| Popis: |
Brian Massumi’s provocative analysis of the concept that cinema, and the reflexive experiences it enables, has something to tell us about affect itself can usefully frame our relationship to awareness and selfhood. This chapter takes Massumi’s hypothesis more seriously than others have taken it, earnestly accepting film as a tool of insight. To showcase this framework’s applicability even to mainstream narrative cinema, I focus on a group of films that represent romantic relationships between women. Through their flirtations with, and epistemic subversions of, photography, High Art, Carol, and Disobedience represent the moving image as a paradoxical source of queer empowerment and self-knowledge precisely because it refuses to affirm a consistent, namable vision of our sexual selves. Building on an understanding of affect’s relationship to cinema that is much like Massumi’s, these films show how misleading it is to see the clues affects give us into ourselves as all leading back to the same, deepest point of origin; to believe, as in a simple reading of Sigmund Freud, that what we desire and are defined by is ultimately some singular past or future primal scene. Privileging everyday acts of mutual observation and vulnerability over more conventionally momentous social statements, events, and acts, these films offer a model of queerness that accepts and acknowledges the intertwining of our sexual passions with non-sexual longings and needs. They force us to rethink both our specific expectations about cinematic representations of sexuality and our broader views of their medium as a tool of self-documentation and exploration. |
