Search Results for: cinema

The threshold of fire: Man the shooter and his subhuman incendiary Other

...of The Jungle Book, is more than preserved in the two popular Walt Disney cinematic adaptations of the book: it becomes the overarching theme and dominant plot line in the 1967 and especially the 2016 films. The centrality of the threshold of fire across the three versions of The Jungle Book highlights its salience not only across times but also across empires. No author represents the cultural and literary apparatus of empire better than Rudyard...
Photograph of interior of Old Egyptian Fort, destroyed by English Fleet. July 1882, Alexandria, Egypt.

A monument to the unknown worker: Roberto Bolaño’s 2666

...with a certain three-dimensionality or depth of field, as introduced into cinema by Gregg Toland, or an installation. (As I briefly suggest below, the latter is important with regard to part four of the novel). This is the case, for example, with the philosopher Oscar Amalfitano, a bit player to the literary critics JeanClaude Pelletier, Manuel Espinoza and Liz Norton as he guides them around Santa Teresa in search of the novelist Archimboldi, in...

Notes on the photographic image

Dossier: Undoing the aesthetic image

...of experts in art, namely in the art of interpreting signs and documents. Cinema was a series of tests of our world. Atget’s photos were indices to interpret; Sander’s collections were notebooks for teaching combatants in the social struggle to readily identify allies and adversaries. The photographic medium participated in the construction of a sensible world where men of the age of the masses could affirm their existence as both possible subjec...

The singular and the specific: Recent French philosophy

...conversion of far and nearʼ (Cinéma 2, Lʼimage-temps, Minuit, Paris, 1985/Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1989, p. 111/83). 37. ^ Žižek, For They Know Not, p. 46. 38. ^ Examples include the alignment of particular wills in Spinozaʼs ʻreasonableʼ polity and Rousseauʼs volonté générale, and the fusion of particular interests in the univocity of One proletarian disinteres...

Consumed by night’s fire: The dark romanticism of Guy Debord

...rk of an iconoclastic – in the strict sense of the word – use of classical cinema. The words have an intrinsic value independent of the function of the image. In that sense, it is significant that, in 1990, Debord republished only the text, not the full screenplay, and simply added a series of footnotes. The film is made up of quotations from other films, and the text is also full of quotations, some with the sources given (von Clausewitz, Marx and S...

The machine is an ethic

...on (‘The Computer as a Mode of Mediation’) uses a comparative appraisal of cinema and the computer, the media forms fundamental to discipline and control respectively, as a frame though which to consider two ways in which media technologies might be critically analysed. These are the concept of media and that of modes of mediation, and the distinctive critical traditions that the two encapsulate define two different possibilities for the study of...

Chris Marker, 1921–2012: Future anterior

...textile factory in Besançon, with whom Marker collaborated (as part of the cinematic collective SLON) as the Groupe Medvedkine in the late 1960s. Let the people who live it tell their story. They have the necessity; just give them the tools. Marker also spread this access, indirectly, by example – by demonstrating how much could be done with how little. He worked with minimal budgets, begged or borrowed materials, chance opportunities, sweepings o...

28 Reviews

...pens the way for a historical, yet still theoretical, understanding of the cinema. One that views cinema (and culture generally) not in terms of base/superstructure models but as an aspect of the capital relation – an eminently historical relation – and in terms of the concrete relations of production, distribution and consumption that cinema mediates in specific historical contexts. Kevin Robins Notes 1 T.W. Adorno, ‘Sociology and Empirical Resea...

Juddering: On Lyotard’s Discourse, Figure

...rhaps only be worked out in practice – as applied to analyses of painting, cinema and so on. So, we repeat to ourselves the injunction that we must suspend our sense that Lyotard’s project was already an anachronism in 1972 and see where it leads now. There’s not an awful lot of practical aesthetics in Discourse, Figure but it does seem to owe a lot to, or at least share, some resources not only with Roland Barthes but also with Gilles Deleuze. In...

Jeff Wall: Art after photography, after conceptual art

...ntinue with ‘straight photography’, and what I later began to think of as ‘cinematographic’ and ‘neo-realist’ pictures. All of those contain, more or less, energies that came from the frustration of Jeff Wall is a Canadian artist and writer, born in Vancouver in 1946, who has been at the forefront of the use of large colour transparencies as a medium for contemporary art since the early 1980s. His early work from the late 1960s was conceptual in c...

Does phenomenology have a future?

...acterʼ of the Investigations, is surely more appropriate. 8. ^ G. Deleuze, Cinema 1, trans. H. Tomlinson and B. Habberjam, Athlone, London, 1986, p. 56. 9. ^ It is one of the frustrating, though inevitable, consequences of abridging the Investigations to a single, manageable, volume that certain key sections are omitted – in this case, the crucially important §70 of Chapter 11, ʻElucidation of the Idea of a pure theory of multiplicities [Mannigfal...

The aesthetics of appearing

...t lets everything enter into the stream of its daydreams. [5] The event of cinematic movement thus becomes the event of presenting a form of perception for which all interpretations and meanings become provisional. Philip roth has someone read a line from shakespeare However the flight of a plastic bag is experienced – as a real occurrence, as a film document, or as an artistic presentation – flying plastic bags can be grasped differently. We chase a...

Gillian Rose’s critique of violence

...s to a poetic description of Joan Lindsay’s Picnic at Hanging Rock and its cinematic adaptation by Peter Weir. It relates the fictional story of a girls’ school picnic at the eponymous rock, which ends in disaster as two of the schoolgirls and one of the teachers disappear without trace, never to be seen or heard of again. As a result, the school is ruined. The headmistress, Mrs Appleyard, and Sara, an orphan who had been refused permission to joi...

Towards a Theory of Videotics

...organisation of programming. Residual counter-hegemonic practices such as cinema going and home movies clearly point to areas in which deconstructive techniques play an important role. The realm of the videotic covers all spheres of human, and non-human, activity and extends to the unconscious, which we now know is structured like a video-tape. {Often 27 badly worn and likely to play erratically through constant repetition and sudden fast-forward...

Nationalisms by, against and beyond the Indian state

...reversed, the playing of the national anthem was made compulsory in every cinema before a film was screened. It was not uncommon during this period to read news stories reporting vigilante attacks against people who were unable or unwilling to stand for the anthem. 16 In her account of the visual politics of Indian nationalism, Srirupa Roy argues that ‘the reproduction of the nation-state rests not on the existence of individuals who identify wit...

Reason and Emotion

...nn Mimesis and Construction in the Work of Boulez and Cage MUSic, Modernism and Signification But What if the Object Began to Speak? The Aesthetics of Dance Berkeley: Bishop or Buzby? Deleuze on Cinema Sewing Machine; Building Monumentally Andrew Benjamin and Peter Osborne lCA Documents January 1991 ISBN 0905263189 Radical Philosophy 57, Spring 1991 [ . 19...

Fragments of an Analysis: Lacan in Context: Including Chris Arthur's 'Notes on the Animal Kingdom of the Spirit'

...p.9 ff. Sheridan, ij.319. Cf. Laura Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, Screen Vol. XVI, No.3, Autumn 1975, pp. 6-18. Mitchell and Rose, p.147. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, p.75. Georges Bataille, L’Erotisme, Paris 1965, p.ll0. Sheridan, p.225. ‘What is jouissance? … a negative instance. Jouissance ts that which has no purpose’, Encore, p.l0. Georges Bataille, Madame Edwarda, Oeuvres Completes, Ill, Paris 1971, pp.2...

More than everything: Žižek's Badiouian Hegel

...age reception to spawn Logics of Worlds (2006) as Being and Event, 2 – the cinematically abbreviated subtitle of which hints at its author’s bonding with Žižek over the revival of Lenin. Less Than Nothing more or less exactly matches for length the extended version of Being and Event. Of course, size is just the mundane guise of the idea of the ‘big book’ here, the book with the big ideas, the book that will become part of the history of philosoph...

The tremor of reflection: Slavoj Žižek's Lacanian dialectics

...lytic theory, and are enlivened by constant reference to works of fiction, cinema, classical music and opera. They also cheerfully disregard ingrained oppositions between high and mass culture, without proclaiming a pseudo-populist levelling of aesthetic distinctions. Finally, Zizek’s East European provenance provides a quirkily original perspective on the questions of subjectivity, phantasy and desire, and the problem of the resurgence of collect...

New Labour versus Horny Catbabe

...e-ups of genitals during oral sexʼ – in other words, the very staples of a cinematic genre that relies more than any other on intimate shots of human body parts. It is also interesting to note that prior to ʻliberalizationʼ only ʻpassing shots of anusʼ were acceptable, but under the new dispensation ʻlingering shotsʼ were OK. Inevitably, long, animated and occasionally even heated discussions ensued within the Board over what actually constituted...

Chats perchés: Chris Marker’s mimetic, comical and historical prophecy

Dossier: Philosophy of the Essay Film

...nto a man? And the shot finally answers the question by suggesting that in cinematic poetics a pan can be a pun. The sight gag, often used in slapstick films, alludes to the magic power of film and its capacity to turn real things into fictional objects without even touching them – just by modulating the perspective. Such capacity in this shot nevertheless depends on a performative act, the one the title card enacts. The propositional sentence tha...