Louis Malle’s Kleistian War Machine: Becoming-Animal, Becoming-Woman, Becoming-Imperceptible in Black Moon (1975)

Framed through an analysis of Kleist’s molecular war machine in his play, Penthesilea, in which Achilles and Penthesilea form a new assemblage of affective war, this chapter explores Louis Malle’s Black Moon (1975) where the battle of the sexes becomes the catalyst for a new series of becomings. The film takes the form of a waking dream as a teenage fugitive, Lily is led through a series of depersonalized movements by a unicorn to a secluded Dordogne farm where Kleist’s utopian “mad duality” is manifested though a strange, non-Oedipal family dynamic in which a mute brother and his sheep-herding sister – both also called Lily – live with a group of naked children and a bedridden elderly woman whose companion is a talking rat and where the animals are treated as equal agencies in the narrative. Although by film’s end Brother and Sister Lily become caught up in the ravages of a gender war, teenage Lily inherits this ‘deterritorialized velocity of affect’ by adopting the role of the breastfeeding mother to the unicorn, all in relation to the becoming multiplicity of the pack: in short, a true war machine that envelops both protagonists and spectators alike in a transformed zone of indiscernibility.