Anna Powell,
Deleuze and Horror Film.
Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005
ISBN: 0-7486-1747-7
US$36.00 (pb)
232pp
(Review copy supplied by Edinburgh University Press)

The rhizome has bloomed. The leaves now push up. Even in many undergraduate film programs, the multiplicity of Deleuze (or Deleuzoguattarian, or schizoanalytical) film scholarship has begun to variegate, differentiate and change. At the arrival of Anna Powell’s Deleuze and Horror Film in 2005, film-specific scholarship emerging out of the wave of interest in schizoanalysis and revolutionary continental philosophy was beginning to flourish. With the benefit of some hindsight, it is possible to see this Deleuze moment as being a touchstone for reappraising the broader political instincts in continental philosophy. It has become, perhaps against itself, a way to introduce and inculcate a reader into a constant and immanent relationship with the act of thinking (if we are to still follow through thinking’s difference from intellectualising.).

So, that the relationship of cinema scholarship and psychoanalysis would come under further strain from scholars working with this touchstone is natural. It is the heat and intensity of cinema that makes the Deleuzian approaches so attractive, where psychoanalysis often articulated the heat in systemic relationships. Powell’s text is rich and specific as an applied Deleuzian exploration, and her close interest in the texts indicates an appreciation for that impossible intensity of horror film.

In introducing the project, Powell disclaims at some length that the book mixes “Deleuze/Bergsonism with more traditional techniques from Film Studies, such as detailed textual close reading, to retain a sense of the medium’s specificity. “ (p. 9) There is a sense, however, as the disclaimers and positioning statements begin to overlay, that the reader is being asked to perform some of the argumentative warrant themselves. For example, the assertion that “film theory shaped by psychoanalysis and semiology treats images as static, symbolic components of underlying representational structures” and that it “abstracts them from their moving, changing medium” (p. 10) is, in itself, representational and strict. The central paradox of the project is that, in attempting to move past the representational elements of the cinema in favour of the affective and the intense, those cinemas (following the idea of molecularity) sometimes possess intensity only through that representational idiom – writ large in the production of some of the films chosen for analysis.

For example, in responses to Demon Seed (Donald Cammell 1977) and Hellraiser (Clive Barker 1987), Powell responds with a careful articulation of the ever-popular concepts of molecular becoming (in this case, becoming-human) and the body-without-organs. Sensing in both cases that the project faces a kind of immanent representational heat – the perverse, devouring domesticity in Demon Seed, and the paranoid furtive thrusting of Hellraiser – Powell begins to map the concepts against the films as much as with them. It is to the book’s credit that while some of the close reading may seem counter-intuitive, they always seem instinctual. As murderously and explicitly Freudian as Barker’s world is, Uncle Frank’s organs-without-a-body always served as a cheeky irrepressible autocritique.

Though it is never made truly explicit, Powell’s broader movement is a cult deprogramming of psychoanalytic readings in horror per se, as the examples move from recuperative, to establishing, to speculative. Two problems, of which Powell is eminently aware, give the book its negative and positive frictions. First, simply that schizoanalysis is poorly suited as a model of reading anything but itself – if we take it up as a modality of expressiveness, then portable readings will carry out only the most perfunctory of maneuvers. The second, as we explore the time-image and movement-image in the later sections, we have to do away with psychoanalysis’s graveyard. As welcome as that is, Powell flags at several junctures that the analysis is primarily performative of the theoretical impulse. The brilliant reading of The Haunting (Robert Wise 1963) recuperates it from character-intensive psychoanalytical readings, just as Powell admits that no recuperation is necessary when Deleuzian thought generally, but the Cinema books specifically, are infuriatingly open mechanisms.

The collective cognitivist brain-burp that led up to and followed Carroll and Bordwell’s exclamatory demand for us to ‘think again’ in Post-Theory, and the subsequent ungenerous and childish responses by Slavoj Zizek and his troops, coincided with a post-millenial urgency for film studies to get its house in order. But no unifying theory is coming. Powell’s introduction is perhaps the richest part of Deleuze and Horror Film precisely for this reason; a full admittance that film theory need not be pre-disposed to abstraction in the hopes of bringing the party to a close, but can instead get down to the nitty gritty of real work, of which there is always more. Horror film is seemingly always the site of the most intense intellectual disputes; horror causes thinking. Perception makes thought. So, rather than genre history and film theory causing a schism, Deleuze and Horror Filmperforms its best film-historical work when it is unapolgetically Deleuzian. With a long list of horror films (and many cross-genre selections), we are given less of an exploratory gesture for horror and more of a series of segmented gestures – which often explore genre and Deleuzian thought in tandem rather than at once.

Powell’s next book, Deleuze, Altered States and Film (2007) expanded on some of the conceptual material in this book, but forwarded far more of Powell’s reading of Deleuzian essays and in doing so, pierces the text of film trances, dreams and rituals with more elasticity.

Christian McCrea,
Swinburne University, Australia.