about this blog

Want to know a little more about this blog? Read on…

Cineosis explores ‘new films as they hit the screen’
I write about new films that hit the cinema where I live in Manchester, England. Though, of course, sometimes a film may take a couple of years to be distributed in the UK. I watch the films predominately at Home, (previously The Cornerhouse) and Manchester AMC. Both are a wee stroll from my house. Also, films on here may have been encountered through a special screening; which could be any kind of event, at a conference, by way of a retrospective, or even as part of my university work. The only condition is that it must have been released after 1995 (and thus created in second century of cinema, and after the publication of Deleuze's Cinema books).

Cineosis does not review films
I don’t write about every film I see, only about films I like. Further, I don’t question why I like the film. Rather, that I like a film is simply the call to write about it.

Cineosis is not film criticism
It is not the job of this blog to say how the film should have been, or could have been made better. The film maker made the film. Every film is an experiment, and the experiment can go well or badly. Any film is always as good or as bad as it is. I only write about good films… meaning, the films I like.

Cineosis is film theory
The cineosis blog has a single purpose… to write about new films through the film philosophy of Gilles Deleuze. Deleuze wrote two interrelated books on cinema, Cinema 1: The Movement Image and Cinema 2: The Time Image. For Deleuze, philosophy is the creation of concepts, and the Cinema books do just that, create a load of concepts to explore cinema.

Cineosis is a neologism – or invented word. I created it for two reasons. First, as shorthand for ‘cinematic semiosis,’ which is to say, a taxonomy of Deleuze’s cinema concepts. Secondly, to indicate that this taxonomy has been reconstituted from Deleuze’s Cinema books which to a certain extent resist such an activity. To read more see cineosis.com.

Cineosis objectives
Reading a film through the cineosis means I am essentially imposing a pre-existing concept to a film (though the concepts were developed in consort with cinema). I make no apologies for this. In fact, I think it is wonderful to approach a film with a methodology to look at it. We already do this all the time. This is what we do when we look at a film through genre (horror film, science fiction, etc) or through an auteur (the style of a director), though national identity (the films of France, South Korea, etc) or through politics, psychoanalysis, etc. Indeed, approaching a film without some preconceived framework is a delusion... it just means we haven't sussed out what our framework is. The cineosis is thus an explicit way to organise thinking about cinema, and one that is very different from those mentioned above in that it is organised around concepts proper to cinema. The objective of this blog is, in this way, twofold:

1. To see if the cineosis allows me to say something new about the film… and/or that the film allows me to open up some aspect of the cineosis.
2. To popularise the work of Deleuze on cinema… to lead people to the Cinema books.

Cineosis … when will it end?
This blog will go on until I have at least one film for each of the cineotic signs.

Cineosis does ‘spoilers’
I can’t apologise for ‘spoilers.’ In other words, I don’t say sorry for revealing stuff in the films that if you haven’t seen them, may spoil a twist or an ending, etc. If you haven’t seen the film and don’t want to know what happens, I wouldn’t risk reading that cineosis entry. Check the movie out and come back. Writing about the twists and endings can be crucial to the cineosis thing…