Birds Desaster

Film-Philosophy 14.
2010
Its the End of the World!: The Paradox of Event and Body in Hitchcocks The Birds
Bruno Lessard
Ryerson University
After all, what most urgently needs thought in this century, if not the event and the phantasm. - Michel Foucault (1977, 180)
The rise of ecocriticism in literary and cultural studies in the 1990s has paved the way for a similar interest in the representation of nature and environmentalist discourses in film studies.1 Expanding on initial interests in Romantic poetry and American transcendentalism, pioneering publications such as Jhan Hochmans Green Cultural Studies: Nature in Film, Literature, and Theory (1998), Gill Branstons Hollywood Utopia: Ecology in Contemporary American Cinema (2004), and David Ingrams Green Screen: Environmentalism and Hollywood Cinema (2004) have contributed to introducing film scholars to environmentally oriented topics such as industrialisations impact on endangered species, ecofeminisms critique of mans power struggle with nature, the destruction of ecosystems, instrumental rationality and human beings careless treatment of nature. Given the increasing number of films that focus on the hypothetical destruction of the earth, the retribution of the earth via natural disasters, and the representation of post-apocalyptic environments, we could perceive as only logical the extension of ecocriticism to film studies.
1
For a concise account of the rise of ecocriticism, see Heise (2006).

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Film-Philosophy | ISSN: 1466-4615
Film-Philosophy 14.1
2010
My intervention in the rapidly expanding field of ecocriticism argues that future work in film studies, while continuing to pay attention to the representation of animals and natural disasters,2 will have to expand its already broad horizons to foreground one concept that systematically underlies writings on catastrophe films, namely, the event. In twentiethcentury philosophy, the concept of the event has occupied a central place in the writings of Alfred North Whitehead, Martin Heidegger, Gilles Deleuze, and Alain Badiou. Nevertheless, as Foucault points out in this articles epigraph, few concepts need more to be at the centre of contemporary thought than that of the event. Nature-oriented film analysis cannot overlook this most debated of notions. Sparked by the increasingly predominant position of event(s) within the contemporary political, media, and environmental spheres, ecocriticism provides us with an opportunity to rethink the relations between the controversial concepts of humanity, nature and animality as they relate to eventness. Yet it seems that critics who have analysed disaster films have bypassed crucial factors that should configure the understanding of this genre. Such films all relating to an implicit concept of the event around which characters and cinematic language gravitate, I aim to show that it is nearly impossible to discuss them without a prior theorisation of the visual production of events in contemporary cinema.3 Considering floods, volcanic
Such recent films form a relatively new genre that is called disaster films, and it certainly takes its roots in 1950s science-fiction films. What disaster and postapocalyptic films such as Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982), Waterworld (Kevin Reynolds, 1995), Twister (Jan de Bont, 1996), Dantes Peak (Roger Donaldson, 1997), 28 Days Later (Danny Boyle, 2002), Time of the Wolf (Michael Haneke, 2002), and 2012 (Roland Emmerich, 2009) have in common, not to mention the apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic worlds depicted in Japanese animation, is their portrayal of a world immersed in the visual representation of destruction or the rendering of an unimaginable aftermath. With the help of digital technologies, morphing, and computer-generated imaging, contemporary filmmakers are able to envision catastrophic events that could only be glimpsed at in science-fiction films of the 1950s. 3 A few film scholars have examined cinema from the point of view of event theory. For investigations of cinema that use a Deleuzian framework, see Bttner and Ries (1997) and Conley (2000). Branston (2007) proposes an interesting concept, issue event cinema, to characterise recent blockbusters that center on climate change. However, he does not philosophically foreground his notion of event. Mullarkey
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eruptions, or earthquakes as instances of events will hopefully add to both the theorisation of the event in philosophy and the conceptualisation of natural catastrophes in film studies. In this article I will not be concerned with such disaster films. Instead, I will purposely turn to what could be considered a pre-disaster film, Alfred Hitchcocks The Birds (1963), in order to shed light on the concept of the event as it could be used by ecocritics and to suggest that such a concept is equally pertinent to support the analysis of such a film. I will use The Birds as a case study for circumscribing the filmmakers own theory of the event and compare it to those of Gilles Deleuze and Alain Badiou. Ultimately, Hitchcocks use of bird attacks will be shown to motivate an understanding of the event as a relational concept that cannot resort to the dichotomy between continuity and rupture that has been advanced in influential conceptualisations. Foucaults admonition to rethink the concepts of the event and the phantasm can fruitfully shed light on the fate of The Birds in Hitchcock studies. Upon closer inspection, one will soon notice that it is the latter term, phantasm, which has occupied centre stage in critical interventions. To the detriment of a theorisation of the event that seems to have been taken for granted, critics have focussed on the films depiction of lifes unpredictability, the maternal superego, threats of castration and fetishism, and the apocalyptic imaginary, among others.4 I argue that it is imperative to turn to the notion of event to actually evade interpretations of the film; indeed, the question What do the bird attacks mean? has occupied critics for decades, but the construction of the attacks as relational events has not been touched upon.5
(2009, 182-184) briefly examines Titanic (James Cameron, 1997) from the point of view of Bergson and the event. In this article, when discussing events, I am referring to representations of events in films rather than cinema qua modernist event. 4 See respectively Wood (2002); iek (1991); Modleski (1989); and Perry (2003). 5 As Ian Buchanan rightly remarks, The impossibility of deciding why the events [in The Birds] are taking place calls into question and literally falsifies our standard means of apprehending them. (2006, 138). What Buchanan implicitly argues for is another way of conceiving of the bird attacks, a strategy that cannot resort to approaches based on signification.
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After a brief introduction to contemporary event theory, I will explore the way in which the event cannot be discussed without recourse to a concept of nature that configures emergence and relationality as crucial determinants in the negotiation of evental situations. More precisely, a theory of the event and nature that circumscribes the coeval individuation of human and bird in relation to modalities of evental experience will be preferred to well-known interpretations of what the bird attacks supposedly mean. The Birds would allow the spectator to watch the difficult emergence of subjects, and the diverse phases and individuations that events provoke would permit characters such as Melanie to reveal the processual and relational genesis of the individual. I will then turn to Hitchcocks use of empty-time to characterise his concept of the event, which discloses a fascinating ambivalence between emergence and the void. An underlying argument will be that the films events show a general movement beyond traditional conceptions of being and human subjectivity, a tendency that relates to various recent critical interventions that have problematised issues of signification and representation.6 I will conclude with some thoughts on the paradoxical nature of the bodies and events that the film constructs in relation to Hitchcocks fashioning of cinematic time.
The Event: Two Varying Conceptions In twentieth-century philosophy, the concept of the event has divided philosophers between two opposing stances that could be roughly summarised thus: the thinkers who believe in continuity and emergence, and those who believe in discontinuity and rupture. While the former conceive of the event as a continuous pattern of emergence that stems from becoming,
6
Indeed, derived from either an enthusiastic encounter with Gilbert Simondons and Gilles Deleuzes writings (e.g., see Shaviro (1993), Gil (1998), Marks (2000), Massumi (2002), and Manning (2007)) or a critical assessment of Deleuze (e.g., see Badiou (1999) and Hansen (2004 and 2006)) several recent studies focussing on movement, affect, sensation, cinema, digital arts, politics, dance, and ontology have subtly questioned the legacy of cultural studies with regard to the study of issues such as race, gender, class, art, and media. Whether it be about pre-individual singularities or generic truths, the traditional notions of being, subjectivity, and body have been radically altered in such work.
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the latter claim that the event shatters any conceivable present and breaks with the past. The ensuing situation reveals a new world where old coordinates become obsolete. For those who uphold the concept of the event as a prolonging experience, the event translates into pure immanence. While the former conceptualisation is based on Deleuzes meditations on the event, the latter can be said to derive from Badious controversial engagement with Deleuzes thought and from his own conceptualisations of the event.7 The concept of the event has been equally neglected in recent studies of film, technology, and culture. However, given the fact that it is nearly impossible to discuss transformative experiences, modes of emergence, creativity, and embodied human agency without addressing the concept of the event, it does seem imperative to theorise a fluid notion of the event that will pay attention to relationality in all its material and immaterial forms. The potential problem with Hitchcocks concept of the event is that it fluctuates between expressiveness, relationality, radical breaks, and the void. One has to oppose already proposed concepts of the event as a form of emergence or becoming or, on the contrary, as marking rupture or discontinuity in nature,8 for these conceptions would establish a dual or binary mode of experience that does not reveal how The Birds functions. Of course, one could argue that Deleuzes and Badious concepts of the event would shed new light on the film. On Deleuzes account, events have no meaning; they are meaning. Events cannot be reduced to mere effects; they question the causal relation between cause and effect. Moreover, an
For comparative studies of Deleuze and Badiou, see Bostana (2005), Tarby (2006), and Besana (2007). Badiou himself has devoted a great number of pages to Deleuze, one of his major interlocutors with Lacan. See Badious book-length study of Deleuzes philosophy, The Clamor of Being (1999), and his more explicit comparison in Badiou (2009b, 381-387) 8 To draw a parallel between event theory and film theory, Deleuzes and Badious diverging views on the configuration of the event cannot but remind one of the dichotomy Bazin (2000) identifies in terms of the filmmakers who believe in the image (i.e, montage) and those who believe in reality (i.e., the long take and depth of field). Whereas Deleuze seems to believe in continuity characteristic of the long take and depth of field, Badiou privileges the cuts and ruptures that define montage. Badiou mentions this issue in an interview and emphasises that cinema should privilege rupture instead of repetition. See Badiou (2004).
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event is to be distinguished from its actual effectuation in time and space. Deleuze argues that events take place between time periods, and in The Logic of Sense he explicitly states that The event is coextensive with becoming (1990, 8). The event would thus evade meaning, interpretation, and analysis because it occupies a relational function that alternatively plays with cause and effect to the point of indeterminacy. Deleuze likens the event to a singularity that does not relate to identity, essence, or representation: It [the singularity] is essentially pre-individual, non-personal, and a-conceptual. It is quite indifferent to the individual and the collective, the personal and the impersonal, the particular and the general and to their oppositions. Singularity is neutral. (1990, 52; emphasis in original) Deleuze maintains that events are not problems but redraw the contours of potential problems, their conditions, and their hypothetical solutions. Indeed, the ending of The Birds could be said to show such a state of affairs. The problems Deleuze mentions usually take the form of two questions: What happened? and What will happen? Such an understanding somewhat bypasses the present form of the question: What happens? This double causality stems from the bodies that are involved in the event and in the other events that guide or orient future events. Inspired by the Stoics account of the event and their revision of causal relations, Deleuze will go on to claim that events reveal expression and creation instead of necessity or causality. This could be expressed in the form of What are the expressive rapports between events? or Can one find compatibility or incompatibility between given events? Deleuze claims that such a concept of the event cannot rely on causality because it looks only at effects. What the philosopher ultimately argues for is a serial concept of the event that somewhat eschews causal relations, contradictions, and meaning. The event would then allow the individual to become someone else or at least be given a new perspective on the event: It would be necessary for the individual to grasp herself as event; and that she grasp the event actualised within her as another individual grafted onto her. In this case, she would not understand, want, or represent this event without also understanding and wanting all other
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events as individuals, and without representing all other individuals as events. (Deleuze 1990, 178) Pointing to the becoming-event of the individual, Deleuzes serial concept of the event reveals how it stems from the actions and bodies of humans while being different from them. Events are different because they are not part of bodies; they do not represent bodies. They are, Deleuze concludes, incorporeal (1990, 182). The Birds could be equally examined from the point of view of Badious influential conceptualisation of the event. Rejecting Deleuzes account of the event, Badiou argues that events are not the result of becoming, extension, evolution, or progression. On the contrary, the French philosopher claims that events characterise abrupt ruptures and decisive breaks in that they redefine the parameters of the world. In other words, they are all about interruption and cessation.9 Events reveal the evental site or new coordinates that were inconceivable prior to the event taking place. More importantly, for Badiou authentic subjects do no preexist events; they are the result of events or traces of evental occurrences.10 The remains of events would be what we call bodies. As opposed to Deleuzes singularity of continuity, Badiou posits singularities of interruption . One can become a true subject when one goes beyond the event or its void and when one embraces a new way of thinking that is about trajectory or path instead of becoming.11 Badiou is interested in conceptualising the subject as the trace of
Prior to the publication of his 2006 magnum opus, Logiques des mondes, and guided by the thoughtful criticisms of other philosophers, Badiou had been increasingly reconsidering the dichotomy between being and event in his Being and Event (2005 [1988]) and the way in which such a bipolar structure does not account for relation and emergence. See Badiou (2000) and the preface to Logics of Worlds (2009b) for his turn to relationality and the logic of emergence. For insightful comments on the absence of relationality in Badiou, see Bosteels (2005) and Gillespie (2008). 10 To be more precise, in Logics of Worlds (2009b, 62-67) Badiou further qualifies the types of reaction to an event subjects can actually have. He singles out four orientations (faithful, reactive, obscure, and resurrected), which he calls the four subjective destinations. 11 Noteworthy is that for Badiou real events can only occur post facto in four generic realms called truth procedures: science, politics, art, and the amorous relationship. These function as the conditions under which philosophical thought can
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the event that is added to the body. This is precisely what the ending of the film would have us believe: characters who, after the bird-events, will not be able to continue living on the way they used to.12 It is rather tempting to juxtapose these two concepts of the event to foreground an analysis of Hitchcocks film. We could confront Deleuzes conception of the individual as becoming-event and Badious subject as becoming-object of the event. As Badiou puts it: Appearing is nothing else, for a being [tant] initially conceived in its being [tre] as pure multiple than a becoming-object. (2009b, 220-221). In other words, while Badious focus would be on appearing, Deleuzes would be on continuing. Whereas Deleuze speaks of pre-individual singularities and bodies, Badiou does not conceive of the body as pre-existing but as constituted: So we must first of all answer the following question: in a world where an event-site is given, what is a body? What is the appearing of a body? Or, more precisely, what marks out a body among the objects that constitute the appearing of a world (2009b, 454). These questions relate to the fact that for Badiou all subjects are post-evental bodies that still bear the traces of the event. From nonexistence to existence, the Badiouian body is what is beckoned and mobilized by the post-evental sublimation of the inexistent (Badiou 2009b, 470). Besides their salient divergences, what stands out most between the two philosophers conceptualisations is their congruent view of the post-evental entitys task. Indeed, where Deleuze and Badiou seem to converge is in the
take place. Badiou does not address explicitly the possible analysis of events represented within a given truth procedure such as the bird-events in Hitchcocks The Birds and how such fictional events could relate to the Hitchcock event in cinema. 12 Joseph Vogl also speaks of bird-events (Vogel-Ereignisse) in his essay on The Birds. In a way similar to my theoretical orientation, Vogl addresses bird-events in order to evade approaches based on the signification of the attacks. As he points out, Thus before being signs or questions, these birds are events in the film, and this leads to the questions: What events occur with the birds? How do they occur as events? (2005, 52) However, Vogl inquires into the bird-event from the point of view of Lacanian theory, which could be said to overdetermine his critical agenda.
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stand that the subject must uphold in order to live after the event. Deleuze claims that we must become worthy of what happens to us, and thus to will and release the event, to become the offspring of ones own events, and thereby to be reborn, to have one more birth, and to break with ones carnal birth (1990, 148-149). Being worthy of the event in the face of an unprecedented situation reappears in Badious own suggestion to confront post-evental situations and equally underlines the task of the new body: To accept and declare this body is not enough, if one wishes to be the contemporary of the present of which this body is the material support. It is necessary to enter into its composition, to become an active element of this body. The only real relation to the present is that of incorporation (2009b, 508). As the reader can conjecture, the ontological and ontogenetic premises of both thinkers greatly vary in terms of what qualifies as multiplicity; however, given their echoing conclusions as to what awaits the post-evental subject, whether she be a becoming-event or a becoming-object of the event, both philosophers point to an ethical stance that does not advocate resisting either the event or its embodied effectuation in post-evental entities.13 Hitchcocks film offers a different take on the event, one that relates to the prospective merging of human and animal subjectivities and their multifaceted expressions in a particular cinematic time characterised by the void and relationality. The Birds develops a narrative that features the individuation of bird and human in a cinematic time that relies on the void to be effective. The film would thus revisit Deleuzes and Badious theories of the event as that which always already involves embodied effectuation and would think expression, emergence, and the void in coextensive terms.
The Nature of Things The natural world of Bodega Bay and the concept of the event with which we are concerned in this article refer to various human and non-human
13
In a manifesto published after Logics of Worlds, Badiou elaborates on the singular ethical stance he proposes in the conclusion to Being and Event II (2009b, 507-514), advocating a life worth living [une vie digne de ce nom] beyond democratic materialism. See Badiou (2009a).
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modes of life in all their diversity and intersections. It is precisely at such intersections between humans and birds that Hitchcocks The Birds configures its concept of nature. The film does not postulate a generic difference between humans and birds; on the contrary, it displaces birds from their animalistic base to the plane of humanity via various cinematic techniques that strikingly evoke subjectivity on their part. While the filmmaker is not concerned with the traditional attributes with which nature is often endowed (e.g., authenticity, value, peacefulness, permanence), Hitchcock seems more intent on problematising the concept of nature by showing its unstable points of reference. In fact, he displays a relentless will to denaturalise human nature, or what passes as human nature, in the face of unprecedented events that drastically alter any process of individuation. In his extensive reflection on individuation, Gilbert Simondon often uses the expression theatre of individuation to describe the continuous processes within which living agents, as variables that do not preexist relations but come to realisation via relations, evolve in perpetual forms of metastability. Instead of positing being or substance as the primary terms of a relation, Simondon argues that, if we still want to have recourse to such perennial categories, relation should function as that which enables being or substance in the first place because we cannot distinguish the extrinsic from the intrinsic; what is truly and essentially the individual is the active relation, the exchange between the extrinsic and the intrinsic The individual is the result of a constituting relation, not the interiority a constituted term. (2005, 62)14 Following on Simondons insight into relationality, the individual would be the theater of a relational activity. Simondons writings have not been disseminated within film studies as much as those of other French thinkers such as Lacan and Deleuze. However,
14
At stake for Simondon, and for any theory of the event, is the priorisation of relation and the debunking of any founding term such as substance, being, representation or identity that systematically obscures how emergence and individuation function. Given that relation cannot exist if it is not linked to at least two concepts, it cannot be described as another master or transcendental concept in the tradition of Western metaphysics. Jean-Hugues Barthlmy has recently touched on this fundamental point (cf. 2006, 132).
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his account of relationality in the context of a theatre of individuation is most compelling, provided that we adapt it to speak of a cinema of individuation, which is what The Birds offers the spectator. In such a cinema of relationality, the characters and the birds do not function as preexisting terms; their problematic relation precisely is what the film reveals. The many interpretations of what the bird attacks would signify fail to disclose how the montage of individuation takes place in this particular universe that foregrounds relations between shots, birds, and humans and the events that can potentially jeopardise the process of individuation.15 In the film the axiomatic differentiation between humans and birds is questioned as the relations between the animal world and humanity invariably disclose the collapse of any founding term. Hitchcock would tend to adopt a monist understanding of nature and humanity in his cinema of individuation, and The Birds contests and redistributes into zones of uncertainty the cultural divide between human and non-human, rational subject and animal.16 One could argue that the films events reconfigure the concept of animality as a relational notion that binds human and animal in more than one way, and such a renewed understanding forces the revision of the concept in the context of the emergence of subjectivity in non-human forms and non-subjective experience in human forms. A first example of the emergence of non-subjective behavior in the human could be the female characters own lack of speech facing the terrible outcomes of the bird attacks. Lack of speech having always been a predominant characteristic to differentiate between humans and animals,17 this trait would possess a modular form in all beings, as it completely
15
Indeed, Simondon is often thought of as the precursor of a philosophical orientation that privileges becoming, Deleuze being its major proponent. However, Simondon himself does mention that there are disruptive processes which are not structuring but only destructive. (2005, 550; emphases in original) 16 The films general trajectory actually recalls Deleuzes description of a Francis Bacon painting: In place of formal correspondences, what Bacons painting constitutes is a zone of indiscernibility or undecidability between man and animal. (2004, 20; emphasis in original). 17 Kate Soper notes: Western thought has therefore, in an important sense, regarded the animal as the antithesis to the human, and done so very largely on account of its lack of speech. (1995, 81).
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vanishes in the case of Lydia when she discovers the eyeless corpse of Dan Fawcett and when Melanie is subjected to the famous bird attack near the end of the film. If animals indeed mediate our perception of ourselves and of others, as the lovebirds do in the bird shop sequence that stages Melanie and Mitchs first encounter, how can we still hold on to a constructed differentiation that pits animalistic behavior against human habitus? The potential problem with the preceding depiction of nature lies in the question of animality, which does not pertain to representation. Rather, it is a matter of creation, emergence, and affect. Indeed, too often relegated to discussions of representation, animality in cinema functions in more sensual, processual, and relational terms that variously move viewers and the characters themselves. Therefore, it is simply not a question of cultural discourse, denied rights, or symbolic representation with which we are concerned.18 A viable position between rights and representation, I argue, is to focus on the aspects that tie humans and animals and in the very questioning of these rigid categories in order to offer an account of distributed expressiveness among life forms. This position would normally lead us to the study of ethology, which would entail, as Erin Manning reminds us, paying attention to the composition of relations or powers between different things. Ethologies are not about knowledge as end-points but about accumulation and difference. They are about extension, about expressions, about events, about becomings. (2007, 144)19 Hitchcock renders his concept of nature and its underlying ethology in a way that allows him to experiment with various forms of emergence. These forms point to the bird attacks and their creation of a relational concept of nature that transforms human subjects into post-evental entities. In his books on cinema, Deleuze makes interesting remarks on The Birds that refer to the relational quality he discerns in Hitchcocks works in
18
As Greg Garrard has justly emphasised: The study of the relations between animals and humans in the Humanities is split between philosophical considerations of animal rights and cultural analysis of the representation of animals. (2004, 136). 19 The contemporary interest in ethology derives from Deleuzes reading of Spinoza. See the final chapter of Deleuze (2003, 164-175).
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general.20 As a matter of fact, Deleuze emphasises not only the relations between subjects, animals, events, and objects in Hitchcocks cinema but also the blurring of ontological boundaries that such relations provoke. For example, discussing the final sequence in which the birds witness the departure of the humans without attacking them, Deleuze concludes that at this precise moment the human and the inhuman enter into an uncertain relationship (1986, 20). The merging of human and inhuman certainly suggests the effacement of categorical distinctions between these entities, but a more elaborate description certainly is appropriate to account for the birds behaviour in the final sequence of the film.21 Faced with The Birds, one cannot help but feel that the emphasis placed on relationality reveals multifaceted components that would benefit from a broader perspective. This would include a description of nature (and the birds) in a way that would testify to the importance of affect in order to enlarge the concept of relation to its actual effectuation in the film. Building on Whiteheads deceptively famous empiricist description of nature as that which we observe in perception through the senses (2004, 3),22 one could emphasise the fact that, besides his focus on the senses, the philosopher conceptualises nature as an entity which primarily relates to life as event.
20
John Rajchman has also commented upon Hitchcocks reliance on relation: Alfred Hitchcock is an empiricist for Deleuze since he constructs a cinematic time built from relations prior to the individuals that fill them. (1998, 3). 21 One should not underestimate the power of non-verbal communication to affect the relational quality of the exchanges between human and birds in the last minutes of the film. Interestingly, Hitchcocks use of innovative electronics to produce birdlike sounds contributes to accentuate the spectators impression that the apparently impossible communication between humans and birds cannot be resolved. Electronics allows Hitchcock to produce a new form of aural intrusion into the experience of cinema, one paralleling the birds into the society of Bodega Bay, and to question spectatorial expectations, the restrictive confines of human subjectivity, and ontology. In her study of music in Hitchcocks The Birds, Elisabeth Weis focuses on suspense and audience manipulation to claim that the use of electronics and sound effects points to a desire to go beyond subjectivity, describing the film as an extrasubjective work. (1982, 136) As will be made more explicit in the following pages, going beyond subjectivity may not be the appropriate phrase to describe the expressive processes at work between characters and birds. For a recent analysis of what one critic calls Hitchcocks most revolutionary sound track, see Sullivan (2006, 259-272). 22 For a thorough examination of Whiteheads philosophy, see Stengers (2002). For a recent reappraisal of Whitehead in English, see Shaviro (2009).
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Whitehead distinguishes three features that can help locate and describe an event, namely, place, time, and character. Strangely recalling Whiteheads description of the event, Deleuze, elaborating on The Birds, mentions three characteristics that organise the bird attacks: modes, places, and victims. (cf. Deleuze 1986, 20)23 As will be made clearer in the next section, these three features cannot be adequately described in their relational combinations if the concept of the event does not configure the analysis of nature and birds. If indeed events are shot through with affects, the birds and the humans who are produced by events see their bodies transformed into sensuous archives of experience that relate to the various modes of (im)materiality that qualify events in the first place.24 The spectators task would be to identify such a processual individuation.
The Hitchcokian Bird-Event If the individuation of both birds and humans is to be understood as a concept that does not presuppose the domination of one term over another but instead emphasises the primary relation between terms as its major mode of effectuation, how can we account for a version of the concept of the event that insidiously excludes the materiality of the subject in the cinema of individuation?25 Hitchcock certainly integrates various bodies before, during, and after the attacks. If the films bird-events point to the potential
23 24
For a comparative analysis of Deleuze and Whitehead, see Villani (1996). I borrow the expression archive of experience from Massumi (2003). 25 It is noteworthy that critics who adhere to a Deleuzian approach to the event always seem to face, sooner or later, the imperative return of materiality, even though they claim that events are immaterial. For example, Alan Bourassa argues that It is important not to confuse the event with a state of things, with bodies and materials that come together to produce results. Rather than being a set of bodies and things, rather than being the mingling and colliding of these bodies, the event is the effect of their mingling and colliding [] Existing and not existing; noncorporeal, yet the effect of bodies; neither active nor passive, yet the result of action and passion, the event is always paradoxical. And its greatest paradox is its relation to language. (2002, 66; emphasis in original) What Bourassa ultimately concedes is the relational concept of the event which I advocate in this article, one that takes into consideration the events paradoxical regime of materiality instead of dismissing it. Contrary to Bourassas emphasis on language, I wish to stress that the greatest paradox of the event is in its treatment of and relation to the body. I return to the paradox of event and body in the last section.
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individuation of bird and human, it cannot relegate the body to an immaterial realm. One has to focus on how The Birds displays the individuation of bodies and on what its logic of appearance or emergence is. The birds force the humans to engage in multiple individuations, albeit with difficulty, and, as spectators, we watch the transformative process of humans who face terrifying events. The film would thus offer a contribution to both event theory and ontogenesis; first, The Birds constructs a relational milieu to think bodies and events, and, second, ontogenesis and individuation can now be reconceptualised via a notion of event that integrates corporeality and affect without taking the individual as always already constituted. The problem for Hitchcock in The Birds is to think events, bodies, and individuation alongside the effects of the bird-events as they unfold in cinematic time. In order to solve this problem, Hitchcock unfolds events in a serial pattern that deserves closer attention. While one could describe the films narrative arc as a series of bird attacks that culminates in the final attack on Melanie, this insight would fail to disclose the manner in which the bird attacks are interspersed with three interludes the bird that smashes into Annies front door and which functions as bad omen; Lydias discovery of Dan Fawcetts eyeless corpse; and Annies dead body that is found by Mitch and Melanie that ultimately reveal Hitchcocks understanding of evental situations. As we shall see, the filmmaker provides a concept of the event that intermeshes empty-time, bodies, and event time.26 After the single birds attack on Melanie in the boat, we have the first post-evental situation: the discovery of a dead seagull on Annies porch. Two attacks will follow this discovery: the birds that crash Kathys outdoor birthday party, and the birds that later invade the Brenner house through the chimney. Between this third attack and the fourth, there is the second interlude featuring Lydias dramatic discovery of Dan Fawcetts body and the
26
My use of empty-time within the context of event theory is indebted to Bernard Groethuysen, but I have adapted it to the study of film. See Groethuysen (19351936).
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famous jump cuts on his disfigured face. Again, two bird attacks will follow this post-evental interlude: the attack on the school children and the attack on the gas station and its surrounding area. The fifth and sixth attacks will be separated by another post-evental interlude: Mitch and Melanies unexpected discovery of Annies body. Afterwards, the final bird attacks, the sixth and the seventh, will be on the house and in an upstairs room in the culminating confrontation between Melanie and the birds. The preceding breakdown of the bird attacks allows us to better understand Hitchcocks mastery of suspense and, most importantly, his serial concept of the event as it unfolds in cinematic time. There are an undeniable pattern and rhythm at work after the first attack on Melanie riding her boat across Bodega Bay. This rhythm follows a 1-2-1-2-1-2 pattern in which 1 stands for a post-evental interlude while 2 refers to the two attacks that ensue. Paying closer attention to this serial pattern, we gather that Hitchcocks notion of the event differs from that of Badiou and Deleuze in the sense that his bird-events do not mark either radical novelty or perennial becoming. On the contrary, his is a more nuanced understanding of evental situations that demonstrates the interrelation between empty-time and event time, between bodies and the birds that attack them either onscreen or offscreen. The very narrative arc of the film, via its cyclical unfolding of event-time, reveals that for Hitchcock events do more than follow one another in patterns of either sheer rupture or indefinite prolongation. The interludes testify to a conjunctive understanding of the event in which bodies follow other bodies in various patterns of empty-time (the interludes) and event time (the attacks) based on the relational proximity of bodies, either dead or alive. Hitchcocks dual notion of the event, as an overlapping phenomenon that integrates bodies in two temporal regimes, empty-time and event time, thus questions the very notion of event time as excluding bodies. The overlapping of events in the film would presuppose a concept of the event that questions causality and contingency, as they relate to time-based understandings of events. Bird attacks do not represent natures cruelty, or
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Melanies and humanitys complacency, as Hitchcock famously described the meaning of his film. They function according to an entirely different economy of motion, affection, and (dis)placement that highlights how humans actually come to terms with events. Where Hitchcock departs from both Deleuze and Badiou is in his postulation of a concept of the event that is directly linked to the experience of individuation as an embodied affair based on relational patterns between affective emergence and the void. Hitchcocks film deploys events and modes of emergence that relate that which happens and how it happens. The manner in which things do happen is in their embodied consequences: bodies get hurt, children scream and cry, and humans die horrible deaths. The filmmakers original perspective on the event is that he foregrounds relation as the primary form of expression between empty-time, events, and the bodies that link them. The films innovative concept of the event divides time between emptytime and event time and finds a way to ultimately relate them. It is noteworthy that Hitchcocks emphasis on relationality and suspense makes his cinematic practice depart from that of other filmmakers such as Ozu and Antonioni who have been mentioned as equally alternating between narrative and empty-time. In Hitchcocks films, however, empty-time is paradoxically filled with characters or focuses on a specific characters body part. Not only does he focus on characters in these moments but he also exploits the various ranges of emotional experience of humans who fear potential attacks, thus relating time-effects to corporeal manifestations. Therefore, Hitchcocks notion of temporal emptiness is always already related to the expressive nature of bodies and the underlying concern for the difficult individuation of human and bird. An interesting example of the uneasy rapprochement between humans and birds relates to Hitchcocks configuration of empty-time. In the jungle gym scene that precedes the attack on the school children, Melanie is seen sitting on a fence, lighting a cigarette while several birds arrive and perch behind her. The spectator soon realises that after each cut the number of birds increases. As we look at Melanie smoking her cigarette, waiting for the
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children to go to recess, her facial expression reveals impatience and uncertainty. As soon as the spectators gaze identifies with Melanies via a subjective shot which tracks a flying birds descent, the next shot shows the jungle gym covered with dozens of birds. This shot is immediately followed by the gradual upward ascension of Melanies face in the frame that highly contrasts with the birds downward motions. Hitchcocks strategy is not only to direct our attention to the impending bird-event but also to the moments before and after the event. His characters thus become links or traces between attacks, and the temporal flow of the film is thus decelerated to allow the presence of empty-time frames. The crucial attack on the gas station near the Tides restaurant further exemplifies Hitchcocks use of empty-time and its relation to the dialectics of entrapment that is fundamental in the film. Divided into three parts, the fifth attacks narrative arc is characterised by a first sequence in which the characters in the restaurant draw our attention to menacing gas leaks that will lead to explosions. Here Hitchcock introduces a fascinating combination of motion and stillness that has received little attention. Anxiously waiting to see if a man lighting a cigar will drop his match and cause an explosion, Melanie and the other characters then witness a series of spectacular explosions. What is particularly striking are the reaction shots that frame Melanies stupefied face. Indeed, Melanies face reacts to explosions, but her face is uncannily immobilised in the frame as though we were looking at a photograph of a woman emoting before a shocking sight. Four such reaction shots are used in less than four seconds, and they cut between explosions, displaying Melanie posing and looking in a new direction each time. On the one hand, the immobile face of Melanie thus contrasts with the other characters agitation in the background; on the other hand, Melanies face literally poses for shots that represent empty-time in both her embodied reception of the events and in the very film itself. The first portion of the attack qua event therefore emphasises empty-time as embodied stillness. The second part of the attack, interspersed with a birds eye point-ofview shot, consists in Melanie exiting the restaurant and taking refuge in a
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phone booth into which several birds will crash. This type of entrapment certainly prefigures the final bird attack that also centres around Melanie, but here it most importantly refines the notion of embodied empty-time as relates to entrapment. Seeking a way to link empty-time and event time by using bodies as the relation between the two, Hitchcock gives spectators an attack on his lead actress and transforms her into the link that joins the first and the third part of the attack, that is, between embodied stillness and further entrapment. Mitchs sudden arrival will allow Melanie to safely return inside the restaurant. The third and last segment in this attack presents us with Mitch and Melanie returning to an apparently empty restaurant. Yet around the corner they find several women in two single files, waiting for the attack to end. While they gaze at Melanie as though she were responsible for the bird attacks, as one woman intimates, the spectator gradually comes to understand the narrative arc of this most important attack. Indeed, while the first part of the attack features Melanies face in very peculiar reaction shots as quasi-photographs, the second part features the culminating event, an attack on Melanie trapped in an enclosed space. The third part of the attack underscores the collective stupefaction at the bird-events. The attacks figure of entrapment thus unfolds three times: Melanies body trapped in time (first part of attack); Melanies body trapped in space (second part); and various characters trapped in hermeneutic circles (third part). As spectators of the film very well know, the attack on the gas station features two enigmatic birds eye views that punctuate the action. These shots directly relate to one of Hitchcocks innovations in the film: the use of empty-time in which characters wait to be assigned a position in the expressive pattern. Therefore, it is not the meaning of the bird attacks that matters but the functioning of the attacks between empty-times and how these empty-times are constructed. In other words, the importance of the bird-events cannot be reduced to an outside force that would explain or justify their occurrence. In fact, one could argue that Hitchcock pokes fun at the spectators or film critics who seem intent on reproducing the very same
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questionings of characters who constantly seek the meaning behind the attacks, typically asking: Why are they doing this? or Why did they want to kill children? Completing its relational conceptualisation of events and empty-times, The Birds ends with two devastating attacks. The first, during which the main characters are secluded in the house, shows birds entering through windows and doors, and the second features the culminating attack during which Melanie will be severely injured. Between these two attacks, there is a beautifully lit scene in which low-angle camera work successively reveals the faces of Mitch, Melanie, and Lydia. This scene perfectly embodies Hitchcocks notions of event, empty-time, and emergence. The characters appearance in the frame ensues from an upward motion: Mitch from the low right, Melanie from the low left, and Lydia arising in the center of the image. The camera then pulls back to reveal Lydia in close-up, medium shot, and long shot, integrating Melanie on the left, and, still pulling back, Mitch also on the left. This scene stands as one of the most significant constructions of empty-time in the film, as the characters listen to the birds fly away. When the three characters are in the frame, desperately waiting for the birds to go, one perceives that Hitchcocks emerging tableau vivant truly expresses the novel concept of the event that he ingeniously constructs in his film. Contrary to a Deleuzian reading of the preceding attacks and events, I prefer to underline the way in which The Birds manages to resolve the tension between Deleuzes insight that Hitchcocks cinema is a cinema of relations and the fact that Deleuzes own theory of the event fails to adopt an equally relational perspective. Indeed, given the number of embodied events murders, accidents, attacks, happenstances that recur in Hitchcocks 1963 work and in his films in general, it seems difficult to entertain the idea that his is a cinema of relations that does not put forward a relational theory of evental situations. Hitchcocks innovation with regard to cinema is not only to have reconfigured cinematic time in terms of relation, as Deleuze justly points out, but also to have grafted onto this a relational theory of the event that merges empty-time, bodies, and event time in a way that radically
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challenges a theory of the event that relies on pure continuity and becoming such as Deleuzes.
In the Realm of Paradoxical Bodies Relying on ecocriticism to explore Hitchcocks work does not culminate in examining how birds, dogs, or cats function in his visual world. Rather, it should entail focusing on his films from a perspective that has been used to reorient debates over auteurist and psychoanalytic concerns.27 This article has proposed that we put the emphasis on the movement and emergence of bodies, as they relate to a process of effectuation that could not exist without the void acting as that which enables appearance in the first place. The evaluation of new life forms and confrontations between objects, animals, and humans demand such a revision of both ontological demarcations and the ethical and corporeal imports of such processes. At the end of the film, Melanies body is drastically cut and bruised, and her psychological state could be likened to catatonia.28 The coeval individuation of bird and human certainly has a price: bodies are transformed, and a new world order seems to emanate from the quasiapocalyptic scenery that characterises the films denouement.29 The birds
27
Already in the early 1980s, Fredric Jameson expressed the desire to study the conditions of emergence of Hitchcocks cinema as event: It is therefore less a question of deciding what genre Hitchcocks films belong in, than rather of reconstructing the generic traditions, constraints, and raw materials, out of which alone, at a specific moment of their historical evolution, that unique and nongeneric thing called a Hitchcock film was able to emerge. (2007, 138) More importantly, Jameson has linked the abandon of genre criticism to a criticism that would do away with consciousness, character, and the anthropomorphic. (quoted in Cohen 2005a, 2) Cohens recent studies of Hitchcocks films evade the classic debates to which Jameson alludes in order to emphasise teletechnic revolutions and the filmmakers cinema as event. 28 I will refer the reader to Donald Spotos account of the disturbing shoot of the final bird attack for the description of the radical merging between actress and female subject in the case of Hitchcocks infamous treatment of and infatuation with his leading star, Tippi Hedren. See Spoto (1999, 458-461). 29 Consider Camille Paglias description of the final sequence of the film: Its a composite of thirty-two images against a matte paintingof the barnyard, landscape and dawn sky. The barn and moving car required separate segments, as did the foreground, which is in three parts with multiplied photos of the same gulls. Though a third of the birds are fake, there are some live chickens as well as 500 local ducks painted grey. The rustling birds who stir but dont fly as Mitch edges out the porch
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have invaded the human world and have deliberately forced the blurring of distinctions between human and non-human bodies. What the final sequence shows, in all its fragile balance, is what both Deleuze and Badiou mention discussing events: one must negotiate the event and accept the new bodies that result from it. Indeed, humans partake of and stem from events, and, in the film, they are part of the process that ties them to birds. The ethical step toward accepting the event certainly demands that characters come to terms with the attacks and accept that their embodied presence in the world will be tied forever to insecurity and imbalance. In other words, their bodies as well have to negotiate new spaces that cannot be similar to the ones that preceded the events. The fashioning of new bodies, which relate to the radical confrontation between birds and humans, reflects the films emphasis on a renewed conception of emergence. Insofar as it eschews focussing on the ontology of the event (in the form of being and event) in order to suggest the expression of events (in the form of emergence and event), the film is not so much about unpredictable turns of events or unforeseeable catastrophes as much as bodies that act and are acted upon. The uncertain cohabitation between humans and birds, which the final sequence shows, echoes this relational concept of nature, the equally relational notion of empty-time in Hitchcocks films, and the innovative concept of the event that emerges from the subjects paradoxical corporeal effectuation. Such effectuation deserves a final development and clarification. On the one hand, events take place concomitantly with interstitial and paradoxical bodies, in-between and ephemeral organisms that cannot be accounted for in theories such as Deleuzes and Badious that deny the multifaceted and relational workings of materiality in the unfolding of events and bodies. As Jenny Edbauer has pointed out: The affective body is an
were either tranquilised or wore miniature binders, and the feet of the gulls on rooftops were secured with elastic bands. (1998, 17) Couldnt we say that the final shots perfectly render the composite and hybrid nature of both the event and individuation, as birds and humans confront artifice, stillness, and (im)mobility in the face of the supreme non-event with which the film closes? Arent human forms in the film all secured with elastic bands in the post-evental stage?
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event; it is implicated in the doubleness of the event we must come to understand the body as an affective body, as a total event. (2004, n.p.) On the other hand, Hitchcocks film reveals that an approach to the event that would exclusively focus on corporeality would limit the scope of such a theory and would confine it to immobile bodies outside the relational pattern between event and body. It is probably Foucault, in his description of the event, who has most adequately described the paradox between ephemerality and materiality that characterises the unfolding of events which a film such as The Birds offers: Of course, an event is neither substance, nor accident, nor quality nor process; events are not corporeal. And yet, an event is certainly not immaterial; it takes effect, becomes effect, always on the level of materiality. (1982, 231) Putting the emphasis on the qualities that undergird the effectuation of evental situations, Foucault shows how the event, even though it is not the result of bodies, nevertheless participates in a paradoxical regime that joins together material and incorporeal agents and constituents: Let us say that the philosophy of event should advance in the direction, at first sight paradoxical, of an incorporeal materialism. (1982, 231) On such a differentiated account of the event, the bird attacks, as events considered in light of paradoxical instances of evanescent materiality and material volatility, cannot be reduced to the apocalyptic scenarios of disaster films. Even though one could be tempted to describe the ending of The Birds as apocalyptic, a closer look would reveal a more ambiguous tension between time, event, and body. As Tom Cohen has remarked, the birds cannot be apocalyptic. Their invasion as a warping of temporal logic implies a folding in of the frame, without outside. (2005b, 154) Surely, the end of the world has not arrived yet, but the film produces a world in which such a kinetic space blurs the boundaries between bird and human, event and non-event, and their effectuation in empty-time. Such a process redefines what it is to be a post-evental entity because, as Jos Gil puts it apropos of atmospheric sensation, it evinces what separates the interior from the exterior, one body from the next, bodies and things. (2000, 16)
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Cohens and Gils comments direct our attention to what Hitchcock himself understood a long time ago in classics such as Rear Window (1954), Vertigo (1958), and Psycho (1960): suspense and audience manipulation can be effective only if they recalibrate what it is to feel and experience via the transformational and associative potential of bodies to affect and be affected. A forthcoming task may be to conceptualise the void and the event in terms of the reciprocal individuation (and concretisation) of bodies, events, and media.30 In the meantime, the confrontation of differentiated bodies does not have to be a traumatic experience; in fact, it can be even beneficial, as in the case of Hitchcocks family drama that turns into a case study for rethinking the interrelations among the animal, the human, and nature and their often difficult individuations. Therefore, it is not only a matter of embodying paradoxical spaces, as when Gil mentions that A human body [] can become animal, become mineral, plant, become atmosphere, hole, ocean, become pure movement (2006, 28), but also of constructing and conceiving of interstitial bodies that constantly engage, merge, or vie with various forms of life in hybrid environments. It is when birds and humans have never been so entwined, as in the final moments when nature and event coincide in relational patterns and, mostly, when ontological differences no longer seem to matter, that the film pushes to the extreme the obligation to face the bird-event. If an animal is not to be defined by its species or its organs but by the relations and assemblages in which it participates, as Deleuze has often emphasised, couldnt we say that the characters in the film (and humans for that matter) must equally be reconsidered not from the point of view of identity and subjectivity but from the vantage point of the event(s) that (re)define what it is to be in the throes of effectuation and individuation, of movement and the void?
30
Gil points in this direction when he remarks that the void is that which is inscribed in the work as non-inscription. It is the site of a non-inscription. (2000, 18) Some filmic work would produce situations in which the spectator would be invited to locate the non-inscriptions of events by way of circumscribing the void. For such a critical perspective on cinematic work, see Lessard ( 2009).
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The author wishes to thank Paula Willoquet-Maricondi for her comments on the first draft of this article
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Buchanan, Ian (2006) Is a Schizoanalysis of Cinema Possible? CiNMAS v.16 n.2-3: 117-145. Bttner, Elisabeth and Marc Ries (1997) Deleuze und die Natur des Ereignisses im Kino. Eds. Oliver Fahle and Lorenz Engell. Der Film bei Deleuze/Le cinma selon Deleuze. Weimar/Paris: Verlag der BauhausUniversitt/Presses de la Sorbonne Nouvelle, 350-360. Cohen, Tom (2005a) Hitchcock's Cryptonymies: Volume 1. Secret Agents. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Cohen, Tom (2005b) Hitchcock's Cryptonymies: Volume 2. War Machines. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Conley, Tom (2000) The Film Event: From Interval to Interstice. The Brain Is the Screen: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Cinema. Ed. Gregory Flaxman. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 303-325. Deleuze, Gilles (2004) Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation. Trans. Daniel W. Smith. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, Gilles (2003) Spinoza. Philosophie pratique. Paris: Editions de Minuit. Deleuze, Gilles (1990) The Logic of Sense. Trans. Mark Lester. New York: Columbia University Press. Deleuze, Gilles (1986) Cinema 1. The Movement-Image. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Edbauer, Jenny (2004) Executive Overspill: Affective Bodies, Intensity, and Bush-in-Relation. Postmodern Culture. V.15, n.1: n.p. Foucault, Michel (1982) The Discourse on Language. The Archaeology of Knowledge and The Discourse on Language. Trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith. New York: Pantheon, 215-237. Foucault, Michel (1977) Theatrum Philosophicum. Language, CounterMemory, Practice. Ed. Donald F. Bouchard. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 165-196. Garrard, Greg (2004) Ecocriticism. New York: Routledge. Gil, Jos (2006) Paradoxical Body. Drama Review. v. 50, n.4: 21-35. Gil, Jos (2000) Les petites perceptions. Chimres. n. 39: 9-20. Gil, Jos (1998) Metamorphoses of the Body. Trans. Stephen Muecke. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
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Gillespie, Sam (2008) The Mathematics of Novelty: Badious Minimalist Metaphysics. Melbourne: Re.press. Groethuysen, Bernard (1935-1936) De quelques aspects du temps. Recherches philosophiques, n.5: 139-195. Hansen, Mark (2006) Bodies in Code: Interfaces with Digital Media. New York: Routledge. Hansen, Mark (2004) New Philosophy for New Media. Cambridge: MIT Press. Heise, Ursula K. (2006) The Hitchhikers Guide to Ecocriticism. PMLA V.121, n.2: 503-516. Jameson, Fredric (2007) Signatures of the Visible. New York: Routledge. Lessard, Bruno ( 2009) Disparatre, dit-elle: The Vanishing of Lol V. Stein as (Dis)Embodied Haunting and Invisible Spectacle. In the Dark Room: Marguerite Durasand Cinema. Eds. Rosanna Maule and Julie Beaulieu. New York: Peter Lang, 173-190. Manning, Erin (2007) Politics of Touch: Sense, Movement, Sovereignty. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Marks, Laura U. (2000) The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses. Durham: Duke University Press. Massumi, Brian (2003) The Archive of Experience. Information Is Alive: Art and Theory on Archiving and Retrieving Data. Eds. Joke Brouwer, Arjen Mulder, and Susan Charlton. Rotterdam: NAi Publishers, 142151. Massumi, Brian (2002) Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Durham: Duke University Press. Modleski, Tania (1989) The Women Who Knew Too Much: Hitchcock and Feminist Theory. New York: Routledge. Mullarkey, John (2009) Refractions of Reality: Philosophy and the Moving Image. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Paglia, Camille (1998) The Birds. London: BFI. Perry, Dennis R. (2003) Hitchcock and Poe: The Legacy of Delight and Terror. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press. Rajchman, John (1998) Constructions. Cambridge: MIT Press.
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Shaviro, Steven (2009) Without Criteria: Kant, Whitehead, Deleuze, and Aesthetics. Cambridge: MIT Press. Shaviro, Steven (1993) The Cinematic Body. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Simondon, Gilbert (2005) Lindividuation la lumire des notions de forme et dinformation. Grenoble: Millon. Soper, Kate (1995). What Is Nature?: Culture, Politics, and the Non-Human. Oxford: Blackwell. Spoto, Donald (1999) The Dark Side of Genius: The Life of Alfred Hitchcock. New York: Da Capo Press. Stengers, Isabelle (2002) Penser avec Whitehead: une sauvage cration de concepts. Paris: Seuil. Sullivan, Jack (2006) Hitchcocks Music. New Haven: Yale University Press. Tarby, Fabien (2006) Matrialismes daujourdhui. De Deleuze Badiou. Paris: LHarmattan. Villani, Arnaud (1996) Deleuze et Whitehead. Revue de mtaphysique et de morale. n.2: 245-265. Vogl, Joseph (2005) Lovebirds. Blickzhmung und Augentuschung. Zu Jacques Lacans Bildtheorie. Eds. Claudia Blmle and Anne von der Heiden. Zrich/Berlin: Diaphanes, 51-63. Weis, Elisabeth (1982) The Silent Scream: Alfred Hitchcock's Sound Track. Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. Whitehead, Alfred North (2004) The Concept of Nature. New York: Dover Publications. Wood, Robin (2002) Hitchcocks Films Revisited. New York: Columbia University Press. iek, Slavoj (1991) Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture. Cambridge: MIT Press.
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Filmography Hitchcock, Alfred (1954) Rear Window. USA. Hitchcock, Alfred (1958) Vertigo. USA. Hitchcock, Alfred (1960) Psycho. USA. Hitchcock, Alfred (1963) The Birds. USA.
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Film-Philosophy 14.

For a concise account of the rise of ecocriticism, see Heise (2006).

Film-Philosophy | ISSN: 1466-4615

Film-Philosophy | ISSN: 1466-4615

Film-Philosophy | ISSN: 1466-4615

Film-Philosophy | ISSN: 1466-4615

Film-Philosophy | ISSN: 1466-4615

Film-Philosophy | ISSN: 1466-4615

Film-Philosophy | ISSN: 1466-4615

Film-Philosophy | ISSN: 1466-4615

Film-Philosophy | ISSN: 1466-4615

Film-Philosophy | ISSN: 1466-4615

Film-Philosophy | ISSN: 1466-4615

Film-Philosophy | ISSN: 1466-4615

Film-Philosophy | ISSN: 1466-4615

Film-Philosophy | ISSN: 1466-4615

Film-Philosophy | ISSN: 1466-4615

Film-Philosophy | ISSN: 1466-4615

Film-Philosophy | ISSN: 1466-4615

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