Post-Cinematic
Embodied Affect
Body one
Body two
Our lived body in the
world
Our body under
biopower
Sensuous experience
Controlled experience
Being-in-the-world
Governmentality
Phenomenological
Post-structuralist
Film acts as an agent of
biopower as well, subjecting the
viewer to energies and
intensities
“phenomena emerge through
material agential intra-action”
Karen Barad,
Meeting the Universe Halfway
Being-in-the-film
Cinema affects us is through its
body (its material and symbolic
actions, such as color,
movement, editing, etc) via
processes known as emotional
contagion and affective
transmission.
Black Swan apprehends our
musculature in the scenes
where we experience Nina
dancing
Haptic ruptures
When Nina stumbles, stubs her
toe, breaks her nails, and
ultimately later in the film when
her legs buckle unnaturally, the
impact is terrible, shocking and
physically abrasive.
We feel subjected to the same
tribulations as Nina through the
mimetic faculty defined by
Walter Benjamin and Michael
Taussig.
Digital media long for Firstness;
to be perceived with the body
Laura Marks, Touch
“mimesis is mediated by the
body [presuming] a continuum
between the actuality of the
world and the production of
signs about that world.”
Laura Marks, The Skin of the
Film
Syncopated editing
Jumpy, unstable editing
Narrative and spatial flow is
disrupted
Post-continuity
Body one / Body two
What Black Swan does
eminently through its haptic
ruptures is to make oppressive
bodily regimes present for the
viewer.
Biopower
The presentification of
discursive regimes brings with it
the recognition that power —
any form of power — acts as a
kind of violence.
Biopower
Nina’s metamorphoses is
violent because that is the only
response to the (masked)
violence done to her.
Becoming-animal
The goal of the post-human as
a zoo of posthumanities rather
than the family of man.
Becoming-animal is a rejection
of both phallocentrism and
anthropocentrism.
Becoming-swan
The swan transformation
reveals Nina’s rejection of the
discipline her body two is
placed under.
Becoming-swan
Rather than submit to
heteronormativity Nina moves
outside of the oppressive
structure of male-female social
relations and instead becomesswan.
We can only cheer Nina on, feel
for her, sympathize with her
plight and thereby question the
social categories and
boundaries which she
physically attempts to
transcend.
The emotional contagion and
affective transmission of the film
dissolves the boundary
between Nina’s body, the film’s
body and our body.
Only the profane and grotesque
body can be perfect and so the
profane becomes the sacred.
Being excluded from the
symbolic social order is an act
of violence and it manifests
itself on Nina’s body one
The film’s affects are efficiently
used to reveal and make
sensible the biopower of
contemporary culture
Thank you!