Digital Cinema. Now.

Abstract

Post-Cinematic Affect By Steven Shaviro Zero Books, 2010 200 pp./$19.95 (sb) Since releasing his groundbreaking 1993 book Cinematic Body: Theory Out of Bounds, which introduced a Deleuzian view on affective cinema spectatorship, Steven Shaviro has written on network society, postmodernity, and the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead. His most recent book, Post-Cinematic Affect (2010), once again engages with film. It offers an important commentary on the condition of contemporary cinema overtaken by digitization, which has irreversibly altered our understanding of what film is and affected its aesthetics to such a degree that the medium has received verdicts about its end. The book drills straight into questions about the new conditions of cinema: What is the role of cinema, an art form inseparable from modernity, as part of late modern digitized media culture? Zero Books aims at inspiring new paths of critical thought, and Post-Cinematic Affect succeeds in this. The book is defined by Shaviro's literary, rather than overtly academic, starting point, asking what it feels like to live in the twenty-first century. Shaviro analyzes the new stylistic sensibilities in contemporary American cinema using Grace Jones's music video Corporate Cannibal (2008, directed by Nick Hooker), Richard Kelly's dark science fiction drama Southland Tales (2006), and Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor's science fiction thriller Gamer (2009) as examples of the features of digitized moving image culture, and offers a more thematic exploration of the multinational global market economy in Olivier Assayas's thriller Boarding Gate (2007) and his neo-noir Demonlover (2002). The examples discussed in the book, which explore the endlessly mutating, interconnecting, inorganic rhythms and flows of business economy, are analyzed on both thematic and cinematic levels. These flows define post-cinema; the Fordist production of classical Hollywood is replaced by a post-Fordist economy incarnated in digital forms of fluidity and constant change. Shaviro's outlining of recent American cinema, or post-cinema, will be of great interest to scholars of film and new media aesthetics, and their discussion focuses neatly on the relationships between modernist humanist aesthetics and posthuman tendencies. The poetics of post-cinema, or the analysis of the ways in which contemporary producers of film and music videos embrace digitization, will also be of interest to artists working in new media and film. The book encourages readers to think about artistic possibilities for diagnosing the structures of global capitalism, gender, race, and nationality, as well as the role of media itself. Because of its easygoing style, the book is also accessible to more mainstream audiences interested in the whereabouts of contemporary American cinema. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] In Cinematic Body, Shaviro demonstrated an impressive ability to grasp the tissue of cinematic images, to seize the aesthetic qualities and effects of film, and to tie these tightly within a conceptual framework; this functions enchantingly in Post-Cinematic Affect as well. …