SCREEN THOUGHT: Volume 9, November 2025



ARTICLE

Alex D'Aloia: On Deleuzian fabulation and the problem with story-telling

Keywords: affect, Bogue, Deleuze, fabulation, philosophy, story-telling 

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This paper reconsiders the use of the term story-telling in the place of fabulation with regard to Gilles Deleuze’s Cinema 2: The Time-image (1997b). In the English translation of Cinema 2, the concept of “l’affabulation” (p. 325), which is central to Deleuze’s later-period philosophical engagements, is rendered as “story-telling” (p. xvii), and without much further explanation as to why. As such, what appears to be a simple error in translation now marks a conceptual displacement—one that has significant implications for how Deleuze’s cinematic project is received, particularly in English-language scholarship where fabulation is commonly understood through its elaboration in Deleuze and Guattari’s What is Philosophy? (1994). By tracing the elision of fabulation in Cinema 2, this paper argues that what is assumed to be an absent or underdeveloped concept in Deleuzian philosophy is, in fact, already structurally operative in relation to film philosophy. The implications of this displacement are also explored through a critical engagement with Ronald Bogue’s Deleuzian Fabulation and the Scars of History (2010). While Bogue’s work on fabulation is central to anglophone understandings of the term, it, too, risks treating fabulation more as thematic content and less as temporal structure. This paper therefore proposes a re-reading of story-telling and/or fabulation as an interpretive delay that haunts the break between the Cinema books.


J. Rosenbaum:  Can AI Generated art transcend kitsch?

Keywords: Generative AI, artificial intelligence, kitsch, CGI, 3D

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Generative AI is still a fairly new art form looking to create the real and the unreal all in a completely believable setting. Generative AI has the power to create thrilling and realistic special effects, to make the mundane intriguing and the magical believable. However, no matter how artists strive, it never quite looks 100% real. There is always something missing that causes a cognitive dissonance. I wish to explore that sense, the moment where suspension of disbelief becomes slightly fractured. This paper examines the notion of kitsch and flaws in 3D CGI artworks and generative AI images. I will explore the core concepts behind modelling in 3D, the issues that arise from perfectly trying to capture expression and the nature of flaws in CGI and then further to how generative AI has impacted this environment. I will explore the Uncanny Valley and ways that artists have worked to subvert its effects. I will also examine the practice of Photoshopping photographs to make them look more artificial to contrast my statements. I believe that the more that a generated figure looks perfectly human the less kitsch it seems but that there is a moment, between perfect photorealistic renderings and cartoonish ideas, where flawless figures transcend the Uncanny Valley, but are they still kitsch? Are they still camp? I will support my position with examples taken from the world of 3D CG art, generated images from my own research and discourses on Kitsch and on camp and ugliness. I will contrast this with Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation (Baudrillard 1994) where I posit that the final two stages are represented by CGI and Generative AI.


Shaun Wilson: Reflecting on metamodern slow film in The 51 Paintings Suite

Keywords: Metamodernism, slow cinema, slow, affect

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This paper is the first of two works that contextually responds to The 51 Paintings Suite, a long-term study that investigated metamodern affect, trauma memory, and slow cinema through practice-based film art. It consolidated a significant body of long-form slow films published between 2012-2023 across public screenings and online scholarship. The aim of the study was to consolidate perspectives about trauma memory and slowness through the moving image that led to the discovery of a new way to model metamodern affect in slow films which I term a ‘structure of reason’. These films developed an epistemological response to metamodernism that challenged existing scholarship focused on an ontological structure of feeling. As this research has reflectively aligned metamodern theory to the production of these films it sought to establish new knowledge about trauma memory and slow films within critical studio practice. The outcome of the published study will be reflected through, first, a significant dossier of practice-based slow films argued to be unique and significant to the field, second, a new theoretical model to consider trauma through metamodern affect in slow films; and third, an original and significant advancement of film-based metamodern scholarship.

ARTEFACTS

Shaun Wilson: Place and domestic cinema in filmic memorials

Keywords: place, home movies, slow cinema, affect, practice based research 

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Filmic Memorials (2005–2025) is a twenty-year practice-based research project comprising twenty long-form slow films that reconfigure vintage family home movies into a sustained investigation of place. Drawing on Standard 8 and Super 8 footage filmed by the artist’s grandfather and father across Europe, the Americas, and Australia from 1954 to 1988, the project develops a topographical methodology to analyse spatial memory within the moving image. It proposes a reconceptualisation of home movies as domestic cinema—not as amateur or nostalgic artefacts, but as formally grounded works capable of engaging with phenomenological themes of identity, time, and memorialisation. The project foregrounds intersubjectivity between viewer and film, arguing that temporality reshapes the affective dimensions of screen space. Its significance lies in establishing a new theoretical approach to place in film, producing 20 hours of original slow cinema works, and receiving peer-reviewed exhibition at major international venues including ACMI, ACCA, and the Reina Sofia Museum.