Give Me A Brain: Deleuze and the Ethics of Thinking in the Essay Film and Believing in This World

Abstract

Today we are faced with complex and multivalent challenges that are both material and existential. At the same time, it is increasingly easy to ignore the global chaos of our deeply polarised and atomised social, political and cultural milieu. For this reason, our art, philosophy, science and politics must, through their unique modalities, think through these issues in an ethical framework. In the medium of cinema, I argue that the ‘essay film’ is uniquely positioned to ethically respond to the challenges we are facing. The essay film is as a mode of ‘in-betweeness’, a filmic non-space, that coalesces the impulses of fiction, documentary and experimental filmmaking. This cinematic mode, like its literary antecedent, embraces heresy, liminality, and above all, thought. The essay film utilises the cinematic techniques of horizontal montage, elliptical editing, blending multiple mediums, reuse of archival footage, contrapuntal voice- over, and intertitles. The mode creates a violent oscillation of colours, sounds, rhythms and movements with a piercing essayistic inquisitiveness that cognitively and sensorially enlivens the spectator. I contend that present film scholarship fails to account for the intensities of the essay film’s operations and its intimate relationship with philosophy and ethics. I argue that by examining this form through the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze a radical potential for a unique ethical spectatorship emerges. Deleuze’s writing on the figuration of thought and film’s ability to elicit artistic affect and philosophic concepts provides a helpful framework to understand the essay film’s cinematic operations. An examination of Deleuzian becoming illuminates the philosophical implications of this unique mode. Finally, by exploring the essay film’s ethical underpinning as a Deleuzian call for belief in this world, the emancipatory capacities of this mode emerge. I examine three contemporary essay films that are exemplary of this mode’s aesthetic, philosophic and ethical potential: Two Years At Sea, I Am Not Your Negro and Homo Sapiens. They are, respectively, essayistic explorations of: world-building; identity/inequality; and ecological catastrophe. These films refuse to offer simplistic answers or saccharine optimism and instead present the complexity of the ethical concerns they address. They offer the spectator the opportunity to think, feel and embrace our fundamental capacity to address their ethical imperatives; the chance to restore our belief in this world.