In this article I consider Peter Greenaway’s film THE FALLS as an extended Deleuzian meditation on modes of reception of an Event.
I argue that
(1) the film deterritorialises the documentary form with the falsifying narration of responses to an unseeable and unsayable event (called the «Vast Unknown Event»)
(2) its content amounts to a catalogue of these diverse responses in terms of the loss of previous fixed identity and the entry into becoming (the film enumerates various modalities and degrees of becoming bird)
(3) its subtended subjectivity is that of the line of flight empowered by the becoming (exemplified in the film by Erhaus Falluper)
(4) its vision is ethological: a typology of the degree of affinity between the becomings and the line of flight, ranging from conforming to a model (becoming-bird) to inventing a new possibility of life (bird-becoming).
AGENT SWARM 