bio
Orna Raviv is a filmmaker and a film theorist. She is an assistant teaching professor at the Unit for History and Philosophy of Art, Design and Technology, Shenkar College, and a teaching fellow at the Philosophy Department of Haifa University.
title
"Cinematic Modalities of Post-Human Activity"
abstract
This paper looks into the ethical possibilities that cinema opens for thinking the notion of the Other in the domain of the post-human. By looking into Gilles Deleuze’s ethics of immanence, I show how cinematic experience changes the way a viewer perceives self and world, allowing her an encounter with an Other as part of a plane of assemblages of becomings. I begin with a critical view of science-fiction films, claiming that although they seem to promote screen encounters with the Other in its most radical phase, as a non-human, they mostly tend to stay within an anthropocentric approach. Steven Shaviro’s analysis of Chris Cunningham’s video to Bjork’s “All Is Full of Love” (1999) gives me a starting point to explore new cinematic modes of perception and affection that remove the viewer from her human perspective (Shaviro; 2002). Thinking along with Deleuze and Shaviro I look into Chris Landreth’s short animated documentary Rayan (2004) as an example of how post-human cinema understood in terms of assemblages and becomings is not fully available to the viewer’s perceptual and conceptual reach and therefore allows an encounter with alterity. I will conclude my discussion with the ethical implications of such a view.
