[D-G] new Deleuze and cinema book
edelrio at ualberta.ca
edelrio at ualberta.ca
Mon Jun 8 15:52:40 PDT 2009
Apologies for possible multiple mailings.
A new book by Elena del Río: Deleuze and the Cinemas of Performance:
Powers of Affection, Edinburgh University Press, 2008 (US distribution
by Columbia University Press, 2009), 248 pages.
Available at: amazon.com (copies at half-price), amazon.ca,
euppublishing.com, etc.
http://www.amazon.com/Deleuze-Cinemas-Performance-Powers-Affection/dp/0748635254
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.
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 Deleuzes philosophy of the body, and on
Deleuze-Spinozas 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
books engagement with performance is a consistent attention to the
bodys 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.
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 theoryfrom
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.
Elena del Río is associate professor of film studies at the University
of Alberta.
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