P.P.R.W. Pisters

The Universe as Metacinema

Hitchcock’s fantasy about directly entering people’s brains seemed very futuristic and absurd in the fifties when he expressed these words to his scriptwriter Ernest Lehman. However, a few decades later, scientific and cinematographic technology has improved to such an extent that Hitchcock’s joke seems to be not so far-fetched anymore. In Douglas Trumbull’s Brainstorm (1983) and Katherine Bigelow’s film Strange Days (1995) direct recording and playing of brainwaves is possible. Of course these films belong to the genre of science fiction, and the actual possibilities of such techniques are not as refined as they portray. But I am not interested in the exact state of affairs that might be represented in these films. Rather, I am challenged by the implications for the relationship between human beings (subjects), images and the world — and for the underlying image of thought that Hitchcock’s words express, both in respect of his own work, and in respect of developments in contemporary cinema and contemporary audiovisual culture. What if we do not consider Hitchcock’s words as merely a never-to-be-fulfilled fantasy of having effects on people without representations, bypassing the eyes of the spectators and reaching them directly via the brain, as the psychoanalytic model of thought does? What if we consider him to be a visionary, anticipating contemporary scientific and cinematographic preoccupations, as would a rhizomatic model of thinking, according to which the brain is literally the screen?

The Refusal of Reproduction : Paradoxes of Becoming - Woman in Transnational Moroccan Filmmaking

The female body has always had a double function with respect to reproduction. By becoming pregnant and giving birth the female body literally reproduces life. At the same time, metaphorically it is often seen as the safeguard of the nation, the reproduction of national values, tradition, and patriarchal history. However, both these reproductive functions have often worked at the cost of the body of the woman, who disappears in the shadow of her offspring and of history. Since the 1970s both French feminist theory and Anglo-American feminist film theory and practice have begun to reclaim the female body and rewrite history. A young generation of transnational women directors of Maghrebin descent, who live and work between the Maghreb and Europe, now seems to continue this feminist project in their films, albeit with some new dimensions.2 In this essay I argue that contemporary concerns with the female body in transnational Moroccan cinema are most productively understood in relation to the Deleuzian concepts of “becoming-woman” and “becoming-minoritarian.” Although initially critically received by feminist philosophers, these concepts in fact relate very well to feminist concerns and provide new and paradoxical ways of understanding postcolonial transnational cinema in relation to the nation, minorities, and the body of women.

Memory is no longer what it used to be

In Difference and Repetition, Gilles Deleuze develops a philosophy of time that allows three different conceptualizations of memory: memory conceived from the present, memory from the past and memory from the future.1 According to Deleuze, in any human being there is always an interplay between these different ways of conceiving memory and time more generally. On a more collective cultural level, however, I propose that we have moved into new dominant way of understanding memory: In the twenty-first century we increasingly conceive memory from the point of view of possible futures. In contemporary cinema, as well as elsewhere in culture, memory is no longer what it used to be.

Image as gesture: notes on Aernout Mik’s Communitas and the modern political film

Walking through Aernout Mik’s exhibition Communitas, dwelling in the encounter with the people and situations in front of and on the screens, one is struck by the cinematic and political qualities of the gestures in these powerful video installations. In this article I will develop some film-philosophical reflections on the silent performative force of the image as gesture and as politics. Drawing on Giorgio Agamben’s “Notes on Gesture”, Robert Bresson’s “Notes on the Cinematographer” and Gilles Deleuze’s reflections on the modern political film, I will contextualize Mik’s work in the tradition of the modern political film. Being in between language and image, a go-between that connects people, things and the world, the gesture belongs to ethics and politics more than to aesthetics. Characters in Mik’s work perform gestures that express the possibility of resistance and of the possibility of a shared community, a gesture which is shared by the artist, his actors and the visitors of the exhibition alike. Just like the modern political film the video works manage to change our perception of familiar situations via a simple tic, a spasm or a shared bodily posture.

Opereren in de werkelijkheid

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