Postscript: Invitation(s)

The cinema of experience, read through the cinema of Chantal Akerman and the phenomenology of Simone de Beauvoir, showcases experiences of ambivalence, stasis, horror, cringe, and plasticity. As theorized here, this form of cinema utilizes cinematic mechanisms to shift the gaze, create a new aesthetic language, and more fully represent the diversity of people’s lives and experiences. But what is most important is that the cinema of experience reorients affective and relational pathways and assemblages (in our bodies, our heads, and in the world) by stirring up unfamiliar and often unwelcome forms of feeling, feelings so buried by habitual gesture and ways of thinking, moving, and reproducing, that they do not rise to the level of consciousness. Bringing our attention to this cinema of experience and the feelings it invites, the book opens a space where we can together explore what it might feel like to feel like feminists.