Argument
Powell builds a typology of altered consciousness that moves from dream machines and pharmacoanalysis through altered body maps to temporal distortion and fractal becoming. Deleuze and Guattari's assemblage, affect, haptics, and synaesthesia are applied across mainstream, art, and experimental cinema. The analysis follows how cinematic techniques derange the spectator's habitual coordinates. Digital and fractal images become new sensory directions.
Core question
How does cinema induce altered consciousness through dreams, hallucinations, drugs, trance, ecstasy, sound, colour, rhythm, and spatial distortion? How does this affective contamination reorganize the spectator's body and thought?
Argument structure
Dreams, drugs, the sensorium, time, and fractal becoming form altered states co-composed by film and spectator. Visual distortion, sonic organization, bodily response, and narrative consequences interact. Dream signs enlarge circuits of actualization, while direct time concerns image relations that emerge when action loses its governing role.
Related concepts, chapters, and films
Original editions, translations, and access
Deleuze, Altered States and Film
English · Edinburgh University Press · 2007
ISBN 9780748632824Original edition detailsNo translation details listed.