Theorizing Film Through Contemporary Art: Expanding Cinema, 2020
As the cinematic experience becomes subsumed into today's ubiquitous technologies of seeing, cont... more As the cinematic experience becomes subsumed into today's ubiquitous technologies of seeing, contemporary artworks lift the cinematic out of the immateriality of the film screen and separate it into its physical components within the gallery space. How to read these reformulations of the cinematic medium - and their critique of what it is and has been? In Theorizing Cinema Through Contemporary Art: Expanding Cinema, leading film theorists consider artworks that incorporate, restage, and re-present cinema's configuration of the key categories of space, experience, presence/absence, production and consumption, technology, myth, perception, event, and temporality, so interrogating the creation, appraisal, and evolution of film theory as channeled through contemporary art. This book takes film theory as a blueprint for the moving image, and juxtaposes it with artworks that render cinema as a material object. In the process, it unfolds a complex relationship between a theory and a practice that have commonly been seen as virtually incompatible, renewing our understanding of each and, more to the point, their interactions.
If the Deviate! theme of this Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen Media special issue is under... more If the Deviate! theme of this Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen Media special issue is understood in its broadest sense as change and innovation rather than purely as the second part of the norm-deviation couplet that David Bordwell critiques, then, in essence, the task at hand becomes the daunting one of considering what amounts to a byword for the history of the moving image (27). This broad spectrum of innovation within screen media includes aesthetic, thematic, formal, conceptual, narrative or, even, ethical change. Regardless of the ratio in which the categories above combine, consistent and continual deviations within them have led to the extraordinary evolution of the moving image into its current myriad forms and formats over little more than a century-long trajectory. Indeed, the intrinsic engine of change that gave rise to and continues to drive the moving image-and hence film and media studies-is tacitly acknowledged in the very title of this special issue, the imper...
In this paper, I propose to examine how Godard’s reading of the body of Marie as both image and s... more In this paper, I propose to examine how Godard’s reading of the body of Marie as both image and site of the sacred in Je vous salue Marie ( Hail Mary, 1985) evokes Jean-Luc Nancy’s thinking on art as sacred in the post-Christian epoch. In his essay “Visitation: On Christian Art” (2005), Nancy considers how the sacred is embodied in Christian art, while simultaneously identifying the subordination of the religious to art. I argue that a similar motivation may be ascribed to Godard’s use of Passion iconography in Je vous salue Marie , which, I submit, subscribes to a deconstructed Christianity that is Nancean in nature. In addition, referring to Nancy’s essay “ Noli Me Tangere : On the Raising of the Body” (2008) , a meditation on Renaissance representations of the meeting between Mary Magdalene and Christ after his resurrection, in which Nancy implements his philosophy of touch as spacing and withdrawal to reflect on the relationship between divine and human, I will discuss the dicho...
In a 2015 article on “Tweeting to Empower”, Karen Hua of Forbes Magazine argued that “digital cul... more In a 2015 article on “Tweeting to Empower”, Karen Hua of Forbes Magazine argued that “digital culture has had a huge influence on the push for global gender equality”. This idea has been taken up most recently in a series of articles that marked the tenth anniversary of Twitter’s inception; one such being Zeba Blay’s “21 Hashtags that Changed the Way We Talk About Feminism” in The Huffington Post, which recounts the mechanics of the platform beyond its social value and suggests it “has shaped conversations about women’s issues and [that] feminism has had an unprecedented impact”. In a specifically film and screen media context, one need only look to the “hashtivism” of campaigns such as #AskHerMore and #FavWomanFilmmaker to see not only how the topic of female representation in and across media is gaining increasing momentum within popular discourse, but also how the subject of female representation is, by virtue of the need for such activism, an inherently sociopolitical issue.
... film's producer, Jeremy Prokosch (Jack Palance), watching preliminary cuts in th... more ... film's producer, Jeremy Prokosch (Jack Palance), watching preliminary cuts in the screening room. ... Godard's punning unintentionally extends further in its English translation in that the term 'screenplay ... Kevin Boon suggests that the first original screenplays at the beginning of the ...
The short film La ricotta (Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1963) tells the story of Stracci, an extra workin... more The short film La ricotta (Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1963) tells the story of Stracci, an extra working on a film of the life of Christ, which is presented in part via tableaux vivants of Mannerist paintings. Pasolini’s film is replete with formal, stylistic and narrative binaries. In this article, I examine a particularly emphatic binary in the film in the form of the abstract, ethereal corporeality of the Mannerist paintings versus the raw and bawdy corporeality of Stracci. I show that through the reenactment of the paintings and their literal embodiment, Pasolini creates a rapprochement and, ultimately, a reversal between the divine forms created by the Mannerists and Stracci’s unremitting immanence, which, I argue, is allied to the carnivalesque and the cinematic body of Charlie Chaplin’s Little Tramp. I examine how Pasolini gradually deposes the Mannerists, and thus the art-historical excesses and erotic compulsion he feels towards the crucifixion, substituting in their place the co...
Theorizing Film Through Contemporary Art: Expanding Cinema, 2020
As the cinematic experience becomes subsumed into today's ubiquitous technologies of seeing, cont... more As the cinematic experience becomes subsumed into today's ubiquitous technologies of seeing, contemporary artworks lift the cinematic out of the immateriality of the film screen and separate it into its physical components within the gallery space. How to read these reformulations of the cinematic medium - and their critique of what it is and has been? In Theorizing Cinema Through Contemporary Art: Expanding Cinema, leading film theorists consider artworks that incorporate, restage, and re-present cinema's configuration of the key categories of space, experience, presence/absence, production and consumption, technology, myth, perception, event, and temporality, so interrogating the creation, appraisal, and evolution of film theory as channeled through contemporary art. This book takes film theory as a blueprint for the moving image, and juxtaposes it with artworks that render cinema as a material object. In the process, it unfolds a complex relationship between a theory and a practice that have commonly been seen as virtually incompatible, renewing our understanding of each and, more to the point, their interactions.
If the Deviate! theme of this Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen Media special issue is under... more If the Deviate! theme of this Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen Media special issue is understood in its broadest sense as change and innovation rather than purely as the second part of the norm-deviation couplet that David Bordwell critiques, then, in essence, the task at hand becomes the daunting one of considering what amounts to a byword for the history of the moving image (27). This broad spectrum of innovation within screen media includes aesthetic, thematic, formal, conceptual, narrative or, even, ethical change. Regardless of the ratio in which the categories above combine, consistent and continual deviations within them have led to the extraordinary evolution of the moving image into its current myriad forms and formats over little more than a century-long trajectory. Indeed, the intrinsic engine of change that gave rise to and continues to drive the moving image-and hence film and media studies-is tacitly acknowledged in the very title of this special issue, the imper...
In this paper, I propose to examine how Godard’s reading of the body of Marie as both image and s... more In this paper, I propose to examine how Godard’s reading of the body of Marie as both image and site of the sacred in Je vous salue Marie ( Hail Mary, 1985) evokes Jean-Luc Nancy’s thinking on art as sacred in the post-Christian epoch. In his essay “Visitation: On Christian Art” (2005), Nancy considers how the sacred is embodied in Christian art, while simultaneously identifying the subordination of the religious to art. I argue that a similar motivation may be ascribed to Godard’s use of Passion iconography in Je vous salue Marie , which, I submit, subscribes to a deconstructed Christianity that is Nancean in nature. In addition, referring to Nancy’s essay “ Noli Me Tangere : On the Raising of the Body” (2008) , a meditation on Renaissance representations of the meeting between Mary Magdalene and Christ after his resurrection, in which Nancy implements his philosophy of touch as spacing and withdrawal to reflect on the relationship between divine and human, I will discuss the dicho...
In a 2015 article on “Tweeting to Empower”, Karen Hua of Forbes Magazine argued that “digital cul... more In a 2015 article on “Tweeting to Empower”, Karen Hua of Forbes Magazine argued that “digital culture has had a huge influence on the push for global gender equality”. This idea has been taken up most recently in a series of articles that marked the tenth anniversary of Twitter’s inception; one such being Zeba Blay’s “21 Hashtags that Changed the Way We Talk About Feminism” in The Huffington Post, which recounts the mechanics of the platform beyond its social value and suggests it “has shaped conversations about women’s issues and [that] feminism has had an unprecedented impact”. In a specifically film and screen media context, one need only look to the “hashtivism” of campaigns such as #AskHerMore and #FavWomanFilmmaker to see not only how the topic of female representation in and across media is gaining increasing momentum within popular discourse, but also how the subject of female representation is, by virtue of the need for such activism, an inherently sociopolitical issue.
... film's producer, Jeremy Prokosch (Jack Palance), watching preliminary cuts in th... more ... film's producer, Jeremy Prokosch (Jack Palance), watching preliminary cuts in the screening room. ... Godard's punning unintentionally extends further in its English translation in that the term 'screenplay ... Kevin Boon suggests that the first original screenplays at the beginning of the ...
The short film La ricotta (Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1963) tells the story of Stracci, an extra workin... more The short film La ricotta (Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1963) tells the story of Stracci, an extra working on a film of the life of Christ, which is presented in part via tableaux vivants of Mannerist paintings. Pasolini’s film is replete with formal, stylistic and narrative binaries. In this article, I examine a particularly emphatic binary in the film in the form of the abstract, ethereal corporeality of the Mannerist paintings versus the raw and bawdy corporeality of Stracci. I show that through the reenactment of the paintings and their literal embodiment, Pasolini creates a rapprochement and, ultimately, a reversal between the divine forms created by the Mannerists and Stracci’s unremitting immanence, which, I argue, is allied to the carnivalesque and the cinematic body of Charlie Chaplin’s Little Tramp. I examine how Pasolini gradually deposes the Mannerists, and thus the art-historical excesses and erotic compulsion he feels towards the crucifixion, substituting in their place the co...
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