Books by Patricia MacCormack
Posthuman Ethics
Posthuman theory asks in various ways what it means to be human in a time when philosophy has bec...
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Posthuman theory asks in various ways what it means to be human in a time when philosophy has become suspicious of claims about human subjectivity. Those subjects who were historically considered aberrant, and our future lives becoming increasingly hybrid show we have always been and are continuously transforming into posthumans. What are the ethical considerations of thinking the posthuman? Posthuman Ethics asks not what the posthuman is, but how posthuman theory creates new, imaginative ways of understanding relations between lives.
Ethics is a practice of activist, adaptive and creative interaction which avoids claims of overarching moral structures. Inherent in thinking posthuman ethics is the status of bodies as the site of lives inextricable from philosophy, thought, experiments in being and fantasies of the future. Posthuman Ethics explores certain kinds of bodies to think new relations that offer liberty and a contemplation of the practices of power which have been exerted upon bodies. The tattooed and modified body, the body made ecstatic through art, the body of the animal as a strategy for abolitionist animal rights, the monstrous body from teratology to fabulations, queer bodies becoming angelic, the bodies of the nation of the dead and the radical ways in which we might contemplate human extinction are the bodies which populate this book creating joyous political tactics toward posthuman ethics.
Contents: Posthuman ethics; The great ephemeral tattooed skin; Inhuman ecstast; Animalities: ethics and absolute abolition; The wonder of Teras; Mystic queer; Vitalistic ethics: an end to necrophilosophy; Epilogue: after life; Bibliography; Index.
About the Author: Patricia MacCormack is Reader in English, Communication, Film and Media at Anglia Ruskin University, UK, and author of Cinesexuality.
Reviews: ‘This is an exhilarating and thought-provoking book. Neither judgmental nor unconditionally celebratory of the posthuman condition, MacCormack's analyses make for compelling reading. The core of the argument is a passionate call for rethinking ethics starting from the multiple 'others' who were never quite human to begin with. Posthumanism will never be the same again after reading this remarkable study.’
Rosi Braidotti, University of Utrecht, The Netherlands
‘Written in the finest tradition of Spinoza’s practical philosophy, Patricia MacCormack’s Posthuman Ethics envisages a life without the dominating discourse of human subjectivity, the “undoing of us” as the basic ethical standard. Building upon Michel Serres’ concept of grace as a stepping aside, a ceding of place through ineffable silence, MacCormack forces us to “think the unthinkable” as pure flesh, as creative becoming.’
Colin Gardner, University of California, Santa Barbara, USA
Cinesexuality
Cinesexuality explores the queerness of cinema spectatorship, arguing that cinema spectatorship r...
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Cinesexuality explores the queerness of cinema spectatorship, arguing that cinema spectatorship represents a unique encounter of desire, pleasure and perversion beyond dialectics of subject/object and image/meaning; an extraordinary 'cinesexual' relationship, that encompasses each event of cinema spectatorship in excess of gender, hetero- or homosexuality, encouraging all spectators to challenge traditional notions of what elicits pleasure and constitutes desiring subjectivity.
Through a variety of cinematic examples, including abstract film, extreme films and films which present perverse sexuality and corporeal reconfiguration, Cinesexuality encourages a radical shift to spectatorship as itself inherently queer beyond what is watched and who watches. Film as its own form of philosophy invokes spectatorship thought as an ethics of desire. Original, exciting and theoretically sophisticated – focusing on continental philosophy, particularly Guattari, Deleuze, Blanchot, Foucault, Lyotard, Irigaray and Serres – the book will be of interest to scholars and students of queer, gender and feminist studies, film and aesthetics theory, cultural studies, media and communication, post-structural theory and contemporary philosophical thought.
Contents: Series editors' preface: for the love of cinema; Spectatorship: an inter-kingdom desire; A cinema of desire: cinesexuality and asemiosis; Cinemasochism; Baroque cinesexuality; Baroque becomings; Zombies without organs; Necrosexuality; The ecosophy of spectatorship; Bibliography; Index.
About the Author: Patricia MacCormack is Senior Lecturer in Communication and Film at Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge. Her principal research interests are in continental philosophy, particularly the works of Deleuze, Guattari, Irigaray, Foucault, Bataille, Lyotard and Blanchot and she has published extensively in these areas. She has also written on a diverse range of issues such as body modification, post-human ethics, performance art, monster theory and particularly Italian horror film.
Reviews: 'In film and cultural theory, we have lived too long in the age of signification and identification. In her brilliant and challenging book, Cinesexuality, Patricia MacCormack brings us into the era of intensity and becoming. Offering an Anti-Oedipus for image theory, MacCormack has produced a completely original approach to spectatorship as a corporeal and material distribution of desire beyond dialectics. For many readers, this will be an intensely liberating book.'
D.N. Rodowick, Harvard University, USA
'MacCormack is the ultimate third millennium sexual radical: she subverts discussions about the gender of the gaze with bold insights into the ethics and the erotics of contemporary spectatorship. She swaps linguistic regimes of signification for corporeal perspectives, semiotics for affect, identifications for hybrid contagions and exemplary cases for productive anomalies. This is a wickedly clever trans-disciplinary analysis of who we are in the process of becoming.'
Rosi Braidotti, Utrecht University, The Netherlands
Deleuze and the Schizoanalysis of Cinema
In 1971, Deleuze and Guattari’s collaborative work, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia ca...
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In 1971, Deleuze and Guattari’s collaborative work, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia caused an international sensation by fusing Marx with a radically rewritten Freud to produce a new approach to critical thinking, which they provocatively called "schizoanalysis." Deleuze and the Schizoanalysis of Cinema explores the possibilities of using this concept to investigate cinematic works in both the Hollywood and non-Hollywood tradition. It attempts to define what a schizoanalysis of cinema might be and introduces a variety of ways in which a schizoanalysis might be applied. This collection opens up a fresh field of inquiry for Deleuze scholars and poses an exciting challenge to cinema studies in general. Featuring some of the most important cinema studies scholars working on Deleuze and Guattari today, Deleuze and the Schizoanalysis of Cinema is a cutting edge collection that will set the agenda for future work in this area.
Contributors include: Gregory Flaxman, Amy Herzog, Joe Hughes, Gregg Lambert, Patricia MacCormack, Bill Marshall, David Martin-Jones, Elena Oxman, Patricia Pisters, Anna Powell and Mark Riley.
Table Of Contents
Introduction: Five Theses of Actually Existing Schizoanalysis of Cinema, Ian Buchanan (Cardiff University, UK)
1. Schizoanalysis and the Phenomenology of Cinema, Joe Hughes (University of Edinburgh, UK)
2. Schizoanalysis and the Cinema of the Brain, Gregg Lambert (Syracuse University, USA)
3. Losing Face, Gregory Flaxman (University of North Carolina, USA) and Elena Oxman (University of North Carolina, USA)
4. Disorientation, Duration and Tarkovsky, Mark Riley (Roehampton University, UK)
5. Suspended Gestures: Schizoanalysis, Affect and the Face in Cinema, Amy Herzog (CUNY, USA)
6. Schizoanalysis, Spectacle and the Spaghetti Western, David Martin-Jones (University of St Andrews, UK)
7. Cinemas of Minor Frenchness, Bill Marshall (University of Glasgow, UK)
8. Delirium Cinema or Machines of the Invisible?, Patricia Pisters (University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands)
9. Off Your Face: Schizoanalysis, Faciality and Cinema, Anna Powell (Manchester Metropolitan University, UK)
10. An Ethics of Spectatorship: Love, Death and Cinema, Patricia MacCormack (Anglia Ruskin University, UK)
Authors
Ian Buchanan
Ian Buchanan is Professor of Critical and Cultural Theory at Cardiff University, UK. He is the author of Deleuzism (Edinburgh UP, 2000) and the editor of Deleuze Studies.
Patricia MacCormack
Patricia MacCormack is Senior Lecturer in Communication and Film at Anglia Ruskin University, UK. She is the author of Cinesexuality (Ashgate, 2008).
Reviews
‘The eleven essays collected in this book produce a series of inventive digressions and displacements, or better, new social series that put cinema in play with the great critical project of Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Through the broader cultural arguments of Guattari and Deleuze, Deleuze and the Schizoanalysis of Cinema opens up new discursive spaces for investigating cinema through the linked domains of politics and desire.’
Professor D.N. Rodowick, Harvard University, USA
Pleasure, Perversion and Death: Three Lines of Flight for the Viewing Body
Book version of PhD Dissertation
Papers by Patricia MacCormack
When Anglo-Saxon warriors buckled on gem encrusted, intricately wrought gold arms and armor, they...
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When Anglo-Saxon warriors buckled on gem encrusted, intricately wrought gold arms and armor, they did not merely transform their appearance, but shifted their fundamental ontology. We consider objects from the Staffordshire Hoard as embodiments of fah and aelf-sciéne, specifically Anglo-Saxon ideas of visual splendor, and the modern notion of bling in order to excavate their role in the transformation of men into posthuman teratological wonders. We strive to imagine the hoard not as a series of objects but as embodied apparatuses inextricable from those who wore them and from the violence they were intended to fend off, yet accelerate.
This is part 1 of 6 of the dossier What Do We Talk about when We Talk about Queer Death?, edited ...
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This is part 1 of 6 of the dossier What Do We Talk about when We Talk about Queer Death?, edited by M. Petricola. The contributions collected in this article sit at the crossroads between thanatolo ...
Deleuze and the Schizoanalysis of Cinema
Deleuze and the Schizoanalysis of Cinema
, 2008
In 1971, Deleuze and Guattari’s collaborative work, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia ca...
more
In 1971, Deleuze and Guattari’s collaborative work, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia caused an international sensation by fusing Marx with a radically rewritten Freud to produce a new approach to critical thinking, which they provocatively called "schizoanalysis." Deleuze and the Schizoanalysis of Cinema explores the possibilities of using this concept to investigate cinematic works in both the Hollywood and non-Hollywood tradition. It attempts to define what a schizoanalysis of cinema might be and introduces a variety of ways in which a schizoanalysis might be applied. This collection opens up a fresh field of inquiry for Deleuze scholars and poses an exciting challenge to cinema studies in general. Featuring some of the most important cinema studies scholars working on Deleuze and Guattari today, Deleuze and the Schizoanalysis of Cinema is a cutting edge collection that will set the agenda for future work in this area.
Necrosexuality
Transgressive sexuality has frequently been defined through the dominant paradigms which it trans...
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Transgressive sexuality has frequently been defined through the dominant paradigms which it transgresses. This means transgressive sexuality is often seen as either affirming these paradigms by being oriented in dialectic opposition to them, or politically challenging in reference to them. Perversion is, however, the multiplicity at the very heart of desire that dissipates and redistributes the body's intensities. 'Normal' sexuality is one reiteration of these corporeal libidinal cartographies – reiterative because reliability in repetition is a key feature of normal sexuality's nature and power. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's claim that all desire affords a becoming means that transgression [1] is already within all forms of desire. Theirs is a project of queering desire, rather than reifying any one form of sexuality as queer. This article will explore the queerness of one seemingly heterosexual desire – male/female sexual situations – as it is incarnated in necrophilia. Deleuze and Guattari, together and separately, as well as Foucault, all critique the term 'transgression'. Transgression is unable to exist independently as a haecceity. It can only be measured against and in reference to, while a Deleuzio-Guattarian reading is an interrogation of the different parameters, paradigms and plateaus within rather than against systems, an alteration of trajectories and velocities. Perhaps a more correct term would be 'lines of flight', however I use the term transgression here because necrophilic trajectories have been truncated and reified through a variety of institutions and thus have a particular relationship with these institutions. The use of the term is, however, brief and tactical, and is only relevant while necrophilia's relationship with these institutions is being discussed and reactive rather than active affect is maintained in the analyses.
[2] Non-aggressive examples of necrophilia in three films, Beyond the Darkness (Aristede Massaccesi, Italy, 1979), Macabre (Lamberto Bava, Italy, 1981) and Flesh for Frankenstein (Antonio Margheriti, Italy, 1973), which include both male and female corpses, emphasise the ways in which necrophilic desire requires a destratification of the body into a Body without Organs. Accidentally but nonetheless relevant, these three films have all been banned, thus conflating the transgressive nature of their content and the act of viewing them – another point at which the residue of the problematic notion of transgression arises. Forensics describes the ruptured body in death as 'dishevelled'. Organs become genital, surgery sexual and the striation of the gendered body is dishevelled through the planes of pleasure [2] offered by the corpse. Necrophilia is configured into dialectic and onanistic practice, confusing subject and object, desire and disgust. These corpses are physically bodies with organs, but entirely reorganised, as is the desire of the necrophiles. When Deleuze and Guattari ask us to sing with our rectum, here we see those who fuck with their entrails, launching on becoming-viscera. Reading the body through gender signifiers of genitals is no longer relevant in these 'heterosexual' relationships. The larger structure of necrophilia in society will not form a major part of the essay. However recent changes to the laws in the US punish necrophilia as 'immoral' while vindicating institutionalised homophobia and misogyny seen in laws such as the homosexual panic law, and the low incidence of prosecution for rape. 'Perverse' sexualities, from homosexuality and necrophilia to celibacy and lust-murder are morally maligned as equivalent based on the ways all challenge 'proper' object choice. But non-violent perverse sexualities pose challenges to issues of corporeal volition and desire beyond traditional oppositional and hierarchical libidinal configurations.
Great Directors: Antonio Margheriti
Senses of Cinema: Great Directors
Antonio Margheriti
The category of great Italian horror direc...
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Senses of Cinema: Great Directors
Antonio Margheriti
The category of great Italian horror director throws up a variety of names, each of which are adept at particular subgenres. Among others Dario Argento is renowned for his gialli and occult films, Mario Bava most celebrated for his gothic horrors, Lucio Fulci for his gore films, Riccardo Freda for films heady with atmosphere, Ruggero Deodato for his seminal cannibal films and Aristide Massaccesi for exploiting the intersections of sex and gore. However only radically underestimated Antonio Margheriti has managed to produce beautiful and fascinating films in each of these genres in a career spanning five decades.
Very little has been written on Margheriti's work. Because he did not specialise in one or two subgenres of horror he is seen to be somewhat lacking commitment, hence specialisation, which has led to the mistaken belief that Margheriti is artisan of all but artist of none. Troy Howarth calls him “bargain basement” compared to Bava (2), the seminal Aurum encyclopaedia of Horror continually sees Margheriti as similar to but not as successful as Bava, Freda and even Argento. This opinion both fails to address his unique position as arguably the only director to make delirious and imaginative films in many subgenres and also highlights the habit of subjugating him to inevitable comparisons with those directors considered the expert in those particular subgenres. Such auteur isomorphism does not sit well for fans of Margheriti. His signature as an auteur is found in abstract evocations of styles and themes (particularly of perversion).
Baroque Intensity: Lovecraft, LeFanu and the Fold
Gothic sensibility is a haunted one. Protagonists are haunted by memories, by ghosts and supernat...
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Gothic sensibility is a haunted one. Protagonists are haunted by memories, by ghosts and supernatural beings, by the uncanniness of the unfamiliar made familiar and the familiar made unfamiliar, and by their own selves – which are often alienated, not known to themselves, impressionable and frequently ill. However illnesses of the brain and of sanity - particularly those pathologies which conflate phantasy with reality or, worse still, elucidate reality as an arbitrary apprehension of experience and phenomena - make the crises of the Gothic protagonist more than just dark fairy tales, lamentations or nightmares from which they can escape. The incarnation of so-called hallucination as capable of effectuating action and physical transformation enacts a versimilitudious conflation which is that of the material and the perspectival, of thought as real and reality as always and already a version of thought – the sensible is material. Captain Barton’s proclamation in J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s ‘The Familiar’ that ‘it was a reality’ expresses the inherent multiplicity of reality (my italics). The haunted Gothic protagonist lives in a particular world, a world of agreement between rational people (usually men, women are constantly running off to enjoy cacodaemonic copulations with vampires, werewolves and other assorted hybrid incarnations of seductive turpitude.) This protagonist is alienated from that rational world, but not entirely within a world of delirium. Hallucination describes the presence of an unreal within the world of a real, an intrusion of a not-there into what is there, be it a feeling which manifests itself through paranoia, nostalgia, a haunting ghost, mourning or simply the idea that the protagonist himself is alienated from the world as not really there: ‘The interior sense, it is true, is opened; but it has been and continues open by the action of disease.’(3)
Delirium is a complete colonisation of the real by phantasy. All becomes hallucination. Surely then if all becomes hallucination, hallucinations are reality. The memory of a former shared social real can either become the haunting ghost or a devolved mode of perception.  Delirium does not refer to things in the world that are not there, or a covering of the world by a different world. Delirium is an altogether otherworldly perception of the world, or, more precisely, the acknowledgement of the world as multiple, as concurrent palimpsest, as a teeming multi-plateaued incarnation rather than a singular space which we occupy. Hallucinations are otherworlds intruding or slipping between the cracks and hollows of any one singular plane of perception. In Gothic these slips are the point of the supernatural or the horrific. They must be exorcised to reiterate the protagonist as a person within society. Baroque does something quite different with similar phenomena.  Killeen emphasises that ‘the fear of marginalisation – rather than marginalisation itself – [is a] central feature of the Irish Gothic tradition.’(4) Paranoia and the compulsion to be cured of one’s perspective-altering pathology show that marginalisation is not a threat but rather that inclusion is always a tentative and arbitrary phantasy. Marginalisation excludes, but the fear of marginalisation finds the protagonist teetering on that very margin, on the in-between, oscillating precariously within the crack and hollow. The protagonist is within the fold, a key idea of Baroque posited by Leibniz which will be extrapolated later in this article. In Gothic the protagonist encounters these other worlds, but rather than elements of those worlds intruding through singular symbols as hallucinations, the Baroque protagonist is folded within these worlds. These worlds are simultaneous with the real world but apprehensible at different frequencies, through different planes and via different streams of physics, and are thus folded with the real world. The question for the Baroque protagonist is not whether the hallucination as symptom can be cured, but to what extent the otherworld will be welcomed and thus entire perspective altered? The Baroque protagonist in Gothic fiction is the one that dies. There is no cure for the Gothic pathology, but the death of the Gothic protagonist is the birth of the Baroque. While the protagonist may ‘die’, there is rare evidence that this death is not the end. The Baroque protagonist is not haunted by a dead relative or friend, but at best haunts his own former world. Usually however, Baroque literature loses interest in the former worlds and seeks to explore these new worlds, or the stories cut off at the point of death of the protagonist because our perception from this world makes an encounter with any post-death/post-reality perception difficult at best. How can one describe the indescribable, show the entirely visible within the dark, explain form through non-Euclidian physics, or through systems where it is the in-between not the demarcated that constitutes communities of non-dividuated individuals?  Baroque heroes love their symptoms, welcome their pathologies, and die only in order for their perception of what constitutes life to be reborn.
Great Gothic monsters come from alternate genealogies or, more correctly, they are non-genealogical. The vampire and werewolf are both hybrid and repeat cellularly through infection rather than reproduction. The created monster, such as Frankenstein’s creature, is similarly hybrid, both alive and dead. This monster prefers the dead world but as he is already dead what he seeks is a world of dreaming. Vampires and werewolves perceive in the otherworlds and dream in this one. They awake at night because for them the real world is a phantasy, an ethereal adventure, lucid dreaming through monstrous bodies of light. Otherworldy monsters are Gothic from the perspective of a society that wishes to banish them, Baroque from the perspective of the protagonist relinquishing that society. Let’s face it, most victims of these monsters are willing victims. The vampire does not repeat itself but brings the victim into a different mode of perceiving the world. The wolf is the becoming-animal of the human. Werewolves and vampires collapse the bifurcations which sustain social reality – male/female, human/animal, material/phantasmatic, repellent/attractive, monstrous/godly, devolved/evolved. Unsurprisingly the most willing victims of these monsters are frequently those who are to an extent already alienated from the normal or dominant perspectives of society – women, the solitary, the intellectual, the homosexual, the alienated, and the reclusive. All of these have, to an extent, already forsaken that reality which Baroque seductions redeem them from. Using two stories by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, ‘Green Tea’ and ‘The Familiar’ as examples of Irish Gothic stories, and reading them with the work of H.P. Lovecraft, particularly ‘The Dreams in the Witch-House’, this article will attempt to posit Le Fanu as, beyond a Gothic teller of tales, a great writer of the Baroque.
Great Directors: Lucio Fulci
“And you will face the sea of darkness, and all therein that may be explored.”
– ”The Book of Ei...
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“And you will face the sea of darkness, and all therein that may be explored.”
– ”The Book of Eibon”, cited in The Beyond
Lucio Fulci is best remembered for his delirious hallucinatory and visceral horror films of the late 1970s and early 1980s. Expressed in these films was a creative libation of splanchnic yet nonetheless seductive images strung together by loose, almost incoherent, narratives. As a director, Fulci has worked in most genres. In over 60 films and 120 scripts he has shown himself to be a film pragmatist, working within generic and financial constraints to produce films which intensified during certain periods of time and style to redefine genre and cinematic pleasure.
This tour of Fulci films will seem, particularly in the earlier summaries, rudimentary and not entirely sensitive to a thorough analysis of what is here being called a Great Director. Completists may suggest I am fetishising certain films, perhaps because of my own proclivity toward the horror genre, at the expense of the redeeming features of others. However, unlike other great directors, who exhibit strengths and weaknesses in a body of films that are coherent and present disparate aspects of a generally unified auteurist vision, Fulci expressed a vision that not only strained against the limits of his tight budgets and the lack of respect he received in his lifetime beyond the fringe of cult film aficionados, but also the limits of cinematic form itself. While paying limited address to the necessities of narrative, character, resolution and plot, unlike other film directors he did not transform these in a project of deliberate challenge or deconstruction of image and perception. Fulci seems more to be possessed of a certain conceptual world, a fleshy and dark world which insinuates the infinity of possibilities of thought and the affectivity of art beyond signification itself, even subversive signification. Far from being the radical challenge to good taste or fetishised for being a driving force in the denouncement in Britain of the video nasty that many (mostly male) critics espouse him as, Fulci does not seem to care for those conventions he flouts. Although the claim may place me at a lunatic fringe, I am tempted to align his vision with those of other mystics such as William Blake, Arthur Machen, H.P. Lovecraft and Austen Spare, someone more deserving of analysis through Deleuze and Guattari rather than film theory. These people were not interested in particular projects so much as the project of possibility itself. That they came from the disparate arenas of poetry, prose, philosophy and art matters less than their shared philosophies, and here Fulci is the visionary who is an accidental filmmaker, rather than a director with something to say. The act of viewing Fulci's best films is similarly an act of possibility, opening up to the creative act of thought launching self outside the self, thought from the outside, and the involution of image, flesh and thought that reflects itself the incarnation of these three elements in the trinity of Fulci, Rossi and Sacchetti. He is yet to receive academic attention beyond rudimentary pop criticism, and the loss of this director is made more acerbic through the knowledge that he will never see the acclaim his films may one day (deservedly) receive.
Barbara Steele's Ephemeral Skin
Steele's drama of totalisation as the fetish object for male fans of Italian horror is, worse tha...
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Steele's drama of totalisation as the fetish object for male fans of Italian horror is, worse than being burnt at the stake or donned with her mask, the real tragedy of her destiny. No fan would deny her visual texture opens us to excesses of signification, even rudimentarily to what 'desirable' means, but more to film's dispersion of gender, sexuality and pleasure. In order to celebrate the intensity of film, new systems of thinking the images therein need to be included in film philosophy, especially in reference to theorising women beyond their resignation to an expression of male psyche and theory. Moving from sign to affective inflection makes images material and viewing transformative, something cinephiles celebrate as the palpable thrill of watching. Lyotard states:
We will never be sufficiently refined, the (libidinal) world will always be too beautiful, there will always be too great an excess of mute vibrations trembling in the most ordinary nonsense or depressions, we will never stop becoming disciples of its affects, the routs of its affects ceaselessly crossing and recrossing the signs of representation and tracing the most unheard of, the most audacious, the most disconcerting itineraries on them…because desire cannot be assumed, accepted, understood, locked up in names – nomenclatured because these intensities we desire horrify us. (20)
An Italian horror film may seem a nonsensical realm for rethinking women within sexual discursive regimes. But film's, especially strange and beautiful horror film's, propensity for making desire peculiar and pleasure surprising places it in a positive position through which to think gender and sexuality differently. There is something about Steele's face that is too beautiful, too audacious, horrifying, but only as it is expressed through the medium of film. Hence our relationship with this face is incomparable to other discourses of sexuality. Our cinesexuality, not our 'everyday' sexuality (which I would argue exists tactically not ontologically) allows us to be seduced by Steele. In the world of horror film her face is hol(e)y and we are the disciples of its affects.
Christopher Lee: His Italian Journey Into Perversion
It is tempting to begin any discussion of Christopher Lee's work with a summation of his British ...
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It is tempting to begin any discussion of Christopher Lee's work with a summation of his British horror roles. But if Lee's British roles resonate with every plateau of horror that can be hermeneutically incarnated within a character, his work in Italy between 1961 and 1964 evoke worlds of perversion, populated not purely with strange characters, but which function through paradigms of necrophilia, sadism, masochism, fetishism, autoerotica, torture, nazism, homosexuality, asphyxophilia and the pleasure both characters and viewer take in violence. It is key in this article however that the term perversion is understood as a creative term which points to revolutionary representations of desire in general rather than specific sexual pathologies. It is in no way disparaging or derogatory. Lee begins his journey into perversion (1) in Mario Bava's 1961 peplum/horror Hercules in the Haunted World (Ercole al Centro Della Terra) as the evil Lico, Prince of the Underworld. In The Crypt and the Nightmare (La Crypta e L'Incubo, Camilo Mastrocinque, 1962), an adaptation of J. Sheridan LeFanu's lesbian vampire novel Carmilla, Lee plays Count Karnstein, the father of Laura (Adriana Ambesi), who takes a suspiciously exerted interest in his daughter's sexual appeal, especially as it becomes the victim of the perversion of lesbian vampirism. The following year Lee played Kurt Menliff in Mario Bava's The Whip and the Body (La Frusta e il Corpo, 1963) a contentious character, described by most critics as sadistic but more a slave to his lover Navenka's (Dahlia Lavi) masochistic drives and to the sadism exhibited by his dead jilted lover. The same year Lee played the deformed and complicit loyal servant Erich, to skull faced torturer and ex-Nazi Punisher (Mirko Valentin), for whom he sacrifices his life, holding Punisher like a lover as he dies, in Antonio Margheriti's The Virgin of Nuremberg (La Virgine di Norimberga). Lee's final Italian horror is strangely the most old-fashioned and low budget (filmed in black and white), and perhaps the most peculiar both in Lee's heavily made-up appearance and obsession with necrophilia as Count Drago. Castle of the Living Dead (Il Castello dei Morti Vivi, Luciano Ricci, 1964) was also Michael Reeves' first taste of directing and Donald Sutherland's first film acting role. It was filmed, like Crypt, Flesh for Frankenstein (Antonio Margheriti, 1973) and many other Italian horror films, in Bormazo Castle, near Viterbo. Unlike most of the other films however, Castle utilises the gardens, which include titanic carved statues designed to present a vision of hell – enormous fighting fantastical beasts, a life-sized elephant with soldier in trunk beating him to death on the ground, a screaming face cave, the entrance to which is through the gaping maw. This film palpably emphasises what the others evoke, in that perversion exceeds one character, orienting the entire landscape and hanging heavy in the air, not antagonising but consuming the 'normal' characters. In Lee's own words, his most famous role of Dracula incarnates a “strange sexual manifestation. Maybe it's because I tried to make Dracula a romantic figure. Someone you could feel sorry for.” (2) His roles in the five Italian movies with which this article deals present figures for which there is no sympathy. These Italian figures are instead seductive in the baroque sense of the word, presenting suffering and the various perverse contortions of human flesh as inextricable from desire, conflating the astonishingly beautiful with the deliriously horrific.
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