Presented by the Centre for Cinema Studies and Cinema Thinks the World, the Critical Thinkers Series features research talks by notable and emerging scholars in Cinema and Media Studies. Join us for the next talk in the Spring 2026 Series by by Claire Cao, PhD candidate in Cinema and Media Studies, UBC.
The Persistence of the Impossible: Georges Bataille and the Substitutive Logic of Cinematic Form
Film theory’s historical concerns might be read as vibrating through a tension around a philosophy of substitution. According to Rudolf Arnheim, “film is always at one and the same time a flat picture post card and the scene of a living action”; André Bazin states that “the photograph is the object itself…it is the model”; Jean-Louis Baudry argues that the cinematic apparatus produces a unified subject by masking its own discontinuity, substituting fragmented conditions of perception with the illusion of continuity. From the collective desire to make cinema “cohere” as a medium of meaning, contemporary discussions of the substitutive logic of cinema register a persistent anxiety and curiosity: Jacques Rancière argues that cinema is not a unified medium but a field of “intervals” (écarts) among narrative, image, politics, and sensation; Shane Denson shows how post-cinematic media reconfigure these gaps, producing a surface coherence that conceals deeper disjunctions, among other contemporary reformulations of cinema’s constitutive gaps. Embedded within this logic of substitution resonates with what Jacques Derrida theorizes as the supplement, that substitution already inscribes a constitutive lack—one that emerges in cinema as the site of its instability or failure.
If cinema can be understood, crudely, as a flawed machine of substitution, this talk examines moments when its substitutive logic “fails” or “collapses” within the formal organization of relations. In The Master (2012), relational forms—master and disciple, father and son, therapist and patient, even lovers—never fully hold. Drawing on Georges Bataille’s account of non-productive expenditure, I argue that Freddie (Joaquin Phoenix)’s excess—his volatility, desire, and resistance to legibility—exposes how the “productive” logic of substitution breaks at its seams. Alex Ross Perry’s The Color Wheel (2011) extends this problematic: through a mumblecore form of excess—duration, repetition, and flatness—substitution is pushed to its limit, where incest, as a Bataillean moment of expenditure, not only collapses “difference” in love, but leaves nothing in its place.
About Claire Cao
Claire Cao is a PhD candidate in Cinema and Media Studies at the University of British Columbia. Her research brings together film theory and philosophical aesthetics, with a focus on relationality, subjectivity, and mediation. She draws on continental philosophy, phenomenology, trauma studies and critical race theory to explore how cinema figures subjectivity in its unstable or unworked forms. Her dissertation examines how cinematic form organizes and unsettles relations, attending to moments where mediation—and its substitutive logic—reaches its limits. She has written on cinematic negativity, coloniality and cannibalism, racialized flesh and posthuman embodiment. She holds an MA in Cinema and Media Studies from the University of Chicago.
This event is free and there is no need to RSVP.