Following our exploration of digital modularity, week two shifts toward the sensory “structure of feeling” that defines the post-cinematic era. As Steven Shaviro argues, we must distinguish between personalised “emotion”-the psychological clarity of classical cinema seen in Mildred Pierce (1945)-and “affect,” which is a pre-personal, physical intensity that hits the nervous system before conscious thought.

“A visual contrast in cinematic regimes: The psychological clarity of classical emotion in Mildred Pierce(1945) versus the free-floating, impersonal affect of the post-cinematic ‘Men Shouting’ in The Big Short(2015).

Shaviro highlights Nick Hooker’s music video for Grace Jones’s “Corporate Cannibal” as a radical example of this shift. As a digital production, it has little in common with traditional film; Jones’s body is subjected to digital processing that stretches and deforms her image, moving beyond character representation into a pure, deforming affective flow.

I experienced this “regime of affect” first-hand during the filming of Eximo (2024). A significant challenge involved reacting to my own alternate characters using the Meisner technique. Meisner requires being “in the present” and reacting purely from physical sensation. In a post-cinematic set, however, that “present” is fragmented. In the digital void of the green screen, my performance became a dialogue with a shadow. Reacting to my own alternate versions-ghosts that would only exist in post-production-I had to abandon the safety of a psychological arc. My body transformed into an affective conductor, channeling raw, visceral intensities that bypassed narrative logic to feed the digital machine.

This mirrors what Matthias Stork calls “Chaos Cinema,” where the “truth” of a performance lies in its kinetic energy rather than linear continuity. We see this in films like The Big Short (2015), where anger circulates as a free-floating affect, or in the fractured memories of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), where characters feel intensities without understanding their narrative source.

Subjectivity in fragments Michel Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004) uses non-linear editing to mirror the characters’ loss of narrative memory, forcing the audience to experience raw affect before psychological understanding.

Free-floating affect Adam McKay’s The Big Short (2015) uses kinetic editing and “men shouting” to circulate impersonal intensities that mirror the volatility of global finance. 

Furthermore, Francesco Casetti’s concept of “Relocation” reminds us that the cinematic experience is no longer tied to the theatre; it is reactivated on any device, from a cinema screen to a smartphone. As an actress, being “mindful” of this means understanding that my performance is a module of intensity designed to resonate within the fragmented flows of our global media ecology. By treating this blog as “performative research” (Grant, 2016), I can conclude that my craft is now an essential gear in the post-cinematic affective machine.

Post by: Rocío Cerqueiro

Bibliography

• Casetti, F. (2015) The Lumière Galaxy: Seven Keywords for the Cinema to Come. New York: Columbia University Press.
• Grant, C. (2016) ‘The Audiovisual Film Essay as Performative Research’, Necsus Journal.
• Shaviro, S. (2010) ‘Post-Cinematic Affect: On Grace Jones, Boarding Gate and Southland Tales’, Film-Philosophy.
• Stork, M. (2012) Chaos Cinema [Video Essay].