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Thinking about the dynamics of precarity challenges us to defy and avoid any essentialised and crystallised category of exploitation and of the worker in the contemporary chain of value extraction. Indeed, since the neoliberal paradigm is often described as a regime shattering any distinction between life and work, such a productive dimension involves tackling subjectivity at the intersection of class, race, gender, ability/disability. The aim of this paper is to examine the recent The Assistant (2019) by Kitty Green, which, because of its melancholic and disempowering affective patterns, embodies a fascinating critical potential in reversing mythologies and imaginative traps related to dreams of individualised self-entrepreneurship. The film allows us to discuss these same intertwined levels by observing the emotional economy entailed in cultural work and how much this ecology can be connected with more general coordinates and strategies of feminisation and extraction of care-related activities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nikolaj Lübecker's book, "Twenty-First-Century Symbolism: Verlaine, Baudelaire, Mallarmé," explores the role of poetry in contemporary society. Lübecker argues that poetry can be seen as a form of solid and consistent thought, capable of challenging and reimagining our understanding of the world. The book examines the works of Verlaine, Baudelaire, and Mallarmé, highlighting their contributions to the redefinition of human existence and the relationship between the individual and the environment. Lübecker emphasizes the ecological nature of subjectivity and the importance of relational dynamics in shaping our perception, emotion, and action. The book ultimately celebrates the power of poetry to inspire and enrich our lives. [Extracted from the article]

This article aims to investigate the political and conceptual power of the successful and highly praised film Bacurau (Juliano Dornelles and Kleber Mendonça Filho, 2019) by inserting it within general trends of contemporary visual culture surrounding the issue of cinematic precarity. The discussion will find its analytical coordinates around the notions of chronotope and dialogism. These tools are notoriously attributed to Mikhail Bakhtin and are intended to investigate regular patterns in aesthetic experiences and to evaluate the differential and subversive potential to be attributed to every case study. The grounding assumption of the following analysis is to understand cinematic experience as an ecological encounter and an affective and conceptual interaction in which viewers find the opportunity to explore and experience complex ethical systems: a productive interrelation that allows us also to connect the discussion with reflections upon general dynamics of neoliberal governance and with trajectories of resistance and revolt against it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The following introduction to the Special Issue addresses the problematic definition of the notion of precarity by highlighting its multifaceted value and possible interpretation in relation to the moving image. It also aims, at the same time, to show some directions in which, in accordance with the work of many scholars, it is possible to come with effective transversal modes of adopting and applying the concept. In this sense, the introduction also shows how the various papers of the Special Issue are capable to contribute to this understanding in unique and productive ways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Deuce observes the transformations of the notorious 42nd street of New York across the 1970s and 1980s. Aim of this paper is demonstrating how the series enacts this urban mutation through the integration of the affective and experiential texture of the story-world into a unitary, yet multifaceted and transformative, ecology. The analysis will be carried out by drawing from Mikhail Bakthin's notions of chronotope and dialogism, demonstrating the pragmatic power of artistic experience in enacting space-time dimensions characterised by an intrinsic emotional and conceptual polyphony. These concepts will be examined within the framework of an enactivist and film-philosophical understanding of cinematic experience addressing the ethical power entangled in viewers' aesthetic engagement. I will resort to these ideas to discuss how The Deuce offers a complex and critical enactment of the socio-economic dynamics of the Neoliberal Turn, metonymically embedded, in its conflicts and contradictions, within the series' mutating environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the emergence of embodied cognitive theories, there has been an ever-growing interest in the applic ation of these theories to media studies, generating a large number of analyses focusing on the affective and intellectual features of viewers' participation. The body of the viewer has become the central object of study for film and media scholars, who examine the conceptual physicality of the viewing experience by associating body states with parallel intellectual and moral constructions. In this article, I contribute to the study of embodied cognition and cinema by drawing upon Baruch Spinoza's philosophy, especially from his process-based notion of the body. I will put this ecological and dynamic concept of the body in connection with recent studies on enactive cognition, and define a radical enactivist approach to be applied in the discussion of the experiential dynamics of Lynne Ramsay's You Were Never Really Here. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I analyze Park Chan-wook's The Handmaiden (Ah-gassi, 2016) by addressing its puzzle narrative and complex interactive dynamics as embodied and affective categories. In particular, I employ Mikhail Bakhtin's theory of the chronotope together with Giuliana Bruno's work on media theory and Steffen Hven's notion of the embodied fabula to show how the film, in all its aesthetic complexity, enacts a creative and transformative experience based on the continuous subversion of the power dynamics I describe. Furthermore, I demonstrate how this semantic and experiential reconstruction couples viewers' alignment with the two main characters in their rebellion against patriarchal power and obsessive male fantasies. Ultimately, then, in this article I aim to connect the experiential and affective engagement of the film with a critical reading of power dynamics as ecologically situated structures to be challenged and revolutionized through a creative process of becoming. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Teorie del Cinema: Il Dibattito Contemporaneo, Adriano D'Aloia and Ruggero Eugeni (eds) (2017) Milano: Raffaello Cortina Editore, 408 pp., ISBN: 9788860309587, p/bk, €35.00 Bodies in Suspense: Time and Affect in Cinema, Alanna Thain (2017) Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 328 pp., ISBN: 978-0-8166-9295-8, p/bk, $30.00; ISBN: 978-0-8166-9293-4, h/bk, $120.00 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article analyzes the film "Inside Llewyn Davis," starring Oscar Isaac. Particular focus is given to the way the film stages melancholic perception of the world and the affective components of the experience in this motion picture, such as camera movements, special effects, and soundtrack. The author discusses the negative emotions that the film generate and the link of the melancholic sensations with the emotional world of Isaacs.

The aim of this article is to outline a Spinozian-Deleuzian analysis of audio-visual experience and to combine this account with an embodied cognitive perspective on cinema. Thus, film experience integrates affection and intellection and is not a passive and contemplative phenomenon, but a constructive interaction that involves a creative encounter between the screen and the viewer. Furthermore, I will address the role of sad passions and the problematic relation between creation and resistance, also by drawing upon Primo Levi's work on memory and on the shame of being human. Consequently, I will argue that my Spinozian-Deleuzian perspective involves an idea of cinema and art as ethically productive events since they allow a creative opposition against all those forces that mortify and enclose existence. Andrei Tarkovsky's masterpiece Andrei Rublev offers the possibility to develop this discussion; in this biopic, the life of the famous Russian painter is pervaded by problematic questions upon the nature of God, the necessity of Evil, the role of art within a world of violence and misery and, at the same time, the tension and the marvel in the discovery of the real. Following the ideas on spectatorship outlined by Deleuze and combined with Spinoza's thought, we can say that the film makes us perceive these issues through the embodiment and the engagement of the relations it describes. At the same time, the movie gives us the possibility to re-discuss these terrible questions revealing the active and productive nature of art, as different sequences (like the enigmatic prologue) demonstrate. A further aim of this article is, then, to show how this assemblage of different concepts is possible through the vivid and interactive dimension of film experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Disarticulate: Language, Disability, and the Narratives of Modernity, James Berger (2014) New York, NY: New York University Press, ix + 301 pp., ISBN: 9780814708460, h/bk, $79, ISBN: 9780814725306, p/bk, $26, ISBN: 0814708463, e-book, $12.75 Interface, Branden Hookway (2014) Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 184 pp., ISBN: 9780262525503, p/bk, $26.95, ISBN: 9780262322614, e-book, $18.95 Cinematic Chronotopes: Here, Now, Me, Pepita Hesselberth (2014) London: Bloomsbury Academic, xii+200 pp., ISBN: 9781623567668, h/bk, £66.60, ISBN: 9781501316104, p/bk, £17.99, ISBN: 9781623566470, e-book, £57.99 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]