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Riley, Liam

University of British Columbia

Film theory has historically related the cinema and the body. This relation can and has been made using various methodologies, namely phenomenology, embodiment, and cinematic affect, as means of understanding how spectators experience cinema and how cinema makes us think and feel. Alternatively, philosophers like Gilles Deleuze have suggested the cinema is itself an organ of the mind in the way that it functions and conjures images. While the previously mentioned methodologies frequently consider the place sensation and feeling have in the cinematic experience, I posit Deleuzian and post-Deleuzian film theory which builds on this ontology of the cinema must consider the soma in sum to appropriately assess the cinema's organic qualities. While the brain is only one part of a complex system of somatic cognition and sensation, contemporary science finds the body’s gut figures into these processes, and that the gut and brain are coevolved and entangled as organs of the mind and body. I suggest an examination of the cinema as a body relevantly articulates issues of health and wellness, as traditional film philosophy has been interested in considering the relationship the cinema and its spectators have with perception and cognition that are themselves affected by neurological ailments like schizophrenia. This thesis then asks, what generative insights regarding health in cinema might be drawn when considering both the brain and the gut? What’s more, to engage the gut is to engage what is perceived as a lesser, lower, and ultimately subaltern part of the body. Accordingly, questions of difference become essential in considering the gut and the brain in concert, and the subject of colonialism becomes relevant in this consideration of the subaltern body. Therefore, I argue analyzing what is digested by bodies, namely subaltern bodies, provides generative insight into the function of American colonialism. This thesis thus examines representations of illness and the colonial commodities of sugar and milk in American cinema to develop a gut-based methodology that proposes an understanding of what I call ingestive/digestive capital. I will do so by considering Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon (2023) and Kelly Reichardt’s First Cow (2019).

Text

2024-07-08

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/88595

Cinema and Media Studies

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/