The Pulse in Cinema

Abstract

This book builds on Jean-François Lyotard’s concept of the dispositif, Gilles Deleuze’s work on sensation and Georges Bataille’s economic theory to conceptualise a pulse in cinema. Its aim is to rethink the affective force and economy of film spectatorship better understood by Lyotard’s concept of the dispositif than the formulation of the cinematic apparatus of 1970s film theory. The dispositif recognises the distribution of the pulse – the force of intensities in the body of the spectator and in the image – in terms of an energetic exchange and expenditure. Charting prototypes of the pulse in cinema’s rhythmic forms through Étienne-Jules Marey’s protocinematic experiments from the nineteenth-century and experimental film from the twentieth-century, the book goes on to advance a theory of the pulse in an analysis of body horror films such as Georges Franju’s Le Sang des bêtes/Blood of the Beasts (1949), William Castle’s The Tingler (1959), George A. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead (1978), Lucio Fulci’s L’aldilà/The Beyond (1981), and Andrzej Żuławski’s Possession (1981). Drawing on ideas of movement, intensity and expenditure, this book argues that blood in the images of body horror films has the unseen intensity of vectors of the pulse. It contends that what the pulse communicates is affect.