The grace of destruction: a vital ethology of extreme cinemas PDF
Preview The grace of destruction: a vital ethology of extreme cinemas
The Grace of Destruction Thinking Cinema Series Editors David Martin-Jones, University of Glasgow, UK Sarah Cooper, King’s College, University of London, UK Volume 3 The Grace of Destruction A Vital Ethology of Extreme Cinemas Elena del Río Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc NEW YORK • LONDON • OXFORD • NEW DELHI • SYDNEY Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway 50 Bedford Square New York London NY 10018 WC1B 3DP USA UK www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2016 © Elena del Río, 2016 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Río, Elena del, author. Title: The grace of destruction: a vital ethology of extreme cinemas/Elena del Río. Description: New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016. | Series: Thinking cinema | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2015039371 | ISBN 9781501303029 (hardback) | ISBN 9781501303036 (paperback) Subjects: LCSH: Violence in motion pictures. | Motion pictures–Philosophy. | BISAC: PERFORMING ARTS/Film & Video/History & Criticism. | PHILOSOPHY/General. Classification: LCC PN1995.9.V5 R56 2016 | DDC 791.43/6552–dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015039371 ISBN: HB: 978-1-5013-0302-9 ePDF: 978-1-5013-0304-3 ePub: 978-1-5013-0305-0 Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India For Constanza vi Contents Acknowledgments viii Introduction: From Violence to Forces: Extreme Cinemas as Ethological Experimentation 1 1 The Disease of Morality 31 2 Bare Life 77 3 Physics of Violence, Folds of Pain 117 4 Ethology of Death 157 5 Extinction 197 Notes 217 Bibliography 245 Index 253 Acknowledgments Under the title “Violently Oscillating: Science, Repetition and Affective Transmutation in Fassbinder’s Berlin Alexanderplatz,” a slightly different version of the first half of Chapter 3 has appeared in Deleuze Studies 3, no. 1 (2009). A slightly modified version of the latter has also appeared in A Companion to Rainer Werner Fassbinder, ed. Brigitte Peucker, Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012. Under the title “Berlin Alexanderplatz: The Becoming-Violence of Performance,” an abridged and revised version has appeared in Acting and Performing in Moving Image Culture: Bodies, Screens, Renderings, eds Jörg Sternagel, Deborah Levitt and Dieter Mersch, [transcript] Metabasis, 2012. The ideas in this book came together in a state of crowded solitude, in dialogue with the ideas of many. I am very grateful to Patricia Pisters for inviting me to participate in the 2010 Deleuze Summer School in Amsterdam. The lectures that I gave on that occasion sowed the seed for this project and launched me into thinking about the conjunction between cinema, ethics, and negative affects. I am also grateful to Ian Buchanan, Joshua Delpech-Ramey, Eleanor Kaufman, Gregg Lambert, and James Williams for being such good-natured, party-loving philosophers. I am particularly thankful to Gregory Flaxman, who has been a generous, steady interlocutor and whose subtle questioning of some of my early ideas went a long way toward helping me find the direction this book finally took. I also wish to thank Claire Colebrook for engaging with me on the topic of virtual violence and for encouraging me to think further along those lines. Brent Adkins generously shared his thoughts on death and Spinoza and helped me untangle some apparent contradictions. Aaron Gerow gave me a lot to think about in regard to Kitano’s cinema. Among the friends and kindred spirits in the conference circuit, I want to thank Jennifer Barker, Allison de Fren, Celestino Deleyto, Amy Herzog, and Kriss Ravetto for their brilliant minds and their warm hearts. A special debt of gratitude goes to Ronald Bogue, whose support of my work on Deleuze and cinema has been consistently reliable and invaluable over the years. The grant I received from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada was instrumental in allowing me to travel to conferences Acknowledgments ix while I was writing the book and to secure graduate student assistance. Among the students at the University of Alberta who worked with me on this project, Emily Hass and Shama Rangwala deserve a special mention for their hard work and their attention to detail. I’m also very grateful to Brianna Wells who worked happily and diligently to make it all come together during the formatting/ editing process. David Martin-Jones and Sarah Cooper, editors of the “Thinking Cinema” series at Bloomsbury, offered their enthusiastic support early on, and paved the way for a smooth submission process. Their final editing comments just rounded it all up in a beautiful way. The anonymous readers at Bloomsbury provided generous and insightful comments and contributed to making this a better book. Thank you also to Katie Gallof and Mary Al-Sayed at Bloomsbury for their efficiency in all practical matters. Finally, my gratitude to my friends in Edmonton who have always made me feel at home—Chris, Ela, Gisele, Miriam, Piet, Stefano, and Sylvia—and to those friends in the distance who remain so close and dear, especially Ana, Arianne, Rita, Roz and Teresa. And, as always, my gratitude to Prem Rawat for showing me that things can always change in the time it takes to take one breath.
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