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New Review of Film and Television Studies

Vol. 00, No. 0, 2012, 1–6

1
2
3
4 BOOK REVIEW
5
6 Deleuze and the cinemas of performance: powers of affection, by Elena del
7 Q1 Rı́o,
Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2008
8
9 Deleuze and the Cinemas of Performance: Powers of Affection might unjustly
10 be/become an overlooked work. The presence of Deleuze in the title might put
11
off some readers, while the notion of performance might put off others. While
12
essential reading to the (no doubt impressive) number of scholars working on
13
performance and/or Deleuze in relation to film, the book is perhaps not relevant-
14
seeming enough to other scholars to make their already sizeable reading list.
15
And yet, this book should merit a place near the top of not just Deleuze- and
16
performance-focused film scholars, but any film scholar’s film scholarly reading
17
18
list – if not their general one. Of course, the book is about performance as
19 considered through a Deleuzian framework. However, it is also about how cinema
20 can and does affect us in terms of our feelings, thoughts and attitudes. That is,
21 the book is about the experience that lies at the heart of our relationship with
22 cinema – and at the heart of our relationship with the world. Every film scholar
23 should be interested in what happens during the cinema experience. In addition,
24 since Powers of Affection, the preferred title of the book (4), is really about the
25 cinema experience (and not really about Deleuze, nor really performance), then
26 film scholars should read it – because it also happens to be good.
27 The presence of Deleuze in the title might still put some people off. Abstract
28 at best and confounding at worst, Deleuze is thought by some to make great
29 unsubstantiated pronouncements about many aspects of existence. If, however,
30 Deleuze and Félix Guattari pronounce in A Thousand Plateaus (1987) that affect
31 is key to existence, they are not necessarily wrong to do so. For there seems
32
enough evidence from other disciplines to suggest that we are only ever in/with
33
the world. Although del Rı́o does not bring these debates into her argument,
34
we might look at neuroscience and/or philosophy to find that thought is embodied
35
(e.g. Damasio 1994, 1999; LeDoux 1998; Lakoff and Johnson 1999) – that is,
36
37
that even our ‘higher order’ and conscious functions spring from our bodily
38
interactions with the world. Alternatively, we might look at physics and Niels
39 Bohr’s concept of ‘complementarity’ (1937), whereby, similarly, there is no such
40 thing as being able to disconnect ourselves from the world that surrounds us.
41 In other words, even if through instinct or as a result of experience with Deleuze
42 one does not think that we should consider experience as the root of even our
43 most lofty achievements, be they conceptual or manual, there is plenty of other
44 evidence to say that we should. Furthermore, Powers of Affection is not beholden

ISSN 1740-0309 print/ISSN 1740-7923 online

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17400309.2012.660346
http://www.tandfonline.com
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2 Book Review
45 to Deleuze (as some books that use him might seem to be). Instead, Elena del Rı́o
46 uses Deleuze to produce a book that is certainly her own.
47 Del Rı́o suggests that we look at film not just on a representational level,
48 which has perhaps long dominated much work in film studies. As del Rı́o herself
49 says, work on film as a representational medium has had ‘strategic value’ and
50 ‘timely importance’ (32). Laura Mulvey in particular has been instrumental in
51 helping us to think about the gender imbalances in cinema, whereby women have
52 been posited, particularly in classical Hollywood cinema, as a threat to male
53 hegemony (see, for the most famous example, Mulvey, 1975). While of ongoing
54 importance, though, the work of what we might term political critique (exposing
55 the seemingly naturalised biases present in any film) takes us away from cinema
56 as an affective medium – a medium that can make us feel and, by extension,
57 think not just new thoughts, but also in new ways. This process of feeling and
58 thinking through cinema is what del Rı́o wishes to clarify here.
59 Of course, del Rı́o is not alone in writing about film as an affective medium.
60 Not only does she draw upon Deleuze, but she also weaves into her book ideas
61 wrought from Vivian Sobchack (1992) and Jennifer M. Barker (2009), who in
62 turn base their analyses of the film experience on the phenomenological work of
63 Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Edmund Husserl. If culturally we are encouraged to
64
think along definite lines of male – female, white –black and old – young, the lived
65
body does not respect these boundaries and as such is always in excess of these
66
systems that, according to Sobchack, codify and even negate the body. For this
67
reason, del Rı́o argues, ‘the particular female body is always more than just
68
the fetishised construct of the male gaze’ (114). But where Merleau-Ponty
69
understands movement and affect as
70
71 subjective phenomena arising out of an intentional and individuated rapport with
72 the world, Deleuze regards the kinetic and the affective as material flows whose
individuation and exchange do not rest upon subjectified intentions, but rather upon
73
the workings of a non-organic, anonymous vitality. (115)
74
75 In other words, Deleuze is useful for del Rı́o in taking the study of affect in new
76 directions, in that subjectivity emerges out of affect and movement, rather than
77 being their source. This allows del Rı́o to argue not just for subjective experience,
78 then, but for subjective experience within the context of the ‘whole’ from which
79 it cannot be separated. In the context of film, this would appear to be the
80 conjunction of film and viewer; ‘the body only exists in relation, which is to say
81 in performance’, del Rı́o argues (116), which means to say that we are not fixed in
82 our being (which would appear to Merleau-Ponty’s bottom line), but rather we
83 are always becoming, even in our encounter with film.
84 Rather than the ‘negative’ critique of political/ideological readings of films,
85 then, del Rı́o proposes that our embodied encounters with cinema constitute
86 a significantly more productive and affirmative encounter – and she offers plenty
87 of examples during Powers of Affection. The main chapters of the book constitute
88 excellent analyses of work by Douglas Sirk (26 –66), Rainer Werner Fassbinder
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New Review of Film and Television Studies 3

89 (67 – 112), Sally Potter (113 –47), Claire Denis (148 –77) and David Lynch
90 (178 – 207). In the work of Sirk, del Rı́o looks at moments of heightened intensity,
91 such as Marylee Hadley’s ‘dance of death’ in Written on the Wind (USA, 1956).
92 The scene’s loud noises, heightened colour scheme and montage (all of which
93 constitute the film’s performance), together with Dorothy Malone’s own physical
94 performance as Marylee, take us outside of the realm of ideological critique,
95 and become ‘anomalous irruptions of affective force into an otherwise largely
96 coherent narrative fabric’ (61). With regard to Fassbinder, Die bitteren Tränen
97 der Petra von Kant/The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (West Germany, 1972)
98 exemplifies a logic whereby Petra’s cruelty towards Marlene and Karin is in fact
99 an act of love, one that is reflected by the film’s own attitude towards the
100 audience. Cruelty, writes del Rı́o,
101
can be perceived as furthering an unwelcome disintegration of the self or,
102
alternately, as the deterritorialising force capable of interrupting the delusions that
103 impede the body’s expansion outside its rigid narcissistic boundaries. From this
104 angle, cruelty is the ethical attitude that allows performance and performer to
105 become vehicles of honesty and love. (103 – 4)
106
Fassbinder does not mollycoddle his audience, then, or tell them how to think and
107
feel, but instead respects them by avoiding mainstream thinking/feeling: ‘Only
108
when feeling ceases to be mere cliché, and instead becomes disorganising and
109
even biting, can it unleash its violence, and paradoxically healing, powers’ (104).
110
In her chapter on Sally Potter, meanwhile, del Rı́o does not deny the political
111
force of Potter’s work, but instead, particularly in The Tango Lesson
112
(UK/France/Argentina/Germany/Netherlands, 1997), she finds it reaffirmed in
113
the body’s powers of affection as Sally not only learns how to dance from Pablo,
114
115
but also teaches Pablo how to act:
116 This politics does not arise as a reactive move against male domination [which
117 might be deemed the ‘representational’ reading], but as an active, ethically
118
committed force cognizant of its own transformative potential and willing to
experiment with it without the expectation of predictable goals or measurable
119
results. (143)
120
121 In other words, The Tango Lesson well exemplifies in its diegesis how film can
122 build relations with viewers (based on the present/presence), rather than simply
123 be a representation of something that is otherwise absent.
124 Del Rı́o then argues how Claire Denis makes films in which there is little
125 movement, and not so much in terms of plot that viewers can follow. Instead, the
126 films elicit from us a different set of demands – ‘not only in terms of their departure
127 from classical narrative patterns, but also in terms of their divergence from
128 typically more cerebral experimental strategies’ (174). Finding the affective –
129 performative logic the most useful for articulating what we might term ‘the Denis
130 effect’, then, del Rı́o charts the way in which film is not something specifically to
131 be looked at (from a distance), but a phenomenon that touches us, that, in del Rı́o’s
132 terms, can also ‘love’ us (even if that love can also be ‘cruel’) (174).
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4 Book Review
133 Meanwhile, Mulholland Dr. (France/USA, 2001) exemplifies, through its
134 reworking of images from various Hollywood genres, including noir and
135 melodrama, the way in which director David Lynch uses cliché – or images the
136 ‘meaning’ of which is ‘obvious’ by virtue of our having seen them so often before –
137 as ‘the limit against which a different kind of affective force or energy bounces off
138 and asserts itself’ (202). That is, genre is not here the ‘safe ground or protective
139 umbrella that sanctions the . . . legitimacy and intelligibility [of images]’, but rather
140 the dangerous ground from which Lynch’s most powerful moments can arise,
141 particularly the Club Silencio scene in which La Llorona collapses while singing a
142 Spanish-language version of Roy Orbison’s ‘Crying’ (202). The inexplicable nature
143 of this moment and other images in Lynch’s films is what makes them challenge our
144 thought, affecting us in a manner that is palpably real and which, as a result,
145 challenges the notion that film is somehow a disembodied experience.
146 If bodies are in relation, and if film has a ‘body’ of sorts, in that it can touch
147 us, then film images are only in relation. Perhaps the discussion of genre and
148 cliché with respect to Lynch helps to bring this out most clearly, but it is worth
149 emphasising that del Rı́o is not really describing the quality of specific moments
150 in films, but rather an aspect of the film experience as a process – and an aspect of
151 life experience in general, as del Rı́o elaborates in her compelling if problematic
152 conclusion (208 –17).
153 Before turning explicitly to the conclusion, though, a note on del Rı́o’s choices
154 of films to analyse. In choosing relatively well-studied if not necessarily very
155 popularly known films, del Rı́o runs the risk of reaffirming the (academic) canon of
156 films and filmmakers. Sirk, Fassbinder, Potter, Denis and Lynch are resolutely the
157 residue of auteur-driven film criticism. Although now is not the time to weigh up
158 the pros and cons of such an approach, del Rı́o’s unremitting good taste potentially
159 poses problems, in that the affective – performative model that she adopts might be
160 deemed suitable only for certain films, or perhaps even the mark of a certain quality
161 of filmmaker. And yet, since del Rı́o is writing about a process (the film
162 experience), the potential for which surely lies in the conjunction of any image and
163 viewer (especially if they have never seen any images like the ones that they are
164 now beholding), then to understand her work in this way would be a disservice to it.
165 One wonders if the affective potential of some real Hollywood schlock, some
166 home movies or of some rather more outlandish fare might also have helped to
167 make this point clear. Reading Powers of Affection, I thought that del Rı́o’s
168 approach would happily cross over on to the baroque camera movements and the
169 ghastly (in the best sense of the word) acting of the less studied films of Andrzej
170 Żuławski, or, indeed, to evoke a recent cinematic example, the other worldly
171 shapes and movements that the bodies perform in Wim Wenders’ Pina
172 (Germany/France/UK, 2011). But more, I wondered why this might not apply to
173 the accelerated battle scenes of Michael Bay’s The Transformers (USA, 2007), in
174 which the fighting robots become a blur of colour so incomprehensible to follow
175 that there really is a touch of the film, or the digital effects, ‘taking over’ and
176 ‘performing’ something perhaps not even intended by the filmmaker.
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New Review of Film and Television Studies 5

177 That said, del Rı́o perhaps chooses wisely to take on well-known films precisely
178 because of the reader’s (hopefully) shared familiarity with such moments.
179 Admittedly, del Rı́o does open her analysis up in her conclusion – and beyond
180 cinema, no less. There del Rı́o describes an incident in which an aboriginal Canadian
181 began to scream in a supermarket in the town in which del Rı́o lives. The force of the
182 scream caused everyone to stop in their tracks – thereby undermining any unthinking
183 aspects of the moment at hand and bringing people forcibly to confront the present.
184 ‘Like many aboriginal people here, he may have been classified as homeless and/or
185 jobless, perhaps pronounced to be addicted to something or other’, del Rı́o speculates
186 (213–4). While del Rı́o laudably posits that thinking through cinema can also be a
187 means of thinking through and with the world in which we live, it is interesting that
188 her thought reaches for stereotypes on this occasion. ‘Although the force I heard was
189 neither aboriginal nor white, it was coming out of a body marked as aboriginal – by
190 history, by me, by himself, by others’, she continues (214). Here we reach a tension
191 that needs to be thought through: affective performances take us into new realms of
192 thought, but they do so by emerging from the ground of ‘clichéd’ or ‘stereotyped’ or
193 ‘automatic’ thought, as del Rı́o’s examples makes clear. That is, the powers of
194 representation are still very much with us – since, if I may myself speculate, del Rı́o’s
195 understanding of Canadian aboriginals as never far from unemployment and drug
196 addiction will surely have been mediated by various institutions, including cinema,
197 television and the print press. The validity of the powers of affection, then, is in their
198 emerging from the ground of (and going against) normalising (or, to adopt a
199 biological metaphor, unconscious and homeostatic) thought. Del Rı́o no doubt
200 knows this, but in emphasising the affective, the persistence of the representational is
201 perhaps lost somewhat.
202 As an addition to the growing body of work on cinematic affect, and, in the
203 Deleuzian vein, the power of film to bring us to new modes of thought, del Rı́o’s work
204 is exemplary. However, now that work on affect is catching up with work on
205 representation, a detailed analysis of the complex relationship between the two is
206 perhaps called for. Del Rı́o speaks of ‘our customary numbness’ in the face of easy-
207 to-comprehend images (‘clichés’), which leaves us ‘unable to engage in real thought
208 or feeling’ (210). If I were certain as to what real thought is, I’d perhaps agree with del
209 Rı́o here. However, rather than seeking aesthetic experience in the extremes, or in the
210 canonically ‘extreme’ cinema that del Rı́o puts to work here, perhaps we might see
211 that there is no numbness. We do not and cannot live in a vacuum; we cannot wake up
212 from an anaesthetic existence through aesthetic moments; instead, we must realise
213 that cinema – and life itself – is only aesthetic, if by varying degrees of intensity,
214 from curtains up to curtains down, and from screaming start to whimpering finish.
215
216
References
217
Barker, Jennifer M. 2009. The Tactile Eye: Touch and the Cinematic Experience.
218
Berkeley: University of California Press.
219 Bohr, Niels. 1937. Causality and Complementarity. Philosophy of Science 4, no. 3 (July):
220 289– 98.
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6 Book Review
221 Damasio, Antonio. 1994. Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain.
222 London: Vintage.
———. 1999. The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Marking of
223
Consciousness. London: Vintage.
224 Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and
225 Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. London: Athlone.
226 Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. 1999. Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind
227 and its Challenge to Western Thought. New York: Basic Books.
LeDoux, Joseph. 1998. The Emotional Brain: The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional
228
Life. New York: Phoenix.
229 Mulvey, Laura. 1975. Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. Screen 16, no. 3 (Autumn):
230 6 – 18.
231 Sobchack, Vivian. 1992. The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience.
232 Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
233 William Brown
234 Roehampton University
235 William.Brown@roehampton.ac.uk
236 q 2012, William Brown
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