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Deleuze and Cinema: The Aesthetics of Sensation

Barbara M. Kennedy

Deleuze and Cinema: The Aesthetics of Sensation by Barbara M. Kennedy, 2000 edition cover
2000 English edition coverCover source
01

Argument

Kennedy joins Deleuzian desire, affect, becoming, and becoming-woman to poststructuralist feminist film theory, replacing an Oedipalized viewing subject with an aesthetics of sensation. Cinema becomes a material rupture and molecular assemblage: rhythm, colour, and movement actively recompose bodies and identities. Readings of Orlando, The English Patient, Romeo + Juliet, Strange Days, and Léon ground the framework in distinct sensory organizations.

02

Core question

How can cinematic experience shift from a model of the spectator interpreting a text to an event of sensation composed by matter, technology, brain, and body? How do colour, movement, and rhythm pass through conscious subjectivity while also acting on the body beyond it?

03

Argument structure

Micropolitics and the critique of psychoanalysis lead into abstract machines, becoming, bodies, and sensation. The film studies examine how colour, movement, rhythm, and bodily position carry cinematic experience beyond narrative meaning. Feminism runs through this argument: molecular becoming unsettles fixed identities while remaining answerable to concrete gendered power.

05

Original editions, translations, and access

ORIGINAL

Deleuze and Cinema: The Aesthetics of Sensation

English · Edinburgh University Press · 2000

ISBN 9780748611348Original edition details
PUBLISHED TRANSLATIONS

No translation details listed.