Film stars — performers whose names, likenesses, biographies and appearances circulate as commodities outside of the films they appear in — are often featured in histories and theories of fame or religion that account for the phenomenon of persons renowned among a great number of people or across wide temporal dimensions. Within film theory, the film star is usually discussed in relation to the sociology and phenomenology of film viewing, theories of enunciation and authorship, the role of film and film actors in the marketplace of capitalist economies (i.e., in industrial production and mass circulation of commodities), as well as in relation to theories of spectator identification, audience (even national) adulation and fan fascination. These theoretical lenses are not mutually exclusive and, in fact, theories focused on one of these contexts usually implicitly or explicitly address questions pertinent to the others.

Theorists working within film studies or “star studies” contexts since the 1970s typically identify and examine stardom as a discursive construct — that is, as constructed out of a variety of media representations that produce and are produced by culturally and historically situated meanings — and much of what follows in this essay explores their theories. However, early film theorists concerned with defining the aesthetic and phenomenological and, in some cases sociological, qualities of film form often used the acting or appearance of stars in films, and their own responses to them, to describe not only what is cinematically specific and sociologically important about that form, but also what makes film viewing such a powerful, affective experience.

The Star and the Power of the Filmic Image

Many film theorists writing in the 1920s explored cinematic specificity against the aesthetic properties of literature, theater, painting and photography. These writers believed that the camera was an instrument of knowledge and identified the close- up shot as exemplary not only of film's uniqueness as an art form but also as a significant mode of communication about the world. French theorist Louis Delluc, credited by French theorist and film director Jean Epstein as the originator of the term photogenie, wrote that “the cinema will make us all comprehend the things of this world as well as force us to recognize ourselves” (Delluc, 139).

A Resilient Notion

In the new millennium, five major English- language books and anthologies have returned to the question of film authorship (Gerstner and Steiger 2003; Wexman 2003; Grant 2008; Sellors 2010; Kozloff 2014) putting into new light the richness of film studies classics such as John Caughie's Theories of Authorship: A Reader or Andrew Sarris's The American Cinema: Directors and Directions. To this day, virtually every guide to film studies presents an entry on the topic. Studies on national cinema, including Hollywood, tend to devote substantial space to “directors and directions.” Monographs and biographies in this vein abound; director series published by academic presses have proliferated. For all the profusion, there is general agreement that film authorship is a powerful myth and the film author a decidedly problematic construction. Nonetheless, even the most recent and sophisticated auteur studies do not fully embrace the constructionist assumption nor completely reflect the many theoretical misgivings well known to film studies scholars. For all the debates about the constitution of film authorship, embodied authors are more present than ever in film reviewing, film criticism, film studies as well as in film festivals and the film industry in its various countenances.

The notion of the film author is intimately linked to the larger endeavor to establish cinema as an art and movie going as a legitimate cultural practice. “The auteurist idea at its most basic (that movies are primarily the creation of one governing author behind the camera who thinks in images and sounds rather than words and sentences) is now the default setting in most considerations of moviemaking, and for that we should all be thankful,” assessed Kent Jones in 2014. “We'd be nowhere without film auteurism, which boasts a proud history: the lovers of cinema did not just argue for its inclusion among the fine arts, but actually stood up, waved its flag, and proclaimed its glory without shame” (Jones 2014, 41– 42). The long and illustrious history of this notion dates back to European film reviewing and criticism of the 1920s.

In a 2001 essay introducing the already vast literature on globalization, Mauro Guillen asks, tongue partially in cheek, “Is Globalization Civilizing, Destructive or Feeble?” Guillen presents globalization as a problem rather than a stable and coherent field, as a paradox best approached indirectly, through the wide range of responses that it generates. How, he asks, can the process of global integration in the economic and cultural spheres be perceived simultaneously as a powerful force of modernization, a step toward an Americanized world, a mortal threat to existing ways of life and a mere rhetorical flourish or vacuous academic trend with few real- world consequences? How can globalization be viewed as the pathway to “boundless prosperity and consumer joy” (135), a formula for homogenization and inequality, and nothing at all?

Instead of accounting for the inherent contradictions in the literature on globalization, most scholars have focused on a particular subset of the field, managing those incongruities by excluding them from their frame of analysis and leaving the outliers for another discipline. In the intervening years, the contradictions have only multiplied, with an intensified version of technological utopianism and corresponding resistance movements now assuming a more prominent role in the cultural politics of globalization.

The primary problem with studies of world cinema or global media is not the images or industries in the foreground of that scholarship but, rather, the acceptance of a commonplace but unsustainable definition of the “world.” To consider the range of problems that fall under the rubric of globalization, we have to first address the foundational question formulated recently by Pheng Cheah, “What is a world?” A slight alteration of the perspective or analytical frame can distort that object beyond recognition, especially when the focus changes from the abstractions of mathematized financial markets or utopian internationalism to the concrete reality of skyscrapers, factory labor and environmental devastation. As John Urry argues, “The emergent global order is one of constant disorder and disequilibrium,” and its effects are “non- linear, large- scale, unpredictable and partially ungovernable” (2000, 208).

While much of film theory has explored the function of representation, image and stereotype, there is renewed focus on the “being” and affective life of race within visual culture. Critics explore the conditions of racialization in which a subject does not fully accede to humanity — forms of what Mel Chen calls animacy specifically in relation to Asian objects and bodies — and how racialization exposes subjects to conditions of precariousness and risk of death. The history of racial stereotype might be explored through this lens, through the calcification of type as a form of denaturing or what Homi Bhabha calls the “ ‘fixity’ in the ideological construction of otherness” or a fixed form of representation that denies the play of difference (312). The most abiding racial and ethnic stereotypes are of figures that are deemed uncivilized, subhuman or disposable subjects: Mexican bandits, Latina spitfires, Latino buffoons, Pacific Islanders in grass skirts, mammies, uncle Toms, maids of all races, bloodthirsty Native Americans, hypersexual squaws, inscrutable Asians, lotus blossoms and dragon ladies. In all of these depictions, race is a sign of nonbeing or lesser being. In this chapter, I explore various tributaries of film theory and racial being through recent critical interventions that capture many of the tropes of film and media theory and point to new ways of imagining and depicting racialized figures.

Visual culture participates in the transformation of political cultures, a link made all the more powerful and complex by the recent emergence of new digital modes of screen production and reception and a social responsibility raised to heightened value in times — such as now — of great social tension. Films such as Get Out (2017) are imbued with the charged political events and violence against black bodies that inspired Black Lives Matter while television shows that feature nuanced black characters and storylines, like Shonda Rhimes's Scandal (ABC 2012– 18), are bolstered by the political efforts of Black Twitter — the same digital means that helped foment a revolution in the Arab world.

One of the founding organizers of Black Lives Matter, Alicia Garza, makes apparent the connection of this movement with Latinx politics, particularly around the carceral complex that includes prisons and extends to detention centers for migrants.

If film theory paradigms are stocks on the intellectual market, following their peak highs in the 1970s, shares in semiotics and allied conceptual frameworks have been in decline and past decades have seen a major sell- off in favor of cognitive, neo- formalist, affectbased, phenomenological and various other theoretical approaches. Yet like semiotics more generally, cinemasemiotics (for short) is far from a single unified corpus of theoretical works, one specific doctrine, or a position that is amenable to being either fully embraced or rejected. Within film theory, semiotics is an umbrella term of convenience covering many differently oriented theories of the basic units of filmic communication and/ or films as wholes conceived as signs or symbol systems. As in other contexts, film signs are seen to compose messages. For some theorists, these are governed by the use of codes and sub- codes, historically variable conventions of signification often entwined with socio- cultural assumptions, beliefs and ideologies.

Christian Metz is rightly regarded as a founding father of film semiotics. His seminal work, rooted in the linguistic structuralism of Ferdinand de Saussure and several of his major followers, is a primary reference point for any discussion of it. For Metz and theorists favorably disposed to his general program (as laid out in his early essay collection, Film Language) cinema relies on some of the same design features that are productive of linguistic sense- making, as appropriately modified to fit the medium's primarily visual mode of address. These include a reliance on cinematic and extra- cinematic conventions (and related codes), the presence of syntagmatic relations (as may be found in both the spatial and temporal axes of the film form, and both within and among images and sequences) and cross- media intertextuality.

Metz's approach is centered on the causal, spatial- temporal structures in and through which cinematic stories and worlds are created and comprehended.

Judith Butler has been called upon time and again to explain the motivation for her seminal work, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. One particularly telling rationale for her project appears in Undoing Gender: “I wanted something of gender trouble […] to disturb — fundamentally — the way in which feminist and social theory think gender […] one has to understand the sea- change that took place when feminist studies turned from being the analysis of ‘images’ of women […] to being an analysis of sexual difference at the foundation of cultural and human communicability” (2004, 207– 8). And yet, few commentators on Gender Trouble saw it as a reaction to “the analysis of ‘images’ of women,” as Butler herself notes. Certainly, no discipline at the time of Gender Trouble's writing more exemplified the analysis of images of women than film theory. Feminist film theory established the terms by which images of women became the central epistemological question of the 1970s and 1980s in film and related disciplines. That a Hegelian philosopher took as her starting point the analysis of “images of women” speaks to how transdisciplinary the analysis of images of women was at the time. Feminist film theory, like Woman herself, refused to stay domesticated, confined. As Janet McCabe explains in Feminist Film Studies: Writing the Woman into Cinema, “the body of work called feminist film theory and criticism has played a crucial — and often controversial — role in the emergence of film studies as an academic discipline; in turn, film studies shaped feminist concerns as well as granted feminist research a space to flourish” (2004, 1). This body of work was so far- reaching that by 1990, it played a crucial role in the advent of queer theory, a term coined by one of the founding scholars of feminist film theory, Teresa de Lauretis (1991).

In this essay, I shall offer a historical overview of cognitive approaches to film, before putting forward what to cognitive film theory might be an ‘heretical’ argument, in that I shall try to find ways in which cognitive film theory can work with, rather than against, more ‘classical’ film theory in order to enrich our understanding of cinema. I shall do this by looking at the concept of heuretics, as discussed by Christian Keathley in his book, Cinephilia and History, or The Wind in the Trees (2006). Before reaching this point, though, let us look at the history of cognitive film theory.

From The Photoplay to Post- Theory and Beyond

For the uninitiated, cognitive film theory has as perhaps its central principle the idea that viewers are active while watching a film; that is, viewers constantly are carrying out cognitive/ conscious labour in order to recognise what they see, make sense of a story, make evaluations about situations and characters, have an emotional response to films and so on. In some senses, to assert as much should be self- evident: of course, viewers engage actively with films when they watch them. Nonetheless, this claim was perhaps a big one when cognitive film theory began to emerge in the mid- 1990s through the development of the Society for Cognitive Studies of the Moving Image (SCSMI) and, in particular, the publication of David Bordwell and Noel Carroll's edited collection, Post- Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies (1996a). For, as various authors make clear in that collection, cognitivism marks a break from the older, more ‘classical’ film theory that had psychoanalysis and Marxism at its theoretical core.

Emerging most prominently out of the journal Screen in the 1970s, the ‘classical’ or ‘Grand’ film theory argued that viewers of films were passive in that they unwittingly were prey to the ideologies peddled by mainstream cinema. Laura Mulvey (1975) famously suggested, for example, that mainstream cinema reinforced a specifically masculine way of looking both at the world and at women in particular, since in most mainstream narrative films, women are reduced to spectacles that are to be looked at, rather than being active agents or rounded characters.

Karl Marx died in 1883. He was buried in a Victorian cemetery in Highgate, North London. Still today, a small but regular flow of tourists from across the globe visits the grave, where the British communist party built a tombstone with a portrait bust in 1954 (Figure 1.1). Some of them bring flowers, some even burst to sing aloud “The Internationale” in front of the cenotaph. But, very rarely do these visitors happen to cross another grave, which is located off the beaten track at the far side of the cemetery, next to the fence that borders Swain's Lane and the mock Tudor houses from the 1920s. This is where we encounter the grave of William Friese-Greene, a British entrepreneur and early pioneer in the development of moving picture technology in the United Kingdom (Figure 1.2). Friese- Greene passed away in 1921.

Surely, it is merely a coincidence that these two individuals came to share the same cemetery. The spatial proximity of Marx's and Friese- Greene's earthly remains nonetheless suggests resonations and overlaps between the two key historical forces of modernity these two individuals were part of, and in many ways epitomized. In this respect, a visit to the Highgate cemetery today brings about a certain sentiment of loss, even nostalgia. On the one hand, we remember the individual who gave his name to one of the defining political worldviews and philosophies of the twentieth century, a worldview that is increasingly undermined by the triumph of the current neoliberal form of capitalism. On the other hand, we are reminded of a person who, even if he holds merely a minor position in the (pre)histories of cinema written today, contributed to the birth of a medium that is now losing its status as the leading global cognitive and cultural technology. Digitalization and neoliberalism — those are the predatory forces (tightly married to one another, one could argue) that have been eroding the subjects of this essay: films and Marxism.

But how are we to map cinema in relation to Marxist thought? Marx, as is known, was a philosopher and political economist of German Jewish origin, famous for his theory of historical materialism — stipulating, to put it crudely, that a society's means of production determine its makeup.

Composed and written with force and conviction, the essays in this collection attest to the continued pertinence and promise of film theory. Born of cinema itself, whether in view of the Lumiere Brothers's Workers Exiting a Factory or Bill Morrison's Dawson City: Frozen Time, theory begs us to consider how and why we commit ourselves to study cinema and visual media. And for what ends: examining at a gamut of cinemas from the origins of the seventh art to the digital age, each of the authors in the pages above discerns issues that make theory contemporary. Mindful of film history, they show how the moving image remains a compelling forum for dialogue and exchange over issues of a first magnitude: what it means to live in a world that by and large we experience on screens or through moving images; but also, on how visual media might shape the future of cognition as such. The authors remind us that with theory, we are enabled to consider the force and fragility of cinema: in what ways the medium is endowed with uncanny power and yet, how ephemeral and passing it can be. Demonstrating that theory rescues cinema from itself without the promise of redemption, the authors employ a variety of concepts and methods that turn films into unsettling critical objects.

At the risk of repeating what Hunter Vaughan notes cogently in the Preface, and what in different ways the authors have shown in their contributions: the foundations of theory are strong, and the directions it is taking bear untold promise. Several major of lines of inquiry draw their way through the sum of the essays. First, as historians of the present are quick to remind us, since 2007, following the implementation of the cell phone and the iPad, the advent of Facebook and the growth of the internet, we live in the world in ways inalterably other than those we had known even a decade ago. We can posit that the great tradition of ‘going to the movies’ is long gone and that the movie palace is now either a museum or a photographic image.

At six minutes, five seconds into Chantal Akerman's No Home Movie (2015), the film cuts from a handheld high- angle shot of a backyard to a close- up shot from behind Natalia Akerman, the filmmaker's mother. Natalia pushes a door screen left and enters the living space. A camera – Chantal – follows Natalia before stopping at the doorway. While the camera records this modest entry into an apartment's open space, the relation between subject/ mother and camera/ daughter reveals both the comfort of a family home and a hesitant urgency to fully witness, capture and hold dear. The camera's sway in Akerman's hands suggests at once the immediacy of home movie footage, and the ephemerality of an always already lost present. Such felt proximity to transient subject, space and time in these early moments of Akerman's final film, with its Akermanesque rhythm of extended long take and sudden break, enacts a flow between intimate ‘real life’ duration and the insistent minimalism of an artist devoted throughout her career to an ethics of a ‘very frontal gaze’, as Adrian Martin and Cristina Alvarez Lopez suggest, among others. The seeming formalist/ realist juxtaposition of No Home Movie's opening sequence, in fact, offers a subtle microcosmic mapping of a fundamental dichotomy in classic film theory, a distinction and opposition that corresponds, as Dudley Andrew writes, ‘to the cliche that all cinema has roots in either Melies or Lumiere‘(1976, vi), in either formal experimentation that foregrounds the medium's distinctiveness (formalism) or an ‘objective’ documentation that reveals an indexical link with the real (realism).

Apparatus theory claims to study the “machineries” of the seventh art. Dealing not so much with cameras, projectors, film stock, the design of iPads, editing programs and applications than the relations that viewers sustain with the medium, it lays stress on psychic and social mechanisms that shape the experience of cinema. Considered in a broad sense, it accounts for the power that film holds in respect to the world in which it operates or is deployed. Adepts of apparatus theory consider how cinema is viewed, what it does to the imagination, and in what ways it gets consumed, remembered, classified and even forgotten. For enthusiasts of cinema trained in psychoanalysis, apparatus is understood as a complex process of libidinal exchange between the perceiving spectator and the various screens on which moving images are perceived and registered, which include both the surfaces on which films are projected and the psychic devices that sift the impressions we gather from the experience of viewing a film. For the sociologist and historian of the seventh art, apparatus can refer to a broadly defined economic sphere in which of film is construed to play a significant role in the construction, management and practice of everyday life, in short, as a mechanism having purchase on the lives and minds of collective groups of moviegoers. For those who would call themselves “ordinary” or gardenvariety viewers of cinema, apparatus theory deals with how enthusiasts and cinephiles control, mediate or even politicize their passion for film.

For the sake of brevity it can be said, grosso modo, that in its purview of the mental economies that drive the medium the theory gives rise, first, to a critical appreciation of cinema and, second, to a creative doubt prompting us to be aware of why and wherefore cinema functions in our sentient lives.

The contexts in which the idea of apparatus takes shape tell much about what it was, how it has evolved and, perhaps, where it is and how it works today. Officially born in France in the turmoil and conflict of May 1968, it reflected on the political and aesthetic virtues of theory — in other words, on how film, which otherwise belonged to the industry of capital, could be interpreted to acquire political and philosophical mettle enough to work contrary to consumerism.

Today, film theory is at a crossroad. On the one hand, its body of concepts is growing thanks to the emergence of new perspectives and new situations to be taken into account. On the other hand, some of its traditional keywords are being strongly criticized, especially by the exponents of the so- called philosophy of film, because of their alleged inconsistency and inefficacy.

The growth of theory responds to a multifold impulse. First of all, the process of digitalization and media convergence, with their huge impact on film, urge theory to reckon with new questions and to dialogue with other disciplines equally interested in the same facts. The increasing use of new devices and platforms, from computers to smart- phones and to headsets like Oculus Rift, changes our perspectives on the film apparatus and recalls aspects that are more familiar to media studies. Film's migration into domestic spaces, urban squares or theme parks calls for an ecological sensibility that was formerly largely unknown in the field (although the configuration of movie theatres could have certainly already suggested that cinema is an environmental art). The development of new forms of vision, from 3- D to virtual reality, reshapes our approach to film reception and asks for a wider attention to processes that are currently undertaken by neurosciences. Film theory confronts unprecedented situations and adjusts its own methods and goals. As a consequence, it shares with other disciplines concepts like digitization, scale, network, hybridity, cybernetics, embodied cognition and the Anthropocene.

At the same time, the availability of never- explored archives provides the opportunity to gain a better grasp on the topics discussed in the past. This is true for the Western canon: one thinks of Abel (1988), an anthology on the first wave of French film theory, Andel and Szczepanik (2008), a collection of early Czech film theory, and more recently, Kaes, Baer and Cowan (2016), an anthology of German film theory until 1933. It is equally true for traditions that fall outside of it, as shown by current explorations of early Asian debates by Nornes and Gerow (2009), Bao (2015) and Fan (2015), which provide a much better sense of the issues at stake in the field and their transnational circulation.

This essay invites those of us who think with cinema to try on a process approach. Let's try seeing the world as an open, ever- changing whole, a matrix of motile relations from which all kinds of entities take shape, differentiate and create new relations. This is what we see when we switch from a metaphysics of substance to a metaphysics of process. As we'll see, film theory is already doing process philosophy, avowedly or not. I will introduce some concepts from process metaphysics that show how objects crystallize from processes; characterize becoming as an interrupted flow; privilege relations over fixity; treasure singularity; and critically examine how entities individuate in a milieu. All these concepts lend well to thinking alongside movies. The essay will draw on European and North American process thinkers, highlighting the work of Alfred North Whitehead. I will also bring in the thoroughly modern thought of the seventeenth- century Persian philosopher Sadr al- Din al- Shirazi, or Mulla Sadra, and the relational philosophy of Martinican philosopher- poet Edouard Glissant.

My cinematic thinking companion, two works by African American filmmaker Arthur Jafa, test the possibility of viewing someone or something — in particular, Black people and Blackness — as not a figure, subject/ object or thing but as a process of becoming. Jafa's 2013 documentary Dreams Are Colder Than Death both witnesses and elicits creative individuations, within and despite a murderous milieu. Jafa's film draws in arguments from Black intellectuals, including Saidiya V. Hartman, Hortense Spillers and Fred Moten, which enable me to test and hone the aptness of process concepts of singularity, individuation and relation.