Jeeshan Gazi

This paper provides an original, innovative, conception of a metaphysics of film that examines the relationship between the image upon the celluloid and reality. Rather than considering the real of film to be a placeholder for ontological truth, my theory proposes that celluloid has its own distinct reality.

For instead of addressing the images on the screen, as with Deleuze’s »Cinema« texts, this paper draws on Deleuzian-Bergsonian metaphysics in order to ultimately propose that film itself – the physical, celluloid, frame – is an alternate physical and temporal world to our own. This is to say that the filmic frame consists of spatial and temporal planes distinct to those which we inhabit.

By reconfiguring Deleuzian film theory I propose that the filmic frame is a unique level of duration that contains a complex of co-existing time-relations that are temporally displaced from the duration of our consciousness; due to the process of image-formation via the snapshot, this level of duration is born of our past, yet exists in our present; thus it is this temporal displacement of the data contained on the physical frame that marks out celluloid as a spatial plane as well as a temporal plane distinct from our own. It is in this respect that we can conceive of film as another world.

Jeeshan Gazi successfully defended his Ph.D. thesis in Film Studies, from which the above paper is drawn, at the University of Essex in May 2015. As such, he currently has no affiliation while he applies for postdoctoral and lecturer posts. His thesis drew upon the analytical skills he attained from his BA in Philosophy at the University of Manchester and the continental critical theory skills he attained from his MA in Contemporary Approaches to English Studies at Goldsmiths, University of London.

He has several articles accepted for publication in Spring 2016, in the influential theory journal »SubStance« (»Redeeming Kracauer’s 'Theory of Film': An Examination of the Importance of Material Aesthetics«), the high impact »Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction« (»Mapping the Metaphysics of the Multiverse in Pynchon's 'Against the Day'«), and socio-political »Journal for the Study of Radicalism« (»Pynchon’s Nineteen Eighty-Four: 'Vineland', Film, and the Tragedy of the American Activism of the Nineteen-Sixties«). He has also presented papers on cinema and literature at several international conferences in both the UK and the US.