From the universal to the cosmic: The surroundings of Beau Travail

This article is in two parts, where the first part offers a reading of the film in terms of an inversion of genre. This de-centring inversion of genre is extended to an inversion of generality and universality, and it is further envisaged that the generic appears encompassed within a generativity that may be said to be cosmic. Whilst this is explored with reference to scenes in the film and to Melville’s ‘Billy Budd, Sailor’, the second half of the article considers the implications of the analysis for a theorization of the cinematic genre. Here, Deleuze’s understanding of the cinematic in terms of temporal duration is juxtaposed with an African understanding of time towards a theory of spectatorship in terms of relaxation.