Search Results for: cinema

Harun Farocki, 1944–2014: The image scout

...as the starting point of a compilation film that was created to celebrate cinema’s centennial in 1995 (La Sortie des usines). To film work at the beginning of the twenty-first century, in one shot, and thereby seize an individual act at the heart of an apparatus of production destined for transformation: this is the challenge that this last anthropological survey of gestures confronts. Berlin’s Hamburger Bahnhof museum, this summer, hosted the sc...

This is not my body

Dossier: Undoing the aesthetic image

...and tinting applied directly to the celluloid frame, Schneemann provides a cinematic eroticism, challenging dominant representations of sex in cinema and proposing an alternative to patriarchal representations of sexuality. In her insistence that she is and can be both image and image maker, Schneemann is a forerunner both of performance art and new media installations, as well as of much contemporary feminist art as well. In 1967, invited as a bo...

Robinson in Ruins: New materialism and the archaeological imagination

...ut, recent theoretical attention to the soundtrack has helped to uncover a cinematic experience which is less about a ‘passive recipient of images at the pointed end of the optical pyramid’ and more concerned with ‘a bodily being enmeshed acoustically, spatially and effectively in the filmic texture’. [15] The materiality of sound, and its ability to engage in demanding, even overwhelming ways with our sense of physical integrity in space – balanc...

Pandemic suspension

...the strike rallies) and Eisenstein’s political engagement. 24 Indeed, the cinematic representation of the strike itself is also predicated on suspension, this time as a form of insurrectional political struggle that consists in the collective workers’ decision to suspend the assembly line or any other work process. This indicates a form of suspension that is insurrectional, rather than merely masochistic. Such a form of suspension is further elab...

From Virginia Woolf to the Post-Moderns: Developments in a Feminist Aesthetic

...e. In a certain loose sense, then, Mulvey’s ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ articulates central features of a post-modern outlook. Mulvey limits the appropriate task of a feminist aesthetic to the construction of a mode of representation which corresponds to the specific difference of the experience of femininity in a patriarchal society. In keeping with the spirit of post-modernism she is content to define the project of a feminist aesthet...

A welfare culture?: Hoggart and Williams in the fifties

...d cajoled a verger before I even saw the chains. Now, across the street, a cinema advertised the Six-Five Special and a cartoon version of Gulliver’s Travels. The bus arrived, with a driver and a conductress deeply absorbed in each other. We went out of the city, over the old bridge, and on through the orchards and the green meadows and the fields red under the plough. Ahead were the Black Mountains, and we climbed among them, watching the steep f...

Becoming everyone: The politics of sympathy in Deleuze and Rorty

...docudrama, Fertile Memory, as follows: This film turned the PLO’s militant cinema upsidedown. It demonstrated that it is more important to show the thinking that leads to the political slogan than the expression of this slogan that is political discourse. For the first time, we could see Palestinian women in their private environment, all by themselves. Their memory was becoming subject, since they were themselves the subjects of their people’s dr...

Kristeva and The Idiots

...ess and shakiness of the image are features that could perhaps be called a cinematic language dominated by the semiotic. It creates an uncertainness of viewpoint which makes perceptual space uncertain and fleeting, and the borders between perceived object and point of view become compromised and ambiguous. In The Idiots, furthermore, the semiotic language of the film is impossible to detach from its theme: a group of people deciding to live together...

Global homocapitalism

...texts depicting the lives of the super elite are avidly consumed by Indian cinemagoers of all classes in a range of affective modes including identification, aspiration and escapism. In this sense, what the queer critics were calling ‘homonormativity’ was also deeply ‘authentic’, conforming as it did to the canons of mainstream Bollywood cinema. The second representation, described on social media as India’s first lesbian advertisement, was produc...

The cunning of capital explained?: Neil Davidson, How Revolutionary Were the Bourgeois Revolutions?, Haymarket Books, Chicago, 2012, xxi + 812 pp., £22.99 pb., 978 1 60846 067 0.

...99 pb., 978 0 74565 567 3 hb., 978 0 74565 568 0 pb. To call a book simply Cinema is to frame its contents as a contribution to the theorization of cinema, and thus, for a certain readership, to identify it as something other than film criticism. It is, in other words, to announce its apparent participation in, or proximity to, film theory. In an interview conducted by a former editor-in-chief of Cahiers du cinéma, Antoine de Baecque, for the orig...

Border crossings

Reivew of Brigitta Kuster, Grenze filmen
...well as the temptation of the paranoid colonial viewpoint. It is only the cinema of migration that can reflect upon such places like the market, where the eurocentric world is turned upside down, such zones of commingling and simultaneity, in a manner that is independent and deficient. That is also why the cinema of migration shows the sea as a space that is not made until it is traversed, from the middle and out of its midst, and shows the pract...

Michel Foucault: Film and Popular Memory

...icably linked. Cahiers: This history, then, is being rewritten both in the cinema and on television. It seems this rewriting of history is being carried out by film-makers who are thought of as more or less left-wing. This is a problem we should look at more closely. Foucault: I dori’t think it’s that simple. What I’ve just said is very schematic. Let’s go over i t again. There’s a real fight going on. OVer what? Over what we can roughly describe...

Cleaning artefacts

Reivew of Dan Kidner and Alex Sainsbury eds., Nightcleaners & ’36 to ’77
...itself part of a more general process in which historic figures of radical cinema such as Chantal Akerman, Harun Farocki, Jean-Luc Godard and Chris Marker increasingly have their work displayed in art galleries as much as in cinemas. Moreover, this has occurred alongside a positive re-evaluation of documentary practices discernible in contemporary art over the last few years, as well as this field’s fascination with collaborative artistic producti...

You let her into the house? Reflections on the politics of aid in Africa

...nd Duchamp Phenomenological Aesthetics: Merleau-Ponty and Derrida Deleuze: Cinema Contemporary Art and Critical Writing MA philosophy and contemporary critical theory Hegel Nietzsche Concepts of Critique: Adorno, Horkheimer, Foucault Deleuze and Guattari: A Thousand Plateaus Sovereignty and Insurgency: Agamben and Negri Commodification and Subjectivation: Marx, Balibar, AdornoMA programmes are 1 year f/t, 2 years p/t Research degrees ma by research...

184 Reviews: Neil Davidson, How Revolutionary Were the Bourgeois Revolutions? Alain Badiou, Cinema George Henderson, Value in Marx: The Persistence of Value in a More-Than-Capitalist World Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman David Kilcullen, Out of the Mountains: The Coming Age of the Urban Guerrilla Lydia H. Liu, Rebecca E. Karl and Dorothy Ko, eds, The Birth of Chinese Feminism: Essential Texts in Transnational Theory Federico Campagna, The Last Night: Atheism, Anti-work and Adventure Gyanedra Pandey, A History of Prejudice: Race, Caste, and Difference in India and the United States Peter K.J. Park, Africa, Asia, and the History of Philosophy: Racism in the Formation of the Philosophical Canon, 1780–1830 Gilbert Achcar, Marxism, Orientalism, Cosmopolitanism

...great unnamed cast of film theorists) and the five 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 finally cinema as affording what Badiou calls ‘ethical genres, genres that are addressed to humanity so as to offer it a moral mythology’. What follows...

Histories of cultural populism

...pleasure is evaluated, as when Day Lewis compares newsreel-watchers at the cinema to gaping fish nosing the glass wall of their tank, or when Auden offers to redeem the workers, through communism, from their deluded ‘talkie-house’ or canalside amusements, or it may adopt a more equivocal – even celebratory – tone, as in Tony Bennett’s account of Blackpool Beach or John Fiske’s celebration of video arcades as ‘semiotic brothels’.27 Either way, much...

The pig in the bath: New materialisms and cultural studies

...ge. For other writers, notably Peter Wollen, who mentions it in his essay ‘Cinema, Americanism, the Robot’, Isotype, as a standardized system of interchangeable parts, seems to exemplify the ways in which a certain kind of modernism mirrored the car manufacturing system established by Henry Ford, and in doing so perhaps uncritically celebrated uniformity, mechanization and alienation. Isotype is read as an attempt at a functional and ideologically...

Empiricism and Racism

...Break in the DeadZock, Heigha~ Press, £9.95 hc C. Metz, PsychoanaZysis and Cinema, HacMillan, £15 hc D. Punter, BZake, HegeZ and DiaZectic, Rodopi BV, Amsterdam, Df1. 50.0 S. Rose (ed.), Against BioZogicaZ ~terminism, VoZ.I; Towards a Libe~tory BioZogy, VoZ.II, A11ison and Busby, £4.50 each pb M. Sarup, Education, State and ~isis: a marxist perspective, RKP, £8.95 hc, £4.95 pb J. Sayers, BioZogicaZ PoZitics, Tavistock, £4.95 pb Screen Reader 2, Ci...

Are you now or have you ever been a bourgeois philosopher?

...nly briefly mentioned) or anything which might offer alternative models of cinematic practice. Nor is there any consideration of the historical context of film, as, for example, a discourse which develops in a specific relationship with technological modernity. The only non-cinematic artwork discussed in any detail is a painfully overfamiliar one, Magritte’s Ceci n’est pas une pipe, around which debates from Foucault and psychoanalytic theory are...

Adorno and the Weather: Critical Theory in an Era of Climate Change

...ght without image. This is one reason for his hostility to photography and cinema. When Adorno says of Benjamin that ‘the rebus is the model of his philosophy’ or that ‘the glance of his philosophy is Medusan’, [9] he is paying his friend a left-handed compliment, not endorsing a method that is not his own. For himself, Adorno insists that ‘the innermost striving [of art is] towards an image of beauty free of appearance.’ [10] What gradually emerg...

Television Fictions: Quality and Truth-Telling

...invite people to descend to a sensual, hypnotic, rhythmic level of being. Cinema was seen as reducing its audience to trapped, solitary passivity. Likewise now the flow of TV images is feared. It is zappable, segmented, small in size, domestic in consumption and trivial in content, and is therefore liable to create its own degenerate audience, blanketed by a three-minute culture and with the concentration span the length of a TV ad. This is serio...