Post-CinematicEmbodied Affect

Body oneOur lived body in the world

Sensuous experience

Being-in-the-world

Phenomenological

Body twoOur body under biopower

Controlled experience

Governmentality

Post-structuralist

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

“phenomena emerge through material agential intra-action”

Karen Barad,

Meeting the Universe Halfway

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.

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

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.

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

Digital media long for Firstness; to be perceived with the body

Laura Marks, Touch

“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

Syncopated editing

Jumpy, unstable editing

Narrative and spatial flow is disrupted

Post-continuity

Body one / Body two

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

Biopower

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

Biopower

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

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.

Becoming-swan

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

Becoming-swan

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

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.

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

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

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

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

Thank you!