David H. Fleming

The creative evolution and crystallisation of the ‘bastard line’: drifting from the Rive Gauche into Suzhou River

Deleuze argues that ‘it is never at the beginning that something new, a new art, is able to reveal its essence’; instead, what is tacit at the outset only reveals itself later, after taking a significant ‘detour in its evolution’. This paper argues that Lou Yes Suzhou River can be understood as the détournement of the ‘bastard line’ of the so-called Sixth Generations urban realist impulse, and as such materialises a new modality of mainland time-image cinema. By also putting the film into critical relation with Alain Resnais’ Last Year in Marienbad (1961) via Deleuze, I aim to illustrate how Lous evental film can be understood as actively modifying our understanding of the cinematic past.

The method meets animation: On performative affect and digital-bodies in Aronofsky's ‘Performance Diptych’

ABSTRACT Darren Aronofskys The Wrestler (2008) and Black Swan (2010) each mount a sustained investigation into issues surrounding performance in and beyond cinema, across a wide range of different registers. The Wrestler reifies the backwards-looking ‘realist’ film that focuses on the past and memory, whereas Black Swan surfaces as a digitally augmented ‘expressionistic’ film concerned with breaking down barriers and reaching towards new heights of becoming. As these performance themes become reflected in the form and content of the ‘companion’ films, this article poses some timely questions on the changing nature of performance in relation to cinemas digital event. The investigation harnesses three overlapping categories to explore issues of performance within and across the diptych, beginning with a notion of the double that is key to both narratives and fictional characters. Thereafter the concept of doubling is expanded to explore the relation between actor bodies (typage), star images and a ‘block of becoming’ that links together humanist method techniques and digital technicity through a focus on issues of performative affect. Moving beyond extensive considerations of acting, the affective tonality of performance is approached through an Artaudian lens and evaluated in terms of an expressionevent for viewers.

Selling (un)real estate with “Shi(势)-nema”: manipulation, not persuasion, in China’s contemporary cinematic-cities

ABSTRACT Investigating what has been called the mise-en-scene of Capitalism’s Second Coming in China, this essay explores how cinematic principles have become divorced from the medium of cinema and can be found operating within contemporary Chinese urban spaces in order to increase the efficacy of real estate showroom settings. Specifically, we explore the effects of affectively distributed networks of human, architectural and nonhuman “actors” that appear to be arranged in such a way as to manipulate and impact the thoughts, feelings and actions of potential buyers. To best expose the effectiveness of these modern urban assemblages, we engineer an encounter between the Chinese concept of shi (势) – described by sinologist-philosopher François Julien as the “inherent potentiality at work in configuration” – and that of cinematicty, wherein the cinema and city are recognised as co-determining and mutually enabling site/sights.

Deleuze and Chinese Cinemas

Introduction to Special Issue of Journal of Chinese Cinemas, on Gilles Deleuze and Chinese Cinemas.