The Cinema Effect by Sean Cubitt

Sean Cubitt’s book, The Cinema Effect, is an intricate philosophical analysis of film. Following from studies like Gilles Deleuze’s Cinema 1 and Cinema 2, Stephen Shaviro’s The Cinematic Body and D.N. Rodowick’s Gilles Deleuze’s Time Machine, Cubitt chooses to look at film’s materiality. These analyses are all perspectives on film that look deeper than its stars and narratives. The materiality they seek to explore is the fundamental existence of the image. Moreover, this is a complicated idea of materiality, for these studies don’t simply consider the image as a moving photograph. Instead, they are grounded by a belief in the image’s existence as matter in movement. This position has significant ramifications for theoretical writing on the cinema, for what is implied is an equation between bodies in reality and images in the cinema. Deleuze and Shaviro, for example, begin with the matter–image equation and use film to think through philosophical problems of movement and duration. And the concept of the image as moving matter is the premise from which they develop theories of the sign (semiotics). Such semiotic theories, based on the kinetics of bodies in movement, are important because they go against the grain of linguistic-inspired semiology (the dominant semiotic trend of the twentieth century). The Cinema Effect is another analysis of cinema’s materiality, one Cubitt himself defines as a “material theory of film” (39). Cubitt also considers the image as moving matter and endeavours to explore concepts such as duration, aesthetics, semiotics and ethics. He describes this task as an attempt to discover “what cinema does”.