Deleuze, Altered States and Film offers a typology of altered states, defining dream, hallucination, memory, trance and ecstasy in their cinematic expression. The book presents altered states films as significant neurological, psychological and philosophical experiences. Chapters engage with films that simultaneously present and induce altered consciousness. They consider dream states and the popularisation of alterity in drugs films. The altered bodies of erotic arousal and trance states are explored, using haptics and synaesthesia. Cinematic distortions of space and time as well as new digital and fractal directions are opened up.

Anna Powell's distinctive re-mapping of the film experience as altered state applies a Deleuzian approach to how cinema alters us by 'affective contamination'. Arguing that specific cinematic techniques derange the senses and the mind, she links philosophy and art, counter-cultural writers and filmmakers to provide insights into cinema as intoxication.

Anna Powell is Senior Lecturer in Film Studies, Manchester Metropolitan University.