Search Results for: cinema

The history of cinema, as experience

Dossier: Philosophy of the Essay Film

...his relationship to German culture, by linking both of them to his idea of cinema. He places cinema, through the force of its ‘eloquent and profound’ images, alongside philosophy, politics and literature. Godard is probably thinking here of the ‘progressive universal poetry’ and the theory of the fragment in the first German Romantic movement. Images can do without words, for they are filled with special kinds of expressive force and historicity....

Transcendental cinema: Deleuze, time and modernity

...we who make cinema; it is the world which looks to us like a bad film. [64] Cinema For Deleuze cinema is the art form that has the most potential to dramatize the multiple ways of inhabiting the modern form of time. Cinema permits a montage of temporal relays quite different from, but based on the same temporal syntheses as, the experience of human beings. [65] However, in an interview Deleuze comments that the real reason he felt drawn to writing...

Faust on film: Walter Benjamin and the cinematic ontology of Goethe’s Faust 2

...the present as one surreal possibility. Our history is the history of the cinematic; this insight occurs to us at the moment of the decline of cinema’s existing narrative form, with the advent of the digital image and the new vistas demanded by digital, HD and 3D. [79] In this context, Goethe’s phantasmagoric visualization may be considered the primal history of cinema itself. The play dramatizes its own temporality in a phantasmagoric procession...

Late style and contrapuntal histories: The violence of representation in Jean-Luc Godard’s Le Livre d’image

...catastrophic wars of the twentieth century, as well as the years when the cinema (or cinematograph) first came into existence. If Godard’s post-1979 works are less overtly political than those of the late 1960s and early 1970s – particularly the agit-prop style of his films produced under the moniker Groupe Dziga Vertov (1969-1970) – they nonetheless remain politically charged in their insistence on the idea of cinema, and art more generally, as...

People exposed, people as extras

Dossier: Undoing the aesthetic image

...the names of ancient gods). The figurants or ‘extras’ are the night of the cinema when cinema strives to be an art that makes stars shine. To a certain extent, they are to the world of shows what the miserable wretches – the misérables – were to the industrial world of Victor Hugo’s time. The figurants or ‘extras’ would therefore represent something like an accursed share of the high art – and of the huge industry – of cinema. They are situated at...

Art, documentary and the essay film

Dossier: Philosophy of the Essay Film

...sthetic, which was then matched by Shub. Shub’s was seen to be properly a ‘cinema of fact’. What is a cinematic fact? This was a question that was asked and answered in relation to Shub’s projects. It was a debate that took place in the pages of the journal Novyi Lef, where one contributor, Sergei Tretyakov, opined that ‘the degree of the deformation of the material out of which the film is composed’ was tantamount to ‘the random personal factor i...

The ship sails on: Review of Badiou's Cinema

...a great unnamed cast of ilm theorists) and the ive ways in which he thinks cinema. Thus we return to cinema as semblance of the real (Bazin), cinema as making time visible (Deleuze), but then also cinema as the democratization of the other arts, cinema as on the border between art and non-art, and inally cinema as afording what Badiou calls ‘ethical genres, genres that are addressed to humanity so as to ofer it a moral mythology’. What follows in...

Gilles Deleuze and the redemption from interest

...iven in the cinema. And yet they are cinemaʼs concepts, not theories about cinemaʼ (Cinema 2: The Time-Image (hereafter C2), trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1989, p. 280, my emphasis). FC, pp. 16–17. FC, p. 53. FC, pp. 53, 54; cf. p. 59. FC, p. 54. ʻThe task of philosophy when it creates concepts, entities, is always to extract an event from things and beingsʼ ([with Félix Guattari] What is...

All that Hegel allows

Reivew of Robert Pippin, Filmed Thought
...evious books, taking the question of what kind of philosophical reflection cinema makes possible as the primary object of attention. Specifically: the book asks to what extent cinema can be considered a mode of expression capable of the ’non-empirical exploration of meaning and value’. Pippin’s corpus is drawn largely from canonical and mainstream works of US film: two more Hitchcock films, two films by Nicholas Ray, Terence Malick’s The Thin Red...

Television Literacy: A Critique

...Technique and Film Acting, New York, Grove. Metz, C. (1974b) Language and Cinema, The Hague, Mouton. Metz, C. (1982) Psychoanalysis and Cinema: The Imaginary Signijier, London, MacMillan. Resnick, D. P. and Resnick, L. B. (1977) ‘The nature of literacy: an historical exploration’, Harvard Educational Review, Vo!. 47, No. 3, pp. 370-85. Morley, D. (1980) The NATIONWIDE Audience, London, British Film Institute, 1980. Salomon, G. (1979) Interaction...

Playing the code: Allegories of control in Civilization

...olitical realities into film has a complicated track record. For mainstream cinema generally deals with problems of politics not, in fact, by preventing them, but by sublimating them. Fifty years ago Hitchcock showed the plodding, unfeeling machinations of the criminal justice system in his film The Wrong Man. Today the police are not removed from the crime film genre, far from it, but their micromovements of bureaucratic command and control are gone...

Here comes the new: Deadwood and the historiography of capitalism

...s, p. 20; Buck-Morss, ‘Envisioning Capital’, p. 437. 38. ^ Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam, Continuum, London and New York, 2005, pp. 150–51; Bazin, ‘The Western’, p. 147. 39. ^ Deleuze, Cinema 1, p. 152. 40. ^ The gendering of entrepreneurship – in the figure of Alma Garrett, who takes over her murdered husband’s unexpectedly lucrative gold mine, on the one hand, and the Madame, Joanie Stu...

Spirit of the Bauhaus in electronic sounds: Florian Schneider-Esleben, 1947-2020

...lled Schloss Nörvennich, before building their own Inner Space studio in a cinema in Weilerswist outside of Cologne. ^ John Patterson, ‘A film without a cinema’, The Guardian, 2 October 2004, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2004/oct/02/featuresreviews.guardianreview13 ^ Eric Santer, Stranded Objects: Mourning, Memory and Film in Postwar Germany (New York: Cornell University Press, 1990), xiii. In the case of Kraftwerk, the kinship with Fassbinde...

Elasticity of demand: Reflections on 'The Wire'

...diegetic and segmentary character may be described as either novelistic or cinematic, its televisual character should not for that reason be ignored. Indeed, it has been suggested that the segmentary quality of the television moving image is definitive of its form: originally anchored in domesticity, distraction, and the predominance of the glance over the cinematic gaze. Interrupted viewing (by adverts, for example) is constitutively inscribed in...

Flux and flurry: Stillness and hypermovement in animated worlds

...in the sense of Walter Benjamin’s ‘optical unconscious’ of photography and cinema, a new mode of seeing beyond seeing, using the segmenting powers of the camera and cinematic technology on a dissected image world that must be broken down in order to be made up again. As such animation might be not just the illusion of movement but also the movement of illusion. Frozen social relations are warmed into life; the rigid surface unthaws. Animation has...

Theatre and the public: Badiou, Rancière, Virno

...A National Theatre can be imagined and indeed effectuated, but a National Cinema? Cinema is international, global, but private, Badiou continues; it bears no relation to the state. However, if there have been times when theatre has literally been summoned in and out of existence by royal command, every theatre performance today still carries a sense of being a ‘command performance’. According to Badiou, the theatre (small ‘t’) is the art of the s...

Interview: Forgetting Vietnam

...because they go by subject. But if, instead of content, they were to go by cinematic concerns, they wouldn’t program them together. For me, lumping them together would make it impossible for the viewer to open up and take in their autonomy and integrity as film. I mention all this to give you the wider context required to respond to your question about the complex relation between forgetting and remembering. In the making of Forgetting Vietnam one...

Media and Images

...ce, or rather a particular conjunction of the collective with the private. Cinemagoing is both a collective matter and an intensely individualised matter, and represents a transition from essentially collective to essentially privatistic pursuits. As such, films at the peak of the cinema’s image-making power displayed a number of techniques and practices for coping with both ends of the transition. Films developed as a unique blend of the reali~ti...

Revolutionary commemoration

Dossier: On the 1917 commemorations

...outube.com/watch?v=1SmuBMANFKw. ^ GV Aleksandrov, Epokha i kino [Epoch and Cinema] (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo politicheskoi literaturi, 1983), 104. ^ The first objection was voiced by Sergei Tret’iakov, the second and third by Osip Brik, see Yuri Tsivian, ‘Eisenstein and Russian Symbolist Culture: an Unknown Script of October’ in Eisenstein Rediscovered, ed. Ian Christie and Richard Taylor (New York, NY: Routledge, 2005), 75–104, 89. Thanks to Alex Fle...

From stillness to movement and back: Cartoon theory today

...ilities – find broad distribution in a variety of conventional and arthouse cinemas. Many audiences and critics take these films to heart, but they remain foreign, essentially strange within the context of usual cinema output because of their lack of stars and their absence of hooks to the outside world of gossip, fashion and journalistic discussions of contemporary morality and how ʻweʼ should live our lives. * This commentary was developed from a...

The irony of anatomy: Basquiat’s poetics of black positionality

...f the painting or drawing. When he alludes to the humanist vocation of his cinematic ambitions, should we conclude that while Basquiat paints predominantly anti-humanist positions and powers on canvas, he may indeed have portrayed human stories on celluloid? Or was he merely toying with his interlocutor, as he was wont to do? That is a question we cannot answer, but it suggests another that we can. How does Basquiat portray the temporal movement o...