Deleuze and the Cinemas of Performance: Powers of Affection

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.

Elena del Río is Professor Emerita of Film Studies at the University of Alberta, Canada. Her essays on the intersections between cinema and philosophies of the body in the areas of technology, performance, and affect have been featured in journals such as Alphaville, Angelaki, Camera Obscura, Canadian Journal of Film Studies, Deleuze Studies, Discourse, Film-Philosophy, Image and Narrative, Necsus, The New Review of Film and Television Studies, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, Science Fiction Studies, Studies in French Cinema, and SubStance. She has also contributed to numerous edited volumes on the films of Atom Egoyan, Michael Haneke, and Rainer Fassbinder, and on topics such as Asian exploitation film, cinema and cruelty, the philosophy of film and new media, film noir, film phenomenologies, and Deleuze and cinema. She is the author of The Grace of Destruction: A Vital Ethology of Extreme Cinemas (Bloomsbury, 2016) and Deleuze and the Cinemas of Performance: Powers of Affection (Edinburgh University Press, 2008).