Digital Audiovisual Media Class Blog

A space for uploading regular blog posts on topics covered in the module

Post-Cinematic Affect as A New Structure of Feeling

It is evident that the development of digital technologies has enabled various new forms of film producing and editing styles these days. Terms such as “chaos cinema” and “post continuity” are brought up by many scholars studying the concept of post-cinema. However, it is also important to look at what new sensations and viewing experiences that digital technologies has brought to contemporary audience in a “post-cinema” era. This section would focus on explaining in detail what Steven Shaviro calls the “post-cinematic affect” as a new structure of feeling and some examples will be provided. To begin with, post-cinematic affect refers to a kind of expressive sensibility that free-floated in the society we live in. Such strategies of making moving images are applied in addressing contemporary audience’s viewing experience. This means that these works not only reflect the progress of socio-cultural development, but also contribute in the constitution of social processes.

For instance, from the frequent transitions among multiverses in the movie Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022), it is hard to find the existence of continuity in space and movement. Instead, we feel overwhelmed by the intensified moving images and are no longer certain about the presence of what we see has actually existed. The mechanism behind is the development of advanced information technology and neoliberal financial dynamic, reflecting the fact that we are surrounded by an unstable environment filled with fast-changing information and more ‘flexible’ individual autonomy. Similarly, as the screenshots from the Southland Tales (2006) shown below, the incorporation of cable news channels, ubiquitous surveillance screens, and reality TV shows in the movie map the flow of how it feels like living in a post-cinematic era filled with excessive and fast-changing transmedia network.

To better understand the term post-cinematic affect, it is also essential to distinguish “affect” and “emotion”. Affect is a non-subject sensation that comes before narrative in a way that we may not even realize its existence, whereas emotion is when affect is sensed by a subject and qualified or produced its own meaning based on the consciousness of that subject. As Shaviro also mentioned, subject would control the affect they captured in a way that produce their own emotions. Take the clips from The Big Short (2015) as an example, faced with the pressure from the Wall Street to squeeze the short

position in the US housing market, Scion Capital, Brownfield Fund, and Front Point Partners all swamped by the flow of such intensive affective flow and expressed through loose shouting but without specific content about what they are shouting about. This actually linked with Massumi’s argument, which demonstrates that subject engages with and formed by broader cultural, political and financial processes when the flow of affective has weakened the individual subjectivity and move us away form, even beyond ourselves.

Sia (Xinyi Ji) – 33729902

9/11/2022

michaelgodd

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