Deleuze and the Cinemas of Performance: Powers of Affection

by Elena del Rio

This book offers a unique reconsideration of the performing body that privileges the notion of affective force over the notion of visual form at the centre of former theories of spectacle and performativity. Drawing on Gilles Deleuze's philosophy of the body, and on Deleuze-Spinoza's relevant concepts of affect and expression, Elena del Río examines a kind of cinema that she calls 'affective-performative'. The features of this cinema unfold via detailed and engaging discussions of the movements, gestures and speeds of the body in a variety of films by Douglas Sirk, Rainer W. Fassbinder, Sally Potter, Claire Denis, and David Lynch. Key to the book's engagement with performance is a consistent attention to the body's powers of affection. Grounding her analysis in these powers, del Río shows the insufficiency of former theoretical approaches in accounting for the transformative and creative capacities of the moving body of performance.Deleuze and the Cinemas of Performance will be of interest to any scholars and students of film concerned with bodily aspects of cinema, whether from a Deleuzian, a phenomenological, or a feminist perspective.Key Features*The first study of the interface between Deleuzian theory and film performance.*A sustained consideration of the links between the body of performance and the body of affect.*A reevaluation of central concepts in earlier film theory-from fetishistic spectacle and performativity to Brechtian distanciation, sadomasochism, and narcissism.*An analysis of the relation of the performative body to a feminist politics.*New readings of classical melodramas as well as contemporary independent cinemas.

Genres: Film, Philosophy, Art

248 pages, Hardcover

First published February 1, 2009

Reviews

[winnie wang · Rating 4 out of 5]

“What if peace were a power of affection that resided in each body and could be accessed therein, a force that could be transmitted and expanded through our bodies’ interactions and compositions with other bodies?”

[Ayanna Dozier · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is DENSE! I will be honest, I struggled immensely to understand how Del Rio uses the body to reach a peak, in my opinion, on affect theory through Deleuze. With that being said, the book was such a rewarding read for me. I read it at the same time as I was reading Deleuze's Cinema books so it was nice to have to the two play off of each other. Del Rio has such a brilliant mind and finds a way to distill breadths of knowledge into each sentence, this book is definitely one to come back to as each read adds more information/context than the last. If you are not familiar with Del Rio's work I would suggest reading some of her articles first before tackling this book as it will help clarify some of her points, in my opinion but perhaps it could just be my misinterpretation of the text.

[Steen Ledet · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting book on film affect and Deleuze. Its strongest point is its hybridization of a variety of other theories and theorists into a Deleuzean framework. Rich readings of films and arguments for film’s powers of affection make this required reading for anyone interested in film and affect.