Spinoza and Cinematic Beatitude in Perrin and Cluzaud’s Les Saisons (2015)

Abstract

This article advances Jacques Perrin and Jacques Cluzaud’s nature documentary Les Saisons (2015) as a film that, on account of its nuanced folding of what Gilles Deleuze calls movement- and time-images, presents an audio-visual scaffolding pointing beyond itself to the beatitude defined by Benedict Spinoza in terms of the third kind of intuitive knowledge. In this regard, the relationship between Spinoza’s philosophy and the theorisations of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari is elaborated upon, before the connections between Spinoza’s three kinds of knowledge and Deleuze’s Cinema 1: The Movement-Image and Cinema 2: The Time-Image, are thematised. Thereafter, it is argued that Perrin and Cluzaud’s Les Saisons constitutes a film that both reflects creative variants of Deleuze’s movement- and time-images, and folds them into each other in a way that points toward intuitions of Spinozan beatitude.