Kara Keeling's Deleuze and Cinema Website

entry by Corry Shores
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Kara Keeling's Deleuze and Cinema Website

Kara Keeling taught a graduate seminar on Deleuze and Culture this past Fall (She is an Assistant Professor of Critical Studies in the School of Cinematic Arts and of African American Studies in the Department of American Studies and Ethnicity at The University of Southern California. She is also the author of The Witch's Flight: The Cinematic, the Black Femme, and the Image of Common Sense. Her other publications are listed here. At last summer's International Deleuze Studies conference, I was fortunate to attend her presentation, “Music from the World Tomorrow:” “Bartleby; Or, The Formula” and the (Im)possible Politics of Afrofuturism. And you can visit her excellent blog, Spittin' Change).

As a requirement for the seminar, her students provide explanation and commentary to particular scenes that Deleuze refers-to in his cinema books. They do a wonderful job of explaining Deleuze's ideas, and the clips are high fidelity (also, subtitles are nicely incorporated).

The main page is here. It opens to an index and further description. There written:

The following selection of film clips from films discussed by French philosopher Gilles Deleuze were compiled in the Fall of 2009 by the participants in Professor Kara Keeling's Critical Studies graduate seminar on Deleuze and Culture at the University of Southern California.

Throughout his cinema books, Gilles Deleuze refers to various films in order to illuminate what they make available to thought, given the theoretical approach to cinema Deleuze develops in his work with film. The selection of clips available here are from films referenced by Deleuze. The commentary that accompanies them have been written as part of the course requirements for Professor Kara Keeling's advanced graduate seminar on Gilles Deleuze and Culture.

Here are the entries so far:

Intolerance and Deleuze 1 By Jih-Fei Cheng

Passion of Joan of Arc and Deleuze by Alison Kozberg and Genevieve Anderson

Samuel Beckett's Film and Deleuze 2 by Alison Kozberg

Seven Samurai and Deleuze by Jih-Fei Cheng

Story of a Love Affair and Deleuze by Changwon Choi

The Crowd and Deleuze by Critical Commons Manager

The Great Dictator and Deleuze by James Crawford and Tim Holland

The Lady from Shanghai and Deleuze By James Crawford and Alison Kozberg

Umberto D and Deleuze by Jih-Fei Cheng

Deleuze references well over 600 movies. Some films he refers-to many times, each for different reasons, and he also discusses directors in general. Cataloging these references is a massive project, but could conceivably be done as a collective effort. Keeling invites others to contribute, in case anyone else would like to join the project.