This essay invites those of us who think with cinema to try on a process approach. Let's try seeing the world as an open, ever- changing whole, a matrix of motile relations from which all kinds of entities take shape, differentiate and create new relations. This is what we see when we switch from a metaphysics of substance to a metaphysics of process. As we'll see, film theory is already doing process philosophy, avowedly or not. I will introduce some concepts from process metaphysics that show how objects crystallize from processes; characterize becoming as an interrupted flow; privilege relations over fixity; treasure singularity; and critically examine how entities individuate in a milieu. All these concepts lend well to thinking alongside movies. The essay will draw on European and North American process thinkers, highlighting the work of Alfred North Whitehead. I will also bring in the thoroughly modern thought of the seventeenth- century Persian philosopher Sadr al- Din al- Shirazi, or Mulla Sadra, and the relational philosophy of Martinican philosopher- poet Edouard Glissant.

My cinematic thinking companion, two works by African American filmmaker Arthur Jafa, test the possibility of viewing someone or something — in particular, Black people and Blackness — as not a figure, subject/ object or thing but as a process of becoming. Jafa's 2013 documentary Dreams Are Colder Than Death both witnesses and elicits creative individuations, within and despite a murderous milieu. Jafa's film draws in arguments from Black intellectuals, including Saidiya V. Hartman, Hortense Spillers and Fred Moten, which enable me to test and hone the aptness of process concepts of singularity, individuation and relation.