMA’ AND EDUCATION

When one of the authors of this book gives a lecture at his present day university
in Australia, he often feels as if he is delivering a hermetic dialogue on television.
Put another way, the distance between himself as speaker of the lecture, and the
reception of these words in the student audience has increased and is increasing,
or, the transition between speech and thought is lost somewhere in the image
bound experience of the auditorium. This is not meant in a melodramatic or
phenomenological manner, because the personal experience or any reaction to
the frequent non-event of university lecturing is irrelevant. This statement about
the image of thought in university lecturing helps to furnish what is meant by ‘a
pedagogy of cinema’ in education. The students already have access to the lecture,
as the power-point presentation has been posted on a university-operated web site,
several weeks before the designated time of the lecture. Everything that the lecturer
says will be recorded and posted on the same web site as the lecture power-point
automatically. As the lecturer stands at the front of a large auditorium, behind a
lectern with the university’s logo, students sit in banked rows and stare at their
mobile phones, tablets and laptop computers. The lecturer has no idea what they
are in fact looking at. One could state that everything about the set-up of modern
lecturing takes away the probability of entering into lively debate or dialogue about
the topic under investigation. Rather, the intensity of the interaction between the
lecturer, the students and the topic, is sublimated and diffracted through the many
layers of screen-attention, image, information, time, mediation and control that are
heaped around the modern lecturing event, and this intense knot will be unravelled
through ‘a pedagogy of cinema’.

8
 Introduction to ‘A Pedagogy of Cinema’

From the perspective of the second author, Japanese university students, who
might be midway through their time at university, become increasingly pressurized
by administrators, future employers and society at large, to follow prescribed models
of behaviour, to attend job meetings, interviews, job shows – all to escape the
classroom – and in order to fit the image and mould of their future careers. Casual
attire and bright hair colour are jettisoned overnight for orthodox hair colours and
styles, black uniforms and suits. Universities in Japan have for decades deliberately
turned a blind eye to the disastrous, invasive effects job hunting has on learning. For
example, a regular occurrence during class time is for students with their mobile
phones stuck to their ear, to leap to their feet, and to begin conversing in business
parlance with a suitor at the end of the phone, as they promptly exit the classroom.
The student returns minutes later with a sheepish nod to the teacher. There is no
escape. Students are literally bombarded with messages, calls and announcements:
their schedules are so full, that they have no time for little else, other than the barmy
job-hunting circus. As a consequence, the cinema-thinking that ‘a pedagogy of
cinema’ encourages is a vital antidote to the madness of the job frenzy in Japanese
universities.
‘A pedagogy of cinema’ looks to explain the ways in which the dynamic image
processes of screen culture work, by thinking laterally about the consequences of
the contemporary university lecture, university culture, and the trickle down effects
throughout the educational system. One could state that this type of thinking called
here: ‘cinema-thinking’, comes about as a direct result of the questioning of ‘the
image of thought’ that Deleuze (1994) began in Difference and Repetition, and that
culminated in the rhizome or vegetal thought of A Thousand Plateaus. The rhizome
is a conceptual figure precisely designed to escape the image production and
reproduction of the representational mode of thought that is predominantly used in
contemporary screen culture (Figure 2). In Figure 2, rhizomes develop horizontally
between interpersonal or ‘inter-dividual’ cubes that are made up of semiotic chains,
organizations of power, and circumstances relative to the arts, sciences, and social
struggles. ‘A pedagogy of cinema’ in this book will try to produce rhizomes or
cinema-thinking through the confluence of the concept of cinema, continental
theory and specific films (Figure 1). The rhizome is the ‘lightning strike’ or leap
of imagination that connects the ‘inter-dividual’ cubes and makes collective
expression or ‘assemblages of enunciation’ possible again, and therefore signifies
a political move in education, away from the episodes of ‘business as usual’ in the
university context as described through the two episodes above. One author has
sought evidence that this strategy works in education by using the notion of Multiple
Literacies Theory (MLT) in classrooms; wherein the potentially homogenising and
top-down effects of an imposed and rigid definition of literacy as spelling, grammar
and reading comprehension – and the consequent formation of moral and identity
codes in the population around spelling, grammar and reading comprehension – are
removed, and an open system of multiple linguistic intervention is used in teaching
and learning (Masny & Cole, 2009). This book will act in a manner that adds to

9
Chapter 1

the effects of MLT and the rhizome (Figure 2) in education, but through ‘cinema-
thinking’ and in the deep analysis of images.

Figure 2. Illustration of A Thousand Plateaus, chapter 1, paragraph 6 (Ngui, 2012):

“Any point of a rhizome can be connected to anything other, and must be;” and,
“A rhizome ceaselessly establishes connections between semiotic chains, organizations of
power, and circumstances relative to the arts, sciences, and social struggles”.
(Deleuze & Guattari, 1988, p. 7 emphasis added)

One could argue that the action of the rhizome (Figure 2) is more politically
inflected than the analysis of image that can be found in Deleuze’s (1992b, 2005)
Cinema books. This is partly because of the influence of the activist thinker, Félix
Guattari on the writing of A Thousand Plateaus, and the fact that the rhizome book
is about capitalism and schizophrenia. In a similar way to Buchanan’s (2006) point
about schizoanalysis prefiguring and being an unmentioned part of the cinema-
thinking that we can derive from Deleuze’s Cinema books, the rhizome can likewise
be inserted into the notion of ‘a pedagogy of cinema’. ‘A pedagogy of cinema’
does not impose a transcendent model that tells us what we learn from watching
certain films, or how to think through specific directorial choices in film, but works
immanently from the image outwards, filling in the gaps between the image and
understanding how they function in the world. In so doing, this thinking introduces
a moment of critique in this immanent, transversal process. This action grants us
access to the virtuality of the transversal relations and the notion of a-signifying
rupture as developed in A Thousand Plateaus.

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 Introduction to ‘A Pedagogy of Cinema’

What ‘a pedagogy of cinema’ does precisely is apply and map readings of cine-
thinking to the education context. It is political in this respect because it views
cine-thinking as a shock to complacency, docility and the often mind-numbing
aspects of school and university life. The work of developing cinema-thinking is a
political task because education itself is encased in a global-economic situation that
produces and reproduces images of what it means to think (e.g. governmental and
corporate-think), which can lead to the standardised, repetitive and unimaginative
interpretation of film. The challenge of ‘a pedagogy of cinema’ is to think new
thought about cinema, to look to the future of education (Cole, 2014a), and to
perform an immanent material analysis (Cole, 2013b, 2014b) about how images and
the thinking that they can give rise to might engender bifurcations, non-relations,
breaking points and imperceptible cracks that impact throughout, and as a part of the
many folds of the present educational system.

CHAPTERS OF THE BOOK

Chapter 2 – The fundamentals of horror and learning

David R. Cole

There is a horror story behind and throughout the narrative of the current educative
situation without dénouement or clear ending. If one thinks about financial crises,
overpopulation and environmental catastrophe, one may sense a definite background
noise or affect, that is an expression of continuous disquiet and uncertainty about the
future. In contrast to Hollywood disaster movies such as ‘2012’, that has a narrative
of mass destruction, and end-of-the-world scenario that leads to possible salvation,
this chapter theorises horror as a continuous yet broken affect of living through the
contemporary moment; i.e. there is a pronounced time-image of horror which we
are living through. This chapter will take images from films such as Dario Argento’s
‘Suspiria’, images from the films of David Cronenberg and the recent film, ‘Under
the Skin’, in order to explain how the affects of horror work as learning. This chapter
theorises ‘a pedagogy of cinema’ in terms of cinematic images of aesthetic horror,
and how they function in education.

Chapter 3 – Decoding through cinema: The case of Arthur Lipsett

Joff P.N. Bradley & Michael Dancsok

Arguing from the standpoint of schizoanalysis and ‘a pedagogy of cinema’, this

chapter makes the claim that the experimental documentaries by Canadian avant-
garde film director Arthur Lipsett act as a poetic means of communication for
expressing schizophrenia qua process and breakthrough. Prior to his descent
into a chronic form of schizophrenia, this chapter notes how Lipsett’s schizoid
breakthrough caused flows of desire to circulate. His extraordinary work can be

11
Chapter 1

considered therefore as a cartography of breakthrough ahead of any reductive

reading of evidence of mental illness. In celebrating Lipsett’s work as one of pure
affect, this chapter will consider the Deleuzian idea that cinema is a powerful mode
of thought in itself and Lipsett’s ‘minor’ cinematic style – which deconstructs the
use of the actual to create new virtualities or incorporeal and inaugural worlds of
reference – and effectively confounds the political and economic axiomatics of his
time. This chapter claims that through a schizoanalytic and immanent pedagogy of
Lipsett’s images and collage editing techniques, which chart both a ‘confrontation
with madness’ (Deleuze) and ‘profound interpretations’ of the world, we unearth ‘a
true cinema’ that hallucinates a universal history and calls for ‘a people yet to come’.

Chapter 4 – Bohemianism and pedagogy [in and out] of the cinema

David R. Cole

There are two basic questions that one must confront in terms of ‘a pedagogy of
cinema’. The first relates to our identities: Who are we? given the influence and
affective qualities of cinema and image. The second question relates to the lifestyle
that we lead given the augmented and pivotal ‘cinema-thinking’ that this book
proposes. This chapter will focus on an analysis of the film ‘Performance’ by Donald
Cammell. In ‘Performance’, the central character, played by Edward Fox, is an East
End of London hoodlum who transforms under the influence of Mick Jaggar, a
bohemian artist, leading an alternative lifestyle. Jagger changes in tandem with the
transformation of the Fox character, as the film convincingly portrays the criminal
underworld of London and the bohemian hideout, away from the conventionality of
everyday life. This chapter explores the conventionality or normative format of ‘a
pedagogy of cinema’ against the backdrop of cinematic images taken from the films
‘Performance’, selected works of Peter Greenaway and ‘The Devils’ by Ken Russell.

Chapter 5 – Semio-materialism and the master of relations

Joff P.N. Bradley

In recent years, Alfred Hitchcock’s neuroses and pathologies, his Catholicism and
perversions – literally his dirty linen – have been aired for all and sundry to view.
This chapter rejects this approach to focus not on the man but on the different ways
in which the spectator enjoins the unfolding of the time-image through an experience
of ‘nooshock’ which means to jolt the viewer from pervasive or dominant modes of
perception. In this respect, the moving image – cinema – is a thinking. This chapter –
which should be read in conjunction with Chapter 7, which will show the crisis of
the photographer in greater detail – will examine how the characters in his films
are torn out of context and place – how they are paralysed diegetically or unable
to move in accord with the axioms of classic cinema – and what this means for ‘a

12
 Introduction to ‘A Pedagogy of Cinema’

pedagogy of cinema’. This is the birth of a cinema of the non-place. To understand

relations correctly, a novel reading of thirdness by Deleuze will receive treatment.
Through the immanent unfolding of images, this pedagogy of cinema will scrutinise
the break between perception and action. Examining the possibility of unseating the
sovereign relation of the ‘I’ to the image itself by grappling with Hitchcock’s ‘game
of relations’ and by considering that the spectator and the character are the lens, the
chapter will probe the interconnection of the third eye, the fourth dimension of time
and mental relations to ask of the possibility of pure cinema or a pure pedagogy of
thought.

Chapter 6 – Congruent theories of time, image and education

David R. Cole

What does ‘a pedagogy of cinema’ tell us about the current situation as defined
by globalisation? This chapter (re)invents a theory of globalisation and education
through the pedagogic notion of cinema that underpins this book. The complex,
metaphysical, ontological and epistemological constructions of this chapter rely
on images from the films: ‘Brazil’, ‘Memento’, ‘Snowpiercer’ and ‘Melancholia’.
These films, far from responding to material theories of time and image, develop
their own logic under pressure from globalisation and the maelstrom of possible
reactions that one could take in relation to the global congruence of forms that we are
experiencing under globalisation. This chapter puts pressure on a homogenised and
unifying conception of a ‘pedagogy of cinema’. Rather, images under stress due to
the processes of globalisation show how ‘a pedagogy of cinema’ works from within
and outwards in the proliferation of’ a pedagogy of cinema’ to distribute congruent
theories of time, image and education universally.

Chapter 7 – Cinema of a ‘New Real’: Learning from within images

Joff P.N. Bradley

Building on from chapter 5, in this chapter, the genre of documentary film-making

will be examined through the prism of a trans-semiotic, post-structural framework
to consider how affect is engineered from film sensation and presented through ‘a
pedagogy of cinema’. This chapter will show how the representation of the real
is undermined in cinema as the image assumes virtual, immanent dimensions.
Of consideration in this chapter are a documentary by Alfred Hitchcock and the
documentary about photographer James Nachtwey. The former’s documentary on
the Holocaust will be examined to scrutinise not only the role of the director and
his gaze, the political dimension to art, but the implication of the jouissance of the
viewer in the horror of what is seen. We shall ask the question from a pedagogic
perspective, namely, what does it mean to make a documentary about the reality of

13
Chapter 1

horror through a relay of immanent relations, passing from a cinema of cruelty to

the cruelty of cinema?

Chapter 8 – Conclusion to ‘A Pedagogy of Cinema’

David R. Cole & Joff P.N. Bradley

This last chapter pulls together the various divergent lines and shards of thought that
make up A Pedagogy of Cinema. The authors believe that the most forward thinking
aspect of this volume does not lie in an explanation of Deleuze, Stiegler, or Virilio,
and their relations with cinema, but in the development of a new concept of cinema-
thinking, termed here as the ‘pedagogy of cinema’. This is educational thinking at
its most productive, future orientated, expansive yet intense. The question that this
volume will end with is not what can we do to cinema to make us think, but what
thought is in the process of emerging through cinema. This chapter focuses on the
value of ‘a pedagogy of cinema’ and how the analysis of the images in this book help
to move away form the nihilism contained in images of the non-place and any-space-
whatever. As such, this volume will act as a guide and source of inspiration for future
filmmakers, philosophers and educationalists alike …

REFERENCES
Adorno, T. W. (1974). Minima moralia: Reflections from damaged life. London: NLB.
Buchanan, I. (2006). Is a schizoanalysis of cinema possible? Cinémas: revue d’études cinématographiques
[Cinémas: Journal of Film Studies], 16(2–3), 116–145.
Cole, D. R. (2011). Educational life-forms: Deleuzian teaching and learning practice. Rotterdam, The
Netherlands: Sense Publishers.
Cole, D. R. (2013a). Affective literacies: Deleuze, disciple and power. In I. Semetsky & D. Masny (Eds.),
Deleuze and education (pp. 94–112). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Cole, D. R. (2013b). Traffic jams: Analyzing everyday life through the immanent materialism of
Deleuze & Guattari. New York, NY: Punctum Books.
Cole, D. R. (2014a). Inter-collapse … educational nomadology for a future generation. In M. Carlin &
J. Wallin (Eds.), Deleuze & Guattari, politics and education: For a people-yet-to-come (pp. 77–95).
New York, NY: Bloomsbury.
Cole, D. R. (2014b). Capitalised education: An immanent materialist account of Kate Middleton.
Winchester, VA: Zero Books.
Colman, F. (2011). Deleuze and cinema: The film concepts. Oxford & New York, NY: Berg.
Decoster, P. J., & Vansieleghem, N. (2013). Cinema education as an exercise in ‘Thinking Through Not-
Thinking’. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 46(7), 792–804. doi:10.1080/00131857.2013.795853
Deleuze, G. (1992a). Postscript on the societies of control. October, 59, 3–7.
Deleuze, G. (1992b). Cinema 1: The movement-image (H. Tomlinson & B. Habberjam, Trans.). London:
The Athlone Press.
Deleuze, G. (1994). Difference and repetition (P. Patton, Trans.). New York, NY: Columbia University
Press.
Deleuze, G. (2005). Cinema 2: The time-image (H. Tomlinson & R. Galeat, Trans.). London: Continuum
International Publishing Group.
Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1988). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism & Schizophrenia II (B. Massumi,
Trans.). London: The Athlone Press.

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Dowd, G. (2010). Pedagogies of the image between Daney and Deleuze. New Review of Film and
Television Studies, 8(1), 41–56. doi:10.1080/17400300903529331
Giroux, H. (2001). Breaking into the movies: Pedagogy and the politics of film. JAC, 21(3), 583–598.
Guattari, F. (1984). Molecular revolution: Psychiatry and politics (R. Sheed, Trans.). Harmondsworth:
Penguin Books.
Guattari, F. (1989). The three ecologies (C. Turner, Trans.). New Formations, 8, 131–147.
Illich, I., & Verne, E. (1976). Imprisoned in the global classroom. London: Writers and Readers Publishing
Cooperative Ltd.
Jameson, F. (1991). Postmodernism, or, the cultural logic of late capitalism. London: Verso.
MacKenzie, S. (2014). Film manifestos and global cinema cultures: A critical anthology. Berkeley, CA:
University of California Press.
Masny, D., & Cole, D. R. (Eds.). (2009). Multiple literacies theory: A Deleuzian perspective. Rotterdam,
The Netherlands: Sense Publishers.
Ngui, M. (2012). Illustration of 1000 Plateaus, chapter 1, paragraph 6. Retrieved March 16, 2015, from
http://www.bumblenut.com/drawing/images/plateaus/bigger/1000platos-intro-06.gi
Szendy, P. (2014, May 4). The new iconomy, The Philosopher’s Zone, RN Radio, Australia. Retrieved
June 5, 2014, from http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/philosopherszone/the-new-
iconomy/5415648

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 CHAPTER 2

THE FUNDAMENTALS OF HORROR

AND LEARNING

INTRODUCTION

There is a horror story behind and throughout the image of contemporary globalised
education without dénouement or clear ending. If one thinks about financial crises,
human overpopulation and environmental catastrophe, one may sense a definite
background noise or affect, which is an expression of continuous disquiet and
uncertainty about the global future. In contrast to Hollywood disaster movies such
as ‘2012’, that has a narrative of mass destruction, and an end-of-the-world scenario
that leads to possible ‘human’ salvation – this chapter theorises horror as the basis
for representation of the contemporary moment, and, of having a continuous yet
broken affect; i.e. there are pronounced yet affective images of horror which we are
currently living through. This section presents ‘a pedagogy of cinema’ in terms of
these cinematic images of horror, and looks to show how they function in education
as learning. Learning moves through us, and is a part of the cinematic images of the
films presented here, not as Gothicism, or a definite or representative sense of genre
about the horror portrayed, but as the combined, messy affects of an unconscious,
disaffected and alienated nature.
Much of contemporary education is concerned with having definite goals and
is analysed with respect to specific purposes. For example, children go to school
to achieve good grades, or students go to university in order to pass their degrees
(and to presumably have a better chance of getting a qualified job). This simple and
straightforward logic behind education breaks down when we accept that learning
happens across a spectrum of representational media and through a myriad of inter-
laced and complementary sources, which could be broadly defined as screen culture:
… [and in which screens] “are themselves always already connected to
assemblages of power, capital, and transnational movements of peoples,
goods, and information” (Pisters, 2012, p. 2) … “contemporary culture has
moved from considering images as ‘illusions of reality’ to considering them as
‘realities of illusions’ that operate directly on our brains and therefore as real
agents in the world” (ibid., p. 6).
It is in this entanglement of screens, minds and bodies that this writing locates
and to a certain extent exonerates horror. Horror is not the problem, it is an affect.
Affects are deep brain and feeling processes that circulate between agency and

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Chapter 2

relation until something new happens, which one may formulate through cognition
into a concrete idea or express through language. Horror at this level is a deep-
seated ontological process and not part of the clearly known or everyday world of
images and narrative-based representations that films often possess and present. One
may draw a parallel at this point with Heidegger’s (1993) ontological argument,
that cites the uncanny as an ontological quality of existence that makes us feel
‘less at home’ (§40, pp. 184–191) and anxious. One may equate this type of horror
with anxiety about the direction and logic of contemporary life, about the fear
embedded in imminent environmental disaster, about the ways in which humans
are hurtling towards destruction and extinction under the guises of humanism,
democratic progress, economic development and in education, through ‘evidence-
based practice’. However, this section’s reading of horror and learning through
‘a pedagogy of cinema’ does not assume a phenomenological method. The deep
realisation of horror through learning will be reached in terms of the classification
and analysis of cinematic images as Deleuze (1992, 2005) suggests. This move of
and into ‘cinema-thinking’ takes away the comfort and affordance of human agency
behind the analysis, or the ultimate resolution of dislocation through language. In
other words, there is no binding consciousness that makes sense of the ways in which
horror is connected to learning – the inter-relationship in this analysis is as complex
and as convoluted as the screen culture in which we find ourselves projected and
reproduced.
The question remains as to how the deep and far-reaching sense of horror is
connected to film. Anna Powell (2005) has analysed horror in film from a Deleuzian
perspective, and makes the observation that: “Horror’s frequent undermining of
normative perspective by fragmented images and blurred focus operates in tandem
with the erosion of the subjective coherence and ego-boundaries of its characters”
(p. 11). In other words, one could state that the genre of horror is ready-made for the
type of Deleuzian analysis that questions the straightforward representation of the
human, and the assumptions of human agency behind thought. Yet the commercial
genre of horror films is not where Deleuze (2005) looks for his ‘cinema-thinking’,
as it does not include the type of ‘spiritual automaton’ that he states drives ‘image
thought’. Deleuze’s spiritual automaton comes from Spinoza’s theory of parallelism,
that indicates a level of automatic movement of thought, that cannot be artificially
reproduced and is beyond direct representation. The worry for Deleuze is that
propagandists and commercial interests may seize upon what causes one to think
deeply through images, and to use such exceptionalism for their own purposes,
resulting in distortion, cliché and the reproductive-image. The cinema-thinking of ‘a
pedagogy of cinema’ is therefore a philosophical and aesthetic act before and beyond
a political or commercial response to image. Such an approach fundamentally
changes the images and films one uses as ‘a pedagogy of cinema’ and introduces
aesthetic evaluation into the equation from the start. As Steven Shaviro (2008) has

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 The fundamentals of horror and learning

written in an essay about his book on the Cinematic Body: “To have an aesthetic
experience is many things; but at the limit, it is to feel – and perhaps thereby to
cry, to laugh, or to scream” (p. 52). Deleuze (2005) says, “it makes us grasp, it is
supposed to make us grasp, something intolerable and unbearable” (p. 18).
In contrast, most genre horror films reinforce ‘scary’ stereotypes and try to create
audience reaction through ersatz monsters and often predicably shocking or surprising
moments. The profound understanding of horror and learning is therefore a search
for aesthetic and philosophical images in cinema that link us to horror at a deeper,
more affective and intellectual ‘limit’ level when compared to formulaic horror
movies. The activity of ‘a pedagogy of cinema’ is not merely a search for ‘good’
cinema that shows us how horror and learning come together through film making,
but is a search for: “cinema as an art form [that is] quite unique, and deals with its
subject matter in ways that no other form of art is capable of, particularly as a way of
relating to the experience of space and time” (Roffe, online). With this stipulation in
mind, the first film images for horror and learning that will be considered in depth as
‘a pedagogy of cinema’ are taken from Dario Argento’s ‘Suspiria’.

‘SUSPIRIA’ – THE LOGIC OF ENTRAPMENT

I have whirl’d with the earth at the dawning,

When the sky was a vaporous flame;
I have seen the dark universe yawning,
Where the black planets roll without aim;
Where they roll in their horror unheeded, without knowledge or lustre or name.
(Lovecraft, 1917, stanza 2)
The connection between ‘a pedagogy of cinema’, Lovecraft, and the film ‘Suspiria’
is a deep sense and honour for the power of horror (a love of/for horror). Horror
is not metaphorical or representative of something else on these terms, but works
in its own parameters if set free and allowed to roam as it might. Such a schema
for representation has the intention of making the imagination and rationality work
together, and not be diluted or compromised in terms of one being an adjunct to the
other or part of a means to control and limit the other. In fact, the calling to represent
horror, as Lovecraft ably demonstrates, requires extraordinary concentration and
focus, both in terms of having the technical skill to know what works as horror,
and of possessing an intuitive grasp of what is terrifying without embellishment or
the need to explain. Argento fits in with these requirements, in that he has created
a luscious horror film that works on its own terms, it is definitely not a ‘run-of-the-
mill’ genre horror piece, one could claim that the film in fact introduces a new visual
and audio language into filmmaking.
The Italian horror film ‘Suspiria’ (Argento, 1977) does not present a traditional
cinematic narrative, easy-to-follow storyline, or usual sense of plot. Instead, the

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Chapter 2

time and movement-images, hermetic dialogue, intersecting planes of colour and

intense, abrasive music are spread across a field of grotesque and useless death and
aesthetic points of suture. The experience of watching ‘Suspiria’ is a confronting
and arresting one. The film effervescently leaps from the flat space screen, and
one could say forms an enveloping, abstract and ‘feeling-sensing image-scape’.
The force of the cinematic movement in ‘Suspiria’ gathers together everything
cinematically possible to unsettle the relationship between the watcher and the
watched – in other words, the film presents a form of multi-dimensional cinematic
haunting (Figures 4 & 6). One cannot stay grounded in an objective or unmoved
sense after watching ‘Suspiria’, even if one denies the experience. One could argue
that ‘Suspiria’ demonstrates an image of thought that does on the screen what ‘a
pedagogy of cinema’ looks to do in education – i.e. it creates an immanent plane in
which the distinctions between horror and learning are attended to and dissolved.
In other words, one could state that this film contains an interpretation of non-
representative metaphysics, as it moves towards an immanent plane of interaction
as an experience of viewing. Such a proposition comes about in ‘Suspiria’ due to
the cinematic-familiar being substituted for the cinematic-strange, narrative work
is produced by fields of colour, shades of meaning and signification are resolved in
silence, reflections, diffraction, misunderstandings and by witchcraft.
One could perhaps argue that the male (and perhaps specifically Italian) imprint
of the director, Dario Argento, is present in terms of the overwhelming presentation
of womanhood and image of ‘the feminine’ throughout the film, and that is powerful
enough to animate non-human nature. However, the very absence of masculinity in
the film, or any contrast to the ways in which the female characters are manipulated
and placed by the director, does not give one a ground for female transcendence,
or an ideal image (or anti-image) of the female. Rather, femininity is mixed up and
spliced in the film with murder, corruption, animist magic, odd coincidences, flight
and vague implication. There is a deliberately constructed, amateurish quality to the
film that is in contrast to slick, mainstream, market-driven, formulaic Hollywood
productions, where artifice is usually hidden. ‘Suspiria’ is parallel to the French and
Italian new wave and neo-realist films that Deleuze (1992, 2005) analyses in the
Cinema books in terms of the broken images, optical and the reflective/diffractive
nature of the narrative (Figures 3 & 5). The juddering nature of the film includes a
condensed style of disjointedness and time-fracturing that allows for and permits
pre-personal affect to circulate. Rather than being swept along in an escapist yet
terrifying fantasy, or in the scripted tension in a traditional horror flick, the viewer is
ultimately not positioned or subjectified as audience, or directly manipulated through
familial distancing techniques of fright, or through the crescendos of predictable
horror and routine violence. The image of thought that ‘Suspiria’ presents destroys
itself from within – and in its very sumptuousness, the film devours every morsel
of sensible action that it portrays. The unconscious is consequently opened up and
directed by the film, we are left wondering what exactly we have just witnessed, and
where we have been taken to (and whether we can get back from there). In the end,

20
 The fundamentals of horror and learning

the very fact that it is hard to say what exactly we think about ‘Suspiria’, makes it
an excellent vehicle to demonstrate ‘a pedagogy of cinema’ as it suggests how to
crush the difference between horror and learning through the understanding of image
as an affect that passes through us (cf. Chapters 3, 4, & 6). ‘Suspiria’ represents an
intersecting image plane between the becoming-horror of contemporary pedagogy
and the pedagogy of horror per se.
In the following four images taken from the film (Figures 3, 4, 5, & 6), one
may directly sense the fear of the main character, Suzy Bannon, and see how she

Figure 3. Suzy Bannon in the Figure 4. Dead bodies in a hall

cityscape room

Figure 5. Suzy Bannon exiting a corridor Figure 6. Suzy Bannon meeting the
governess on her arrival at the academy

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Chapter 2

is progressively entrapped in the European dance institute. The planes of colour,

long echoing corridors, concentric and geometric shapes on and in the building, the
bright, obtuse and iconic furniture, and the sparse wall paintings; all seem to resolve
as one and form into a trap. As the audience, we know that the whole set up of the
film from the start is an entrapment, but precisely because the director does nothing
to hide this fact, and because it is projected, displayed proudly, lambasted ironically,
and treated without shame, the self-effacing encirclement of the film is all the more
terrifying. We are not tricked into thinking that the heroine will be trapped, or that
she might escape, as we know that she will be ‘taken over’ and become other from
the very beginning. The film works as deep horror in the sense that is suitable here,
precisely because all artifice and illusion have been taken away. Everything about
the film works towards trapping the main character, and nothing else. The film asks
the question: What would absolute entrapment look like?
The congruence between the film ‘Suspiria’ and the current state of education is
uncanny. This is because education serves one of the basic axioms of the State or
government, as Deleuze and Guattari (1988) express it: “A state apparatus is erected
upon the primitive agricultural communities, which already have lineal-territorial
codes; but it overcodes them, submitting them to the power of a despotic emperor,
the sole and transcendent public-property owner, the master of the surplus or the
stock, the organizer of large-scale works (surplus labour), the source of public
functions and bureaucracy. This is the paradigm of the bond, the knot. Such is the
regime of signs of the State: overcoding, or the Signifier. It is a system of machinic
enslavement: the first ‘megamachine’ in the strict sense, to use Mumford’s term”
(pp. 427–428). Education is fully implicated in this ‘megamachine’ and is the source
of the overcoding and the regime of signs on and in the population that produces
surplus value as code, and that supports a bureaucratic and differential, information-
based control of society. This is where we find the connection between horror and
learning is most concretely figured. The State produces and disseminates its codes
through education, for example, in the form of ‘citizenship studies’, ‘classroom
management’ or more recently through ‘financial literacy programs’ (Cole, 2013).
Such programs serve the purpose of overcoding, and produce conformity and
domesticity to the State bureaucracy, yet their functions are largely invisible. Parallel
to Lovecraft’s greatest invisible monsters or Nietzsche’s coldest of all cold monsters,
the State is a contemporary form of a shared ‘Cthulhu Mythos’, invisibly supporting
integrated world capitalism.
Steven Shaviro (1993) analysed ‘Suspiria’ from a Deleuze|Guattari perspective
and in terms of the body politics that emerges around the ways in which the central
character, Suzy Bannon is manipulated and submerged for aesthetic affect. Anna
Powell (2005) has categorised the images that the film produces according to
Deleuze’s (1992, 2005) analysis. ‘A pedagogy of cinema’ takes the approaches of
Shaviro and Powell further in terms of understanding how the image of thought
that the film produces works in terms of enabling an analysis between horror and
learning. In an elaborate analysis of French ‘new wave’ films, Deleuze (2005, p. 12)

22
 The fundamentals of horror and learning

claims that a new regime of signs, organised under what he terms as tactile signs or
‘tactisigns’, appear as a result of the experimentation of the new wave films. These
tactisigns are an important evolution in filmmaking according to Deleuze (2005)
that provide an intellectual bridge between the movement-image and the time-
image in cinema by allowing for and producing visions of touch. Powell (2005,
pp. 142–145) argues that the images of ‘Suspiria’ (Figures 3, 4, 5, & 6) appear under
the hierarchy of the ‘tactisigns’, and this may be especially applied to the finale:
[which] “is a flamboyant showpiece of sensory stimulation. Suzy enters the hidden
chambers of the coven via its magic key of art nouveau, a blue metal iris on the wall.
She accidentally knocks over a peacock ornament, which encapsulates the film’s
colour scheme in miniature. When Suzy pierces the amorphous, shadowy witch-
queen with a knife, she forces her to materialise in the partial form of organs without
a body. Her mouth, eyes and hands, each one a sensory tool, appear in isolation,
and she uses them to both to perceive and to terrify her assailant. Electronically
mixed sound is used to create her distorted voice. In a finale of tactility and colour,
the red academy is finally burned down in a hellish conflagration of scarlet flames”
(Powell, 2005, p. 145).
The idea to be carried forward for ‘a pedagogy of cinema’ is that the tactisigns
of ‘Suspiria’ are a means to comprehend the connections between learning and
horror. The learning of the film works through a type of sensory overload, and an
introduction to the other side of learning efficiency, wherein the action of learning
forms reflective and diffracted knots for understanding that go beyond superficial
or pre-set learning goals and objectives (see Chapter 7). One could explain such
learning action through cinematic epiphanies (Cole & Throssell, 2008), or ‘image-
ghosts’ in the cinematic machine (Cole & Hager, 2010). ‘A pedagogy of cinema’
embraces such learning as a means to propel the analysis of film beyond critical
perceptions of what the film means, or how it can be used in education. ‘Suspiria’ is
an example of horror and learning in that its time-image stands out as a means to mix
the use of colour planes, subjective manipulation, grotesque death and magic. In the
next section, the work of the Canadian director, David Cronenberg will be analysed
from the perspective of ‘a pedagogy of cinema’ with the aim of joining horror with
learning.

CRONENBERG – WHAT CAN A BODY DO?

If, cruel, [art] does not invite us to die in ravishment, [it] at least has the virtue
of putting a moment of our happiness on a plane equal to death.
(Bataille, 1993, CD Rom)

The cinematic director who has pushed the connections between horror and learning
furthest is David Cronenberg. Cronenberg has consciously chosen film matter and
cinema themes that lend themselves to working through the deep, ontological levels
of horror and affect that are required for ‘a pedagogy of cinema’. In fact, he has had

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a minor horror genre partly named after his work, that of ‘body horror’. Body horror
confronts us with what the body can do in terms of inner and outer transformation,
and what the body can become compromised with and by, for example, the media,
politics and the State, science, drugs, transport and technology. In this section,
images from three of Cronenberg’s films (1991, 1996, 1983) will be analysed: (i)
‘Naked Lunch’; (ii) ‘Crash’; (iii) ‘Videodrome’.
In Cronenberg’s reinvention of Burrough’s (1959) novel, Naked Lunch, body
transformation is a central motif. The image of thought portrayed by this film and that
connects horror with learning most closely is the figure of the Mugwump (Figure 7).
The Mugwump is a name reused by Burroughs from its original definition as an
American Republican political deserter; in the book, the Mugwump is a vicious
creature that secretes addictive fluid through their penises that prolongs life. In the
film, the Mugwumps are creatures that secrete addictive liquid through tubes that
come from their heads (Figure 7), as well as being the writing machine (typewriter)
and the writer’s alter ego. The Mugwump is body transformation that makes us aware
of another body, which is always in a differential relation to the body that we have
now, and forms feedback loops with our body that helps us to notice of how bodies
can change. The sense of horror and learning of body transformation in Cronenberg’s
‘Naked Lunch’ is encapsulated by the emptying out of the body through addiction,
and the ways in which the writer becomes interpellated with various shady and
unknown agencies in the interzone through this process. Furthermore, and parallel to
Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘Body-without-Organs’ (BwO), the Mugwumps act beyond
ideology and not because of it. The Mugwump as presented by Cronenberg could be
related to ‘a force of nature’, or to an image of thought that encapsulates desire. As
explained by Deleuze & Guattari [my insertions in square brackets]:
There is desire whenever there is the constitution of a BwO under one relation
or another [e.g. the Mugwump]. It is a problem not of ideology but of pure
matter, a phenomenon of physical, biological, psychic, social, or cosmic
matter. That is why the material problem confronting schizoanalysis [and ‘a
pedagogy of cinema’] is knowing whether we have it within our means to make
the selection, to distinguish the BwO from its doubles: empty vitreous bodies,
cancerous bodies, totalitarian and fascist. (Deleuze & Guattari, 1988, p. 183)
The horror and learning associated with the Mugwumps shows us how the desire
to write or to understand how convoluted and often hidden forces may affect us
can create monsters of transformation, decadence and decay. The image of the
Mugwump is in-itself not terrifying. It is an example of a ‘time-image’ (Deleuze,
2005), wherein the narrative elements of the film are eradicated in favour of an
image that evokes time shifts and the playing with time that is a central motif of
Deleuze’s second book on Cinema. The horror and learning that may come about
due to the Mugwump describes a mode of thinking about subjectivity addicted to
shifting elements beyond direct control. In educational research, this form of bodily
understanding has gained treatment in term of ‘fullness’, and to the ways in which

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 The fundamentals of horror and learning

one may understand learning beyond the narrow confines of psychological analysis
or in the broad sweep of sociology (Cole, 2011). The problem with most educational
research with respect to learning is that it either comes down to very specific testable
hypotheses, for example: motivation, self-concept or the locus of control, or it tries
to take into account meta-theoretical constructs such as the recent interest in the
notion of a class-based ‘precariat’ and how this affects education (Standing, 2011).
The difference that the Mugwump of Cronenberg presents is that it represents a very
specific affection and time-image that is theoretically and intellectually enveloping.
The horror at the bottom of the Mugwump is the fight between a globalised subject,
desperately trying not to become invisible in a one world market, and using any
means possible to become recognised, including dangerously addictive drugs,
violence, deception, sexuality and imitation; and the last remnants of a civilised,
reasonable self, rationally trying to talk the Mugwump out of its manic push for
dominance and control (see Chapters 4, 6, & 7). ‘A pedagogy of cinema’ follows
Cronenberg through the affection and time-image into a place where these forces in
the self are apparent, real and recognised, and one can see the struggle for what it is;
a war of desire, representation and thought.
The second image for the Cronenberg section on horror and learning comes from
the film, ‘Crash’ (1996) (Figure 8). In this image, Dr Helen Remington and Gabriella
are coupling in the back of Vaughan’s wrecked car. This image comes at the end of
the film, and to an extent coalesces many of the images and action that has preceded
it. The coupling happens in the recently dead ex-TV scientist, Dr Vaughan’s car,
who is the linchpin of the film. Cronenberg has taken Ballard’s (1973) novel, Crash
and adapted it much more closely for cinema than the earlier ‘Naked Lunch’, but
has changed the context from England to America. The focus of the film and book
is a study of symphorophilia, or car-crash fetishisation, and Cronenberg manages
to adapt Ballard’s novel without sensationalisation or falling into obvious or crude
pornography. Yet the labelling of the image of thought in ‘Crash’ as a form of
mental disease is misleading, and deflects the deeper analysis of horror and learning
that this time-image can lead to. The analysis of ‘a pedagogy of cinema’ takes into
account Deleuze’s section of Cinema II (2005, pp. 182–215), and the possibility
that we may be hard-wired into a type of car crash spectacle image fixation that
‘Crash’ gives cinematic reality to. The televising of O. J. Simpson’s seeming flight
from justice in 1994, or the numerous car chases and car crashes that one may
witness daily on the news, or the viewing of actual car crashes on the roads, gives
rise to the profound sense that our brains have the time-image of car crashes firmly
connected to excitement and interest, and this image is in concordance with the
fluctuations of desire.
Deleuze’s (2005) interest in neuroscience is not borne out with an exhaustive
investigation of the empirical facts. Rather, he proposes that new neural pathways
are opened up through time-images and movement-images, and it is possible to think
these new circuits (Deleuze, 1995, p. 60). In other words, the images contained in
a film such as ‘Crash’ can open up new regimes of thought about car crashes. The

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danger of Cronenberg’s film is that one begins to interpret the images in terms of
psychoanalytical concepts such as repression and catharsis, and that the connections
between car crashes, sexuality, death and thought become part of a psychoanalytic
landscape or symbolic, dream-representation. Rather, the use of Deleuze’s image
analysis in the Cinema books looks to initiate new, real thought, or cinema-thinking
as we have termed it here for and in ‘a pedagogy of cinema’. The image (Figure 8)
therefore needs to be expanded and connected to the various ways it has come about,
not to remain at the level of visual semantics, but to show how the neural circuits and
brain patterning that has come about in its construction can be understood through
analysis. If ‘the brain is the screen’ as Deleuze (2000) claims in an interview with
Cahiers du cinéma on the time-image, we need to investigate the molecular biology
that makes up the image.
Firstly, even though the image is certainly erotic and takes place in the recently
dead Vaughan’s car, the deeper connects between horror and learning of ‘a
pedagogy of cinema’ make us aware that as a time and movement-image, many
accumulated thought processes that flow through ‘Crash’ pivot and coalesce in this
image (cf. Chapter 5). The female coupling is significant in that they continue the
processes of car crash investigation that were instigated by Vaughan on a flat, sexual
plane, cradled and protected by his death vehicle. ‘Crash’ is full of coincidences
and meetings between previously disassembled bodies. The new assemblage of
Remington, Gabriella and Vaughan’s car acts as continuity between Vaughan’s
death in the car, and the coming car crash with the same car between Ballard and
Catherine. Ballard and Catherine are a bored couple looking for excitement who
begin the movie; Ballard meets Remington after crashing into her car and killing
her partner; Gabriella is a callipered and scarred car crash victim who is part of
Vaughan’s underground that re-enacts famous crashes and investigates the effects
of car crashes on the body. In effect, the image in Figure 8 shows us a neural circuit
of cinema in ‘Crash’ between car crashes and coupling that works on the non-
representative level as horror and learning.
Elsewhere, I (Cole, 2013) have argued that images of car crashes and traffic
jams can give rise to understanding the background of petrol politics that lie behind
everyday life. Using the immanent materialism of Deleuze and Guattari’s (1988)
A Thousand Plateaus, the argument is that the plateau of October, 2011 may be
constructed from images that create an intersection between the reality of traffic
jams and the ways in which this reality has come about. One could add the image
from ‘Crash’ analysed in this section (Figure 8) to my previous collection, and even
though the linkage with petrol politics is a difficult line to draw at this intersection
on horror and learning, the implication is that there is more to this image that ‘a
pedagogy of cinema’ could reveal. For example, the connections between car crashes
and health, depicted in the film as the deformation, scarring and transformation of the
body, could be followed more closely as a result of the cinema-thinking around this
image. The petrol politics of the film revolves around the ways in which the mostly
colourless images have an in-built, oily, out-of-focus blur, making the aesthetics of

26
 The fundamentals of horror and learning

the film seem as if one has to look through a dirty screen to see the true screen. Such
a delayed reaction to experiencing and feeling anything due to the images of ‘Crash’,
takes us to a dark place of horror and learning, and one in which the full realisation
of the image is possible (cf. Chapter 7). In this place, one may understand that the
artificial, mechanical stimulation of car crashes, driving cars manically, and the
pleasures associated with car manipulation, are now integrated into our behaviours
through the brain as a screen and as a thought generator.
Before Cronenberg directed ‘Naked Lunch’ and ‘Crash’, he had created the
controversial film called ‘Videodrome’. The two iconic images that are being used
here for ‘a pedagogy of cinema’ (Figures 9 & 10) show how the theme of bodily

Figure 7. (i) The ‘Mugwumps’ secrete Figure 8. (ii) Dr. Helen Remington
an addictive fluid that is ‘milked’ and Gabriella ‘coupling’ in the back of
Vaughan’s wrecked car

Figure 9. (iii) The gun coming out of Figure 10. (iii) The video insertion
the TV screen pocket in Max Renn’s torso

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Chapter 2

transformation was taken up in this movie. ‘Videodrome’ features portals between

the body of the main character, Max Renn, a distributor of pornographic films
through his TV channel, a video cassette containing the illegal show, ‘Videodrome’,
a gun that becomes melded with flesh, the TV screen, and various other characters,
including his lover, Nicki Brand. Cronenberg uses the same washed out colour
palette in ‘Videodrome’ as in ‘Crash’, but instead of implying an oily surface over
the viewing – the images of ‘Videodrome’ resemble watching a cheap, reused VHS
cassette. ‘Videodrome’ examines the ways in which images mutate and change
under pressure from the strangeness and otherness of video programming, as it
constructs cinema from the extractions that video programming can execute from
everyday life, as videos can be watched in private, outside of the public performance
of the cinema screen. ‘Videodrome’ introduces into ‘a pedagogy of cinema’ images
of the body being penetrated by technology, and of technology melding with flesh,
as the characters fuse and spiral with non-human objects due to the influence of the
shady world of ‘Videodrome’ (Figures 9 & 10). At the level of horror and learning,
‘Videodrome’ works as a means to understand how the desires of the main characters
can access penetrating thought patterns that can lock us into voyeurism, depravity
and death.
‘Videodrome’ was made on the cusp and in the light of television dominating the
place in screen culture that once been occupied by cinema. ‘A pedagogy of cinema’
aligns itself with cinema and not with television because of the possibilities and
collective nature of cinema that are not apparent in television (cf. Chapter 7). Even
though television screens can now approach cinematic proportions, the optical
inferences possible from television are distinct from those of cinema. As Franco
Berardi (2013) has stated in a different context: “Many say that the London rioters
are just looters – consumerist and violent. They forget that these young people
have been shaped by an ugly human landscape produced through thirty years of
competition and consumerism. Empathy has become frail, solidarity has been
ridiculed and destroyed. The rioters of London have been specifically cultivated by
Murdoch’s popular magazines and TV garbage” (online). In other words, the ‘TV
garbage’ can penetrate us and produce herd behaviours of the most severe forms,
as the television is usually viewed in private or in restricted circles and therefore
subjectivises us. In contrast, cinema is primarily and always public, and the
concept of cinema for ‘a pedagogy of cinema’ has the possibility of animation and
thought beyond the channels usually opened up through subjective, individualised
and audience-based television production. Whether we express these possibilities
in aesthetic terms as happens in ‘Suspiria’, or in bodily transformation as does
Cronenberg, is secondary to the notion of an expanded, collective, conceptual and
image platform in cinema, in contrast to the normatively defined, and narrowly
consuming world of television and the reproductive-image based on viewing
figures (cf. Chapters 4 & 6).
There are two major points for ‘a pedagogy of cinema’ that we may draw from
the time and movement-images (Figures 9 & 10) in ‘Videodrome’. (1) Capitalism

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 The fundamentals of horror and learning

works through screen culture as an inter- and intra-penetrative construct; (2) the
screen culture represented in ‘Videodrome’ is itself under pressure from the very
forces that construct it. Frederic Jameson (2011), following Deleuze and Guattari
(1988) put these two points rather neatly when he said that [‘Videodrome’ shows
how] a profoundly illiterate capitalism keeps up the symbolic order only for show.
In other words, you don’t straightforwardly read Capital, as Capital reads you.
“You can’t simply play with Capital, as Capital plays with you” (p. 92). These
formulations of Capital and subjectivity are even more cogent now, given the
recent promulgation and intensification of screen culture and Capital via the
internet. The transmigration and distribution of the ‘Videodrome’ disease via a
video cassette is augmented and infinitely complexified given the distribution
potential of an internet borne virus. The horror and learning that the images of
‘Videodrome’ show us, include a time-based element that brings the film up to date
and reinvents the purposes and politics of the images. Behind the disturbing reality
of ‘Videodrome’ are the concurrent forces of power, figured here as capitalism,
yet beyond direct comprehension or rational analysis. Rather, the forces of and
in Capital take over and battle to control the body without any clear winners or
losers other than death and the processes of decay that accompany annihilation
(see Chapters 6 & 7).
These images from ‘Videodrome’ (Figures 9 & 10) are fitting final images to
analyse with respect to the work of David Cronenberg. The forms of horror and
learning that might accompany such images summarise the ways in which the
director has added to the image catalogue of cinema by inventing that which Deleuze
(2005) called a ‘crystal image’ or hyalosign in Cinema II. The crystal image, which
encapsulates time, and brings together the virtual with the actual in Deleuze’s
terms, shows how cinema has moved on from action-images, that dominated early
cinema. At the end of Cinema I, Deleuze (1992) lists 5 characteristics of the new,
time-based images that explains how they have emerged due to a crisis in the
action-image: (i) the dispersive situation; (ii) the deliberately weak links; (iii) the
voyage form; (iv) the consciousness of clichés; (v) the condemnation of the plot
(p. 210). Cronenberg has seemingly taken on board these points on the transition
of cinema according to Deleuze, and has used aspects of them to deepen the time
element in his images.

WHAT IS ‘UNDER THE SKIN’?

The last film that shall be analysed for horror and learning is the 2013 work called,
‘Under the Skin’ (Glazer, 2013). The cinematography of ‘Under the Skin’ focuses
on image and not providing continuity for the plot, while we follow an shape-
shifter played by Scarlett Johansson (seen in Figure 11), as she wanders around
Scotland in a white van, preying on men to pick up and to absorb in the artificial
and unreal ‘dark place’. The main character has inherited a new image at the
beginning of the film, and seems to be preying on suitable men while controlled

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Chapter 2

by a high powered motorcyclist and using her seductive body image. Much of the
film is unexplained, tension is created by focussing on the realistic ways in which
the men are picked up, and by creating (an)other space where the men are absorbed
into thick black liquid (Figure 14). Abstract images play an important part in the
film (e.g. Figures 12 & 13) and create a different layer and texture to the exterior,
figurative images, which suggests machinic processes that are beyond our direct
control, and sit alongside the exterior action of the film. The narrative changes
after the alien encounters a lonely, disfigured man and decides to let him go after
luring him into the back void (Figure 11). After his point, the alien is a hunted
figure, and this reversion from the perspective of the hunter leads to the eventual
downfall of the alien, as it is burnt alive in a forest.
One could argue that this film is primarily about images. The alien takes on a
new image from another female alien invader at the beginning of the film, and
learns about the power of image from her observations of human society. The alien
henceforth uses her image to attract men and to take them back to the black tar pit for
absorption. We find out at the end of the film that the image that the alien has taken
on is literally only skin deep, as she takes off the human skin after the attempted rape
in the forest. The film alternates between movement-images, in which the action is
depicted realistically, as if being filmed in secret through hidden cameras, and time-
images, set in the black void, or showing abstract images and shapes as montage. The
cinematic, image-based experience of ‘Under the Skin’ therefore vibrates between
hyper-realism and extra-terrestrial fantasy, recalling what Baudrillard (2005) has
said about media images: “the photographic image is the purest because it simulates
neither time nor movement and confines itself to the most rigorous unreality. All
the other forms (cinema, video, computer generated images) are merely attenuated
forms of the pure image and its rupture with the real” (p. 97). Baudrillard therefore
draws a hierarchy between photography and all other media (including cinema),
which ‘Under the Skin’ follows as a means to extenuate and work with the rupture
as described above. As a result, it is difficult to know what the real is in the film, or
what is truly being represented in ‘Under the Skin’ at any given time, and we have to
work as an audience to fill in the gaps and to explain the images and their sequence
that are presented (cf. Chapter 7).
It is tempting to try and explain ‘Under the Skin’ and to assemble a symbolic
order around the images that designate what it means. However, the impetus behind
‘a pedagogy of cinema’ is to work in the opposite direction, and to understand how
the specific images function, and to create regimes of signs that might or might not
have direct (expressible) meaning. Clearly, the director and producers are playing
with the topology of cinema through ‘Under the Skin’, as the outward, everyday
space that we perceive through the realism of the film is complementary and
congruent to the inner space of the alien world. Similarly, the stark depiction of the
‘mechanical time’ of the outer realist film complements and works with the timeless
void of the alien enclosure, setting the time dimension off in different directions

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 The fundamentals of horror and learning

Figure 11. The alien and disfigured Figure 12. Close up of iris in abstract
man in the ‘dark place’ sequence at beginning of film

Figure 13. Red laser light coming from Figure 14. Floating blue man after
a slit in abstract sequence after the blue being picked up by the alien and taken
man has been absorbed to the ‘dark place’

and with different purposes in the film. Ultimately, the horror and learning that one
may extract from ‘Under the Skin’ works in a less penetrating and more dispersive
manner than the previous image examples analysed. This is because we are not
drawn to the main character in any way in the film, rather, we watch dispassionately
as ‘she’ goes about her business and becomes the victim at the end. The result of
the film is dislocation and placement in the element of dislocation, as one may
question every angle and through-line in the film. The cinema logic of ‘Under the
Skin’ works in reverse as the alien dies and reverts back to the ‘Under the Skin’
form, the hidden self, never before seen in the film. In terms of the time-image, or
‘chronosigns’, ‘Under the Skin’ would seem to suggest the body as series, or: “the
before and after are no longer themselves a matter of external empirical succession,

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but of the intrinsic quality of that which becomes in time. Becoming can in fact
be defined as that which transforms an empirical sequence into series: a burst of
series” (Deleuze, 2005, p. 275).
‘Under the Skin’ succeeds in disrupting one’s sense of what a science fiction
or horror film should look like through its series and becoming. The series of the
film consists of the alternation between a documentary-style realism and inner space
fantasy. ‘A pedagogy of cinema’ is not about making films more comprehensible,
or putting them in a visual semantic frame with other films that try to do similar
image work (cf. Chapter 3). Rather, the singularity of ‘Under the Skin’ and the most
prescient aspect that is suitable for ‘a pedagogy of cinema’ is the vibration between
seduction and absorption, the flipping between image and annihilation. What is
really ‘Under the Skin’ is not a predatory or recalcitrant alien, but everything that
is not on show through image, for example, the hopes and desires of the multitudes
portrayed in the film. The simply stated point of the film is that there is a direct
connection between image and death, or how external, deadly forces can become
ingratiated as the familiar.

CONCLUSION

This writing builds a picture of horror and learning though the methodology of ‘a
pedagogy of cinema’ and by paying close attention to particular cinematic images.
This forms an idea about learning that is deeply felt on many levels, and opens out
to the fluctuations of the present day situation, in fact one could say that the learning
depicted here is designed to specifically bisect and go through the contemporary. One
could assert that the image of thought that these ideas create serves to demonstrate
the effectiveness of the approach advocated in ‘a pedagogy of cinema’, that treats
images from cinema as art and as possessing complex and intricate relationships
with movement, time and signs. The sense of horror that one may appreciate from
the images comes about as subjectivity is loosened and an enveloping feeling
or contact with underlying affect is apparent. The Deleuzian impulse to analyse
images pushes one’s rationality and critical self into an uncomfortable place, where
the realisation of horror accompanies everyday perceptions and sequences of events
in the world.
The educational practice that most closely resembles the work that has been
done here could be defined under the rubric of multiple literacies theory or MLT
(Masny & Cole, 2009). This is because literacy is presented by this book wholly in
terms of becoming, and this becoming takes into account and responds to the types
of affects that have been synthesised with horror. For example, children schooled
in closed institutional contexts, may well show gains in their short-term literate
behaviours and specific skills such as grammar and spelling. However, the long-term
damage of being exposed to authoritarian and power-based pedagogic techniques
will inevitably bring problems with the children’s underlying mental states, as they
will have had to respond to pedagogy through their schooling in terms of fear and

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obedience. In contrast, ‘a pedagogy of cinema’ is more akin to open, inclusive, inter-

disciplinary and progressive modes of teaching and learning, where the reach and
scope of the learning is uppermost (Cole, 2011). One could counter that the theme of
horror and the image examples presented here, do not give themselves to the type of
open educational approach that ‘a pedagogy of cinema’ professes (see the following
chapters), however, I would like to argue in the opposite direction, and tie up the
three sections of this section in the process of explanation.
Firstly, the images from ‘Suspiria’ lend themselves to an aesthetic appreciation of
horror and learning. Cronenberg takes us to a place where body-horror is real and the
images reflect the sense that bodily deformation is inevitable in the present situation.
Lastly, the images form ‘Under the Skin’ show us how horror and learning can produce
oscillation between hyper-realism and space fantasy. The image amalgamation of
these films is therefore: aesthetics – body transformation – alien space/real. The
aesthetics of ‘Suspiria’ definitely position us in the place of the audience, as we
watch the heroine as she is entrapped on every level in the weird European dance
academy. The bodily transformations of Cronenberg make us wonder if the intense
and peculiar happenings on the screen could be taking place in us. The two sides of
‘Under the Skin’ make us aware that under the surface of our everyday lives, another
inter-linked world is increasingly proliferating, and this world has the potential to
directly absorb and rupture our ‘outer selves’. The synthesis of these images therefore
does present an open system for learning, and one which could make a difference to
our understanding of horror. This is because the exploration of subjectivity that this
writing presents is, in Guattari’s words: “[an] ensemble of conditions which render
possible the emergence of individual and/or collective instances as self-referential
existential territories, adjacent, or in a delimiting relation, to an alterity that is itself
subjective” (1995, p. 9). In other words, the intention here is not to instil fear into
the reader, but to open up new avenues for thought between horror and learning in
the same way that Spinoza’s notion of affect opens up a new model of the mind. The
subjectivity produced by the horror and learning of globalisation is not a narrow or
trapped one, but is able to roam free on a new immanent plane of becoming made
real through the cinematic images and reading ‘a pedagogy of cinema’. The next
chapter takes the reading of horror and learning to another level through the deeply
personal schizophrenic filmmaking of Arthur Lipsett.

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Masny, D., & Cole, D. R. (Eds.). (2009). Multiple literacies theory: A Deleuzian perspective. Rotterdam,
The Netherlands: Sense Publishers.
Pisters, P. (2012). The neuro-image: A Deleuzian film-philosophy of digital screen culture. Stanford:
Stanford University Press.
Powell, A. (2005). Deleuze and horror film. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Roffe, J. (2005). Deleuze, Gilles | Internet encyclopedia of philosophy. Retrieved April 24, 2015, from
http: //www.iep.utm.edu/deleuze/
Shaviro, S. (1993). The cinematic body. Minneapolis, MN: The Minnesota Press.
Shaviro, S. (2008). The cinematic body REDUX. Parallax, 14(1), 48–54.
Standing, G. (2011). The precariat: The new dangerous class. London: Bloomsbury.

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 CHAPTER 3

DECODING THROUGH CINEMA

The Case of Arthur Lipsett

INTRODUCTION

This chapter follows on from Chapter 2 by asking a basic question for ‘a pedagogy
of cinema’: How can we ‘decode’ what is happening due to the present day
educational situation qua capitalism? We are coded from every angle through
educational processes; i.e. through feedback questionnaires, testing, evaluation
and assessment. How can we escape these processes, and how does cinema work
in this context? This writing explores how the experimental collage documentaries
of Canadian avant-garde film director Arthur Lipsett (1936–1986) contribute to ‘a
pedagogy of cinema’ by walking the tightrope between delirium qua processual
schizophrenia, and the ever present risk of breakdown as clinical entity (Massumi,
1992). Lipsett’s oeuvre – especially the last work ‘Strange Codes’ (1974) –
confirms the argument of Buchanan (2006) who insists that ‘the royal road’ to
a schizoanalysis of cinema lies via delirium rather than pre-ordained dream or
fantasy. The genre of collage film is therefore read as a schizoid apprenticeship
in and a scrambling of codes. Crucially, we shall examine this from both the
viewer’s and director’s perspectives. The subversive manipulation of incongruous,
dissonant images and sound – a chaos which breeds images (Deleuze, 2003) – can
be understood as a poetic means of communication, as something which, as T.S.
Elliot insists, must be created rather than understood (cf. Chapters 2 & 7). We shall
thus undertake a schizoanalysis of Lipsett’s evocative messages, eccentricities
and the power of affect in his films, to show the dimensions of extraordinary
experimentation and the risks involved in delirious thinking to demonstrate how
the outside of normatively agreed upon, commercial, and conceptually vacant
filmmaking is traversed through the very figure of Lipsett. The way Lipsett breaks
through boundaries in his art and life is exactly what ‘a pedagogy of cinema’ aims
to do, in other words, to enable ‘cinema-thinking’ and to create a schizoanalysis by
cinematic means and an ‘decoding’.
In this retrospective of Lipsett’s work, and in considering the claim central to ‘a
pedagogy of cinema’ that cinema is a powerful mode of thought in itself (Flaxman,
2000, p. 366), we shall reflect upon the idea that Lipsett, like other auteur directors

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Chapter 3

thinks with movement and time images instead of concepts (Deleuze, 1986, 1989).
Indeed, Deleuze writes in Cinema 1 (1986, p. xiv) that the great cinema directors
may be compared not merely with painters, architects and musicians, but also with
thinkers – as they think, albeit with images, duration and time. Furthermore, we shall
address the question of Lipsett’s ‘minor’ cinematic style, as that which straddles the
multifaceted ‘image realities’ of modern life and effectively confounds the codes of
the actual, to engender ‘decoding’. We make the claim that his art is a fabulatory one,
as it deploys and invokes ‘the powers of the false’ (cf. Chapter 4). In the second part
of the chapter, we shall address the question of Lipsett’s breakdown, his becoming-
radio, his creation of a ‘sound wall’ at the precise moment when cinema stalls
qua means and mode of creativity, to show how this limit adds a visceral and real
underpinning to ‘a pedagogy of cinema’.
The work of Lipsett elucidates some of the common features of a schizoanalysis
by cinema which is read as consistent with and complementary to ‘a pedagogy of
cinema’. Through the prism of Lipsett’s work, ‘a pedagogy of cinema’ is heuristic
in explaining what Pisters calls “the madness of contemporary audio-visual culture”
(Buchanan & MacCormack, 2008, p. 112). The line of experimentation from
schizo breakthrough or delirium to clinical breakdown can be decodified through a
schizoanalytic methodology which understands cinema, pedagogically, in terms of
“chaos, ‘wild’ connections, immersive overload of the senses, ambiguity, confusion
and affect” (ibid., p. 112).

PART 1

Right at the beginning of his career, Lipsett’s work attracted many reputable
admirers. George Lucas recognized Lipsett’s potential from the outset. He was not
alone as Lipsett’s creative ability was also spotted by other well-known filmmakers.
Stanley Kubrick (Letter to A. Lipsett, May 31, 1962) called the 7-minute ‘Very Nice.
Very Nice’, ‘one of the most imaginative and brilliant uses of the movie screen and
soundtrack I have ever seen’. And cinema critic Donald Richie (November 14, 1962)
describes the same film, as ‘mordant, sarcastic, and extremely funny evaluation of
western society’.
Watching the scrambling of the codes in Very Nice, Very Nice is a vertiginous
experience in itself. A small segment of the collage art exemplifies this. The
images I chose proceed as follows: From a ‘No’ sign (Figure 15), to confident
man (Figure 16), to joyful smile (Figure 17), to nuclear testing (Figure 18), from
America at a crossroads (Figure 19), to a skull looming over an impersonal crowd
(Figure 20), then to rocket technology (Figure 21) and finally the repetition of the
face of a petrified child (Figure 22). This demonstrates how and where traditional
reading breaks down and why ‘a pedagogy of cinema’ is both timely and necessary.

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 DECODING THROUGH CINEMA

‘Very Nice, Very Nice’

Figure 15. A semiotic questioning of the Figure 18. ‘Happiness’ is juxtaposed with
direction of society images of nuclear bomb tests

Figure 16. Eyes often look up or Figure 19. America is at a crossroads.

elsewhere, beyond the camera’s reach Keep moving right ahead, please

Figure 17. Images of eyes and teeth Figure 20. Images of contorted faces
signifying health and happiness as death hovers above

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Figure 21. Technology as a panacea Figure 22. The face says it all.
for social ills? A concern for the present and future

‘21–87’

Lucas in particular had much to say about Lipsett: ‘No one understood the power
of image and sound better than Lipsett’ (Lavut, 2007). Indeed, Dancsok argues
‘21–87’ greatly influenced the overall story of THX 1138, the 1971 science fiction
film directed by Lucas, the then debutante filmmaker. Indeed, in his notes for an
early work, ‘Free Fall’ (1964) Lipsett explains his intention was to visualize a
poem by Dylan Thomas The Force that Through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower
(Lipsett, 1963b). Here we encounter for the first time ‘The Force’ – that is to say,
some form of spirit behind all life that interconnects with everything else. While
the Force is not straightforwardly analogous to the Lovelockian Gaia hypothesis it
does suggest something organic and interconnected.
The notion of ‘the Force’, which is central to the filmmaking of Lipsett,
reappears in ‘21–87’, from which Lucas confessed he appropriated the idea and
incorporated it into the ‘Star Wars’ series, now one of the most watched films in
history. So with the release in December, 2015, of ‘Star Wars: Episode VII – The
Force Awakens’, it seems timely to think how the influence of Lipsett continues
to ‘schiz’ the Hollywood film business and to appreciate how the Star Wars
franchise, now operating under the Disney entertainment umbrella, makes the
commodification of the universe by Disney all the more schizophrenic. Disney is
the Empire. So here generations of filmgoers incorporate dozens of expressions:
‘Use the Force Luke’; ‘May the Force be with you’; ‘The Force is strong with this
one’; ‘The Force is what gives a Jedi his power. It’s an energy field created by all
living things. It surrounds us and penetrates us. It binds the galaxy together’; ‘I
felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in
terror and were suddenly silenced. I fear something terrible has happened’. Like
the Sony Walkman, which has inadvertently schizophrenized entire generations,

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according to Deleuze (who claimed schizophrenic Louis Wolfson was the real
inventor), it could be equally said that Lipsett’s films have ‘schizzed’ cinema and
its spectatorship, as his revolutionary collage techniques have been incorporated
widely into film. In a very important sense then, Lipsett schizzed the film aesthetic.
His schizoid collages of unrelated images and sound engender myriad couplings
and connections to the real. His film language – satirical and eccentric – collage,
montage, ad hoc juxtaposition of disparate images – creates a means to grasp the
real of the schizo qua revolutionary process.

‘21–87’

Figure 23. Passage from Figure 25. ‘21–87’ shows the

becoming-robot of man to robotic paranoid eyes of those caught
society as such by the camera

Figure 24. Lipsett mounts a critique Figure 26. Lipsett thinks the cruelty
of technology of US civil society by observing a monkey

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Chapter 3

Figure 27. Simulacrum of beauty Figure 29. Frenetic movement exposes

juxtaposed with contorted the inhuman, animality and negative
inhuman images capacity of jazz

Figure 28. A concern with the fate Figure 30. The finale of ‘21–87’
and future of a society hell bent on is the circus and spectacle
technological determinism

To explain the schizophrenic aspect of the image in collage cinema, let us look
at ‘21–87’ briefly. The vast array of images in ‘21–87’ is spellbinding, with
representation of their significance rendered nigh impossible. This deconstruction
of representative meaning explains how Lipsett schizzed the cinema aesthetic. The
movement at the beginning of the film exemplifies the scrambling of conventional
meaning. We see collages passing from skull to trapeze artist to cremated cadaver,
to robotic man (Figure 23) to robotic arm (Figure 24) to sunlight and pensive
face (Figure 25) and ape (Figure 26). Although the juxtaposition of mannequin
(Figure 27), searching man (Figure 28), contorted, frenetic bodies (Figure 29)
and circus spectacle (Figure 30) makes no sense, as it effectively undermines any
straightforward interpretation, sense must be created through and by an active
spectatorship.

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 DECODING THROUGH CINEMA

FORCE FIELD

According to Sandiford (Siegel, 1986) Lipsett insisted everything had a sound or a

force field:
He had that kind of intensified perception of things. I didn’t know anyone
who paid that much attention to the world. It was this intense capacity for
observation that later became unbearable for Arthur. He bought industrial ear-
protectors because he couldn’t bear hearing things. He was just too sensitive.
At first he got them because of noisy neighbors, then he began to wear them all
the time. Inanimate objects had symbolic importance for him. His films made
you see things you didn’t see otherwise.
Everything is connected through what Lipsett terms as ‘the Nexus’. This reflects
Lipsett’s vast interests, according to filmmaker Tanya Tree (Siegel, 1986):
“Everything interested him: Chinese dictionaries, Buddhist chants. He was trying
to find universals in human culture, like an anthropologist. It was as if he, himself,
were from another planet, looking at us all – as he did in his films”. Perhaps it was
this search for universals – a search for the universals of schizophrenia – which
engineered too many connections, and resulted in misconnections, misfirings, the
brain operating too quickly as it makes too many neural connections, an overload
resulting in seizure (Virilio, 1991; Pisters, 2011).
From the site of ‘a pedagogy of cinema’, Lipsett’s films produce a liberatory
pedagogy, manifested in and through images (cf. Chapters 6 & 7). Through his
films, the viewer learns to “deal critically and creatively with reality, and discovers
how to participate in the transformation of the world” (Shaull, 1970, p. 16). His art
shows how to scramble and descramble images, and in so doing, highlights their
origin within a new environment, creating a schizo attribute to the image, a process
that enables ‘a pedagogy of cinema’. In this specific process that emerges through
Lipsett’s art, a demythologizing occurs – one that acts as an antidote to psychological
warfare, something that Lipsett was very concerned about (Nutter, 1997). In his
last film ‘Strange Codes’ (1974), we are provided with a dual process – one that
expresses a journey to uncover meaning, as well as providing a candid look at how
an artist transforms thought.

YOUTH AND THE PEDAGOGY OF CINEMA

This section adds an empirical element to ‘a pedagogy of cinema’ by looking at the

reception of Lipsett among young people in the 1960s. In a short documentary, ‘Two
Films by Lipsett’ (Rennick, 1967), teenagers consider the significance of Lipsett’s
films, what feelings or thoughts they evoke, what they suggest about the evolution
of mankind and the future of life on Earth. After viewing ‘Free Fall’ (Lipsett, 1964)
and ‘A Trip Down Memory Lane’ (Lipsett, 1965), students admit that the abruptness

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of the images shocked them. While they saw – images of nature, man’s capacity
for mass destruction, the ugliness of existence in Lipsett’s films – they could also
discern the spark of the new, a moment of beauty amidst the chaos. The narrator
explains the conundrum of Lipsett’s art:
These teenagers have just watched a film by Arthur Lipsett. Lipsett has
obviously made contact with this generation. To an older generation, his films
are often considered mere gibberish. To some learned critics he is a brilliant
expressionist. A man who builds controlled hysteria out of abstract images.
Lipsett himself says that if he could explain what he was doing in words, he
wouldn’t be making movies.
One of the producers of the film, Mark Slade, was involved in promoting NFB films
for use in various school curricula. He believed that Lipsett’s works would connect
with youth and made efforts in providing reasons for teachers to use Lipsett’s films.
Gordon Martin, a colleague of Slade, stated in an interview that Slade was responsible
for some of the first screen study programs in Ontario (Gordon, 1996). So here we
find that Lipsett’s films effectively connect with youth – his schizoanalysis of society
used as classroom material in Canada – his schizoid world forges connections and
schizzes mainstream Canadian education.
Boy 1 in the documentary says Lipsett’s pessimism effectively shocks the
spectator:
I think here he didn’t have any hope. And he didn’t want to show any hope. To
show us…to shock us. I think Arthur Lipsett’s God is an innocence or nature
itself. His God is nature and beauty and the innocence of the children which
he showed. And the horror in their faces because they were slowly being taken
over by the adult society and everything. And then it shows man moving in on
innocence, on nature, and on God. You like destroying it and changing it and
continuing it in all the different societies…
Girl 3 grasps the schizoid movement of collage:
All of sudden everything was running around, crazy as anything. And you
couldn’t grasp. And, yet, it was very difficult to keep your eye focused on
everything. But then all of sudden, it quieted down. And, you notice that there
was something that was spectacular, in its own…especially the swan. And it
just sort of sat there and radiated. Do you know what I mean? And the music
was just sort of subtle. And it said, you know, “Look at it”. “I’m beautiful”.
You know what I mean? And everything else was rushing around. And I
thought everything else was falling apart completely. Because they stopped
and recognized that the swan had beauty and the child had beauty and the
flower had beauty. That was like we are not all going to pot after all.
Indeed, Dancsok (1998, p. 1) describes his own first viewing of ‘21–87’ (1963a) as ‘a
liberating event’, because, for him, the unique editing techniques creates ‘profound

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interpretations’ of the world. He argues that ‘21–87’ – which was billed as a ‘wry
comment on a machine-dominated society and filled with dystopian symbolism’
according to a promotion poster – frees the viewer from a passive relation to the
image, and allows for a more playful interpretation, a position which is affirmed
throughout this book as a quintessential aspect of pedagogy of cinema. Dancsok
(1998, p. 1) says: “With ‘21–87’, I could ignore the narrative developed by Lipsett
and create my own”. The combination of sounds and images – at once unique and
dissonant – simply presents themselves, allowing the viewer to let them be, “without
attempting to rationalize them”. Such a form of documentary style is not defined by
verisimilitude as such, but by an aesthetic of the image, an iconology, a new image
of thought. For Dancsok, with the collapse of conventional linearity in Lipsett’s
film, the viewers can explore the rhythmic patterns and the virtual relationships
between sounds and images which, through Lipsett’s imaginary, unsettles, distorts
and undermines everyday perceptions of the time of technology (see Chapter 6).
For example, in ‘N-Zone’ and ‘Strange Codes’ there is a breaking with, not only
conventional narrative structure, but also with Lipsett’s own technique of narrative
ruptures and decoding. Unlike his previous films such as ‘Very Nice, Very Nice’,
‘Free Fall’, ‘21–87’, ‘A Trip Down Memory Lane’ (1965), and ‘Fluxes’, Lipsett is
no longer a conductor who builds a symphony of sounds and images, but rather a
sculptor who weaves patterns of relations from arrangements of ideas.
The use of close-ups in ‘21–87’ challenges, subverts and plays with orthodox
narrative and established ways of seeing, thinking, and feeling as it sets up cinema-
thinking. Lipsett’s work challenges the view that film merely reflects reality
(cf. Chapters 2, 4, & 5). His style unites seemingly unrelated sounds and images
to construct a coherent, albeit dissonant, vision. The shots used in his films are
liberated from their original purpose to deliver new meanings. Recycled footage,
arranged with Lipsett’s own camera work, retains a trace of its origin and in doing
so allows for an ironic questioning of the originary value of the shots. His ironic
use of imagery challenges the viewer’s perceived notions. Through a subversion of
the documentary genre, his avant-garde art looks to side-step any straightforward
representation of the real, a point which will be examined in depth through the
notion of bohemianism in Chapter 4.
Consistent with ‘a pedagogy of cinema’, because collage genre operates
in an intensely affective mode, as a consequence and in a very important sense,
Lipsett’s films liberate viewers from complacent, docile positions and relations.
His phantasmagorical collage arrangements undermine the Adornian axiom of
complicity with images. While Adorno insists that it is through the very act of film
watching that we give consent, Lipsett follows Hitchcock’s exhortation vis-à-vis
his audience: ‘Let them play God’. It is the audiences’ imagination which fills in
the gaps and shows how ‘a pedagogy of cinema’ functions – a point which shall
be explored in detail in Chapter 5. We can say that Lipsett’s collages demonstrate
both a concern for the fate of society and an attempt to liberate viewers from the
complacent perspectives of what Foucault calls ‘docile citizens’ in Discipline and

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Punish (1977). For example, writing, in the Montreal Gazette, Mark Slade finds
in Lipsett’s 23-minute collage film, ‘Fluxes’, the scrambling of meaning, in the
sense that it does not reside in images per se – as there is no ‘final codification’ as
such – but rather, meanings ‘are in us’ to be generated and constructed (Does, 2012,
pp. 67–68), not a priori but in the images to be generated from a relation with
the outside. Through this unravelling and scrambling of the codes inherent in
the perceived representational value, Lipsett delivers antidotes for psychological
warfare to the audience. According to Christopher Nutter (1997), Lipsett was very
concerned with psychological warfare which extended to worries about his own
films falling into the wrong hands.

COLLAGE AS A SCRAMBLING OF CODES (DECODING)

For Antonin Artaud, cinema functions to confront the spectator with the
impossibility to think as such. In other words, cinema is a paralysis of thought
in contrast to the axiom of this book, which is to engineer cinema-thinking.
Artaud’s argument is that the speed of images makes interpretation impossible. The
association of one image and the next proves impossible. For Artaud, cinema is a
scrambling of the codes, the de-association of images, a dissonant polyvocality.
Here Artaud informs Lipsett’s work, because the nooshock is a purely ‘neuro-
physiological vibration’ brought about by the movement and speed of the images
passing through the projector. The nooshock prevents thinking the totality. And
it is this which discloses the modern malaise: a powerlessness (impuissance) of
thought. Similat to Walter Benjamin’s argument about the possibilities inherent in
spectator distraction, this suggests the possibility of the birth of a new image of
thought, other than representational or dogmatic images. It is the bifurcations, false
movements, disconnected spaces, autonomous images and sounds of time image
cinema, which manifest the object in a purely cinematic logic: the movement of
time image cinema is affective, kinetic. For Deleuze, (1989, p. 122) film itself is
thought of as “the sum of all the ways of escaping from the flashback, and the
false piety of the recollection-image”. Pastiche cum collage acts as an assemblage
of ‘movement-images’. They do not pretend to convey the truth of society in any
conventional sense, but in their very compositionality generate truth qua “powers
of the false”. Through a perverse perspectivism, truth becomes ‘intensely affective’
(Ambrose, 2013, p. 128). In ‘Strange Codes’, in his universe of schizophrenia,
Lipsett looks for reasons to believe in the world.
After resigning from the Film Board in 1970, Lipsett made ‘Strange Codes’, in
which he appears in a variety of costumes and acts out what appears to be a search
for clues (or codes) that, in his words (n.p.), “could enable a human being to help
make transformations and connections from his inner world of feeling, to the world
of day to day reality systems”. We find Lipsett entombed in his own apartment
in Toronto, searching for ‘the Force’, the force-field, the Nexus, Orenda, for all
manner of secret codes (Figure 31). He plays the role of the artist-magician who

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 DECODING THROUGH CINEMA

metamorphoses – becomes-‘Shriner detective’ (Figures 35, 36) – searches through

a small Chinese magic box and discovers a roll of paper with a large number of
Latin words on it (Figure 37). The detective finds a Latin dictionary to uncover the
meaning of the words (Figure 32). The artist makes numerous costume changes,
adorns masks (Figure 34), prepares props and sets. It is a story of Lipsett’s search for
the secret codes of the universe, which is parallel to the way in which ‘a pedagogy
of cinema’ unhinges images from their habitual places in consciousness. ‘Shriner
detective’ becomes ‘Monkey King’, uncovering more codes and further hidden
meanings. There is also a becoming-Russian Cossack, a becoming-shaman. He
penetrates the surface of things to uncover further connections. The transcendent
third eye of the camera surveys the collage of codes scattered on the apartment floor
(Figure 38). This eye forms an arrangement of desire, a collage of varying shapes,
sizes and media: an agencement of desire, constructed as a machine to search, sort
and ‘decode’ codes.

‘Strange-Codes’

Figure 31. Searching for ‘the Force’ Figure 33. An abstract chakra to diagram
AND for all manner of secret codes the madness of civilisation

Figure 32. The detective finds a Figure 34. A play of masks and
Latin dictionary to uncover the identities
meaning of words

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Chapter 3

Figure 35. Deconstruction of identity and Figure 37. Linguistic codes are assessed
a process of becoming-other for what they may reveal

Figure 36. A concern with decodification Figure 38. The audience witnesses
the finale of the process of
scrambling the codes

As the credits are shown the Peking Opera soundtrack cuts to AI specialist Warren S.
McCulloch’s baritone voice saying:
Now, by that I mean this: If you start out with subatomic particles, they have
very strong field at short ranges. And they construct large numbers of affairs,
many of which are sufficiently enduring for us to recognize them as atoms…
The soundtrack then cuts back to the Peking Opera. Thus begins the vocal duel or
dance that at times punctuates Lipsett’s performance and at other times interrupts the
vocal stream of the audio protagonist. Throughout the movement of the performer/
detective/artist, a provocative soundtrack surrounds the actions. It is an acoustic dance
between Warren S. McCulloch and a Peking Opera (probably The Monkey King).
This is not the first time McColloch’s voice is used by Lipsett. Used in both ‘21–87’
and ‘A Trip Down Memory Lane’, McColloch is Lipsett’s bête noire as he represents
the strand of science that atomizes human thought: a science that removes human
relations from its interconnectivity to the universe. In ‘Strange Codes’, McColloch’s
pontification on how ‘systems’ or ‘humans’ relate to their ‘environment’ is countered

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with a barrage of symbols dissonantly clanging, with other percussion instruments,

coupled with high-pitched reed instruments and singing. The opera shocks the
viewer free from the seductive and hypnotic voice of science in a similar way that ‘a
pedagogy of cinema’ works to dislodge beliefs and assumptions in film.
With ‘Strange Codes’ the spectator realizes that they are not only looking at an
abstract investigation but an artistic process of ideas formation; concepts are pinned
to the walls and cover the floor, brought together or discarded. In the end, the artist
reveals the final product. As the film reaches a denouement (Figure 38), Lipsett
himself appears in a bathrobe, overlooks the final product, in this case a mural
displayed on the floor, perhaps the Charkra mural (Figure 33) he initially intended to
construct. The artist appears satisfied. ‘Strange Codes’ acts as a Bretchian psycho-
drama that reveals what is behind the curtain.
And it is this revealing which compels Lipsett to confront the limits of madness
as such. Put another way, it is not so much that Lipsett’s cinema gives us the illusion
of the world, but rather restores “belief in the world” (Deleuze, 1989, p. 172). Or as
Deleuze says: “Surely a true cinema can contribute to giving us back reasons to
believe in the world and in vanished bodies? The price to be paid, in cinema as
elsewhere, was always a confrontation with madness” (Deleuze, 1989, p. 201). As
intensively affective montage, Lipsett’s work engineers nooshocks to the brain,
schizzing the experience of cinema, prompting new thoughts to come into being,
thoughts other than the everyday nihilism of 1960s America. Such a cinema and
the neuro-circuity of the viewer forms new thoughts. Lipsett constructs movement-
images which connect to thought itself. Perhaps we can say that through metaphorical
collage his cinema produces shocks to thinking as such, which is to say, Lipsett is a
primary inspiration for ‘a pedagogy of cinema’.
Prior to breakdown, in cinema, Lipsett finds the means to break through the
normalizing tendencies of his age. His schizophrenic art initially resists neurosis
as it is plugged into diverse assemblages that breathe inaugural virtual possibilities;
it hallucinates a universal collage. Cinema was his means to explore creativity
qua schizophrenic process. But when the creative juices ran dry, Lipsett loses all
consistency. Prior to this was an intense voyage, a joyful art that flees: his desiring–
machine redraws territories, splinters codes, unpicks signifiers. Surreptitiously,
gently, mockingly, in confounding the codes, his desiring-machine sets flows
in motion. Through “incredible sufferings, vertigos, and sicknesses” (Deleuze &
Guattari, 1983, p. 131) – a challenge to the dominant codification – the Lipsett-
machine does not refer to a solitary human but to a new cinematic earth and territory:
his minor machine becomes the focus for analysis for ‘a pedagogy of cinema’.
Schizophrenia qua process is affective and universal (cf. Chapter 4). As Deleuze and
Guattari insist schizophrenia is at once the wall, the breaking through this wall, and
the failures of this breakthrough (Deleuze & Guattari, 1983, p. 136). In Anti-Oedipus
they write: “Everywhere there are break-flows out of which desire wells up, thereby
constituting its productivity and continually grafting the process of production onto
the product” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1983, p. 6).

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BWO

From heterogeneous images and sounds and their dissonant juxtaposition, it is the
kinetic collages, which, as an arrangement or agencement of desire, allow Lipsett to
experiment with his own Body Without Organs (BwO). Kinetic collage is a literally
a ‘gluing’, a sticking or pasting of discarded film frames; a pastiche of jettisoned
elements. The patchwork arrangement of desire in collage art is at once material-
immaterial, corporeal-incorporeal, discourse-nondiscursive, actual-virtual. At the
limit of his psychical tethering with the outside, Lipsett says to hell with the mad
arrangement of society and rejects the organs of endemic forms of violence, the
threat of nuclear war, mindless death, endless daily grind. He rejects the organs
of the state, the military-industrial-complex, a society hell bent on self-destruction.
Cinema is the vehicle for this statement (cf. Chapters 2, 4, 6, & 7). But such a
schizoid breakthrough of desire reaches the limit of what it can endure and confronts
a selection process of how and what it must connect with and to. This is the BwO
of Lipsett the schizo. The limit of his breakthrough therefore is not a psychical
breakdown. It is rather an experiment with the becoming images of sound, and the
becoming sounds of the image: an ensemble of connections with consistency. At this
limit, Lipsett’s BwO surpasses the limit and calls forth a new earth, and an absolute
deterritorialization in a strict sense.
The collages of discarded images, a veritable archive of irrational cuts, are
schizophrenic speech acts par excellence, pertaining to world-memory – a Being-
memory. Collages are constructed from disconnected images of world-memory. Art
then is an engagement in the matter-flow or flux of discarded images: fragments
juxtaposed with other fragments. Such an art is a matter-flow of the archive of unused
and unseen cinema. A work of virtual construction, from images real and fantastical.
To make sense of Lipsett’s art the spectator must think consciousness with the
‘matter-flow’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 411). To appreciate Lipsett’s work one
must embrace an immanent or educational materialism (Cole, 2012, p. 10) which
perceives matter as that which is in movement, in flux, in variation. Schizoid cinema
is this matter-flow, non-hylomorphic, an itinerant voyage of material intensity.
If we follow the materials of Lipsett’s art, follow the matter-flow, learn to think
from jettisoned materials, we find “the consciousness or thought of the matter-
flow” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 411). Then, Lipsett’s cinema is not a vehicle of
signification, but rather enjoins with the materiality of discarded, deterritorialized
images, the matter-flow, the affect-flow, intensity-flow.
Lipsett’s style effectively erodes a clear distinction between real and unreal,
documentary and avant-garde cinema, as his schizoid collages of unrelated image
and sound engender new couplings and connections to the real. Dancsok states that
linear narrative is deconstructed through ‘the interpretive narrative of the collage film’
(1998, p. 18). And as Lipsett states in a 1961 proposal for the film ‘21–87’, his grand
plan is for the audience to ‘transcend’ iconographic representation to experience the

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world (Lipsett, 1962). His film techniques and pedagogy of cinema was in effect a
challenge to orthodox notions of documentary film and representation. Conditioned
rhythmic associations between sound and image are challenged and overturned. As
Canadian filmmaker Richard Kerr notes in Lipsett’s editing technique, the image
and sound are ‘contrapuntal worlds working together’ (Kerr, 1996, p. 15). For
Dancsok, although sounds and image seem to be distinct and operating in rhythmic
parallel worlds, they nevertheless cohere. Viewers enter a world where everyday
consciousness, perception and truth is bracketed. In ‘Fluxes’, Lipsett sets out to
critique society’s movement towards scientific dogmatism. His startling use of
images and sound critiques the dependency on science at the expense of spiritual
values. And in a letter to Kit Carson, Lipsett explained how this theme is explored
in ‘21–87’: as each shot tends to have its own reality; by enjoining isolated shots,
a multi-reality situation tends to emerge which symbolically represents a larger
multi-realm situation, such as the collective consciousness (and unconsciousness)
of a civilization. Schizoanalytically, we can say, Lipsett’s work operates via a meta-
modelization process. In ‘Free Fall’, we find a montage of images challenging the
everyday distinctions between consciousness and nature, humanity and nature. For
Lipsett, the filming of diverse images – gospel music, ants carrying leaves, single-
head shots of tree trunks, and humans intermingling – was the medium to explore
higher states of consciousness. In Deleuzian terms, the film collage pertains less
with meaning and more with the passage of intensities: it is more a question of the
becoming of the image. This view is captured by Lipsett himself, who says that ‘Free
Fall’ expresses in filmic terms, an intensive flow of life – a vision of a world in the
throes of creation – the transformation of physical phenomena into psychological
ones – a visual bubbling of sound and picture operating to create a new continuity
of experience through the fusion of recognized past correspondences and mediate
sensory patterns (Lipsett, 1963b).
The collages in Lipsett’s cinema exhibit the irrational cut which determines “the
non-commensurable relations between images” (Deleuze, 1989, p. 214). He ‘thinks’
with and through images and sound to produce inaugural images of thought. His work
may be thought of as a model to disrupt what Jan Jagodzinski calls our “dominant
molar visual regime of globalised media” (Carlin & Wallin, 2014, p. 18) – in the
sense that it connects with an outside and disrupts those forces which maintain the
status quo. His montage of sound and image and the irrational cuts of his collage
technique formulate a ‘pedagogy of perception’ (Deleuze, 1995), a new approach to
the image that is incorporated into ‘a pedagogy of cinema’ (cf. Chapters 6 & 7). The
disconnect between image, sound, and time via the irrational cut renders possible an
‘interstice between images’ (Deleuze, 1989, p. 179), from which something virgin
may emerge. Jagodzinski describes the image in this space as becoming “disruptive,
powerful, beautiful and intolerable for the mind to grasp” (Carlin & Wallin, 2014,
p. 27), with its sublime dimension disrupting thought. In this way, cinema becomes
‘an aporia machine’ (ibid.).

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LIPSETT, TIME AND UTOPIA

In many ways, as time seems out of joint in Lipsett’s works, this opens up questions
about the temporal order in ‘a pedagogy of cinema’. His use of time challenges the
exploration of filmic time-based sensibilities by structuralist filmmakers such as
Paul Sharits, Tony Conrad and Michael Snow. A Lipsett moment is the capturing
of the decisive moment that is ‘extended in the moment in motion’ (Hancox, 2001,
p. 185). In an interview Nutter (1997) describes a Lipsett moment in ‘21–87’:

I remember being amused by a very quick shot of a duck’s ass exiting the
frame. A swan’s tail. And it’s sort of swimming away. And it’s swimming out
of the frame. And it’s very brief. And it’s at the end of a series of nice “looking
at the swans” shot. And then there is this tiny little shot of a swan’s tail leaving
the frame. I thought, “Geez, that’s like a shot of the cut” (laughs) or the shot of
the thought of, “Oh, he is going to cut now”.

In another example is ‘Free Fall’ (Lipsett, 1964) which begins with single-frame
concatenations which are, at times, book-ended with long shots and enjoined
with other single-frame sequences. The single-frame shot, edited in camera, is an
animation technique with the camera positioned over an animation table. Lipsett
used this animation technique outdoors, single-frame shooting faces of people on
the street, ants carrying leaves, tree trunks, and the sun poking out from behind
leaves. Dancsok (in press) describes this as “pixilated bursts, which are further
unified by a highly exuberant gospel chorus soundtrack and other musical fragments
from unidentified documentaries”. Sandiford rightly states that in the 1960s this
was a very risky technique because it was far from certain if people could even
‘see’ the images being shown (Lavut, 2006). At times the viewer is relieved from
the hundreds of 1/24th per second shots bombarding the eye and the brain with a
long shot of various photographs. These photographs, mostly of faces, are shown for
only a couple of seconds, but seem to be on the screen for much longer. This dance
between persistence of image, rhythm, and time suggests a meticulous awareness of
how time is relative to our perception of the moment.
Knowing that 24 frames passes by the lens every second is something all animators
need to know, but many narrative filmmakers tend to forget. Lipsett worked with
devices, camera and projector, whose sprockets linearly claw the film from its reel
and position it in front of a lens – one that absorbs light, the other that emits light
onto a screen. Both devices create shadows, the camera on the film, the projector
on the screen. They are illusionary shadows that suggest glimpses of the whole.
But in the end, how can linearity interpret thought? Or how can it express multiple
modes of transformation and transcendence? This was the challenge Lipsett faced
working with a time-based medium. And it is perhaps the reason why he stepped
away from filmmaking in 1970. In interviews with Dancsok, both Christopher Nutter
and Terry Ryan (1996) state that Lipsett wanted to create sculptures. This may hold
some currency given that around the time of resigning from the NFB, Lipsett wrote

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‘Composition Notes’ for a mural he intended to make. His goal was to create a mural
representing the different parts of a Chakra Mandela (Figure 33). From the notes we
see that Lipsett was still very much concerned with the collage process:

Each of these Chakra Murals should have its own peculiar vibration complex.
Head-chakra, throat chakras, heart charkas, gut charkas, pelvic chakras all
should be elevating and curative and be used for m.l.s. (medium long shot)
contemplation as well as c.u. (close up) details instruction.

Using technical terms for camera framing ironically suggest a camera as a medium
of production. However as his notes continue they suggest that a time-based medium
could no longer manifest the artistic path he was pursuing:

When choosing a clipping, attention should be paid to which type of vibratory

chakra it belongs, as well as what position it belongs to because of what it is;
positions existing from center to edges, top, bottom and east and west. Each
position has it special significance. Attention should also be paid to overall
tones, colours etc of each vibratory chakra.

Lipsett’s films consistently address the dystopian milieu or landscape the spectator
or voyeur is complicit with and fastened to. His antidote was to make the spectator
aware of it through subverting our perceived notions of reality. In his 1961 film
‘Very Nice, Very Nice’, near the beginning of this film we hear an audio clip,
possibly extracted from an interview with the Canadian literary theorist, Northrop
Frye (Ryan, 1996) where he states:

People who have made no attempt to educate themselves, live in some kind
of dissolving phantasmagoria of a world. That is they completely forget what
happened last Tuesday. A politician can promise them anything and they will
not remember later what he has promised.

This is followed by an audio clip of a man expressing the ‘beauty’ of the ‘sport’
married with photographic images of professional wrestlers punching each other
or putting holds on opponents grimacing with pain (Lipsett, 1961). In ‘21-87’ we
have become the mechanism, robotic. We are given a number that makes us feel
‘fine’ (Lipsett, 1961). ‘Fluxes’ (1968) continues this theme showing monkeys being
experimented upon; pushing coloured buttons to receive a reward, and images of
mechanical devices operating in slow motion. However, intertwined with Lipsett’s
condemnation of the present is his antidote – a decoupling of the image from any
immediate representational value, a cinematic form which provides clues to where
utopia may lie. In ‘Very Nice, Very Nice’ he uses a phrase twice that shows his
optimism: ‘Warmth and brightness will return and the renewal of the hopes of men’
(Lipsett, 1961). In short, while Lipsett’s work is suggestive of utopia, he complicates
any clear vision of how to get there. Following this process, as ‘a pedagogy of
cinema’ works from images to produce cinema-thinking, this can likewise construct

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and deconstruct utopias and dystopias. Lipsett’s films inform how this may be
achieved through close attention to the temporal order.

LES PUISSANCES DU FAUX

The ‘powers of the false’ is the moment in cinema when the purpose of narration
ceases to be truthful. In ‘a pedagogy of cinema’, a ceaseless questioning of the
truth of images occurs as part of an intellectual process. Lipsett’s cinema comes
into being when the virtual, detaches from the actual and assumes a life of its own
(Deleuze, 1989). His art conspires to defamiliarize the world and in so doing resists
the formation of the subject. The time image reconfigures narration as a ‘momentary
productive intensity’ that challenges the spectator to think otherwise, to consider the
world afresh. Irrational cuts are therefore not chaotic or random in Lipsett’s terms.
Rather, what the method permits is for the spectator to construct new ideas about
the ‘I’ and its relation to others and the world – and this is a founding principle of ‘a
pedagogy of cinema’.
The collages in Lipsett’s films exemplify the powers of the false and demonstrate
the thinking capability of cinema. He creates shocking and thought-provoking effects
through the juxtapositions of images, through schizophrenic collages which scramble
the codes of 1960s American capitalism. His images amount to a compulsive,
vertiginous and affective shock to dominant ways of thinking or decoding. Perhaps
we can say that Lipsett’s ‘cine-thinking’ or ‘thought-machine’ is principally
concerned with “not-yet-to-be thought” (Deleuze, 1989, p. 168). In his collages we
find the delinking of perception from the world and nature of his day, from 1960s
America which as a nation has undergone some kind of crisis or breakdown. In
them we notice something is not right – an incapacity of transformation. One of the
nameless speakers – a ghost from an unknown documentary – in ‘Very Nice, Very
Nice’ makes the point:
I would say that’s a, that’s a very dangerous thing. If the only thing that you
can think of to express your individuality is an orange plantation in Brazil …
(Lipsett, 1961)
The ‘powers of the false’ is an important concept for ‘a pedagogy of cinema’,
because it ties in with the Kleeian notion of a ‘people yet to come’. In a non-clichéd
and transformative manner, we argue that Lipsett’s work sows the ‘seeds of a people
to come’ (les germes du peuple a venir) because it exhibits a search for a missing
people and a utopia freed from the horrors under which vast swathes of mankind
live. In ‘21–87’ (Lipsett, 1963a) a voice of a woman is heard dramatically pleading
over an image of a crying dishevelled child: “Well take me to a place where I have
freedom! I’m a human being I wanna feel free! I wanna feel free and do things as
I please, the same things that you wanted to! You’re human, I’m also human!” In
this respect, Lipsettian cinema is a becoming time-image, a scrambling of the codes
differentiating the real and fiction. We can say that the concept of the powers of the

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false probes the very relationship between reality and the utopian, and articulates
how ‘a pedagogy of cinema’ crosses over into the virtual to become-other.

PART 2

BREAKDOWN

As mentioned earlier, ‘Strange Codes’ marks the onset of Lipsett’s psychological

malaise. His breakdown occurred around this time. Dancsok argues that ‘Strange
Codes’ marks the peak or limit of his artistic explorations via film (Dancsok, in
press), after which intractable psychological problems laid waste his artistic ability.
As it was through film that Lipsett engineered meaning, when this medium broke
down, so collapsed the process. Perhaps the bombardment of the sensorium from
sound and images proved an overpowering flux, with the schizo making too many
connections. The sensorium overloaded – schizophrenia ensues. Famously, for Dr
Paul Schreber it is ‘miracle rays’ which penetrate his body to link him with the
extraterrestrial. In Lipsett, his many voices evoke otherworldy beings invading his
cognitive space. In Memoirs of My Nervous Illness (1955), Schreber expressed fears
that the world was going to disappear after a massive earthquake and that he would
be the sole survivor because of his ability to predict the future. Such apocalyptic
fantasies manifest also in Lipsett’s war footage. We find a terrain of mushroom
clouds, bombs dropping, and rockets launching into outer space. Lipsett connects
with Gods, aliens, other realities, multiple realities: all the names in history. In his
film proposal, Lipsett explains the composition of his films in terms of “area deities”
that “radiate a sphere of influence?” (Dancsok, 1998, p. 90).
For Antoine Duhamel, cinema prevents thinking as such, as he says (n.p.): “I can
no longer think. The thoughts in my head have been removed by moving images”.
In contrast, for Lipsett, thinking is schizo-cinematic but only up to the point at which
breakthrough becomes breakdown; that is to say, at the limit at which pedagogy
and cinema are unravelled. At this point, moving images are no longer vehicles
for thinking. For Lipsett, there is a retreat to a dominant refrain, the surrounding
of oneself with electronic appliances, a communing with them, an arrangement or
ensemble of desire to ward off the voices in one’s head. So for Lipsett the moving
images become too much. They stall and stop. More precisely put, it is not so much
that cinema, the machine which sustained his fragile health, breaks down, but as a
plastic or incorporeal universe of reference (Guattari, 1995) it loses consistency;
his means of expression resorts to communing with the polyvocality of the radio.
Ethologically, in constructing a machinic arena of radios and mechanical equipment,
Lipsett makes an affective relation to the world, a wall between himself and the
outside (cf. Chapters 6 & 7). This is not merely a question of input and output but of
the construction of “mediums of alterity” (Guattari, 1995, p. 42).
Through the radio, forces of territorialization-deterritorialization are at work.
Through signature tunes, the radio entraps the schizo back in a dominant, vicious

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refrain. The machines that Guattari describes pertain to the affective realm of the
world – and the energies by which they move are not all tied to power grids, electrical
batteries, radio waves and antennae – as their components are epistemological,
contingent, and act as a platform. The entrapment by this cycle of deadly repetition
bears close resemblance to Gorz’s “scientific and technical worker” (1967, p. 106).
Lipsett’s flow of knowledge tapers off. As a last resort he creates ‘sound walls’ to
order his crumbling reality. In Lipsett’s case flows of knowledge, information, and
training turn inward and fizzle out. Absorbed by radio waves, transfixed by the
axiomatized stupidity of the world, which ‘a pedagogy of cinema’ is designed to
specifically counter, Lipsett finds in the radio his own little desiring-machines. As
Deleuze and Guattari famously bemoan, “O despair!” (1983, p. 216).
In a world of war, famine, nuclear bombs, rampant consumerism, endemic
alienation and unrest, Lipsett feels and sees ‘too much of everything’. He finds
the world “intolerable and unbearable” (Deleuze, 1989, p. 18). To paraphrase
Deleuze, he feels something “too powerful, or too unjust”, too beautiful, which
pulverizes his “sensory-motor capacities” (Ibid.). Ultimately, with creative energies
depleted, Lipsett turns neurotic with the relationship to the outside all but closed
off. Lipsett turns recluse, with his existential consistency in tatters, he sinks into
the mire of mental illness. He surrounds himself with radios as a link to embrace
the many different voices in his head. Lipsett surfs the radio waves, pulverized by
the juxtaposition of schizoid voices, fully and mournfully aware of the limit of his
creativity. The unfinished ‘Traffic Signals’ is one such example where the existential
consistency of his earlier work discernibly breaks down. The result is a film about
a group of people sitting in an apartment playing homemade musical instruments.
As Lipsett comes to understand his plight, crisis and loss of consistency, he writes
a memo to his producer Bob Verral, dated September 21, 1978, in which he explains
the reasons for his resignation. Lipsett writes: “I, Arthur Lipsett have developed a
phobia of sound tape. Also my creative ability in the film field had disappeared.
There is no way to explain this and the result is that I cannot continue to work for the
government. Sincerely” (Lipsett, 1978, p. 2).
Prior to this, his art may be interpreted as the machine to ward off the schizophrenic
paranoia as clinical condition. Now, cinema stops being the medium for his
creativity. In despair, and in the sessions with Dr. Carpenter, Lipsett turns naysayer
(n.p.): “Dying would be a good thing because I’ve finished – I have no creative ideas
left”. According to Dr. Carpenter, Lipsett suffered auditory hallucinations, which
were sometimes a great comfort to him when they were nice, and when they were
not tormenting him for being a Jew (Carpenter, 1997). Yet, and contra Goodyear
(2004), who reads ‘Fluxes’ in terms of a dogmatic and reductionist framework and
insists that Lipsett’s films are a product of clinical schizophrenia and nothing else,
and therefore convey ‘the sensory overload of schizophrenia’, the question is not so
much about the clinical category of schizophrenia, but how Lipsett experimented,
how he broke through the wall: the question at root pertains to his breakthrough

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rather than breakdown. In this way, we can affirm Deleuze and Guattari’s mantle
that it is the “undoing all the reterritorializations that transform madness into mental
illness” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1983, p. 321), which is a cogent lesson for ‘a pedagogy
of cinema’.
The visual aesthetic of Lipsett is frenetic, a kaleidoscopic and collage of
fragmentary, recycled images. We find a dystopian obsession with fascism, authority,
government, military, religion, spiritualism and destruction. Accompanying the
vast array of images are unusual sound samples and voice-overs: dystopian quasi-
narrative. His vision looks to transcend a world pockmarked by the alienating effects
of science and technology. The juxtaposition of images history and culture of the
20th century symbolically represents the collective desire and unconscious of the
socius. In ‘Very Nice, Very Nice’ (1961), we find a sardonic interpretation of late
1950s’ consumerism, mass media and popular culture. Confronted with Cold War
suspicion, repression and nuclear escalation, ‘N-Zone’ documents a private quest for
spiritual transcendence, while ‘Strange Codes’ acts both a riddle and ‘an index to his
other films’. The artist’s apartment becomes the stage for a disjunctive, live-action
self-portrait, intensified with numerous costume changes, masks, constructed props
and sets, as well as references to his earlier films. The result is a looping concoction
of serious play and light mysticism. Indeed, Lipsett’s voices evoke other-worldly
beings invading cognitive space.
Schizophrenic or otherwise, Lipsett’s cinema presents ‘a pedagogy of cinema’
because it contests everyday perceptions of material reality through a radical take
on the order of things (decoding). His films critically afford the viewer access to the
thought processes and experience of the schizophrenic process. For a schizophrenic
world, we need a tool-box of ideas to make sense of the non-sense. His collage
technique as a filmmaker is to burst asunder the dualism between the real and the
irreal. Lipsett makes many representations of reality into a montage pieces to unveil
his own experience of reality so that something deeper takes hold; e.g. otherness,
alienation, alterity.
In April of 1986, with energies depleted, Lipsett took his own life in his apartment.
Psychologists diagnosed Lipsett with chronic or paranoid schizophrenia. Lipsett was
assailed by auditory hallucinations, sometimes manageable, sometimes tormenting.
As the voices get the better of him, he loses interest in his physical appearance
and his paranoia grows, as do hallucinations, restlessness, greater use of self-
medication and recreational drugs. There is an overall inability to block out sounds.
As everything is now endowed with a sound or force field, Lipsett buys ‘industrial
ear-protectors’ to block out the outside. Suffering from too many connections, as a
subject besieged by mass media imagery, Lipsett’s apathy grows, he withdrawals
from society. Lipsett delirium can be interpreted as emerging through a ‘regime of
signs’ – a veritable tsunami of meaning. His schizo body loses its own active internal
struggle against the organs. The defeat ends in catatonia, or ‘a pedagogy of cinema’
too sensitive to the passages of thought that it has opened up.

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CELEBRATION OF MAN WHO BUILDS ‘CONTROLLED HYSTERIA

OUT OF ABSTRACT IMAGES’

The collage technique is untimely and disruptive, a zone of indiscernibility, alien

to everyday life. It is a vehicle for schizoanalysis and ‘a pedagogy of cinema’.
The cinematic collage process – both diagrammed and later rendered cinematic –
engineers virtual events which help us to see and feel differently. We can say
even that his diagrams ‘blow apart’ orthodox codes of interpretation (decode) that
dominate the social field (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). That his cinema is ‘gibberish’
is not a problem for ‘a pedagogy of cinema’ because it is at the border of sense and
nonsense, meaning and its collapse, stupidity and intelligence, chaos and order, that
something is born in thought, something new comes into the world. Why? Because
for Deleuze and Guattari, the schizophrenic process is revolutionary as the schizo
is able not only to exchange codes but to scramble them by relaying quixotically
between them, according to a logic of non-sense rather than semantics here called
decoding. The powers of the false belonging to cinema stem from the ‘camera-
consciousness’ that surveys the proliferation of post-war any-space-whatevers. In
these pure optical and sound spaces, ambulant characters find themselves deprived
of sensory-motor action. Thinking the non-places of the any-spaces-whatever, we
can say, it is Lipsett’s schizoid collages which, heuristically, explore the modern
affects of fear, detachment, speed and interminable waiting. His world explores
time, unhinged time, the time of lethargic stasis.

CONCLUSION

This chapter has made a connection between collage and ‘a pedagogy of cinema’
by addressing the process of ‘cinema-thinking’ in and through Lipsett’s art. It has
questioned the nature of ‘cinema-thinking’ in Lipsett’s films and highlighted the role
of the outside in his work. This outside is a schizophrenia of schizophrenia itself;
it is a schizophrenia of schizophrenia qua cinema and capitalism. Collage in its
very composability is schizophrenic and maddeningly so. The experimental collage
technique in its very ad hoc constructivism is a questioning of the dominant image
of thought in 1960s America. Collage as non-dogmatic thought is a questioning
and unravelling of the crisis of the movement image and the transition to the time
image in cinema as described by Deleuze. In 1960s America, if life mirrors one
long prolonged series of collage images, the point is that Lipsett’s cinema responds
to this problematic affirmatively. His art in this respect offers an opening for life,
“a path between the cracks” (Bogue, 2004, p. 9). Moreover, Lipsett’s films are more
than a machine propagating axioms of stupidity because his films as a schizophrenic
medium are a way to understand the schizophrenic society at large. The thought
process inhering in his collages is a way to understand the world gone mad. This
chapter has demonstrated how Lipsett’s ‘pedagogy of cinema’ is a visual paragon for
explaining the connections between the concept of cinema itself, continental thought

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and specific films demonstrating the concept of cinema. Here, the philosophy of
the rhizome in Deleuze and Guattari’s thought resonates with Lipsett’s ‘pedagogy
of cinema’ because the image of the rhizome has some purchase in decoding how
collage functions (cf. Chapters 2 & 6). While Lipsett has his own vision of how to
transcend reality, the ‘pedagogy of cinema’ residing in Lipsett’s collage films does
not impose a transcendent model or meta-critique of the world in any straightforward
manner, because it is precisely his collage art that functions immanently from
within the images themselves. Thus the matter at hand is how images function
together – a point demonstrated by Deleuze’s cinematic thought. The images in
their mad arrangement and composition aid the understanding of how the world
is and functions. Furthermore, the application of Lipsett’s emergent schizoanalytic
readings of cine-thinking directly relate to the next chapter, which deals with the
issues of bohemianism, education and cinema.

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Lipsett, A. (1962). Proposal for 21-87. Production files. National Film Board of Canada Archives,
Montreal.
Lipsett, A. (1963b, July 16). Proposal sent to Tom Daly for the film Free Fall. Production files. National
Film Board Archive, Montreal.
Lipsett, A. (1978, September 21). Memo to Bob Verrall, Production Files. National Film Board Archives,
Montreal.
Massumi, B. (1992). A user’s guide to capitalism and schizophrenia: Derivations from Deleuze and
Guattari. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Nutter, C. (1997, March 16). Personal interview with Dancsok.
Pisters, P. (2011, July 01). Synaptic signals: Time travelling through the brain in the neuro-image. Deleuze
Studies, 5(2), 261–274.
Richie, D. (1962, November 14). Quoted in an internal memorandum from the Canadian Embassy, Tokyo
to the Under-Secretary of State for External Affairs, Canada. Very nice, very nice file. Cinematheque
quebecoise archives, Montreal.
Ryan, T. (1996, November 22). Personal interview with Dancsok.
Schreber, D. P., & Macalpine, I. (1955). Memoirs of my nervous illness (Trans., Ed. & with introduction,
notes and discussion). London: Dawson.
Shaull, R. (1970). Foreword. In P. Freire (Eds.), Pedagogy of the oppressed. London: Penguin Books.
Siegel, L. (1986, October). A clown outside the circus. Cinema Canada, 134, 10–14.
Virilio, P., & Beitchman, P. (1991). The aesthetics of disappearance. New York, NY: Semiotext.

FILMOGRAPHY
Lavut, M. (2007). Remembering Arthur [film]. Canada: National Film Board of Canada.
Lipsett, A. (1961). Very nice, very nice [film]. Canada: National Film Board of Canada.
Lipsett, A. (1963a). 21-87 [film]. Canada: National Film Board of Canada.
Lipsett, A. (1964). Free fall [film]. Canada: National Film Board of Canada.
Lipsett, A. (1965). A trip down memory lane [film]. Canada: National Film Board of Canada.
Lipsett, A. (1968). Fluxes [film]. Canada: National Film Board of Canada.
Lipsett, A. (1974). Strange codes [film]. Canada: Giraffe Productions.
Rennick, D. (1967). Two films by Lipsett [film]. Canada: National Film Board of Canada.

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 CHAPTER 4

BOHEMIANISM AND PEDAGOGY [IN AND OUT]

OF THE CINEMA

INTRODUCTION

There are two questions that one confronts in terms of ‘a pedagogy of cinema’ and
that relates to the genesis of this book. The first relates to identity: Who are we?
given the influence and affective qualities of ‘image’, and the ubiquity and mobility
of images that are supported in the current global capitalist situation. The second
question that this book gives rise to relates to the lifestyle that we consequently
lead, given the augmented and pivotal ‘cinema-thinking’ that this book proposes,
and the centrality of image in everyday life as a consequence of the position of
capital, and the ways in which the image/capital dimension potentially affects and
changes us, for example, through consumerism. This chapter will respond to these
two questions in terms of ‘bohemianism’, which is a strategic, deliberate answer to
these questions, or limit thought in terms of ‘what cinema can do’ in response to
identity and lifestyle and flowing on from the previous chapter. Bohemianism acts
as a cohesive motif and thematic, and a deliberate provocation against mainstream,
globalised, capitalist ways of life. The idea here is not that we become necessarily
bohemian after watching and responding to certain images from the films selected
here, but that there is an underlying bohemianism that filmic images currently
negate as part of the normative conditioning contained in the mainstream concept
of cinema as entertainment/commercial enterprise. To undermine and to set free
one’s perception of what ‘cinema can do’ therefore involves taking bohemianism
as a form of pedagogy or limit to ‘uncondition’ one from the current situation, and
in response to the two central questions, and to an extent throughout the book. This
writing therefore signals escape routes from the machinic nature of ‘integrated world
capitalism (IWC)’, through the analysis of specific images and the cinema-thinking
of ‘a pedagogy of cinema’, set against a backdrop of bohemianism and how it may
be communicated through film.
The primary focus in the first section is an analysis of the film ‘Performance’ by
Donald Cammell & Nicholas Roeg. In ‘Performance’, the central character, played
by James Fox, is an East End of London hoodlum called Chas who transforms under
the influence of and through Turner, Mick Jaggar, a bohemian artist, who is leading
an alternative lifestyle, but has lost his ‘mojo’. Jagger changes in tandem with the
transformation of the Fox character, as the film convincingly sets out the criminal
underworld of London and the stark contrast of a bohemian hideout, away from

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and protected from the conventionality and morals of everyday life. These ideas
and images explore the conventionality or normative/moral format of ‘a pedagogy
of cinema’ (cf. Chapters 2, 3, & 6) and what cinema-thinking does in this context,
set against the backdrop of cinematic images taken from the film ‘Performance’,
selected works of Peter Greenaway, and ‘The Devils’ by Ken Russell.

WHAT CAN WE DO WITH AN EAST END GANGSTER? THE TEACHING

AND LEARNING OF ‘PERFORMANCE’

Who loves you, eh? That’s right, Mummy loves you, you little monsters.
Mummy loves you more than anything – more than all the cakes, more than all
the jewellery, more than all the chocolate in the world.
Violet Kray (to her sons) from the film, The Krays (Medak, 1990)
There is something other worldly and ‘beyond’ us with respect to the thought,
the reality, and the possibility of living a bohemian lifestyle, especially from an
entrenched, underworld, gangster perspective. In the film, ‘Performance’ this
contrast and alternation between conflicting realities is compellingly portrayed
through images that take the viewer deeply into the heart of what it is like to exist
in the gangster underworld, and to henceforth emerge from it and into a bohemian
‘other world’. What is interesting about the film is that the changes that we witness
in the central character, Chas, do not simply represent a one-way transformational,
redemptive process, somewhat aligned or metaphorically about going from Hell to
Heaven (Figures 39 & 42). Rather, the diversity of angled images, reflections, echoes,
embedded music, flashbacks, montage, panning long scenic shots and abstract
constructions of thought in the film; make the journey of Chas a metaphysical and
indeed ontological one, which explores the many ways in which thought happens in
the context of ‘gangsterland’ and alternatively in a bohemian hideaway. The central
message that one may carry away from the images of the film, and in terms of ‘a
pedagogy of cinema’, is that identity transformation is a complex mess of violence,
image, memory, desire, relationships, context and power: put simply, “I am a bullet”,
Chas, from ‘Performance’, (Cammell & Roeg, 1970).
Chas ‘escapes’ to the bohemian world to get away from the threat of death in
the gangster reality, however, his emergence into the new world is simultaneously
marked by changes in the bohemian ringleader, Turner, who needs the vital energy
of Chas to ‘respark’ his creativity. There is therefore a definite sense of interpersonal
transference in the film and in the images, in that the becomings shown are not uni-
directional, but are sustained evidence about how complex renderings of time and
personality work, akin to viewing the movements in quantum mechanics through
cinema (cf. Feynmann, 1990). Such a figure of complex transference could be used
as a means to understand the ‘pedagogy’ in ‘a pedagogy of cinema’, because the
multiple dimensional rendering of bodies and how they relate to one another through
change stands in stark contrast to, and as a limit thought to, the familiar image of

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a teacher instructing in front of a classroom. Deleuze’s (1992, 2005) pedagogy of

images is deepened and extended through analysis of the film ‘Performance’, and
reaches the epiphany of ‘a pedagogy of cinema’ through the understanding that a
fully explicit transformational experience is possible through the ways in which
the elements of film comes together in a realised concept of cinema: i.e., image,
dialogue (fleeting, often hermetic, frequently based in literary themes), plot (multiple
dimensional), the unconscious, music, scenarios and context, and time (Figure 42).
However, such a fully realised concept of cinema does not establish a hierarchy
of film, or suggest that films such as ‘Performance’ are in any way better or more
educationally valid than others. On the contrary, the elements of film come together
in ‘Performance’ largely through serendipity, and, in a secondary sense, through
the particular way in which the film was put together, or the logic/methodology of
the film: “It is not the slumber of reason that engenders monsters, but vigilant and
insomniac rationality”, (Deleuze & Guattari, 1983, p. 122).
There is a large amount of what Deleuze and Guattari (1983) would call
‘schizoanalysis’ happening in ‘Performance’. The images from the gangsterland
first part of the film are filled with the delirium of violence and domination/
submission, and the second half images in the bohemian hideout are infected with
the deliriums of sexuality, drugs and normative transgression. Delirium therefore
acts as a backdrop and affect to everything that happens in the film, and shows
how schizoanalysis works in cinematic terms. Schizoanalysis functions in an
opposite manner to psychoanalysis, which looks to interpret and understand the
unconscious through analysis. Schizoanalysis therefore opens up and explicates
how the unconscious works by splitting and deepening the unconscious elements
(cf. Chapter 3), in the case of this section of ‘a pedagogy of cinema’, to be found
in the film, ‘Performance’. Such a perspective is explicitly advocated by the Mick
Jagger character in the film when he said: “The only performance that makes it
… that makes it all the way is the one that achieves madness” (Turner to Chas, in
‘Performance’, Cammell & Roeg, 1970). Turner has lost his creative impulse, and
needs the life energy of Chas to start over again; he needs the violence that Chas has
to reinvigorate the decadent apathy that had overwhelmed him. The schizoanalysis
of identity change between Chas and Turner takes on and may be understood
through four intersecting components as defined by A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze
and Guattari (1988, pp. 160–162):
1. The generative component: the study of mixed semiotics and their variations. In
the case of Chas and Turner the mixtures occur through the in-between nature of
the signs and images of the film, as their identities blend, and as their specific
characteristics are communicated, shared and complicated in time, space &
thought.
2. The transformational component: the study of pure semiotics and the creation of
a new semiotics. In terms of ‘Performance’, the new semiotics could be named as
a ‘performance-semiotics’, and demonstrates a full ‘pedagogy of cinema’ through

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the transformational possibilities that the film exhibits. The new semiotics of
‘Performance’ is a matter of taking the film as a whole and decoding the complex
signs that are strewn throughout its delirious cinematic landscape as identity
change and lifestyle choice.
3. The diagrammatic component: the study of abstract machines, which are the
possible diagrams of the film. The deep identity transformation of the film,
‘Performance’, simultaneously produces an abstract machine of identity change
and how it can happen through cinema. The abstract machines are non-formed or
(in)forming matters that add to the material thesis of the film through the specific
ways in which: audio (loose and non-directed dialogue and music/song), spatial
arrangements (in gangsterland and in the bohemian hideout), time sequences (cut
up, relapse, flashback and dream) and images work. The abstract machine of
‘Performance’ works very specifically to dislocate the image sequences from a
linear or developmental notion of identity change.
4. The machinic component: the study of the assemblages. ‘Performance’ is about
changes in assemblage, or perhaps more pertinently, ‘strange assemblages’ (Cole,
2015). Firstly, there is the gangsterland assemblage, where power is distributed
through violence. This violence permeates and upholds every action and aspect of
the gangsterland assemblage, whether they concern sexuality, money, brotherhood
or trust/loyalty. In the bohemian assemblage, (an)other worldliness keeps the
whole together, sexuality is now tantric love, money concerns do not exist,
brotherhood and trust /loyalty are not spoken about or enforced. Everywhere in
the bohemian assemblage, top-down, oppressive forces are substituted by lateral
expressions of power integration and thought there is an utopian otherness that
lacks direction, will, intention or resolve.

Figure 39. Chas (James Fox) an Figure 40. The clutter and detail of the
East End gangster bohemian hideaway

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 BOHEMIANISM AND PEDAGOGY [IN AND OUT] OF THE CINEMA

Figure 41. ‘Extreme’ hoodlum behaviour, Figure 42. Pherber (Pallenberg) and
killing victims for extortion money Turner (Jagger) face each other across
in gangsterland a mirror with Chas watching

In sum, the film ‘Performance’ is a positive vehicle for schizoanalysis that

reaches a zenith in terms of ‘a pedagogy of cinema’ when all four components
of schizoanalysis are recombined and processed through the images of the film.
The images of the film are about schizophrenia, in that the oppression of the
gangsterland images are systematically replaced and reorganised in the opposite
direction by the expressivity of the bohemian world, and at the same time, both sets
of images are held together by one hybrid, fluid consciousness: – the ‘Chas-Turner
machine’. This machine powers its way through the film as the simultaneous
originator and processing plant for everything that happens around it, and as such
it is a non-hylomorphic model, or ‘meta-model’ (Guattari, 2013) of the ways in
which teaching and learning happens in a schizoanalytic context: i.e. as thoroughly
and irrevocably connected on every level to the film yet at the same time abstract
(cf. Chapters 5 & 7). The pedagogy of cinema works through ‘Performance’ in
that the mind-bending identity blend between Chas and Turner happens out of
the non-formed matter of Chas, which was initially riven with brutal violence
through his involvement with and acclimatisation in gangsterland. Such a life-
force is vital to everything that transpires in the film, as the heart of the abstract
machine of ‘Performance’, and as the machinic plane where the ‘unyoked’ ideas
of ‘Performance’ can develop (in a schizo manner). Performance steps out of a
socialised representation of work or hylomorphic (Deleuze & Guattari, 1988,
pp. 351–424) imprint of trade on personality, through the fluid rendering of the
Chas-Turner machine (Figures 39, 41, & 42), which coheres with and adds to
certain interchanges in the underground classic novel Fight Club: “… you’re not
how much money you’ve got in the bank. You’re not your job. You’re not your

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family, and you’re not who you tell yourself… You’re not your name… You’re
not your problems… You’re not your age …. You are not your hopes”, (Palahniuk,
2010, p. 143).
The schizoanalytic achievement of Cammell and Roeg (1970) through the
production of the film ‘Performance’ should not be underestimated. The harnessing
of the raw energy and matter of Chas, the journey of this pivot through the Chas-
Turner machine, the twisting of every dimension in the film, and of every modulation
for expression around this focus are indeed extraordinary. However, definite
influences and forms of the unconscious and affect (Cole, 2011) can be extracted
from the chaos of ‘Performance’, and which are worth mentioning in terms of how
the teaching and learning and pedagogy of cinema function in ‘Performance’ as a
non-hylomorphic model:
1. Aristocratism: When Chas first emerges from gangsterland and into the bohemian
hideout, power relations are initially enacted by Turner and the others in and from
the bohemian world, as Chas is categorised as a non-aristocratic other. At this
point, he is therefore considered a straightforward thug, and not given a chance
to integrate into the new bohemian world. The inhabitants of the bohemian lair
had been living their unrestricted, non-normative lifestyle previous to the arrival
of Chas, and therefore had formed a territory, or (an)other space around the
world that they inhabited, and therefore controlled. However, Chas’ life-force is
quickly recognised and considered something special by Turner and the others,
and he is henceforth allowed into the bohemian reality, and the identity rituals
and transformations start to occur in tandem with his breach of their territorial
boundaries. Chas is transformed through the Chas-Turner machine, and by
everything that happens around him in the bohemian reality. The Chas-Turner
machine works to erase the memories of gangsterland, and the attributes of
violence, tone and the confrontations of the past. Chas’ masculinity is tamed and
feminised, his wounds are cauterised, his vulgar speech is refined and interrupted,
his thoughts are redirected philosophically, and away from the continually
reactive in terms of power, violence and control. In short, an aristocratic milieu
has been systematically inserted into the nature of Chas, and this milieu results in a
change of values and character for Chas: “When anything can happen, everything
matters”, (McEwan, 2006, p. 207).
2. Occultism: The ways that the Chas-Turner machine works in ‘Performance’ is not
a simple mode of enhanced transparency, or, for example, increased democracy in
the political sphere. On the contrary, there is a deliberate hiding and camouflaging
of signs, the images of the film are to an extent masks that attempt to hide and
reveal the depths and turns of identity transformation through their organisational
and time-based sequencing. In contrast to, for example, the rationally based,
system of signs that Deleuze (1992, 2005) evolves throughout his Cinema books
that attempt to dichotomise and explain the differences between the movement-
image and the time-image, the signs of ‘Performance’ are often hidden, occult

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and partial. The occultism of ‘Performance’ is a mode of coding to avoid the

obvious, metaphorical and concrete ways in which identity transformation may
be thought of through time, and coincides with the a-signifying semiotics of
Guattari (1996): “… what will be determinant in the political and aesthetic plane
is not the words and the content of ideas but essentially a-signifying messages
that escape dominant ideologies”, (p. 154).
The signs of ‘Performance’ escape the dominant ideologies of the moral majority
and mainstream capitalism through the passage of the Chas-Turner machine
from the underworld gangsterland to the aristocratic, occult inflected bohemian
world. The socio-cultural ‘middle ground’ is avoided in the film ‘Performance’,
and that gives it a hypnotic and fascinating otherness and unpredictability
(cf. Chapters 3 & 6). One could argue persuasively that the identity transformation
of ‘Performance’ is about desire: “Desire is forced to maintain itself” writes
Guattari, “in this space between reality and pleasure, this frontier that power
jealously controls with the help of innumerable frontier guards: in the family, at
school, in the barracks, at the workshop, in psychiatric hospitals and, of course,
at the movies”, (1996, p. 144). ‘Performance’ is an example of a fully realised
pedagogy of cinema, exactly because the frontier guards have been removed; the
transformations of the Chas-Turner machine are unrestricted, the ways in which
the power relations are realised and portrayed are unhindered by moral codes or
‘audience satisfaction ratings’. The creators of ‘Performance’ have pushed the
limits with this film, and it stands out as a means to understand how ‘a pedagogy
of cinema’, whilst educationally valid as a break out mode of new cinema-thinking
and intense critical-affective image thought, simultaneously works on the aesthetic
and political planes (Figures 40 & 41). This is because the images and signs of
the film concentrate on power and its concomitant effects without glamorising or
romanticising what they are and what they have become. The Chas-Turner machine
is a locus of power and becoming, and does nothing outside of this function, which
conjoins with this comment from Judith Butler (1990) about gender: “… to operate
within the matrix of power is not the same as to replicate uncritically relations
of domination”, (p. 30). The whole of the film ‘Performance’ is an immanent
power matrix, with the Chas-Turner machine at its heart. All signs and messages
revolve around and are related to this matrix, but they do not sublimate or disrupt
its psychedelic functioning.
The film ‘Performance’ was not a significant vehicle for the career of Mick Jagger
as Turner, and James Fox suffered a mental breakdown, and did not work in cinema
for ten years after production of film had ceased. Donald Cammell never reproduced
the many layered cinematic processes and complex lines of cinematic-thought that
flow throughout ‘Performance’ in later films. There is something exhausting and
expended about the time-image or ‘domain of unthought’ (Cole & Hager, 2010)
of ‘Performance’, it is a film that revolves around itself in terms of reciprocating
though patterns, and gives no room for mediocre comment or an ability to compare

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with other films or similar works of art. The singularity of ‘Performance’ is that
it cannot be copied or reproduced. The film does not extend any simple formulas
for cinematic success, but only works through the schizoanalysis of its very detail
(cf. Chapter 3) and the Chas-Turner machine. Furthermore, this perspective on
cinema that the film ‘Performance’ gives rise to corresponds with Nietzsche’s view
of the will to power:
My idea is that every specific body strives to become master over all space
and to extend its force (– its will to power) and to thrust back all that resists
its extension. But it continually encounters similar efforts on the part of other
bodies and ends by coming to an arrangement (union) with those of them that
are sufficiently related to it: thus they then conspire together for power. And
the process goes on … (Nietzsche, 1968, p. 340 [s 636])

TOWARDS A FABULATION IN/OF IMAGE: GREENAWAY AND

THE INVENTION OF NEW CINEMA

Cinema is far too rich and capable a medium to be merely left to the storytellers.
(Peter Greenaway)
In contrast to the bohemianism of ‘Performance’, which is concentrated in the closed
‘other world’ of the bohemian hideout, Peter Greenaway has been thoroughly and
systematically attending to elements of bohemianism across his films. Bohemianism
therefore acts as an immanent part of the images, and that implicitly merges with
the stories, dialogues, soundscapes and logic of the films, and gives a different
perspective on ‘a pedagogy of cinema’. Rather than a central power matrix controlling
and informing the action and thought processes of the identity transformation and
lifestyle, the ‘spread out’ nature of the Greenaway bohemian world, takes power
away from directed relationships, and displaces it into and between new and
unforeseen circumstances and choices (Figures 44 & 45). Greenaway sets a thousand
tiny abstract machines to work in his films, and it is these machines that govern the
pedagogy of cinema of his art. This section of ‘a pedagogy of cinema’ will attend
to and explicate images from two of Greenaway’s (1985, 1988) films, ‘A Zed and
Two Noughts’, and ‘Drowning by Numbers’, which show how he has used images
to create a consistent mode of bohemianism, suitable for cinema, and pertinent to
the aesthetic and ethical choices of film. In Greenaway one encounters the adage:
‘what an image can do’.
The images of ‘Drowning by Numbers’ can be organised into three inter-related
strata or levels, which show how the bohemianism of the film works, and what the
implications for ‘a pedagogy of cinema’ are in terms of lifestyle and identity:
1. Love-Death: the three women called Cissie Colpitts in ‘Drowning by Numbers’
control the action and signs of the film through love and death. They each drown
their husbands for different reasons, and yet they remain aloof from punishment
and the consequences of the processes of love and death, as the love of the

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coroner, Madgett, is manipulated by them to stave off prosecution. At the heart

of the film is therefore the mystery of these three women and their powers over
love and death. Each of them exudes a mode of bohemianism, which is mixed up
and reprocessed as witchcraft, sex magic, nonchalance and power. The men who
love them die, whilst they carry on, more deeply in tune and at one with nature,
and more able to understand and act on the intuitive, instinctual and unconscious
forces that are flowing through them. The film sets up a regime of signs wherein
rationality is secondary and subservient to the darker, less clear and inexpressible
forces that run through life (Figures 45 & 46). The Cissie Colpitts in the film
are strange attractors, those who fall in love with them face a watery grave;
becoming close to the Colpitts does not mean comfort, pleasure or being more
at ease, but signifies becoming closer to the inhuman and cold forces that direct
life. Of course, the ‘love-death’ semiotic element of ‘Drowning by Numbers’
has historical precedents in pre-Christian and non-theistic religion, for example,
in Dionysian ritual and in literature that has previously explored such territory
(e.g. Carpenter & Faraone, 1993). As such, the Colpitts are not simple renditions
of human characters, but show how figures in cinema can be representative of
deep and complex forces, beyond contemporary normative functioning and
unperturbed by simple morality.
2. Games-Number: The domination of the meaning and semiotic landscapes
by the Colpitts, and the image of their powers over love and death, relegates
reason to the realms of games and number. The images of games and number
are organised around the male characters, Madgett and his son, Smut. Every
death is marked by a consecutive number up to 100, and Smut commemorates
the deaths with fireworks and paint. Smut also explains the detailed rules of
the games that are played throughout ‘Drowning by Numbers’, as if they are
extraordinarily important, and thus further adding to the trivial use of language,
meaning and reason in contrast to the pantheistic ‘love-death’ regime of signs
that controls the action. In fact, the games-number strata of ‘Drowning by
Numbers’ is about unmeaning, and the ways in which the deaths of the male
protagonists, including ultimately, Smut and Madgett, serve no recognisable
purpose other than the marking of the inevitable power of the Colpitts. The
complicated, endless and futile games playing, and the numbering of death is
an attempt by the male elements of the film to ‘pass and mark the time’ with
structure and organization (Figure 46), whereas the only power that ‘counts’
is the love-death quotient or synthesis. The games-number regime and set of
images in ‘Drowning by Numbers’, works through and as bohemianism, because
they contrast so starkly the high value that quantitative understandings of reality
(e.g. statistics) and rule following is often given by society. In education, the
quantitative results of tests and research, the rule following that is enforced and
produced by classroom management (Cole, 2013) and other normative systems,
such as student feedback questionnaires, and the domination of STEM (Science,
Technology, Engineering and Maths) subjects in terms of funding and prestige,

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are poles apart from the semiotics of the ‘games-number’ synthesis in ‘Drowning
by Numbers’. In other words, Greenaway has reversed through cinema the large
scale tendency towards quantification, that has been set in motion by the elites
of techno-capitalist society, and is that is continually reinforced through the
education systems of these societies (cf. Chapters 2, 7, & 6). The pedagogy of
cinema of ‘Drowning by Numbers’ shows us through image that the meaning of
rule following (games) and number (as in the act of numbering) are subservient
to the conjunction ‘love-death’ as a means to understanding life.
3. Nature-fable: The third stratum that informs a regime of signs in ‘Drowning by
Numbers’ is that of ‘nature-fable’. This stratum loops back to the love-death regime
of signs to recapitulate the fundamental questioning attitude of the film (cinema-
thinking), and to doubly undermine the rational and rule based understanding
of what the film is about. Perhaps one could accuse Greenaway of a romantic
conception of nature, in that the pastoral context of the images continually evades
and obfuscates ‘man’s’ attempts to limit and control their reach. For example,
the ‘water tower conspiracy’ as named by the eldest Colpitts, fails to punish the
three women for their crimes, even though they lose a rule based game against
them (tug-of-war); the Colpitts swim away in the last scene of the film, leaving
Madgett to die. In this instance, nature, in the form of free flowing water, wins and
carries off the Colpitts, ‘man’s’ intervention fails, in the contained forms of the
water tower conspiracy and Madgett. Perhaps better than a romantic, Greenaway
could be named as a vitalist in a similar vein to Deleuze: “Everything I’ve written
is vitalistic, at least I hope it is, and amounts to a theory of signs and events”,
(Deleuze, 1995, p. 143). The nature-fable couplet holds the film together, because
the signs and events of the film are dependent on the vitality of nature and they are
a fable about this very vitality. This does not mean that we can write the film off
merely as a ‘fairy story’, but that this fabulation of nature is inserted into the very
fabric and narrative of the film as a productive device, showing what an image
can do, and arresting the tendency towards the representation of nature, certainty
about the facts of the film, or ‘the truth’ of its message (cf. Chapters 5 & 7).
The fabulation of image through nature goes some way to show ‘the power of
the false’, which is according to Deleuze (2005) connected to how a narrative
can become falsifying in cinema, yet in ‘Drowning by Numbers’ the power of
the false is about the absurdist, strange and unlikely nature of the plot/situations
(Figure 45). We cannot read ‘Drowning by Numbers’ in simple narrative terms,
or impose a normative system of meanings on its component parts, rather, the
three inter-related regimes of signs connect together to make a whole. This whole
is the material thesis of the film, which corresponds to the monism of Deleuze,
and which he derived from Spinoza: “Yet although the sign and its relations
introduce and sustain different worlds respectively, Deleuze holds that they are
all still fundamentally part of the same material stratum. Deleuze is a material
realist, and as such he observes and asserts that all worlds share a common
materiality”, (Drohan, 2007, p. 14). Greenaway creates cinema-thinking that it

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suitable for ‘a pedagogy of cinema’ in ‘Drowning by Numbers’, precisely because

the fictional elements of the images are relentlessly stylistically embellished and
reworked, until the nature-fable couplet is realised, and one is no longer able
to relax objectively as an observer, or as merely subjectively feeling the film.
This strategy coheres with Deleuze’s ‘power of the false’ as has been explored in
Chapter 3. Greenaway inserts jarring elements on every level that work as fables
on the molecular stratum and show how multiple abstract machines work in ‘a
pedagogy of cinema’.

Figure 43. The Deuce twins laugh Figure 45. A bicycle-cow collision, and
with Alba in bed while her daughter βeta deaths numbers 78 & 79 from ‘Drowning
makes a puzzle of the world and plays a by Numbers’
record in the foreground ‘Z00’

Figure 44. The Deuce twins submit to an Figure 46. The 3 women called ‘Cissie
army of snails crawling over their bodies Colpitts’ in ‘Drowning by Numbers’ relax
whilst recording the results in ‘Z00’ with sheep and Madgett. Death 91 is
marked on the tree

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The bohemianism of ‘Drowning by Numbers’ is foregrounded and deepened through

attention to Peter Greenaway’s (1985) earlier, ‘A Zed and Two Noughts’ (henceforth,
‘Z00’). Both films are enhanced by a Michael Nyman scored musical pulse, and
it is perhaps in ‘Z00’ that image fabulation is taken to an exhilarating new height,
due to the sheer complexity and inter-linkage of the images, which means that the
inter-related, triple strata of ‘Drowning by Numbers’, is replaced by numerous
abstract machines and strata, that all relate to, or are initiated by the becoming of the
Deuce twins in ‘Z00’. However, this becoming is unlike the Chas-Turner machine in
‘Performance’, because it is not a power matrix, portal mechanism, or doorway from
one world to another, which marks significantly different semiotic regimes. Rather,
the Deuce machine is more akin to a gradated dimension that runs through the film,
as the Deuce twins grow inexplicably more alike, and as their grieving for their dead
wives leads them to explore the mysteries of death, decay, time and reproduction:
“Cinema … becomes a means to conquer time, to slow death’s inexorable creep
to a speed at which it can be observed and itemized”, (Goldsmith, 2010, online).
This slowness produces a startling series of exceptional filmic images, which are
particularly open and receptive to cinema-thinking and ‘a pedagogy of cinema’.
‘Z00’ is a type of Russian doll film, or multiply nestled cinema experience.
The context and meaning of ‘Z00’ (as a physical zoo), the becoming of the twins,
dealing with the reality of death, amputation (Alba), the production of doubles and
symmetry, Vermeer paintings, and the power intrigues and their sexual-relationship-
atmospheric consequences, all vie for one’s attention as the action progresses
(Figures 43 & 44). The dialogue seems to be frequently contingent on set piece
scenes that are elaborately staged, artificial constructions, and that often do not serve
unified, central plot development. This auto-production of dialogue from individual
scenes is interrupted and further complexified by the insertion of direct narrative
from natural history documentaries that describes the processes of life on earth.
‘Z00’ sets up and portrays important questions in life through cinema such as: How
would you react if your loved ones inexplicably die? Why do some die and others
survive, even if the living are crippled or maimed? Does the understanding of death
and its processes such as decay, ultimately give one greater insights into the meaning
of life? Where does ‘man’ stand in the natural order of things? And: Is ‘he’ merely
(an)other animal with an intelligence that he struggles to control/understand?
‘Z00’ does not answer these questions, but sets about to construct elaborate
cinematic images that might act as markers or clues to their unravelling. Certainly,
overall, the film could be seen as an homage to the biological sciences, and their efforts
to get to the bottom of the meaning of life. Yet this scientific effort, which is framed
through the dimension of the Deuce machine as mentioned above, is inseparable
from the material and emotional conditions which support it. The Deuce brothers are
grieving for their dead wives and unborn offspring throughout the film. This grieving
process pushes them further into their biological experiments, and closer to the driver
of the car that killed their wives, Alba Bewick, who is an amputee, and involved with
various power intrigues in the film. Interestingly, the power intrigues that work off,

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around and through the Deuce machine, are never explicitly addressed, but remain
as unexplained plot lines that criss-cross the biological and experimental impetus of
the film, and are borne out through the images of characters such as Venus de Milo,
who is obsessed with being paid for her services, and the veterinarian surgeon, Van
Meegeren, who wants to emulate the Dutch painter, Vermeer. Ultimately, the biologism
of the film is upheld by the very figure of the ‘Z00’, which is both the physical place
where animals are enclosed, experimented upon, analysed and observed for meaning,
and, literally, the last letter of the alphabet, followed by two number zeros or noughts
(the names of Oliver & Oswald Deuce). This double ambiguity, play on words and
paradox of ‘Z00’, sets up the semiotic inter-play of the film, and acts as a shield to the
specific becomings of the Deuce machine.
In the terms of ‘a pedagogy of cinema’, the meaning of ‘Z00’ is not a metaphor,
but sets up real questions about the status of science, life, and the ways in which
human knowledge is produced and understood in and part of the maelstroms of
life. Images of animals and decaying animals are interspersed with the ambiguous
(human) power concerns and vague plotlines of the ‘Z00’, and both are distributed
evenly throughout the film, which questions the status of humans over animals and
of the superiority of human knowledge (Figure 44). Indeed, the results of the Deuce
machine animal experiments are never discussed, only the images and time lapse
sequences are shared with the audience. The point of the biological studies in the
film therefore remains open. The bohemianism of ‘Z00’ henceforth fills the gap that
remains open as to exactly why the Deuce brothers are obsessed with understanding
the processes of life and death, and which renders them largely ignorant and
powerless with respect to the power intrigues that revolve around and through them.
‘Z00’ as a mode of bohemian pedagogy teaches us that money and power are less
important than the working through of the biological milieu, where the forces of life
and death exactly preponderate. The Deuce machine steers through the distractions
of the power intrigues around them to become ‘one’, and which drives them on to
visually effect that which Greenaway names as one of the inspirations for the film:

The tape was a three-minute time-lapse film of the decay of a common mouse
first shown on a BBC Horizon programme in 1981. Thanks to the speeding up
of the time-lapse material, it was seen that maggots acted in unison on a corpse,
devouring it systematically in a pack. It was the camera-operator’s ambitious
hope one day to film the decay of an elephant. (Greenaway, n.p., online)

GOD IS DEAD: THE IMAGE HAS KILLED HIM …

RUSSELL AND ‘THE DEVILS’

The last film that shall be analysed for pedagogy and bohemianism is Ken Russell’s
(1971), ‘The Devils’ (Figures 47, 48, 49, & 50). This film is based on Aldous Huxley’s
(1952) The Devils of Loudun, which is itself based on seventeenth-century events in
the small French town of Loudun. However, the film is far from an accurate historical

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account of what took place, but uses the power of cinema and image to dramatise the
facts as we know them, which are that a Jesuit priest, Urban Grandier, was burnt at
the stake in Loudun, after being accused of conspiracy with the Devil by the Convent
of Ursulines, led by Jeannes de Anges. The nuns became ‘possessed’, and the film
includes fascinating and disturbing images of this possession, as well as torture, sexual
obsession and fantasy, and a version of how the echelons of power functioned at the
time (Figures 47 & 48). The film exaggerates these echelons of power, and those
‘in power’ such as Louis XIII, Cardinal Richelieu and Baron Jean de Laubardemont
are portrayed in often unbelievable and ‘over-the-top’ ways. The images of the King
are especially grandiose, which exaggerates the decadence of his image, or how the
Monarchy is portrayed in the film (Figures 49 & 50). The Devils makes a statement
about power on two levels, in that: (1) it is by its very nature corrupting and those at
the top can often fall into a mode of bohemian extravagance, and that (2) the effects
of power are themselves corrupting, and they are able to be manipulated by those
who understand how this corruption works. This two-fold play of signs leads to the
pedagogy of cinema with respect to ‘The Devils’ being about power, the representation
of power and how this representation plays itself out in the population.
The decadence of ‘The Devils’ works through the levels of power that are present
in the film, and produces pedagogy in terms of unravelling and explicating the
semiotics and images that are related to these inter-related levels. The structure of
the film may be divided into three parts that define the images and regimes of signs
in the film and how they work:
1. The King. ‘The Devils’ portrays Louis XIII as the ultimate in decadent
bohemianism. In this exaggerated cinematic version of seventeenth century life,
the King sits at the top of the pile, he can do anything that he wants, and he
has a private means to communicate with God, and in many respects is a ‘God-
like’ figure himself (Figure 49). The belief systems of those around him must
recognise and act on the construction of his magnificence and power, and those
who are recognised by him as questioning his rule will soon find themselves
either dead or cut off from the benefits of power. The images that this structure
leads to are of luxury, extravagance and the subservience of everyone around him,
even when he goes incognito to Laudun with a holy relic.
2. The professional classes, led by the clergy and the aristocracy. Given the domination
of the situation by the King, an almighty power struggle ensues between those
who have and those who seek favour with the King. It is this milieu that the
major players of the film fight it out for respect, dignity and control. Grandier,
a charismatic and handsome figure, and who becomes the leader of Laudun, has
little control over his sexual appetite, which partially leads to his downfall. The
hunchback Jeannes des Anges has an immense sexual drive for Grandier, which
she interprets as evil, and uses against Grandier in the accusation of witchcraft
(Figure 48). Cardinal Richelieu and Baron Jean de Laubardemont, who are aided
by the witch hunter, Father Pierre Barre (Figure 50), plot and scheme to take over

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Laudun. It is in this regime of signs that the seventeenth century conflict between
Catholicism and Protestantism takes place through images.
3. The masses. Everyone else in the film is part of the masses. The nuns in the
Catholic Convent supposedly become possessed, and demonstrate various modes
of lewd, animal behaviours, quite out of keeping with their religious positions.
The rest of the population of Laudun either form an audience for the power
struggles and demonic possessions at public events, or are drawn into these
behaviours through a mode of convulsive religious mania that infects the whole
film (cf. Chapters 3 & 6).

Figure 47. The nuns ‘worshipping’ in Figure 49. Louis XIII stages ‘the dance of
the white convent in Loudun with the Venus’ to his delighted courtiers
hunchback Jeannes de Anges at the front

Figure 48. Jeannes des Anges Figure 50. The ‘witch hunter’ Father Pierre
hallucinates that Urbain Grandier is Barre clutching ‘holy’ remains between the
Christ, and she ‘attends’ to his wounds King (in disguise) and de Anges

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‘The Devils’ is an inaccurate historical film that exploits image to express a

perspective on power. However, it is precisely by doing this, that the film and the
consequent pedagogy of cinema of ‘The Devils’ tells us something about our present
day ‘Society of the Spectacle’. Aldous Huxley takes a similar line of argument in his
Devils of Loudun:
Most of us find it very hard to believe that we could ever have enjoyed the
spectacle of a public execution … When public executions were abolished,
it was not because the majority desired their abolition; it was because a small
minority of exceptionally sensitive reformers possessed sufficient influence
to have them banned. In one of its aspects, civilization may be defined as a
systematic withholding from individuals of certain occasions for barbarous
behaviour. In recent years we have discovered that when, after a period of
withholding, these occasions are once more offered, men and women,
seemingly no worse than we are, have shown themselves ready and even eager
to take them. (Huxley, 1952, p. 63)
The spectacle of the burning of Grandier, and the frenzied, mob like behaviours
that accompanied the whole episode in Loudun, create an exciting historical set of
images, that we can distance ourselves from due to changes in contemporary society,
such as the limitations to public execution. However, what ‘The Devils’ shows us
through image (Figures 48 & 49) is that this distance is an artificial one, and that the
same energies and modes of stimulation play out in contemporary society, but these
same energies have transmuted into the ‘Society of the Spectacle’ as theorised by
Debord (1983). We may now no longer take our families on days out to view public
executions, but we do watch with anticipation and interest if a ‘terrorist’ or fugitive
is killed on our screens or is involved with killing. The global media world, which
is driven by audience numbers and the flow of capital, and which in turn depends
on advertising revenue connected to the viewing figures, needs constantly updated
images of sensation, intrigue, impact and emotion (cf. Chapters 2, 6, & 7). Photo-
journalists scour the globe for these images at the bequest of the media companies,
and are paid for the highest impact shots to ‘sell’ the news.
The problem for ‘a pedagogy of cinema’ as it relates to this media production
and procession of images, is expressed by Noys, when commenting on Debord’s
1960s critique of representation and spectacle: “… capital can only be put on screen
as [a] ‘social relation’ that makes everything into an image, even ‘the most radical
gesture’” (Noys, 2007, p. 397), which puts under pressure the politics of ‘a pedagogy
of cinema’ in this book. Even though ‘The Devils’ portrays historical events and
exaggerates their reality, it gives us a way into the problematic of the image, that
could be expressed as: we cannot ‘see’ the structuring of social relations by capital
behind the image. This is because image is by its very nature deceptive; it is a mode
of camouflage, depending on copying, pretence, and of recognising only the outer
layer and lies. This is why we need to analyse the image through signs, or as a mode
of ‘semio-capitalism’ to understand how image is manipulated behind-the-scenes by

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capital through semiotics (Cole, 2014). ‘The Devils’ helps us to do this as a historical
example of extreme image manipulation, but, with the provisos that now: God is
‘the image’, the King is a media Baron (take your pick as to whom), the professional
classes are now the beneficiaries of integrated world capitalism (or the 1%), and
everyone else is ‘the masses’, and who are subject to the mass hysteria and the
manipulations of capital through the media and image. We propose the analysis of ‘a
pedagogy of cinema’, and the bohemianism as a means to escape these oppressive
facts of the contemporary situation.

CONCLUSION

This part of ‘a pedagogy of cinema’ mobilises bohemianism as a powerful counter-

strategy to the domination of image culture through integrated world capitalism.
This strategy works in three ways as outlined by the analysis of image in cinema as
pedagogy:
1. Identity transformation: the possibilities of identity transformation as shown
through the film ‘Performance’ are a potential line of flight away from the
domination and hegemony of image culture. This is because the identity movement
in ‘Performance’ is towards the bohemian world, where working for a living is an
anathema, and one’s identity is not defined by work, but rests in (an)other place,
alongside tantric love and normative transgression. ‘A pedagogy of cinema’ does
not suggest that we merge our identities in a hippy orgy, but that there are viable
escape routes for us from the present capitalist situation that are represented by
elements of bohemian culture. Rather than dismiss bohemianism in terms of
identity transformation, one can use the notion to refigure and transmute into
a ‘holey’ self (cf. Chapters 3 & 5). This holey self, cares little for money and
power as motivation, but strenuously advocates a return to the ways in which
collectivity can be reborn and remade in the current situation. Such a change in
the subjective moulding of individuals could be initiated and encouraged through
mass screenings of ‘Performance’, and the requisite cinema-thinking that this
writing chapter has outlined.
2. The fabulation of image: the analysis of Peter Greenaway’s ‘A Zed and Two
Noughts’ and ‘Drowning by Numbers’ show how images can be created,
recreated and embellished, until they go beyond mere cinematic images that
take us on a narrative journey and explain human relationships. Greenaway’s
images enter into relationships with and of nature in the ways that have been
explained in this writing. This cinematic operation creates a mode of vitalism,
which helps to destabilise the human intent behind cinema, and enables the types
of semiotic analyses and categorisation of signs as advocated by Deleuze (1992,
2005). The bohemianism in these images is therefore dispersed and molecular
but ever present, as if it were a natural effect of the action, and integral to the
images. The fabulation of image from Greenaway therefore further erodes one’s

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certainty about the inevitability of the domination of the human (capitalist) image
(see Chapters 2, 6, & 7). The contingency of nature as pedagogy acts as a counter
weight to the ways in which images are upheld and sustained through capital.
3. Power in/of image: ‘The Devils’ uses image to full effect to recreate and dramatise
a historical melodrama that shows the very worse in human nature. Rather than
dismissing such a piece of cinematic production and art as merely fanciful, the
implication here is that ‘The Devils’ is a pedagogic work that tells us something
profound about society of the ‘then and now’. This is that the bohemianism that is
concentrated in the extremely powerful sets the tone for the rest of society, and can
give rise to the forms of mass hysteria as seen in ‘The Devils’, and as witnessed
through the ways in which the media deal with image. Today in the media, the
images of wealth, power and beauty that are predominant in advertising and
that are used to sell products, are juxtaposed with constant images of suffering,
pain and death in the news, and this bipolarity of image production introduces
a schizophrenia of image consumption in the populace (cf. Chapters 3 & 7).
Cinema such as ‘The Devils’ helps to address this bipolarity, by realigning image
with power and by concentrating images of bohemianism and decadence with
those in power. The harsh, abrasive and unremitting nature of ‘The Devils’, acts
as a point of reference, or artistic middle ground of images/action/signs to the
ways in which thought is currently being remodelled and manipulated by the
media between the good (capitalist success = wealth and power) and the bad
(capitalist failure = destitution and powerlessness). In the next chapter, the power
in/of image will be analysed in and through the films of Alfred Hitchcock.

REFERENCES

Butler, J. (1990). Gender trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity. London: Routledge.
Cammell, D., & Roeg, N. (Directors). (1970). Performance [film]. London: Goodtime Productions.
Carpenter, T. H., & Faraone, C. A. (1993). Mask of Dionysus. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Cole, D. R. (2011). The actions of affect in Deleuze – Others using language and the language that we
make …. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 43(6), 549–561.
Cole, D. R. (2013). Affective literacies: Deleuze, discipline and power. In I. Semetsky & D. Masny (Eds.),
Deleuze and education (pp. 94–112). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Cole, D. R. (2014). Capitalised education: An immanent materialist account of Kate Middleton.
Winchester: Zero Books
Cole, D. R. (2015). Strange assemblage. Portal: Journal of Multidisciplinary International Studies, 11(2).
doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/portal.v11i2.3200
Cole, D. R., & Hager, P. (2010). Learning-practice: The ghosts in the education machine. Education
Inquiry, 1(1), 21–40.
Debord, G. (1983). Society of the spectacle (K. Knabb, Trans.). Detroit, MI: Black & Red.
Deleuze, G. (1992). Cinema 1: The movement-image (H. Tomlinson & B. Habberjam, Trans.). London:
The Athlone Press.
Deleuze, G. (1995). Negotiations. New York, NY: Columbia University Press.
Deleuze, G. (2005). Cinema 2: The time-image (H. Tomlinson & R. Galeat Trans.). London: Continuum
International Publishing Group.

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Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1983). Anti-oedipus: Capitalism & schizophrenia (R. Hurley, M. Steem, &
H. R. Lane, Trans.). London: The Athlone Press.
Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1988). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism & Schizophrenia II (B. Massumi,
Trans.). London: The Athlone Press.
Drohan, C. M. (2007). Toward a material concept of the sign: The semiotics of Gilles Deleuze (Unpublished
Ph.D. thesis). European Graduate School, Geneva.
Feynmann, R. P. (1990). QED: The strange theory of light and matter. London: Penguin Books.
Goldsmith, L. (2010). A zed & two noughts. Retrieved from http://www.notcoming.com/reviews/
azedandtwonoughts
Greenaway, P. (Director). (1985). A zed and two noughts [film]. London & Amsterdam: British Film
Institute & Allarts Enterprises BV.
Greenaway, P. (Director). (1988). Drowning by numbers [film]. London & Amsterdam: Film Four
International & Elsevier Vendex Film.
Greenaway, P. (n.p.). A zed and two nought. Retrieved from http://petergreenaway.org.uk/zoo.htm
Guattari, F. (1996). A cinema of desire (D. L. Sweet, Trans.). In S. Lotringer (Ed.), Félix Guattari,
Soft subversions (pp. 143–154). New York, NY: Semiotext(e).
Guattari, F. (2013). Schizoanalytic cartographies (A. Goffey, Trans). London: Bloomsbury.
Huxley, A. (1952). The devils of Loudun. London: Vintage Classic.
McEwan, I. (2006). Saturday. London: Vintage Books.
Medak, P. (Director) (1990). The Krays [film]. London: Fugitive TV Productions.
Nietzsche, F. (1968). The will to power (W. Kaufmann, Ed., W. Kaufmann & R. J. Hollingdale, Trans.).
New York, NY: Vintage Books.
Noys, B. (2007). Destroy cinema!/Destroy capital!: Guy Debord’s The society of the spectacle (1973).
Quarterly Review of Film and Video, 24, 395–402.
Palahniuk, C. (2010). Fight club. London: Vintage Books.
Russell, K. (Director). (1971). The devils [film]. London: Warner Brothers Inc.

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 CHAPTER 5

SEMIO-MATERIALISM AND THE MASTER

OF RELATIONS

INTRODUCTION

This chapter analyses the films of Alfred Hitchcock in the light of ‘a pedagogy of
cinema’, and explains how Hitchcock’s images construct meaning in their very
movement and passing. The argument in this chapter is that Hitchcock is better
interpreted without a singular, obsessive focus on his Catholic background, his larger
than life personality, without ad hominem recourse to concepts such as original
sin, a guilty subject or a God demanding retribution (Deleuze, 1986). From this
perspective, it is then a misreading to consider Hitchcock solely in psychoanalytical
terms, that is to say, with an unhealthy focus on his ‘dirty little secret’ or perverted
scopophilia. More positively, this chapter suggests that Hitchcock remains a master
of images as he aimed to direct the spectator with ‘relations of images’, and not
with narrative or simple facial reactions. In a parallel case to Hitchcock, Deleuze in
Cinema II (1989, p. 72) describes Bresson’s automatic characters as pure, “bereft
of ideas as of feelings, reduced to the automatism of segmented daily gestures, but
endowed with autonomy”. On this reading, both Hitchcock and Bresson produce
spiritual automatons and thinking as such in the spectator through an experience
of ‘shock’ (cf. Chapters 2, 3, & 4). This shock could be expressed as ‘nooshock’;
or as a circuit between the images and the audience that produces thinking as a
shared experience. It is this process which helps explore the interface between
education, semiotics and cinema. Furthermore, although much work as of date has
been done on semiotics and education (Semetsky, 2006, 2010; Semetsky & Stables,
2014), this chapter differs from this approach as it focuses primarily on particular
cinematic examples and the expression of signs therein to demonstrate ‘a pedagogy
of cinema’.
We shall retrieve the philosophical import of Hitchcock via Gilles Deleuze’s
Cinema books, with attention given to the effective closure of classical cinema in
Hitchcock and the unfolding of the time-image and the emergence of the cinema
of the seer. This is not the spectator mirroring what the director covets, but an
engagement in the shared construction of meaning. Furthermore, the character is
reduced to a gaze – not in terms in what s/he covets – but in terms of a certain sense
of impotence, against a backdrop where events lose sense in terms of movement.

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The treatise of the time-image shows precisely that the character is torn out of context
and place. This is the cinema of the any-space-whatever (espace quelconque) or
non-place (see Chapters 6, 7, & 8). The character watches on as a non-participant
in a game of relations. On this point Deleuze in Cinema II: The Time-image, (1989,
p. 205) argues: “If one of Hitchcock’s innovations was to implicate the spectator
in the cinema, did not the characters themselves have to be capable – in a more or
less obvious manner – of being assimilated to spectators?” To understand relations
clearly and to show the significance for ‘a pedagogy of cinema’, we will approach the
problem through a novel reading of Peircian ‘thirdness’ understood in the Deleuzian
sense to demonstrate that the cinema of relations occurs in Hitchcock’s work right at
the beginning of his career.
Hitchcock shares similarities with Italian neorealist directors such as Federico
Fellini in the way his characters are paralysed in some way in the film. In post-war
cinema, Deleuze points to Italian neo-realism, to Roberto Rossellini et al., as there
is a breaking of the link between perception and action. In other words, characters
are disorientated, situated in a catastrophic environment they no longer understand
ethically. There is a resultant loss of faith or belief in the world and a loss in narrative
structure in the films. As will be seen, Hitchcock’s lesson is this: both the spectator
and the character become the lens. This is important for ‘a pedagogy of cinema’,
because this insight allows us to think cinema in terms of a third eye or a system of
relations. In this respect, Pisters (2003, p. 17) writes: “The spectator is not looking
for representations of his own life, but is participating in the game of relations that
are set up by Hitchcock”. What Hitchcock’s work in effect articulates is a system of
mental relations, a pure cinema or thought in itself – cinematic relations producing
thought.

‘Blackmail’

Figure 51. The face reveals all Figure 52. The distorted, increasingly
amplified voice of the nosey neighbour

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 SEMIO-MATERIALISM AND THE MASTER OF RELATIONS

Figure 53. We read the guilt-ridden Figure 56. The tension builds through
face with panicking eyes the distortion of the voice until the
knife is thrown

Figure 54. The camera focuses on the Figure 57. Seconds pass to let the
eyes, as they dart from left to right intensity build

Figure 55. The camera moves from Figure 58. The shrieking of the word
the eyes to the knife ‘knife’ leads to the knife’s release

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I mean it’s one thing to buy chocolates out of hours, but it’s quite another to
stick a knife into a gentleman … A good, clean, honest whack over the head
with a brick is one thing. There’s something British about that. But knives…
nope, knives is not right. I must say that’s what I think and that’s what I feel.
Whatever the provocation I could never use a knife. Now mind you a knife is
a difficult thing to handle… knife… knife… knife…
(nosey neighbour in Hitchcock’s ‘Blackmail’)
This section will examine the knife sequence in ‘Blackmail’ (1929) [Figures 51–58]
through Deleuze’s philosophy and Charles Sanders Peirce’s semiotics to demonstrate
both thinkers applicability to ‘a pedagogy of cinema’. In Britain’s first ‘talkie’, there is
the expressionistic manipulation of sound, distortion in the ringing bells and shrieks of
inhuman sonic matter – techniques that characterise much of Hitchcock’s later oeuvre.
The following is a brief synopsis of the scene: In a bid to maintain the semblance of
normality, Alice White (Anny Ondra) eats breakfast with her parents in the shop’s
parlour; the previous day she killed the man who tried to rape her. The camera hones in
on the murderer; Alice’s guilt-ridden face (Figures 51, 53, 54) signifies it is through her
ears that we hear. A neighbour discusses the latest hearsay and repeatedly utters ‘knife’;
it sears into Alice’s and the spectators’ minds. Alice fights to resist the torment – the
action stalls and the tension builds to the point at which the character is ready to act
(Figure 58) – we see this through the movement of the camera (Figures 55–58). The
potential inheres in this moment until she cracks and throws the bread-knife out of her
hand. The knife on the table is threatening. It can cut and kill.
In this ‘mental image’ it is not the case that the thoughts of the character are
simply revealed but rather that the ‘machinic’ sound of the word knife is a sign
that signifies the object which killed a man and the presence of a knife on the table
(Colebrook, 2006). Furthermore, following Misak who explains (2004, p. 21) if “A
produces an event B as a means to the production of an event C”, then the knife
produces the event of the memory of murder, prompting Alice to throw the knife.
The sonic matter of the word knife produces the unbearable, prompting Alice to
lose control. Here, the audience establishes a relation of sign to its object (from
the sonic matter of the shriek – Figure 52 – to the release of the knife – Figure 58).
Alice and the audience are the third relation. This form of cinema produces an
image of the virtual, which is a critical move for ‘a pedagogy of cinema’ in the sense
that this is where all potential for learning lies (cf. Chapters 2 & 6). The objects
proper for the mental image are relations, symbolic acts, intellectual feelings and
learning. Hitchcock describes his films in terms of postulates, or set of relations,
which undergo logical development. Using Peirce’s terminology we can say that
there can be actions/reactions if there is a potential power to act (firstness), and there
can only be perception of relations if relations have been actualised (secondness or
actual fact); but the perception of relations qua relations opens the scene such that
the spectator may finally think beyond the movements presented. In Hitchcock’s
films, in the forces of relations, there is an image of thirdness (the being of law

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that govern facts in the future). The scheme firstness, secondness and thirdness
can be expressed more economically as: possibility, existent and law. For Deleuze,
there are not just movements or tendencies to move, but systems or frames which
hold those movements together, and in the case of this book, to connect images to
learning through ‘a pedagogy of cinema’. Moreover, what we discover in the knife
scene is the recombination of marks and sounds, producing a surplus value of sense
(Deleuze, 1990). Importantly, the actual and material forces produce an incorporeal
transformation, a new virtual and singular world of sense. It is a knife but one that
recalls the killing of the rapist and the act that stabbed a knife into his body, cutting
flesh and meat. Back in the parlour, the knife is for cutting a loaf, but once wielded
by the murderer, it creates a regime of interconnected crimes, criminals, laws and
judgements, verdicts: it manifests an incorporeal event, a death sentence.
In the background there is the shrieking of pain words – knife! knife! knife! The
affective qualities of the knife: sharpness in cutting not only bread, but the horror of
a recent memory and the meat of a corporeal being constitute pure singular qualities,
potentialities, or pure ‘possibles’ (Rio, 2008; Deleuze, 1986). The amplification of
the utterance ‘knife’ engineers a new thought in the spectator. The sonic matter opens
out onto the virtual. In Deleuzian terms firstness is an impressionistic and a sensible
sign linked to the affection-image found, for example, in the expressions of Alice’s
face (faciality). Secondness is the sign to which this affection gives rise, namely it
is a perception of action. Here, the knife is held for a particular reason. The sign of
thirdness goes beyond action to form mental relations, judgments, and learning. Here
there is a complex interplay of knife, knife wielder, the repetition of sonic matter –
knife! knife! knife! – and the intuition and pedagogy that something will happen.
Secondness includes firstness as that which has been determined or brought into
existence as a thing is a tool for brandishing, cutting, slicing, stabbing, lacerating.
Thirdness is the murder weapon, no longer a bread knife, but the memory of the knife
which killed the rapist. The knife interacts with the bread and butter and is affected as
such. This is the materiality of the relation, the knife affects the bread and is affected
by the materiality of the brute thing, as it has to ‘resist’ the characteristics of the bread.
The knife on the table can cut and kill. It threatens. It is ‘a’ threat. What is important
to note here is the mental image’s relation to the image of the virtual. ‘A pedagogy of
cinema’ in this respect is concerned with the movement of images, and not with the
motivation of the actors or the inspiration of the director. It is a matter of understanding
the profound movement and passage of images and the meaning and learning which
emerges as a result. Semiotics is an essential methodology for ‘a pedagogy of cinema’.
Clarifying the point above, Hitchcock explains to Francois Truffaut (1967) that he is
opposed to actors or actresses simply conveying inner feelings to the audience through
facial expressions. In this way, the audience comes to understand that they too are
aware of the ‘meaning’ of the knife. Hitchcock explains to his interlocutor:
The wrong way to go about this scene would have been to have the heroine
convey her inner feelings to the audience by her facial expression. I’m against

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that. In real life, people’s faces don’t reveal what they think or feel. As a film
director I must try to convey this woman’s frame of mind to the audience by
purely cinematic means… Thanks to the camera, the public is now actually
living the scene. (Truffaut, 1967, pp. 110–111)

Referring to ‘Sabotage’ (1936), a film based on Joseph Conrad’s novel The Secret
Agent: A Simple Tale (1907) – Hitchcock states that faces seldom reveal what people
truly think or feel. Instead, the purview of the director is to convey a ‘frame of
mind’ to the audience by ‘purely cinematic means’. There is a scene in ‘Sabotage’
where Sylvia Verloc (Sylvia Sidney) decides to kill her terrorist husband Karl Verloc
(Oscar Homolka) – again with a knife – which is cited by Hitchcock to explain that
it is the camera that frames her hand, eyes, and moves back and forth between the
two until “suddenly her look makes it clear that she’s become aware of the potential
meaning of that knife” (Truffaut, 1967, p. 111). The camera then pans to Mr Verloc,
who is eating, and back to the hand and the knife before he moves towards his wife,
who ultimately stabs him in the stomach.
Hitchcock’s explanation of cinema is therefore consistent with Deleuze’s
idiosyncratic reading of the history of cinematic images, which insists that ‘pure
cinema’ conveys not only acts or emotions but also the mechanisms of thought. In
this respect, cinema is a thinking machine, a point that this book makes through
‘a pedagogy of cinema’. For Deleuze, Hitchcock’s camera establishes the mental-
image. This is not solely a close circuit of objects and signs, but it is the thought or
the mental-image that is generated. For example, at the beginning of ‘Rear Window’
(1954), Deleuze writes that the camera pans around the courtyard and searches
the apartment of the immobilised Jeff Jefferies as he sleeps. For Deleuze, it is the
camera, and not the dialogue in Hitchcock’s films, which explains “why” (Deleuze,
1986, p. 201). Importantly, there is a kind of autonomous camera-consciousness
motion independent of the characters’ desires. Mental relations pertain not to the
analytical deconstruction of the Hitchcockian camera gaze, but belong on the plane
of affects and percepts. Dissecting his craft, Hitchcock – again in talks with Truffaut
regarding ‘Rear Window’ – says it is entirely ‘a mental process, done by use of the
visual’. And in the interview Masters of Cinema in 1972, he adds:
If you remember a film I made years ago called ‘Rear Window’, which was
all from the point of view of one man, James Stewart, sitting in a window.
Well, he had to look, then, I had to cut to what he saw, then, cut back to his
reaction. Now, what I was really doing was showing a mental process of the
man, by means of pictures, by what he saw.

In effect, what Jefferies sees is a mental process ‘blown up in his mind’. Importantly
for ‘a pedagogy of cinema’, James Stewart as Jeffries does not emote as such, but it is
through the camera that the viewer comes to understand thinking as such. Hitchcock
says in the first instance you have an immobilised man looking out. The second part
shows what he sees. The third part how he reacts. Hitchcock says this is the purest

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expression of a cinematic idea. For him, ‘Rear Window’ is “strictly pure cinema”
(Stevens, 2006, p. 268), adding: “You do a close-up of James Stewart. He looks.
You go back to him and he reacts. So you set up a mental process”. Put another way,
this is what Deleuze designates as noosigns or thought-signs – which arise when
movement unfurls beyond the conventions of spatial extension to intensive thought
itself. For Deleuze, Hitchcock in effect perfected the action-image (secondness), and
in doing so destabilised the sensory-motor schema of classical cinema. Hitchcock
is the inventor of a new kind of image which Deleuze calls the relation-image
(mental-image/thought-image). The process of thought itself becomes the object of
signification. As a harbinger of modern cinema (also to be found in the work of
Michelangelo Antonioni, Jean-Luc Godard, Alain Resnais), Hitchcock engineers
percepts and affects, but does not quite leave classical cinema behind. The reason
for this is because Deleuze situates Hitchcock as contributing to classical cinema
(in terms of perceptive, affective, and active montage), and also to the modern
cinema of time, despite privileging movement over time. In modern cinema, time is
decoupled from movement in some sense. It appears through false movements and
false continuity. Images are severed through irrational cuts (cf. Chapters 3 & 6). The
immobile body is no longer the subject of movement or the instrument of action, but
reveals time, time in-itself, through exhaustion or endless waiting, in spaces stricken
by the trauma and horror of the modern world, analysed through ‘a pedagogy of
cinema’ in chapter seven.
Yet in contrast to Ishii-Gonzáles’s work (Allen, 2003), who claims that the mental
image was effectively perfected in the 1950s, in ‘Rear Window’, ‘The Wrong Man’,
and ‘Vertigo’, we can also say that the mental image was already well formed during
Hitchcock’s British phase of cinema in the late 1920s and 1930s, in ‘Blackmail’ and
‘Sabotage’ to name but two films. However, Ishii-Gonzáles’s point is exemplified
in Hitchcock’s American phase of cinema where the idea of camera-consciousness
and mental images is indeed effectively and classically represented in the famous
shower sequence from ‘Psycho’ (1960) and again with a knife used as the murder
weapon. The camera-consciousness plays a key role in articulating the thinking of
the molecular and affective movement of Norman Bates’ knife-thrusts. For Powell
(2007, p. 185) the camera articulates a “liquid mode of perception” when the camera
focuses on Marion Crane lying dead on the floor.
Multiple cameras first hone in on Marion and the simple pleasure of taking a
shower (Figure 59). Already the momentum is building as the spectator sees a
shadow moving behind the shower screen (Figure 60). A moment later the knife
acts in unison with piercing sonic matter, affects are generated – slashing, cutting,
lacerating. From multiple perspectives, the liquid expressivity of inhuman affect
(Figure 61) emerges. In terms of the passage from plug hole to eye, Figure 62
demonstrates the significance of the eye for Hitchcock and the continuing surrealist
and German expressionistic influence on his work. Marion is dead, but the eye
watches on (Figures 63, 64) as the camera moves from the dead body to newspaper
to the Bates’ home (Figures 65, 66) – engineering mental relations.

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‘Psycho’

Figure 59. Momentum builds: no words Figure 62. Surrealist and German
but the camera speaks volumes expressionistic influence. The passage
from plug hole to eye

Figure 60. Repetitive, violent sound. Figure 63. The eye watches on
Mental relations create meaning – passing
from shower to murdered body

Figure 61. From multiple perspectives, Figure 64. Meaning is passed from the
liquid expressivity of inhuman affect eye to the object at hand

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Figure 65. Hitchcock moves the camera Figure 66. Moments later Norman Bates
from the eye to the newspaper to runs back to the scene of the crime
the Bates home

In Cinema 1, Deleuze gives a clever example of this kind of passage or play of

relations of firstness, secondness and thirdness vis-à-vis the Marx Brothers. The
silent Harpo represents firstness, as he is determined by affects. As such, he is
the pure affect-image. Chico represents secondness of the action-image since “it
is he who takes on action, the initiative, the duel with the milieu, the strategy of
effort and resistance” (Deleuze, 1986, p. 199). Groucho is adjudged to represent
thirdness: because he is the man of interpretations, a master of reasoning – using
arguments, syllogism – “of symbolic acts and abstract relations” (Deleuze, 1986,
p. 199). Interestingly, for Žižek (Fiennes & Žižek, 2006), the triad of relations
can be explained through Lacanian psychoanalysis. Firstness represents the pre-
Symbolic Real, secondness constitutes the duality of the Imaginary, and thirdness
for the ternary nature of the Symbolic order (see Jagodzinski, 2012). Or put
another way, Žižek finds this in the three Marx Brothers: it is Groucho who acts
as hyperactive superego; Chico is ego, always rational, egotistic and calculating;
Harpo is mute, silent, the id.
To summarize, in ‘Blackmail’, Hitchcock is developing, improvising and creating
new cinematic techniques; he is manipulating the desires of the audience. Indeed,
and consistent with Jean Douchet (2004), while Peirce considers that the interpretant
sign, which differs from Saussure’s dyadic conception of a sign, is always produced
by or for a rational being, for Hitchcock, desire always intervenes in meaning and
logical relations. The logical processes of induction and deduction are secondary “to
feelings of desire and fear” (Douchet, p. 63). In Hitchcock’s films, actions, affections,
perceptions are a matter of interpretation, “from beginning to end” (Deleuze, 1986,
p. 200). The task of ‘a pedagogy of cinema’ is to understand the centrality of desire
and how this desire produces mental relations (see all other chapters).

A 1,2; A 1,2,3,4: PEIRCE’S ‘THIRDNESS’ AND ZERONESS

What follows in this section is an explication of the notion of mental element and the
ramifications for ‘a pedagogy of cinema’. Our starting point is Peirce. According to

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Peirce, in any ordinary triadic relation, there will always be a mental element. While
brute action is secondness, mental processing involves thirdness. Thirdness pertains
to the category of continuity, regularity, habit, rule, law, interpretation, representation,
and thought. Peirce insists thirdness is a conception of mediation, through which
a first and a second are brought into relation. According to Bogue (2003, p. 67),
speaking in terms of the affection-image, firstness is “something that refers to
nothing but itself, quality or potential, pure possibility”. Secondness is “something
that refers to itself only through something else, existence, action-reaction, effort-
resistance” and thirdness is “something that refers to itself only in relating one
thing to another thing, relation, law, necessity”. For ‘a pedagogy of cinema’, the
materiality of cinema is analysed, following Deleuze, as a semiotic framework.
As such, one may reinterpret Peirce’s classic semiology of triadic relations to find
a potentially limitless taxonomy of images and signs. Although Deleuze deploys
Peircian terminology, albeit in maverick and sometimes contradictory ways, what is
interesting is how his logic of deduction necessitates a perception image – the “set
of elements which act on a center, and which vary in relation to it” (Deleuze, 1986,
p. 217). The perception of perception is the condition of possibility of the triadic
relation. Peirce’s taxonomy of signs, the three fundamental Ceno-Pythagorean
categories of being and consciousness are firstness, secondness, and thirdness.
Yet even before firstness, Deleuze reinterprets Peirce’s conception of zeroness
and finds a degree zero of images, a virtual plane of movement-images – a plane
of immanence – from which signs take shape. Deleuze builds an interpretation of
semiotics from Peirce’s taxonomy of signs – icons, index, symbols – which finds its
way into his two cinema books and The Logic of Sense (1990). From this, Deleuze
makes the argument that Peirce and Hitchcock were both concerned with thirdness.
Briefly expressed, icons, index and symbols form triadic relations consistent with
firstness (the is of is), secondness (the existential: a physical force, a shock), and
thirdness as a mediating, generating category. In Marks’s essay, “Signs of the Time”
(Flaxman, 2000, p. 196) there is an excellent explanation of Peirce’s work, where
she argues that firstness is ‘a mere quality’, such as ‘red, bitter, tedious, hard, noble’.
Firstness as prereflexive and atemporal is both a simple quality and possibility: it is
being-in-itself. It can be a feeling, a ‘raw’ feeling, an immediate, pure perception.
It is only possible rather than actual because it is consciousness which interprets it.
It is pure possibility (of actions, relations, or interpretations to come) rather than
consciousness. In terms of cinema history and through combining elements of
Bergson’s Matter and Memory and Spinoza’s philosophy of the body and affect, and
breaking crucially with the Saussurean linguistic tradition, Deleuze finds Peirce’s
triadic semiology of images is missing a relation to movement. His innovation is
that Peirce’s taxonomy presupposes an image which must be deduced and acts as a
mental space, and it is this space which ‘a pedagogy of cinema’ occupies. Deleuze
fills this absence with the perception image or degree zeroness – a virtual plane
of movement-images from which signs form. To clarify, the genetic sign of the

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perception-image is the degree zero or ground on which all other images are based.
It is deduced from thinking the function of the movement-image. Deleuze insists
there is a ‘zeroness’ prior to ‘firstness’. The sign can be understood in terms of
Bergsonian philosophy as the construction of an interval between two movements
opens an empty place. The zeroness is the ground for ‘firstness’ (affection-image),
‘secondness’ (action-image) and ‘thirdness’ (relation-image) and acts as a basis for
thinking ‘a pedagogy of cinema’. Peirce’s observation about the nature of zero in
Objective Logic (Peirce & Ketner, 1992, pp. 258–260) helps to clarify the nature of
the pure zero:
We start, then, with nothing, pure zero. But this is not the nothing of negation.
For not means other than, and other is merely a synonym of the ordinal numeral
second. As such it implies a first, while the present pure zero is prior to every
first. The nothing of negation is the nothing of death, which conies second to,
or after everything. But this pure zero is the nothing of not having been born.
There is no individual thing, no compulsion, outward or inward, no law. It is the
germinal nothing, in which the whole universe is involved or foreshadowed.
As such, it is absolutely undefined and unlimited possibility – boundless
possibility. There is no compulsion and no law. It is boundless freedom.
For Deleuze, the three types of image are related to this movement-image (two
intermediate types – impulse image, reflection image – and the perception image)
and so we find six types of signs in Deleuze’s semiotics. In Cinema 1, Deleuze
presents six images: perception-image, affection-image, impulse-image, action-
image, reflection-image, and relation-image. Transposing Peirce’s scheme into
the cinematic realm, we have the images of perception, affection, impulse, action,
reflection and relation. Deleuze’s taxonomy adds to Peirce’s three categories that
together define ten classes of signs, or 66 signs in totum depending how you classify
them, as Liszka argues (1990). We can express Peirce’s triadic schema of semiosis
or logic of relations, the production of meaning, as follows: A is red (firstness), A
collides with B (secondness as existence or actuality, brute fact), A gives B to C
(thirdness). For Peirce, as we know, everything can be reduced to these categories.
As representational beings, we are signs. Importantly, thirdness as representation
(intentionality forms the basis of representation) is irreducible to firstness or
secondness. Peirce’s semiotic system helps Deleuze develop a pure geometry of
mental images, decreed as learning as such in ‘a pedagogy of cinema’. Building
upon his study of ‘English’ analytic philosophy and David Hume in particular,
Deleuze finds that relations are external to their terms. According to Deamer (2008,
p. 164), Deleuze interprets the Peircian scheme à la Bergson as follows: “the passage
proceeds from perception – corresponding to zeroness in Peirce – to affection and
action, to relation or habitual memory”. What Deleuze does with Hitchcockian
cinema is place it within the tradition of English thought or English empiricism – in
the theory of “external relations” (Deleuze, 1986, p. x). With Hitchcock, Deleuze

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claims, we find a new series of ‘figures’, figures of thoughts, which appear in film
history. Hitchcock’s cinema of relation is situated squarely within this philosophy of
external relations as the master of relations in ‘a pedagogy of cinema’.
Crucially, in precipitating a crisis of the action-image, it is Hitchcock who
introduces the mental-image (Deleuze, 1986) into cinema. What is of interest here
for ‘a pedagogy of cinema’ is the relation between thirdness, as an intermediary,
because thirdness is essential for understanding the science of relations. Deleuze
is interested in thirdness not so much in terms of actions as symbolic acts, but in
the sense of interpretation and intellectual relations, that is to say, how Hitchcock
implicates the spectator in the sets of relations. And of course this is crucial for
the constructivism of ‘a pedagogy of cinema’. The spectator does not engineer
images on the basis of what is immediately presented, but on the basis of memory
and by themselves filling in the blanks. The spectator makes connections between
the different images and forms rhizomatic, mental connections, a point made in
Chapter 1. Thirdness emanates from a complex interplay of relations between
the look of the characters, the camera, and the spectator. Moreover, film images
manifest through the functioning of three parts: “the director, the film in itself
and the reactions of the spectator” (Deleuze, 1986, p. 206). As a paradigmatic
example, ‘Rear Window’ reveals that the protagonist of modern cinema is the
wandering ‘seer’, a voyeur, and therefore not the agent (cf. Chapters 6 & 7). It
is the ‘seer’ who exhausts the conventional modes of perception and perceives
as a consequence something intolerable, unbearable and overwhelming: it is this
something that cannot be straightforwardly responded to. Deleuze’s point is that
there is no subjectivity to respond to the crisis of the age: no proletariat waiting
for intellectual deliverance by the vanguard. No, it is the artists, following Klee,
who must prepare for those yet to come or the arrivant in Derrida’s language –
we might even say for those becoming-other. This is the condition of possibility
of difference, of politics, of responding to the intolerable, to the shame of the
present. In Cinema 2 (1989), Deleuze finds in ‘Rear Window’ and ‘Vertigo’ and
in Italian neorealist film the sense that the audience’s perceptions of the sensory-
motor image have been inverted. In other words, the agent has been thwarted.
Jeffries in ‘Rear Window’ has been reduced to purely optical situations. The crucial
point, and this has important consequences for ‘a pedagogy of cinema’, especially
in chapter seven of the book, is that modern – crisis-ridden – cinema contains
the seeds of the visionary, of thinking ‘the people yet to come’. For example, the
character themselves – for example in Hitchcock’s films ‘Rope’ (1948) – have
become spectators. From this spectatorship, for Deleuze, there is something to be
extracted – something to be thought.
Yet, an important point to be made here is that ‘a pedagogy of cinema’ is not
concerned with political cinema in a straightforward sense. Contra Badiou (2005),
Deleuze is resistant to the idea that there remains some potential to transform men’s
minds and souls via the classical constructions of the sensory-motor image. Although
both Badiou and Deleuze concern themselves with locating a fitting subject of

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modern cinema, a subject of political cinema, it is Deleuze who concludes that our
lot is more or less futural. Transformation belongs to those who are yet to come,
those who are yet to be constructed, to those who are yet to become what they are.
Julian Reid in his timely edition on the critique of fascism by Deleuze (Evans, 2013)
suggests that time remains out of joint, not yet right for those who will respond to
the intolerable, the unbearable, the shame of being human. Perhaps it is this aspect
of analysing the images of cinema that gives ‘a pedagogy of cinema’ a political
dimension (see Chapters 6 & 7). In its own way then ‘a pedagogy of cinema’ is a
message for those yet to come. Reid writes on what he terms a cinema of incapacity:
“This is a cinema of incapacity, of paralysed and traumatised characters who, living
in the margins, struggle to muster the courage to fulfil their own convictions. Of
characters who, overwhelmed by what they have seen, fail to extricate themselves
from the abyss with which they are then faced” (Evans, 2013, p. 84).
For Elliot (2011), Hitchcock qua director wants to touch the bodies of his
audience – to make them “sweat, jump, blush, feel nauseous” (Elliot, 2011, p. 5).
Hitchcock’s films – “spine chilling and tingling, blood boiling, hair raising, heart
thumping, skin crawling” (pp. 26–27) – demand an embodied reading – quite
different from psychoanalytic models – as film spectatorship is a multimodal
experience; sounds trigger tastes, sights excite touch, smells provoke salivation –
engineer intensities. The sensory and perceptual ‘I’ that is the spectator is destabilised
within “flows, energies, movements, and fragments” (Kennedy, 2002, p. 65). For
Kennedy, cinema grapples with experience in fresh ways outside the purview of
restrictive codes and the orthodoxies of the psychoanalytic model. Because film is
a “visceral vital and dynamic aesthetic experience”, according to Kennedy (2000,
p. 46), it is the Deleuzian paradigm which is able to chart “a post-semiotic”, “post-
linguistic paradigm” (p. 5) to engineer different ways of interpreting the screen. She
finds in Deleuze’s notion of Spinoza-inflected affect, a neo-aesthetic theory beyond
the psychoanalytic language of desire and pleasure and shrink-wrapped notions of
subjectivity and identity. In other words, Deleuze’s philosophical endeavours can
be harnessed to orchestrate what Rodowick calls “an exuberant new aesthetic” of
the cinema (1997, p. 11). Modern cinematic spectatorship is embodied, not as an
autonomous isolated ‘I’, but as an experiencing body full of kinetic rhythms, neuro-
chemical balances. Cinema has a relationship to the brain, to synaesthesia, to the
haptic, to a polyvalence of semiotic chains, and this is not reducible to psychoanalytic,
Oedipal categories in any straightforward manner. Deleuze thinks cinema in terms of
haptics – how we see and feel, how we perceive with all the senses (cf. Chapter 2).
The spectator thinks with the skin, and bodily emotions connect to thinking as
consciousness is nothing more than a sensual filter.
Reflecting upon this new “postmodern scopic regime”, Elliot (2011, p. 4)
insists with both the autonomous visual sense and a fixed ontological subject
under assault, understanding the mechanism of vision is therefore premised
more on a compositional grasp of the other senses, the body and the sensorium.
In terms of ‘a pedagogy of cinema’, this necessitates thinking the sensorium in

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terms of neuroscience – and more concretely, how touch, smell, taste and other
sensual experiences work upon vision. Returning to the crisis of classical cinema,
we find in brute everydayness that the action-image and movement-image tend to
disappear. In Cinema 1, Deleuze explains that in classical cinema, action imposes
itself upon time; it determines the duration of a scene and as such the next scene is
a reaction to this action. In Cinema II, he will say that the time-image is based on
pure thinking – it does not follow the scheme of action-reaction, but evokes a time
prior to movement.
An example of how the ‘opsign’ or optical sign develops as a cognitive demand
in Hitchcock’s imagery, and is placed upon the spectator, is found famously in
‘Suspicion’ (1941), where the illuminated glass of milk being carried up the stairs
becomes a focal point for the film and shows how the mental relations in Hitchcock
work for ‘a pedagogy of cinema’. The camera shows us a long shadow, which
indicates the presence of Johnnie, who is to bring a glass of milk up to Lina. The
milk becomes the object of attention as the illuminated glass takes centre stage.
Meaning making is engineered via the centrality of the illuminated object and threat
it poses. By purely cinematic means, the spectator becomes aware of the threat
to Lina – from eyes to milk and back to the eyes. From Hitchcock’s semiology
of images – mental relations made between milk and eye – a regime of affects
emerges – fear, anticipation, the possibility of escape. Although nothing is said, the
audience understands the passage of time.
As we have seen in terms of Deleuze’s logic of images, Hitchcock was tied to the
classical film paradigm because his mental relations are regulated by the sensory-
motor schema. Yet the images of thought Hitchcock engineers push the mental-
image to its limit. Colebrook (2006, p. 71) explains this point well: “Faced with
affects and actions, the spectator is presented with the power to think as such, what
it means to think”. Deleuze accords Hitchcock a pivotal place in cinema, and this is
underscored by ‘a pedagogy of cinema’, because he transcends the action-image to
produce mental relations, exuding ‘a kind of vision’. Deleuze (1995, p. 54) writes:
“It’s not a matter of the look, and if the camera’s an eye, it’s the mind’s eye”. From
the position of ‘a pedagogy of cinema’, this is the third eye because the spectator is
not looking for representations of his/her own life, but is participating in the game of
mental relations as established by Hitchcock.
So Hitchcock is “the last of the classic directors” and “the first of the moderns”
(Deleuze, 1995, p. 54). At the beginning of Cinema II, Deleuze, discussing camera-
consciousness and how it produces mental connections in time, says that Hitchcock
has a premonition of this, which will eventuality come true. Hitchcock envisions,
according to Deleuze, “a camera-consciousness which would no longer be defined
by the movements it is able to follow or make, but by the mental connections
it is able to enter into” (Deleuze, 1989, p. 23). The role of the mental image is
illuminated through the notion of the virtual as it describes the power to think as
such, a power to form relations, for example, in and through learning which is
of critical importance for ‘a pedagogy of cinema’. Hitchcock presents an image

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of relations that forces the problem of the movement-image to a crisis point.

According to Deleuze, Hitchcock is thought-provoking, because he refuses to
repeat the clichéd set of whodunit gestures based on narrative linear sequences,
but instead examines “the set of relations in which the action and the one who did
it are caught” (1986, p. 200). The point to be made is that although Hitchcockian
cinema remains classical, in the sense that it is inextricably bound up to the sensory
motor schema and the passage of logical relations, it also heralds the crisis in the
movement-image and sets up the time-image which is so essential to learning
through film in ‘a pedagogy of cinema’.

H2O

For me never before and never again since has the cinema been so close to its
essence and its purpose: to present an image of man in our century, a usable,
true and valid image in which he not only recognises himself, but from which,
above all, he may learn about himself. (Wim Wenders, ‘Tokyo-Ga’, 1985)

In pre-war cinema, notably in early silent cinema, Deleuze finds the “breaking
through” of a “very pure time-image” (Deleuze, 1989, xiii), which emerges in
Japanese cinema. For example, in the still-life moments in Ozu Yasujirō’s films,
Deleuze finds an ‘unchanging form of time’ which aids explicating the loosening
of the sensory-motor link. In Ozu’s films, life is simple, but man never ceases to
complicate this simplicity, or as Deleuze says, by ‘disturbing still water’ (agitant
l’eau dormante). Deleuze writes:

There is a time for life, a time for death, a time for the mother, a time for
the daughter, but men mix them up, make them appear in disorder, set them
up in conflicts. This is Ozu’s thinking: life is simple, and man never stops
complicating it by ‘disturbing still water’… (Deleuze, 1989, p. 14)

There is no strict distinction between, on the one hand, banal, everyday life, and on
the other, a moment of resoluteness or decision. Deleuze famously writes (1989,
p. 15): “It is men who upset the regularity of series, the continuity of the universe”.
Here, as it was with Hitchcock, we find a mutation in the cinematic image which
acts as an introduction to ‘a pedagogy of cinema’. Ozu’s works is equally productive
of a uniquely non-logocentric cinematic consciousness. In the still-life forms and
everyday banality of empty spaces, Deleuze discerns the incipient time-image.
Ozu’s films are classified as bearing witness to the ‘crisis of the movement-image’,
or crisis of the action-image, while heralding the ‘direct’ time-image. It is in Ozu’s
films, as the ‘inventor’ of ‘opsigns’ or optical signs, where we see the breakdown of
the sensory-motor scheme, in the sense that what is seen can no longer be extended
into action, and this mode of non-representation lends itself to the learning of
‘a pedagogy of cinema’. Such a form of time does not itself change, but despite
everything, everything changes in it. Deleuze writes (1989, p. 18):

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In everyday banality, the action-image and even the movement-image tend to

disappear in favour of pure optical situations, but these reveal connections of a
new type, which are no longer sensory-motor and which bring the emancipated
senses into direct relation with time and thought.
Deleuze finds in Ozu’s films a relationship to time, a sense of durée, ‘a little
bit of time in its pure state’ (un peu de temps a l ‘etat pur). In a philosophical
sense, Ozu is read as depicting time in a pure state. For example, the vase in ‘Late
Spring’ (1949) famously conveys the sense of pure, transcendental time. The scene
indicates how we inhabit and operate within time. Ozu is analysed by Deleuze
in terms of the way he utilises space, and disconnected spaces especially. Such
disconnected spaces are explored by the camera: they become any-space-whatever
(espace quelconque). One space becomes just as good as another and this disturbs
Deleuze. Ozu’s spaces afford pure contemplation. What remains is the any-space-
whatever, the screen in front, and the paralysis of relations, the non-place (Bradley,
2012). Chaos cannot be ordered in landscapes destroyed by war or in cities laid
waste by mortar fire, aerial assaults or the A-bomb (Deamer, 2008). Despite the
somewhat arbitrary periodization of cinema pre- or post- World War II, Deleuze
claims that the Second World War marks the collapse of the sensory-motor schema
and with that moment passed, the time-image in Western cinema begins to emerge.
This emergence signals a conceptual approach to cinema, whereby the concept of,
and for our purposes, ‘a pedagogy of cinema’ becomes possible. In Chapter 6 this
change in cinema will be linked to the changing conditions of globalisation and ‘a
pedagogy of cinema’.

CONCLUSION

The pedagogy of cinema in this chapter has made the case for an analysis of cinema
based more than a single focus on Hitchcock as the quintessential Peeping Tom,
voyeur or scopophiliac, for it is the immobilized seer entangled within petrified
relations that is worthy of further attention. Mulvey (1989) explains the obsessive
voyeurs and Peeping Toms who gain sexual satisfaction, “in an active controlling
sense”, from watching an objectified other (1989, p. 17). This is the Lacanian objet
petit a, the object cause of desire which signifies the unattainable object of desire in
the other. This is expressed in Lacan’s matheme of fantasy $<>a, which describes
the link between the split subject (torn between consciousness and unconsciousness)
and the object of desire. Whilst Mulvey’s critique (1989) of the male gaze has
clearly instigated a paradigm shift in film studies, the analysis of pure cinema and
the thinking of mental relations need not necessarily adopt to what ‘a pedagogy of
cinema’ reads as a reductionist form of interpretation. The remark in ‘Rear Window’
by Stella (Thelma Ritter), Jeffries’ nurse, on her patient’s and societal paralysis in
general, captures much of the spirit of ‘a pedagogy of cinema’ here. Stella, observing
Jeffries’ emerging obsessional behaviour, says: “Oh, dear. We’ve become a race of

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Peeping Toms. What people ought to do is get outside their own house and look in
for a change”. This is precisely Deleuze’s point too because for him it is a question
of forging relations with the outside, not burying oneself ever deeper into the theatre
and plague of the unconscious.
Lurking or insinuating himself between Freud and Deleuze is Žižek, whose
analysis, whilst exceedingly interesting, posits itself vis-à-vis Hitchcockian cinema
at the level of Lacanian psychoanalysis (Pisters, 2003). Yet ‘a pedagogy of cinema’
as proffered in this chapter focuses on affects using Peircean semiotics. While Žižek
is right to ask how do we know what we desire, his answer that desire is artificial
seems unsatisfactory. As we know with Žižek, spectators are taught to desire and,
as he say, cinema is a perverted art par excellence but this chapter had made the
case that Hitchcock at the beginning of his career – developing and extending the
montage ideas of Sergei Eisenstein – also created a cinema that thinks. Running
throughout Deleuze’s explication of mental relations, we find Hitchcock as one of
the founding fathers of cinema. Moreover, we can perhaps save Hitchcock from
reductionist viewpoints when we think question less about the gaze of the man
behind the lens and more to do with the lens that thinks, guides, desires, and directs
the viewer. To reduce Hitchcock’s masterpieces to another case of male triangulated
desire and little else sadly misses the point. Hitchcock’s cinema is pure as it operates
through mental relations. While Deleuze understands this and thinks it with Peirce’s
assistance, Žižek has to reinterpret Lacan to get at the real.
This chapter has shown that Hitchcock’s films play a central role in Deleuze’s
cartography of the cinema because the latter is thought-provoking primarily because
of the perceptual innovations in his cinematic work. The idea that the camera can
manipulate the spectator is one which compelled Deleuze to think about film’s
connection with the brain. The task of ‘a pedagogy of cinema’ is to think these
concepts and to create signs which transcend their signification, to go beyond them,
to form an a-signifying semiotics and couplings pertaining to education, cinema
and philosophy: to formulate a becoming-cinema of philosophy and a becoming-
philosophy of the cinema (cf. Chapters 4 & 6).
The work of ‘a pedagogy of cinema’ is to fabricate and to fabulate a fresh and
unique way to understand cinema-thinking, which constitutes in a singular way a
new relationship between learning, philosophy, film and aesthetics. Deleuze thinks
cinema qua art form, and in terms of its encounter with philosophy, as a mutual
becoming, which, as this chapter has argued, is deepened and intensified through ‘a
pedagogy of cinema’.
With reference to Bergson, Deleuze considered cinema as a means to perceive
time and movement as a whole. The question is what affects are created in art,
what percepts are produced in philosophy and what concepts are produced through
learning. Philosophy becomes ‘cinematic’ as film-philosophy and produces
new cinematic concepts through ‘a pedagogy of cinema’. Film becomes not just
‘philosophical’ but manifests affective and aesthetic thought – a kind of cinematic
thinking that runs through the whole of this book. As such, cinema as a medium of

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thought thinks (and we learn). For example, Deleuze finds in Resnais’ films such
as ‘Hiroshima Mon Amour’ (1959) a certain kind of philosophical activity. His
characters neither talk about philosophy nor echo the director’s worldview. But what
Deleuze insists upon is that Resnais ‘invents’ a cinema of philosophy and creates an
unprecedented ‘cinema of thought’ which is being explored through ‘a pedagogy of
cinema’. Resnais forms “a rare marriage between philosophy and cinema” (Deleuze,
1989, pp. 208–209) and this raises questions about both the shame of being human
amidst the destruction and death of the 20th century and the utopian moment
which considers the ‘people yet to come’. On this point, Deleuze writes with great
acumen, and in a vein at odds with the catatonia of Adorno’s thought: “The great
post-war philosophers and writers demonstrated that thought has something to do
with Auschwitz, with Hiroshima” (Deleuze, 1989, p. 201). Film affects the spectator
because the medium is not dominated by the content of the monologue, dialogue
or oratory of a particular actor or actress, but the perceptual and temporal medium
which directly acts upon the brain (Deleuze & McMuhan, 1998), through affect. As
such, the body and the senses are affected as a whole, there is an interplay between
affect and cognition; perception is enjoined with action (see Chapters 2, 3, & 7). It
is images which start to narrate: images form thoughts. Spurred on to think by the
auteur genius of Hitchcock, and the sheer timeless majesty of Ozu’s films, Deleuze’s
philosophy asks questions about how images affect the diagram of body and brain,
perception and memory. This questioning comes together through ‘a pedagogy of
cinema’ and will be explored further in Chapter 6, which specifically questions how
cinema-thinking can emerge under the contemporary conditions of globalisation and
how new theories of time, image and education may be produced.

REFERENCES
Allen, R., & Ishii-Gonzales, S. (2003). Hitchcock: Past and future. London: Routledge.
Badiou, A., & Toscano, A. (2005). Handbook of inaesthetics. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Bogue, R. (2003). Deleuze on cinema. New York, NY: Routledge.
Bradley, J. (2012). The future of a transnational cultural history of the non-place. Institute of Human
Sciences, Toyo University, (14), 47–60.
Colebrook, C. (2002). Gilles Deleuze. London: Routledge.
Deamer, D. (2008). The spectre of impossibility, Deleuze, Japanese cinema and the atom bomb
(Unpublished doctoral dissertation). Manchester Metropolitan University, England.
Deleuze, G. (1986). Cinema 1: The movement-image. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota.
(Originally published L’image-mouvement, 1983.)
Deleuze, G. (1989). Cinema 2: The time-image. London: Athlone. Originally published L’image-temps.
(1985).
Deleuze, G. (1990). The logic of sense. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. (Originally published
Logique du sens, 1969.)
Deleuze, G. (1995). Negotiations, 1972–1990. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. (Originally
published Pourparlers, 1990.)
Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1983). Anti-oedipus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. Minneapolis, MN:
University of Minnesota Press. (Originally published L’anti-Œdipe, 1977.)
Deleuze, G., & McMuhan, M. (1998, October 01). The brain is the screen: Interview with Gilles Deleuze
on ‘The Time-Image’. Discourse, 20(3), 47–55.

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Douchet, J. (2004). Hitch and his audience. In R. P. Kolker (Ed.), Alfred Hitchcock’s psycho: A casebook
(pp. 67–83). New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Elliott, P. (2011). Hitchcock and the cinema of sensations: Embodied film theory and cinematic reception.
London: I.B. Tauris.
Evans, B., & Reid, J. (2013). Deleuze & fascism: Security, war, aesthetics. London: Routledge.
Flaxman, G. (2000). The brain is the screen: Deleuze and the philosophy of cinema. Minneapolis, MN:
University of Minnesota Press.
Hitchcock, A., Lindstrom, P., Everson, W. K., & Musilli, J. (1990). Masters of Cinema. Kent, CT: Creative
Arts Television.
Jagodzinski, J. (2012). Psychoanalyzing cinema: A productive encounter with Lacan, Deleuze, and Žižek.
New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan.
Kennedy, B. (2000). Deleuze and cinema: The aesthetics of sensation. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
Press.
Kennedy, B. (2002). Choreographies of the Screen. Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies, 1, 63–77. Retrieved
October 22, 2013, from http://ir.uiowa.edu/ijcs/vol1/iss1/7
Liszka, J. J. (1990, January 01). Peirce’s interpretant. Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, 26(1),
17–62.
Misak, C. J. (2004). The Cambridge companion to Peirce. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Mulvey, L. (1989). Visual and other pleasures. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
Peirce, C. S., & Ketner, K. L. (1992). Reasoning and the logic of things: The Cambridge conferences
lectures of 1898. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Pisters, P. (2003). The matrix of visual culture: Working with Deleuze in film theory. Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press.
Pisters, P. (2012). The neuro-image: A Deleuzian film-philosophy of digital screen culture. Stanford:
Stanford University Press.
Powell, A. (2007). Deleuze, altered states and film. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Río, E. (2008). Deleuze and the cinemas of performance: Powers of affection. Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press.
Rodowick, D. N. (1997). Gilles Deleuze’s time machine. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Semetsky, I. (2006). Deleuze, education and becoming. Rotterdam, The Netherlands: Sense Publishers.
Semetsky, I. (2010). Semiotics education experience. Rotterdam, The Netherlands: Sense Publishers.
Semetsky, I., & Stables, A. (2014). Pedagogy and edusemiotics: Theoretical challenges/practical
opportunities. Rotterdam, The Netherlands: Sense Publihsers.
Stevens, G., & American Film Institute. (2006). Conversations with the great moviemakers of Hollywood’s
golden age at the American Film Institute. New York, NY: A. A. Knopf.
Truffaut, F., & Hitchcock, A. (1967). Hitchcock. New York, NY: Simon and Schuster.

FILMOGRAPHY
Fiennes, S., & Žižek, S. (2006). The pervert’s guide to cinema [film]. New York, NY: Zeitgeist Films.
Hitchcock, A. (1929). Blackmail [film]. London: BIP films.
Hitchcock, A. (1936). Sabotage [film]. London: GFD films.
Hitchcock, A. (1941). Suspicion [film]. Los Angeles, CA: RKO Radio Pictures Inc.
Hitchcock, A. (1948). Rope [film]. Los Angeles, CA: Transatlantic films.
Hitchcock, A. (1954). Rear window [film]. Los Angeles, CA: Paramount pictures.
Hitchcock, A. (1960). Psycho [film]. Los Angeles, CA: Paramount pictures.
Ozu, Y. (1949). Late spring [film]. Tokyo: Shochiko.
Wenders, W., & Sievernich, C. (1985). Tokyo Ga [film]. Berlin: Chris Sievernich Filmproduktion.

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 CHAPTER 6

CONGRUENT THEORIES OF TIME,

IMAGE AND EDUCATION

INTRODUCTION

What does ‘a pedagogy of cinema’ tell us about contemporary life as defined by

globalisation? And how does ‘a pedagogy of cinema’ (re)invent theory? This chapter
works by reimagining a theory of globalisation and education through the pedagogic
notion of cinema, and the analysis of images that underpins this book. The variant
metaphysical, ontological and epistemological constructions in this section rely
on images from the films: ‘Brazil’, ‘Memento’, ‘Snowpiercer’ and ‘Melancholia’
(Figures 67–82). These films, far from responding to specific material theories of
time and image, develop their own logic, under pressure from globalisation, and
from within the maelstrom of possible reactions that one could take in relation
to the global congruence of forms that we are experiencing due to globalisation.
Chapter 6 therefore presents a specific understanding of the theory that one can
yield from cinema, which is congruent through the theories of time, image and
education may emerge from it, to challenge the self-same processes of globalisation
(cf. Chapters 2, 3, & 4).
This section therefore works as a culminating yet distribution point to the story so
far with respect to ‘a pedagogy of cinema’. To some extent, there is a theory of time,
image and education regarding any film or set of images, given the possibilities of
cinema-thinking that this book has used and developed, and the ways in which this
challenge could be taken up in terms of pedagogy, learning, identity and educational
change. Yet there is at the same time something very specific about the theory and
concept construction that ‘a pedagogy of cinema’ lends itself to. Such specificity lies
in the ways in which ‘a pedagogy of cinema’ puts under erasure the stereotypical,
repetitive and conditioned images of globalisation. Globalisation, here defined as
the capitalist processes of unification and congruence that eliminate difference and
suggests that we are all workers under a regime of signs directed by capital, presents
images as representation as to what this regime of signs might look like. This writing
therefore puts images to work as pedagogy to fundamentally question this globalised
regime of signs, and to destabilise image-thought homogenisations under the forces
of globalisation (cf. Chapters 2, 3, & 4). In the 1990s, this work was carried out
under the aegis of postmodernism, before that, for example, the ideas of Jean
Baudrillard (1993) and Guy Debord (1994) addressed the ways in which image and
thought were coming together in the type of mass viewing and conditioned society

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that was evolving in the 1960s & 1970s. Now, as has been argued in Chapter 1, the
urgency to address the amalgamation of image and thought globally is even greater,
due to the intensification of digital interconnectivity and mobile devices, this part
of ‘a pedagogy of cinema’ will specifically address the image-thought congruence
concern through specific images drawn from four films as concept creation, and as
part of the overall pedagogy of cinema that this book promotes.

‘BRAZIL’: ONE STEP FORWARD, TWO STEPS BACK

TO THE IMAGE OF THE FUTURE

Thesis One: An image of the future includes a loop in time, that provokes and brings
up past time periods as memory, life and projection.
The film, ‘Brazil’ (Gilliam, 1985) present a dystopian vision of the future that
shows how technology and the often indiscernible forces that control our lives
have merged together, and become part of an apparatus that works on every level
to make life hard to endure and that specifically limits freedom. Partly based on
the 1949 George Orwell novel, 1984, ‘Brazil’ creates an oppressive world of fear,
wholly repetitive and mechanised work activities, and impenetrable bureaucracies
that focus on harvesting and processing personal information about every citizen.
Escape in this world is only possible through fantasy, or the thought of an active
underground that resists this reality. However, such an underground are defined
as terrorists by the ruling powers, and are ceaselessly herded and chased into
corners on every level: i.e., physically, financially, psychologically, socially,
culturally and spiritually, until the only options left are conformism to the norms
of those in power or madness. In ‘Brazil’, the future society wins, and the hero
drifts into a comatose state, wherein he feels at last an unconscious release from
oppression. The question for this part, and for ‘a pedagogy of cinema’ is whether
or not studying from and thinking about images (Figures 67–70) of the type that
‘Brazil’ has created, helps to understand globalisation, in which the image culture
of Integrated World Capitalism has almost universal predominance. Or, after the
words of Tiqqun (2001), the problematic for this section of Chapter 6 could be
expressed as:
Under the hypnotic grimaces of official pacification, a war is being waged.
A war that can no longer be called simply economic, social, or humanitarian,
because it is total. And though each of us senses that our existence has become
a battlefield where neuroses, phobias, somatizations, depression, and anguish
are but a kind of defeated retreat, no one can grasp the trajectory of the battle
or understand what’s at stake in it. (p. i)
The often nonsensical and manic nature of ‘Brazil’, where war is waged against the
population without dénouement, or any clear purpose other than that of control or
to produce fear, reflects the current state of financial mayhem, which is produced
and reproduced globally through the logic of the markets. Of course, the purpose

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of financial capitalism is for financial institutions, companies and stakeholders to

make profit through the deployment and flows of capital. However, the semiotic
result is the same, the oppression is universal, a regime of signs spreads across
the populace, in the current state connected to credit and debt structures, the
images that these structures produce, and any possible escape from becoming
‘man in debt’ (Lazzarato, 2012). A war begins inside of us about how to avoid
the notion that we have to work in desperate, repetitive and menial ways to pay
our way out of universal debt, and time itself is consumed by this process. Image
culture, the screen, any motivational practice, learning and the ways in which
qualifications and bodies of knowledge could aid in the escape from debt and
its reorganizational power over time become paramount (cf. Chapters 2, 3, & 7).
Whereas, in fact, there are processes of education that sit alongside and outside
of the current regime of signs as defined by financial capitalism and as shown
through, for example, the images of ‘Brazil’ (Figures 67–70). These processes
could be summarised as:
i) Fearlessness, or the self-effective strategies that take one out of the universal
paranoia of repayment
ii) Understanding and working with machines, not to be trapped and used by
‘edu-business’ in terms of superficial skills development, supposedly for the
‘future economy’, but to make a pact with the most productive forces of the
now and that power thought, e.g. philosophy/critique/analysis/ ‘a pedagogy of
cinema’
iii) Questioning the image of thought, for example, that defines life as a series of
interconnected activities organised by the need for and manipulation of capital
in all its guises

Figure 67. Lint in a mask, psychologically Figure 68. Welcome to the Ministry of
tortures Lowry Information!

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Figure 69. Lowry exiting his vehicle Figure 70. Lowry using the information
on the street machines to track a bureaucratic error
with Kurtzman waiting anxiously

The images of ‘Brazil’ recreate the fear and oppression of the World War II years
in Europe and beyond (Figures 67 & 68). The main difference now is that images
of the ways in which the world financial system works are not external, explicit or
physical. In ‘Brazil’, the retrospective and haphazard nature of the machines that
dominate the landscape, gives rise to the sense that they will break down, and that
the rupture points in their functioning are a cause for hope, and as an affect. For
example, the main character finds his love interest as a result of a bureaucratic
typing error, later he comes into contact with a figure from the underground via
a domestic plumbing breakdown. The problem with the current situation is that
the machines of financial infrastructure that lie behind what is happening are
often hidden and invisible. Electronic networks carry buy and sell messages
and capital transactions across the world at lightning speed. In contrast, the
technology of ‘Brazil’ seems clunky, mechanical and slow. Today, the machinery
of financial capitalism gives the impression of instantaneous action, and a certain
sense of freedom, as the overall physicality of oppressive and invasive machines
has been replaced by the smooth digital space of globalisation (cf. Chapters 2, 4,
& 3). The time loop that is enacted in ‘Brazil’ between the 1980s and the 1940s
is replaced in the current situation, wherein time is absolutely controlled and
accounted for through financial means, and hence escape routes from it are
becoming increasingly obscured. However, one option that to some extent
treads the same path as the application of ‘a pedagogy of cinema’ to the images
of ‘Brazil’ as cinema-thinking – is the analysis that accelerationism affords
globalisation:

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But which is the revolutionary path? Is there one? – To withdraw from

the world market as Samir Amin advises Third World countries to do, in a
curious revival of the fascist “economic solution”? Or might it be to go in
the opposite direction? To go still further, that is, in the movement of the
market, of decoding and deterritorialization? For perhaps the flows are not
yet deterritorialized enough, not decoded enough, from the viewpoint of a
theory and practice of a highly schizophrenic character. Not to withdraw from
the process, but to go further, to “accelerate the process’” as Nietzsche put
it: in this matter, the truth is that we haven’t seen anything yet. (Deleuze &
Guattari, 1983, pp. 239–240)
In other words, accelerationism according to Deleuze and Guattari (1983) is about
exploding the processes of capitalism from within – and through the time dimension.
However, in order to do this, one has to understand what the processes are, and
how they can be exploded through/in time. This explosion is concomitant with the
development of new critical thought, here based on images and ‘a pedagogy of
cinema’. The problem for educationalists, philosophers and social scientists is that
financial capitalism is a highly complex system, relying on credit-debt structures
that are increasingly disguised, and governments that are beholden to finance for
their very existences. The images of ‘Brazil’ accelerate the dimensions of fear,
repetition, mechanical inefficiency and obsolescent technology, and the sense that
freedom and pleasure in life is being managed out of existence. However, the film
is not representative of any stage of capitalism, but shows how its mechanics works
through image. The question for ‘a pedagogy of cinema’ is whether or not the
images of ‘Brazil’ help us to ‘escape the program’ or to develop a set of strategies
that afford purposeful and expansive thought about contemporary globalisation
(Figures 67 & 70).
It is certainly true to say that Terry Gilliam did not relinquish the influence
of Monty Python, and his image-thought about the future is partly a comic one,
deliberately exaggerating and emphasising the elements of control, and the
evacuation in freedom/pleasure in the current situation. Humour is in this context
demonstrative of a survival instinct, and an attempt to stave off madness against
the odds. What ‘Brazil’ shows us is the ‘innocence’ of the main character to a
disconcerting and impenetrable environment, and which allows him to sidestep
many of the ways in which this environment controls him, until he goes someway
to realise his dreams, and in so doing becomes unstuck in the matrix of love. The
realisation of pleasure signals the end for Lowry, as it is precisely what had been
systematically extracted from his life by work, relationships, power, technology
and timelessness. To echo and quote George Orwell (2000) and the inquisitor
O’Brien from 1984: “… – always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly
increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will
be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless.

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If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face –
forever” (p. 280). 1984 gives us this retrogressive and violent picture, the opposite
of utopia and hope, an excessive picture, where time has been abolished through
the constraints on the self. ‘Brazil’ recreates this image of the future through an
obsessive and mangled, technologically bleak landscape, where time has looped
back on itself, and progress in human society is trapped in and by this loop. It
is possible that accelerationism and the pedagogy of cinema as cinema-thinking
of this book offer new ways to work with the looping of images of the future in
the context of education (cf. Chapter 4). This is because the images of ‘Brazil’
(Figures 67–70) and the provocation of accelerationism work in the temporal
dimension to challenge the norms of capitalism. However, before this possibility
is explored further through the images of the film, ‘Snowpiercer’, this piece will
add to theories of image, time and education with an analysis of the time-based
movie, ‘Memento’.

THINKING TIME WITH MEMORY: MULTIPLE

WAYS TO DISTORT THE PASSAGE
OF TIME (‘MEMENTO’)

Thesis Two: There are flows and points of confluence in time and memory that can
be represented through image and by cinema.
One film that demonstrates Deleuze’s notion of the time-image with memory
in modern cinema is Christopher Nolan’s ‘Memento’ (2000). Deleuze’s idea of the
time-image and memory can be summarised through the quote from Cinema II:
“Memory is not in us; it is we who move in a Being-memory, a world-memory.
In short, the past appears as the most general form of an already-there, a pre-
existence in general, which our recollections presuppose” (Deleuze, 2005, p. 98).
In ‘Memento’, the main character, Leonard Shelby has anterograde amnesia, a
mental problem which means that he cannot form new memories, wiping out his
short term memory, but preserving certain long term thoughts. Memory is therefore
literally not in Leonard’s mind, but he has to rely on body tattoos and polaroids
with written instructions and names (Figures 71 & 73). The film is organised in
two time flows, one, in black and white, which is chronological, and involves
Leonard speaking on the telephone about his own story, and relating a parallel
story of anterograde amnesia, the other, in colour, which is regressive, so the plot is
revealed as a backwards time movement, in which Leonard is continually ‘waking
up’ having forgotten what had previously happened to him – so the past is played
out as the future. The film deliberately distorts and questions the flows of time,
so that the audience is able to doubt all temporal matters with respect to the main
characters, as well as plot, facts, discourse and power relations (see Chapter 4). In
sum, we are left out of time, confused by the flows of time, and acutely aware of
the time dimension and the effects that it can have on the mind. The useful point of

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transference for ‘a pedagogy of cinema’, is how and where such confluence plays
out in contemporary image production and education.
The nexus of the relationship between education, image and the film ‘Memento’,
is that current education systems require an uploading of an enormous amounts
of information into the short term memory that is necessarily and henceforth lost.
Whitehead (1929) called this ‘inert knowledge’, and this function of the education
systems is used for examination purposes, specialist essays and the testing of
knowledge specific criteria. Most of this knowledge is not useful in the long
term, and therefore has to be jettisoned, so that the agent frees up their cognitive
abilities to be able to function with respect to the pressures of everyday life (Cole,
2013a). Digital technology and the present day image culture in which we live
has accelerated the rapid uploading and forgetting of information in the short term
memory, and has added to the ways in which the agent can now survey a vast
amount of information very quickly and in a cursory fashion. ‘Memento’ points to
an actual mental condition of memory loss – however, this state is being simulated,
multiplied and replicated by the present day education and digital learning systems
‘on mass’ and globally.
It is true that such memory distortion is not being applied homogeneously
across the globe, as internet access issues, the expense of digital learning
technologies, and the ways in which the innovations of online learning and
mediating communication technologies are taken up is not uniform (Pullen &
Cole, 2010). However, as a tendency, and as a teleological direction in education,
guided by capital investment and notions of digital technological progress, the
inevitability and strength of memory loss seems to be growing. What this means
in terms of ‘a pedagogy of cinema’ is that the images of ‘Memento’ help us to
understand aspects of the relational complexities between image, memory and
education. Analysis of the images of ‘Memento’ (Figures 71–74) act as a mode
of critical thought about image, memory and education, and point to one of the
dangers of continuing down the path of image-based, digitally enacted education
that destroys the physical memory of knowledge. As a means to understand how
globalisation works, this memory-loss tendency in contemporary education implies
a deskilling in term of the act of concrete remembering and the requisite thinking
skills, and being able to bring to mind long term knowledge (Cole, 2015). In their
place, a host of short term digital memory circuits are being uploaded into the
minds of the learners, making profound and expansive thought about the current
situation less likely, and bounded by the constraint of coordinated memory loss
through image overload and interconnected digital learning. In such a situation,
extreme ideology, not requiring memory of the past, understanding of the present,
or thought for the future is more likely, and global solutions to complex problems
such as climate change and over population will not be reached, as the memory
and image of what has happened and what is happening will always, already be
wiped out (cf. Chapters 2, 3, & 7).

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Figure 71. Leonard and the ‘map’ of Figure 73. Leonard and Natalie ‘read’
tattoos on his body to help him Leonard’s tattoos in the mirror
remember the past

Figure 72. Leonard confronts Teddy about Figure 74. Advertising poster for
his wife’s disappearance with a gun ‘Memento’ showing mock polaroid
‘memory’ images

There is a timelessness to the images of ‘Memento’ that add to the disruption

by and of the temporal order (Figures 71 & 72). The film is set in: motels, bars,
motorway cafés, car parks, abandoned industrial buildings and vacant, overgrown
lots, ‘somewhere’ in America. The ‘reading’ of ‘Memento’ through ‘a pedagogy
of cinema’, and in terms of the bleakness, emptiness and loss of memory that
it portrays, could be simultaneously read in two interconnected ways: (1) as the

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creative time-action-image of filmmaking and filmmakers who have captured

and demonstrated the way in which contemporary image society is devoid of
meaning and time, and is able to present the blank, soulless places at its heart,
and which breeds a panoply of ennui, soullessness and nihilism; (2) the end of
the enlightenment project in and by image culture and elsewhere, and of definite
knowledge and of ‘the truth’, thus history effectively ends through universal,
timeless image culture enwrapping the globe – the action-time images present the
ways in which civil society has ruptured and has now moved to a somewhat pre-
civilised, tortured, unpolitical time-place, where identity is unknown/unsure/lost
in time and values are hollowed out (cf. Chapters 2, 3, 4, & 5). These two readings
of ‘Memento’ can be justified and explained through two philosophical positions
with respect to the facts of the now, and how ‘a pedagogy of cinema’ relates to
globalisation. The first comes from a preface to Deleuze’s Cinema II:
“… spaces which we no longer know how to describe … deserted but
inhabited, disused warehouses, waste ground, cities in the course of demolition
or reconstruction. And in these any-spaces whatever a new race of characters
was stirring, kind of mutant: they saw rather than acted, they were seers”.
(Deleuze, 2005, xi)
In effect, Deleuze is marking a positive spin on the bleak, memoryless culture
depicted in ‘Memento’. One could argue that the characters in ‘Memento’ do have
a seer-like quality, they make an impression beyond any ‘human’ qualities that
they possess, in that the multiple time flows and confluences create a separateness
and disjunction between their personalities and what we learn about them as an
audience (see Chapter 5). The pedagogy of ‘Memento’ means that we cannot trust
our senses about exactly who the characters are, what their motives are, or why they
are acting in any particular way. Are Teddy and Natalie trying to coerce Leonard
into committing murder, because they know that he suffers from memory loss? Is
Leonard’s memory loss as absolute as it seems? In terms of the second reading of
‘Memento’, there is a tradition in social-political-philosophical thought that traces
a line through the early work of Heidegger, the deconstruction of Derrida, and the
recent ideas of Bernard Stiegler, whose ideas focus on what has been lost in images
such as those in ‘Memento’:
The genuine object of debate raised by the [2008 financial] crisis ought
to be how to overcome the short-termism to which we have been led by a
consumerism intrinsically destructive of all genuine investment in the future, a
short-termism which has systematically, and not accidentally, been translated
into decomposition of investment into speculation. (Stiegler, 2010, p. 4)
In other words, according to this positon, time has been systematically
deconstructed and turned into a consumerist, short termism through financial
capitalism. In many ways, this is a darker and less positive position to take on
the type of out-of-place quality and memory destruction that can be seen in

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‘Memento’. One may wonder: What can ‘a pedagogy of cinema’ do in the light
of the modes in which financial capitalism is currently dictating the forms in
which memory is being progressively wiped, and is simultaneously producing
soulless, non-identifying places such as shopping malls, car parks, road systems,
airports and office blocks (Augé, 2009). One could state that ‘a pedagogy of
cinema’ is a form of counter insurgency, in that it inspires cinema-thinking,
or fully realised and conceptual positions, taken from film images as has been
argued throughout the previous chapters. In terms of ‘Memento’, the process of
‘a pedagogy of cinema’ points to the ways in which time can be manipulated
and how this (re)presents images, and what these images mean in terms of
globalisation (Figures 71–74).
Certainly, the effects of globalisation point to tough times for those opposed to
the enveloping short termism of consumerism and how that changes consciousness,
subjectivity, learning and education in general. ‘A pedagogy of cinema’ works
in this space firstly through pointing out the negative effects of globalisation on
mind, time and place, as seen in films such as ‘Memento’, and by making creative
possibilities apparent, such as those encapsulated by the quote from Deleuze about
the products of the types of scenarios presented in, for example, ‘Memento’. The
politics of Deleuze (2005) are reciprocating and fluid, in that he is certainly not
applauding the production of a mutant race of characters from the non-places and
timeless ennui of contemporary society, yet he is very carefully not making a value
judgement about their production. Unlike Stiegler (2010), who is pointing to the
moral necessity of opposing the short termism of consumerism, Deleuze (2005)
looks to a creative (non-capitalist) space, wherein the forces of globalisation can be
understood and (re)presented without any celebration or applause for their efficiency
(cf. Chapters 2, 3, & 7). In contrast, Stiegler’s (2010) answer to the short termism of
financial capitalism lies in the philosophical understanding of their effects, and an
exploration of the ways in which, for example, technology has become embedded
in the self through the history of western civilization (Stiegler, 1998). Deleuze
(1992) suggests something similar in his ‘Societies of Control’ essay, though again,
his emphasis is on the science fictional consequences of such a society, and the
production of, for example, ‘dividuals’. To add to this debate, and to enhance
understanding of how ‘a pedagogy of cinema’ can help us to analyse globalisation,
we will continue work on time, image and education through an analysis of the film,
‘Snowpiercer’.

FLIGHT THROUGH A FROZEN LANDSCAPE:

‘SNOWPIERCER’ AND REVOLUTION

Thesis Three: The constraints of image culture constitute a machine in which live.
The struggle or applied force necessary to resist these constraints is proportional to
the amount of control image culture is able to exert.

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This section of chapter six addresses a fundamental question for ‘a pedagogy of

cinema’: The ‘so what’ question of this book. If image culture is as all pervasive
and as dominant as has been claimed in and through the portrayal of globalisation
(see Chapters 2, 3, & 7), what possible effect could watching films and the
analysis of film images have in this domain? The answer to this question depends
on the film that is being watched, and the amount of impact and penetration
that the images of the film afford in terms of the critique and analysis of image
culture. ‘Snowpiercer’ is a science fiction film set in the future, an experiment on
atmospheric geoengineering has gone wrong and frozen the planet, the surviving
remnants of humanity whizz around the globe in a train powered by a perpetual
motion engine. Humanity is now contained in the train, which is a rigorously
enforced artificial enclosure (Figures 76 & 78). The film deals with the breaking of
the societal structure in the train, where the majority of the occupants are contained
in slum-like conditions at the back of the train and are fed on gelatinous protein
bars. The revolution against the machine of the train, its corporate CEO, Wilford
and those who do his bidding, may be resolved into three aspects, which are useful
with respect to our analysis of image culture (cf. Chapters 2 & 5) and how to resist
it through ‘a pedagogy of cinema’:
1. Having the brute force and affront to stand up and rebel against the machine. In
‘Snowpiercer’, this force is represented by the character of Curtis, who has been
trapped at the back of the train since its inception. Curtis is mentored by the elder
Gilliam and develops a following who share his vision of rebellion against the
status quo in the train and the enigmatic figure of the engine (Figure 77). The
brute force necessary to defy the machine is accompanied by violence, strategic
thinking, and having the power to act in the moment when necessary as the forces
loyal to the engine respond to quell the rebellion.
2. Developing the cognitive abilities to understand how the machine works.
This aspect of the rebellion in ‘Snowpiercer’ is represented by the character
of Namgoong Minsu. Namgoong developed the security features on the train,
and he helps the rebels to move through the carriages to the head of the train
by disarming the locking system. At the head of the train, it is Namgoong who
devises the explosive device to blow a hole in the train, and put an end to the
enclosure of the machine through the functioning of the engine. Namgoong has
the imagination to see outside of the machine, and this aspect of his cognitive
abilities is reinforced by carefully noticing that the ice was receding, and that life
on the outside might be possible.
3. Working as a collective against the ramifications of the machine. At the end of
the film, it is revealed that Gilliam had in fact been communicating with Wilford,
and that the rebellion was part of a plot to reduce the population of the train to
the desired optimal number according to Wilford and his advisors. Individuals
in the train had therefore been categorised and designated in their places, and

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were controlled with the aim of extinguishing free will, which was replaced by
subservience to the engine. It is interesting that the classroom plays a pivotal
role in this subservience, as children chant their allegiance to Wilford and to the
engine. Education in the closed environment of the train in ‘Snowpiercer’ plays
an ideological role in subduing and creating passive citizens, it makes them want
to fit in with the preordained ways things happen in the machine of the train.
The educational aspect of the image of ‘Snowpiercer’ adds to the generalised
insanity of the train-assemblage, which, far from being due to the randomness and
desperation of the situation, is deliberately pre-programmed, as Wilford suggests
to Curtis:
Wilford to Curtis: “I believe it is easier for people to survive on this train if
they have some level of insanity. As Gilliam well understood, you need to
maintain a proper balance of anxiety and fear and chaos and horror in order to
keep life going. And if we don’t have that, we need to invent it. In that sense,
the Great Curtis Revolution you invented was truly a masterpiece”. (Joon-ho,
2013 [film])
Of course, the fight against image culture in this book and through ‘a pedagogy
of cinema’ is far less clear cut (see Chapter 3). In ‘Snowpiercer’, the elements
of control in the train, including the flight to madness, constitutes a machine
with clear boundaries and systems that act internally against the frozen ravages
of the outside (Figure 75). As an image of thought, ‘Snowpiercer’ is therefore
thinkable – it is a closed system, with control directed in comprehensible lines
against disturbing the equilibrium of the train. In contrast, the fundamental
problem that one has in understanding how image culture works is that its engine,
global capitalism, is a subtle and nuanced, yet relentless multilevel system, that
controls populations and thought through flows of capital, which are now often
directed electronically and algorithmically through digitally mediated financial
transactions.
The amount of control that image culture has over us is therefore slippery and
open to debate. Direct opposition to image culture, of the kind that Curtis and the
rebels muster in the train of ‘Snowpiercer’, is not usually feasible, other than at the
precise moments when the machine of global capitalism can be seen to break down
and thus exposes its enormously unfair workings, for example, during the 2008
GFC (Cole, 2012). Globalisation as a ‘mode of being’ that one inevitably partakes
in through living in the 21st century, washes through us, not as one discernible
image of how things are and will become, but as multiply interlinked and synthetic
thoughts about what the machinery of our lives amounts to. If there is one thing
that ‘Snowpiercer’ teaches us, it is that this machinery does have an origin and
history, and that it can at least partially decoded and understood. The frustration of
not being able to easily and adequately oppose image culture through revolution
is henceforth resolved into a strategic escape mission, here called: ‘A Pedagogy
of Cinema’.

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Figure 75. Exterior shot of the train and Figure 77. The engine at the front of the
the frozen environment train and the dwelling of Wilford

Figure 76. Curtis Everett stands up at the Figure 78. Everett’s mentor and
back of the train and begins the revolt mastermind behind the revolt, Gilliam

In ‘Snowpiercer’, the image of thought portrayed is one where successful

revolution is possible, even if it supports planned eugenics. This is because there is
an identifiable enemy in ‘Snowpiercer’ (the engine), that works on all levels, from
the material to the spiritual and including the ideological. The machine that controls
our lives is not so readily identifiable, in fact, one could state that it is in many
ways invisible. Therefore, to be effective and in any way to oppose and engage in
meaningful encounters with the power and machine of image culture, the concept
of cinema suitable for ‘a pedagogy of cinema’ must work on the non-ocular level as
well the visual. This means that the concept of cinema for ‘a pedagogy of cinema’
is multi-dimensional and ‘travels’ between thought experiments, here represented

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by the images of different films under analysis. Doing such conceptual work for ‘a
pedagogy of cinema’ also means that the concept of cinema is not straightforwardly
contrary to the current state of image culture and global capitalism, nor is it producing
a dialectic that we are working through in this book (see Chapter 5); the concept of
cinema functions through the different angles that one can produce as effects to the
global panoply of capitalist endeavour, for example, through the science fiction of
‘Snowpiercer’ (Figures 75–78). Such a production of ‘crystalline-image-thoughts’
(Deleuze, 2005) is parallel and complementary to the analysis of Pisters (2008) with
respect to the shift in the concept of cinema after Deleuze:
By entering into our brain/mind, cinema has become, what I would like to
call, a machine of the invisible. This paradigm shift also demands that we no
longer consider cinema an ‘illusion of reality’ but rather a ‘reality of illusion’.
It involves a shift from considering cinema and the spectator as a ‘disembodied
eye’ (defined by the look and the gaze, desire and identification) to considering
cinema and the spectator as an embodied brain (defined by perceptions – even
illusory ones –, selections – even random ones –, memories – even fake ones –,
imaginations, suggestions and above all emotions as pure affect). (pp. 113–114)
As such, the conception of cinema for ‘a pedagogy of cinema’ can be realised on
every level for this book. In ‘Snowpiercer’, there is no spectacle, the inhabitants are
wholly inside the machine, and are controlled by the engine, not through images and
screen culture, but through ideology, categorisation and enclosure, and the physical
force/violence to keep the inhabitants of the train in their places. In the ‘real world’
images and screen culture play a pivotal role in controlling, subduing and pacifying
the masses (Pisters, 2008). The images of ‘Snowpiercer’ help us to get inside the
workings of screen culture, precisely because images are not part of its functioning
(they are invisible) – as ‘cinema-thinking’, the film presents a fully realised machine
(Figure 77), in contrast to the ways in which image culture connects up with global
capitalism, which is complex and vast (on every level). The thinking angle that
‘Snowpiercer’ gives to the conjunction: global capitalism/image culture, here figured
as globalisation, coheres with a recent analysis of the cartography of capital:
The notion that capital – as an infinitely ramified system of exploitation, an
abstract, intangible but overpowering logic, a process without a subject or
a subject without a face – poses formidable obstacles to its representation,
has often been taken in a sublime or tragic key. Vast, beyond the powers
of individual or collective cognition; invisible, in its fundamental forms;
overwhelming, in its capacity to reshape space, time and matter – but unlike
the sublime, or indeed the tragic, in its propensity to thwart any reaffirmation
of the uniqueness and interiority of a subject. Not a shipwreck with a spectator,
but a shipwreck of the spectator. (Toscano & Kinkle, 2015, pp. 39–40)
‘A pedagogy of cinema’ advances the notion that there are different ways to analyse
the effects of capital that circumvent and reinvent the problems in representation that

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are fundamental to understanding capital (ibid.). ‘A pedagogy of cinema’ does not tend
towards the tragic, though this tendency is not excluded from its logic, which depends
on the individual and synthetic analysis of images from specific films (see previous
Chapters). For example, the theory of time, image and education, and the cinema-
thinking that is produced by ‘Snowpiercer’ – is that of a coherent and controlled
homeostatic system. In contrast, image culture links up with global capitalism
through the messy and unpredictable ways in which consumerism dominates and
subsumes particular cultures and ways of doing things around the globe; and, as
the spread of globalisation is enabled and accelerated through increasing access to
electronic networks and internet enabled connectivity. The shipwreck of the spectator
is in these terms a loss of objectivity and the ability to understand the workings of the
machinery of global capitalism, precisely as it envelops us. To add to the possibility of
‘a pedagogy of cinema’ indicating a way out of this cognitive and affective reality, we
will proceed with analysis of the time, image and education of the film ‘Melancholia’.

THE IMAGE OF IMPENDING COLLISION: ‘MELANCHOLIA’

AND THE END OF THE WORLD

Thesis Four: The consequences of image culture can be best understood through the
affects that they have produced. These affects show a way out of the entrapment of
image.
The encircling entrapment of image culture that ‘a pedagogy of cinema’ does
it best to escape requires an affective punch, to push beyond its boundaries and
through its limits. This punch is parallel to Deleuze’s (1994) shock to thought,
that he elaborated in Difference & Repetition. In contrast to chapter 2, that dealt
with the slow moving horror that underpins learning in, e.g. the Anthropocene, the
analysis of the film ‘Melancholia’, provides a means to understand the power of
the affects of what is happening. ‘A pedagogy of cinema’ is not about interpreting
film, or in providing semantic maps of the images on offer, but in enabling cinema-
thinking from images that includes the submergence in affect. Therefore, the images
of ‘Melancholia’ provide a theory of time and education, and overall, render an
understanding of globalisation that may be read through affect (Figures 79–82).
Firstly, the reality of depression runs throughout the film. In the first half, Justine
demonstrates her nonchalance to the social conventions of marriage and work, as
she defies her fiancée and corporate boss at her wedding celebrations. In the second
half, the remaining characters in the film are thrown into despair as the wedding
guests disperse (Figure 79), and as the planet ‘Melancholia’ heads for its collision
with the Earth (Figures 80 & 81). However, in the face of the loss of control of
her relatives, the despair of ‘Melancholia’ leaves Justine fearless and calm, and
ready for annihilation as the planets collide. The images of ‘Melancholia’ are not
metaphors, but can be read in two ways: (1) as the financial stress/ennui induced by
globalisation and the consequent monetary depression caused by understanding and
waiting for the inevitable next economic crisis, and the overall meaninglessness of

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capitalist and societal cycles of boom and bust; (2) as a form of geo-trauma, or the
affect that is caused by the realisation that manmade climate change is causing and
will cause in the future irreversible planetary effects, understood under the rubric of
Anthropocene, and leading to probable human extinction (Steffen et al., 2011). The
thinker that has perhaps best aligned the ‘affects’ of financial and environmental or
natural reorganization is Alfred North Whitehead:
All thought concerned with social organization expressed itself in terms of
material things and of capital. Ultimate values were excluded. They were politely
bowed to, and then handed over to the clergy to be kept for Sundays. A creed
of competitive business morality was evolved, entirely devoid of consideration
for the value of life. The workmen were conceived as mere hands, drawn from
the pool of labor. To God’s question, men gave the answer of Cain – “Am I my
brother’s keeper?” – and they incurred Cain’s guilt. (Whitehead, 1925, p. 181)
‘Melancholia’ goes someway to address the concerns expressed by Whitehead, in
that the affects expressed through the character of Justine work on the economic
and environmental levels. It is interesting that Whitehead’s analysis of what was
happening in the early part of the 20th century seems all the more prescient and
relevant to today’s situation. Indeed, in the parallel case of the film images under
analysis, the director of ‘Melancholia’, Lars von Trier, expressly calls upon specific
non-capitalist imagery in his film, associated with German Romanticism, the
movement of the Pre-Raphaelites, and the paintings of the Bruegels, in order to create
images that suggest the affects of economic/societal and environmental collapse.
It is tempting to read the imagery of ‘Melancholia’ in a symbolic register, and
as simply representative of the ‘unthought’ of the current situation. However, ‘a
pedagogy of cinema’ significantly works through the Deleuzian approach to images
in cinema, that ‘unhinges’ the images as philosophical perspectives on thought, and
as montage (signs) – thus questioning the image of thought provided, and supplying
a mode of cinema-thinking about the images under analysis. Hence, the images of
‘Melancholia’ present affects, that are non-cognitive modes of learning, and tend
towards the excessive, unconscious, feeling-modes of being and becoming that we
are experiencing in the current situation (Figures 80 & 81). Far from a retreat and
sheltering in what is mystical or unimaginable, ‘a pedagogy of cinema’ is about going
beyond the normative defined, or ways in which film analysis can reduce images
to their component parts, or suggest a vernacular for their analysis (cf. Chapter 2).
Lars von Trier attempts something similar in his construction of the images of
‘Melancholia’, that are a deliberate and strategically organised means to cause and
harness affect, and that put it to work in terms of the overall cinematic experience.
Some may question the processes of disorientation involved with such an
‘affective image rendering’, for example, the use of the hand held camera work,
that gives the film an unstable, shaky and discordant appearance (cf. Chapter 3).
However, these images, that relate to the audience the narrative aspects of the two
halves of the film, are liberally interspersed with significant montage and images

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of the imminent planetary collision taken from the perspective of the universe.
Therefore, the images work in the contrast between the stillness of the weird montage
(Figures 79 & 78) and the planetary perspective, and the hand held narratives about
depression. Lars von Trier uses special effects in ‘Melancholia’, but these special
effects are not to create an illusion of the unreal or of the impossible, but show
how special effects can create affect, that potentially awaken us from our cinematic
slumbers through contact with the unconscious: “Don’t wake me for the end of the
world, unless it has very good special effects” (Zelazny, 1991, p. 147).

Figure 79. Image of the bride Justine Figure 81. Justine, Claire and Leo
strolling past some trees with trailing reeds (Claire’s son) wait for the collision
between planets in their ‘magic hut’

Figure 80. Justine senses power surging Figure 82. The new planet ‘‘Melancholia’’
through her as ‘Melancholia’ approaches dominates the night sky as it approaches
the Earth

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The introduction of the film ‘Melancholia’ into the frame of analysis for ‘a pedagogy
of cinema’ includes the movement of affect that the images portray. In education,
such affects are removed if educational practice is treated as mode of systematic
inculcation of knowledge, or as a robotic means to achieve positive test results.
Affect importantly moves, it is a connection between nodes, and changes the means
of analysis to expand the dimensionality, or the type of ‘depth analyses on offer. The
introduction of affect has definite effects for and in education in terms of literacy
(affective literacy), classroom management and pedagogy (Cole, 2011 & 2013).
Evidence for the viability and sustainability of the introduction of the functioning of
affect into education is incontrovertible. In the instance of ‘a pedagogy of cinema’,
the inclusion of the film ‘Melancholia’, shows how affect works in educational
terms as a means to include the unconscious mapping of desire – from the images
of disconnected ennui of Justine (Figures 79 & 80) to the normative functioning of
marriage and work, to images of variant perspectives on how we can face the end
of the world.
The point here is not to scare the audience into submission, but to organise an
encounter between the real and the ‘thought-feeling-possible’ or what Deleuze (1994)
calls the virtual. ‘Melancholia’ does not show us a definite end-of the-world scenario
with the idea of this is certainly how it is going to happen. Rather, this is a possible or
contingent scenario that comes alive through the images of the cinematic experience
of ‘Melancholia’, and connects up through affect with an image of globalisation
(cf. Chapters 2, 3, & 7), and the ways in which particular affects can be squashed or
subsumed beneath the reality of todays’ situation. In the first instance, this subsumption
happens in the everyday repetitions and banalities of educational practice, that can
foreground instrumentalism and hence creates a mode of machinic functioning around
factors such as: accountability, exam results, institutional conformity, behaviours
alignment associated with strict work ethics, critical passivity, conservatism, the
enactment of teaching and learning feedback forms, educationally assigned gender
roles and societal power relationships that are at work on a micro level in teaching and
learning contexts. In the second instance, the image of globalisation inculcates with
the panorama of machinic functioning of/in educational practice, and acts as a double
pincer, in that any thought of acting otherwise to the current mode of educational
regulation and control, is doubly problematic given the overriding facts of integrated
world capitalism (Guattari, 1989). The introduction of cinematic images such as those
from ‘Melancholia’ (Figures 79–82) acts as a mode of interruption to this double
pincer, and is reminiscent of a statement from Nietzsche with respect to the ways in
which philosophical thinking can misinterpret and misunderstand ‘the body’:
The unconscious disguise of physiological needs under the cloaks of the
objective, ideal, purely spiritual goes to frightening lengths – and often I have
asked myself whether, taking a large view, philosophy has not been merely an
interpretation of the body, and a misunderstanding of the body. (Nietzsche,
1974, pp. 34–35)

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The images of ‘Melancholia’ are about the break out points from the current situation
(cf. Chapters 2, 3, 4, & 7) – even if they are somewhat absurdly portrayed (the
special effects are not meant to be real). In a parallel way to the ideas of Nietzsche
that free up analysis and affect with respect to the ways in which philosophy has
misinterpreted and ignored the effects of the body, the images of ‘Melancholia’ point
to escape routes from the current illusionary aspects of globalisation. For example,
that the societal conventions and conformism associated with marriage and work
lead to inevitable success, or that the rationality and instrumentalism of human
progress and reason will solve the current environmental situation. Rather, the
images of ‘Melancholia’ point to the ennui, repetitions and predictability of marriage
and work, and that the destructive environmental juggernaut that has been put into
motion through the aggregated actions of human endeavour over time (and at least
since 1945, or the great acceleration (Steffen et al., 2007) will not be stopped by
rational thought on its own. Rather, a new romantic thought-landscape is opened up,
one that doesn’t correspond to instrumental reason, but enacts the power of affect. As
a theory of image, time and education, ‘Melancholia’ brings to the fore a bristling,
trembling, ultimate means to conceive of the now – and points to unlearning the
societal means to shelter oneself from the truth (both economic and environmental),
and includes the imperative to forge a new relationship with nature.

CONCLUSION

The four films selected for analysis here present four divergent theories of time,
image and education. However, this divergence is marshalled and brought together
through the focus of ‘a pedagogy of cinema’, and the ways in which the thesis of
each film adds to and demarcates augmented understanding of how cinematic images
can add to and give fresh insights into globalisation. Globalisation simultaneously
works on the level of the imagination as well the macro, economic/political and
planetary levels (Cole & Woodrow, 2016). On this subjective level, the ways in
which globalisation is inculcated and performed through cinema is as intense and as
real as financial capitalism, the construction of new road systems, air travel and coal
fired power plants. On this level, millions of filmgoers across the world watch the
latest Hollywood blockbuster, experience the best in illusionary special effects, and
receive variant messages with respect to globalisation. On the whole, a middle class,
well educated, capitalist, globalised life style is portrayed ‘as good’ through these
images. ‘A pedagogy of cinema’ gives one a means to question the homogeneity of
these images and the values associated with these images (cf. Chapter 7). Each film
that was analysed lent further depth and direction to this analysis, which functions
via specific images taken from the films. Interestingly, ‘a pedagogy of cinema’ does
not give the analyst a coherent counter politics and definite narrative to challenge
the homogeneity of the images of globalisation, such as communism or a return to
primitivism would do. Rather, in sum, the results of this chapter in ‘a pedagogy of
cinema’ were:

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1. That globalisation includes time loops, and the images associated with these
loops can be used to express elements of control and conformism, for example,
associated with the proliferation of retro/niche imagery;
2. There are channels and flows in time that can show the effects of globalisation
in terms of the evacuation of character and the specifics of culture that enhance
memory and help us to be positioned in place (time/space);
3. Within the whole complex system that expresses how globalisation works,
that are definable sub systems, such as in education; i.e. schools, universities,
departments. Revolution is still possible within these sub systems that are
simultaneously subject to the normalising forces of globalisation;
4. The most potent counter force to globalisation is affect. This is because the
introduction of affect into the plane of image analysis allows for and encourages
a non-instrumental mode of analysis, that goes beyond short term, quick fixes to
problematics that are only defined in terms of globalisation, and therefore cannot
go beyond it. The next chapter takes this argument forward in terms of ‘any-
warzone-whatever’.

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Baudrillard, J. (1993). Symbolic exchange and death (I. Hamilton Grant, Trans.). London: Sage
Publications.
Cole, D. R. (2011). The actions of affect in Deleuze – Others using language and the language that we
make …’ Educational Philosophy and Theory, 43(6), 549–561.
Cole, D. R. (Ed.). (2012). Surviving economic crises through education. New York, NY: Peter Lang.
Cole, D. R. (2013a). Traffic jams: Analysing everyday life using the immanent materialism of Deleuze &
Guattari. New York, NY: Punctum Books.
Cole, D. R. (2013b). Affective literacies: Deleuze, discipline and power. In I. Semetsky & D. Masny
(Eds.), Deleuze and education (pp. 94–112). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Cole, D. R. (2015). Deleuze and Learning. In D. Scott & E. Hargreaves (Eds.), The sage handbook of
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Cole, D. R., & Woodrow, C. (Eds.). (2016). Super dimensions in globalisation and education. Singapore:
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Deleuze, G. (2005). Cinema 2: The time-image (H. Tomlinson & R. Galeat, Trans.). London: Continuum
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Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1983). Anti-oedipus: Capitalism & Schizophrenia (R. Hurley, M. Seem, &
H. F. Lane, Trans.). London: The Athlone Press.
Gilliam, T. (1985). Brazil [film]. UK: Embassy International Films.
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Lazzarato, M. (2012). The making of the indebted man: An essay on the neoliberal condition. Los
Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e).
Nietzsche, F. (1974). The gay science: With a prelude in rhymes and an appendix in songs (W. Kaufman,
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Nolan, C. (Dir.). (2000). Memento [film]. United States: Summit Entertainment, Team Todd.

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Orwell, G. (2000). Nineteen eighty-four. London: Penguin Classics.

Pisters, P. (2008). Delirium cinema or machines of the invisible? In I. Buchanan & P. MacCormack (Eds.),
Deleuze and the schizoanalysis of cinema (pp. 102–115). London: Bloomsbury.
Pullen, D. L., & Cole, D. R. (Eds.). (2010). Multiliteracies and technology enhanced education: Social
practice and the global classroom. Hershey, PA: IGI Global Publications
Steffen, W., Critzen, P. J., & McNeill, J. R. (2007, December). The anthropocene: Are humans now
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Stiegler, B. (1998). Technics and time, 1: The fault of epimetheus (G. Collins & R. Beardsworth, Trans.).
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Toscano, A., & Kinkle, J. (2015). Cartographies of the absolute. Winchester: Zero Books.
Whitehead, A. N. (1925). Science and the modern world. New York, NY: Free Press.
Whitehead, A. N. (1929). The aims of education and other essays. New York, NY: Free Press.
Zelazny, R. (1991). Prince of chaos. New York, NY: William Morrow and Company.

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 CHAPTER 7

THE CINEMA OF A ‘NEW REAL’

Learning from within Images

INTRODUCTION

I’ve reached out through my camera and into you, into your eyes, and touched
at your respectable desire for chaos. Boo.
David Rudkin, The Lovesong of Alfred J Hitchcock
In this chapter, and working within the thematic of ‘a pedagogy of cinema’, I shall
examine in detail the notion of the ‘any-space-whatever’ as presented in Deleuze’s
philosophy to show how it resonates with the use of video in documentary film-
making – and Lazzarato video philosophy (1996). This is undertaken to make the case
that cinema thinks the time-image as a pedagogical tool to disclose non-dominant,
non-ideological ways of thinking. I examine the theoretical implications that arise
from this by looking at the genre of documentary film-making – Christian Frei’s
‘War Photographer’ (2001) – and its interface with video technology to consider
how pre-personal affect is engineered from and within video sensation. In order to
show the liquid-molecular movement from ‘pure cinema’ to what might be termed
the contaminated cinema of video sensation, I compare the latter form with Alfred
Hitchcock’s involvement in documenting Nazi atrocities in the 1940s and then
cinematically by way of his 1954 masterpiece ‘Rear Window’ (which we looked at
briefly in Chapter 5). I shall explore several themes: (1) how video transforms the
aesthetics of violence and the pedagogy of the image; (2) how video sensation thinks
the aesthetics of suffering; (3) the connection between video, documentary and the
time-image; and, (4) how the representation of the real is transformed in video
documentary when the image assumes virtual, immanent dimensions. I shall refer
to a range of contemporary continental philosophers to demonstrate the implications
for ‘a pedagogy of cinema’.
There is a thought-provoking moment at the beginning of Bernard Stiegler’s
third volume of Technics and Time: Cinematic Time and the Question of Malaise
(2011) where the French philosopher explains the promise of what might be called a
pharmacology of cinema – a concept which shall inform this section of ‘a pedagogy
of cinema’. The argument goes like this: while the viewer may well be carried away
by the flow of images, mesmerized by their interplay, captured by the filmmaker’s
exploitation of ‘video-cinematographic possibilities’ – with attention glued to

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images, lost in the addictive qualities of ecstatic temporality – distracted – with

thinking as such transfixed and affected by the ‘cinematic flux of consciousness’ –
the fact remains that if the film is excellent, one may leave the theatre re-invigorated,
“full of emotion and the desire to do something, or else infused with a new outlook
on things” (2011, p. 10). The cinematographic machine, according to Stiegler, may
even transubstantiate boredom into a new energy, and in so doing lift the viewer out
of the nothingness of the while away hours. Stiegler writes about this in terms of a
kind of cinema-thinking (Ibid.):
The cinema will have brought back the expectation of something, something
that must come, that will come, and that will come to us from our own life:
from this seemingly non-fictional life that we re-discover when, leaving the
darkening room, we hide ourselves in the fading light of day.
In terms of ‘a pedagogy of cinema’, Stiegler is ruminating on one key aspect of its
methodology, that is to say, its pharmacological possibility. For Stiegler, cinema
is a pharmakon, in the sense that – as a retention capturing device – it contributes
to the loss of attention but in other ways offers possibilities for thinking the world
afresh. For him it is not only the inside of cinema but also its outside where the
test of the possibility of cinema as such is played out. Mirroring this move, ‘a
pedagogy of cinema’ therefore does not confine its scope of inquiry to classical or
orthodox interpretations of cinema history and aesthetics, but also concerns itself
with the way in which cinema propagates the “derealization of violence” (Lacy,
2014, p. 80) and in what way violence or war is rendered cinematic in the everyday
world as Paul Virilio is wont to say. It may also be true that commercial cinema as
an ‘incorporeal universe’ may drug us, leave us to swim endlessly in our own funk,
but from this pharmacological view, it is equally true that it can bring something
singular into existence. ‘Good’ cinema – which is opposed to a cinema of ‘bad
faith’ which imposes a dominant reality and dominant significations – knows and
shows us this. As Stiegler (2011, p. 32) says: “Getting behind the camera offers the
chance to be ‘a means of writing’ much more direct and effective than orthodox
discourses”. Although Stiegler (2011, p. 101) writes that, on the one hand, as an
‘industrial temporal object’, cinema can be “extremely toxic”, on the other, as he
says, it has the pharmacological potential to generate new attentional forms which
may redirect the flux of the ‘perception-consciousness system’ for positive ends.
This positive pharmacology of the cinema is set up to contest the toxic pharmakon
which disseminates itself through the industrial revolution to the eye (Beller,
2006). Despite the hyperbole and pessimism which sometimes pervades Stielger’s
work, his criticism of ‘industrial temporal objects’ is premised on the drive to
renew psychic and collective becoming, or the life of the mind – and, for Stiegler,
cinema has the potential to do this. One of the tasks of ‘a pedagogy of cinema’ is to
demonstrate this potential for education.

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THE CRISIS OF MENTAL IMAGES

‘A pedagogy of cinema’ searches for film representation which can act as an emoting,
‘empathy machine’ in a fashion contrary to the so-called Americanization of world
consciousness, which is to say, it looks for a cinema which carries the possibility
of wrenching the spectator out of his or her funk or complicity with the culture
industry and the status quo. What is axiomatic in terms of ‘a pedagogy of cinema’ is:
1) cinema is a site for the production of knowledge; 2) cinema can be a site to ward
off anti-production; 3) the image is the site of production as a mode of semiotics/
regimes of signs; 4) cinema is a site of struggle for the battle of intelligence. In
other words, cinema contests the mental pollution of images, a grey ecology (Virilio,
2009) with the images themselves. If this is shown then cinema can be construed as
a regime of knowledge distinct from hitherto formations. This new regime focuses
on percepts, or more precisely, pre-personal affects. In Cinema 2: the Time Image,
Deleuze recognises that cinema is a new practice of images and signs and for him
the task of philosophy is to engage this field of affect through “conceptual practice”
(p. 280). With the idea of cinema as an empathy machine in mind, ‘a pedagogy of
cinema’ is also principally concerned with this field of pre-personal affect.
For example, Mark Cousins at the beginning of the comprehensive analysis of the
history of cinema, ‘The Story of Film: An Odyssey’ (2004), points to how cinema
conveys emotion as an ‘empathy machine’. In Kieslowski’s ‘Three Colours: Blue’
(1993), he finds an exploration of empathy by specific means, through cinematic
affects focused on the face, and therefore not on narrative as such. Cousins
(2004, n.p.) describes it thus:
A young woman in Paris has her eyes closed to feel the warmth of the sun on her
face. At the same time unseen by her this little street drama takes place. White
light floods the screen links the young and old woman. We want to reach into the
screen to help the old lady. This is film making: Cinema as an empathy machine.
This is precisely Deleuze’s point. Cinema is an affect engineering machine as film
transforms a surface like a face into a site of production of affects. And more than
this, as a production of affects, film is able to produce knowledge per se through
affects. Simply put, a film produces knowledge through pre-personal affects. That
the eye becomes the camera is posited on a secondary level, for Deleuze, because the
screen and its relation to the brain and the eye assumes primary importance. The relay
between face and the close up demonstrates this. The surface of the face is the site
of the production of affects. The question then is less to do with the verisimilitude of
images and more to do with how one thinks materially with moving images. Here it
is a question of how we connect with the real. Through affects how is it possible for
cinema to formulate a new knowledge of/for the real? Perhaps it is not so much that
the task of film is to touch authenticity as it were with images but, on the contrary, to
deconstruct authenticity with images themselves.

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In light of these questions ‘a pedagogy of cinema’ also searches for a kind of

counter cinema (Ambrose, 2013) which can throw a ratchet into the cinematic
machine to precipitate a punctum in the passive consciousness of the viewer –
demonstrating that the world can be otherwise, that there is an outside to the cinematic
gaze and the indulgences of emotion, even a politics. Cinema, for Ambrose (2013),
has a uniquely affective way of capturing, preserving experience and collective
dreams, by translating them into affective cinematic images (p. 121). Following
Deleuze, he argues that film delivers “an affective shock” to pre-formatted ways
of thinking. The “cinema of counter sense” as Ambrose calls it (p. 5) opens up a
space to perceive and think reality as “teeming with new and previously unforeseen
possibilities” (p. 3) as it allows the spectator to rethink “the pernicious clichés and
truisms that structure the homogenous field” (p. 4). The ethico-political message of
Ambrose’s book is clear and is consistent with ‘a pedagogy of cinema’ because his
pedagogy of vision is one which reads cinema in terms of counter-sense – through
folds, lacunae, irrational cut and juxtaposition (as we saw in Arthur Lipsett’s cinema
for example in Chapter 3).

THE LIGHT OF LOGOS

For Stiegler, the question is less about the light of logos but rather how to get behind
the camera in the cave of the cinema – to explore a different form of cinematic
possibility. With this perspective in mind, one of the contentions of this chapter in
terms of ‘a pedagogy of cinema’ is that cinema is more than a machine propagating
axiomatized stupidity (Deleuze & Guattari, 1983). Contra Adorno, ‘a pedagogy of
cinema’ insists that cinema can become a medium to do thinking as such. This is a
pedagogy by cinema not of itself. Such an emphasis resists Adorno’s contention in
Minima Moralia (1978, p. 25) that “Every visit to the cinema leaves me, against all
my vigilance, stupider and worse”. Moreover, ‘a pedagogy of cinema’ takes issue
with Adorno’s insistence that when we go to the cinema we give up our right to
respond to the images and that to watch such images is to grant consent to the chaos
of the world as it is. On the contrary, if cinema qua incorporeal universe of reference
is a means to think, it is also equally a possible means to resist, to create new worlds,
or new theoretical and aesthetic models in contradistinction to the Americanization
of ‘world’ consciousness propagated by the Hollywood culture industry. In terms
of Deleuze’s architectonic of cinematic signs, this is consistent with Jean Rouch’s
notion of cinéma-vérité. For Deleuze, it is Rouch who puts the West and himself ‘to
flight’ (Deleuze, 1989, p. 230) in his ethnology of African people. Through ciné-
trance, mutual co-becoming, creative involution, the genre of film can force the
spectators to think; it can produce spiritual automata or trance like states through
which one can think from within the very act of spectatorship itself. In this way,
ciné-trance is a transition, a becoming, ‘machinic transilience’. It can construct
new collective and machinic assemblages which may engineer inaugural collective
utterances, the seed of the non-yet.

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‘War Photographer’ (2001)

Figure 83. Post-war Kosovo, Figure 87. Ramallah, the West Bank
any-warzone-whatever

Figure 84. Homeless families in Figure 88. Tear gas and bullets:
Jakarta, Indonesia precarious subjectivity

Figure 89. The photographer and viewer

Figure 85. Cinematic exploration of have no time for reflection but must
a-signifying rupture engage the flow of images

Figure 86. Any-space-whatever Figure 90. A sulphur mine at Ijen in

merging with non-places East Java, Indonesia

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FROM ANY-SPACE-WHATEVERS TO ANY-WARZONES-WHATEVER

Christian Frei’s ‘War Photographer’ (2001) documentary about the world of

professional photographer James Nachtwey serves to exemplify ‘a pedagogy
of cinema’ as it explores the breakdown and breakthrough of image through
professional journalism. In ‘War Photographer’, it is video rather than photography
which becomes the medium to explore the any-space-whatevers of the modern world.
Video captures or comes close to the flux of consciousness in atemporal spaces
of collapse and destruction. Reflecting the point by Stiegler, the argument is that
while the written word remains central for the generation of meaning, the image and
its relations are also increasingly paramount and rivalrous. Or as Jean-Luc Godard
famously says it is not blood but redness. This is interpreted by Deleuze (1989,
p. 22) as follows: “Godard’s formula, ‘it isn’t blood, it’s some red’, stops being only
pictorial and takes on a sense specific to the image, implying a new conception of
cutting, a whole ‘pedagogy’ which will operate in different ways...”. Put another
way, video is that which ruptures the real but gives us access to a virtual sense
or image. To make sense of how the video camera and video documentary can be
thought about through the concepts of a-signifying semiotics, a-signifying rupture,
and the time-image, ‘a pedagogy of cinema’ asks how video can be used to think war
aesthetics and the representation of suffering in refugee camps, detention centres,
slums and so on. Perhaps it can be explained hence: as a modern instantiation of
ciné-trance, at work in video is an ‘a-parallel evolution’ of both viewer, creator and
object. Through documentary, what James Nachtwey’s art of atrocity demonstrates
is the guidance of the camera, a retraining of the eye, a challenge to what we have
become accustomed to by way of the first person shooter angle (Jagodzinski, 2014).
In ‘War Photographer’, Frei’s documentary uses footage recorded from a small
microcam video camera mounted on Nachtwey’s SLR camera – a kind of roving eye
in the any-space-whatevers of war zones (Figures 83–90). This form of documentary
about the photo-image maker is regarded as a first in modern cinema. But before
we get to this matter in depth, and to make the point clearer, let me first make a
note about the nature of the any-space-whatever. In the English edition preface to
Cinema 2, Deleuze describes any-space-whatevers as emerging in “spaces which we
no longer know how to describe… deserted but inhabited, disused warehouses, waste
ground, cities in the course of demolition or reconstruction” (Deleuze, 1989, p. xi).
In these any-space-whatevers, Deleuze finds “a new race of characters was stirring,
kind of mutant: they saw rather than acted, they were seers” (Deleuze, 1989, p. xi).
For our purposes we shall call these spaces or non-places (Augé, 1995) – slums,
concentration camps, war zones – any-warzone-whatevers – in order to differentiate
the sites of destruction and war proper from their cinematic representation.
Nachtwey’s SLR camera grants a certain presencing to the viewer, filming a series
of tragic, disturbing events and scenes – the struggle for reconciliation in post-war
Kosovo (Figure 83), poverty and riots in Jakarta, Indonesia (Figures 84, 85, 86),

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civil unrest in Ramallah in the West Bank (Figures 87, 88, 89), the daily toil and
health risks at a sulphur mine at Ijen in East Java, Indonesia (Figure 90) – from
the perspective of the emotionally detached photographic machine. On one level, it
compels the viewer to ask why he or she is party to, abides with, bears witness to
these horrifying images. But more than this it renders or turns the viewer into a kind
of director and compulsively so. The promise of the video cinema and this form of
video documentary is to literally convulse us out of our indifference to the world – to
make us directors of our own lives again. The video footage shows us a cinéma vérité
of the violence of the aesthetic. As the mobile camera highlights the presence of the
first person shooter perspective, it is through the video lens, through the shaking,
disjointed, frenetic pace of the recording, that grants a certain immediacy and reality
but also renders the viewer a participant in the construction of meaning out of the
very flux and dissonance of images. At the level of metaphor, ‘War Photographer’
explores the problematics of ‘a pedagogy of cinema’: it questions the ‘we’ who are
the screen, the ‘we’ behind the eyes of the camera (cf. Chapters 2 & 6).
One of the tasks of ‘a pedagogy of cinema’ is to articulate a machine vision of the
body which situates the sovereign ‘I’ as a vehicle of sensation, desire and empathy, and
in so doing, to tear the body out of its inertia or morbidity. On one level, ‘a pedagogy
of cinema’ works to forge relations with the outside – to contest the barbaric images
which flood our screens as so many weapons of war and communication but it must
also aim to transform everyday ways of seeing, saying, doing or simply being. This is
of critical importance for ‘a pedagogy of cinema’ because one of its first principles is
to expose viewers to the outside, which is the realm of pure affects, as Deleuze says.
Through the use of roaming video, Frei’s documentary explores this outside through
a violence of the aesthetic as a form of immanent materialism. Cinema in this way
is always already a matter of politics and an ethics of the everyday. And indeed, for
Guattari, cinema, as a plastic, incorporeal universe, is a key site for ethico-political
struggle. Guattari writes (1995, pp. 119–120):
[H]ow do we change mentalities, how do we reinvent social practices that
would give back to humanity—if it ever had it—a sense of responsibility for
its own survival, but equally for the future of all life on the planet, for animal
and vegetable species, likewise for incorporeal species such as music, the arts,
cinema, the relation with time, love and compassion for others, the feeling of
fusion at the heart of the cosmos?

VIRILIO AND CINEMA

‘War was my university.’ (Virilio & Lotringer, 1983, p. 24)

In his chapter ‘Topographical Amnesia’ in The Vision Machine (1994), Virilio is right
to say that vision machines are leading us to a loss of imagination and apprehension
of the life-world. Under this bleak reading, the viewer suffers a loss of sense, with

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sight and perception configured for purely technological ends, synthetic experience
and thrills. It is our bunkering in with vision machines – as nodes of a new mode
of domination whose operating logic is based on the ‘logistics of perception’ – that
Virilio believes will lead to the decrease in the use of visual organs and connected
physiological and cognitive mechanisms. Images as such replace interpretation and
without the latter images stun you like ‘a blinding light’. Given the effect of speed
on society at large, images replace interpretation. Such an assault on the senses
has damaged people’s ability to create mental images, Virilio contends (Virilio &
Armitage, 2001, p. 118), as people are increasingly unable to “make their own
cinema in their heads”. To counter this pessimism, ‘a pedagogy of cinema’ needs to
develop a precise model for understanding how the any-space-whatever produces
or induces non-human affects – images, sounds, words, intensities, movements,
rhythms, and information. Such a cinema may in some way offer the possibility of
an escape from the dominant semiology of meaning in favour of new “collective
entanglements in and of desire” (Guattari & Lotringer, 2009, p. 149). ‘A pedagogy
of cinema’ warns against the prospects of machinic enslavement, which occurs when
a-signifying semiotics directly impinge on bodily affects, desires, emotions and
perceptions and thereby debars flight from the addictive flow of images and signs.
The question then for ‘a pedagogy of cinema’ is how to couple these affects with
machines of becoming – with the outside.
At its most straightforward, metaphorically level, what the video camera fixed to
Nachtwey’s SLR aims to do is to redirect our eyes not only to the reality of war but
also to its aesthetic and our complicity with the totality of its horror. This is necessary,
not only in terms of Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy, but also, with respect to
Adorno’s critical philosophy, who maintains in his essay Transparencies on Film
(McCormick, 2004, pp. 270–271): “There can be no aesthetics of cinema, not even a
purely technological one, which would not include the sociology of the cinema”. But
‘a pedagogy of cinema’ has also to account for what Virilio names as a disturbance to
the eye. He writes in Manhattan Out (Depardon & Virilio, 2008): “Cinema disturbs
the eye. The speed of movements and precipitous succession of images condemn
the viewer to continuous superficial vision. The eye does not capture images; it is
them which capture the eye. They submerge the viewer’s consciousness. Movies
force the eye to don a uniform, whereas it had been naked until now” (p. 10). From
the standpoint of ‘a pedagogy of cinema’, what lies behind Nachtwey’s haunting
aesthetic, which shows us a world of sad sensations and affects through the video
camera, is a demand to rethink our scopophilia, that is to say, our voyeuristic gaze
and sadistic pleasure. Optimistically expressed, while there may well be complicity
with the fictional images, through video, one is brought back to – or at least close
to – at least for a moment – the unmediated reality which one observes and as such
one is better able to respond to it in like.
If a professional photographer like Nachtwey agrees to make a documentary
about his photography of violence and war, filming as it were the experience of

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constructing images, what do we as spectators see? More to the point, who sees
and why? Is the documentary more about the paralysis to intervene – both his
paralysis and the viewers – and, if so, how this message can be of positive effect in
educational settings? Can we see the eye or vision of the photographer, the vision of
the raw unedited real of the photograph, the raw unedited thinking or raw unedited
percepts? What does this mean for ‘a pedagogy of cinema’? One straightforward
answer might be that it simply reveals the brutality and inhumanity of war, poverty
and slavery. But equally important perhaps is the fact that it also exposes the trauma
of the photographer who sees this horror but is compelled to make an aesthetic out
of it. Through video, can such a documentary compel the viewer to question the
reason why he or she is transfixed by the flight and fancy of moving images? Or can
video cinema halt this bombardment, to construct new thoughts and feelings, present
new horizons of possibility, to raise critical questions as to why spectators follow
the moving image so slavishly? In terms of Frei’s documentary of Nachtwey and
the any-warzones-whatever as I have designated it, as the video footage calls forth
signs of epidemic suffering, the question becomes how can the video camera convey
to the viewer sensations of outrage, grief, disbelief, frustration, sympathy, which as
Nachtwey argues is the remit and modus operandi of the photographer?

THE PROMISE OF PHARMACOLOGICAL CINEMA

Let us return for a moment to ‘Rear Window’ (1958) and Hitchcock’s theory of
mental relations, which we developed in Chapter 5, to show how this semiotic
regime no longer applies to the paralysed viewer of modern cinema. In ‘Rear
Window’, let us recall, we find a clear expression of the passage from the
incapacity of photographic desire as personified in L.B. Jeffries, to the incapacity
of spectatorship in general. Jeffries, unable to decipher the semiotics of atrocity, is
trapped in self-referential petrified, narcissistic relations. More recently, this reality
is also captured in Steve McQueen’s film ‘Shame’ (2011), a film which explores
claustrophobic male desire and the male gaze in a fresh light. While photographer
L.B. Jeffries suffers from his own machinic enslavement, embedded in funk,
paralysed in front of the moving images of multiple screens (Figures 104–106),
Nachtwey’s embodied subjectivity gets out and looks in. From the site of ‘a pedagogy
of cinema’ this is what cinema has the capacity to do: it asks for an outside and then
looks in at passivity and endemic mental paralysis. What the viewer sees is the
paralysis of Jeffries in front of kinetic TV images. The photographer is powerless,
unable to respond to the flow of images before him. What the photographer does
is but to comply with the moving image and succumb to its seductions. Here, there
are parallels between ‘War Photographer’ and the reconstruction of massacre in
Gus van Sant’s ‘Elephant’ (2003) (Figure 94), as the spectator sees the camera
which records the event of the atrocity, can apprehend what is to come, but is unable
to intervene.

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Figure 91. First-person shooter Call of Figure 93. Tomb Raider sets the precedent
Duty – technology-mediated atrocities many will follow

Figure 92. ‘Collateral Murder’ represents Figure 94. Gus Van Sant’s ‘Elephant’,
the confusion of reality, fiction and depicts the events of the Columbine High
entertainment School massacre in 1999. The spectator is
paralysed, a mere ‘seer’

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Figure 95. German Concentration Camps Figure 97. The images of hell in
Factual Study (‘Night Will Fall’) Belsen, Buchenwald, Dachau,
Auschwitz must be seen

Figure 96. Paralysed witnesses to Figure 98. A long lens to ward off
man’s inhumanity to man. What is claims that Hitchcock is manipulating
left is but to bear witness the desires of his audience

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There is a clearly discernible and addictive thrill in the participation of first-

person shooters, a thrill which migrates easily from the video game to the theatre
of war. In Cousins’ ‘The Story of Film: An Odyssey’, we find a clear trajectory
from ‘The Shining’, the respective versions of ‘Elephant’ by Alan Clarke (1989)
and Gus Van Sant (2003), to a much broader continuum incorporating multimillion
dollar video games such as Tomb Raider (Figure 93) and Call of Duty (Figure 91).
But it doesn’t end there as this continuum now passes from the raw footage of
missile death in the 1991 Gulf war to the accidental death of civilians by US
soldiers shown in ‘Collateral Murder’ (Figure 92), which was video footage
surreptitiously uploaded to Wikileaks. In this sense, cinema, like Jeffries, is
impotent or incapacitated face to face with the perception of this suffering. If so,
then, Jean Baudrillard’s provocation holds true: The Gulf war did not happen. As
we saw in Chapter 5, in ‘Rear Window’, the spectator engineers meaning by filling
in the blanks between moving images: from photographs, to camera, to newspaper,
to broken leg, to paralysed wheelchair-bound man. The ‘third eye, the mind’s eye’
of the spectator is the interpreting, hypothesising camera and makes sense by using
a form of a-signifying semiotics. However, video documentary acts in a different
way; it is a kind of ‘live cinema’ akin to the ‘cinema-verite’ in Jean Rouch’s and
Pierre Perrault’s work. In this form of ‘live cinema’, a kind of a-signifying rupture,
the camera does not merely observe the real, but participates with the subjects of
the film in the creation of virtual immanence. It is not so much the camera but
rather the screen which becomes the eye. In terms of Nachtwey’s photography, it
leads him to insist (n.p.): “I don’t believe there’s any such thing as objective reality.
It’s only reality as we experience it”. Through the video camera, in recording how
he plies his trade, we experience a form of constructivism. However, the function
of cinema is not to dogmatically represent reality as such, but rather to explore
the world in terms of non-human sensations and percepts and to translate this
experience into intensities.

‘Rear Window’

Figure 99. Representation of the Figure 100. Jeffries must watch on

immobility of the movement image mentally as his body is paralysed

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Figure 101. Again, Hitchcock Figure 104. The covetous gaze becomes
masterfully generates meaning from the gaze of the camera lens
the movement of the camera

Figure 102. The eye watches on: from Figure 105. Psychosomatic irritation
past life to present stasis of the male gaze

Figure 103. The photographer is Figure 106. Scopophilia is not limited

paralysed physically and mentally. to the male gaze
Hitchcock shows the trauma of both
the viewer and the photographer

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In ‘Rear Window’, the photographer is immobilized (Figure 99) with a broken leg
(Figure 100). In pain and bored to death he takes to watching his neighbours with
his long telephoto lens to pass the time. In the many windows the voyeur observes
sadness, loneliness, and ultimately murder but he is unable to respond to the
troubling images. Yet, Hitchcock’s camera does not show us the emotions of Jeffries
by having his actor play out a range of emotions for us to empathize with but makes
thoughts in the film by having the movement of the camera convey meaning – from
room to photo to leg indicating location, job and status (Figures 101–103). This
idea is reworked by Deleuze, who as we know, finds in Hitchcock’s work and ‘Rear
Window’ in particular, that Jeffries’ paralysis signifies the collapse of the action-
image and the hint of the time-image to come. It is as if Jeffries sees the obsessions
of future generations of screen culture. In film, for Deleuze, there is not so much a
faithful remembering of the past as a fabulation of the future. As he says, because of
this there is the possibility of an escape from the flashback or “the false piety of the
recollection-image” (Deleuze, 1989, p. 122). The sad passion or feeling of shame,
for example, need not then succumb to this false piety. This is what is designated the
powers of the false. In modern political cinema, as a movement of thought in itself,
one searches for a response to the intolerable of the everyday, by an appeal to a people
who do not yet exist. Cinema as absolute deterritorialization or utopos, is therefore
primarily for a people and world, yet to come. Here, and oddly perhaps, Deleuze
finds a comrade in Adorno who famously says that guilt and “nothing else, is what
compels us to philosophize” (p. 364). It is this visionary aspect which ‘a pedagogy
of cinema’ seeks to explore. In cinema qua ‘thought-machine’, extraordinary worlds
are put to the most ordinary use, as Deleuze says in Dialogues. Or as Godard says
more simply cinema is ultimately a form that thinks.
In the documentary German Concentration Camps Factual Study (‘Night
Will Fall’, 2015) (Figures 96–98), Hitchcock’s participation in the documentary
(his only one) – albeit limited to supervising the production and actual camera
work – is significant in terms of ‘a pedagogy of cinema’ because his involvement
says something further about the aesthetics of horror. This Second World War
documentary, shot by Alfred Hitchcock and Sidney Bernstein in 1945, while truly
upsetting and excruciating to watch, affords us the possibility to think the crisis
of the movement image further. The long, panning shots used by Hitchcock –
intentionally set up to avoid criticism that he manipulated the images and hence
the audience – impersonally survey the horror of the concentration camp. From the
point of view of ‘a pedagogy of cinema’, Hitchcock’s lens – supposedly bearing
witness to the horrors of those days – is shell-shocked into in-action. The camera
shows us hundreds and hundreds of dead bodies piled up one on top of another.
Scene after scene, the camera is a seer of the inhumanity of man by man. ‘Night
Will Fall’ exemplifies how the propaganda machine serves the war machine, how
soft power invariably serves military might. In the documentary, Hitchcock explains
his reasons for travelling to the camps (n.p.): “I left America to go to England to do
some war work. I had felt that I needed at least to make some contribution. There

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wasn’t any question of military service. I was over age and overweight at that time,
but nevertheless, I felt the urge”. The Churchill government deploys Hitchcock to
supply image-ammunition, Hitchcock’s panning shots are turned into a ‘logistics
of perception’ in the language of Virilio, who says in War and Cinema, weapons
are tools not just of destruction but also of perception. On this point, Virilio writes
(1989, p. 6) that they are “stimulants that make themselves felt through chemical,
neurological processes in the sense organs and the central nervous system, affecting
human reactions and even the perceptual identification and differentiation of
objects”. Whether it is the panning frames in ‘Night Will Fall’, ‘Rear Window’ or the
video footage in ‘War Photographer’, what is conveyed is the crisis of the movement
image. Nothing moves in these landscapes, those present – shell-shocked by what
they see – are unable to act. The video footage in ‘War Photographer’, however, is
different. We find tracking shots of the any-space-whatever, of a non-place somehow
torn out of coherent space-time coordinates. As we know, before during and after the
Second World War, we find a proliferation of such spaces, according to Deleuze. If
‘Rear Window’ signifies the breakdown of the movement image and the incipient
signs of the time-image, ‘War Photographer’ as documentary video cinema suggests
a means to analyse the time-image and the proliferation of any-space-whatevers. In
the continuum from ‘Night Will Fall’-’Rear Window’-’War Photographer’ there is a
technical transformation of journalism and spectatorship found in the panning shots
of the concentration camp to the embodied subjectivity of Nachtwey’s photography.
Yet the documentary genre carries a fictional function, blurring the aesthetics and
forms of life, according to Laura Marks in her ‘Signs of the Time’ essay (Flaxman,
2000). For Marks, documentary images are interlaced with the fictional to engender
powers of the false. Indeed, truth is not out there simply to be revealed, represented
or documented but must first of all be created. The genre of video documentary here
explores the disorientating effects of the time-image in any-space-whatevers, in war
zones, concentration camp and slums. The documentary time-image engages us with
the contingency of life; it opens us to a duration of thinking, of the virtual, in a process
of sense-making that remains tentative and uncertain. It is for this reason perhaps
that documentary filmmakers struggle to reconstruct ‘the traces of the real’. The
any-space-whatever demands contemplation from the distracted viewer, the spiritual
automaton. What form this takes is the preserve of ‘a pedagogy of cinema’ to define
and deconstruct. The connection between video cinema and the any-space-whatever
is found in the way video documentaries construct meaning in those moments of
inexpressibility, in the unseeable and unsayable real. It is this breakdown of ordinary
meaning which opens cinema to an outside. Through the aperture of the time-image,
there is a deterritorializing of memory, the past is brought into contact with what
is yet to be thought. Marks expounds that ‘documentary images’ are essentially
actualizations of the virtual. While movement-images maintain a division between
the actual and virtual, they effectively impoverish the image. The time-image
however collapses the distinction between actual and virtual because it erases the
distinction between present (actual) and past (virtual). Furthermore, as Marks says,

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confirming Patricia Pisters observation, cinema’s becoming-time-image collapses

the distinction between documentary and fiction, with fake documentaries adjudged
“the current apotheosis of this tendency” (Flaxman, 2000, p. 202).

SUPER-8

In Chaosophy (2008), while Guattari bemoans the fact that cinema, television, and
the media are machinic assemblages which handle libidinal energy and messages –
and often serve a dominant reality and dominant significations, he also views the
Super-8 camera and the videotape recorder as potentially transformational means of
expression. The question for Guattari is how the aesthetic intensities of video can
escape systems of control and refuse subjugation to signifying semiologies. From
Guattari’s point of view, molecular revolution becomes possible in cinema through
the molecularization of visual technology such as the Super-8 camera. In this way,
Super-8 is a tool of democratisation and democratizing perception, a tool of the
amateur, confirming Stiegler’s exhortation for the amateur to get behind the camera.
It is a tool in everyone’s hands. A case in point is the social unrest which stemmed
from the Rodney King case, which was captured by video camera technology and
disseminated widely and quickly.
The verisimilitude and graininess of the video footage in Frei’s ‘War Photographer’
suggests that the any-warzones-whatever which Nachtwey’s art explores can be read
in terms of a-signifying semiotics and rupture. The molecular images presented have
no innate meaning, but rather must be first experienced, internalised, synthesized,
semioticized. In them is a confusion of life and the ‘banality of death’. Here cinema
both shapes and liberates desire. It can be the lynchpin between other people and
groups. In this way, for Guattari, schizoanalysis asks of the flows and desire invested
into the social field and how that very desire can be unshackled to disrupt the
smooth functioning of the wider socius. So it is through a-signifying semiotics that
we can understand the duration of video-cinematographic images as realities which
capture intensities or ‘ways of feeling’. The cinematic montage, Guattari argues,
of a-signifying semiotic chains – of intensities, movements and multiplicities –
“effectively frees it from the signifying grid” (Guattari & Lotringer, 2008, p. 161).
The cinema, formed by a myriad forms of expression – the images, sounds, and
words spoken and written (texts), movements, positions – deterritorializes the image
and perception, and in so doing offers the possibility of bypassing “personological
individuations” and opening up non-dominant subjectivations (Ibid., p. 109). Cinema
is capable, if only for an instant, of making us, as Guattari says, “orphans: single,
amnesiac, unconscious, and eternal” (Ibid., p. 266), or derobing the customary
uniforms which film forces us to don, by questioning the role, function, and meaning
of social status and dominant designation. Making the same point, Lazzarato writes,
following Guattari (2014, p. 111): “The intensities, movements, and duration of film
images can produce effects of desubjectivation and disindividuation in the same way
that childhood, drugs, dreams, passion, creation, or madness can strip the subject of

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his identity and social functions” (2014, p. 111). A signifying elements provide in
some sense the basis for new relations to time, rhythms, space, the body, colours,
and sexuality.
Explaining Guattari’s position, Lazzarato (2014, pp. 109–100) continues:
Through its colors or rhythms, through its images, through the chain of affects
it creates, images (symbolic semiotics) and intensities, movements, intervals,
temporalities, and velocities (a-signifying semiotics) reintroduce ambiguity,
uncertainty, and instability into denotation and signification.

LAZZARATO AND VIDEO PHILOSOPHY

In Signs and Machines (2014), Lazzarato acknowledges his indebtedness to Guattari

through posing the question: How can we escape relationships of domination
to develop practices of freedom and processes of individual and collective
subjectivation using such technologies? His answer in part is through the democracy
of images that video offers. Lazzarato contends that the video-camera is a ‘body’
plunged into the time-image, which in terms of ‘a pedagogy of cinema’ and in terms
of this chapter is precisely what Frei’s documentary in effect does (Figures 83–90).
It is a body that creates its own interval, as Lazarrato says (2007, p. 29) “registering
and crystallizing the perpetually varying flows of pure perception, and constructing
an ‘action’ more or less delayed in relation to the actions undergone”. Lazzarato’s
work can be thought of thinking video in terms of the passage from movement to
time-images. He thinks how video is a medium capable of presenting a pure duration
to us. Video, but also photography, cinema and digital technologies are ‘machines
to contract, to condense’ time. What the video camera does is direct the spectral eye
back to the photograph, back to the question of the punctum, to the sociology of the
real, and in our view, to the axioms of ‘a pedagogy of cinema’. The video camera
in exploring immediacy calls forth the need for interpretation, for the generation of
mental relations.
Video in this way demands a response to the horrors of millions of lives. Eyes are
compelled to revisit images and confront the horror. While cinema is an ‘industrial
temporal object’ according to Stiegler, it can grant, according to Lazzarato (2007;
2008), direct contact with the ‘microtemporal sensory flux’ of our experience. With
the invention of video the material image becomes dynamic. According to Lazzarato
(2008, pp. 121–123), video technology captures movement itself or rather the “pure
oscillations” of light. The video image is “a constantly reshaping profile painted
by an electronic paintbrush”, which takes its movement from “the oscillations of
matter”. The video image is oscillation itself, the flowing of time-matter. As such
“one ensconces oneself in the flow”, in duration or “real time”. According Hansen
in his essay ‘From Fixed to Fluid’ (Khalip & Mitchell, 2011, p. 90), video has the
possibility of direct contact with the sensory flux, between perception and the
dynamic materiality of the world in becoming. It captures the ‘time-matter’ from

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which images are made. It is perhaps this capturing of ‘time-matter’ that we find
in Frei’s documentary (Figures 83–90) as the video genre grants us access to pure
perception. Video is what Lazzarato calls a whatever flow, and in Nachtwey’s case
it is a whatever flow in the any-space-whatever of the war zone. What Lazzarato
is interested in is the deterritorialization of perception from human embodiment,
consciousness, memory or habit. What video does is to cut into the streaming of
flows, to produce an interval in which signifying and a-signifying flows form
relations. Importantly, video increases the delay between perception and reaction,
and this extends the power to act beyond habitual modes of being and thinking.
This is how video modulates or crystallizes time. Video acts as a medium capable of
presenting a pure duration to us. It apprehends movement because video functions
as a modulation of flows and presents the ‘time-matter’ from which the images are
made. For Lazzarato, video production demands becoming ensconced in the flow
(Lazzarato, 2008).

CAVE PHILOSOPHY AND THE TROGLODYTE WITHIN

From the perspective of ‘a pedagogy of cinema’, Stiegler’s observations regarding

the desire to get behind the camera in the cave of the cinema are thought-provoking
and can be represented cinematically. For example, Angela Christlieb and Stephen
Kijak’s documentary ‘Cinemania’ (2002) does this very well as it demonstrates
that cinema junkies are unable to make a world in their own making; they cannot
rid themselves of cinematic uniforms. Their image creativity has as it were been
overtaken by the culture industry – a view both Virilio and Adorno would endorse. The
refrains of the cinema become too much and dominate the sensorium. ‘Cinemania’
captures the sense of the desire of the film-lover to swim indefinitely in funk. In The
Organology of Dreams and Arche-Cinema, Stiegler (2013, p. 4) makes the forefully:
Now, we see that whereas the philosopher wants to leave the cave, the film-
lover, the amateur de cinéma, would like to get behind the camera or into the
screen: what the cinephile loves is the pharmakon and the pharmacological
condition itself insofar as it is also the condition of desire.
One of the arguments of ‘a pedagogy of cinema’ has been to refuse to say it is
necessary to flee from the cave – to reject cinema – to insist upon the light of logos.
Because of the very involution of the outside and the interior of cinema, it is along
this involutionary meniscus where the outside proper is fabricated. Put another way,
and in extremis, if there is no escape from the darkness as Haruki Murakami insists in
Norwegian Wood, then the problem at hand is of getting used to the pitch blackness.
The Japanese writer has one of his characters say: All you can do is sit tight until
your eyes get used to the dark. And confirming the pharmacological sense of cinema
which Stiegler explores, Wim Wenders describes film as a powerful medium, not
simply a flow of stories or narrative but rather ‘a language between images’. It is this
language – constructed between the lines, he adds, which the viewer has to work out

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in his own life. Here Guattari would concur. He makes the point that we suspend for
a moment our usual modes of communication when we visit the cinema. He writes:
“Upon leaving the movie house, one has to wake up and quietly put on one’s own
film reel” (Guattari & Lotringer, 2009, p. 76).
In this way, minor cinema is always already political in import and sets in train a
kind of molecular revolution or soft subversion of the socius. It promotes reflection
in its spectators – a non-hierarchical way of thinking about the ‘I’ that experiences
the object and society at large. At its best, it allows the spectator to work through
the semiotics of cinema to undo the integrity of the dominant subjectivity. On one
level this concerns the interpretation of signs but on another level it pertains to
the processual involution of cinema – (in)-between object and spectator – at the
molecular level – one becoming other for the other. It is a question of how the
experience of the film affects us. Of how we can break away from the image of
cinema as a simple, inexpensive drug, the poor man’s couch, and its profound effects
on the unconscious. Here ‘a pedagogy of cinema’, in aiming to formulate a cine-
truth of a reality perceivable only through the camera, joins with schizoanalysis to
ask for a relation to the outside, “a little real reality” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1983,
p. 334).
What the director is conveying is clearly of importance at the ideological level
but for ‘a pedagogy of cinema’ what is perhaps equally important is the movement
of images and the meaning making which the spectator engages in – viscerally and
corporeally (Kennedy, 2000). There is a possibility of the direct involvement of the
viewer in meaning-making. The viewer feels, senses, becomes an affected surface.
Cinema asks only that the viewer engineers connections with bodies and new
desires. Both Guattari and Stiegler share common ground on this point. Cinema is
pharmacological: it can fuel the machine of eros, to either liberate or repress desire.
Here ‘a pedagogy of cinema’ and schizoanalysis share a methodology which seeks
to critique – cartographically – cinema as a machine for capturing and enslaving
desire for consumption purposes. Yet, what differentiates schizoanalysis from ‘a
pedagogy of cinema’ is that the former takes as its starting point a schizoanalysis of
cinema, whereas the latter addresses the possibility of a schizoanalysis by cinema –
for example, through Lipsett’s collage art or Hitchcock’s mental relations.
Cinema, a new machine of industrial production, while often producing banal
models of subjectivity, is also as Guattari says a ‘giant processual technology’ that
both reflects and shapes the desires of its audiences. Through movement, time,
sound, colour, collage and montage, cinema engineers different experiences that can
be both liberating and repressive. Cinema can encourage molecular revolution or
can result in ‘the stultified reterritorialization of an Oedipal molarity’. How is it
created? How does it work on the audience? What is the difference between the
images of minor and major cinemas? The ‘a-signifying semiotics’ or broken signs
of minor cinema can be construed as a methodology to bypass the “semiotic control
of the dominant voice by appealing to registers that do not necessarily result in the
construction of fixed meaning or interpretation” (Elliot, 2012, p. 120). Cinema is

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then a mixed semiotic assemblage. The broken signs may disrupt the straightforward
conveyance of ideology, the domination of ‘semiologies of signification’ as they
demand that the audience generate meaning from the experience.
In the profound question posed by Guattari, how to construct a-signifying
messages which can escape dominant semiologies? one finds in cinema the possibility
of an a-signifying semiotics which may articulate new collective arrangements of
desire. It is to this question that this book has committed itself to answering. But
as an engaged pedagogy, ‘a pedagogy of cinema’ also throws down the gauntlet to
spectators to consider fresh approaches to daily life, desire. As such it stands by the
Guattarian question: [W]ill we allow them to produce their own journals, their own
literature, theatre, cinema, etc?
A cinema with this promise offers a vision of another world to come, a world
pregnant in the present, a virtual world, a world so very different that the one
dimensional affirmation of violence, rape and war culture which is the staple diet
of Hollywood cinema today. Guattari’s ecology of the virtual finds in cinema,
movement-images and time-images which can constitute the ‘seeds of the
production of subjectivity’. This is not the cinema of the passively representative
image, but of a flux generative of vectors of subjectivation. Cinema is a paradigm
or universe of reference suggesting new social and analytic practices. ‘A pedagogy
of cinema’ addresses this ecology of the virtual and considers it a tool in this
ecosophical project. This virtual, generalised ecology surveys the future along
ethical, aesthetic and analytic lines for the trace of unprecedented formations of
subjectivity on both ocular and emotive levels. Fabulatory, ecosophical cinema
functions to engineer “new systems of valorisation, a new taste for life, a new
gentleness between the sexes, generations, ethnic groups, races” (Guattari, 1995,
p. 92). ‘A pedagogy of cinema’ is thus by its very nature opposed to the way the
world is as it is, to the way education is as it is in many universities, schools and
institutes across the world. It rummages through strange contraptions, machines
of virtuality, for ‘blocks of mutant percepts and affects’, new sensations, in search
of what Guattari calls a new art of the possible, or what we may call, a new art of
the possible in education.

CONCLUSION

If cinema is a machine to gain fresh relations to the outside – then better a schizo
out for a walk, than a cinemagoer entombed and enchained in their own funk. In
the case of ‘War Photographer’ (Figures 83–90), Nachtwey’s video message and
sensations questions how kinetic images seared into the mind can draw our eyes
back to the horrors of the world. It methodically counters the general movement
towards passivity as it teaches the incapacitated viewer to read photography
again, to behold the aesthetics of violence, to respond. In this way video is also
pharmacological and thus a potential antidote to the present formation of ‘image
junky’ culture. While for Guattari, cinema has become “a gigantic machine to shape

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the social libido”, inherent in minor cinema is the potentiality to “upset our whole
existence” (Guattari & Lotringer 2008, p. 256). His argument is that a film could
have “unimaginable liberating effects” (Ibid.), effects, he adds, based on an entirely
different scale and register from those produced by books or marketed literary trends.
Why? Because Guattari explains that cinema intervenes directly in our relations with
the external world. The ‘minimal aperture’ of change or molecular revolution from
film is able to undermine and overhaul dominant representations. Speaking in 1982
with Rolnik, Guattari said molecular revolution was not a slogan or programme
as such but rather something “that I feel, that I live, in meetings, in institutions,
in affects, and also through some reflections” (Guattari & Rolnik, 2008, p. 9). For
Deleuze too, cinema is a way to pose problems, albeit in a different way. He writes
in his essay ‘The Brain is the Screen’ (Flaxman, 2000, p. 367):
I was able to write about cinema, not because of some right of consideration,
but because philosophical problems compelled me to look for answers in the
cinema, even at the risk that those answers would suggest other problems. All
work is inserted in a system of relays.
Both views are consistent with the premise and promise of ‘a pedagogy of cinema’.
In similar ways, Frei’s ‘War Photographer’ demonstrates this idea because video
documentary through thinking the relationship of duration and time, refrains from
giving the viewer a sense of pure representation of the real but rather disrupts direct
access. It establishes a power of the false. The point is not so much that the director
is aiming to represent the real but rather documentary explores notions of intensity
through a kind of a-signifying semiotics, through which the viewer is freed from
controlling significations and thus able to participate in the play and creation of
meaning. This obviously has a political aspect regarding minor cinema because it is
the experimental, minor constructions of the cinematic image which may escape the
affirmation of the status quo.
Underlying the arguments of this chapter is the question of how cinema may
redirect attention to the plight of others. Frei’s ‘War Photographer’ serves as a
metaphor for this task and thus crystallizes the spirit and purpose of ‘a pedagogy
of cinema’. While the task ahead for ‘a pedagogy of cinema’ can be compared with
the task of schizoanalysis, which is to say, to move beyond the psychoanalysis of
cinema, it also has to deter spectators from giving themselves over to ‘industrial
temporal objects’ and to search out new universes of reference free from dominant
signification. In cinema, under the Guattarian-Stieglerian-Lazzarato construct
presented here, the spectator is a semiotician whose task is to make sense of the
immense flow of images which assault the eyes, to create counter sense to the way
of the world. To get behind the camera in these dark times is to learn to see what
Natchwey sees, to understand the need to bear witness but perhaps more significantly
to decode dominant signification and in so doing to grasp the need to respond to
images. This is to think in the cave and to resist entrapment by the deadly hypnotic
flow of images (cf. Chapters 2 & 6).

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REFERENCES
Adorno, T. W. (1978). Minima moralia: Reflections from damaged life (E.F.N. Jephcott, Trans.). London:
Verso.
Ambrose, D. (2013). Film, nihilism and the restoration of belief. Lanham, MD: John Hunt Publishing.
Augé, M. (1995). Non-places: Introduction to an anthropology of supermodernity. London: Verso.
Beller, J. (2006). Paying attention. Cabinet 24. Retrieved March 23, 2012 from http://www.
cabinetmagazine.org/issues/24/beller.php
Carlin, M., & Wallin, J. J. (Eds.). (2014). Deleuze & Guattari, politics and education: For a people yet-
to-come. London: Bloomsbury.
Cousins, M. (2004). The story of film. New York, NY: Thunder’s Mouth Press.
Deleuze, G. (1989). Cinema 2: The time image. London: Athlone.
Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1983). Anti-oedipus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. Minneapolis, MN:
University of Minnesota Press.
Depardon, R., & Virilio, P. (2008). Manhattan out. Göttingen: Steidl.
Elliott, P. (2012). Guattari reframed: Interpreting key thinkers for the arts. London: I.B. Tauris.
Flaxman, G. (2000). The brain is the screen: Deleuze and the philosophy of cinema. Minneapolis, MN:
University of Minnesota Press.
Guattari, F. (1995). Chaosmosis: An ethico-aesthetic paradigm. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University
Press.
Guattari, F., & Lotringer, S. (2008). Chaosophy: Texts and interviews 1972–1977. Los Angeles, CA:
Semiotext(e).
Guattari, F., & Lotringer, S. (2009). Soft subversions: Texts and interviews 1977–1985. Los Angeles, CA:
Semiotext(e).
Guattari, F., & Rolnik, S. (2008). Molecular revolution in Brazil. Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e).
Kennedy, B. (2000). Deleuze and cinema: The aesthetics of sensation. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
Press.
Khalip, J., & Mitchell, R. (2011). Releasing the image: From literature to new media. Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press.
Lacy, M. (2014). Security, technology and global politics: Thinking with virilio. London: Routledge.
Lazzarato, M. (1996). Videofilosofia: La percezione del tempo nel postfordismo. Roma: Manifestolibri.
Lazzarato, M. (2007, November 1). Machines to crystallize time: Bergson. Theory, Culture & Society,
24(6), 93–122.
Lazzarato, M. (2008, January 1). Video, flows and real time. Art and the Moving Image, 283–291.
Lazzarato, M. (2014). Signs and machines: Capitalism and the production of subjectivity (J. D. Jordan,
Trans.). Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e).
McCormick, R. W., & Guenther-Pal, A. (2004). German essays on film. New York, NY: Continuum.
Rudkin, D. (2014). The lovesong of Alfred J Hitchcock. London: Oberon Books.
Stiegler, B. (2011). Technics and time, 3: Cinematic time and the question of malaise (S. F. Barker,
Trans.). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Stiegler, B. (2013, June). The organology of dreams and arche-cinema. Screening the Past, (346), 1–24.
Virilio, P. (1989). War and cinema: The logistics of perception. London: Verso.
Virilio, P. (1994). The vision machine. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
Virilio, P. (2001). Virilio live: Selected interviews (J. Armitage, Ed.). London: Sage.
Virilio, P., & Lotringer, S. (1983). Pure war. New York, NY: Semiotext(e).
Virilio, P., Burk, D., & Amelunxen, H. (2009). Grey ecology. New York, NY: Atropos.

FILMOGRAPHY
Christlieb, A., & Kuak, S. (2003). Cinemania [film]. Berlin: Ufer TV production.
Clarke, A. (1989). Elephant [film]. Northern Ireland: BBC films.
Cousins, M. (2012). The story of film: An odyssey [film]. NY: Music Box Films.
Frei, C., & Nachtwey, J. (2003). War photographer [film]. Switzerland: Frei Films.

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Hitchcock, A. (1954). Rear window [film]. Los Angeles, CA: Paramount pictures.
Kieślowski, K. (1993). Three colours blue [film]. Paris: 3 Cinemas.
McQueen, S. (2012). Shame [film]. London: See-Saw & Film4.
Singer, A., Angel, S., Ratner, B., Singer, L., Hitchcock, A., & Bernstein, S., (2015). Night will fall [film].
London: British Film Institute.
Van Sant, G. (2003). Elephant [film]. New York, NY: HBO Films.

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CONCLUSION TO ‘A PEDAGOGY OF CINEMA’

INTRODUCTION

What are we left with in terms of the analysis of ‘a pedagogy of cinema’, and where
does this book point to? This chapter is a culminating act, and provides educational
insight into what thinking through the images that have been congealed by a concept
of cinema can tell us. Furthermore, this section, that makes the case for movement in
visual thought in and through a confluence of images, leads to the deepest question
to be considered by ‘a pedagogy of cinema’, which is: What does image analysis
reveal about value? The question of value acts as a pivotal and final aspect of the
connection between the inside and outside of cinema-thinking that strafes this book
through ‘a pedagogy of cinema’. The borderline between cinema as an internal
thought creator, and the reality of external global image culture, which is continually
invading and altering subjectivity according to the changing dictates of capitalism
or IWC, shall be explored through this section, in term of the values and consequent
non-values that the forces of capitalism connected to image afford (read as the
nihilism and value exploration of ‘now’). Such a dynamic leads to an examination of
two key concepts for this book and education, and that have been explored through
images, film and cinema: the non-place and any-space-whatever.
The connection between the non-place and the any-space-whatever is
constructed in this writing as a mode of learning and a vital educational focus, in
order to demonstrate how ‘a pedagogy of cinema’ emerges through the potentially
transformational, affective and reciprocating image dimensions that cinema conveys,
and as it spirals off into new thought. The aim of this section is to demonstrate how
‘a pedagogy of cinema’ is the search for ‘escape routes’ – or ‘shocks to thought’,
away from any collusion with Integrated World Capitalism (IWC), and significantly
diverting the spectator and audience from complicity with the loss of all values other
than those of market-driven commercialism (i.e. surplus value or profit).

NON-PLACE AND ANY-SPACE-WHATEVER

In order to contextualise this final section, one must firstly understand the nature of
the ‘non-places’ (non-lieux) and ‘any-space-whatever’ (espace quelconque) as they
relate to value. According to Augé (1995), a plethora of non-places – airports, coffee
shops and shopping malls – have sprung up since World War II due to globalisation,
or as a consequence of political collapse and the deterioration in civil society.

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Non-places are those sites without cultural context, which exist outside of location
or history. As sites of temporariness and transience, they are devoid of social
relation, shared history or signs of/for collective identification. For Augé (1995),
a place is historical and relational, and carries personal significance for the people
experiencing it. “A place has a history and its inhabitants know the past. Places
focus on the static, whereas non-places focus on the temporary” (Augé, 1995, p.
101). A non-place, devoid of significance, delocalises the participant. People are
disconnected and empathy is absent (Augé, 1995, pp. 77–78). Through non-places,
people pass. Communication is absent. People are self-absorbed and filled with
nothingness. Non-places are growing as sites of education.
As non-places are sites of anonymity for the modern traveller, the archetype of
non-place is the voyager’s space (Augé, 1995, p. 86). This sense is parallel to what
Arjun Appadurai has designated as the ethnoscape, that is to say, the anonymous
spaces of globalisation or planetary capitalism. As an example of the non-place, and
through thinking the otherness of the other, Levinas finds in the café a site of horror
and inhumanity. Levinas (1990, p. 111) writes: “The cafe holds open house, at street
level. It is a place of casual social intercourse, without mutual responsibility. One
goes in without needing to. One sits down without being tired. One drinks without
being thirsty. All because one does not want to stay in one’s room. You know that all
the evils in the world occur as a result of our incapacity to stay alone in our room.
The cafe is not a place. It is a non-place for a non-society, for a society without
solidarity, without tomorrow, without commitment, without common interests, a
game society”.
In the preface to the English edition of Cinema 2: the time-image, Deleuze notes
that in post-war societies situations abound in which ‘we’ no longer know how to
react. Indescribable spaces abound – dilapidated neighbourhoods, rundown schools,
unused libraries, playing fields left unattended. These are designated as ‘any-space-
whatever’, that is to say spatio-temporal coordinates, detached from an action-
oriented sensory-motor continuum, and described as “deserted but inhabited, disused
warehouses, waste ground, cities in the course of demolition or reconstruction”
(Deleuze, 1983, p. 120). Any-space-whatevers can be found in spaces under
reconstruction or demolished towns, waste grounds and shanty towns. As has been
mentioned in Chapters 5, 6, & 7, in the cinema of the any-space-whatever, Deleuze
finds “a new race of mutants ‘stirring’. No longer acting, but seers of a life that
whizzes by. They are these mutants inhabiting non-places which they struggle to
describe” (Deleuze, 1983, p. 32). Theirs is a boredom told with blocks of movement
and duration. The stasis, paralysis, fear and trauma that the mutants experience is
conveyed to the spectator as a sensory event. The boredom, endless waiting – “non-
human affects” (1983, p. 110) – expressions of modern affects of “fear, detachment,
freshness, extreme speed, and interminable waiting” (Deleuze, 1983, p. 124) – is
passed to the viewer who affectively bears witness to the unfolding of the time-
image. The any-space-whatever is thus both important for noting the shift from
movement to time-image cinemas in the post-war era as well as for highlighting the

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gradual process of the ‘flattening’ of capitalist subjectivity. This flattening has been
questioned through images and ‘a pedagogy of cinema’

THE CHAPTERS OF THIS BOOK AND THE VALUE OF ‘A PEDAGOGY OF CINEMA’

‘A pedagogy’ of cinema is a significant counter to the nihilism and desperate ennui

of contemporary life as represented by: the non-place and any-space-whatever. This
is because the thinking practice that working through the images and sections of this
book represents, looks to create and reverse values, and designates a turning away
from business as usual with respect to the collapse into nothingness of Integrated
World Capitalism or IWC. To demonstrate what this means, the values from each
chapter will be explored in relation to the images presented, the non-place and any-
space-whatever, and the connection between the cinema-thinking of this book and
value will be made explicit:
1. The fundamental of horror and learning: In chapter two, a connection between
horror and learning was systematically drawn out. This process is an uneven,
broken, subterranean one, that underlies current educational practice as an
ultimate mode of questioning and the probing of why we are engaged in any
particular educational activity. For example, children are made to compete at
every level through testing, grading and the comparative analysis of their scores.
Learning becomes a self-perpetuating feedback process around numbers, the
question of what is being learnt or why any particular piece of knowledge is
being learnt, is dissolved beneath the need for an increase in performance and
results. At university, this process if augmented and reinforced, as students are
banded and divided by the expected occupation incomes that they will attain,
and the reality of the student debt that accompanies degree level qualifications.
‘A pedagogy of cinema’ fundamentally questions this horror and affect that sits
below current learning practice. The films and images selected were presented
on the premise that capitalist modes of learning were questioned, and that a
transformative subjective experience is possible away from horror and learning,
and through the viewing and cinema-thinking that accompanies the images from
the films in this section.
The images from the film ‘Suspiria’ present a non-place that entraps the victim
and engulfs desires through sensory overload. The non-place is constituted by
the corridors and rooms of the dance academy, where the murders take place and
the inhabitants of the academy possess strange powers and forces, such as the
control of nature. ‘Suspiria’ is a visual and audio cacophony, which is always
trying to break-through our perceptions as viewers, and leads us to experience
the entrapment of the heroine close up. As such, the cinema-thinking that these
images induce show us how our desire can constitute a mode of entrapment. The
heroine genuinely wants to learn, and that desire acts as a mode of blindness
and the suspension of her ability to read the situation in terms of the internal

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labyrinth which is represents. The images of ‘Suspiria’ ask us to think again, and
to question the ways in which our sensual consciousness can become locked in
the impossible dreams of the non-place.
In the images from the film work of David Cronenberg, a mode of body horror
appears, that challenges us to recognise and understand the bodily transformations
that the present state of horror and learning afford. In previous ages, work in
factories would have had a profound effect on the body, as the agent had to
endure the harsh, exploitative and repetitive physical conditions of working in
factories. More recently, this bodily transformation has transmuted to the world of
cybernetics and screen culture that dominate the agent and catch the attentions of
learners from an increasingly young age through education systems. The images
from Cronenberg, sieved through ‘a pedagogy of cinema’, make us think about
how we are increasingly mutated and colluded with machines in every aspect of
our lives. The non-places and any-space-whatevers in his films, signal the bleak
and weird body changes that are happening to us, and show how values change in
and because of these environments.
Lastly, this section addressed images from the recent, ‘Under the Skin’. These
images show us the horror of sexual encounters with aliens and how disguise and
camouflage are two prominent features in contemporary sexuality. The non-place
and any-space-whatevers of this film act as backdrops to the ways in which we
are seduced and absorbed by and through our needs for sex, desire and image.
‘A pedagogy of cinema’ in this context reveals the deep seated processes that
underpin horror and learning, as what we want and what we get are questioned
and reversed by peeling away at the skin of our desire.
2. Decoding through cinema: the case of Arthur Lipsett: In its examination of
experimental collage films of Arthur Lipsett, chapter three concerns itself with
making a connection between ‘a pedagogy of cinema’ and a schizoanalysis by
cinematic means. It is principally focused on the question of breakthrough in
cinema and how this can be transposed – as a breakthrough in thinking as such –
to education settings in general. How by thinking with and through cinema, can
the world be thought other than it is? The chapter is therefore a celebration of
processual schizophrenia as found in Lipsett’s art. Through Lipsett’s dissonant
collages of sound and image, the viewer is able to think or even create a world
beyond the confines of common sense and the status quo. The chapter underscores
the belief that ‘a pedagogy of cinema’ by cinema – by thinking through percepts
instead of concepts – is a mode of thought in itself, potentially a form of liberatory
pedagogy when expressed in and through images. A core idea is the view that
Lipsett’s work not only discloses the madness and schizoid nature of American
society in the 1950s and 1960s, but also with respect to contemporary media
culture, through the invention of ‘The Force’, Lipsett not only effectively
schizzed the film aesthetic but also accelerated the schizophrenic-like behavior
of cinemagoers. Not only this, but the chapter also shows the effects on youth
if schizoid film becomes part of mainstream curriculum, for example, in how

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Lipett’s schizoanalysis of society has been used as classroom material in Canada.

Bradley and Dancsok affirm the way in which Lipsett’s art of narrative rupture
and dissonant configuration of sound and image has the potential to free the
viewer from a passive relation to the image, which is to say, how it allows for
a more playful interpretation. It was shown that this style of collage genre and
scrambled meaning of sound and image is consistent with ‘a pedagogy of cinema’
because in its intensely affective mode, it has the potential to liberate viewers
from complacent, docile positions and relations. In ‘21–87’, for example, in
his universe of schizophrenia, Lipsett looks for reasons to believe in the world.
This is best understood when one considers the vast array of images and sounds
in the short piece. Accompanied by the sound of an electric shock treatment
machine, images move from skull to trapeze artist to cremated cadaver. There is a
passage from robot arms to man and bird and child’s face, brought together with
a recording of a high mass and a black gospel choir. Then to sunlight, to ape and
pensive face. Onwards to mannequin and hat and women and shopping and street
urchin, then to old and youth. “We tried occupational therapy”. This comment
is juxtaposed with politicians, a cigarette advertisement, dancing youth and
the sound of heavy breathing, of someone in an orgasmic state. Following this,
images of a gun, sleeping in the sun, flying birds and a man in wonderment. Next
to captured bird and human friendship to flying bird and child’s face, passing
from ape and passing faces to screams of joy, dancing and a fashion catwalk to
immolation, interspersed with audio from a high mass, and mixed with an image
of astronaut and distorted mirror. Finishing with rapture, a circus elephant, a horse
race, watchful and passing eyes and cars, to a child’s hopeful face, a trapeze artist
and distorted lights – “Repeat. God”. All of the above expressed in collage, with
the meaning impossible to decode through words alone.
Amidst this confusion of images, and in terms of ‘a pedagogy of cinema’,
what is potentially liberatory is the way in which his Lipsett’s cinematic style
confounds the codes and sets flows in motion and renders the spectator no
longer a passive ‘seer’ but rather a co-creator of meaning and thought. Lipsett’s
art is therefore a precise instrument demonstrating how to think the any-space-
whatever through and by images. And so Lipsett’s artistic genius, his joyful art
of intensively affective montage, in this chapter is viewed as a gift of a ‘true
cinema’, in the sense that it gives the spectator renewed belief ‘in the world’.
Yet as such a gift hallucinates a universal collage and a new earth; ‘a pedagogy
of cinema’ warns that such a cinema is always at risk of a confrontation with
madness (Deleuze, 1989, p. 201), and it is this caveat which is acknowledged in
this book with respect to Lipsett’s art.
3. Bohemianism and pedagogy [in and out] of the cinema: Chapter four concentrates
on images that portray bohemianism. Bohemianism in this context is not a
superficial or decadent choice of values and the simple rejection of the servitude
of work values, but shows how a deliberate schema for value choice can result in
the subjectivity of the agent stepping outside of the value system of mainstream

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global capitalism, rather than being destroyed by it. In contrast to the desperate
and alienated figures of the non-place and any-space-whatever that have been
created by capitalist exploitation, the portrayal of bohemianism in the writing of
this section, is a celebration of what alterative and non-orthodox, non-capitalist
choices can mean in images and through cinema.
The first set of images in this section come from the film, ‘Performance’. In
this film a gangster, who runs away from certain death in ‘gangsterland’, end
up in a bohemian hideaway. In the hideaway, the gangster becomes a bohemian
and, the bohemian ringleader turns into a gangster. The identity change of the
two characters is accompanied by an array of cinematic techniques that embed
the change in complexity and non-linear time. One way to read the images is
through a schizophrenic lens, i.e. the two characters merge in mind and through
hallucination, and there is an indulgence of cinematic person intermingling. ‘A
pedagogy of cinema’ works in this instance to reveal the ways in which identity
transformation and lifestyle choices are accompanied by complex processes that
follow these changes, and are not as a result of straightforward rational choice,
but show the functioning of will on every level. In contrast, characters that
pass through and come from non-places and any-space-whatevers are indelibly
marked by these experiences, making identity change and conscious lifestyle
choice increasingly unattainable.
In the next section of chapter four, images from the work of Peter Greenaway
were analysed. Bohemianism is dispersed throughout Greenaway’s oeuvre,
and does not appear in a definite hideaway, as in ‘Performance’. Bohemianism
defines a certain set of values in the films analysed, values that coincide with an
interest in and co-existence with nature, in unsettling encounters with death, and
with a collusion in/by art. The images of the films of Peter Greenaway present a
mode of endeavour that is tinged with madness, power games, magic, undeniable
compulsion and sexuality. In ‘Z00’, two scientific twins deal with the deaths of
their spouses by becoming obsessed by the processes of decay, in ‘Drowning
by Numbers’, three characters called Cissie Colpitts drown their husbands and
escape prosecution through the love of the coroner, whose son marks every
death with a number, fireworks and paint. Greenaway raises the level of film
making to include unconscious, pre-modern and pantheistic elements, that define
non-capitalist value systems and ways of doing things that defy present day
convention. ‘A pedagogy of cinema’ works here through understanding these
regimes of signs, and in realising that profound and non-human forces can be
portrayed through cinema, reversing the tendency through film art towards non-
places and any-space-whatever.
In the third section, images from ‘The Devils’ were analysed. This film is set
in seventeenth century France, and therefore comes from a time previous to the
development of non-places and any-space-whatever. The time period is marked
by a definite value system, with the King at the top of the social pyramid, and
everyone else clamouring for power and attention in a definite social position

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that was defined in advance in relation to the King. The images in this film of the
King are concentrated bohemianism, he exudes the sense that he can do whatever
he wants. In contrast, images of the mass hysteria that broke out in the city of
Loudun, show how whole crowds may became possessed with a religious and
sexual madness, and have very little control over their actions. The manipulated
puppets in the break out of mass hysteria portrayed by ‘The Devils’ parallel the
ways in which pervading non-places and any-space-whatevers create zombie
behaviours, mindless action and the loss of control. Even though, ‘The Devils’ is
set in a historical time period, the analysis that ‘a pedagogy of cinema’ affords,
gives the viewer and a thinking platform to consider how this happening is still
relevant today.
4. Semio-materialism and the master of relations: The title of chapter five ‘Semio-
materialism and the master of relations’ emphasises that ‘a pedagogy of cinema’
is principally concerned with the abstract movement of images and the relation
to affect rather than a psychoanalytic account of what cinema is and does – for
example, pertaining only to “original sin, a guilty subject or a God demanding
retribution” (Deleuze, 2006, p. 202). This assertion comes as Alfred Hitchcock’s
neuroses and pathologies have been recently scrutinised in cinema and television
(Jones et al., 2015), and in theatre (Rudkin, 2014). What this chapter does is
recognize the perceptiveness of psychoanalytic accounts, for example, as found in
Slavoj Žižek’s books and documentaries on cinema, but importantly looks beyond
this mode of analysis to address Hitchcock’s enduring vision and technique. The
chapter focuses on the flow of images and the construction of meaning which
selected Hitchocock films manifest and their educational importance.
The author of this chapter examines Hitchcock’s work through the theoretical
prism of ‘a pedagogy of cinema’ to depict Hitchcock as a clairvoyant of sorts, a
director who is essential for understanding the movement of cinematic concepts,
affect and the relations of images. Moreover, the chapter confirms that Hitchcock
helps to understand an array of Deleuzian cinema concepts such as the crisis of
the movement-image, the emergence of the time-image and the cinema of the
any-space-whatever. This chapter undertakes its task by accentuating a semiotics
of images and the intellectual inheritance from Peirce. Furthermore, ‘a pedagogy
of cinema’ demonstrates the delinking of perception and action and the paralysis
of characters in post-war cinema through a third eye – a system or game of mental
relations, a semiology, a pure cinema of thought. Similar to Lipsett’s work in
chapter three, Hitchcock’s cinema implicates the spectator in meaning-making,
which is to say, his art demands an appreciation of the rendering of the characters
as spectators themselves. This is vital for understanding how in the milieu of
the any-space-whatever, characters are disorientated, situated in a catastrophic
environment they no longer understand ethically.
The chapter highlights the philosophical import of Hitchcock via Gilles
Deleuze’s Cinema books, with attention given to the effective closure of classical
cinema in Hitchcock and the unfolding of the time-image. Using images from

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‘Blackmail’, ‘Psycho’ and ‘Suspicion’, through the emergence of an image of

the virtual through C. S Peirce’s semiotics, the chapter highlights the potential
applicability of the methodology to other films. In the catalogue of Hitchcock’s
cinematic images, we find that ‘pure cinema’ conveys not only acts or emotions
but also the mental-image, the mechanisms of thought. In terms of the any-
space whatever, in Hitchcock’s ‘Rear Window’ (1954) the camera pans around
the courtyard and searches the apartment of the immobilized Jeff Jefferies
as he sleeps. Jeffries is reduced to purely optical situations. For Deleuze, it is
the camera, and not the dialogue in Hitchcock’s films, which explains ‘why’
(Deleuze, 1986, p. 201). This is important for ‘a pedagogy of cinema’, because
it explains a field of affects and percepts, how camera-consciousness articulates
molecular and affective movement. It shows how for Deleuze, Hitchcock in effect
perfected the action-image and in doing so destabilized the sensory-motor schema
of classical cinema. ‘Rear Window’ reveals that the protagonist of modern cinema
is the wandering ‘seer’, a voyeur, and not the agent. It is the ‘seer’ who exhausts
the conventional modes of perception and as a consequence perceives something
intolerable, unbearable and overwhelming. As a harbinger of modern cinema,
Hitchcock engineers percepts and affects, but does not leave classical cinema
behind. The reason for this is because Deleuze situates Hitchcock as contributing
to classical cinema (in terms of perceptive, affective, and active montage), and
also to the modern cinema of time, despite privileging movement. In modern
cinema, time is decoupled from movement in some sense. Hitchcock is ‘the last
of the classic directors’. Given his relation to affect and sensation, the author of
this chapter maintains that Hitchcock is necessary for understanding ‘a pedagogy
of cinema’ and the cinema-thinking to come.
5. Congruent theories of time, image and education: Chapter six shows how
individual theories of time, image and education can be built up from the images
of specific films. This shows one of the primary values of ‘a pedagogy of cinema’,
that whole conceptual frameworks can be built from the bottom up, according to
images in particular film. Four films were chosen for this section that demonstrate
important anti-theses to the domination of contemporary image culture, and
therefore construct divergent value systems to globalisation:
i) ‘Brazil’: the images of this film present a dystopia. Technology is
cumbersome and oppressive, bureaucratic systems endlessly gather
information on their citizens, who live in a state of oppression and fear. The
environment of the film is a deliberately constructed, surreal non-place and
any-space-whatever, which corresponds to the imagery and atmosphere
of post-World War II Britain. The construction of the images in ‘Brazil’
present a time loop, that is characteristic of how time forms eddies and
curves in the imagination as an escape from the workings of an endless,
monotonous present capitalist time. ‘A pedagogy of cinema’ works here
in the understanding of how values are construed and reconstrued in the

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context of these time loops, that can deepen and augment the control tactics
of the present through the construction/enhancement of the fear of the past.
The past can come back to haunt us (the ways things were), as a conscious
ploy to fill up the evacuation, meaninglessness and emptiness of the present
moment.
ii) ‘Memento’: images of this film make one question the time dimension
of images as the main character suffers from memory loss. The film is
constructed in non-places and any-space-whatevers, and they present
the reality of living in and through these environments. The bleakness,
futility and struggle of the characters is augmented, as it is seen through
the perspective of the main character with memory loss, and whose only
recourse to try and understand what is happening to him is to have body
tattoos and by writing messages on polaroid pictures. The audiences’
confusion is strengthened because we do not know if the messages that
he has written to himself are true, or have been manipulated by the other
characters. ‘A pedagogy of cinema’ works in this film by building up a value
system based on true memory and in realising how this process can lead to
the freedom to think and to create concepts that help in understanding time,
sequence, life and relationships.
iii) ‘Snowpiercer’: after a global environmental disaster, the Earth has frozen
and the remaining human species travel around the globe in a train driven
by a perpetual motion engine. The people on the train have been segregated
into a strict class system, with the majority of the occupants at the back of
the train, and who are kept in squalor. The film follows a revolution in the
train, and involves unravelling a mystical allegiance to ‘the engine’ through
violence and breaking down the codes which separate the carriages. The
dictates of the engine are designed upon controlling the homeostatic
conditions of the train, including planned euthanasia if the population
becomes too high. ‘A pedagogy of cinema’ involves transferring the image
constructions from this film and thinking through the possibilities of
revolution in any closed or ideologically controlled situation, for example,
as is often presented by mainstream educational provision.
iv) ‘Melancholia’: presents an end-of-the-world scenario. A planet hurtles
towards the Earth. At the same time, a family deals with the depression and
erratic behaviour of the main character, Justine. Under these conditions,
values are questioned and thoughts are turned to the most important things
in life. The film includes extraordinary images of planets and the changes
to the environment that the extra planet creates, as well as montage and
images constructed to resemble famous paintings from history. ‘A pedagogy
of cinema’ attends to the underlying affect of the images in ‘Melancholia’,
and shows how it is transformative with respect to superficiality, and
provocative of deep seated value thoughts. The ultimate message of the

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analysis of ‘Melancholia’, and ‘a pedagogy of cinema’ is that philosophy is

possible through the analysis of images, and not as an imposition on film.
6. Cinema of a ‘New Real’: Learning from within images: As we saw in chapter
five, Hitchcock plays a pivotal role in ‘a pedagogy of cinema’ of the any-space-
whatever and in Deleuze’s cine-semiology of images as a whole. Extending these
reflections, chapter seven examines the any-space-whatever in relation to video
and documentary cinema in what is described as the any-warzones-whatever. In
so doing it applies the theoretical basis of chapter five to a new cinematic genre, to
demonstrate the breadth of applicability of ‘a pedagogy of cinema’. The chapter
claims the time-image is a possible pedagogical tool for disclosing non-dominant,
non-ideological ways of thinking. To shows this, it traces the connections
Hitchcock’s ‘Rear Window’ and Hitchcock’s involvement in documenting Nazi
atrocities at the end of the Second World War, before comparing the role of the
photographer in Christian Frei’s ‘War Photographer’.
Furthermore, the chapter addresses the genre of documentary film-making
and its interface with video technology to consider how pre-personal affect is
engineered from and within video sensation. Chapter seven thinks ‘a pedagogy
of cinema’ in terms of a pharmacology of cinema and ‘industrial temporal object’
(Stiegler), the’derealization of violence’ (Virilio), Guattari (plastic universes of
reference), and importantly, its relationship with the outside/inside of cinema.
The chapter goes some way to answering the following questions: can cinema as
an affect engineering machine also be a site of the production of knowledge?; can
it act as the negation of anti-production?; can the image be a site of production qua
mode of semiotics/regimes of signs?; and can cinema become a site of struggle
for the battle of intelligence?
By the addressing the grainy, violent images of post-war Kosovo, homeless
families in Jakarta, Indonesia, civil unrest in Ramallah, the West Bank, and the
toil of workers in a sulphur mine at Ijen in East Java, Indonesia, as shown in Frei’s
‘War Photographer’, ‘a pedagogy of cinema’ suggests their format and genre in
some ways connects with a different form of temporality and duration. It is argued
that Frei’s documentary of the professional photographer James Nachtwey, serves
as a metaphor for ‘a pedagogy of cinema’ in the way it explores the breakdown
and breakthrough of professional journalism. This metaphor ties in with a central
thesis of the chapter which is that it is the video genre rather than photography
which has become the medium to explore the any-space-whatevers of the modern
world because of the way video captures the flux of consciousness in atemporal
spaces of collapse and destruction. Put another way, video is that which ruptures
the real and gives us access to a virtual sense or image.
To make sense of how the video camera and video documentary can be thought
about through the concepts of a-signifying semiotics, a-signifying rupture, and
the time-image, ‘a pedagogy of cinema’ asks how video can be used to think war

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 Conclusion to ‘A Pedagogy of Cinema’

aesthetics and the representation of suffering in refugee camps, detention centres,

slums and so on. It is shown that through documentary, what James Nachtwey’s
art of atrocity grants, is a certain presencing to, and a certain participation by the
viewer. In filming a series of tragic, disturbing events and scenes from a small
video attached to his SLR camera, we discern the guidance of the camera, a
retraining of the eye, and a challenge to what we have become accustomed to by
way of the first person shooter angle. The conclusion of the chapter makes the
case that ‘a pedagogy of cinema’ can be read as working to forge relations with
the outside – to contest the barbaric images which flood our screens as so many
weapons of war and communication. Frei’s documentary explores this outside
through a violence of the aesthetic as a form of immanent materialism. Whereas,
Hitchcock’s camera is petrified in ‘Night Will Fall’, and Jeffries, the photographer
in ‘Rear Window’ is wheelchair-bound and immobile, rendered ‘a seer’, Natchwey
and the video aesthetic of Frei’s documentary operates in a different paradigm,
exploring the world in terms of non-human sensations and percepts, conveying
this experience through intensities. ‘War Photographer’ suggests a means to
analyse the time-image and the proliferation of any-space-whatevers. It is this
promise and pharmacology of ‘a pedagogy of cinema’ which, when read through
Lazzarato’s video philosophy, shows the widespread applicability of ‘a pedagogy
of cinema’ to education in general.

CONCLUSION

In this book, the extrapolated movement and passage of images taken from specific
films and documentaries can be understood as a form of ‘cinema-thinking’. This
new mode of thought is educational in a fundamental philosophical sense. The
value of ‘a pedagogy of cinema’ is then a means and mode of analysis for education,
which can be taken up and used by educators, and incorporated at all levels of
educational practice. The challenge for educators is to follow Deleuze, and the
other theorists mentioned in this book, and to extend the analysis of film from
its current state as a restrictive mode of critical pedagogy into a more expansive
and creative enterprise. This is not a trivial task, and ultimately points to the ways
in which cinema can break down and break through the cliché, repetition and
monotony that the current state of engulfing image culture tends towards. Just as
we sit on a new precipice of image invasiveness at every level of our lives through
cybernetic means, and through the ubiquity of commercialisation that assaults us;
‘a pedagogy of cinema’ presents a chink in the immaculate armour of IWC. Image
as such can be undone through cinema, but not straightforwardly, and not without
a fightback from the machinic forces controlling capital flows and power in the
world. To think against image is to think how cinema can, will, and does change the
world in an educational sense …

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Chapter 8

REFERENCES

Augé, M. (1995). Non-places: Introduction to an anthropology of supermodernity. London: Verso.

Deleuze, G. (1983). Cinema 1: The movement image. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Deleuze, G. (2005). Cinema 2: The time-image (H. Tomlinson & R. Galeat Trans.). London: Continuum
International Publishing Group.
Jones, K., Toubiana, S., Scorsese, M., Desplechin, A., Fincher, D., Linklater, R., Anderson, W., &
Schrader, P. (2015). Hitchcock, Truffaut. Issy les Moulineaux: ARTE éd.
Levinas, E. (1990). Judaism and revolution: Nine talmudic readings (A. Aronowicz, Trans.). Bloomington,
IN: Indiana University Press.
Rudkin, D. (2014). The lovesong of Alfred J Hitchcock. London: Oberon Books.

156
 INDEX

1984, 100, 103, 104 ‘Blackmail’, 80, 82, 85, 87, 152
‘2012’, 11, 17 Blue man, 31
‘21–87’, 38–52, 149 Bogue, R., 56, 88
Bohemianism, 12, 43, 59–76, 149, 150
A Bradley, J.N., 94, 149
Abstract Machines, 6, 62, 66, 69, 70 ‘Brazil’, 13, 99–104, 152
Accelerationism, 102–104 Bruegels, 114
Adorno, T. W., 7, 8, 43, 96, 124, 128, Buchanan, I., 5, 10, 35, 36
134, 138 Burroughs, W., 24
Aesthetics, 26, 33, 95, 121, 122, 126, Butler, J., 65
128, 134, 135, 140, 155 BwO (Body-without-Organs), 5, 6,
Affect, 5–17, 20–35, 48–61, 83–96, 24, 48
102, 113–123
Affective literacy, 116 C
Alba Bewick, 70 Cahiers du cinéma, 26
Ambrose, D., 44, 124 Call of Duty, 130–132
Anti-Oedipus, 2, 47 Cammell, D., & Roeg, N., 12, 59–65
Anthropocene, 113, 114 Canada, 42, 149
Any-space-whatever(s), 65, 80, Capital, 1–6, 22, 29, 59, 74, 99, 101,
94, 121–126, 128, 135, 138, 105, 112, 155
145–155 Capitalism, 1–3, 10, 22, 28, 35, 52, 56,
Artaud, A., 44 65, 100–104, 107, 108, 113–117,
‘A trip down memory lane’, 41, 43, 46 145–148
Argento, D., 11, 19, 20 Cardinal Richelieu, 72
Aristocratism, 64, 65 Carpenter, T.H., & Faraone, C.A., 67
Assemblage, 6, 9, 17, 26, 44, 47, 62, Chakra, 45, 51
110, 124, 136, 140 Chas, 59–66
Atmospheric geo-engineering, 109 Chaosmosis, 33, 52, 140
Augé, M., 108, 126, 145, 146 Chronosigns, 31
‘Cinemania’, 138
B Cinema-thinking, 3–12, 18, 26, 35,
Badiou, A., 4, 90 44, 51, 56, 59, 60, 65, 68, 70, 95,
Baron Jean de Laubardemont, 72 99, 102, 104, 108, 112, 122, 145,
Bataille, G., 23 147, 152
Baudrillard, J., 5, 36, 99, 132 Cissie Colpitts, 66, 67, 69, 150
Berardi, F., 28 Claire, 115
ßeta, 69 Classroom Management, 22, 67, 116
Bicycle-cow collision, 69 Clergy, 72, 114

157
INDEX

Cole, D.R., 2, 11, 22, 25, 26, 33, 48, 62, ‘Drowning by Numbers’, 66–70, 75,
64, 67, 75, 105, 110, 116 150
Cole, D.R., & Hager, P., 23, 65 Dowd, G., 6
Cole, D.R., & Throssell, P., 23 Dystopia, 43, 51–55, 100, 152
Colebrook, C., 5, 82, 92
Collage, 8, 12, 35–40, 42–57, 139, E
148, 149 Edu-business, 101
Colman, F., 5, 6 ‘Elephant’, 129, 130, 132
Congruence, 13, 22, 99, 100 Elliot, P., 91, 139
Consumerism, 2, 28, 54, 55, 59, 107, Empathy, 28, 123, 127, 146
108, 113 End-of-the-world, 11, 17, 153
Cousins, M., 123, 132 Engine, 109–112, 153
‘Crash’, 24–28 Entrapment, 19, 22, 54, 113,
Critical pedagogy, 3, 5, 155 141, 147
Cronenberg, D., 11, 23–29, 33, 148 Epiphany, 23, 61
Crystal image, 29 Eugenics, 111
Cthulhu Mythos, 22 Evans, B., 91
Curtis Everett, 111
F
D Fabulation, 66–68, 70, 75, 134
Dancsok, M., 11, 38–53, 149 Fear, 18, 21, 32, 33, 56, 87, 92, 100,
Deamer, D., 89, 94 103, 110, 146
Death, 20, 23–32, 37, 48, 60, 66–71, 76, Feynmann, R.P., 60
83, 89, 93, 96, 132–136, 150 Fight Club, 63
Debord, G., 5, 74, 99 Financial capitalism, 1, 101–108, 117
Decoster, P.J., & Vansieleghem, N., 3 ‘Fluxes’, 43, 44, 49–51, 54
Delirium, 5, 6, 35, 36, 55, 61 Foucault, M., 43
Depardon, R., 128 ‘Free Fall’, 38, 41, 49, 50
Derrida, J., 90, 107 Frei, C., 121, 126–129, 136–138, 141,
Deterritorialisation, 48, 53, 103, 134, 154, 155
138
Deuce twins, 69, 70 G
Desire, 3, 11, 24–32, 45–48, 53, 55, 60, Games-number, 67, 68
65, 74, 84, 91, 95, 112, 116, 122, Gangsterland, 60–65, 150
127–129, 136, 140, 147 Gender, 65, 116
‘The Devils’, 12, 71–76, 150, 151 German Romanticism, 114
Diagram, 4, 45, 56, 62, 96 GFC, 110
Difference & Repetition, 113 Gilliam, 109–111
Digital learning systems, 105 Gilliam, T., 100, 103
Disfigured man, 30, 31 Giroux, H., 3, 5
‘Dividuals’, 2, 108 Glazer, J., 29
Douchet, J., 87 Globalisation, 7, 13, 33, 94, 96, 99–118,
Drohan, C.M., 68 145, 146, 152

158
 INDEX

God, 42, 43, 49, 53, 71–75, 79, 114, Joon-ho, B., 110
149, 151 Justine, 113–116, 153
Godard, J.L., 85, 126, 134
Goldsmith, L., 70 K
Gonzales, I., 85 Kennedy, B., 91, 139
Goodyear, S., 54 Kieślowski, K., 123
Gorz, A., 54 King, 72–75, 136, 150
Greenaway, P., 12, 60, 66–71, 75, 150 Kubrick, S., 36
Groucho brothers, 87 Kurtzman, 102
Guattari, F., 2, 13, 33, 53, 63, 65, 116,
127, 128, 136, 137, 140, 141 L
Lacan, J., 87, 94, 95
H ‘Late spring’, 94
Heidegger, M., 18, 107 Laudun, 72, 73
Hitchcock, A., 12, 13, 43, 79–96, 121, Lazzarato, M., 101, 121, 136–141, 155
129–135, 139, 151, 152 Learning, 1, 9, 17–33, 63, 64, 82, 83,
Holey self, 75 92, 93, 99–101, 105–108, 114–117,
Homeostatic systems, 113, 153 121, 145–148
Hoodlums, 63 Leo, 115
Horizon, 3, 71, 129 Leonard Shelby, 104–107
Horror, 11, 12, 17–33, 52, 83, 85, 110, Levinas, E., 146
113, 128, 129, 134, 137, 146, 147 Lifestyle, 12, 59–66, 150
Horror films, 18, 19 Lint, 101
Huxley, A., 71, 74 Lipsett, A., 11, 35–57, 139, 148, 149
Hyalosign, 29 Lotringer, S., 127, 128, 136–141
hylomorphic, 63 Louis XIII, 72, 73
Lovecraft, HP., 19, 22
I Love-death, 66–68
Illich, I. & Verne, E., 1 Lovesong, 121, 142
Identity, 9, 46, 59–66, 75, 91, 99, 107, Lowry, 101–103
137, 150 Lucas, G., 36, 38
Integrated World Capitalism (IWC), 2,
7, 59, 145–147, 155 M
Image of thought, 6, 8, 9, 20–25, 32, 43, MacCormack, P., 5, 36, 57, 119
44, 56, 101, 110, 111, 114 MacKenzie, S., 7, 15
Immanent materialism, 26, 127, 155 Machinic, 22, 30, 53, 59, 62, 63, 82,
Iris, 23, 31 116, 124, 128, 129, 136, 155
Masny, D., & Cole, D.R., 9
J Masses, 73, 75, 112
Jagodzinski, J., 49, 87, 126 Massumi, B., 35
Jameson, F., 3, 29 Max Renn, 27, 28
Jeannes de Anges, 72, 73 McEwan, I., 64
Jones, K. et al., 151 Medak, P., 60

159
INDEX

‘Melancholia’, 13, 99, 113–117, 153, Non-hylomorphic, 48, 63, 64

154 Noys, B., 74
‘Memento’, 13, 99, 104–108, 153 Ngui, M., 10
Memory, 41, 48, 60, 82, 83, 89, 90, 96,
100, 104–108, 135, 138, 153 O
Meta-model, 49, 63 O’Brien, 103
Ministry of Information, 101 Occultism, 64, 65
‘Minority Report’, 2 Orwell, G., 100, 103
Misak, C., 82 Ozu, Y. 93, 94, 96
Montage, 5, 8, 30, 39, 47, 49, 55, 60,
85, 95, 114, 115, 136, 139, 149, P
152, 153 Palahniuk, C., 64
Monty Python, 103 Peirce, C.S., 4, 82, 87–89, 95,
Movement-image, 3, 20, 23, 25, 26, 28, 151, 152
30, 44, 47, 64, 88, 89, 92–94, 135, ‘Performance’, 12, 59–66, 70, 75, 150
140, 151 Petrol politics, 26
Mugwump, 24, 25 Pherber, 63
Multiple Literacies Theory (MLT), Photography, 30, 126, 128, 132, 135,
9, 32 137, 140, 154
Mulvey, L., 94 Pisters, P., 17, 36, 41, 80, 95, 112, 136
Murakami, H., 138 Polaroids, 104
Murdoch, Rupert, 28 Politics of ‘a pedagogy of cinema’, 74
Powell, A., 5, 18, 22, 23, 85
N Precarious, 125
Nachtwey, J., 13, 126, 129, 130, 135, Pre-Raphaelites, 114
136, 138, 140, 154, 155 Professional classes, 72, 75
‘Naked Lunch’, 24, 25, 27 ‘Psycho’, 85, 86, 152
Namgoong Minsu, 109 Pullen, D.L., & Cole, D.R., 105
Natalie, 106, 107
Nature, 2, 17, 20, 24, 28, 42, 49, 52, 68, Q
69, 76 Quantum mechanics, 60
Nature-fable, 68, 69
Neuroscience, 25, 92 R
Nicki Brand, 28 ‘Rear Window’, 84, 85, 90, 94, 121,
Nietzsche, F., 22, 66, 103, 116, 117 129, 132, 134, 135, 152, 154, 155
‘Night will Fall’, 131, 134, 135, Regime of signs, 22, 23, 55, 67, 68, 73,
143, 155 99, 101
Nihilism, 14, 47, 107, 145 Remington (Dr), 25–27
Nolan, C., 104 Revolution, 7, 39, 56, 103, 108–111,
Non-capitalist, 108, 114, 150 118, 122, 136, 139, 141, 153
Non-place, 13, 14, 56, 80, 94, 96, 108, Rhizome, 9, 10, 57
125, 126, 135, 145–148, 150–153 Richie, D., 36

160
 INDEX

Rodowick, D., 91 ‘Strange codes’, 35, 41, 43–47, 53, 55

Roffe, J., 19 Subjectivity, 24, 29, 32, 33, 90, 91, 108,
‘Rope’, 90 125, 129, 135, 139, 140, 145, 147,
Rouch, J., 124, 132 149
Rudkin, D., 121, 151 Super dimensions, 118
Russell, K., 12, 60, 71 ‘Suspicion’, 92, 152
‘Suspiria’, 11, 19–23, 28, 33, 147, 148
S Suzy Bannon, 21, 22
‘Sabotage’, 84, 85 Szendy, P., 2
Samsung, 1
Scarlett Johansson, 29 T
Schizoanalysis (of cinema), 5, 6, 10, 11, Tactisigns, 23
24, 35, 36, 56, 61, 63, 139, 141, 148 Tantric love, 62, 75
Schizophrenia, 10, 11, 35, 41, 44, 47, Tattoos, 104, 106, 153
53–56, 63, 76, 148, 149 Technology, 1, 2, 24, 28, 36, 38, 39, 43,
Schreber, D., 53 55, 67, 100, 102, 103, 105, 108, 121,
Science fiction, 32, 38, 108, 109, 112 130, 136, 137, 139, 152, 154
Screen culture, 7, 9, 17, 18, 28, 29, 112, Teddy, 106, 107
134, 148 Testing, 35, 147
Seers, 107, 126, 146 ‘The pervert’s guide to cinema’, 97
Semetsky, I., 79 Thinking skills, 105
Semio-capitalism, 74 Third cinema, 7, 8
Semiotics, 61, 62, 65, 68, 72, 75, 79, Thirdness, 13, 80, 82, 83, 87–90
82, 83, 88, 89, 95, 123, 126, 128, Thousand Plateaus, 6, 9, 10, 26, 61
129, 132, 136, 137, 139–141, 151 ‘Three colours blue’, 123
‘Shame’, 129 Tiqqun, 100
Shaviro, S., 18, 22 Time-image, 3, 11, 12, 23–26, 30, 31,
Snails, 69 52, 64, 65, 79, 80, 92–94, 104,
‘Snowpiercer’, 13, 99, 104, 108–113, 121, 126, 134–137, 140, 146,
153 151, 154, 155
Society of the Spectacle, 74 Time-lapse, 71
Spectatorship, 5, 7, 8, 12, 13, 39, 40, ‘Tokyo Ga’, 93
42, 44, 47, 48, 51, 52, 79, 80, 82, Tomb Raider, 130, 132
83, 85, 90–92, 95, 96, 112, 113, Toscano, A., & Kinkle, J., 112
123, 124, 129 Tower conspiracy, 68
Spinoza, B., 18, 33, 68, 88, 91 Train, 109–112
Standing, G., 25 Transilience, 124
Steffen, W. et al., 114, 117 Trauma, 85, 91, 104, 129, 133, 146
STEM, 67 Truffaut, F., 83, 84
Stiegler, B., 5, 14, 107, 108, 121, 122, ‘Two films by Lipsett’, 41
124, 126, 136–139, 141, 154 Turner, 59–61, 63–66, 70
‘Story of film: An odyssey’, 123, 132 TV garbage, 28

161
INDEX

U Vitalism, 75
‘Under the Skin’, 11, 29–33, 148 VHS cassette, 28
University lecturing, 8
Urbain Grandier, 73 W
Utopia, 3, 7, 50–53, 62, 96, 104 ‘War photographer’, 121, 125–127,
129, 135, 136, 140, 141, 154, 155
V Wenders, W., 93, 138
Vaughan, 25–27 Wikileaks, 132
Vermeer, 70, 71 Wilford, 109–111
Venus de Milo, 71 Witchcraft, 20, 67, 72
‘Vertigo’, 85, 90 Whitehead, A. N., 105, 114
‘Very nice, very nice’, 36, 37, 43, 51,
52, 55 Z
‘Videodrome’, 24, 27–29 Zelazny, R., 115
Virilio, P., 5, 14, 41, 122, 123, 127, 128, Žižek, S., 6, 87, 95, 151
135 ‘Z00’, 69–71, 150

162