This chapter examines the transition between the ‘politics’ of Theo Angelopoulos' early films... more This chapter examines the transition between the ‘politics’ of Theo Angelopoulos' early films and the ‘humanism’ of his later work. Commentators such as David Bordwell and Fredric Jameson have accounted for this change of direction in Angelopoulos' films. Bordwell, for example, notes the shift from a first political phase to one that is more inspired by an existential humanism. Angelopoulos himself declares that after Marxism and Brechtian methods had had their day, he turned to something grounded in humanism and existentialism. The chapter considers Gilles Deleuze's concept of the ‘time-image’ and how it provides a means of distinguishing between two aesthetic modalities by way of their articulations of the past, of time and of memory. It argues that the key distinction is between what Deleuze calls a ‘recollection-image’, and that which he terms ‘pure recollection’. While Angelopoulos' early films are constructed by way of recollection-images, his later films offer...
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] In an engaging piece on the transformation of Hollywood cinema during the ... more [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] In an engaging piece on the transformation of Hollywood cinema during the 1990s published in 2001, Wheeler Winston Dixon laid bare what were, for him, the "25 Reasons Why It's All Over." (1) His provocation included dismissals of contemporary Hollywood on the grounds that it now catered only to young teenagers; that it was guided almost exclusively by managers, media conglomerates and marketing; that the pace of editing had gotten hyper-ridiculous; that narrative had collapsed; and perhaps above all that, when watching a Hollywood film, there was no longer anything to believe in, that all had been reduced to fakery, games, special effects, and smash-ups. We have some sympathy with Dixon's claims while also noting, as does Dixon, the hyperbolic nature of them. What those claims reveal, it seems to us, is an inherent difficulty in coming to terms with what has happened to Hollywood filmmaking since some time around the late 1980s. Some analyses of this period seem to have given up on the "stuff" of Hollywood films--their stories, techniques, compositions, and so on--in order to focus on the industry: high concepts, media industry theories, franchises, remakes, and the Jerry Bruckheimer-Michael Bay model of filmmaking. (2) Others have focused on the notion of contemporary special effects "attractions", celebrating the decline of narrative and the rise of spectacle-driven, corporeally engaging thrills and spills that have undermined and renegotiated classical Hollywood's relationship to storytelling. (3) Still others have concentrated on the new modes of distribution and exhibition--from TV to DVDs, Blu-rays, online streaming, and so on--that may have rendered cinematic specificity obsolete. (4) Still others have focused more closely on cultural histories, especially those relating to social and political issues in the United States--Ryan and Kellner's Camera Politica marks something of a watershed here (5)--a trend that has continued with a vengeance in the post-9/11 era. All in all, most writers seem to feel the need to identify a definitive break with classical Hollywood--"postclassical Hollywood" seems the preferred term--summed up nicely by Dixon's feeling that "What we are witnessing now is nothing more nor less than the dawn of a new grammar." (6) [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] While certainly admitting that a great deal has changed, and also admitting a certain reticence in figuring out when, or if, the current crop of special-effects driven action blockbusters and superhero comic strip films will ever begin to peter out (also noting that we do not wish to denigrate such films; rather, it's simply a matter of accepting that we have little idea of what to make of them), we want to stress that the supposed newness of the new cinematic grammar is not the be-all and end-all of contemporary Hollywood. Rather, and to the contrary, quite a lot of things have stayed the same. In particular, there remain people committed to making good and interesting films according to fairly traditional Hollywood models. There remain filmmakers who are not very much interested in since the mid-to-late 1980s: Nora Ephron, Ang Lee, and David Fincher. Why these three? They represent, to some extent, filmmakers who have been difficult to place in the overall context of post-1980s Hollywood: Ephron because she resurrected a typically conservative genre, the romantic comedy; Lee because his output is so diverse and his productions transnational; and Fincher because his aesthetic program flouts certain dominant trends in "postclassical" film style. Ephron Ephron can be charged with being an entirely uninteresting filmmaker: her aesthetic seems more indebted to television the moving and shaking of the media conglomerates or in pitching high concepts. There are also filmmakers who don't believe that Hollywood filmmaking joins in a conservative-capitalist conspiracy that is dedicated to pulling the wool over the eyes of billions of worldwide passive consumers of media technology in order to ensure the maintenance of the neoliberal status quo. …
Introduction: What is film theory? Structuralism and semiotics: The foundations of contemporary f... more Introduction: What is film theory? Structuralism and semiotics: The foundations of contemporary film theory Apparatus theory: Jean-Louis Baudry and Christian Metz Screen theory: Colin MacCabe and Stephen Heath Feminism and film: Visual pleasure and identificatory practices Cinemas of the other: Postcolonialism, race and queer theory Philosophers and film: Gilles Deleuze and Stanley Cavell Film as art: Historical poetics and neoformalism The cognitive turn: Narrative comprehension and character identification Recent developments: Phenomenology, attractions and audiences
Does Ridley Scott's Gladiator (2000) provide a critique of spectacle? Such a question may app... more Does Ridley Scott's Gladiator (2000) provide a critique of spectacle? Such a question may appear odd insofar as the film's most engaging moments are undoubtedly those which are spectacular--the opening battle scene and the scenes of gladiatorial combat. On this manifest level the film clearly offers a celebration of spectacle rather than a critique. And without a doubt, audiences, myself included, were impressed by Gladiator's "wow" factor, by the elements of delight and spectacular stimulation which make up what Simon During, with reference to early cinema's celebratory mechanisms, has called "the cinema of action-attractions".[1] Why, then, would I ask whether Gladiator offers a critique of spectacle? To answer such a query we must ask ourselves what Gladiator is about. The film's main narrative line concerns the story of Maximus/Russell Crowe and his quest to avenge the murder of his wife and child by the new Emperor of Rome, Commodus/Joaquin Phoenix. There is, however, also a sub-plot concerning the corruption of the Roman Republic and the leading astray of the Roman people--the "mob"--in the name of Commodus's ambitions of power. And what is the main way in which Commodus leads the Roman mob astray? By spectacle-the gladiatorial games. The film offers its own extra-diegetic comments-we might say that the film has a "voice"[2]--on the moral and political value of "spectacle" as it takes place within the diegesis of Gladiator. The film is arguing that Rome is self-destructing because it is hypnotised by the spectacular productions of the Colosseum and that it is therefore nothing less than spectacle which provides the environment in which tyranny thrives. Ultimately, for there to be any hope for democracy , freedom, happiness and "the greatness of Rome", such a society of the spectacle must be renounced and overthrown, a process which the film duly enacts. The moral lesson of the film, if I can be so bold as to attribute a "moral" dimension to the film on a historical/social/political level, is that democracy and freedom are only possible if we first of all free ourselves from the lure of spectacle. And yet, as spectators of the film are we not also entranced by spectacle, the filmed spectacles of the Colosseum and its gladiatorial combats? Are we not reduced to members of the mob, baying for blood and action and spectacle and sensation? Are we not duped and lulled and drugged into a willing tyranny of special effects or, at least, of spectacular combats? Are we not also and ultimately reduced to subjects of a tyrannical order, to subjects who willingly and joyfully submit to Hollywood's imperialism and its spectacles of action-attraction? The film is drawing an analogy, "unconsciously", we might say, between the tyranny of Commodus and the tyranny of the contemporary Hollywood blockbuster with the imperialism of both dependent upon the audience's enslavement to spectacle. But let's not get too far ahead of ourselves. What is the nature of the "spectacular" scenes in Gladiator? The combat scenes are not bombastic, "thrills'n'spills" effects; there are no helicopters in tunnels, no acrobatic dangling-from-harrier-jump-jet feats, no jumbo jets landing in Las Vegas. Rather, the action scenes in Gladiator are virtuosic, montage-laden combinations of "shock-effects" in a manner reminiscent of Eisenstein. In fact, the complexity and displacement of these scenes was a major irritant for some reviewers of the film. John Simon in the National Review declared that what happens in the action scenes in Gladiator is most often "hard to tell because Scott's chief technique through much of the film is lightning-fast cutting, so that chopped-off limbs, severed heads, gushing blood, etc., fly by so quickly that you can't be sure of what you saw, or whether indeed you saw it." [3] We may, then, despite Simon's reservations, be treading upon the territory of a truly radical, post-classical Hollywood form of filmmaking that is characterised by what Thomas Elsaesser has called "engulfment". …
In his elegy for modernism, Farewell to an Idea, the art historian T.J. Clark registers his undyi... more In his elegy for modernism, Farewell to an Idea, the art historian T.J. Clark registers his undying opposition to capitalism, a capitalism which, he argues, has today more than ever entered into the minutiae of everyday life as a determining factor. Amid his general dismay at the negative consequences the victory of capital has wrought upon the world, he intones that, for him, "at least capitalism remains my Satan." (1) Even in the face of the impossibility of any victory over capitalism, and from the even more impossible position of merely being a scholar in the humanities, at least Clark is prepared to declare that he will resist capitalism with all his might. Perhaps it is possible for an art historian to declare such things, for art history has a long and distinguished list of critics inspired by Marx, from Meyer Shapiro to Harold Rosenberg and beyond (a list on which T. J. Clark can certainly be counted). Film studies, however, has no such distinguished list. On the contrary, a list of film writers or critics indebted to Marx reads more like a list of the damned; names like Adorno and Horkheimer, Jean-Louis Comolli, Colin MacCabe, Stephen Heath, and Jean-Louis Baudry are today ones that current trends in film studies define themselves against (perhaps Walter Benjamin is the only Marxist figure with whom contemporary scholars are sympathetic). From declarations that film studies have entered a post-theory age to numerous attempts to reinvent film studies, (2) the Marxist critique of cinema as an "industry" or "apparatus"--those positions which formed the bedrock of the Marxist critique of cinema--appears to contain interest for scholars only insofar as it can be dismantled and debunked. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Why might this be the case? In 2000 Dudley Andrew charted a small history of cinema studies as an academic endeavor. (3) He argued that cinema studies emerged in a university context in the years surrounding 1968 as a result of the researches of passionate amateurs; no-one working in those early years of cinema studies could claim to have been trained as a film scholar. Nowadays, however, the field is thoroughly institutionalized and much of Andrew's discussion concerns the way that cinema studies had to evolve and adapt to institutional pressures. He emphasizes that much of the expansion and diversification of the field was probably the result of institutional pressures--those of catering to customer (i.e., student) demands and university budgets, the U.S. tenure-track system (mirrored to an extent in the U.K. by the dreaded Research Assessment Exercise) and the agendas and schedules of publishers. Less important, he suggests, have been genuinely intellectual reasons for such advancements. He writes that "If the cinema studies edifice of semiotics, Marxism, and psychoanalysis was abandoned while its mortar was still wet, one can certainly blame the weight of ideas it was asked to bear or the flimsy trusses upholding them, but [one might] look first to a university system that encourages scholars to expand into new subdivisions rather than repair, fortify, or remodel the field's city center." (4) Those approaches of the earlier age--the approaches which blended structuralist semiotics with psychoanalysis and Marxism-might certainly have been overturned for intellectual reasons but, for Andrew, a far more likely reason for its demise was "because its logic was at odds with the university system." (5) [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] It is almost unique to read of a film scholar's nostalgia for what today seem like the bad old days of psycho-Marxism in cinema studies, for the academic masters of the current generation define themselves by their opposition to that earlier age. A range of discourses have today superseded the earlier ones: we are in an age of post-theory, one in which questions of film history are paramount, alongside those of reception, exhibition, comprehension, and film style. …
This chapter examines the transition between the ‘politics’ of Theo Angelopoulos' early films... more This chapter examines the transition between the ‘politics’ of Theo Angelopoulos' early films and the ‘humanism’ of his later work. Commentators such as David Bordwell and Fredric Jameson have accounted for this change of direction in Angelopoulos' films. Bordwell, for example, notes the shift from a first political phase to one that is more inspired by an existential humanism. Angelopoulos himself declares that after Marxism and Brechtian methods had had their day, he turned to something grounded in humanism and existentialism. The chapter considers Gilles Deleuze's concept of the ‘time-image’ and how it provides a means of distinguishing between two aesthetic modalities by way of their articulations of the past, of time and of memory. It argues that the key distinction is between what Deleuze calls a ‘recollection-image’, and that which he terms ‘pure recollection’. While Angelopoulos' early films are constructed by way of recollection-images, his later films offer...
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] In an engaging piece on the transformation of Hollywood cinema during the ... more [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] In an engaging piece on the transformation of Hollywood cinema during the 1990s published in 2001, Wheeler Winston Dixon laid bare what were, for him, the "25 Reasons Why It's All Over." (1) His provocation included dismissals of contemporary Hollywood on the grounds that it now catered only to young teenagers; that it was guided almost exclusively by managers, media conglomerates and marketing; that the pace of editing had gotten hyper-ridiculous; that narrative had collapsed; and perhaps above all that, when watching a Hollywood film, there was no longer anything to believe in, that all had been reduced to fakery, games, special effects, and smash-ups. We have some sympathy with Dixon's claims while also noting, as does Dixon, the hyperbolic nature of them. What those claims reveal, it seems to us, is an inherent difficulty in coming to terms with what has happened to Hollywood filmmaking since some time around the late 1980s. Some analyses of this period seem to have given up on the "stuff" of Hollywood films--their stories, techniques, compositions, and so on--in order to focus on the industry: high concepts, media industry theories, franchises, remakes, and the Jerry Bruckheimer-Michael Bay model of filmmaking. (2) Others have focused on the notion of contemporary special effects "attractions", celebrating the decline of narrative and the rise of spectacle-driven, corporeally engaging thrills and spills that have undermined and renegotiated classical Hollywood's relationship to storytelling. (3) Still others have concentrated on the new modes of distribution and exhibition--from TV to DVDs, Blu-rays, online streaming, and so on--that may have rendered cinematic specificity obsolete. (4) Still others have focused more closely on cultural histories, especially those relating to social and political issues in the United States--Ryan and Kellner's Camera Politica marks something of a watershed here (5)--a trend that has continued with a vengeance in the post-9/11 era. All in all, most writers seem to feel the need to identify a definitive break with classical Hollywood--"postclassical Hollywood" seems the preferred term--summed up nicely by Dixon's feeling that "What we are witnessing now is nothing more nor less than the dawn of a new grammar." (6) [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] While certainly admitting that a great deal has changed, and also admitting a certain reticence in figuring out when, or if, the current crop of special-effects driven action blockbusters and superhero comic strip films will ever begin to peter out (also noting that we do not wish to denigrate such films; rather, it's simply a matter of accepting that we have little idea of what to make of them), we want to stress that the supposed newness of the new cinematic grammar is not the be-all and end-all of contemporary Hollywood. Rather, and to the contrary, quite a lot of things have stayed the same. In particular, there remain people committed to making good and interesting films according to fairly traditional Hollywood models. There remain filmmakers who are not very much interested in since the mid-to-late 1980s: Nora Ephron, Ang Lee, and David Fincher. Why these three? They represent, to some extent, filmmakers who have been difficult to place in the overall context of post-1980s Hollywood: Ephron because she resurrected a typically conservative genre, the romantic comedy; Lee because his output is so diverse and his productions transnational; and Fincher because his aesthetic program flouts certain dominant trends in "postclassical" film style. Ephron Ephron can be charged with being an entirely uninteresting filmmaker: her aesthetic seems more indebted to television the moving and shaking of the media conglomerates or in pitching high concepts. There are also filmmakers who don't believe that Hollywood filmmaking joins in a conservative-capitalist conspiracy that is dedicated to pulling the wool over the eyes of billions of worldwide passive consumers of media technology in order to ensure the maintenance of the neoliberal status quo. …
Introduction: What is film theory? Structuralism and semiotics: The foundations of contemporary f... more Introduction: What is film theory? Structuralism and semiotics: The foundations of contemporary film theory Apparatus theory: Jean-Louis Baudry and Christian Metz Screen theory: Colin MacCabe and Stephen Heath Feminism and film: Visual pleasure and identificatory practices Cinemas of the other: Postcolonialism, race and queer theory Philosophers and film: Gilles Deleuze and Stanley Cavell Film as art: Historical poetics and neoformalism The cognitive turn: Narrative comprehension and character identification Recent developments: Phenomenology, attractions and audiences
Does Ridley Scott's Gladiator (2000) provide a critique of spectacle? Such a question may app... more Does Ridley Scott's Gladiator (2000) provide a critique of spectacle? Such a question may appear odd insofar as the film's most engaging moments are undoubtedly those which are spectacular--the opening battle scene and the scenes of gladiatorial combat. On this manifest level the film clearly offers a celebration of spectacle rather than a critique. And without a doubt, audiences, myself included, were impressed by Gladiator's "wow" factor, by the elements of delight and spectacular stimulation which make up what Simon During, with reference to early cinema's celebratory mechanisms, has called "the cinema of action-attractions".[1] Why, then, would I ask whether Gladiator offers a critique of spectacle? To answer such a query we must ask ourselves what Gladiator is about. The film's main narrative line concerns the story of Maximus/Russell Crowe and his quest to avenge the murder of his wife and child by the new Emperor of Rome, Commodus/Joaquin Phoenix. There is, however, also a sub-plot concerning the corruption of the Roman Republic and the leading astray of the Roman people--the "mob"--in the name of Commodus's ambitions of power. And what is the main way in which Commodus leads the Roman mob astray? By spectacle-the gladiatorial games. The film offers its own extra-diegetic comments-we might say that the film has a "voice"[2]--on the moral and political value of "spectacle" as it takes place within the diegesis of Gladiator. The film is arguing that Rome is self-destructing because it is hypnotised by the spectacular productions of the Colosseum and that it is therefore nothing less than spectacle which provides the environment in which tyranny thrives. Ultimately, for there to be any hope for democracy , freedom, happiness and "the greatness of Rome", such a society of the spectacle must be renounced and overthrown, a process which the film duly enacts. The moral lesson of the film, if I can be so bold as to attribute a "moral" dimension to the film on a historical/social/political level, is that democracy and freedom are only possible if we first of all free ourselves from the lure of spectacle. And yet, as spectators of the film are we not also entranced by spectacle, the filmed spectacles of the Colosseum and its gladiatorial combats? Are we not reduced to members of the mob, baying for blood and action and spectacle and sensation? Are we not duped and lulled and drugged into a willing tyranny of special effects or, at least, of spectacular combats? Are we not also and ultimately reduced to subjects of a tyrannical order, to subjects who willingly and joyfully submit to Hollywood's imperialism and its spectacles of action-attraction? The film is drawing an analogy, "unconsciously", we might say, between the tyranny of Commodus and the tyranny of the contemporary Hollywood blockbuster with the imperialism of both dependent upon the audience's enslavement to spectacle. But let's not get too far ahead of ourselves. What is the nature of the "spectacular" scenes in Gladiator? The combat scenes are not bombastic, "thrills'n'spills" effects; there are no helicopters in tunnels, no acrobatic dangling-from-harrier-jump-jet feats, no jumbo jets landing in Las Vegas. Rather, the action scenes in Gladiator are virtuosic, montage-laden combinations of "shock-effects" in a manner reminiscent of Eisenstein. In fact, the complexity and displacement of these scenes was a major irritant for some reviewers of the film. John Simon in the National Review declared that what happens in the action scenes in Gladiator is most often "hard to tell because Scott's chief technique through much of the film is lightning-fast cutting, so that chopped-off limbs, severed heads, gushing blood, etc., fly by so quickly that you can't be sure of what you saw, or whether indeed you saw it." [3] We may, then, despite Simon's reservations, be treading upon the territory of a truly radical, post-classical Hollywood form of filmmaking that is characterised by what Thomas Elsaesser has called "engulfment". …
In his elegy for modernism, Farewell to an Idea, the art historian T.J. Clark registers his undyi... more In his elegy for modernism, Farewell to an Idea, the art historian T.J. Clark registers his undying opposition to capitalism, a capitalism which, he argues, has today more than ever entered into the minutiae of everyday life as a determining factor. Amid his general dismay at the negative consequences the victory of capital has wrought upon the world, he intones that, for him, "at least capitalism remains my Satan." (1) Even in the face of the impossibility of any victory over capitalism, and from the even more impossible position of merely being a scholar in the humanities, at least Clark is prepared to declare that he will resist capitalism with all his might. Perhaps it is possible for an art historian to declare such things, for art history has a long and distinguished list of critics inspired by Marx, from Meyer Shapiro to Harold Rosenberg and beyond (a list on which T. J. Clark can certainly be counted). Film studies, however, has no such distinguished list. On the contrary, a list of film writers or critics indebted to Marx reads more like a list of the damned; names like Adorno and Horkheimer, Jean-Louis Comolli, Colin MacCabe, Stephen Heath, and Jean-Louis Baudry are today ones that current trends in film studies define themselves against (perhaps Walter Benjamin is the only Marxist figure with whom contemporary scholars are sympathetic). From declarations that film studies have entered a post-theory age to numerous attempts to reinvent film studies, (2) the Marxist critique of cinema as an "industry" or "apparatus"--those positions which formed the bedrock of the Marxist critique of cinema--appears to contain interest for scholars only insofar as it can be dismantled and debunked. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Why might this be the case? In 2000 Dudley Andrew charted a small history of cinema studies as an academic endeavor. (3) He argued that cinema studies emerged in a university context in the years surrounding 1968 as a result of the researches of passionate amateurs; no-one working in those early years of cinema studies could claim to have been trained as a film scholar. Nowadays, however, the field is thoroughly institutionalized and much of Andrew's discussion concerns the way that cinema studies had to evolve and adapt to institutional pressures. He emphasizes that much of the expansion and diversification of the field was probably the result of institutional pressures--those of catering to customer (i.e., student) demands and university budgets, the U.S. tenure-track system (mirrored to an extent in the U.K. by the dreaded Research Assessment Exercise) and the agendas and schedules of publishers. Less important, he suggests, have been genuinely intellectual reasons for such advancements. He writes that "If the cinema studies edifice of semiotics, Marxism, and psychoanalysis was abandoned while its mortar was still wet, one can certainly blame the weight of ideas it was asked to bear or the flimsy trusses upholding them, but [one might] look first to a university system that encourages scholars to expand into new subdivisions rather than repair, fortify, or remodel the field's city center." (4) Those approaches of the earlier age--the approaches which blended structuralist semiotics with psychoanalysis and Marxism-might certainly have been overturned for intellectual reasons but, for Andrew, a far more likely reason for its demise was "because its logic was at odds with the university system." (5) [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] It is almost unique to read of a film scholar's nostalgia for what today seem like the bad old days of psycho-Marxism in cinema studies, for the academic masters of the current generation define themselves by their opposition to that earlier age. A range of discourses have today superseded the earlier ones: we are in an age of post-theory, one in which questions of film history are paramount, alongside those of reception, exhibition, comprehension, and film style. …
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