Post-Cinematic Embodied Affect

1. Post-Cinematic Embodied Affect

2. Body one Our lived body in the world Sensuous experience Being-in-the-world Phenomenological Body two Our body under biopower Controlled experience Governmentality Post-structuralist

3. Film acts as an agent of biopower as well, subjecting the viewer to energies and intensities

4. “phenomena emerge through material agential intra-action” Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway

5. 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.

6. Black Swan apprehends our musculature in the scenes where we experience Nina dancing

7. 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.

12. We feel subjected to the same tribulations as Nina through the mimetic faculty defined by Walter Benjamin and Michael Taussig.

13. Digital media long for Firstness; to be perceived with the body Laura Marks, Touch

14. “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

17. Syncopated editing Jumpy, unstable editing Narrative and spatial flow is disrupted Post-continuity

18. Body one / Body two What Black Swan does eminently through its haptic ruptures is to make oppressive bodily regimes present for the viewer.

19. Biopower The presentification of discursive regimes brings with it the recognition that power — any form of power — acts as a kind of violence.

20. Biopower Nina’s metamorphoses is violent because that is the only response to the (masked) violence done to her.

21. 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.

22. Becoming-swan The swan transformation reveals Nina’s rejection of the discipline her body two is placed under.

23. Becoming-swan Rather than submit to heteronormativity Nina moves outside of the oppressive structure of male-female social relations and instead becomes-swan.

25. 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.

26. The emotional contagion and affective transmission of the film dissolves the boundary between Nina’s body, the film’s body and our body.

27. Only the profane and grotesque body can be perfect and so the profane becomes the sacred.

28. Being excluded from the symbolic social order is an act of violence and it manifests itself on Nina’s body one

29. The film’s affects are efficiently used to reveal and make sensible the biopower of contemporary culture

30. Thank you!