Jenny Chamarette
The Open University, Film and Media, Faculty Member
- Critical Disability Studies, Gender and Sexuality, Phenomenology, Embodiment, Digital Humanities, Film and Media Studies, and 40 moreIntermediality, Digital Media, Museum Studies, Archives, Intersectionality, Feminist Philosophy, Art Theory, Film Theory, Film and Video Art, Continental Philosophy, Queer Theory, Critical Race Theory, Cultural Memory, Affect (Cultural Theory), Film-Philosophy, Museums and Exhibition Design, Feminist Theory, Installation (Art), European Cinema, French Studies, Affect Studies, Gender Studies, Philosophy of Film, Film Studies, Performance Theory, Visual Anthropology, Cultural Studies, Critical Theory, Aesthetics, Visual Culture, Philosophy of Time, French Cinema, Philosophy, Disability Studies, Curatorial Practice (Art), Ecophenomenology, Disability, Disability Theory, Feminist Disability Studies, and History of Medicine and the Bodyedit
- I am a Senior Lecturer in Film and Media at the Open University, as well as a writer, curator and artist. I originall... moreI am a Senior Lecturer in Film and Media at the Open University, as well as a writer, curator and artist. I originally trained in modern European languages at the University of Cambridge, with a PhD in French continental philosophy and visual cultures. I have previously held positions at the Universities of Cambridge, Leicester, Queen Mary University of London and Reading.
My main goal is to nurture outstanding and socially significant interdisciplinary research, driven by ethical-political, feminist and equalities-based values. I apply creative systems-based, intersectional feminist, ecological and disability-informed methodologies to critical problems in filmmaking, exhibition, art practice, archives and museums. At root, I am always interested in the relationships between bodies, technologies, environments and agency – whether that is the agency of self-fashioning, digital access labour, creative practice, or cultural power.
While I have a back-catalogue of traditional single-authored research on film and artist’s moving image, phenomenology, intercultural and intermedial lens-based media, archives and museums, and gender, sexuality, disability and race, I continue to collaborate on innovative social practice, curation and programming. I also write non-fiction, fiction and experimental art-writing for a range of trade and independent publications, which has been shortlisted and longlisted for national and international writing prizes.
From 2018-2022 I was Co-Investigator on the AHRC funded project The Legacies of Stephen Dwoskin's Personal Cinema. Stephen Dwoskin (1939-2012) was a polymath artist and foundational figure for British experimental film, a co-founder of the London Filmmakers’ Co-op, and a Brooklyn-born disabled, Jewish-diasporic man. Our combined team of artists, film historians, computer and information science specialists developed a “360 degree model” of analysis, including traditional archival research, practice-based methods, critical disability studies, data imaging, forensics and visualisation, and machine learning (AI) techniques to preserve, explore and access Dwoskin’s digital and non-digital archive.
I work regularly with the screen industry to build a more equitable and compassionate sector. In How Do You Feel Cinema? co-designed with interdisciplinary artist and cultural leader Gaylene Gould, we collaborated with the British Film Institute and the Independent Cinema Office to hold slow, nurturing spaces of feeling that offer restorative care for cinema workers and cinema audiences. With award-winning advocacy organisation RAISING FILMS I co-produced industry research on the experiences and solutions of parents and carers during and after the COVID pandemic. I continue to work with the creative and cultural industries on access, equitability and compassionate working practices.edit
International Symposium, Goethe-Universität Frankfurt, 23-25 November 2017 The Structures of the Film Experience Jean-Pierre Meunier, Film-Phenomenology and Contemporary Film Studies Conference Location: Aula der Städelschule,... more
International Symposium, Goethe-Universität Frankfurt, 23-25 November 2017
The Structures of the Film Experience
Jean-Pierre Meunier, Film-Phenomenology and Contemporary Film Studies
Conference Location: Aula der Städelschule, Dürerstraße 10, 60596 Frankfurt am Main
Jean-Pierre Meunier’s Les structures de l’experience filmique: L’identification filmique from 1969 is a key text in the history of film studies.
Drawing on the work of the French pioneers of phenomenology, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Jean-Paul Sartre, as well as on the insights of the French Filmology movement, Meunier distinguishes between three major types of engagements viewers can have with moving images: the fiction attitude, documentary attitude and home movie attitude. With this seemingly innocuous distinction, Meunier opens up a new field of inquiry. By adding the home movie attitude as the third type of engagement, he integrates a large and long-neglected type of cinematic practice into the field of film studies and film theory, namely the non-theatrical non-fiction film.
Meunier’s pioneering gesture continues to reverberate throughout film studies, where non-theatrical film has become one of the main areas of research over the last decade.
Furthermore, Meunier addresses the much-discussed concepts of filmic identification and movement in a way that continues to be relevant to current developments in film philosophy and film aesthetics.
Through the readings proposed by Vivian Sobchack, Dudley Andrew and others, Meunier’s work has been an important influence on the development of film theory outside of the French-speaking world over the last decades. However, the full text of Meunier’s book has never been available in any language but French.
On the occasion of the first English language translation of Meunier’s book – prepared by Daniel Fairfax (Yale University/Goethe-Universität Frankfurt) and edited by Fairfax with Julian Hanich (University of Groningen) for the “Film Theory in Media History” book series edited by Weihong Bao (Berkeley), Vinzenz Hediger (Frankfurt) and Trond Lundemo (Stockholm) for Amsterdam University Press – this symposium will bring together international film scholars and philosophers to discuss the enduring significance of Meunier’s work.
The symposium will address the role of Meunier’s book in the history of film theory. It will discuss the continuing relevance of the seminal categories and concepts Meunier proposes for the history of film phenomenology and contemporary film studies. It will search for the book’s philosophical underpinnings and the role the book played in the history of film phenomenology. And it will explore new directions in film theory opened up by Meunier’s work.
The symposium is organized by the Department of Theater, Film and Media Studies of Goethe-Universität Frankfurt (Prof. Dr. Vinzenz Hediger) and the Department of Arts, Culture and Media at the University of Groningen (Prof. Dr. Julian Hanich) in cooperation with the Permanent Seminar on Histories of Film Theories and the Städelschule – Staatliche Hochschule für Bildende Künste.
The symposium is made possible through the generous support of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, the Vereinigung der Freunde und Förderer der Goethe-Universität / Vereinigung von Freunden und Förderern der Goethe, the Stiftung zur Förderung der internationalen wissenschaftlichen Beziehungen der Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität and the Groningen Research Institute for the Study of Culture (ICOG).
The Structures of the Film Experience
Jean-Pierre Meunier, Film-Phenomenology and Contemporary Film Studies
Conference Location: Aula der Städelschule, Dürerstraße 10, 60596 Frankfurt am Main
Jean-Pierre Meunier’s Les structures de l’experience filmique: L’identification filmique from 1969 is a key text in the history of film studies.
Drawing on the work of the French pioneers of phenomenology, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Jean-Paul Sartre, as well as on the insights of the French Filmology movement, Meunier distinguishes between three major types of engagements viewers can have with moving images: the fiction attitude, documentary attitude and home movie attitude. With this seemingly innocuous distinction, Meunier opens up a new field of inquiry. By adding the home movie attitude as the third type of engagement, he integrates a large and long-neglected type of cinematic practice into the field of film studies and film theory, namely the non-theatrical non-fiction film.
Meunier’s pioneering gesture continues to reverberate throughout film studies, where non-theatrical film has become one of the main areas of research over the last decade.
Furthermore, Meunier addresses the much-discussed concepts of filmic identification and movement in a way that continues to be relevant to current developments in film philosophy and film aesthetics.
Through the readings proposed by Vivian Sobchack, Dudley Andrew and others, Meunier’s work has been an important influence on the development of film theory outside of the French-speaking world over the last decades. However, the full text of Meunier’s book has never been available in any language but French.
On the occasion of the first English language translation of Meunier’s book – prepared by Daniel Fairfax (Yale University/Goethe-Universität Frankfurt) and edited by Fairfax with Julian Hanich (University of Groningen) for the “Film Theory in Media History” book series edited by Weihong Bao (Berkeley), Vinzenz Hediger (Frankfurt) and Trond Lundemo (Stockholm) for Amsterdam University Press – this symposium will bring together international film scholars and philosophers to discuss the enduring significance of Meunier’s work.
The symposium will address the role of Meunier’s book in the history of film theory. It will discuss the continuing relevance of the seminal categories and concepts Meunier proposes for the history of film phenomenology and contemporary film studies. It will search for the book’s philosophical underpinnings and the role the book played in the history of film phenomenology. And it will explore new directions in film theory opened up by Meunier’s work.
The symposium is organized by the Department of Theater, Film and Media Studies of Goethe-Universität Frankfurt (Prof. Dr. Vinzenz Hediger) and the Department of Arts, Culture and Media at the University of Groningen (Prof. Dr. Julian Hanich) in cooperation with the Permanent Seminar on Histories of Film Theories and the Städelschule – Staatliche Hochschule für Bildende Künste.
The symposium is made possible through the generous support of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, the Vereinigung der Freunde und Förderer der Goethe-Universität / Vereinigung von Freunden und Förderern der Goethe, the Stiftung zur Förderung der internationalen wissenschaftlichen Beziehungen der Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität and the Groningen Research Institute for the Study of Culture (ICOG).
Research Interests:
Tapping a rich vein of phenomenological and post-phenomenological approaches to film, this book explores how moving images are 'experienced' and 'encountered' as well as 'read' and 'viewed'. Jenny Chamarette brings theorizations of... more
Tapping a rich vein of phenomenological and post-phenomenological approaches to film, this book explores how moving images are 'experienced' and 'encountered' as well as 'read' and 'viewed'. Jenny Chamarette brings theorizations of phenomenology from philosophy, psychology and anthropology, to four close studies of experimental and avant-garde moving image works by internationally recognized and widely studied contemporary French filmmakers, whose cinematic production spans the 1950s to the present day. Acknowledging the shifting ground of the cinematic across multiple media and geographies, from 35mm feature film, to video-tape, to projected installation and digital video, this volume asks how phenomenological approaches to film can help us to rethink the relationship of subjectivity to our future cinematic world.
Research Interests: Film Theory, French Cinema, French Studies, Installation Art, Embodiment, and 14 morePhenomenology, Philosophy of Film, Autoethnography, Continental Philosophy, Film-Philosophy, Photography Theory, Auteur Theory, Cinema, Affect (Cultural Theory), Subjectivity, Chris Marker, Agnes Varda, Chantal Akerman, and Philippe Grandrieux
As theoretical positions and as affective experiences, the twin currents of contrition – guilt and shame – permeate literary discourse and figure prominently in discussions of ethics, history, sexuality and social hierarchy. This... more
As theoretical positions and as affective experiences, the twin currents of contrition – guilt and shame – permeate literary discourse and figure prominently in discussions of ethics, history, sexuality and social hierarchy. This collection of essays, on French and francophone prose, poetry, drama, visual art, cinema and thought, assesses guilt and shame in relation to social morality structures, language and self-expression, the thinking of trauma, and the ethics of forgiveness. The authors approach their subjects via close readings and comparative study, drawing on such thinkers as Adorno, Derrida, Jankélévitch and Irigaray. Through these they consider works ranging from the medieval Roman de la rose through to Gustave Moreau’s Symbolist painting, Giacometti’s sculpture, the films of Marina de Van and recent sub-Saharan African writing. The collection provides an état-présent of thinking on guilt and shame in French Studies, and is the first to assemble work on this topic ranging from the thirteenth to the twenty-first century. The book contains nine contributions in English and four in French.
Research Interests:
In this article, I argue that looking and staring, which are typical aspects of Stephen Dwoskin’s experimental, highly personal approach to cinema, contribute to a broader sensory enquiry into conditions of diasporic and disabled (gender)... more
In this article, I argue that looking and staring, which are typical aspects of Stephen Dwoskin’s experimental, highly personal approach to cinema, contribute to a broader sensory enquiry into conditions of diasporic and disabled (gender) dysphoria. I explore the intersecting relationships between these four d’s – Dwoskin, diaspora, disability, dysphoria, understanding how in recent years trans studies, diaspora studies and disability studies have become interested especially in conditions of dysphoria as strategies that negotiate complex embodiment and ethnicity. In doing so, I adopt a hybrid approach to aesthetic modes of self-estrangement and radical interruptions of normative embodiment in Dwoskin’s late films. Adopting what Elliot Evans has described via Eve Kosofsky Sedgewick and Paul B Preciado as a ‘universalising’ orientation of cutting edge trans theory,1 and earlier work by historians of disability and masculinity such as David Serlin,2 I read across these concepts to suggest that the formal and aesthetic structures and contexts of Dwoskin’s late films trouble the borders between embodied conceptualisations of diaspora, disability and dysphoria. This has consequences for Dwoskin’s positioning in wider discourses of experimental filmmaking, both within and beyond Britain where he spent the majority of his adult life, and helps to connect the relationships between his diasporic Jewishness and disability. Thinking expansively, this article examines how expressions of dysphoria, discussed in trans, disabled and diasporic communities, have the potential to offer, not recuperation or rehabilitation of Dwoskin’s work, but a space to think from that is resistant to the binarist, normative and exclusionary logics prevailing in British culture at this moment in the 21st century.
Research Interests:
This essay considers experimental filmmaker Stephen Dwoskin’s work as a lifelong process of technological activism and “knowing-making.” Using recent frameworks from Critical Disability Studies, Chamarette demonstrates how Dwoskin’s... more
This essay considers experimental filmmaker Stephen Dwoskin’s work as a lifelong process of technological activism and “knowing-making.” Using recent frameworks from Critical Disability Studies, Chamarette demonstrates how Dwoskin’s decades of activism parallel and in some cases pre-date the evolution of Disability Studies as it is currently situated. As an early adopter of digital and ‘cusp-of digital’ technologies (Hi-8 cameras, Mini-DV tapes, email, digital editing suites), Dwoskin’s creative work aligns with and backdates the “Crip Technoscience Manifesto” developed by Aimi Hamraie and Kelly Fritsch in 2019. Drawing on Dwoskin’s films and his archive, now housed at the University of Reading Special Collections (UK) Chamarette reframes Dwoskin’s late creative activity as tactics of technological adaptation, crip technoscience, and spheres of influence within digital and non-digital realms. These digital activisms ultimately give cause to reflect on the ambivalent, interdependent, friction-filled relationships between filmmaking, digitality and disability.
Research Interests:
Stephen Dwoskin was a prolific experimental filmmaker from the mid-1960s until his death in 2012. Commonly associated with the New York underground film scene and the London Filmmakers’ Co-Op, which he co-founded in 1966, Jewish-American... more
Stephen Dwoskin was a prolific experimental filmmaker from the mid-1960s until his death in 2012. Commonly associated with the New York underground film scene and the London Filmmakers’ Co-Op, which he co-founded in 1966, Jewish-American Dwoskin was also a childhood survivor of polio and a disability rights activist. Though an enduring oral legacy of feminist criticism of Dwoskin’s work remains since the 1980s, Dwoskin’s later work from the 1990s and 2000s is acutely understudied. In this article, I recontextualize earlier feminist positions in light of the ‘cripping’ of sexuality and gender proposed by recent critical disability studies, applied to two of Dwoskin’s later works. Adopting archival evidence of feminist critique, feminist art histories and Crip approaches to sexuality, I examine androgyny and genderqueerness in Dwoskin’s photomontages from Ha, Ha! La Solution Imaginaire (1993) and conflations of critical medical and BDSM-structured care in the film Intoxicated by My Illness (2001). I conclude that Dwoskin’s work invites rich epistemological re-evaluation of both feminist critique and entrenched sociocultural conceptions of gendered subjectivity, intimacy and sexual agency.
Research Interests:
This essay acknowledges the values attributed to the filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard’s cultural production, while offering an alternative analytical framework for his first and only installed moving-image exhibition, Voyage(s) en utopie –... more
This essay acknowledges the values attributed to the filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard’s cultural production, while offering an alternative analytical framework for his first and only installed moving-image exhibition, Voyage(s) en utopie – Jean-Luc Godard, 1946–2006: A la Recherche d’un théorème perdu (Voyage(s) in Utopia [...] In Search of a Lost Theorem). Evaluating archival evidence alongside certain tendencies within this controversial exhibition’s critical reception, I employ contemporary art histories and feminist reappraisals of Godard’s authorship to re-examine Voyage(s)’ capacity for institutional critique. I show how archival and art-historical analysis of Voyage(s) and its subsequent scholarly reception reveals significant tensions more broadly relevant to film studies, as the field fluctuates uneasily between 20th-century art and film histories, modernist aesthetics and cinematic exhibition, and 21st-century models of interdisciplinary recontextualization, pluralist historiographies and canonical reappraisal. By acknowledging these tensions, I reconsider one of film studies’ most tenaciously defended auteur figures, not as an author, artist or curator but as an institution, ripe for critique itself.
Research Interests: Feminist Theory, Film Studies, French Cinema, Installation Art, Contemporary Art, and 10 moreAuteur Theory, Feminist film theory, Auteur Studies, Institutional Critique, Cinephilia, Jean-Luc Godard, Cinema Studies, Subjectivity, Film Exhibition, and Contemporary art history and institutional history of museums
Do I honour the work or the person? And if I honour the person, how do I then honour the work? These questions have preoccupied me for some time, and they are brought sharply into focus in the work and person of Timothy Mathews. The... more
Do I honour the work or the person? And if I honour the person, how do I then honour the work?
These questions have preoccupied me for some time, and they are brought sharply into focus in the work and person of Timothy Mathews. The etymologies of the term are disputed but indicative – honor from the Old French, honestus from the Latin, and onus, a moral weight or duty. In Greek, it is filotimo – a love of values, worth, and esteem. And this is where my intervention in this volume sits most comfortably: in the space between the sensuous space of a love of art, and an understanding of its values. In writing about honour, I am also thinking about the creative practice of honouring tied up in critical writing; a practice deeply embedded in Mathews’ own writing and work.
These questions have preoccupied me for some time, and they are brought sharply into focus in the work and person of Timothy Mathews. The etymologies of the term are disputed but indicative – honor from the Old French, honestus from the Latin, and onus, a moral weight or duty. In Greek, it is filotimo – a love of values, worth, and esteem. And this is where my intervention in this volume sits most comfortably: in the space between the sensuous space of a love of art, and an understanding of its values. In writing about honour, I am also thinking about the creative practice of honouring tied up in critical writing; a practice deeply embedded in Mathews’ own writing and work.
Research Interests:
Compared to more familiar names in interwar European avant-garde cinema and early film theory, such as Germaine Dulac, Jean Epstein, and Louis Delluc, Ricciotto Canudo is far less well known. And yet Canudo, a polymath, poet, writer,... more
Compared to more familiar names in interwar European avant-garde cinema and early film theory, such as Germaine Dulac, Jean Epstein, and Louis Delluc, Ricciotto Canudo is far less well known. And yet Canudo, a polymath, poet, writer, journalist, and editor, moved in social and professional circles that included some of the most famous names in the European avant-gardes. In his relatively short life, Canudo collaborated with eminent writers, painters, composers, painters, and filmmakers, from Guillaume Apollinaire to Pablo Picasso, Maurice Ravel to Raoul Dufy, Marc Chagall to Fernand Léger, Abel Gance, and Jean Mitry. He produced distinctive poetry that was adapted into ballets and musical compositions, and notably performed by the Ballet Suédois in Paris – the same company who later performed Relâche, which was famously accompanied by René Clair’s avant-garde film, Entr’acte, in 1924. Canudo’s name and work circulated throughout Paris during the Belle Époque and in the interwar period, particularly because of his journal editorships, his leadership of the world’s first cinéclub, and his poetry and arts criticism. He edited two major art journals: Montjoie!, which ran from 1913 until the eve of the First World War in 1914, and La Gazette des Sept Arts, which ran from 1923 to 1924, with the last issue published in memoriam in March 1924, after Canudo’s death on 15 November 1923. And from April 1921 until his untimely death, he ran the world’s first cinéclub, the Club des Amis du Septième Art (Club of the Friends of the Seventh Art, or CASA).
There is no doubt that the traumatic experiences of total war and mass death, and the long-standing socio-cultural phenomena of Spiritism and Spiritualism in fin de siècle Paris, had a lasting influence on Canudo’s theories of cinema, as they did on later proponents of French film theory too. This essay therefore speaks to both Canudo’s intermediality – his reflections on cinema as a ‘total’ art form encompassing all others – and his sense of the spirit or spirituality of cinema, which is alluded to in his writings from 1908 to 1923. Although I focus mainly on his later years of work, and specifically on his essay, ‘Reflections on the Seventh Art’, there is naturally some overlap between these and his earlier pre-war writing, in particular his ‘Birth of the Sixth Art’, written in 1911, and his essay ‘The Triumph of the Cinema’, written originally in Italian and published in 1908. Both were published posthumously and more widely distributed in 1927 via an edited collection of his works entitled L’Usine aux images (The Factory of Images). In the latter parts of this essay, I also place Canudo’s writing in posthumous relation to some examples of experimental and intermedial photography and film of this period in France, as a speculative and exploratory way of examining what might have been for Canudo’s theories, had he lived to engage with these new and dynamic artworks. Canudo is often seen as a shadowy forebear of later film theory, with the period of strongest influence in relation to his work taking place after his too-early death in 1923, the same year that his last essay, ‘Reflections on the Seventh Art’, was published. Thus, in a way, my contribution to this collection does its own spirit work, by bringing the traces of Canudo’s writing and thought into contact with the ghostly images of avant-garde photography and film from 1924 onward.
There is no doubt that the traumatic experiences of total war and mass death, and the long-standing socio-cultural phenomena of Spiritism and Spiritualism in fin de siècle Paris, had a lasting influence on Canudo’s theories of cinema, as they did on later proponents of French film theory too. This essay therefore speaks to both Canudo’s intermediality – his reflections on cinema as a ‘total’ art form encompassing all others – and his sense of the spirit or spirituality of cinema, which is alluded to in his writings from 1908 to 1923. Although I focus mainly on his later years of work, and specifically on his essay, ‘Reflections on the Seventh Art’, there is naturally some overlap between these and his earlier pre-war writing, in particular his ‘Birth of the Sixth Art’, written in 1911, and his essay ‘The Triumph of the Cinema’, written originally in Italian and published in 1908. Both were published posthumously and more widely distributed in 1927 via an edited collection of his works entitled L’Usine aux images (The Factory of Images). In the latter parts of this essay, I also place Canudo’s writing in posthumous relation to some examples of experimental and intermedial photography and film of this period in France, as a speculative and exploratory way of examining what might have been for Canudo’s theories, had he lived to engage with these new and dynamic artworks. Canudo is often seen as a shadowy forebear of later film theory, with the period of strongest influence in relation to his work taking place after his too-early death in 1923, the same year that his last essay, ‘Reflections on the Seventh Art’, was published. Thus, in a way, my contribution to this collection does its own spirit work, by bringing the traces of Canudo’s writing and thought into contact with the ghostly images of avant-garde photography and film from 1924 onward.
Research Interests:
Generosity, interconnectedness and hope are so prominent in Katharina (Kat) Lindner’s scholarship that to celebrate her work is to bring the necessity and power of these three, often critically undervalued, qualities in mind. Equally as... more
Generosity, interconnectedness and hope are so prominent in Katharina (Kat) Lindner’s scholarship that to celebrate her work is to bring the necessity and power of these three, often critically undervalued, qualities in mind. Equally as highly accomplished an athlete as she was a brilliant !lm and gender scholar, Kat brought together incredible physical, emotional and psychological acuity in her writing. Her forms of knowledge spread across intellectual, social, affective and kinaesthetic planes, both resistant to dominant formations and simultaneously, centripetally hopeful for a time where cinematic embodiment might breathe more freely beyond the heteronormative constraints of binary gender.
Research Interests:
Chantal Akerman was only 18 when she made her first short film, Saute ma ville. The figure of the young woman, played by Akerman, radically and violently disrupts the domestic space of her apartment, transgressing all of the domestic... more
Chantal Akerman was only 18 when she made her first short film, Saute ma ville. The figure of the young woman, played by Akerman, radically and violently disrupts the domestic space of her apartment, transgressing all of the domestic meticulousness later portrayed in elongated detail in Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles from 1975. Of all the films of Akerman that I have watched, this angry, young, singing woman returns to me over and over again. In this vision, there is so much farcical, explosive, rabid anger: a mercurial state of self-rebellion that burns under the surface of many of Akerman's other images. Saute ma ville's English title is Blow Up My Town. But in fact, the film does not portray an act of mass urban destruction. It is instead a small, radical act of self-annihilation by a young woman whose gestures still betray a little of her gauche, awkward adolescent body. In the black leader of the end of the film, the young woman's last self-destructive act isn't even visible. The sound of an explosion is all that is left, followed by her triumphant, tuneless singing. Akerman kills off the figure of the young woman aged 18, in 1968. The very first film she ever makes is a shadow of her own death. It is a significant overstep to make any comparison between this baroque, rebellious, raging representation in Saute ma ville, and the circumstances of her actual death, aged 65, in October 2015, when she took the decision to end her own life. But perhaps there is another way of seeing it. The figure-avatar of the young woman floats through very many of Akerman's films. This ageless figure stands in, over and over, for Akerman, whose own body will now age no further, since to age one must be alive, still changing, still moving. Ageing is a sign of life, even though at the same time it portends mortality.
Research Interests: Emotion, Gender Studies, Women's Studies, Feminist Theory, Film Studies, and 15 moreFilm Theory, French Cinema, Queer Theory, Feminist Philosophy, Embodiment, Autobiography, Simone de Beauvoir, Cinema, Ageing and Health, Mortality, Phenomenology of Temporality, Affect (Cultural Theory), Film and Media Studies, Motherhood, and Chantal Akerman
This chapter discusses the intersecting relationships of feminist phenomenologies, queer phenomenologies, and phenomenologies of disability and race, in three contemporary examples of moving image work centrally featuring individuals or... more
This chapter discusses the intersecting relationships of feminist phenomenologies, queer phenomenologies, and phenomenologies of disability and race, in three contemporary examples of moving image work centrally featuring individuals or characters with lived experiences of disability. While each of these phenomenological modes puts forward substantively different methodologies, their common ground is found through a critique of the normative boundaries of the body as constituted by the white, male, able-bodied subject of philosophical and political discourse. Broadly speaking, their aims are also to create alternative visions of what these non-normativised subjectivities might be.
Phenomenologies extend far beyond the field of philosophy: examples of phenomenological praxis are also found in cultural studies, visual cultures, anthropology, the medical humanities, and, of course, film. The epistemological claims of feminist phenomenologies are therefore necessarily interdisciplinary. Not only this: I argue that feminist phenomenologies 'inform' the study of film no more and no less than the study of film informs the development of feminist phenomenologies. No one single relationship, identity or definition can designate the ways in which feminist phenomenologies contribute to ongoing intellectual conversations about the place of bodies and embodied experience in the world; the means by which these experiences and bodies are performed and represented in the world, through film, constitutes a vital dynamic in the development of feminist phenomenologies.
Phenomenologies extend far beyond the field of philosophy: examples of phenomenological praxis are also found in cultural studies, visual cultures, anthropology, the medical humanities, and, of course, film. The epistemological claims of feminist phenomenologies are therefore necessarily interdisciplinary. Not only this: I argue that feminist phenomenologies 'inform' the study of film no more and no less than the study of film informs the development of feminist phenomenologies. No one single relationship, identity or definition can designate the ways in which feminist phenomenologies contribute to ongoing intellectual conversations about the place of bodies and embodied experience in the world; the means by which these experiences and bodies are performed and represented in the world, through film, constitutes a vital dynamic in the development of feminist phenomenologies.
Research Interests: Gender Studies, Feminist Theory, Film Studies, Film Theory, Disability Studies, and 12 moreEmbodiment, Phenomenology, Feminist Phenomenology, Disability Theory, Phenomenology of the body, Documentary Film, Intersectionality, Queer Phenomenology, Crip theory, Disability Rights, Interdependence, and Film-phenomenology
Phenomenology is the study of things as they appear in the world. While this concept seems simple enough, the ways in which phenomenology manifests itself, particularly in the study of gender and cinema, become more complex. Phenomenology... more
Phenomenology is the study of things as they appear in the world. While this concept seems simple enough, the ways in which phenomenology manifests itself, particularly in the study of gender and cinema, become more complex. Phenomenology is often identified as an alternative to philosophy—but this is confusing, because many of the individuals associated with the emergence of phenomenology were themselves European philosophers of the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries. As is so often the case, this list reads in the masculine: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger are all associated with the emergence of phenomenology as a philosophical field. But perhaps it is not helpful to begin with the philosophical origins of phenomenology, particularly because phenomenology itself is not interested in origins or roots. It is interested in the now: what we see, how we perceive, and how those perceptions shape or become the world that is constitutive both of our environment and us.
In this chapter, I am not just seeking to connect feminism with phenomenology, or phenomenology with film, but gender, film and phenomenology. I am also interrogating terms of varying familiarity to film studies—spectatorship, embodiment, and sensation. This is no doubt a difficult task. But it is important to identify those aspects of thinking about film that destabilize film as a detached object of cool observation, an object that can be decoded or ‘read’ as a text. If studies of spectatorship acknowledge that the screen is not the only site where meaning is made for a film, then studies of embodied spectatorship go one step further: they attempt to talk about the ways that film relates to and affects a film viewer’s entire bodily experience: her breathing, her sensation, her memory and her emotion.
In this chapter, I am not just seeking to connect feminism with phenomenology, or phenomenology with film, but gender, film and phenomenology. I am also interrogating terms of varying familiarity to film studies—spectatorship, embodiment, and sensation. This is no doubt a difficult task. But it is important to identify those aspects of thinking about film that destabilize film as a detached object of cool observation, an object that can be decoded or ‘read’ as a text. If studies of spectatorship acknowledge that the screen is not the only site where meaning is made for a film, then studies of embodied spectatorship go one step further: they attempt to talk about the ways that film relates to and affects a film viewer’s entire bodily experience: her breathing, her sensation, her memory and her emotion.
Research Interests:
Let go. Let go of it. This need to give an account of it, of the film, AIR (Anna Cady and Pauline Thomas, 2015).1 I am not giving an account. But how do I speak about myself around and inside and beyond a film? One that touches me, moves... more
Let go. Let go of it. This need to give an account of it, of the film, AIR (Anna Cady and Pauline Thomas, 2015).1 I am not giving an account. But how do I speak about myself around and inside and beyond a film? One that touches me, moves and inspires me to write in airy, aleatory ways? What voice can I locate in the breath between this film and me? This is my question. And the breath between this film and me is also the breath between you and me. If you read this aloud, you will breathe—and think—this space differently.
I have been asked to bring to bear my phenomenological and embodied approaches upon a film, in order to explore the thinking, writing, breathing space between them. How that breathing space might help to articulate or inspire affect, how it can become moving, before and after and between forms of language. With or without words. I can only do this relationally, not directly. I feel like Echo, endlessly repeating the sacred voice of art that I can only reflect.
Also available online: http://www.thecine-files.com/chamarette2016/
I have been asked to bring to bear my phenomenological and embodied approaches upon a film, in order to explore the thinking, writing, breathing space between them. How that breathing space might help to articulate or inspire affect, how it can become moving, before and after and between forms of language. With or without words. I can only do this relationally, not directly. I feel like Echo, endlessly repeating the sacred voice of art that I can only reflect.
Also available online: http://www.thecine-files.com/chamarette2016/
Research Interests:
"In this chapter, I argue the case that film, and cinema more broadly, have produced metaphorical and literal shifts of focus and frame within the museum context. The chapter initially discusses the multi-layered ways in which film, as a... more
"In this chapter, I argue the case that film, and cinema more broadly, have produced metaphorical and literal shifts of focus and frame within the museum context. The chapter initially discusses the multi-layered ways in which film, as a representational medium and as an exhibited object, interacts with its political and socio-cultural counterpart: the institution of cinema. I then argue that these focal shifts in the treatment of film in the museum, and the treatment of museums on film, potentially eliminate some aspects of the museum from cinema’s perceptual field, while highlighting others, operating as a counter-discourse to the prime concerns of museums at a given moment in time. These aspects are also subject to, and affected by changes in the tangible materiality of cinema, as an object, an experience, an exhibition space, and a cultural institution. Rather than imagining film as a ‘medium’ in the technological or communicative sense, the chapter examines the politics of film as a mediator, negotiator, or indeed critic of museum spaces and museum politics. The ‘visible’ and ‘invisible’ institutions in the title of this chapter refer to these shifts in focus and frame that draw attention toward – or away from – the political and cultural contingency of film in the museum space.
Cinema’s historical and contemporary privileged position in French cultural heritage suggests that thinking about French museums specifically informs an understanding of the moving image’s conceptual and spatial shift away from ‘cinema’ as such, towards a broader conception of the medium. ‘Cinema’ as we like to think about it has long since left the auditorium and found itself transmitted across multiple screen media technologies, from the handheld mobile device, to digital streaming, to large-scale screening on tower blocks: such devices have inevitably been adopted by museums as modes of education, interpretation and outreach. Increasingly, ‘cinema’, as a mutable cultural institution that defies visible definition, has made a shift into the ‘museum’: a socio-cultural institution which often courts both physical presence and virtual existence, in add-on digital apps, screen-based interpretation and online exhibition spaces. Consequently, the case studies of this chapter are situated within a French cultural context that offers concrete examples of the complex relationships between cinema and the museum. In doing so, the chapter interrogates the complex political, curatorial and broader socio-cultural concerns of the institutionalized ‘housing’ of film within the museum, both as a public space and as a political institution.
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Cinema’s historical and contemporary privileged position in French cultural heritage suggests that thinking about French museums specifically informs an understanding of the moving image’s conceptual and spatial shift away from ‘cinema’ as such, towards a broader conception of the medium. ‘Cinema’ as we like to think about it has long since left the auditorium and found itself transmitted across multiple screen media technologies, from the handheld mobile device, to digital streaming, to large-scale screening on tower blocks: such devices have inevitably been adopted by museums as modes of education, interpretation and outreach. Increasingly, ‘cinema’, as a mutable cultural institution that defies visible definition, has made a shift into the ‘museum’: a socio-cultural institution which often courts both physical presence and virtual existence, in add-on digital apps, screen-based interpretation and online exhibition spaces. Consequently, the case studies of this chapter are situated within a French cultural context that offers concrete examples of the complex relationships between cinema and the museum. In doing so, the chapter interrogates the complex political, curatorial and broader socio-cultural concerns of the institutionalized ‘housing’ of film within the museum, both as a public space and as a political institution.
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As a scholar whose work often turns toward feminist, phenomenological and situated approaches to the moving image, I have in the past been accused of ‘cherry-picking’ the artists and works with which I think and write. In a sense, this is... more
As a scholar whose work often turns toward feminist, phenomenological and situated approaches to the moving image, I have in the past been accused of ‘cherry-picking’ the artists and works with which I think and write. In a sense, this is absolutely correct. My studies tend to rely on serendipity and an openness to new encounters with creative expression, in examples that are rarely constricted by singularities of form and categories of scholarly discipline. Consequently I have found myself described both as a dabbler and a dilettante. But I prefer to be described as restless: this latter term acknowledges my reluctance to situate myself comfortably within the well-worn pathways of disciplinary structures in the humanities My writing here, in a volume about women, Woman, and the multiple crossroads of feminisms in twenty-first century Film Studies, continues these peregrinations.
I cannot claim that the recent moving image works of Shirin Neshat and Gillian Wearing bear close resemblances in their formal structures or theoretical concerns. While they are both living contemporary artists working with the moving image, there is relatively little that connects them structurally or thematically. I do not consider gender alone to be a uniting force for their thinking and creativity, and certainly do not wish to relegate their endeavours to some sort of biological essentialism. I want to draw attention to their work for emotional and intellectual reasons. First, I have been moved by and drawn to works by both artists over the past few years of research in contemporary film and art. Second, the serendipitous collision of creative concepts is one of the most fruitful ways in which feminism has made interventions in studies of film, and art. Some of the finest examples of this can be seen in the writing of Sara Ahmed, Mieke Bal, Laura U. Marks, Laura Mulvey, Griselda Pollock and Emma Wilson. A close examination of two female artists working with the moving image requires an understanding of their respective ethical, political and aesthetic concerns, but also a closer engagement with feminist philosophy and feminist critical studies in the light of experimental filmmaking by and about women. Nonetheless, here I hope that, by bringing together feminist philosophies of the image, and the experimental film work of two contemporary female artists, the open encounters between these works will help to explore new territories of feminism and experimental film.
I cannot claim that the recent moving image works of Shirin Neshat and Gillian Wearing bear close resemblances in their formal structures or theoretical concerns. While they are both living contemporary artists working with the moving image, there is relatively little that connects them structurally or thematically. I do not consider gender alone to be a uniting force for their thinking and creativity, and certainly do not wish to relegate their endeavours to some sort of biological essentialism. I want to draw attention to their work for emotional and intellectual reasons. First, I have been moved by and drawn to works by both artists over the past few years of research in contemporary film and art. Second, the serendipitous collision of creative concepts is one of the most fruitful ways in which feminism has made interventions in studies of film, and art. Some of the finest examples of this can be seen in the writing of Sara Ahmed, Mieke Bal, Laura U. Marks, Laura Mulvey, Griselda Pollock and Emma Wilson. A close examination of two female artists working with the moving image requires an understanding of their respective ethical, political and aesthetic concerns, but also a closer engagement with feminist philosophy and feminist critical studies in the light of experimental filmmaking by and about women. Nonetheless, here I hope that, by bringing together feminist philosophies of the image, and the experimental film work of two contemporary female artists, the open encounters between these works will help to explore new territories of feminism and experimental film.
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This essay provides an overview of the emerging field of film phenomenology. It argues that the field is a different ‘scratching of the philosophical itch’ that is created by an interrogation of film's relationship to embodied and... more
This essay provides an overview of the emerging field of film phenomenology. It argues that the field is a different ‘scratching of the philosophical itch’ that is created by an interrogation of film's relationship to embodied and situated experience. Film phenomenology is not a movement as such, and yet in the past decade, a wave of scholarship, often written by female scholars and often feminist, has emerged in this field, and in the associated fields of cultural studies, political theory and sense theory. Contrary to the ‘rigor’ of philosophical traditions (though this term is questionable in the context of phenomenology's antiphilosophical stance), film phenomenologies retain a looseness and lightness of foot. This characteristic is often described as a lack of rigor under standardized disciplinary modes, where rigor stands in as a means of summarily dismissing methods that resist disciplinary singularity. In this context, the essay presents a plural, flexible notion of feminist film phenomenologies rather than a singular methodological enterprise, in examples of recent research in this field from the US and UK.
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This article illuminates the threads of connection drawing together the work of the Palestinian filmmaker Elia Suleiman and French cultural production, while acknowledging the broader international contexts of these connections. The... more
This article illuminates the threads of connection drawing together the work of the Palestinian filmmaker Elia Suleiman and French cultural production, while acknowledging the broader international contexts of these connections. The transcultural relations identified in the article title are a means of articulating these concerns. Suleiman's films, funded by French production companies and supported by French film festivals, have a tacit connection to France. Suleiman's mute self-representation within his films also draws upon auteurist and absurdist tropes familiar to European literature and art in the twentieth century. First discussing the broader cultural and geopolitical contexts of Franco-Palestinian filmmaking, the article then engages closely with critical tropes of the Absurd and human gesture in relation both to the critical reception of Suleiman's films, and the films' aesthetics, specifically in his recent feature films Divine Intervention (2002) and Le Temps qu'il reste/The Time that Remains (2009). Offering an alternative articulation of these complex transcultural relationships, the article explores Suleiman's position as a mute filmic figure and auteur director. It re-opens an often ‘unspoken’ dialogue of Franco-Palestinian cinematic relations which has been frequently designated as historical or political, rather than also and in equal measure, cultural, aesthetic, ethical and personal. At the same time, it seeks to open out these dialogues beyond France and Palestine, towards transcultural relations between Europe, the Middle East, North Africa and North America.
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The works of Agnès Varda and Chantal Akerman span two generations of female influence in the sphere of contemporary visual culture in France. Both filmmakers have seized upon the richly intermedial potential of film, photography, video... more
The works of Agnès Varda and Chantal Akerman span two generations of female influence in the sphere of contemporary visual culture in France. Both filmmakers have seized upon the richly intermedial potential of film, photography, video and installation, while acknowledging their own status as figures engaging with the marginal politics of auteurist filmmaking. This article interrogates how the recent installations, Les Veuves de Noirmoutier/The Widows of Noirmoutier (Varda, 2005) and Marcher à côté de ses lacets dans un frigidaire vide/To Walk Next to One’s Shoelaces in an Empty Fridge (Akerman, 2004) stage an encounter between the cinematic, ethical and spatial practices of each female auteur, the female subjects of their moving image work, and their viewers. By invoking concepts of gesture from Giorgio Agamben, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and recent writing on dance and film, the article explores the intermedial potential of gesture as a framework for examining processes of meaning-making, spatial experimentation and spectatorial physicality in these recent moving image installations.
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This article discusses the complex cultural and theoretical relationships between France and Iran, Europe and the Middle East in recent intermedial work by the filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami. Through the installation Looking At Tazieh (2004),... more
This article discusses the complex cultural and theoretical relationships between France and Iran, Europe and the Middle East in recent intermedial work by the filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami. Through the installation Looking At Tazieh (2004), the film Shirin (2008) and the staging and direction of the opera Così fan tutte, the article explores the philosophical and contextual implications of spectacle within these trans-cultural productions. In particular, it discusses how French cultural interventions into Kiarostami’s recent intermedial work can be rethought productively outside the remit of Francophone or transnational cinemas, instead refocusing on the intermediality of spectacle and modes of enculturated looking in these three recent productions.
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"In this article I argue that thresholds of attention or distraction provoke a phenomenological engagement with the ephemerality of moving image installations. Thus, patterns of spectatorial attention and distraction offer a potential... more
"In this article I argue that thresholds of attention or distraction provoke a phenomenological engagement with the ephemerality of moving image installations. Thus, patterns of spectatorial attention and distraction offer a potential methodology to examine ephemeral installations which exist for a limited duration, in particular in exhibition spaces. The article probes a range of conceptualizations of attention with relation to contemporary phenomenological film theory, and performance theory, in order to stage a reflective encounter with Chantal Akerman’s recent installation, Marcher a cote de ses lacets dans un Frigidaire vide (To Walk Beside One’s Shoelaces in an Empty Fridge, 2004). It ultimately argues that engaging with a phenomenology of the ephemeral may act as a corrective balance to the narrativizing and canon-building tendencies in recent film criticism of Akerman’s work."
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This article explores the dynamics of the ‘spectre’ or ‘spectral body’ of the auteurist figure of Agnès Varda, as a means of discussing the ethical practices of mourning and memorial in two of Varda’s recent moving image works. It further... more
This article explores the dynamics of the ‘spectre’ or ‘spectral body’ of the auteurist figure of Agnès Varda, as a means of discussing the ethical practices of mourning and memorial in two of Varda’s recent moving image works. It further elaborates on the motifs of ‘spectral bodies’ and ‘temporalised spaces’ to negotiate memorial practices between and across film viewing, filmmaking and the filmmaker. It does so using two interrelated projects by Varda; one in the realm of the plastic arts (her exhibition of 2006 entitled L’Île et elle, with a particular focus on the installation Les Veuves de Noirmoutier (The Widows of Noirmoutier, 2005) and the other in film format for cinema distribution, her most recent film, Les Plages D’Agnès (The Beaches of Agnès, 2008). Drawing upon Jacques Derrida’s notion of the spectral return, or revenant, specifically in audio-visual media, I examine the processes of spectral embodiment and motile mourning at work in these autobiographical projects. The article concludes by reflecting upon the ethical possibilities of productive nostalgia and repetitive mourning, and how these gestures and sites of longing and bereavement offer an open and ludic space for shared flows and communities of affect and memory between filmmakers, artworks and audiences.
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This article discusses the relationships between memory, subjective temporality and cinematic time, exploring the recent writing of Laura Mulvey, Mary Ann Doane and Laura U. Marks, alongside the well-known work of Freud, C.S Peirce,... more
This article discusses the relationships between memory, subjective temporality and cinematic time, exploring the recent writing of Laura Mulvey, Mary Ann Doane and Laura U. Marks, alongside the well-known work of Freud, C.S Peirce, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Gilles Deleuze. Via a discussion of Freud's wax tablet analogy, Peirce's trace, and Merleau-Ponty's river, the article highlights the philosophical paradox of cinematic temporality, and the irreducibility of time to representation. It suggests that cinematic temporality and memory operate as parallel analogies, or in some senses, allegories, rather than as interchangeable concepts.
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This chapter explores notions of cinematic temporality in Chris Marker's short film La Jetée. In particular it attends to the relationships between stillness and dynamism, rhythm and discontinuity, and cinematic affect, and the ways in... more
This chapter explores notions of cinematic temporality in Chris Marker's short film La Jetée. In particular it attends to the relationships between stillness and dynamism, rhythm and discontinuity, and cinematic affect, and the ways in which these elements are held in tension within the film. The chapter argues that complex temporalities operating on the level of filmic form, and it paradoxical processes of animation and de-animation, become crucial to the representation and mediation of subjectivity in La Jetée.
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Certain forms of art privilege the ellipsis. For example, in poetry, one has only to think of Mallarmé's Un Coup de dés for ellipsis to mark its peculiar trace upon the processes of meaning. Nonetheless, because ellipsis situates itself... more
Certain forms of art privilege the ellipsis. For example, in poetry, one has only to think of Mallarmé's Un Coup de dés for ellipsis to mark its peculiar trace upon the processes of meaning. Nonetheless, because ellipsis situates itself so curiously between meaning and signification, a formal definition may seem too categorical in explaining what ellipsis can do in its between-state, flanked by visuality, semiotics and signification. This article examines how Merleau- Ponty, Derrida and Deleuze, employ textual-visual and ontological-perceptual strategies for making sense of this slippery signifier. These strategies allow us to think through examples of ellipsis in the writing of Hélène Cixous and in the photographs of Robert Frank, in terms of semantic, affective, aesthetic and material qualities.
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A blog post on the film AIR (Anna Cady and Pauline Thomas, 2015) and the Embodied Interpretations curatorial project, for the Life of Breath project, a Wellcome Trust funded project co-hosted between Durham University and the University... more
A blog post on the film AIR (Anna Cady and Pauline Thomas, 2015) and the Embodied Interpretations curatorial project, for the Life of Breath project, a Wellcome Trust funded project co-hosted between Durham University and the University of Bristol. Further details can be found here: http://lifeofbreath.org/2016/02/the-breath-between-art-film-mortality-and-air/
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Co-curated with Anna Cady, Pauline Thomas, Melanie Rose, Gabriel Galvez. Participating artists: Briony Bennet, Tami Haaland, Joan McGavin, SJ Fowler, Owen Lowery, Kate Koning, Brian Evans-Jones, Marcus Slease, Angela Rawlings, Sachiko... more
Co-curated with Anna Cady, Pauline Thomas, Melanie Rose, Gabriel Galvez.
Participating artists: Briony Bennet, Tami Haaland, Joan McGavin, SJ Fowler, Owen Lowery, Kate Koning, Brian Evans-Jones, Marcus Slease, Angela Rawlings, Sachiko Murakami, Steve Kemper, Abby Wollston, Tara Stuckey, Jan Hendrickse, Sebastiane Hegarty, Aaron D'Sa, Deepak Venkateshvaran, Howard Moody, Stephen Emmerson
Participating artists: Briony Bennet, Tami Haaland, Joan McGavin, SJ Fowler, Owen Lowery, Kate Koning, Brian Evans-Jones, Marcus Slease, Angela Rawlings, Sachiko Murakami, Steve Kemper, Abby Wollston, Tara Stuckey, Jan Hendrickse, Sebastiane Hegarty, Aaron D'Sa, Deepak Venkateshvaran, Howard Moody, Stephen Emmerson
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I have been collaborating with Anna Cady, visual artist, since 2009. Activities have included: - Roundtable discussion with Anna Cady, Louisa Makolski and Zoulikha Bouabdellah at Light Up! Short Film Festival, October 2009 -... more
I have been collaborating with Anna Cady, visual artist, since 2009. Activities have included:
- Roundtable discussion with Anna Cady, Louisa Makolski and Zoulikha Bouabdellah at Light Up! Short Film Festival, October 2009
- *‘Conversations: A story about collaboration’, co-presented with Anna Cady (visual artist), Modern French Visual Culture Symposium, University of Cambridge, 26 May 2011
- ‘“Art Which Speaks for Us” - Anna Cady and Louisa Makolski’s It Works Both Ways project’ by Jenny Chamarette was published in the catalogue for Kunstfilmtag, (Duesseldorf, November 2012)
- Anna was a participating artist in the Translation Games exhibition, with Matt Rowe, Aura Satz and Mayuri Boonham, 31 July - 2 August 2013, Old Anatomy Museum, King's College London
- Roundtable discussion with participating curators, artists, writers, and translators: Jenny Chamarette, Anna Cady, Ricarda Vidal, Mayuri Boonham, Colleen Becker, Emilie Oléron Evans at ‘Translation Games: What We Made’, talk and demonstration, King's College Arts and Humanities Festival, 24 October 2013
- Anna was also a participating artist in the Translation Games event at the Poetry Library, Southbank Centre, London (5 March 2014)
- Roundtable discussion with Anna Cady, Louisa Makolski and Zoulikha Bouabdellah at Light Up! Short Film Festival, October 2009
- *‘Conversations: A story about collaboration’, co-presented with Anna Cady (visual artist), Modern French Visual Culture Symposium, University of Cambridge, 26 May 2011
- ‘“Art Which Speaks for Us” - Anna Cady and Louisa Makolski’s It Works Both Ways project’ by Jenny Chamarette was published in the catalogue for Kunstfilmtag, (Duesseldorf, November 2012)
- Anna was a participating artist in the Translation Games exhibition, with Matt Rowe, Aura Satz and Mayuri Boonham, 31 July - 2 August 2013, Old Anatomy Museum, King's College London
- Roundtable discussion with participating curators, artists, writers, and translators: Jenny Chamarette, Anna Cady, Ricarda Vidal, Mayuri Boonham, Colleen Becker, Emilie Oléron Evans at ‘Translation Games: What We Made’, talk and demonstration, King's College Arts and Humanities Festival, 24 October 2013
- Anna was also a participating artist in the Translation Games event at the Poetry Library, Southbank Centre, London (5 March 2014)
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Translation Games explores the theory and practice of translation within literature (i.e. between languages), the fine arts (i.e. between art genres), and textile design as well as across these disciplines. Modelled on the game of Chinese... more
Translation Games explores the theory and practice of translation within literature (i.e. between languages), the fine arts (i.e. between art genres), and textile design as well as across these disciplines. Modelled on the game of Chinese Whispers, where a message is passed from person to person and goes through various stages of transformation, the Games see a commissioned source text translated through a series of languages, art genres, and textile designs. Based on collaboration and knowledge exchange between literary translators, artists, designers, and academics, the project comprises a programme of workshops and symposia, as well as a series of public exhibitions, performances and publications.
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Water has the capacity to distort and magnify light and sound: it bends and reshapes these elemental parts of the moving image to create something altogether different from what we might usually experience. In this programme drawn from... more
Water has the capacity to distort and magnify light and sound: it bends and reshapes these elemental parts of the moving image to create something altogether different from what we might usually experience. In this programme drawn from moving image artists, filmmakers and public information broadcasts, water is both an inspiration and a distraction, for viewers and filmmakers alike.
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"For the twelfth Escalator retreat at Wysing, Space of Attention, ten artists, art-writers and curators explored alternative educational models and strategies. During an intensive four days, each participant led one workshop for the group... more
"For the twelfth Escalator retreat at Wysing, Space of Attention, ten artists, art-writers and curators explored alternative educational models and strategies. During an intensive four days, each participant led one workshop for the group and participated in others.
Each day, invited speakers helped contextualise the workshop environment adding historical context and their own contributions. Crits and practical talks asked participants to reflect on their practice, consider new or alternative ways of producing, share ideas and to approach their work from other and alternative perspectives. The final day concluded with a public outcome from the retreat group.
The retreat was formed as a progression from the previous Retreat 11: And if it Was it Can't Be Is which was developed in collaboration with artist Mark Titchner. Participants from the previous retreat contributing to Space of Attention include Annabelle Craven-Jones, Mat Do, Clare Gasson, Claire Hope, Glen Jamieson, Kit Poulson, Florian Roithmayr and Alan Stanners.
The participants were: Jenny Chamarette, Annie Davey, Jamie George, Natasha Hoare, Fiona James, Sidsel Meineche Hansen, Stephanie Misa, David Morris, Rosalie Schweiker and Khadija von Zinnenburg.
The invited speakers were: Matthew de Kersaint Giraudeau, Lucky PDF and the participants of Retreat 11, And If It Was It Can’t Be Is."
Each day, invited speakers helped contextualise the workshop environment adding historical context and their own contributions. Crits and practical talks asked participants to reflect on their practice, consider new or alternative ways of producing, share ideas and to approach their work from other and alternative perspectives. The final day concluded with a public outcome from the retreat group.
The retreat was formed as a progression from the previous Retreat 11: And if it Was it Can't Be Is which was developed in collaboration with artist Mark Titchner. Participants from the previous retreat contributing to Space of Attention include Annabelle Craven-Jones, Mat Do, Clare Gasson, Claire Hope, Glen Jamieson, Kit Poulson, Florian Roithmayr and Alan Stanners.
The participants were: Jenny Chamarette, Annie Davey, Jamie George, Natasha Hoare, Fiona James, Sidsel Meineche Hansen, Stephanie Misa, David Morris, Rosalie Schweiker and Khadija von Zinnenburg.
The invited speakers were: Matthew de Kersaint Giraudeau, Lucky PDF and the participants of Retreat 11, And If It Was It Can’t Be Is."
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The Light Up! Film Festival was part of a long running series of biannual Film Festivals at Murray Edwards College, Cambridge, and screened a selection of the best short films by talented new and established filmmakers, particularly, but... more
The Light Up! Film Festival was part of a long running series of biannual Film Festivals at Murray Edwards College, Cambridge, and screened a selection of the best short films by talented new and established filmmakers, particularly, but not exclusively, from the East Anglia region. It was the first Film Festival of its kind at the University of Cambridge to showcase these films and presented an exciting programme of innovative and fast-paced short filmmaking from around the world.
Light Up! screened three programmes of shorts over one weekend (23 and 24 October 2009), where film audiences and filmmakers celebrated the exhilarating but often underexposed world of short film. The Light Up! Film Festival also welcomed more established Guest Filmmakers to discuss their work before and after the screenings. An Audience Prize was awarded to the 'best film', as voted by our audiences over the course of the three screenings.
Light Up! screened three programmes of shorts over one weekend (23 and 24 October 2009), where film audiences and filmmakers celebrated the exhilarating but often underexposed world of short film. The Light Up! Film Festival also welcomed more established Guest Filmmakers to discuss their work before and after the screenings. An Audience Prize was awarded to the 'best film', as voted by our audiences over the course of the three screenings.
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‘Hypothèse fondamentale : à l’origine de l’écriture, du texte, de la poèsie, il y a un voir.’ (Carasco 2014 : 7) The films of Raymonde Carasco are relatively unknown, but recently witnessed a resurgence of interest amongst French cinema... more
‘Hypothèse fondamentale : à l’origine de l’écriture, du texte, de la poèsie, il y a un voir.’ (Carasco 2014 : 7)
The films of Raymonde Carasco are relatively unknown, but recently witnessed a resurgence of interest amongst French cinema scholars, such as Nicole Brenez, and in circles of documentary and ethnographic film in Europe and beyond. Carasco’s film work is deeply experimental, tinged with a sense of the transcendent, and follows repetitions of gesture and voice that trace both the life rituals of the Mexican ethnic group, the Tarahumaras, and the writing of Antonin Artaud on this same people. Carasco was also a writer and academic: her writings grasp at the poetics of language, writing, and looking, in a formative philosophy of film. Her concepts of the ciné-fragment and auto-bio-ciné-graphie complement theorisations of cinema and writing from celebrated filmmakers such as Agnès Varda. This paper aims primarily to bring Carasco’s work back into the spotlight, particularly in an Anglophone context. Her films in the 1970s offers a very different form of experimental, indeed transcendental ethnography, compared to other filmmakers of the time (Strand, Rouch), and offer some insight into theorisations of contemporary art cinema in relation to transcendental filmmaking 'from the ground up'.
The films of Raymonde Carasco are relatively unknown, but recently witnessed a resurgence of interest amongst French cinema scholars, such as Nicole Brenez, and in circles of documentary and ethnographic film in Europe and beyond. Carasco’s film work is deeply experimental, tinged with a sense of the transcendent, and follows repetitions of gesture and voice that trace both the life rituals of the Mexican ethnic group, the Tarahumaras, and the writing of Antonin Artaud on this same people. Carasco was also a writer and academic: her writings grasp at the poetics of language, writing, and looking, in a formative philosophy of film. Her concepts of the ciné-fragment and auto-bio-ciné-graphie complement theorisations of cinema and writing from celebrated filmmakers such as Agnès Varda. This paper aims primarily to bring Carasco’s work back into the spotlight, particularly in an Anglophone context. Her films in the 1970s offers a very different form of experimental, indeed transcendental ethnography, compared to other filmmakers of the time (Strand, Rouch), and offer some insight into theorisations of contemporary art cinema in relation to transcendental filmmaking 'from the ground up'.
Research Interests: Gender Studies, Avant-Garde Cinema, Dance Studies, Film Theory, French Cinema, and 13 moreFrench Studies, Ethnography, Contemporary Art, Gesture, Philosophy of Film, Antonin Artaud, Film-Philosophy, Ethnographic Film, Documentary Film, 20th century Avant-Garde, Experimental Film, Mexico, and Sergei Eisenstein
I want to address the issue of gender both head on and obliquely, by talking about female artists in museum spaces. Their physical (and virtual) interventions have not only produced a matter of filmic record, but have also shaped the ways... more
I want to address the issue of gender both head on and obliquely, by talking about female artists in museum spaces. Their physical (and virtual) interventions have not only produced a matter of filmic record, but have also shaped the ways that museums can be thought about and understood. The museum is the home of the muses but it has also taken away their voice. This chapter attempts to go some way to redress that silencing.
The extracts I am planning to read out today adopt a mode of creative non-fiction that might seem unfamiliar to academic scholarship. But I believe that they offer a means of reflection, particularly on issues of intermediality and performance, that work with, rather than against, the complexity of the material. While the body of my book chapter actually addresses the work of three female artists from successive generations of artistic production, Andrea Fraser, Marina Abramović and Camille Henrot, today I am focussing only on one small extract. I’ve named it:
A parable of Andrea Fraser, or why I can’t see her
The extracts I am planning to read out today adopt a mode of creative non-fiction that might seem unfamiliar to academic scholarship. But I believe that they offer a means of reflection, particularly on issues of intermediality and performance, that work with, rather than against, the complexity of the material. While the body of my book chapter actually addresses the work of three female artists from successive generations of artistic production, Andrea Fraser, Marina Abramović and Camille Henrot, today I am focussing only on one small extract. I’ve named it:
A parable of Andrea Fraser, or why I can’t see her
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As a scholar of film, I am constantly torn in two different directions when I use my eyes. I am trained to read. I sift through written material quickly to find the nuggets of information or analysis that will help me to make sense of... more
As a scholar of film, I am constantly torn in two different directions when I use my eyes. I am trained to read. I sift through written material quickly to find the nuggets of information or analysis that will help me to make sense of something else. But I am also trained to look – and looking isn’t always reading. Looking is as much to do with observation, as it is to do with analysis. It is as much about understanding how to describe what I see, as it is about interpreting those things that I see.
Fittingly, one of the dominant paradigms of Film Studies lies in the textual analysis of films. This is the one that I was initially trained in. For the purpose of textual analysis, our powers of observation and informed scrutiny enable us to ‘read’ films as flat, legible surfaces. Characters reveal ethical, behavioural or narrative features of the film. Mise-en-scène can be decoded for political or aesthetic means. But how does one ‘read’ an image floating on a screen, when the screen itself is different every time? Is a moving image the same moving image if we’ve seen it on a tablet, or as a massive immersive multi-screen installation? How do we account for the differences between experiencing moving images in a cinema auditorium, versus the experience of moving image projection in a gallery, or in another site-specific installation?
All of these seem like logical and valid questions. But perhaps in the rush to distinguish what we ‘read’ into a film from the individual acts of looking that we each commit when viewing the moving image, there is something of an artificial barrier put in place. If films are flat ‘texts’, then they can only be read in certain lights and from certain angles. What becomes legible – eligible even – as ‘film’ stays firmly in the realm of screen images that can be sustained in an upright manner in a fairly limited set of circumstances: in a cinema auditorium, on a television screen or more likely, on a portable computing device. So where does that situate all the marginal, evanescent examples of moving images, that still have an extremely powerful effect on the ways that we look at and experience screen media?
Fittingly, one of the dominant paradigms of Film Studies lies in the textual analysis of films. This is the one that I was initially trained in. For the purpose of textual analysis, our powers of observation and informed scrutiny enable us to ‘read’ films as flat, legible surfaces. Characters reveal ethical, behavioural or narrative features of the film. Mise-en-scène can be decoded for political or aesthetic means. But how does one ‘read’ an image floating on a screen, when the screen itself is different every time? Is a moving image the same moving image if we’ve seen it on a tablet, or as a massive immersive multi-screen installation? How do we account for the differences between experiencing moving images in a cinema auditorium, versus the experience of moving image projection in a gallery, or in another site-specific installation?
All of these seem like logical and valid questions. But perhaps in the rush to distinguish what we ‘read’ into a film from the individual acts of looking that we each commit when viewing the moving image, there is something of an artificial barrier put in place. If films are flat ‘texts’, then they can only be read in certain lights and from certain angles. What becomes legible – eligible even – as ‘film’ stays firmly in the realm of screen images that can be sustained in an upright manner in a fairly limited set of circumstances: in a cinema auditorium, on a television screen or more likely, on a portable computing device. So where does that situate all the marginal, evanescent examples of moving images, that still have an extremely powerful effect on the ways that we look at and experience screen media?
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Paper given at the Modern French Research Seminar, University of Oxford, 19 November 2015 This paper is a work-in-progress chapter of the monograph I am currently writing, a book entitled Cinemuseology: Museum Vitrines, Digital Screens,... more
Paper given at the Modern French Research Seminar, University of Oxford, 19 November 2015
This paper is a work-in-progress chapter of the monograph I am currently writing, a book entitled Cinemuseology: Museum Vitrines, Digital Screens, and the Cultural Politics of Film. It is one of the more ‘French Studies’ chapters in the book, which also spans Film Studies, Art History and Museum Studies, with forays into Performance Studies, Media Archaeology and Cultural Anthropology. I am seeking out the parallels between cinema and the museum, predominantly in the 20th and 21st centuries; parallels that both tie together these two dominant sources of knowledge and cultural production, and push them apart. Part of the aim of the book is to show how Film Studies and Museum Studies share discourses about key issues of human ethical life and culture: for example, the value of objects, the ways in which things, people and cultures are exhibited and observed, the visual and material manifestations of hierarchies of knowledge and power, and the ethics of appurtenance, audiences and ownership.
This particular chapter is perhaps the most historically focused, since it scrutinizes a particular moment, or rather, a set of moments, in French and French-language documentary filmmaking of the 1950s and 1960s. They span the death-knells of the French colonial project, and its immediate aftermath. The films that I address in this chapter include those by what would become the ‘Left Bank’ new wave filmmakers in the late 1950s and 1960s, but they also include the work of African filmmakers living and working in Paris. But for today’s paper, I will focus primarily on two films and their relationships to the museum. Moi, un noir (Me, A Black Man) was directed by Jean Rouch, the famous French ethnographer, in 1958. Les Statues meurent aussi (Statues also die) from 1953, was co-directed by Alain Resnais and Chris Marker, with cinematography by Ghislain Cloquet. More specifically, I want to reflect on these films relationships to the ethics of looking, and the parallel forms of looking espoused by cinema and the museum, which pertain to uncomfortable things. Uncomfortable things like what it means to look at another being as an object, an abject insect no less, and what the reciprocal relationships might be between looking, knowing and owning, in the ethnographic vein of these films.
This paper is a work-in-progress chapter of the monograph I am currently writing, a book entitled Cinemuseology: Museum Vitrines, Digital Screens, and the Cultural Politics of Film. It is one of the more ‘French Studies’ chapters in the book, which also spans Film Studies, Art History and Museum Studies, with forays into Performance Studies, Media Archaeology and Cultural Anthropology. I am seeking out the parallels between cinema and the museum, predominantly in the 20th and 21st centuries; parallels that both tie together these two dominant sources of knowledge and cultural production, and push them apart. Part of the aim of the book is to show how Film Studies and Museum Studies share discourses about key issues of human ethical life and culture: for example, the value of objects, the ways in which things, people and cultures are exhibited and observed, the visual and material manifestations of hierarchies of knowledge and power, and the ethics of appurtenance, audiences and ownership.
This particular chapter is perhaps the most historically focused, since it scrutinizes a particular moment, or rather, a set of moments, in French and French-language documentary filmmaking of the 1950s and 1960s. They span the death-knells of the French colonial project, and its immediate aftermath. The films that I address in this chapter include those by what would become the ‘Left Bank’ new wave filmmakers in the late 1950s and 1960s, but they also include the work of African filmmakers living and working in Paris. But for today’s paper, I will focus primarily on two films and their relationships to the museum. Moi, un noir (Me, A Black Man) was directed by Jean Rouch, the famous French ethnographer, in 1958. Les Statues meurent aussi (Statues also die) from 1953, was co-directed by Alain Resnais and Chris Marker, with cinematography by Ghislain Cloquet. More specifically, I want to reflect on these films relationships to the ethics of looking, and the parallel forms of looking espoused by cinema and the museum, which pertain to uncomfortable things. Uncomfortable things like what it means to look at another being as an object, an abject insect no less, and what the reciprocal relationships might be between looking, knowing and owning, in the ethnographic vein of these films.
Research Interests:
In 1965, the famous Senegalese filmmaker Ousmane Sembène held a conversation with Jean Rouch, the influential ethnographic filmmaker. While applauding Rouch’s experimental films such as Moi un noir (1958), he criticised Rouch’s more... more
In 1965, the famous Senegalese filmmaker Ousmane Sembène held a conversation with Jean Rouch, the influential ethnographic filmmaker. While applauding Rouch’s experimental films such as Moi un noir (1958), he criticised Rouch’s more traditionally ethnographic films in the following terms:
« On y montre, on y campe une réalité mais sans en voir l’évolution. Ce que je leur reproche, comme je le reproche aux africanistes, c’est de nous regarder comme des insectes… » (Cervoni 1996 : 106).
What does it mean to look at someone like an insect? What would the ethics be of this looking, and what kind of temporality would it reveal? These questions are the prompts for this work-in-progress paper, which investigates modes of looking, and the parallel (and uncomfortable) evolutions of cinema, in particular museum documentary and ethnographic film, and colonialism. This paper investigates three interconnected films about African art and objects, ethnography and museums: Les Statues Meurent Aussi (Alain Resnais and Chris Marker, 1953), Moi, un noir (Jean Rouch, 1958), and what has been described as Africa’s first feature film, La Noire de… (Ousmane Sembène, 1966). Each of these films engage directly and indirectly with the remains of French and European (post-)colonial power in Africa.
In my work-in-progress, I want to discuss the points of connection between these films’ interests in the objects, archives and collections of museums in France and Europe, and orientalising forms of acquisitive collection. These critical engagements display on the one hand the remit of the political and intellectual concerns of French documentary filmmakers (Rouch, Resnais, Marker), and on the other, the legitimate cautioning by Sembène about the ethical impact of these films’ ways of looking. By revealing the aesthetic limitations within these films, such a critique also indicates the political and ethical occlusions made by white French filmmakers about black African worlds. By looking particularly at the invocations of objects as part of the ‘ethnographic screen’ of these films, I want to examine how these occlusions reveal important connections and tensions between the histories of cinema, the museum, and the painful history of colonial power.
« On y montre, on y campe une réalité mais sans en voir l’évolution. Ce que je leur reproche, comme je le reproche aux africanistes, c’est de nous regarder comme des insectes… » (Cervoni 1996 : 106).
What does it mean to look at someone like an insect? What would the ethics be of this looking, and what kind of temporality would it reveal? These questions are the prompts for this work-in-progress paper, which investigates modes of looking, and the parallel (and uncomfortable) evolutions of cinema, in particular museum documentary and ethnographic film, and colonialism. This paper investigates three interconnected films about African art and objects, ethnography and museums: Les Statues Meurent Aussi (Alain Resnais and Chris Marker, 1953), Moi, un noir (Jean Rouch, 1958), and what has been described as Africa’s first feature film, La Noire de… (Ousmane Sembène, 1966). Each of these films engage directly and indirectly with the remains of French and European (post-)colonial power in Africa.
In my work-in-progress, I want to discuss the points of connection between these films’ interests in the objects, archives and collections of museums in France and Europe, and orientalising forms of acquisitive collection. These critical engagements display on the one hand the remit of the political and intellectual concerns of French documentary filmmakers (Rouch, Resnais, Marker), and on the other, the legitimate cautioning by Sembène about the ethical impact of these films’ ways of looking. By revealing the aesthetic limitations within these films, such a critique also indicates the political and ethical occlusions made by white French filmmakers about black African worlds. By looking particularly at the invocations of objects as part of the ‘ethnographic screen’ of these films, I want to examine how these occlusions reveal important connections and tensions between the histories of cinema, the museum, and the painful history of colonial power.
Research Interests:
Exponential virtuality: Attending to Marina Abramović In this paper I propose an examination of the exponential capacities of audio-visual form in recent moving image work made by or centrally concerning the performance artist Marina... more
Exponential virtuality: Attending to Marina Abramović
In this paper I propose an examination of the exponential capacities of audio-visual form in recent moving image work made by or centrally concerning the performance artist Marina Abramović. Recent retrospectives of her work in the US and UK have unfolded largely as a result of the immense volumes of documentation surrounding her live art projects – videos, sound recordings, photographs, live streaming, and recently, a documentary produced simultaneously with Abramović’s 2010 durational performance at the MOMA in New York, The Artist Is Present. Particularly in response to this recent ‘hyper-mediated' version of Abramović’s work, where, surrounded by curatorial and former artistic partners, she and a group of young artists performed a selection of her previous works, critics such as Amelia Jones have pointed out that the exhibition itself produced problematic hierarchies of ‘seeing’ and ‘presence’ in relation to live art. Jones points out: ‘the dependence of Abramović and MoMA on documentation (before, during, and after the actual time of the exhibition’s display) to spread the word of her “presence” and its supposedly transformative effects, points to obdurate contradictions in the recent obsession with live art, its histories, and its documentation and re-enactments.’ (Jones 2011: 17)
In my paper I want to examine two issues. First, I enquire what it means to attend to Abramović in the multi-dimensional and polysemous streams of audiovisual data that surround her most recent projects (The Artist Is Present, 512 Hours). Second, in the context of Abramović’s current recognition as one of the world’s foremost performance artists, I want to ask what happens when her famous, aesthetically complex body, effectively becomes untouchable through its exponential virtuality on every conceivable screen medium, and via her ever-expanding portfolio of manifestos, actions and movements? How can we attend to form, when the forms of Abramović’s seemingly endlessly remediated body are exponentially complex?
In this paper I propose an examination of the exponential capacities of audio-visual form in recent moving image work made by or centrally concerning the performance artist Marina Abramović. Recent retrospectives of her work in the US and UK have unfolded largely as a result of the immense volumes of documentation surrounding her live art projects – videos, sound recordings, photographs, live streaming, and recently, a documentary produced simultaneously with Abramović’s 2010 durational performance at the MOMA in New York, The Artist Is Present. Particularly in response to this recent ‘hyper-mediated' version of Abramović’s work, where, surrounded by curatorial and former artistic partners, she and a group of young artists performed a selection of her previous works, critics such as Amelia Jones have pointed out that the exhibition itself produced problematic hierarchies of ‘seeing’ and ‘presence’ in relation to live art. Jones points out: ‘the dependence of Abramović and MoMA on documentation (before, during, and after the actual time of the exhibition’s display) to spread the word of her “presence” and its supposedly transformative effects, points to obdurate contradictions in the recent obsession with live art, its histories, and its documentation and re-enactments.’ (Jones 2011: 17)
In my paper I want to examine two issues. First, I enquire what it means to attend to Abramović in the multi-dimensional and polysemous streams of audiovisual data that surround her most recent projects (The Artist Is Present, 512 Hours). Second, in the context of Abramović’s current recognition as one of the world’s foremost performance artists, I want to ask what happens when her famous, aesthetically complex body, effectively becomes untouchable through its exponential virtuality on every conceivable screen medium, and via her ever-expanding portfolio of manifestos, actions and movements? How can we attend to form, when the forms of Abramović’s seemingly endlessly remediated body are exponentially complex?
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"The notion of cinematic worlds brings about an implicit consideration of the ways in which such worlds are peopled, or otherwise collectively inhabited. This paper considers then, the ways in which film-philosophy, as a formative... more
"The notion of cinematic worlds brings about an implicit consideration of the ways in which such worlds are peopled, or otherwise collectively inhabited. This paper considers then, the ways in which film-philosophy, as a formative ‘cinematic world’, is inhabited both by filmic texts and philosophical concepts that have established a kind of collective identity. While the richness and diversity of film-philosophical thought has evolved substantially since it emerged in the 1990s, this paper acts as a gentle reminder of the attendant risks of disciplinary establishment, in that such tendencies often silence the voices of difference. While gender serves as the principal concern in my paper, this issue is certainly not limited to sexual difference.
Drawing on female French philosophers of the image, Michelle LeDoeuff and Marie-José Mondzain, and film theorists such as Rosalind Galt and Catherine Constable, my paper makes a case for the place of difference and dissent, over and above the demands of collective enterprise and academic community, in the intellectual labour of film. To do so, I turn to Self-Made (2010), the documentary-fiction-performance hybrid film by Turner Prize-winning artist Gillian Wearing, interrogating the grounds of collective difference and self-difference presented through the film’s exposure of performance, artistic endeavour, and lives lived otherwise.
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Drawing on female French philosophers of the image, Michelle LeDoeuff and Marie-José Mondzain, and film theorists such as Rosalind Galt and Catherine Constable, my paper makes a case for the place of difference and dissent, over and above the demands of collective enterprise and academic community, in the intellectual labour of film. To do so, I turn to Self-Made (2010), the documentary-fiction-performance hybrid film by Turner Prize-winning artist Gillian Wearing, interrogating the grounds of collective difference and self-difference presented through the film’s exposure of performance, artistic endeavour, and lives lived otherwise.
"
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Research Interests: Visual Studies, Art History, Art Theory, Installation Art, Performance Studies, and 17 moreInterdisciplinarity, Contemporary Art, Experimental Media Arts, Intermediality, Opera, Gender, Culture, Film-Philosophy, Stanley Cavell, Iranian Cinema, Artistic Research, Art writing, Voice, Curation, Writing in Visual Art, Artists’ Books, and Art ‘beyond the gallery’
In 2007, French philosopher Marie José Mondzain published a short article in the Cahiers du cinema on an installation by the Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami. His installation, Looking at Tazieh, which reconfigured a recorded... more
In 2007, French philosopher Marie José Mondzain published a short article in the Cahiers du cinema on an installation by the Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami. His installation, Looking at Tazieh, which reconfigured a recorded performance of the Iranian Shi’a passion play, was described by Mondzain as a way of seeing differently. She writes: ‘Culture appears here as that which, in its respect for difference, produces a relationship of universal recognition between subjects’ (Mondzain 2007:19, translation mine). Effectively she suggests that affect creates a universal commerce of intersubjective encounters, which unite spectators and performers, regardless of their positioning in Western or Eastern viewing traditions.
This paper gently contests Mondzain’s proposal, that affect and spectatorial co-presence produces the condition of possibility for shared experience or meaning-making, by examining the recent film by the exiled Iranian photographer and video artist, Shirin Neshat: Women Without Men (2009). Much of Neshat’s work is consumed with the conjoining of opposites: male and female, the real and the magical, formal stillness and choreography, political concreteness and poetic abstraction. Here I engage with Neshat’s shift from the gallery space into the cinema: a move against the tide of filmmakers who have recently transferred into the gallery. Though Neshat too claims a universal existential questioning for her work, I employ this interrogation of visual philosopher and visual artist to explore the issue of transitional and enculturated affect, or the manner in which ways of looking – even the sophisticated kinds of looking invited by Neshat’s hybrid, exilic artwork – may always be culturally inflected and delimited. Consequently, I explore how and why we don’t all look the same way: neither in space, nor through culture. Ultimately I hope to question some recent discussions of theories of affect that call upon universality, in favour of a re-engagement with the cultural and spatial specificity and diversity of affect, where the plural ‘we’ cannot be reduced to the singular ‘I’ of specular or phenomenological engagement.
This paper gently contests Mondzain’s proposal, that affect and spectatorial co-presence produces the condition of possibility for shared experience or meaning-making, by examining the recent film by the exiled Iranian photographer and video artist, Shirin Neshat: Women Without Men (2009). Much of Neshat’s work is consumed with the conjoining of opposites: male and female, the real and the magical, formal stillness and choreography, political concreteness and poetic abstraction. Here I engage with Neshat’s shift from the gallery space into the cinema: a move against the tide of filmmakers who have recently transferred into the gallery. Though Neshat too claims a universal existential questioning for her work, I employ this interrogation of visual philosopher and visual artist to explore the issue of transitional and enculturated affect, or the manner in which ways of looking – even the sophisticated kinds of looking invited by Neshat’s hybrid, exilic artwork – may always be culturally inflected and delimited. Consequently, I explore how and why we don’t all look the same way: neither in space, nor through culture. Ultimately I hope to question some recent discussions of theories of affect that call upon universality, in favour of a re-engagement with the cultural and spatial specificity and diversity of affect, where the plural ‘we’ cannot be reduced to the singular ‘I’ of specular or phenomenological engagement.
Research Interests: Visual Studies, Art History, Art Theory, Film Studies, Installation Art, and 16 moreInterdisciplinarity, Contemporary Art, Phenomenology, Iranian Studies, Contemporary French Philosophy, Gender, Culture, Film-Philosophy, Artistic Research, Affect (Cultural Theory), Diaspora and transnationalism, Art writing, Curation, Writing in Visual Art, Artists’ Books, and Art ‘beyond the gallery’
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The physicality of the body on screen is a major attraction for Akerman as a filmmaker, and a compelling reason for her filming and re-filming of three generations of female actresses: Delphine Seyrig, Aurore Clément, Sylvie Testud. It is... more
The physicality of the body on screen is a major attraction for Akerman as a filmmaker, and a compelling reason for her filming and re-filming of three generations of female actresses: Delphine Seyrig, Aurore Clément, Sylvie Testud. It is also a compelling function of Akerman’s presence, on- and off-camera, and offers an entwined set of intersubjective relations, between Akerman, the muse-figures who often perform Akerman in her films, and Akerman as a figure before the camera. Exploring notions of the burlesque, and interrogating concepts of bodily attention, this paper engages with notions of gesture and gender as they inhabit both a cinematic performance and a moving image installation: specifically Akerman’s 2004 film Tomorrow We Move and her 2004 installation, To Walk Beside One’s Shoelaces in an Empty Fridge.
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This paper explores the complex intermedial and transnational relationships between the Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami's recent projects in installation, film and opera, and France as a node of viewing and funding for these works. In... more
This paper explores the complex intermedial and transnational relationships between the Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami's recent projects in installation, film and opera, and France as a node of viewing and funding for these works. In particular, it interrogates the limitations of affect and shared or communal viewing practices, which are actively and self-reflexively invoked in the installation Looking at Tazieh (2004), the film Shirin (2008), and the opera Così fan tutte (2008/9)
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Later published by Peter Lang (2008)
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International Symposium, Goethe-Universität Frankfurt, 23-25 November 2017 The Structures of the Film Experience Jean-Pierre Meunier, Film-Phenomenology and Contemporary Film Studies Conference Location: Aula der Städelschule,... more
International Symposium, Goethe-Universität Frankfurt, 23-25 November 2017
The Structures of the Film Experience
Jean-Pierre Meunier, Film-Phenomenology and Contemporary Film Studies
Conference Location: Aula der Städelschule, Dürerstraße 10, 60596 Frankfurt am Main
Jean-Pierre Meunier’s Les structures de l’experience filmique: L’identification filmique from 1969 is a key text in the history of film studies.
Drawing on the work of the French pioneers of phenomenology, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Jean-Paul Sartre, as well as on the insights of the French Filmology movement, Meunier distinguishes between three major types of engagements viewers can have with moving images: the fiction attitude, documentary attitude and home movie attitude. With this seemingly innocuous distinction, Meunier opens up a new field of inquiry. By adding the home movie attitude as the third type of engagement, he integrates a large and long-neglected type of cinematic practice into the field of film studies and film theory, namely the non-theatrical non-fiction film.
Meunier’s pioneering gesture continues to reverberate throughout film studies, where non-theatrical film has become one of the main areas of research over the last decade.
Furthermore, Meunier addresses the much-discussed concepts of filmic identification and movement in a way that continues to be relevant to current developments in film philosophy and film aesthetics.
Through the readings proposed by Vivian Sobchack, Dudley Andrew and others, Meunier’s work has been an important influence on the development of film theory outside of the French-speaking world over the last decades. However, the full text of Meunier’s book has never been available in any language but French.
On the occasion of the first English language translation of Meunier’s book – prepared by Daniel Fairfax (Yale University/Goethe-Universität Frankfurt) and edited by Fairfax with Julian Hanich (University of Groningen) for the “Film Theory in Media History” book series edited by Weihong Bao (Berkeley), Vinzenz Hediger (Frankfurt) and Trond Lundemo (Stockholm) for Amsterdam University Press – this symposium will bring together international film scholars and philosophers to discuss the enduring significance of Meunier’s work.
The symposium will address the role of Meunier’s book in the history of film theory. It will discuss the continuing relevance of the seminal categories and concepts Meunier proposes for the history of film phenomenology and contemporary film studies. It will search for the book’s philosophical underpinnings and the role the book played in the history of film phenomenology. And it will explore new directions in film theory opened up by Meunier’s work.
The symposium is organized by the Department of Theater, Film and Media Studies of Goethe-Universität Frankfurt (Prof. Dr. Vinzenz Hediger) and the Department of Arts, Culture and Media at the University of Groningen (Prof. Dr. Julian Hanich) in cooperation with the Permanent Seminar on Histories of Film Theories and the Städelschule – Staatliche Hochschule für Bildende Künste.
The symposium is made possible through the generous support of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, the Vereinigung der Freunde und Förderer der Goethe-Universität / Vereinigung von Freunden und Förderern der Goethe, the Stiftung zur Förderung der internationalen wissenschaftlichen Beziehungen der Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität and the Groningen Research Institute for the Study of Culture (ICOG).
The Structures of the Film Experience
Jean-Pierre Meunier, Film-Phenomenology and Contemporary Film Studies
Conference Location: Aula der Städelschule, Dürerstraße 10, 60596 Frankfurt am Main
Jean-Pierre Meunier’s Les structures de l’experience filmique: L’identification filmique from 1969 is a key text in the history of film studies.
Drawing on the work of the French pioneers of phenomenology, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Jean-Paul Sartre, as well as on the insights of the French Filmology movement, Meunier distinguishes between three major types of engagements viewers can have with moving images: the fiction attitude, documentary attitude and home movie attitude. With this seemingly innocuous distinction, Meunier opens up a new field of inquiry. By adding the home movie attitude as the third type of engagement, he integrates a large and long-neglected type of cinematic practice into the field of film studies and film theory, namely the non-theatrical non-fiction film.
Meunier’s pioneering gesture continues to reverberate throughout film studies, where non-theatrical film has become one of the main areas of research over the last decade.
Furthermore, Meunier addresses the much-discussed concepts of filmic identification and movement in a way that continues to be relevant to current developments in film philosophy and film aesthetics.
Through the readings proposed by Vivian Sobchack, Dudley Andrew and others, Meunier’s work has been an important influence on the development of film theory outside of the French-speaking world over the last decades. However, the full text of Meunier’s book has never been available in any language but French.
On the occasion of the first English language translation of Meunier’s book – prepared by Daniel Fairfax (Yale University/Goethe-Universität Frankfurt) and edited by Fairfax with Julian Hanich (University of Groningen) for the “Film Theory in Media History” book series edited by Weihong Bao (Berkeley), Vinzenz Hediger (Frankfurt) and Trond Lundemo (Stockholm) for Amsterdam University Press – this symposium will bring together international film scholars and philosophers to discuss the enduring significance of Meunier’s work.
The symposium will address the role of Meunier’s book in the history of film theory. It will discuss the continuing relevance of the seminal categories and concepts Meunier proposes for the history of film phenomenology and contemporary film studies. It will search for the book’s philosophical underpinnings and the role the book played in the history of film phenomenology. And it will explore new directions in film theory opened up by Meunier’s work.
The symposium is organized by the Department of Theater, Film and Media Studies of Goethe-Universität Frankfurt (Prof. Dr. Vinzenz Hediger) and the Department of Arts, Culture and Media at the University of Groningen (Prof. Dr. Julian Hanich) in cooperation with the Permanent Seminar on Histories of Film Theories and the Städelschule – Staatliche Hochschule für Bildende Künste.
The symposium is made possible through the generous support of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, the Vereinigung der Freunde und Förderer der Goethe-Universität / Vereinigung von Freunden und Förderern der Goethe, the Stiftung zur Förderung der internationalen wissenschaftlichen Beziehungen der Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität and the Groningen Research Institute for the Study of Culture (ICOG).
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An approach to subjectivity of any sort demands a persistent, if rarely linear, engagement with notions of time and temporality. Time is vital to lived experience; lived experience is vital to the encounter with time as a phenomenon. And... more
An approach to subjectivity of any sort demands a persistent, if rarely linear, engagement with notions of time and temporality. Time is vital to lived experience; lived experience is vital to the encounter with time as a phenomenon. And yet, without an a priori or rational acknowledgement of time, so many notions of the subject, of subjectification and subjectivity would fail to develop. Take, for example, Freud’s stages of childhood, or Lacan’s formative Mirror Stage, which presuppose a passage of the self from infancy to adult maturity (Freud 2001; Lacan 1977). Alternatively, Foucault’s trajectories of subjectification rely upon concepts of socialisation and historical genealogy that must acknowledge the position of the past with relation to the present (Foucault 2006). In terms of thinking about non-linear time, Bergson’s thoughts on consciousness, perception and duration, or Merleau-Ponty’s engagement with moments of apprehension as conditions of being-in-the-world as in the ep...
We long for objects, because they are never ours for long. Peter Schwenger’s comment above serves as a reminder of the persistently affective relationship between a subject and an object. When that object in question relates to the film... more
We long for objects, because they are never ours for long. Peter Schwenger’s comment above serves as a reminder of the persistently affective relationship between a subject and an object. When that object in question relates to the film object, what takes place is a subjective spatio-temporal encounter that is as simulacral as it is material. In this chapter, the melancholy and the productivity of nostalgia, that particularly timely affect, become the key means of thinking with productive communicative and relational strategies of cinematic subjectivity. Nostalgia, as an immaterial, powerful, circulating form of affect, becomes coextensive with virtual and actual cinematic worlds. As a consequence, ethics do not dominate the thinking of cinematic subjectivity here, but instead ethical relationality surfaces as a mode of apprehending the spatio-temporal engagements of Agnes Varda’s films and installations.
This vision of the body, described by the filmmaker Philippe Grandrieux in a special edition of the Cahiers du Cinema in 2000, is a chaotic and perplexing one. It is a primeval body: one that bears a direct relationship to the bodies... more
This vision of the body, described by the filmmaker Philippe Grandrieux in a special edition of the Cahiers du Cinema in 2000, is a chaotic and perplexing one. It is a primeval body: one that bears a direct relationship to the bodies first inscribed by prehistoric man on the caves of Lascaux (see Bataille 1955 or Blanchot 1984). It is a fragile body: hallucinatory, feverish, suffering in its attempts to represent itself to itself. That failed representation is also constitutive of a productive failure to account for or produce subjectivity from within that hallucinatory, quivering body. It is also a formless body: opaque and shaped by darkness, only to be eviscerated and exposed by light, and indeed, by representation itself. Representation, as a form of showing, or a manifestation of signification, dematerialises this body at the moment of its encounter.
Seeking to rebalance the emerging canon of philosophical film, this panel explores considerations of gender and feminism that interrupt and reconfigure current trends in film-philosophy. Featuring Anglophone and French-speaking... more
Seeking to rebalance the emerging canon of philosophical film, this panel explores considerations of gender and feminism that interrupt and reconfigure current trends in film-philosophy. Featuring Anglophone and French-speaking philosoph y, film and visual culture , the panel scrutinizes, through a gendered perspective , philosophical questions of surface, dialogue, possibility and difference. Neoliberalism as Neofeminism: Worlds of Surface and Consumption from ‘Girls’ to ‘The Bling Ring’ Anna Backman Rogers, Stockholm University anna.rogers@ims.su.se Following McRobbie (2000, 2008) and Radner (2011), this paper sets forth that contemporary ‘post-feminist’ (Tasker and Negra 2007) visual culture functions insidiously through its recuperation and distortion of feminism in order to promote neoliberal values (as neofeminism). In turn, neofeminism precipitates a state in which the human subject can no longer function as an ‘affective agent’ (Rizzo 2012; del Rio 2012). Taking m...
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In this paper I propose an examination of the exponential capacities of audio-visual form in recent moving image work made by or centrally concerning the performance artist Marina Abramovic. Recent retrospectives of her work in the US and... more
In this paper I propose an examination of the exponential capacities of audio-visual form in recent moving image work made by or centrally concerning the performance artist Marina Abramovic. Recent retrospectives of her work in the US and UK have unfolded largely as a result of the immense volumes of documentation surrounding her live art projects – videos, sound recordings, photographs, live streaming, and recently, a documentary produced simultaneously with Abramovic’s 2010 durational performance at the MOMA in New York, The Artist Is Present . Particularly in response to this recent ‘hyper-mediated' version of Abramovic’s work, where, surrounded by curatorial and former artistic partners, she and a group of young artists performed a selection of her previous works, critics such as Amelia Jones have pointed out that the exhibition itself produced problematic hierarchies of ‘seeing’ and ‘presence’ in relation to live art. Jones points out: ‘the dependence of Abramovic and MoMA ...
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Phenomenology is not without its problems when trying to explore, describe and invoke issues of embodiment. Philosophical discourses of phenomenology, in particular those instigated by the Franco-German philosophical tradition in the 20... more
Phenomenology is not without its problems when trying to explore, describe and invoke issues of embodiment. Philosophical discourses of phenomenology, in particular those instigated by the Franco-German philosophical tradition in the 20 th century, have been critiqued by feminist scholars for their failures to fully acknowledge the situatedness of the bodies from which phenomenology begins to speak: this is particularly apparent in the writing of Iris Marion Young, or of Judith Butler. Those feminist critiques of phenomenology might extend so far as to a critique of the situated bodily sensorium that the figure of the phenomenologist takes on when writing about phenomenology. Film phenomenology, with its particular calls to the faculties of sight, sound, movement and touch, seems to take this bodily problem one step further. This paper sets out to explore the relationships and contacts between a film phenomenology that rethinks the sensorium beyond the audiovisual, and the persisten...
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As theoretical positions and as affective experiences, the twin currents of contrition – guilt and shame – permeate literary discourse and figure prominently in discussions of ethics, history, sexuality and social hierarchy. This... more
As theoretical positions and as affective experiences, the twin currents of contrition – guilt and shame – permeate literary discourse and figure prominently in discussions of ethics, history, sexuality and social hierarchy. This collection of essays, on French and francophone prose, poetry, drama, visual art, cinema and thought, assesses guilt and shame in relation to structures of social morality, language and self-expression, the thinking of trauma, and the ethics of forgiveness. The authors approach their subjects via close readings and comparative study, drawing on such thinkers as Adorno, Derrida, Jankelevitch and Irigaray. Through these they consider works ranging from the medieval Roman de la rose through to Gustave Moreau’s Symbolist painting, Giacometti’s sculpture, the films of Marina de Van and recent sub-Saharan African writing. The collection provides an etat-present of thinking on guilt and shame in French Studies, and is the first to assemble work on this topic rangi...
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In my Introduction to this volume, I emphasised the coextensive, but often unqualified, relationship between cinema and subjectivity, a relationship which has been a focus of so much attention in film theory, film philosophy and film... more
In my Introduction to this volume, I emphasised the coextensive, but often unqualified, relationship between cinema and subjectivity, a relationship which has been a focus of so much attention in film theory, film philosophy and film history, without explicitly being framed in such terms. Evidently, the scope and span for a project about cinematic subjectivity has the potential to become unfeasibly large, but in this project, thinking cinematic subjectivity has been brought together with a range of phenomenological frameworks surrounding issues of temporality and embodiment affect and agency, and the material conditions of cinematic technologies and our cinematic worlds.
In the words of the French film scholar and critic, Raymond Bellour, almost everything there is to be said about Chris Marker’s short film La Jetee (1962), has already been said (Bellour 2002a: 146). And yet, in both volumes of his... more
In the words of the French film scholar and critic, Raymond Bellour, almost everything there is to be said about Chris Marker’s short film La Jetee (1962), has already been said (Bellour 2002a: 146). And yet, in both volumes of his collected essays, Bellour repeatedly returns to La Jetee as a point of departure, and a point of return, to reflect upon the materialities, intertextualities and relational ontologies between filmic images (Bellour 1999, 2002a). To write about La Jetee is, in some sense, to write about a history and philosophy of cinema, and the shift, as Bellour puts it (and with him, Deleuze) from thinking about cinema as embodying and internalising movement, to thinking about time as the most interior element to cinema. For other critics, such as Roger Odin and Reda Bensmaia, La Jetee has proven to be a launch point from which a psychoanalytic-semiotic conceptual framework can be established in order to interrogate theories of film (Odin 1981; Bensmaia 1990).
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colonialist attracted to a black servant (Chapter 3), or a member of the Jewish North African culture (Chapter 6). By foregrounding Beauvoir’s analysis of the Hegelian concept of the Other, the authors go to the heart of the social and... more
colonialist attracted to a black servant (Chapter 3), or a member of the Jewish North African culture (Chapter 6). By foregrounding Beauvoir’s analysis of the Hegelian concept of the Other, the authors go to the heart of the social and cinematic construction of Woman as the quintessential Other, identified by her as fundamental to women’s oppression. The essays engage with the perception that, both in life and through the lens, women are depicted as deviations from the norm − always outsiders attempting to emulate ‘normality’ or at odds with it. Some of the films chosen demonstrate that women are as capable of choice as men, that they can elevate themselves and move beyond the immanence to which they were previously resigned and reach transcendence, a position in which women take responsibility for themselves and the world, where they define their own freedom. The editors note that a new wave of French female film directors has begun to appear from 2011, excelling in a profession traditionally dominated by men, and see this phenomenon as a legacy of Beauvoir’s writings on society in general and on film-making in particular. If Beauvoir thought like a man, as her father once said, then these female directors are replacing men in a role traditionally reserved for them within the industry and, more significantly, exerting their right to transcendence as a freedom enabled by the multiple opportunities offered by the future.
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Bibliographie information published by Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data is available on the Internet at... more
Bibliographie information published by Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data is available on the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de. A catalogue record for this book is available from The ...