Book Announcement Victor J. Vitanza, Chaste Cinematics. Brooklyn, NY: Punctum Books, November 1, 2015. http://punctumbooks.com/titles/chaste-cinematics/ Victor J. Vitanza (author of Sexual Violence in Western Thought and Writing) continues to rethink the problem of sexual violence in cinema and how rape is often represented in ³chaste² ways, in the form of a Chaste Cinematics. Vitanza continues to discuss Chaste Cinematics as participating in transdisciplinary-rhetorical traditions that establish the very foundations (groundings, points of stasis) for nation states and cultures. In this offering, however, the initial grounding for the discussions is ³base materialism² (George Bataille): divine filth, the sacred and profane. It is this post-philosophical base materialism that destabilizes binaries, fixedness, and brings forth excluded thirds. Vitanza asks: why is it that a repressed third, or a third figure, returns, most strangely as a ³product² of rape and torture? He works with Jean-Paul Sartre and Page duBois¹s suggestion that the ³product² is a new ³species.² Always attempting unorthodox ways of approaching social problems, Vitanza organizes his table of contents as a DVD menu of ³Extras² (supplements). This menu includes Alternate Endings and Easter Eggs as well as an Excursus, which invokes readers to take up the political exigency of the DVD-Book. Vitanza¹s first ³Extra² studies a trio of films that need to be reconsidered, given what they offer as insights into Chaste Cinematics: Amadeus (a mad god), Henry Fool (a foolish god), and Multiple Maniacs (a divine god who is raped and eats excrement). The second examines Helke Sander¹s documentary Liberators Take Liberties, which re-thinks the rapes of German women by the Russians and Allies during the Battle of Berlin. The third rethinks Margie Strosser¹s video-film Rape Stories that calls for revenge. In the Alternate Endings, Vitanza rethinks the problem of reversibility in G. Noé¹s Irréversible. In the Easter Eggs, he considers Dominique Laporte¹s ³the Irreparable,² as the object of loss and Giorgio Agamben¹s ³the Irreparable,² as hope in what is without remedy. The result is not another film-studies book, but a new genre, a new set of rhetorics, for new ways of thinking about cinematics, perhaps postcinematics. ---- To sign off Screen-L, e-mail [log in to unmask] and put SIGNOFF Screen-L in the message. Problems? Contact [log in to unmask]