Rhizomatic Cinema: Film Poetry as Minor Literature

Introduction: Deterritorializing the Image-Text Relation

Film poetry constitutes what Deleuze and Guattari might recognize as a “minor literature” within cinema—a practice that deterritorializes dominant forms from within, operating through continuous variation rather than fixed structures. In the space between conventional poetry and traditional cinema, film poetry creates what these theorists termed “lines of flight”—trajectories that escape the binary logic that would subordinate image to text or text to image. This theoretical exploration examines film poetry through a Deleuzian lens, considering how its form and practice embody principles of multiplicity, becoming, and resistance to what Deleuze and Guattari termed “arborescent” or hierarchical structures of meaning and representation.

The Molecular Revolution: Film Poetry as Praxis

In Cinema 1 and Cinema 2, Deleuze elaborates a distinction between the movement-image and the time-image—a transition from cinema subordinated to action and narrative progression to one that presents direct images of time itself. Film poetry, in its contemporary manifestations, operates primarily in the realm of the time-image, creating what Deleuze terms “crystal-images” where actual and virtual, present and past, become indiscernible.

Following Deleuze and Guattari’s conceptualization in A Thousand Plateaus, we might understand film poetry as operating through “molecular” rather than “molar” organization. Unlike the molar structures of commercial cinema—with their fixed conventions, genre expectations, and industrial production processes—film poetry proceeds through molecular becomings, creating assemblages that reconfigure the relation between viewer and viewed, between language and image, between perception and thought.

This molecular approach manifests in film poetry’s rejection of unified style or method in favor of singularities and multiplicities. When film poets employ techniques that disrupt standard cinematographic conventions, they enact what Deleuze and Guattari termed “micropolitics”—interventions that operate below the threshold of institutional recognition but nevertheless transform the conditions of perception itself.

Any-Space-Whatever: The Deterritorialization of Cinematic Time

In Deleuze’s cinematic taxonomy, the “any-space-whatever” (espace quelconque) represents a deterritorialized space liberated from determined coordinates and conventional relations. Film poetry, through its manipulation of temporal structures, creates what we might term an “any-time-whatever”—a liberation of time from chronological progression and causality. This approach produces what Deleuze identified as “irrational cuts” that disrupt the sensory-motor schema of traditional narrative.

The significance of this temporal deterritorialization extends beyond formal experimentation. As Deleuze argues in Cinema 2, the time-image responds to a crisis in action—a situation where conventional responses and movements no longer suffice. Film poetry’s temporal manipulations can thus be understood as responses to contemporary crises where established temporal frameworks (progress narratives, developmental trajectories, teleological history) have become inadequate to lived experience.

When film poets employ techniques like looping, reversal, extreme slow motion, or temporal collage, they create what Deleuze terms “sheets of past” and “peaks of present” that coexist rather than succeed one another. This liberation of time from chronological imperatives opens possibilities for what Deleuze and Guattari, following Bergson, understood as “duration”—a non-chronological time of becoming rather than being.

Body Without Organs: The Haptic Visuality of Film Poetry

Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the “Body without Organs” (BwO) provides a productive framework for understanding film poetry’s engagement with embodied experience. The BwO represents not a body lacking organs but rather a body freed from the organization that subordinates organs to determined functions. Similarly, film poetry liberates the eye from its determined function within conventional cinematic vision, creating what film theorist Laura U. Marks, extending Deleuze, terms “haptic visuality.”

Unlike the optical visuality of mainstream cinema—which maintains distance between viewer and viewed object—haptic visuality invites a proximate, tactile relationship to the image. This engagement transforms the viewing experience from one of mastery and comprehension to one of embodied participation and affective response. When film poets create works that emphasize texture, grain, surface, rhythm, and materiality, they invite what Deleuze terms “affection-images” that bypass cognitive processing to create direct sensory engagement.

This haptic dimension holds particular significance for minoritarian perspectives within cinema. As Deleuze and Guattari argue in their analysis of Franz Kafka, minor literature often works through intensities rather than significations, affects rather than meanings. Film poetry’s emphasis on the haptic thus becomes not merely an aesthetic choice but a strategy for creating what Deleuze and Guattari term “intensive multiplicities” that resist stratification and codification.

Machinic Assemblages: Film Poetry in the Digital Age

Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of “machinic assemblages” offers a particularly productive lens for understanding film poetry in the digital age. Unlike mechanical systems defined by fixed components and determined functions, machines in the Deleuzian sense constitute assemblages characterized by their connections and capacities. Digital technologies, approached through this framework, are not merely tools but components in assemblages that transform both technology and human practice through their interaction.

Film poetry in the digital era exemplifies this machinic approach, creating assemblages that connect human perception, algorithmic processes, network distribution, and multimedia engagements. As Deleuze argues in “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” digital technologies operate through modulation rather than molding, continuous variation rather than fixed form. Film poetry’s digital manifestations similarly operate through modulation and variability, creating what Deleuze might term “dividual” rather than individual experiences—experiences composed of variable elements rather than unified wholes.

This transformation is not merely technical but ontological. When film poets utilize open-source software, engage in collaborative digital production, or distribute work through decentralized networks, they participate in what Deleuze and Guattari term “nomadic distribution”—systems characterized by non-hierarchical organization and flows of desire rather than structures of lack. The digital transformation of film poetry thus represents not just an aesthetic evolution but a reconfiguration of what Deleuze termed the “plane of consistency” upon which creative practices unfold.

Schizoanalysis: Beyond Representation to Becoming-Minor

In Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari propose “schizoanalysis” as an approach that rejects representational thinking in favor of productive connections and desiring-production. Applied to film poetry, schizoanalysis directs attention away from what images represent toward what they produce—the connections, affects, and transformations they make possible. Film poetry, in this framework, constitutes not a mode of representation but a process of “becoming-minor”—a creative practice that deterritorializes dominant forms from within.

As Deleuze argues in his analysis of Francis Bacon, the task of art is not to reproduce or invent forms but to “capture forces” that would otherwise remain invisible. Film poetry similarly aims not to represent realities but to capture imperceptible forces—temporal, affective, political—that conventional representational systems cannot accommodate. When film poets employ techniques that disrupt conventional visual pleasure, create deliberate disjunctions between sound and image, or fragment linguistic structures, they engage in what Deleuze terms “painter’s operations” that bypass representation to create direct sensory encounters.

This approach to film poetry aligns with what Deleuze and Guattari identify as a “minor” practice within a major form. Like Kafka’s deterritorialization of the German language, film poetry deterritorializes cinematic language, creating what Deleuze terms “a foreign language within language” or what we might call a foreign cinema within cinema. This practice does not seek to create a new major language but to set cinema in continuous variation, creating what Deleuze and Guattari term “intensive usage” that foregrounds the material and affective dimensions of cinematic expression itself.

Conclusion: Toward a Nomadic Film Poetics

As Deleuze and Guattari argue in A Thousand Plateaus, nomadic thought rejects fixed territories in favor of continuous movement across smooth spaces. Film poetry, understood through this framework, represents not a fixed genre or category but a nomadic practice that traverses established boundaries between disciplines, media, and sensory modes. What unites diverse film poetic practices is not adherence to determined forms but rather what Deleuze terms a “consistency of approach”—a shared orientation toward deterritorialization and becoming-minor.

This nomadic quality resists definition not through negation but through continuous variation and multiplication. Each new work of film poetry potentially reconfigures the field itself, creating what Deleuze and Guattari term “new earth and people that do not yet exist.” In this sense, theoretical approaches to film poetry cannot aim at comprehensive definition or taxonomic completeness but must themselves remain nomadic—moving alongside creative practice rather than attempting to contain it.

The future of film poetry, from this Deleuzian perspective, lies not in establishing new aesthetic rules or categories but in creating conditions for what Deleuze and Guattari term “lines of flight”—trajectories that escape established coordinates to create new possibilities for perception, thought, and collective becoming. By remaining attentive to these lines of flight, film poetry fulfills what Deleuze identified as cinema’s highest potential: not to represent the world, but to create belief in this world and its possibilities for transformation.