A Cinematic Mode of Existence studies what images can do. Can the percepts and affects that cinematic images engender shape our eyes anew, by which we do not just see differently, but see different things and different worlds with many eyes? Expanding on Gilles Deleuze’s work on cinema, the book practices a new, perspectival analytic of the image honed to movement. In doing immanent analyses of numerous filmic works, the book blows wide open cinema’s modern constitution, its all-too-narrow, anthropocentric operative logic, and the natural mode of perception underlying it. A spiritual automaton, an extraordinary machine for perspectives, a cosmopolitical medium for the more-than-human – cinema far exceeds what we have dogmatically held it for, and only in starting to see that can we learn to live with its images in ways that they do not just haunt and possess us.
