I hope that Richard Leskosky and Mike Frank can find it in their hearts to forgive me for making some spelling errors early in the morning when I wrote my post on *Dead Man Walking.* In addition I regret not being able to express myself in the lucid prose that their posts are such shining examples of. I was merely trying to point to a reading of *Dead Man Walking* that accounts for the "ghost image." I also wanted to indicate that the film could be read against a horizon defined by affect rather than politics. A developed reading along such lines would take many pages and include an exposition of a complex theoretical matrix. My intention was just to show that such an interpretation is possible. I thought that was needed to be pointed out since at the time the thread on *Dead Man Walking* was made up of posts saying that the film was politicaly irreponsible, posts claiming that the film was progessive, and posts praising the style of the film. I meant to show that the film could be seen as a machine working on subjectivity. The paraphrase of Deleuze's take on "method" acting indicated a parameter of the film's form directly involved in its work on the subject. Deleuze says (on page 159 of *The Time Image*) that the images produced by such acting in certain films "in its most general definition, the impression is the inner, but visible, link between the permeating situation and the explosive action." This seems to me a good description of the thespianism in *Dead Man Walking.* If either of my interlocutors can spare the time to read and then discuss Deleuze or even *Dead Man Walking,* I'd be delighted. If seeing the film as a double passion and relating it to the problematic of method acting is not "real reflection" for Mike Frank, or is not up to Richard Leskosky's standards of scholarship, then I apologize for wasting his time. I must however insist that *Dead Man Walking* opens itself as a text not when considered as a broadside against the death penalty, but as what Deleuze calls an affect-image. The film reveals compassion as a limit experience. If reading the posts complained of was such a waste of energy I wonder how these two busy professors found the time to post their frustration. I thank them for making the effort to police the list. In a recent memo "Richard J. Leskosky" <[log in to unmask]> wrote: In the discussion of DEAD MAN WALKING, I was surprised to see the following statement accepted as completely true. >There are more prisons >than schools and governement is putting whole generation of African >Americans and Latinos to prison. It seems to me that on the face of it the claim that there are more prisons than schools is absurd. Can anyone provide actual figures on this? I found more troubling the phenomenon represented by the following passage: "The image of the murdered couple ....is an expression of the permitation of both of protagonists utter permiation by the elements of the situation that has lead to Penn's recieving a leathal injection from the state. .... As the greatly mourned Giles Deleuze put it "method" acting is centered around the permiation of the actor by the situation of the film. In *Dead Man Walking* that permiation happens untill it is a saturation and the actors emit pure affect instead of actions." Are words such as "permitation" and "permiation" actually new critical terms coined by Deleuze or are they merely examples of sloppy spelling (say, for "permeation" or "permutation")? Since there are other misspellings in the passage, I suspect the latter is the case. I realize that lists such as SCREEN-L are less formal than than a scholarly journal in many ways, but surely if one wishes to be understood one has the obligation to observe some basic rules of spelling and grammar in trying to communicate one's ideas. Even a quick reread before hitting the 'send' button could spare one's readers a lot of confusion and annoyance. --Richard J. Leskosky Richard J. Leskosky office phone: (217) 244-2704 Assistant Director FAX: (217) 244-2223 Unit for Cinema Studies University of Illinois * * * * * * END OF ORIGINAL MESSAGE * * * * * * * * i can't speak for anyone else but i myself was astonished at the claim about the relative number of schools and prisons, and thought it likely to be wrong . . . but the rest of the message--including not only the obvious spelling errors but, even more important because it has implications for the quality of the thinking behind the words, an impossibly gnarled and ultimately unintelligible syntax--suggested that the writer was at best irresponsible and at worst [expletive deleted] and thus hardly work arguing with . . . some rhetorical postures are so blatantly not an expression of anything like real reflection that they are hardly worth taking seriously and one just goes on the the next memo . . . . . . i'm afraid that in their rhetorical stance some of the messages on this and similar lists resemble nothing so much as cartoonish placards annopuncing that the world is coming to an end . . . i hope that few of us take time to debate such claims seriously mike frank lgs ---- To signoff SCREEN-L, e-mail [log in to unmask] and put SIGNOFF SCREEN-L in the message. 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