Patricia Pisters

a Deleuzian film-philosophy of digital screen culture

The neuro-image

Bernd Herzogenrath

Caleb Kelly

Ellen Rutten

Jakko Kemper

"In recent years, the trend to present the notion of imperfection as a plus rather than a problem has resonated across a range of social and creative disciplines and a wealth of world localities. As digital tools allow media users to share ever more suave selfies and success stories, psychologists promote 'the gifts of imperfections' and point to perfectionism as a catalyst for rising depression and burnout complaints and suicide rates among millennials. As sound technologies increasingly permit musicians to 'smoothen' their work, composers increasingly praise glitches, noise, and cracks. As genetic engineering upgrades with swift speed, philosophers, marketeers, and physicians plea 'against perfection' and supermarkets successfully advertize 'perfectly imperfect' vegetables. Meanwhile, cultural analysts point at skewed perspectives, blurry images, and other 'deliberate imperfections' in new and historical cinema, painting, photography, music, and literature. In less positive terms, scholars in fields ranging from disability studies to tourism critically interrogate a trend to fetishize imperfection and poverty. They rightfully warn against projecting privileged (and, often, emphatically western-biased) feel-good stories onto the less privileged, the distorted, or the frail. Imperfections synthesizes the swiftly growing but fragmented critical scholarship on mistakes, glitches, and other aesthetics and logics of imperfection into the first transdisciplinary, transnational framework of imperfection studies. With this framework, the editors offer scholars and students across various disciplines tools to craft more historically grounded and critically informed conceptualizations of the imperfect"--

Studies in Mistakes, Flaws, and Failures

Imperfections

Rosi Braidotti

An exploration of the relevance of Deleuze's nomadic thought for re-thinking norms, values and laws in a manner that by-passes structural negativity while avoiding relativism.

Revisiting Normativity with Deleuze

This book explores Gilles Deleuze's contribution to film theory. According to Deleuze, we have come to live in a universe that could be described as metacinematic. His conception of images implies a new kind of camera consciousness, one that determines our perceptions and sense of selves: aspects of our subjectivities are formed in, for instance, action-images, affection-images and time-images. We live in a matrix of visual culture that is always moving and changing. Each image is always connected to an assemblage of affects and forces. This book presents a model, as well as many concrete examples, of how to work with Deleuze in film theory. It asks questions about the universe as metacinema, subjectivity, violence, feminism, monstrosity, and music. Among the contemporary films it discusses within a Deleuzian framework are Strange Days, Fight Club, and Dancer in the Dark.

Working with Deleuze in Film Theory

The Matrix of Visual Culture

This book offers a comprehensive overview of the most important theoretical visions on film, television, and new media The works of the legendary film director and producer Alfred Hitchcock that cover an extensive period have had a huge influence on film and television history. His work forms the main theme in this excellent introduction and provides the starting point for different methods of analysis and interpretation in modern film theory. Based on existing extensive studies and publications concerning Hitchcock, several theoretical approaches such as author theory, semiotics, gender theory and postmodernism are illustrated and compared. In conclusion Patricia Pisters connect the results with the contemporary developments in the media landscape. In the final chapters of this updated new edition, the author delves deeper into the influences of Derrida and Deleuze on visual culture and in the afterword highlights new theoretical tendencies present in the digital era.

Een Inleiding in Mediatheorie

Lessen Van Hitchcock, Herziene Editie

Vanwege de directe band met de massa is film een politieke kunstvorm. De klassieke film kon een volk representeren, maar in de moderne politieke film is dat niet meer mogelijk, want het geloof in een volk is ondermijnd. De relaties tussen filmmaker en zijn personages, en tussen fictie en werkelijkheid, zijn vrij en indirect. Door middel van een analyse van verschillende vormen van cinema is het mogelijk te onderzoeken hoe deze relaties worden ingekleurd en is het mogelijk te bepalen wat de politieke dimensie van de hedendaagse cinema is.

Politieke cinema en de vrije indirecte Rede

Opereren in de Werkelijkheid

Arguing that today's viewers move through a character's brain instead of looking through his or her eyes or mental landscape, this book approaches twenty-first-century globalized cinema through the concept of the "neuro-image." Pisters explains why this concept has emerged now, and she elaborates its threefold nature through research from three domains—Deleuzian (schizoanalytic) philosophy, digital networked screen culture, and neuroscientific research. These domains return in the book's tripartite structure. Part One, on the brain as "neuroscreen," suggests rich connections between film theory, mental illness, and cognitive neuroscience. Part Two explores neuro-images from a philosophical perspective, paying close attention to their ontological, epistemological, and aesthetic dimensions. Political and ethical aspects of the neuro-image are discussed in Part Three. Topics covered along the way include the omnipresence of surveillance, the blurring of the false and the real and the affective powers of the neo-baroque, and the use of neuro-images in politics, historical memory, and war.

A Deleuzian Film-Philosophy of Digital Screen Culture

The Neuro-Image

This volume assembles some of the most distinguished scholars in the field of Deleuze studies in order to provide both an accessible introduction to key concepts in Deleuze's thought and to test them in view of the issue of normativity. This includes not only the law, but also the question of norms and values in the broader ethical, political and methodological sense. The volume argues that Deleuze's philosophy rejects the unitary vision of the subject as a self-regulating rationalist entity and replaces it with a process-oriented relational vision of the subject. But what can we do exactly with this alternative nomadic vision? What modes of normativity are available outside the parameters of liberal, self-reflexive individualism on the one hand and the communitarian model on the other? This interdisciplinary volume explores these issues in three directions that mirror Deleuze and Guattari's defense of the parallelism between philosophy, science, and the arts. The volume therefore covers socio-political and legal theory; the epistemological critique of scientific discourse and the cultural, artistic and aesthetic interventions emerging from Deleuze's philosophy.

Wim Staat

Shooting the Family, a collection of essays on the contemporary media landscape, explores ever-changing representations of family life on a global scale. The contributors argue that new recording technologies allows families an unusual kind of freedom—until now unknown—to define and respond to their own lives and memories. Recently released videos made by young émigrés as they discover new homelands and resolve conflicts with their parents, for example, reverberate alongside the dark portrayals of family life in the formal filmmaking of Ang Lee. This book will be a boon to scholars of film theory and media studies, as well as to anyone interested in the construction of the family in a postmodern world.

Transnational Media and Intercultural Values

Shooting the Family

Catherine M. Lord

This book focuses on the micro-political implications of the work of Gilles Deleuze (and Félix Guattari). General philosophical articles are coupled to more specific analyses of films (such as Fight Club and Schindler's List) and other expressions of contemporary culture. The choice of giving specific attention to the analyses of images and sounds is not only related to the fact that audiovisual products are increasingly dominant in contemporary life, but also to the fact that film culture in itself is changing ("in transition") in capitalist culture. From a marginal place at the periphery of economy and culture at large, audiovisual products (ranging from art to ads) seem to have moved to the centre of the network society, as Manuel Castells calls contemporary society. Typical Deleuzian concepts such as micro-politics, the Body without Organs, becoming-minoritarian, pragmatics and immanence are explored in their philosophical implications and political force, whether utopian or dystopian. What can we do with Deleuze in contemporary media culture? A recurring issue throughout the book is the relationship between theory and practice, to which several solutions and problems are given.

Reading the Rhizomes of Deleuze and Guattari

Micropolitics of Media Culture

The first monograph of the work of one of the Netherlands' most prolific filmmakers spanning sixty years of cultural history ranging from the second world war to the rebellious sixties and eighties, from Dutch water management to modern architecture, and from Europe to global consciousness. 0This book presents a journey in the rich audio-visual and artistic sources of the world of a filmmaker who over the last sixty years, and long before we all had a mobile camera in our pockets, always had his camera on standby. This book proposes the most salient features of a wide-ranging and vital oeuvre that becomes more amazing and important as time goes by. Van Gasteren's work is an invaluable source of historical documentation and visionary cultural analysis made by a venturous "participating observer" of the twentieth century that is worthwhile (re)discovering in and for the twenty-first century.

The Work of Louis Van Gasteren

Filming for the Future

The works of the legendary film director and producer Alfred Hitchcock that cover an extensive period have had a huge influence on film and television history. His work forms the main theme in this excellent introduction to the theory concerning film, television and new media, and provides the starting point for different methods of analysis and interpretation in modern film theory. Based on existing extensive studies and publications concerning Hitchcock, several theoretical approaches such as author theory, semiotics, gender theory and postmodernism are illustrated and compared. In conclusion Patricia Pisters connect the results with the contemporary developments in the media landscape.

een inleiding in mediatheorie

Lessen van Hitchcock

Wanda Strauven

Jaap Kooijman

Mind the Screen pays tribute to the work of the pioneering European film scholar Thomas Elsaesser, author of several volumes on media studies and cinema culture. Covering a full scope of issues arising from the author’s work—from melodrama and mediated memory to avant-garde practices, media archaeology, and the audiovisual archive—this collection elaborates and expands on Elsaesser’s original ideas along the topical lines of cinephilia, the historical imaginary, the contemporary European cinematic experience, YouTube, and images of terrorism and double occupancy, among other topics. Contributions from well-known artists and scholars such as Mieke Bal and Warren Buckland explore a range of media concepts and provide a mirror for the multi-faceted types of screens active in Elsaesser’s work, including the television set, video installation, the digital interface, the mobile phone display, and of course, the hallowed silver screen of our contemporary film culture.

Patricia Pisters

Books

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