Ecologies of desire: cinema, masochism, time

Thesis

This dissertation examines a corpus of contemporary French and international filmmakers (Claire Denis, Mati Diop, Lucile Hadžihalilović and Apichatpong Weerasethakul) interested in ecology and dilated temporalities. I begin with the premise that slow films are not simply endurance tests: in their evocation of time-scales beyond human cognition, these films are undeniably pleasurable, full of sensorial richness and detail. In inviting us to enjoy the protracted rhythms of the natural world, I argue that they elaborate a psychoanalysis of nature, allowing us to abandon the opposition between the nonhuman turn and psychoanalysis that remains operative within the humanities.

In my first chapter on Denis, I amend some of the extreme directions taken by recent non- anthropocentric theory, in the form of the ecological anti-humanism of the recent ‘Dark Deleuze’ trend. Reading this thought alongside Beau Travail (1998) and High Life (2018), I show how Denis can recuperate Deleuze’s anti-humanist death drive into a renewed human sociality. My chapter on Hadžihalilović functions in a complementary manner, as I follow Maurice Merleau- Ponty in retrieving much of Freud’s thinking of nonhuman life that has been de-emphasized by the linguistic emphasis of Lacanian theory. Following the Merleau-Pontian Freud, my readings of Innocence (2004) and Evolution (2015) argue that ‘normal’ adult sexuality requires recuperating childhood and nonhuman perversity. In my third chapter, I show how this time- straddling perspective takes on geo-political contours in Apichatpong’s Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010) and Cemetary of Splendour (2015), as communal and intersubjective relations depend upon Freud’s “animist” thinking. Finally, Mati Diop’s Atlantique (2019) elaborates a similarly ambiguous and magical form of kinship that grants agency to objects. Across all of these films, I outline how the relationality prized by psychoanalysis necessitates nonhuman life as its ecstatic unmooring towards the Other and reality.

Authors: Taylor, M

• DOI: 10.5287/ora-brmk4jeon
• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English
• Keywords: Gilles Deleuze; nonhuman turn; environmental humanities; psychoanalysis; Maurice Merleau-Ponty; French cinema; Roland Barthes; Sigmund Freud; slow cinema
• Subjects: Film Theory; Film Studies; French Studies; Film Philosophy