Deleuze and Cinema: The Aesthetics of Sensation
English · Edinburgh University Press · 2000
ISBN 9780748611348Verify editionNo verifiable published translation record was located.
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?
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.
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.