The Morph-Image: The Subjunctive Synthesis of Time

In The Morph-Image: The Subjunctive Synthesis of Time, Steen Ledet Christiansen argues for a new model of digital cinema that draws on Deleuzian and Whiteheadian insights into time and the future. This model insists that the philosophy of time must be rethought to provide a better understanding of the future and that the digital capacities of post-cinema present occasions of thought well-suited to this task. The figure of the morph, Christiansen posits, allows a conception of how post-cinema expresses time as a means of capture that appears liberatory, but modulates subjectivities into temporal forms of control. These temporal forms include digital animacies, flows, loops, synthetic long takes, and disjunctive editing, all of which are false formations of freedom. Ultimately, the author positions the unruly creativity of an event’s potential, of making the impossible possible in order to bring about true advancements into novelty, as escape from this dynamic. This book contributes to both Deleuzian film theory and a burgeoning Whiteheadian film-philosophy through deep engagement with key post-cinematic films, including Holy Motors, Collateral, Domino, Limitless, Spring Breakers, and Everything Everywhere All at Once. In doing so, important concepts of potentiality, actuality, and the future are considered and addressed in relation to the contemporary capitalist regime of control.

Table of Contents:
Chapter 1: The Emergence of Post-Cinematic Time — Holy Motors Chapter 2: Errors and Unruly Images — Collateral Chapter 3: The Disjunctive Synthesis of Time — Domino Chapter 4: Thinking Like a Capitalist — Limitless Chapter 5: An Excess of Future — Spring Breakers Chapter 6: Fabulating the Future — Everything Everywhere All at Once

About the Author :
Steen Ledet Christiansen is professor of culture, media, and aesthetics at Aalborg University, Denmark.

Review :
“This is a brilliant and original book. It proposes a bold new theory of cinematic form and expression in the digital age . . . The Morph-Image is a major work of film scholarship and criticism, as well as of film theory understood in the broadest terms." In a time in which change is the only stable reference point of orientation, Steen Ledet Christiansen‘s book attempts to ‘kill two birds with a stone.’ Christiansen proposes the morph-image – the ‘devourer of form’ – as a response both to the digital future(s) of the image (and a contender for a Cinema III), as well as our ‘image of the future’ in the age of a ubiquitous and rampant capitalism. And: He succeeds! The Morph-Image is a fascinating and almost clairvoyant book that deserves a wide readership. The Morph-Image is an ambitious and provocative attempt to go beyond conventional forms of analysis and interpretation, instead decoding the very movement of the future as it unfolds in the audiovisual forms of post-cinema.