The Matrix of Visual Culture: Working with Deleuze in Film Theory (review)

In The Matrix of Visual Culture Patricia Pisters pragmatically applies Gilles Deleuze's film-philosophy to the sustained critique of various canonical, commercial and contemporary films. Translating Deleuze's philosophical methodologies into digestible terms of engagement is a laudable achievement in itself, as I recall trying to work with the dual volumes—cinema 1: movement-image and cinema 2: the time-image—as being challenging, to say the least.

Pisters's final outcome is admirable. Explanations of the new Deleuzian terminology are grounded with excellent textual analysis of a variety of moving-image events. Importantly, Pis-ters is not, it seems, a Deleuze apologist— a trait that characterizes many defenders of his film-theory-philosophy. Avoiding the relativism of attempting to champion all facets of Deleuze's critical strategy, Pisters makes clear that, for the time being, certain principles are more fruitful in their application to known films, while other arguments are less developed. Concepts such as the interconnection of the virtual and the actual, and the notion of "becoming," "a process and an attempt to think differently, to see or feel something new in experience by entering into a zone of proximity with somebody or something else" (p. 106), are particularly engaging. By referring to popular films, the accessibility of this new approach to Deleuze's film scholarship is reiterated. Further, and more interesting from a disciplinary perspective, is the positioning of Deleuzian film theory in subtle opposition to contemporary psychoanalytic theory—which Pisters exemplifies most notably through the film criticism of Slavoj Zizek.

Consequently (and arguably rightly so) Pisters's Deleuzian methodology does seem to make considerable moves toward a viable alternative to psychoanalysis, specifically in the critique of subjectivity and the cinema. The knowing opposition of post-structuralist deconstructive approaches with Deleuze's rhizomatic generative methodology (in crude summary, the study of networks rather than isolated points) does provide a welcome respite from the deliberations of certain strands of film scholarship that lack a developmental perspective.

In that sense, The Matrix of Visual Culture enters into the spectrum of contemporary film scholarship with the same agenda as Vivian Sobchack's landmark publication The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of the Film Experience (1992), as both a critique of the discipline of film studies, and its simultaneous reinvigoration. Most importantly, in my view, Pisters reconstitutes the apparent ruin of 20th-century film studies in such a way that it accommodates a variety of practices that largely have been excluded. Thus, animation— which Pisters suggests, in her final chapter, is predictive of the future of cinema—stands alongside live-action film, games and other aspects of our contemporary visual culture.

Though the limits of space warrant their absence, I felt an urge to set Pis-ters's use of Deleuze against other aspects of film studies, such as the cognitive agenda—perhaps as an antidote to the trappings of constructing a position in opposition to the praxis of psychoanalytic theory.

Ironically, it is in the reworking of Deleuze's film theory by other writers that its potential is unlocked, for instance, in the way that Pisters shifts away from the auteur stance of his publications toward a contemporary attitude. Such an emphasis on the historical moment within which Deleuze worked is timely, with the application of his philosophy present at the cutting edge of art, science and technology. For this reason, Deleuze is not the film studies panacea that some may feel him to be. However, there is little more Deleuzian per se than the reworking of his philosophy for our contemporary cultural climate, so eloquently demonstrated by Pisters. I had suspected prior to reading The Matrix of Visual Culture that its subtitle—" Working with Deleuze in Film Theory"—might have been something of a misnomer, conscious of Robert Stam's doubt about actually "working" with Deleuze, and holding similar reservations myself. Happily, I have been proven wrong, by a rigorous, progressive...