Abstract

Through a careful study of contemporary filmmakers such as Claire Denis, Lars von Trier and Apichatpong Weerasethakul, I analyze how cinema may resort to (syn)aesthetic strategies to critically perceive the experience of sociality in a manner that breaks from film theory’s subjectivist resuppositions. I propose that as films move beyond the confines of the
individual (a carceral definition of identity) and enter into social practices they can produce alternate ways of living. Shifting their focus from the particular (instant) onto the field of (meta)physical entanglement, these filmmakers offer an aesthetic proposition of non-egoistic experience which unsettles many of film theory’s assumptions about the status of the image.
Instead of asking how moving images stand in for an idea or a concept, my work confronts the question: How does cinema create ways of life that inspire us to imagine, think and feel sociality otherwise? I explore how film studies and affect theory converge to condition the end of the
world as we know (and image) it.
In this dissertation, I draw on film theory, affect theory as well as black studies to explore contemporary cinemas through what I call « trans-apparition. » Unlike relational aesthetics or participatory art, trans-apparition is not a category of art practice, but rather a conceptual tool that engages the interstices between body-images, the knot or tangle of differences. Breaking with traditional forms of perceptual experience, I focus on films that
initiate sociality and fugitivity. For example, in chapter three, I analyze the work of Apichatpong Weerasethakul in terms of the clamor that agitates his images without any goal but to dissolve the beating of time. Weerasethakul creates an atmosphere that cuts through his films particularistic tendencies. He does so by unsettling our habits of perception and by using a cut-up technique that foregrounds the nonlocality of differences.
The filmmakers I examine in Whereas use different approaches to elemental
entanglement, building on techniques of interdisciplinary practice to announce and make felt other ways of living, thinking and doing.