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Mar 14, 2018
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#59
These time machinics ask how to negotiate the differential of excess as the remainder of anotherness. Machines here are black boxes of relation, serving to derange. But the ethico-aesthetical question across these films [Vertigo, Sushou River, Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive, and Inland Empire], How to live in the intensity of becoming's heterogeneity, without falling into exhaustion or death? What kind of time machinics open to anotherness as a felt futurity? Across Vertigo and its affective remakes, this differential might fail at the level of character body, but is made felt, across spectatorial and cinematic bodies, as the sign of the more-to-life, or the productiveness of bodies in time.
At least since George Méliés's Le voyage dans la lune (1902), the history of cinema is a long archive of images of the future, beautiful and dreadful visions of how the future might look and sound. Cinema today is in what we might call, borrowing from Steven Shaviro, a "post cinematic" moment, affected, but not caused, by the technologies of the digital turn in cinema. The post cinematic marks a moment when cinema has lost its cultural dominance, and enters into an experimentation with the new "powers of expression"; in a sense, the anachronistic persistence of the cinematic is precisely a productive eccentricity. An anarchival impulse characterises the postcinematic moment, as we feel new potential emerging from cinema's pastness: a "suspended re-animation" of post cinematic time machines.7 Cinematic time machines are reinvented through the production of what I call "anarchival bodies." Suspended between memory and emergent novelty, this anarchival impulse figures suspense itself as a mode of ambiguous embodiment, characterised by the double [....] These are bodies as time machines: a primary mode for rediscovering the heterogeneity of our own existence in time.
Allana Thain
Like your last good meal on earth?
Like the electric chair.