It's All About Love

Félix Guattari's Minor Cinema

Abstract

This paper analyzes the film It’s All About Love (Thomas Vinterberg, 2003) as a work of Félix Guattari’s minor cinema. By assembling and outlining a selection of Guattari’s writings on minor cinema, subjectivity and anti-psychiatry, the essay offers an understanding of minor cinema that questions the de facto yoking of minor cinema to (national) identity politics. Through a necessary return to Guattari’s overshadowed solo writings, especially his chapter “Le cinéma: un art mineur” in the book La révolution moléculaire, the essay allows for a reading of It’s All About Love that explores how the film constructs a potentially mad character subjectivity through colour and sound intensities or a-signifying cinematic part-signs. As a result, the essay argues that It’s All About Love advances a necessarily collective notion of love based on shared movements of affect and desire which can form the basis of future bonds of social organization that function beyond the bureaucratic limits of the nation state and the subjective constraints of national identity.